How Teachers Might Have Taught but Most Didn’t, and Why

Abstract

We discuss one of the oldest ambitions in U.S. education: that teachers should treat children as active learners, teaching should be intellectually engaging, teachers should respect students’ thinking, and schools should cultivate thoughtful work. These ideas originated when Horace Mann and his allies campaigned for them. We revisit them and take up a key problem in the study of U.S. schooling: can those ambitions be turned into regular work in many classrooms?

Keywords:

• Policy and practice
• educational reform
• instructional improvement

In this article, we discuss one of the oldest ambitions in U.S. education: that teachers should treat children as active learners, that teaching should be intellectually engaging, that teachers should respect students’ thinking, and that schools should cultivate thoughtful work. These ideas seem to have originated when Horace Mann and his allies campaigned for them in the 1830s and 1840s (Mann, 1839, 1844, 1846). We revisit them and take up one of the oldest problems in the study of U.S. schooling: can those ambitions be turned into regular work in many classrooms? Historians and sociologists have reported that these ambitions failed of broad realization (Labaree, 2011), yet ambitions for intellectually engaging teaching are still lively today. One need only to consider some versions of the Common Core, which urge much more thoughtful and intellectually ambitious work for many more students (Cobb & Jackson, 2011). The combination of persistent didactic and mechanical instruction and sustained ambition leads us back to a continuing puzzle for scholars and educators: how to explain the many cases of persistent didactic and mechanical instruction (Cohen, 1988).

We center most of this analysis on the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, for we find there much of what is required to explain the failure. We begin with a brief resume of early nineteenth century ambitions for more ambitious schooling and then turn to evidence that those ambitions had not been widely realized by the close of that century. We consider several explanations for the failure, some offered by researchers and educators at the time and others of more recent vintage. We consider those discussions in light of a few cases in which the ambitions seem to have met with something like success, because clarifying the things that made for success can help to explain the larger failure by contrast.

One caution: This is not a study of what, in the twentieth century, came to be called child-centered schooling, or of John Dewey’s ideas about school reform. We deal with an earlier chapter in that story that is connected to Dewey’s work and some of the scholarship from the twentieth century version. But while Dewey had much in common with the reforms that we discuss here—he drew on both—by the time he published School and Society in 1899, the original reform program and the difficulties that we discuss here were set (Dewey, 1899).

Early Ideas about Ambitious Teaching: Mann and His Allies

In 1845, members of the Boston Grammar School Committee swooped into the city’s nineteen grammar schools without notice and administered written examinations in Geography, Astronomy, Natural Philosophy, History, and English Grammar. The Committee, an early governing body for the city schools, compiled the results and wrote a devastating report that depicted many schools in which, they argued, students had not been taught to think (Goldin, 2010). The Committee, finding what it likely expected, professed shock at “many errors in spelling, in grammar, and in punctuation” (p. 9) in schools dominated by memorization and rote learning. In history, for instance, “the scholars have for the most part, learned to recite the words of the text-book, without having had its spirit illustrated, and without having been accustomed to think about the meaning of what they had learned” (p. 12). The report noted, "It is worth positively nothing to know the date of an embargo, if one does not know what an embargo is" (Young et al., 1845, p. 13). In geography, the students’ “want of comprehension … showed plainly, in almost every school, they had learned geography as if it were only a catalogue of names of all the divisions of water, from ponds up to oceans; of land, from towns to empires” (Young et al., 1845, p. 11). The Committee reported further that pupils could name the rivers but could not answer the question: “What is the reason that the waters of these four contiguous states run in opposite directions?” (p. 11). Not only did the students lack understanding of the one-word answers they gave in geography, history, and astronomy, many did not understand questions that reached “principles” rather than just simple "facts" (Young et al., 1845, p. 11).

The Committee argued that classroom work was at least partly responsible for these findings, for they discovered too much reliance on recitation, the superficial use of text-books, and insufficient attention to meaning, with “too much teaching by rote” (Young et al., 1845, p. 15). The Committee assigned much of the responsibility for this to the Grammar Masters, who combined teaching with school management, and most of whom focused on memorizing facts. The report chastised the Masters for not challenging students to think in any subject: "In many schools, nothing but the words of the books are learned, and … these are often learned without understanding their meaning" (Young et al., 1845, p. 12). The Committee summarized, “in most of our Schools, a narrow and merely technical instruction … appeals to the memory quite too exclusively. And, if it leaves the text-books at all, it is only so far as is absolutely necessary for the purpose of explaining them^” (Young et al., 1845, p. 15).

The Committee put this finding down to the Grammar Masters’ "practice of teaching the name of the thing rather than the nature of the thing" (Young et al., 1845, p. 13). The method in the majority of schools, they found:

is to drill into the memory of the pupil all the definitions and rules of the text-book, before he has learned their power and application … Thus, the memory is burthened [sic] with unintelligible rules, and the mind fettered with a cumbrous machinery. (Young et al., 1845, p. 27)

Several authors of the report were Horace Mann’s friends and associates, who had been elected to the Committee, among them Samuel Gridley Howe and Theophilus Parsons. Mann’s was the most insistent public voice for their ambitious vision. In the course of his work as the first Secretary to the recently created Massachusetts State Board of Education, he and his allies argued for learning and teaching that would cultivate students’ capacities as independent, critical thinkers. Early in his position as Secretary, Mann wrote:

To prepare children for resembling the philosopher, rather than the savage, it is well to begin early, but it is far more important to begin right; and the school is the place for children to form an invincible habit of never using the organs of speech, by themselves, and as an apparatus, detached from, and independent of, the mind. (p. 42)

