BackStory; School Days: A History of Public Education

This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. I'm Brian Ballot. And I'm Peter Runoff. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler, to all you kids who wish summer would last forever. Just be glad your school has heat. You read accounts of people trying to drink water in a one room schoolhouse but finding out that the water they had brought in earlier in the day was frozen. That's historian John Zimmerman. One of our guests today is we explore the history of public education. We'll explore the roots of the idea as well as the long tradition of arguing about who's going to pay for America's schools. We'll also hear the story of an African American woman in Virginia who attended segregated schools and went on to run the city's entire school board. People have some erroneous feeling that because we had fewer supplies that we were somehow receiving an inferior education. The history of public education in America. But first, this history and the making. Hello podcast people. Tony Field here, senior producer of the show. Just wanted to remind you that if you

like what you hear on today's show, there's a lot more where it came from. Backstoryradio.org is where you'll find us. There's a link to our archive at the top of the page. And if you still like us after that, you can share your thoughts with others by leaving a review on our page in the iTunes store. Or support us with the donation on our website. Again, that's at Backstoryradio.org. We're also on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. Thanks for listening. And see you next week. Major support for Backstory comes from the National Endowment for Humanities and the University of Virginia. An earlier version of this episode aired in 2009. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory with the American History Guide. A little over five decades ago, the Russian sent the dog into outer space. A mutton named Lika, that some government functionary had found on the streets of Moscow, they suited her up in a dog space suit, put her on a rocket ship and off she went. You know, we later learned

that that little dog only lasted a few hours and she probably died from stress. But back in November 1957, it seemed like most of the stress was on this side of the bearing straight. The US had been caught napping a month earlier when the Russians announced that they had launched Sputnik 1. Now they had repeated the stunt this time with a living, breathing passenger on board at least for a little while. What would Sputnik 3 carry? A nuclear missile? You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the Earth's circling satellite. One of the great scientific feats of the age. It didn't take long for the pundits to figure out who was to blame for this colossal national embarrassment. The military? No. Congress? No. The White House? Uh-uh. It was America's schools who had gotten us into this mess. Russian schools were churning out scientists who could put a dog into space and American schools were churning out, well, rock and roll. As the cover

of life magazine announced the following spring, there was a crisis in education. The Soviet Union now has in the combined category of scientists and engineers a greater number than the United States. Dwight Eisenhower, November 1957. And it is producing graduates in these fields at a much faster rate. This trend is disturbing. It may have been disturbing, but the Sputnik episode was not the first or the last time schools were blamed for our national crises. Just think about all the politicians you've seen railing about low standards in our schools. To take a classic example, a nation at risk, the report commissioned by Ronald Reagan in the early 80s. To quote one of its best lines, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America, the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. Despite record levels of educational spending, America's students

came in last in seven of 19 academic tests compared to students of other industrialized nations. Each week on Backstory, we take a topic from the world around us and explore its historical context. I, Peter Onough, cover the 18th century. And I, Ed Ayers, take care of the 19th century. And I, Brian Ballot, well, I speak for the 20th century. And today, we're devoting the hour to public education. Because once again, no surprise, it's taking its lumps from political leaders. Here's presidential hopeful Mitt Romney back in May. More than 150 years ago, our nation pioneered public education. And yet now we've fallen way behind. Among the developed countries of the world, you probably know this already, United States comes in 14th out of 34 and reading, 17th out of 34 in science. And how about this 25th out of 34 in math. So Peter, yeah, tell us, did people back in your period worry that we were going to fall behind our

competitors, the British or the French or whatever, because our schools weren't doing their jobs back then? Well, this is really deep background. And the answer is no. In fact, the idea that the common people should be educated was a heresy in the old days. That is, why would you want them to be able to read and write? Because as many early modern thinkers thought, if people were too literate, they'd be uppity, they'd, well, maybe they'd claim rights or something like this. And, you know, and that's really the story of American education. It doesn't begin in a kind of international competition. It didn't have anything to do with that. So how many people did go to school, Peter? I mean, you know, was it just for elite? I mean, we think of today, everybody goes to school. Was that the case back in your period? Well, in theory and colonial Massachusetts, every community with a certain population was supposed to have a school. But this was a statute that was observed more in the breach. Most education, as we know it today, took place within homes, particularly

Bible centered homes where literacy was important in the religious life of communities. There weren't schools to do this. You could say that churches as such were a kind of educational institution. But basically, these were places of oral performances, that is where sermons would be delivered and texts would be read out to the congregation. So mass education, as we know, it is really a phenomenon of, well, ed century. Well, now I can, I can see Ed waiting for the school bus. But before we let him get on it, I just got one more question. And yes, Peter, it has to do with your guide, Jefferson. He had a few ideas on education, didn't he? Absolutely, Brian, he is the author of a stillborn notion of universal public education. We don't like to emphasize the stillborn part. We like to say that Jefferson was a great visionary in his 1779 bill for the diffusion of knowledge. It only took I had 130 years to come to pass in his native Virginia.

