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Between the School and the Academy: The Struggle to Promote Teacher Research at Columbia University's Lincoln School, 1917–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jonna Perrillo
Jonna Perrillo*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at El Paso
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Abstract

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This essay examines the development of a research faculty and culture at the Lincoln School, a laboratory school founded in 1917 by the Rockefeller General Education Board (GEB) at Teachers College, Columbia University. The school was dedicated to the production of education research by practicing teachers. The essay focuses in particular on the role played by the two men first charged by the GEB to organize and administrate the school, Abraham Flexner and Otis Caldwell, and some of the school's teachers. Flexner and Caldwell promoted a working environment marked by experimentation, academic freedom, and faculty collaboration. This leadership model created tensions between Flexner and Caldwell and some Teachers College faculty over the use of Lincoln School classrooms as a resource for education research. Over the twenty-four years of the school's existence, Lincoln School teachers published hundreds of studies and textbooks focusing on curriculum development, child development, teaching techniques, and democratic school administration. In a profession where members are expected to be consumers rather than creators of knowledge, and practitioners rather than “experts,” the teachers and administrators of the Lincoln School defied many of the most foundational premises that have guided schools and the production of education research alike.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 90 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

References

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74 Lincoln School teachers transferred to higher education institutions as diverse as Stanford, Wisconsin, Ohio State, California-Berkeley, Montclair State Teachers College, and Maryland State Teachers College. It is worth noting that while the low pay of the Lincoln School teachers was a product of the same gender dynamics that drove low pay in public K–12 schools, it was probably in line with other private progressive schools. The insufficient pay extended to all of the school's teachers. That said, male teachers appear to have been offered high-status university positions (i.e., at research universities rather than teachers colleges) in greater numbers than women. See Lincoln School Comes of Age, 1917–1938 (New York: Lincoln School of Teachers College, Columbia University, 1938), 28–30.Google Scholar

75 The merger between the two schools lasted for five years until the Horace Mann-Lincoln School was closed and Teachers College transferred the GEB endowment to its general research fund. The demise of the Lincoln School and the role of its troubled political relationship with Teachers College in the merger, merits its own evaluation. Currently, the best treatment of this can be found in Buttenweiser, “The Lincoln School and Its Times, 1917–1948,” 169–234.Google Scholar

76 Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Trustees of Teachers College on Horace Mann-Lincoln School (June 1946), 29, File 3607, box 349, series 1.2, GEB. For a more complete account of the GEB's desire for the school to become more financially independent—the end goal of all of its sponsored projects—as well as the GEB's assessment of the Lincoln School's diminished influence in the light of broad school reforms, see Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, 222–25.Google Scholar

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