Instruction would be a gentle and subtle art; teachers would center it on students’ thinking about academic subjects and would respect students’ efforts to make sense of academic work. Further, Mann and his colleagues wrote that students were themselves sense-makers, and that children brought innate problem solving abilities, as well as experiences that were instructionally useful. As Mann made these points, he sought improved teaching. In his third annual report he wrote: "The art of instruction, that is of communicating knowledge to the youthful mind and aiding and encouraging its own efforts … is one of great difficulty and importance" (p. 8). In his seventh annual report he extolled the teachers in Prussia for their expertise in this art and offered a pedagogical vision for America’s common schools:

The Prussian teacher has no book. He needs none. He teaches from a full mind. He cumbers and darkens the subject with no technical phraseology. He observes what proficiency the child has made and then adapts his instructions, both in quality and amount. (p. 342)

According to Mann (1846), excellent teachers focused their instruction on what the child knew and what the curriculum contained. Such teachers would need no harsh discipline. Instead, Mann (1846) wrote:

No observing person can be at a loss to understand how such a teacher can arrest and retain the attention of his scholars … This is the result of talent, of attainment, and of the successful study both of men and of things; and whoever has a sufficiency of these requisites will be able to command the attention of children. (pp. 307–308)

Mann’s allies extended beyond the Committee. They included Elizabeth Peabody, who worked in the Temple School that Bronson Alcott founded, and her younger sister Mary (Peabody, 1836). Marshall’s book about the school helped to publicize the ideas, and Mary, a teacher, became one of Mann’s closest counselors as his second wife (Marshall, 2006). These educators and others made the case for a different sort of learning, in which the meaning of subject matter and the principles of its constituent disciplines, rather than memory of sounds or lists of names, were central. Students would engage the subject matter, analyze its parts, understand its principles, and think about connections, reasons, and causes. With Mann they argued that effective learning occurred when students solved what reformers saw as real problems in real situations. They urged practical problem-solving that mimicked practical learning; such learning was authentic, or in Mann’s word, “natural” (p. 52).

Mann and his allies also believed that students brought usable knowledge to school:

Few children go to school who have not seen a fish,—at least a minnow in a stream. Begin with this, and nature opposes no barrier until the wonders of the deep are exhausted. Let the schoolhouse, as I said, be the first lesson. (p. 147)

All students, according to Mann (1844), bring strength, interests, and experiences to their work, and effective teaching builds upon these. Teachers should teach differently because students could learn in much more sophisticated ways than the Masters believed possible. Students’ work should be marked by initiative and problem solving, not obedience. Students’ pleasure in their work was important, and Mann (1844) proposed a benevolent approach to teaching, fortified with attention to student interests to lead them to self-discipline.

The reformers sketched an ambitious program for schooling. The Committee wrote that the Grammar Masters ought to have a thorough acquaintance with the subjects they taught, and that this would require extensive reeducation. Fundamental reform of teaching was high on Mann’s agenda, for he sought a sharp departure from established practice. The Committee agreed, in words that might have been written yesterday:

the school system of our own City, is wrong in the principle of its organization, inefficient in its operation, and productive of little good, in comparison with its very great expense … Nothing short of radical reform will cure these evils and enable the children of the City to receive a proportionate benefit from the large sums which the fathers of the City annually invest for them. (Young et al., 1845, p. 39)

This reform program lived on. Dewey (1902, 1904, 1913, 1916) made more complex arguments for many of the same educational values in the last years of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Other commentators and educators followed similar paths, including George Counts, Jerome Bruner, Theodore Sizer, Joseph Featherstone, and Deborah Meier among others. Despite the continuing appeal of these ideas, and repeated efforts to put them into practice, scholars who studied classrooms, beginning in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, and continuing to our own time, have told a story of persistent traditional practice. Classrooms were marked by rote teaching and learning, and not the thoughtful problem solving which earlier reformers sought.

Success, Failure, and Explanations

We hope to explain that persistence. We begin with evidence of what persisted and then turn to explanations. A comprehensive contemporary account of failure and success was presented by Joseph Meyer Rice in several articles in The Forum in 1892 and 1893, and then in his 1893 book The Public School System Of The United States (Rice, 1893). Rice was a New York City physician who put aside his medical career to study schools and campaign for reform. He began with nearly two years in Europe, visiting schools and learning about education. Then he returned to the U.S. and organized a study of teaching, learning and management in city school systems. He negotiated access to several dozen systems and traveled the land for five months in 1892, collecting evidence on reading and writing, observing classrooms and interviewing teachers, principals, and system officials. Rice reported that he observed “more than twelve hundred teachers at their work,” in thirty-six cities, and “some twenty institutions for the training of teachers” (Rice, 1893, p. 2). Rice’s study was the first large-scale systematic study of schooling in the U.S. Noting that his book contained many criticisms of schools, Rice (1893) wrote that he did not want to “inflict injury” on anyone (p. 4). But he insisted, he argued for what many others had forgotten, “that the school system exists for the benefit of the child, and not for the benefit of boards of education, superintendents or teachers” (p. 4). That was “the foundation” of the book: “In this work the child’s side will be presented” (Rice, 1893, p. 4).

The book’s chief message was that the child’s side was taking a beating. Rice (1893) reported “antiquated” and “mechanical” instruction that took little consideration of the child and what the child knew, in city after city. Teaching, he wrote, was built on an anemic view of what was worth knowing (Rice, 1893, pp. 26–27):

By an unscientific or mechanical school is meant one that is still conducted on the antiquated notion that the function of the school consists primarily if not entirely, in crowding into the memory of the child a certain number of cut-and-dried facts – that is, that the school exists simply for the purpose of giving the child a certain amount of information…. Consequently, the aim of the instruction is limited mainly to drilling facts into the minds of the children, and to hearing them recite lessons that they have learned by heart from text-books. (Rice, 1893, p. 20)

One of the many errors of such teaching was that “the manner in which the mind acquires ideas is not taken into account, the teacher makes no attempt to study the needs of the child, and consequently no bond of sympathy forms between the pupil and the teacher” (p. 20). Rice (1893) contrasted this with what he, Dewey, and others termed the “new education.” It aimed

to lead the child to observe, to reason, and to acquire manual dexterity as well as to memorize facts – in a word, to develop the child naturally in all his faculties, intellectual, moral, and physical…. the teacher is guided in her work by the nature of the child mind, - that is, by the laws of mental development. (Rice, 1893, p. 21)

Rice continued,

the new education recognizes that there are elements aside from measureable results that require consideration in educating the child. The first and foremost among these elements is the child himself. The old system of education thinks only of the results, and with its eye upon the results, forgets the child; while the new system is in large part guided by the fact that the child is a frail and tender, loving and lovable human being. (Rice, 1893, pp. 220–223)

The sort of mechanical instruction he found nearly everywhere was what Mann and the Committee had criticized half a century earlier. What Rice termed the “new education” was a close relative of what Mann and his colleagues had campaigned for in the 1830s and 1840s. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose (Cohen, 1988).