Yeah, well, that's right, Ed. Hey, Virginians are slow. He was nearsighted, you're saying. Yeah, but his scheme of public education was that every community would support a school for girls as well as boys at the primary level. And then there'd be this kind of pyramidal selection, as you moved up, where a few select boys would be sent on from primary schools to grammar schools or secondary schools. And then on to the peak of his system, the University of Virginia, or William and Mary at that time on a scholarship. But this proposal really reflected the paranoia that Jefferson and other revolutionary leaders had about, frankly, the ignorance of the people that if they weren't adequately educated, they could be subject to demagoguery and they could be misled. And so they had to be trained to be able to detect conspiracies against the liberty within the ruling class. And one of the paradoxical things about the democratization of American

education is that the people resisted this because they suspected the motives of educational reformers. They thought educational reformers were really trying to put one over on the people by taxing them to support a system of education that would primarily benefit elites. So let me tell you about where public education came from in the form that we know it. Peter has described what it was like in the colonial era with this kind of patchwork of homeschooling and so forth. But with the expectation really that the Commonwealth owed an education to people and that the whole population was uplifted by a more broadly distributed education. And so in the 1830s, Horace Mann, who is close to anyone is the parent of American education, looked around and said, you know what we really need to do is to make this a far more coherent, forceful, state supported system. And what Horace Mann says is folks by which folks, I mean wealthy people, it's going to pay off if you'll pay taxes to create public schools for everybody.

So in Peter's period, Jefferson and others are arguing, well, we need an education to create citizens. But are you suggesting that Horace Mann was also saying, you Americans, hey, you know, education produces productive citizens who can actually help this economy? That is exactly my 20th century friend, what he said. And he actually, you know, would make pretty specific arguments to say big manufacturers. Look, guys, if you want workers to be disciplined, to answer bells, to be self motivating to the extent you want them to be, to be able to read simple instructions, education is not merely useful to the commonwealth and creating better citizens, yada, yada, yada, it is literally going into your pocketbook. And you know, you look back at it and you can see that that's really the only way that man was going to be able to persuade the people who paid the most taxes to pay more to educate, frankly, other

people's children. And I don't want to be cynical. People would like to have jobs that were regular and well paying. And industrial jobs brought something that we never had before, which was year round, sustained, guaranteed employment that was not tied to the agricultural cycle. And there might be another dimension of this. I wonder if immigration had something to do with the importance of education. You know, the literacy rate in Massachusetts before Horace Mann was virtually universal for men and pretty high for women as well. So it wasn't that you needed those basic skills. And of course, if you had a religious population that spent all that time at church, they had their own bells, so to speak. They had a kind of discipline. But when you had at large numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants, you faced a kind of new demographic challenge. Is that an element in man's notion of public education is to Americanize? You know, I don't think so. As logical as that seems, part of it would be our

friend chronology. And the fact that this is not my friend. Not my friend. Speak for yourself, Faith. The fact this begins in 1837 suggests that it predated the big tide of Irish immigration that would not come for another decade. And it would not peak for 20 more years. Yeah. So I think in fact, that if man had waited until the challenge was to spend tax money to educate a bunch of new immigrants, it wouldn't happen. It wouldn't happen. So ironically, it's just sort of the fulfillment of a sense that an homogenous America can become even more homogenous by using education. So and what are the social changes that lead to an emphasis on education? If it's not yet widespread immigration, is it the fact that Massachusetts farm children are moving away from home? Because only limited number of people could sustain farm operations through

the generations. So that in a way, there's an anxiety about the future and about what provisions are going to be made for children in a growing recognition that new sets of skills are going to be necessary to cope with an unpredictable future. That's beautifully put Peter and exactly right. And this takes us back to Sputnik because in the same way that the Soviets led to a great period of instability and anxiety in the country. If you're sitting there in Massachusetts and you're watching a lot of your population leave and you're wondering, you know, how it is that you're going to be able to keep up. Yeah. People are really saying, how are we going to be able to keep people in New England when you've got the Northwest open? You know, when there's land out there to be taken, what's going to keep people on the rocky soil of the Berkshures or whatever? And it's also the case that, you know, manufacturing is growing and if you're going to sort of want to compete with a great industrial power of the time, England, you're going to have to have a population that knows how to

