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Does Urban Reform Imply Class Conflict? The Case of Atlanta's Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David N. Plank  and
Paul E. Peterson
David N. Plank
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Dallas
Paul E. Peterson
Affiliation:
Brookings Institute, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

Though the pressures for change had been building for some time, reform came suddenly to the Atlanta public school system. On May 28, 1897, in a City Council meeting ostensibly called to consider some routine matters pertaining to the city's water works, Alderman James G. Woodward introduced a resolution which replaced the sitting seventeen-member school board with a new board comprising one member from each of the city's seven wards. Despite a recent escalation in the level of conflict between the school board and Mayor Charles Collier, the move came as a complete surprise to virtually everyone in Atlanta, including all of the members of the school board. The entire operation took only a few minutes. As the Atlanta Constitution observed the next day:

A Texas hanging couldn't have gone off with the precision and nicety of the sudden execution…. The ax revolved and the heads were basketed.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 1983 , pp. 151 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by History of Education Society 

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References

Footnotes

1. Atlanta Journal (28 May 1897); Atlanta Constitution (29 May 1897).Google Scholar

2. Atlanta Constitution (29 May 1897).Google Scholar

3. Atlanta Constitution (30 May 1897).Google Scholar

4. Atlanta Journal (31 May 1897); Atlanta Constitution (1 June 1897).Google Scholar

5. A classic statement of the class-conflict model together with a valuable summary of the literature can be found in Banfield, E.C. and Wilson, J.Q., City Politics (Cambridge, 1963). Other important contributions include Burnham, W.D., Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Democracy (New York, 1970); Holli, M.G., Reform in Detroit (New York, 1969); Hayes, E.C., Power Structure and Google Scholar Urban Policy: Who Rules Oakland? (New York, 1972); Merton, R.K., Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1957); Hawley, W.D., Nonpartisan Elections and the Case for Party Politics (New York, 1973); Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955); Mowry, G.E., The California Progressives (Chicago, 1963); Hays, S.P., “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 55 (1964): 157–169; Lineberry, R. and Fowler, E.P., “Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities,” American Political Science Review, 61 (1967): 701–716; Shefter, Martin, “New York City's Financial Crisis: The Politics of Inflation and Retrenchment,” Public Interest, 48 (1977); 98–127; Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism (Chicago, 1963); Chambers, W.N. and Burnham, W.D., The American Party System (New York, 1967); Wiebe, R.H., Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, 1962); and Wiebe, R.H., The Search for Order (New York, 1967).Google Scholar A critique of the class-conflict model and some compelling negative evidence are provided in Wolfinger, R.E. and Field, J.O., “Political Ethos and the Structure of City Government,” American Political Science Review, 60 (1966): 306–326.Google Scholar

6. With this general consensus on the sources and consequences of urban reform there is, of course, a good deal of variability in interpretation. For some analysts, including Hofstadter and Lazerson, reform movements represent a reactionary effort by a declining social elite to retrieve some of the presumed moral virtues and social harmony of a rural past. For other analysts, notably Wiebe, reform is an effort by a rising middle class to stabilize conflicts between big business and big labor. For still others, reform is the mechanism chosen by monopoly capitalists to depoliticize the working class, thereby making possible a level of capital accumulation necessary to finance ongoing industrialization. Nevertheless, all of these perspectives interpret urban reform in basically class-conflict categories: in nearly all the major accounts working class groups are perceived to be the “victims” of reform movements sponsored by middle and upper class groups.Google Scholar

7. Among the many studies which deal with school reform, the following are of particular interest: Katz, M.B., Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York, 1971): Katz, M.B., Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York, 1971): Katz, M.B., The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1968); Tyack, D.B., The One Best System (Cambridge, 1974); Cronin, J.M., The Control of Urban Schools (New York, 1973); Salisbury, R.H., “Schools and Politics in the Big City,” The Politics of Education at the Local, State, and Federal Levels, (ed.), M.W. Kirst (Berkeley, 1970), pp 17–32; Callahan, R.E., Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, 1962); Zieger, H.M., Jennings, M.K., and Peak, W., Governing American Schools (North Scituate, Mass., 1974); Lazerson, Marvin, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, 1971); Greer, Colin, The Great School Legend (New York, 1976); and Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