Rice’s (1893) reports were not unique. Two decades after his book, Romiett Stevens (1912) published the results of a four-year study of teaching in New York City. She reported ubiquitous mechanical recitations that closely paralleled what Rice had observed in schools in New York and elsewhere. Stevens (1912) wrote:

The fact that one teacher has the ability to quiz his pupils at the rate of two or three questions in a minute, is a matter of comparatively slight importance; the fact that one hundred different class-rooms reveal the same methods in vogue is quite another matter. The fact that one history teacher attempts to realize his educational aims through the process of ‘hearing’ the text-book, day after day, is unfortunate and pardonable; that history, science, mathematics, foreign language and English teachers, collectively, are following the same groove, is a matter for theorists and practitioners to reckon with. (Stevens, 1912, p. 16)

More than four decades later, Hoetker and Ahlbrand (1969) published an analysis of many studies of teaching and concluded that these same problems persisted. Though some features of classroom work had changed, they concluded “The studies that have been reviewed show a remarkable stability of classroom verbal behavior patterns over the last half century, despite the fact that each successive generation of educational thinkers, no matter how else they differed, has condemned the rapid-fire, question-answer pattern of instruction” (p. 163). That little-changed pattern was a close relation of the instruction that Mann and his colleagues had criticized, and that Rice had so extensively documented.

How to Explain the Persistence of Such Mechanical Work?

We have five explanations. One is the pedagogy and conceptions of knowledge that Mann’s generation had inherited from teaching and learning in the 17^th and 18^th centuries; these practices were passed on through what then was and continues to be the chief agent of teacher education: teachers’ own experience as students in K–12 schools. The past had exerted a powerful influence on teaching and learning through the schools, something that reformers, their eyes fixed on a desired future, persistently underestimated. A second was the difficulty of teaching as reformers proposed: that teaching requires deeper and more flexible knowledge and includes students as more active and prominent sources of instruction. On both counts it increased uncertainty in the process of instruction. A third was the lack of countervailing influences to inherited practice and thus the existence of few opportunities to learn the new version of instruction well enough to make it viable in classrooms. A fourth was the rocketing growth of enrollments in public elementary schools in the last half of the nineteenth century, and of secondary school enrollments in the first half of the twentieth century; in both cases, booming enrollment focused school systems’ attention on basic matters of building schools, hiring teachers, finding materials, and raising money. The success of public education overtook schools’ and teacher education’s capability either to retrain existing teachers or to educate intending teachers in less conventional pedagogies. Here as in other cases, when reforms succeeded, unexpected problems bubbled up in their wake. A fifth explanation is the absence of usable designs for learning and teaching; there were ideas aplenty, but no detailed plans and programs for teaching and learning, and no opportunities to learn how to use such plans and programs effectively.

The “new education” was counter-cultural. It was inconsistent with popular views of instruction and educational practices, with the ways in which teachers and administrators were recruited and educated, and with what many Americans understood as "real school." The influence of that reality was amplified by the political design of public school governance, for schools were popularly and locally governed, and thus quite vulnerable to what their publics knew, believed, and were willing to support.

Inherited Practice

Teaching and learning were not novel practices to be invented for the new schools and school systems, but a living inheritance. They had existed for centuries and had been handed down from generation to generation for as long as the British colonies had existed and before. When Carl Kaestle (1983) summarized the methods of teaching and learning that were current on the eve of reform, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, he wrote about rote memorization of facts, and formal recitation. When E. Jennifer Monaghan (2005) wrote about how reading and writing were taught and learned in the American colonies between 1620 and the end of the eighteenth century, learning to read was not, as we understand it today, a matter of learning to make sense of or interpret text. Instead “reading was conceptualized as a receptive tool—the vehicle for listening to the pronouncements, whether religious or secular, of one’s elders and betters” (Monaghan, 2005, p. 365). What is more, reading was viewed as easy to learn and easy to teach:

Reading was considered a job for an amateur, easy to teach. All that was required of reading instructors was their ability to read themselves. Reading methodology was unquestioned, and the texts used to teach reading were readily available for purchase for a moderate amount of money. Reading was therefore generally taught, unaccompanied by writing instruction, by women, who offered it at home or at school, with their low fees paid by individuals or towns. (Monaghan, 2005, p. 367)

Embedded in the organization of this work were key conceptions about what teachers must know and know how to do to help students learn. Writing was seen as a much more complex matter, and it was usually taught by men:

Writing meant penmanship, a definition that excluded what we consider the primary purpose of writing –self-expression … This pedagogy treated writing as if its only purpose were to be the conduit for the thoughts of one’s elders with its chief virtue lying in the beauty of its presentation and the accuracy of its letters. (Monaghan, 2005, p. 365)

Such writing also was a way to retain access to some content of books that only a few people could own. As late as the 1770s “many aspects of colonial literacy instruction remained remarkably unaltered” (Monaghan, 2005, p. 365).