invent and create. So I think it's recurring theme from as long as we've been in a nation, maybe not back in the colonial period, but didn't take long in the 19th century for that kind of rhetoric of we're under peril and only education can really save us. Well, in a minute we'll delve a little deeper into that 19th century and look at why one-room schoolhouses weren't all they're cracked up to be. We're also going to take a few of your calls, but first it's time for a quick break. Remember, if you'd like to be a caller on a future show, have a look at our website to see the topics we're working on. You can find us at BackstoryRadio.org. We'll be back in a minute. This is Backstory, the show that looks to the past to explain the America of today. I'm Peter Onof, 18th century guy. I'm Ed Ayers, 19th century history guy,

and I'm Brian Ballot, history guy of the 20th century. Today on the show we're exploring the history of public education. Like so many other topics we've explored on Backstory, we tend to remember that history is being much rosier than it actually was. Take, for example, the song we're listening to right now, school days, school days, school days, good old golden rule days, reading writing, arithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick, etc. That's John Zimmerman, a historian of education at New York University. Well, in 1949 in New York Times declared this one of the 10 most popular songs in the US United States. School days is all about a one-room schoolhouse in Ed's period, the 19th century, but it was written in the first decade of my century by a guy named Gus Edwards. Now, what's interesting about school days

as his follows? Gus Edwards was a German immigrant who moved to Brooklyn when he was seven. He never, as best we know, stepped into a one-room schoolhouse and he might not really have left New York. Actually, he did. He eventually went to LA, but Gus Edwards was a vaudevillian. He later became a booking agent. This is the guy who wrote our most popular and our most influential ode to the one-room schoolhouse and he's an urban immigrant from Germany. Part of the reason that John Zimmerman is so fired up about the subject is that he wrote a book about it. It's called Small Wonder, the little red schoolhouse in history and memory. In it, John looks at the way school reformers with a wide range of agendas invoked the one-room schoolhouse as kind of a model educational setting. In fact, until recently there was an actual model of the little red schoolhouse

outside the entrance of the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. Zimmerman basically argues that this nostalgia, a word he likes to point out, comes from the Greek for homesickness that this nostalgia skews all kinds of facts about little red schoolhouses beginning with their very color. Red. Most one-room school houses were rather white or more commonly just unpainted because school districts didn't want to pay to paint them. Help me understand this, John. Americans seem to put education, public education on a pedestal, but you know, we don't want to pay to paint the little schoolhouse. I think that's true and I think that that contradiction goes back all the way to the founding of the common schools. The common school movement, the idea that there should be universal state-supported education, was, although not unique to the United States, in many ways, distinct to it. By 1850, there are greater fraction of elementary school age kids going to school in our country than on any country on Earth. But what we

did in 19th century was we sent an extraordinarily large fraction, relatively speaking, of our kids to school, and we sent them to school in essentially shacks. That's what one-room school houses were. They were 15 by 40 feet in dimension and they were in every sense bare bones. Most of them did not even have a bell for your bell, even though we remember that part too. Very primitive heating systems, if any at all. You read accounts of people trying to drink water in a one-room schoolhouse, but finding out that the water they had brought in earlier in the day was frozen, was ice. The teaching force, which is overwhelmingly single female and young, and young means sometimes as young as 15 or 16, often has very, very little more education than kids their teacher. Yeah. If you think about Little House in the Prairie, right? This was my time stone for all things historical. Exactly. Exactly. Lower Angles wilder,

of course. This was an autobiographical story, and it was about her life on the Prairie in the 1880s. It didn't become popular until the 1930s, which was precise at the time when thanks to the WPA and the PWA, they're ripping down these one-room schools. That's important too, right? Because this again becomes a venue for nostalgia for remembering an institution that's going away. But what does she remember in those stories? I mean, she remembers being a kid teaching other kids. Yes. And she remembers all kinds of problems with the so-called big boys, right? Because you might guess the big boys are the ones that are going to test your authority. And John, what is roughly the age age age age age three to 20, three to 20, and often all in the same place. And sometimes there would be as many as a hundred kids in a 15 by 40 square box. And sometimes there would be as few as four. The major deficiency is that the pedagogy is entirely what we would call wrote. Yeah. And wrote means repeat. And it has to be. It has to be not just because of the lack of training of the teacher, but also because of the