8. Katz, , Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools, pp. 115–16.Google Scholar

9. Tyack, , The One Best System, p. 128. In a previous passage Tyack's argument is put somewhat more ambiguously: “Although school managers tried to create smooth-running, rational, conflict-free bureaucracies during the nineteenth century, often with the assistance of modernizing business elites, in most cities they encountered serious opposition…. In almost every city where the population was heterogeneous, contests erupted in educational politics. Although there were overtones of class assertion or resentment in such conflicts, the issues were not normally phrased in class terms but in the cross-cutting cultural categories of race, religion, ethnicity, neighborhood loyalties, and partisan politics. These concerns had great power to motivate political action, even though they may have blurred commonalities of class interest” (p. 78).Google Scholar

10. Cooper, Walter, Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated (Atlanta, 1896), passim; Martin, T.H., Atlanta and Its Builders (Atlanta, 1902), pp. 645–46; Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Georgia (Atlanta, 1895), Vol. 1, p. 750; Cooper, Walter, Official History of Fulton County (Atlanta, 1934), pp. 853–54.Google Scholar

11. Grantham, Dewey, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1958), pp. 25–26, 29–31; Urban, Wayne, “Hoke Smith and the Politics of Vocational Education,” Paper presented to the Annual Meetings, of the History of Education Society, 1978, pp. 4–7; Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Georgia, p. 937; and Cooper, Walter, Official History of Fulton County, pp. 44–46.Google Scholar

12. Atlanta Journal (28 August 1896).Google Scholar

13. Atlanta Journal (6 February 1897).Google Scholar

14. Atlanta Journal (28 January 1897).Google Scholar

15. Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes (15 February 1897).Google Scholar

16. Atlanta Board of Education, Annual Report (1897), p. 12.Google Scholar

17. Atlanta Journal (28 January 1897).Google Scholar

18. Atlanta Journal (1 February 1897).Google Scholar

19. Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes (15 February 1897); and Atlanta Board of Education, Annual Report (1899), p. 22.Google Scholar

20. Atlanta Board of Education, Annual Report (1898), p. 14.Google Scholar

21. Atlanta Board of Education, Annual Reports (1896–1910). The data are taken from the annual presentations of statistics on expenditures and enrollments.Google Scholar

22. Atlanta Board of Education, Report (1898), pp. 82–104. A full list of the new rules governing the public school system is presented in the 1898 School Board Report. Melvin Ecke, From Ivy Street to Kennedy Center (Atlanta, 1972), pp. 55–56, provides a summary of the most important changes made by the new board.Google Scholar

23. Atlanta Board of Education, Annual Report (1898), p. 14.Google Scholar

24. Atlanta Board of Education, Annual Report (1900), p. 21.Google Scholar

25. Watts, E.J., The Social Bases of City Politics (Westport, Conn., 1978), pp. 71–72, 74–76 and 160–164; and Watts, E.J., “Black Political Progress in Atlanta, 1868–1895,” Journal of Negro History, 59 (1974): 282–85.Google Scholar

26. Watts, , The Social Bases of City Politics, pp. 71–72, 74–76 and 160–164.Google Scholar

27. This consensus was maintained on very much the same terms into the middle of the twentieth century. See Key, V.O., Southern Politics (New York, 1949), Chapter 1 and especially pp. 5–9 for a discussion.Google Scholar