Horace Mann and fellow reformers focused on building something new. As Mann’s twelve annual reports revealed (1837–1848), that was a formidable task, for it included building schoolhouses, furnishing them with benches and slates, organizing fiscal support, educating and assigning teachers, providing outhouses, and more. These and other matters concentrated reformers’ attention on creating the future. They knew that teaching would be essential, and they tried to mobilize support for teacher education, but they seem not to have appreciated the extent to which their new world would be built on a substantial foundation of the old—on practices of learning and teaching, and ideas about instruction, students, and content that had pervaded teaching for centuries.

Mann and his allies worked against deeply rooted instructional practices. What seemed to be an argument with a group of stubborn traditional Grammar Masters was in fact the first public battle in what became a long war about instruction that continues today. Mann and others called for “conversations” between students and teachers, for teachers to structure work with students around their iterative assessments of students’ knowledge, interests, and capabilities, for teachers to build on student knowledge and to organize student work to progress from concrete to abstract. These ideas clashed with extant practice in which schoolwork began with subject matter and made little room for students’ interest and experience. For the Masters, knowledge was codified in books, and the prime activities for learning were memory, recitation, drill, and text study. The Masters did not see the knowledge that students brought to school as a resource for learning; attention to students’ interests and knowledge was a diversion from important work on subject matter. They referred to students’ work as “toil,” requiring memorization, attentive listening, and integration of codified knowledge (Goldin, 2010).

If teachers were to work as the reformers envisioned, they would have had to unlearn much of what they knew about teaching from their experience as students and teachers. They would have had to learn many new things, including how to assess, diagnose, and design instruction responsively. These capabilities differed sharply from the traditional didactic text-centered work that members of the Committee observed in schools. The Committee and Mann envisioned teachers who possessed content knowledge which they could “hold in their heads,” who could assess students’ developing capability and understanding on the hoof, and who could adapt instruction accordingly. These changes would have entailed others—in teachers’ beliefs about curriculum, about the nature of knowledge, and about learning—each major and substantive improvement.

The differences between Mann and the Masters rested on divergent beliefs about human nature and social order. The Masters saw stability and respect for law and governance as key goals of schooling, and argued that students should be obey the teacher. The teachers’ absolute authority would model the larger social and political order in which authority and obedience were central. Mann and his colleagues had a different view. They argued that students should be treated with respect, that stiff discipline was unnecessary and contrary to sound instruction, that students should learn how to think for themselves, and that such intellectual independence was essential for democratic citizenship.

The Difficulty of the New Education

Given these differences, how could teachers and students, most or all of whom would have practiced in the old style, make the transition to work as reformers proposed? Teachers would have had to move from rule-bound and drill-heavy work to instruction that privileged “authentic” problems and entailed working flexibly in response to students’ ideas. Many would have had to unlearn their views of students’ capabilities and learn new conceptions of learning.

It is relatively easy to write these things but doing them would have been much more difficult. Opening instruction to include students as producers of teaching, as reformers proposed, could not be done well unless teachers knew the material well, and knew how students were likely to respond. Connecting instruction to students’ prior knowledge and experience could not be done well unless teachers were familiar with the experience students were likely to have had, knew how to make the connections, and were able to make sense of students’ often puzzling comments. Such teaching would increase uncertainty because opening the floor to students’ ideas would present more puzzles and surprises than conventional instruction. It would create more opportunities for things to go awry, would require more sophisticated management and more flexible thinking.

These things would be more complicated than they might seem because many students, accustomed to conventional instruction, could be confused and even resist. The new pedagogy would be difficult because so many teachers were themselves so modestly educated; they would have a good deal to learn about the subjects they would teach, along with learning a different way to teach them. Hence the new pedagogy also would require the courage to make mistakes and take risks in order to learn and improve (Cohen, 2011; Cohen et al., 2013).

Lack of Countervailing Influence

Still, inherited pedagogical practice was not cast in stone. Its influence depended in part on other things that might enhance or reduce its influence. One of those things was preservice teacher education and the other was the schools and districts in which teachers worked. Either or both could influence teachers’ practice and beliefs. Horace Mann and several other reformers knew that teachers would have much to learn, and they campaigned for more and better teacher education. Yet there was very little formal teacher education, and no experience with helping teachers and students to unlearn the beliefs and practices that they already had acquired and to which they were accustomed. On this Forzani (2011) wrote:

The normal schools represented the first opportunity in any field for novices to engage collectively in the theoretical study of professional work combined with opportunities to practice that work and receive feedback from the same instructors who taught the theory. (p. 18)

A handful of early teacher educators designed opportunities for teachers to learn. Their goals were ambitious: “In their concern with content knowledge for teaching, their commitment to the value of model and practice schools, and their interest in special pedagogies for practice, nineteenth century teacher educators took clear steps in the direction of a practice-focused curriculum for learning to teach.” Yet “the fruits of their experiments were rudimentary…” (Forzani, 2011, pp. 24–25). Why? Mann and his colleagues had ambitious goals, but teacher education had very modest resources. Professional training was nascent, and money, time, staff, knowledge, and skill were in very modest supply. As Forzani (2011) wrote, “There was chronic under-funding and under-staffing in the normal schools and in their affiliated practice schools. In many cases just one instructor—the principal—was responsible for both the normal school and the practice school” (p. 29). Further, normal school educators worked in isolation. Yet, by the last decades of the nineteenth century teacher educators had created many normal schools and teachers’ institutes, and they did reach many teachers. That was a considerable improvement over the situation in 1835. That success was limited by the very problem that the new enterprise sought to solve: Because so many teachers and intending teachers brought such limited and traditional K–12 education to teaching and teacher education, teacher educators spent most of their time teaching the rudiments of the subjects that teachers were to teach, and little time on pedagogy.

The other possible countervailing influence to traditional practice was schools and school systems, since they could have used recruitment, supervision, materials, and in-service education to support the new instruction. J. M. Rice’s (1893) study is helpful in this connection, in two respects. After pointing out that he visited 1,200 classrooms and 20 teacher training institutions, he wrote:

It is not my purpose to decry the good done by our training schools. It is nonetheless true that the professional knowledge received at these institutions does little more than open the book to the student, so that unless the studies be continued after graduation, the effect of the pedagogical training soon becomes lost, the trained teacher falling to the level of the one who has had no training. (Rice, 1893, pp. 15–16)

And yet, he also noted important successes, and from these successes we can learn how to address the sets of enduring challenges sketched here. For example, despite this dismal general picture, he reported on a small number of schools and school systems that did use teacher education, recruitment, and supervision to support the sorts of instruction that he, along with earlier reformers, advocated. His account of success helps to explain the failure in most other localities. It also provides a roadmap for addressing these enduring problems. Rice (1893) wrote that the classrooms in Indianapolis were notable for mutual respect and affection between teachers and students: “The Indianapolis schools abound in the element which in St. Louis is so obviously lacking—consideration for the child, sympathy … The teacher uses every means at her command to render the life of the child happy and beautiful, without endangering its usefulness” (p. 102). Reporting on a primary grade classroom, Rice (1893) wrote:

The scene I encountered was a glimpse of a fairyland. I was in a room full of bright and happy children, whose eyes were directed toward the teacher, not because they were forbidden to look in any other direction, but because to them the most attractive object in the room was their teacher. She understood them, sympathized with them, and loved them, and did all in her power to make them happy. (pp. 101–102)

The class was “typical of the Indianapolis schools,” (Rice, 1893, p. 108) where teachers nurtured the child while aiming their work firmly at academic goals. Rice (1893) depicted a school system that had realized a version of what earlier reformers envisioned. His explanation gave the most attention to teacher preparation, which was “the primary aim of the supervision. Indeed, the school system of Indianapolis represents a training-school of which the classroom teachers are the students and the supervising officials the teachers” (Rice, 1893, pp. 110). “Supervision” included a system-wide commitment, as the Assistant Superintendent for Primary Schools wrote, to “give [students] such training as shall make self-active, powerful, helpful, beautiful, happy human beings (Rice, 1893, p. 113).

To support that aim, managers studied teaching and learning with each other and with teachers. The Superintendent met with individual teachers and led a weekly study group of school principals who read books and discussed such topics as “The Rights of the Child in School [and] How to treat Children” (Rice, 1893, pp. 111). The Superintendent also met with teacher groups monthly. The Assistant Superintendent for primary schools met daily with individual teachers and led several regular meetings with groups of teachers. One was a monthly meeting with teachers, and another was a study group in which teachers read everything from Emerson’s essays (1841, 1844) to Froebel’s (1926) “Education of Man.” Each of these activities shared a focus on teaching and learning to teach grounded in actual classrooms with real students, and proceeded to make these opportunities in such a way that educators were working with one another on problems of teaching practice.

A good deal of the teacher education seemed to focus teachers’ and supervisors’ attention on the school system’s own curriculum, which had been designed to promote what school officials described as

unification, which means the combination of the various branches of knowledge [we would write “subjects”], so that they may acquire more meaning by being seen in relation to one another. An isolated fact is food for the memory alone, and it is only when this fact is seen in its relations to other facts that it becomes interesting and the reasoning faculties are brought into play. (Rice, 1893, pp. 114–115)

This conception of the curriculum proved to be a formidable resource, and one that ­educators in Indianapolis used especially well: unlike most professional development then and now, Indianapolis teachers and system managers seem to have used professional development to improve teachers’ use of the system’s curriculum. This, again, was another, rare, innovation that helps to explain these successes.

There also was a citywide inspectorate that supervised schools, each of which had a principal of its own, and “attend the lessons of the class-teachers, criticize them, and themselves frequently give model lessons which are freely discussed” (Rice, 1893, p. 113). As with other inspectorates, this version combined quality control with teacher education that was grounded in teaching practice and aimed at the improvement of instruction and learning. Both educators’ and students’ learning were centered, and a system of support for seeing and hearing students thinking in relationship with a shared curriculum enabled focused changed.

On Rice’s (1893) account several things explained the absence of conventional instruction. The schools were organized to be educational for educators as well as students. It was a system because it linked teacher education, monitoring quality, curriculum, and management into coherent operations around a citywide curriculum. The system was informed by the idea that schools should cultivate reasoning, humanity, and care, and it was constructed to develop collective capability, not just individual resources, knowledge, or practice. Rice (1893) found a few other cities in some of whose schools some of these things could be found, but they were rare.

Rice (1893) offered one other explanation for this unusual system: the schools’ close relationship with the local normal school: “The educators of Indianapolis entertain an exceptionally high regard for the services rendered by Miss Nicholson, the Principal of the Normal School” (p. 114). The school system employed about 350 teachers and had to hire about 10% of that labor force each year; about 20 of the 35 new teachers each year were graduates of the city’s normal school. We have no direct evidence, but that close a connection between the system and the normal school probably meant that a good deal of the normal school’s teacher education program was tailored to the curriculum and instructional program of the city schools, expanding the system’s reach and coherence. If so, when learning to teach in the normal school, novice teachers might have learned with the curriculum that they were to teach and practiced how to teach it. This is, again, a rare synergy, one that might enable educators to learn to teach in ways focused directly on connecting the child and the curriculum.