28. Atlanta Journal (1 March 1897).Google Scholar

29. Atlanta Journal (11 August 1896).Google Scholar

30. Atlanta Journal (2 February 1897 and 19 February 1897). See also Watts, E.J., “Atlanta's Police,” Journal of Southern History, 39 (1973): 176–82; Jenkins, Herbert, Forty Years on the Force (Atlanta, 1974), pp. 4–5; and especially Bolden, Willie, “The Political Structure of Charter Reform Movements in Atlanta During the Progressive Era” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1978), pp. 11–27 for an authoritative discussion of the factional split and its salience in Atlanta politics.Google Scholar

31. Atlanta Journal (3 February 1897).Google Scholar

32. Atlanta Journal (8–12 August 1896).Google Scholar

33. On the 1897 city council, for example, all five of the English partisans were mentioned in contemporary honorary biographies, while only one of the ten Brotherton representatives was mentioned.Google Scholar

34. Grantham, , Hoke Smith, pp. 31–35 and 131–155; and Bolden, , “Political Structure of Charter Reform,” pp. 64–65 and Appendices B and C, pp. 268, 270, and 273.Google Scholar

35. Atlanta Constitution (29 August 1896).Google Scholar

36. Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Georgia, p. 937; and Grantham, , Hoke Smith, pp. 26–27. Bolden, , “Political Structure of Charter Reform,” p. 15 provides evidence of another tie between Smith and Collier.Google Scholar

37. For Grant, see Martin, , Atlanta and Its Builders, pp. 655, 657; Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Georgia, Vol. 1, pp. 793–95; and Cooper, , Official History, pp. 858–59. For Bleckley, see Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Goergia, Vol. 1, pp. 715–18. For Rawson, see Martin, Atlanta and Its Builders, pp. 693–94. For Inman, see Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Georgia, pp. 833–34; and Cooper, , Official History, pp. 846–48. For English, see Southern Historical Association, Memoirs of Georgia, Vol. 1, pp. 767–69; and Cooper, , Official History, pp. 852–53.Google Scholar

38. Martin, , Atlanta and Its Builders, pp. 633–37; Cooper, , Official History, pp. 837–39; and Woodward, C.V., Origins of the New South, 1872–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1971), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

39. Strickland, Charles, “The Rise of Public Schooling in the Gilded Age and the Attitude of Parents: The Case of Atlanta, 1872–1897” (Mimeographed, Emory University, 1980), p. 4.Google Scholar

40. Racine, P.N., “Atlanta Schools: A History of the Public School System, 1869–1955” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1969), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

41. Atlanta City Council, Minutes (19 April 1894).Google Scholar

42. Racine, , “Atlanta Schools:” 81–91.Google Scholar

43. Strickland, , “The Rise of Public Schooling,” pp. 11–13.Google Scholar

44. Atlanta Journal (19 April 1897).Google Scholar

45. Ibid.Google Scholar

46. Atlanta Journal (5 April 1897).Google Scholar

47. Atlanta Journal (28 May 1897).Google Scholar

48. Atlanta Journal (22 April 1897).Google Scholar

49. Atlanta City Council, Minutes (29 May 1897). Among the three was expresident W.S. Thomson, the sole member of the old board to be reappointed by the Mayor.Google Scholar

50. Ibid.Google Scholar

51. Atlanta Constitution (1 June 1897); Atlanta Journal (30 May 1897); Georgia State Legislature, Legislative Report (10 December 1897).Google Scholar

52. Information on the occupations and addresses of board members was obtained from the annual editions of the Atlanta City Directory, 1872–1918.Google Scholar

53. Atlanta Constitution (29 May 1897).Google Scholar

54. Atlanta Journal (28 May 1897).Google Scholar

55. Atlanta Constitution (30 May 1897).Google Scholar

56. In biology it is possible to argue that the “survival of the fittest” ensures the emergence of eufunctional properties, but only an extreme Social Darwinist would argue that competition among organizational structures is so intense that random change can in a short period yield functional structural innovations.Google Scholar

57. Moreover, Atlanta school reforms in the 1910s and 1920s brought about major increases in per pupil expenditures. The impact of reform on educational finance seems to be largely a function of the economic context in which reform takes place. But that is a topic for another paper.Google Scholar