Rice (1893) did not regard Indianapolis as an unqualified success. Indeed, he believed that the “professional weakness of the American teacher is the greatest sore spot of the American schools.” And if the teachers in Indianapolis were “among our best … [they were] not perfect,” and “not great” (p. 17). He wrote, “[A]s a rule our teachers are too weak to stand alone, and therefore need constantly to be propped up by the supervisory staff” (p. 14). The graduates of city and state normal schools were generally the best available, but

the true professional incompetency of our teachers … does not become fully apparent until we consider that not more than a small percentage of persons engaged in teaching in the public schools of this country are normal school graduates … some are [only] high school graduates, others have simply attended a normal school, high school or academy for one or more terms, while a very large number of licenses to teach are granted to those whose education does not extend beyond that received at a grammar school, with or without little extra coaching. (pp. 14–15)

The most significant feature of Rice’s account is that it was systemic. As he linked work at the micro level in classrooms with actions at the macro level in school and city government, he noted connections and disconnections among what he saw as the key elements of school systems. Though most of the book was taken up with teaching and teacher education, Rice (1893) began his analysis with a systemic perspective:

As the character of the instruction which the child receives represents the result of the general management of the schools—the resultant, as it were, of the action of a number of forces,—to observe the teacher at her work without a knowledge of the whole school machinery would be observing in a very superficial manner. (p. 9)

Here, again, we find a roadmap for success: focusing the attention of educators on the practices of teaching and learning, with close attention to how children learn a particular curriculum, enabled those educators to move past rote and toward the sort of ambitious teaching that had been so elusive.

When Rice (1893) turned his attention to what later came to be known as policy implications, he focused on teaching and teacher education. He argued that school systems should design and develop professional education programs that would improve teaching. That would require superintendents and their staffs to “devote their time primarily to educating the teachers in their charge … [by] the study of educational methods and principles, and by aiding them in the classrooms” (p. 9). He insisted “teachers must constantly endeavor to grow both in professional and intellectual strength” (p. 9). Rice (1893) contrasted this with “Supervision that aims simply to secure results by a periodical examination of classes [which] is productive of as much if not more harm than good, as it is destined to convert both teachers and pupils into automatons” (p. 9). His idea was to convert school system managers from bean counters to professional educators. Though he was one of the few researchers, then or later, who offered a comprehensive organizational and educational explanation for the persistence of conventional instruction, he never explained from where the managers who would be excellent teacher educators would come.

The success of public schools was another impediment to the progress of ideas about the reform of teaching. The rapid expansion of schooling and growth of elementary school enrollments meant that the schools had an enormous appetite for teachers to staff schools (Angus & Mirel, 1999). As the total U.S. population grew in the late nineteenth century so did the rate at which students attended school (NCES, unpublished tabulations). Total enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools roughly doubled between 1869–1870 and 1899–1900, going from 7,652,000 to 15, 503,000 (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 1869–1870). That was partly the effect of population growth and partly the effect of rising school attendance, for during the same three decades the fraction of 5- to 17-year-olds attending school rose from 57% to 71.9% (NCES).

This was real success for public education: as a greater fraction of age-eligible students attended school. High school graduation also increased dramatically, from 22,000 graduates in 1889–1890, to 62,000 in 1899–1900, and then nearly doubling to 111,000 in 1909–1910 (NCES, 1909–1910). But these successes meant that there would either be more teachers, facilities, and administrative and organizational support, or more students crowded into existing facilities. Employment in public education did grow in roughly parallel terms, from 201,000 to 423,000 people in the same three decades, and that was reflected in roughly quadrupled expenditures on instructional staff, from $63,000,000 to $215,000,000 (NCES).

This impressive national picture obscures important differences among localities. If we consider two urban centers—Philadelphia and Detroit—we see very different patterns (Detroit Public Schools, 1870, 1880; Pennsylvania Board of Public education of the First School District, 1903). Enrollment growth in Philadelphia roughly paralleled the national rate during the same period, rising from 81,075 in 1871 (Pennsylvania Board of Public Education of the First School District [Philadelphia], 1871) to 161,066 in 1903 (Philadelphia, 1903). These enrollment numbers, all reported in Philadelphia’s annual reports, are “the number of pupils belonging at the end of the year” (p. 18) and might themselves have understated ADA—average daily attendance.

In contrast, Detroit’s enrollment quadrupled (10,075 to 161,066) in roughly the same three decades (Detroit Public Schools, 1880). Enrollment was growing everywhere, but much more rapidly and presenting more challenges in some places than in others. That growth, coupled with weak teacher education, meant that many new teachers brought only an elementary education or a bit more to their work. The chief influence on their teaching was how they had been taught when they were students in conventional classrooms. The “apprenticeship of observation” helped to transmit traditional practice across the generations (Lortie, 1975, p. 61). Success in this area—expanded access to schools—complicated an already complicated problem. For, how could systems expand in numbers at such a quick rate while bringing rare systemic attention to the cultivation of ambitious teaching and learning?

Support for Instructional Improvement

There was no shortage of arguments for ambitious teaching in the late nineteenth century; the ideas that Rice, Dewey, and others advocated were in the air, and some educators—Col. Francis Parker in the late 1800s among them—made national reputations by advocating a version of the new education. But few teachers could make curriculum from arguments, nor from the appealing principles and ideas offered up by advocates. Such ideas and principles alone were unlikely to be sufficient for most of the weakly educated teachers who staffed classrooms in the late 19^th and early twentieth century. U.S. Several recent studies demonstrate that the improvement of instruction at any scale is much more likely if there are carefully worked out designs for instruction and sustained help, to enable teachers and school managers learn a new approach (Correnti & Rowan, 2007).

This explanation for the persistence of conventional teaching thus centers on things that were lacking: coherently constructed and clearly articulated designs for ambitious teaching; designs for learning such teaching; and assistance for those trying to learn how to use such designs. Such designs and assistance would have helped because the new education implied fundamental shifts in teaching and learning. For example, reformers called for “conversations” between students and teachers—deep and content-rich. They wanted teachers to structure their work with students around iterative assessments of students’ knowledge, interests, and capabilities, what we now refer to as formative assessment. Teachers were to build on student knowledge and organize student work to progress from the concrete to the abstract. Such teaching would have been very different from what most teachers and students then knew how to do. If teachers in the middle and later nineteenth century were to work as reformers proposed, they would have had to acquire a great deal of new knowledge and many teaching skills, not least among them the ability to assess, diagnose, and design subject matter rich instruction responsively. They would have had to unlearn much of what they knew and knew how to do. And they would have had to change how they understood learning and teaching. Yet there would have been very few opportunities for teachers to learn and unlearn these things.

There were very few such designs. One of the only two we found was in the Indianapolis schools on which Rice reported, which we discussed earlier. The other appeared in Larry Cuban’s fascinating account of the Denver reforms in How Teachers Taught (1993). Like the Indianapolis story, Cuban’s (1993) analysis illuminates a relatively successful reform effort while clarifying why ambitious teaching failed of broader realization. The Denver reforms were an effort to use curriculum development to build organizational and other scaffolds for ambitious teaching. Jesse H. Newlon, the school superintendent and a leading Progressive, worked closely with A.L. Threlkeld, his deputy and successor, to develop “organizational mechanisms that would turn curriculum revision into a tool for changing teacher practice” (Cuban, 1993, p. 81). Their effort spanned two decades of continuous work. One central element of the reform was ongoing, collaborative learning for educators. Another was its systemic approach, in which the two managers sought to bring coherence to teaching, curriculum and curriculum development, among administrators’ work, academic content, teaching, and between students’ lives and what they studied in school. Superintendents Newlon and Threlkeld sought to connect many often disconnected elements and actors in their work in Denver public schools between 1920–1937. As Cuban (1993) wrote, “Newlon and Threlkeld believe[d] that if content was connected to current and future situations, and if students saw those links, their interest would be captured and channeled into productive, imaginative schoolwork” (p. 82). Horace Mann and other reformers argued for such connections to enliven and enrich schoolwork. Reformers after WW II would call that link “relevance.”

The Denver reform was iterative, sustained, and reached across the district into many schools, engaging many Denver educators. The effort was collaborative, enabling teachers to work with university curriculum specialists, scholars, and practitioners, and to do so during the school day. Teachers were positioned as learners, as in Indianapolis, and as educators who were capable of fine work. Newlon and Threlkeld deliberately sought to break down many long-ingrained cultural and social features of schooling during their tenure at the Denver Public Schools. The approach was experimental: educators were expected to test their ideas in classrooms, and to consider how their curricula were used and understood by students and teachers. Hence the design and redesign of curriculum was continuous. Moreover, many teachers were actively involved. Cuban (1993) wrote that “10% of elementary school teachers; 42% of junior high school teachers; and 48% of senior high school teachers” (pp. 81–82) served on curriculum committees, which

ensured that each school had at least one teacher on a committee. All secondary principals and one third of elementary principals belonged to this group…. I would guess that roughly between 30% and 40% of the entire instructional staff had participated in curriculum revision. (pp. 81–82)

One reason to involve teachers was to sharply improve teaching. The idea was that “active teacher involvement in determining what should be taught … produced better-trained teachers far more able and eager to conduct a classroom that is ‘more natural, more vital, and more meaningful to the students than it has ever been’” (Cuban, 1993, p. 80). Another aim was to foster collegiality. Newlon wrote that a key ingredient in the venture’s success was the “democratic” administration of the program, specifically the combined efforts and talents of supervisors, curriculum workers, and teachers. He argued that “curriculum and instruction ‘must grow from the inside out,’” and enable teachers to dramatically improve instruction (Cuban, 1993, p. 80). Teacher participation in work of this sort was unusual, as was the scale of the effort.

Denver’s was a systemic approach to improving instruction, which embodied uncommon respect for teachers and their knowledge. Yet Cuban (1993) argued that Denver educators did not fully understand the scope and depth of the work that might be necessary to transform teaching and learning. He wrote that educators’ own learning was not initially focused on teaching, and learning to teach the revised curriculum, but was off-site until the district joined the Eight-Year Study in September 1933, several years after the reforms began. In those first few years, curricula were developed at the administration building: “[E]ach committee prepared objectives, selected content, designed instructional methods (including questions to ask) and suggested varied projects and materials that their colleagues might wish to use” (Cuban, 1993, p. 81). Cuban (1993) contended that the Denver reform was too “top-down” (p. 82).

It is not easy to figure out how deeply the Denver reforms took root in classrooms. Cuban (1993) did extraordinary work unearthing and interpreting evidence about classrooms, but the evidence was almost entirely photographic. Pictures of classrooms can tell us about their physical arrangement, but that leaves open how teachers and students worked within those arrangements. Teachers can sustain instruction that deeply involves students in conventionally organized classrooms, and they can work entirely conventionally in physical arrangements that appear to center instruction on students. If someone sent us back to Newlon’s Denver in a time machine, we would expect to find that the forms of conventional instruction predominated, but we also would expect a good deal of variation in how teachers and students worked within those forms and structures.

The Denver reform had impressive effects, “[A] considerable minority of teachers did adopt, to varying degrees, mixtures of existing and new practices,” Cuban (1993) wrote, while also acknowledging that “most teachers continued teacher-centered practices” (p. 91). But the Denver story also reveals why it was so difficult to make progressive practice work in many classrooms. Educators there faced all of the same obstacles that their predecessors had encountered: most teachers and administrators had a great deal to learn and unlearn; they had to build a complex educational infrastructure—curriculum, teacher education, supervision and quality control among other things—that U.S. public schools lacked; they had to redefine educators’ roles; and they had to find leaders who cared enough to try, who understood enough to support the reform, who were courageous enough to learn, and who were deft enough to manage the often troublesome politics. In the politically porous and very spare organization of U.S. schooling, those were enormous assignments.

School Governance

Each of the chief barriers to ambitious teaching that we discussed was connected to local popular governance of public schools. That scheme had important strengths: it was an early expression of political democracy; it fit with the distinctive U.S. system of weak federal and state power in domestic affairs; it also fit with the nineteenth century realities of transportation and communication in a huge society; and it enabled the development of a school system that responded to varied popular demands (Goldin & Katz, 2018).

Yet those strengths beget weaknesses as U.S. society grew. The combination of local control and weak government meant that public education never developed the educational infrastructure that is found in most national school systems: public education had no common idea of what students should learn, so neither the U.S. nor any of the states developed a common curriculum; hence teachers and managers had no common basis for their work, no common frame with which to identify instructional problems, no common frame with which to design assessment of students’ work, no common basis for problem solving, and thus no way to build a common body of knowledge and know-how for teaching practice; teacher education had no common objective in helping teachers to learn what they should teach and how to teach it.

These and other elements of infrastructure could have been useful to reformers who sought to push instruction in a more ambitious direction, because they would have offered a set of common instruments that educators could have used to develop the means to improve instruction. Instead, each local school district was left on its own to deal with whatever reforms it might choose to adopt. In the quest for more ambitious instruction, this meant that one condition of effective reform in any particular district would be the invention of some version of infrastructure, which is precisely what we found in Indianapolis and Denver. But this meant that reform in another local district would require the reinvention of a version of that infrastructure—a framework for systemic organization including usable resources, capabilities, and knowledge. It also meant that there would be little chance that common capability would develop among districts, and that reform would be difficult to sustain even within unusual districts. Cuban (1993) wrote: “One of the reasons for the speed and intensity of the organizational changes that touched a substantial number of Denver classrooms may have been the remarkable continuity in superintendent leadership, leadership that placed great faith both in progressive pedagogy and in the pivotal importance of the teacher, yet was tempered by the daily realities of schooling” (p. 91). With consistent leadership, Cuban (1993) found that “courses of study, textbooks, and certain teaching approaches did change” (p. 90) in Denver schools. But without these leaders at the helm, and against what Cuban (1993) portrayed as a “national reaction to an intense barrage of criticisms targeting public schools that had a reputation for being progressive,” what resulted was the “demise” of Denver’s general education courses in the 1950s (Cuban, 1993, p. 90).

Our point is not that educational infrastructure would have solved all educational problems. Quite the contrary: had infrastructure existed it could have embodied very conventional and conservative educational content and values, and that could have posed formidable obstacles to more ambitious teaching. Our point is rather that the combination of local popular control and weak governance meant that there was little or no infrastructure, hence reformers lacked even the possibility of common instruments that might have helped in their cause. Hence efforts to advance more ambitious teaching required repeated local invention and reinvention of the instruments—teacher education, curriculum, and more—that can enable communication about and management of instruction. The lack of such common instruments and capability increased the demands and costs of serious reform, and reduced the chances that any local effort would endure.

Conclusion

We have discussed here the legacy that the nineteenth century left to the 20^th, alongside of ever-expanding goals for schooling and learning, and increased diversification. One problem was that the common school crusaders did not consider the “hand of history,” thinking, as many reformers since seem to have done, that they were starting afresh, and ignoring all the unlearning that their reforms implied. Another was the immense success of public schooling, which swamped the schools and left them to play catch-up with population surges. And still another was the lack of infrastructure with which to educate a very rapidly growing supply of teachers. In these ways, the successes of public schooling were partly responsible for the schools’ failure to do as Mann (date) and others had wished.

The changes that reformers urged were revolutionary. They entailed conceptions of knowledge, learning, academic discourse, authority, and teaching that were radically different than inherited ideas and practices. Everything that we know about revolutions, whether cognitive, political, or emotional, is that if they succeed, they do so in modest increments over long time spans. What is the appropriate criterion of success, and the appropriate time horizon, for changes of this sort? That query seems particularly apposite because change in teaching is always change in a particular context. The context of schooling in the U.S. was defined by several particularly significant circumstances: the difficulty of what reformers proposed; the absence of an educational infrastructure that could be turned toward support of reform; and the schools’ situation in traditions of academic instruction and popular conceptions of teaching and learning in which traditional practices predominated. Only a small minority of teachers had anything like the formal education that would have prepared them to find much that was familiar, attractive, and usable in the reform agenda. The reformers never had the detailed designs for instruction that could have re-prepared the reform agenda in forms that would have been classroom usable and feasible for many teachers. There was little professional or organizational capability to help teachers learn new practices and to unlearn old ones.

These points mean that the tradition of instruction that we have discussed was counter-­cultural in every sense of that term: it was inconsistent with established patterns of academic work, with popular understanding of instruction and popular educational practices, with the ways in which teachers and school managers were recruited and educated, and with what many Americans understood as “real school” (Metz, 1989, title). The reforms worked against every imaginable grain.

In that circumstance there were three ways in which reforms could have found some success. One was the slow and partial diffusion of reform ideas and practices into public education—what Cuban (1993) referred to as the development of hybrids. Another was the occasional local district that could mobilize the resources to build enough elements of infrastructure and political support to enable significant progress; Denver and Indianapolis are classic cases in point. A third was the creation of nonpublic schools or school systems that could define a mission and select a clientele that was consistent with the reforms, thus buffering themselves from popular and political counter-pressures. Progressive educators and parents have done that. There has been progress of all three sorts, but that returns us to the question just above: what is the appropriate criterion of success, and the appropriate time horizon for such reforms? Our discussion implies than any answer would depend on the influence of the conditions that we discussed here; the more potent their influence, the more modest the criterion of success and the longer the time horizon. In the case that we discussed, the several influences that we identified were very powerful. Though there has been success, the reforms still have a long way to go.

Our hunger for ambitious learning and teaching have endured, echoing across the work of educational philosophers, reformers, and practitioners. We see, here, that those ambitious goals can only be met with similarly ambitious approaches. Solutions that necessitate our casting off amnesiatic, piecemeal, and impatient approaches to improvement. How, then, might those ambitions be turned into regular work in many classrooms? The legacies we inherit here do not yield easy or convenient roadmaps for the realization of ambitious teaching and learning for the children of our nation. Yet, they do hold promise for what concerted, systemic approaches to reform that are disciplined by a focus on the mechanisms of teaching and learning might do.

Acknowledgments

We thank Professors Larry Cuban and Suzanne Wilson for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).