enormous age range of kids. Yeah. So they all have their own primers. And people would bring in whatever textbook they had. And what they would do is they would memorize it and then recite it in a rotating way to the teacher. And so it was not uncommon to find 11 or 12-year-old kids that could just say a whole textbook. Wow. But was there some basis for the later nostalgia of this home sickness as you put it? If the question is, is there a reason for people to look back longingly on this? There absolutely is. And here's the reason. Whatever their deficiencies, they were communal institutions. In most cases, they were the only public building. So they were not just a place where the kids went to school. They were a place where the community met. If it's the only public building, it's not just a schoolhouse, right? It's the place where voting happens, right? Where debates happen, not just that. Weddings, funerals, all of the holidays, you know, Christmas Easter. And incidentally, you know, there is no memoir of Christmas in a

one-room schoolhouse that is complete without Santa's beard catching on fire. You read this everywhere. It makes sense, right? I mean, it's pre-electricity. It's lit by candle and there's some guy with a whole bunch of cotton on his chin. So they were not perfect. They had a multitude of deficiencies. But when people look back at them and say they were ours, this is absolutely true. Am I being really naive and nostalgic to use your word to think that there was something good about getting literally everybody in the community, kids, adults, etc. All in one room and just letting them hash it out. I mean, contrast that image at any rate to what we have today. This long chain of bureaucratic commands stretching all the way from the secretary of education down to the assistant principal for physical education and discipline. Well, here's the thing. I think you have to go back to

answer the question to distinguish between what adults were doing in these schools and what kids were doing. The one-room schools of the 19th century were profoundly small, de-democratic and debate-filled institutions in the evening, right? Yes. When the entire community showed up to debate, among other things, whether to pay for the school. Exactly. You don't have to be in the stageless to celebrate the idea that there were these public institutions that brought everybody together to debate the content and the contours of their shared lives. However, let's not impute that dynamic to the classroom itself when the kids and teachers were in there because that was not a land of democratic debate. That was a three-hours, wrote, wrote, and wrote. Completely. My way or the highway. And that's why teachers devised all of these to us draconian punishments. By the way, the Dundskap was rarely used, but every other kind of humiliation was often recapitulating the alleged error or sin. So the

talk too much would have a twig affixed to their tongue. A kid who chewed gum would have the gum put on their forehead or their nose. And to me, the most fascinating one, which tells you a lot about the 19th century, is that a kid who was a poor speller would have to cut letters out of a newspaper and eat them. And this sounds quite barbaric in many ways it is. Is that what your words comes from, by the way? Maybe. I mean, we don't know. But something that I find fascinating about this is on one level, it's awful, horrible, humiliating, gross, right? But I think it's also an example of a time when any academic failure was considered to be a function of a lack of effort, right? Yes. Not differential ability, right? That punishment is pre-IQ test, right? Right. And it's pre the entire concept of disability. Yes. If you're not spelling, it's not because you, you know, you have a different learning style that prevents

you from spelling. Right. It's because you weren't listening. So eat some words. Here's your punishment. So so as awful as it is, I think there's also something that in some ways I find rather salutary about it. There is something quite small, de-democratic about the idea that everyone has the same ability. Right. Ergo, if they're doing worse, it's because they didn't apply themselves. Right. There's a presumption that there's an equal starting ground there. Exactly. Yeah. Well, John, I want to thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. John Zimmerman directs the history of education program at New York University's Steinhart School of Education. His new book is Small Wonder, the Little Red School House in History and Memory. You can listen to an extended version of our conversation at BackstoryRadio.org. Well, guys, you noticed I took advantage of being alone with our guests to

conflate all kinds of things. And I was just anticipating you now pulling them apart and maybe want to start with you Ed. And just what do you think about what John said? And does it have any application to all of those schools that you've studied in the South? No, it takes a lot of fun out of it, Brian. We just sort of roll over on your back like that. But actually it was a great interview. And I think in many ways it captures what the experience of the 20th century South was like. The South, as we know, was a little bit behind the times when it comes to education. It just simply wasn't the same kind of value placed on it. All the way from the 18th century on, the elite was actually pretty well educated. Then they went to a lot of trouble to create academies and colleges and boarding schools and tutors and all those kinds of things. But if you go back to the 19th century South, there were no mechanisms for middle and lower class people to gain an education. And if you were African-American, of

course, it was illegal to learn how to read. So not only were they're not schools, but there were laws that prohibited you from gaining literacy. So the idea coming along of a school for everybody was a late innovation and progress. So guys, this may be naive, but you know, at least one good thing about this notion of a common schoolhouse is it does strike me as a place where at least everybody could come together. Well, they come together, Brian, but not necessarily on everybody's terms. I mean, if you think about early public education in New England and Massachusetts, particularly where the King James Bible is a text in effect. I mean, it's a Protestant education. And that was one of the reasons why many Catholics, one of the many reasons why they wanted their own schools. Yeah. Yeah. And those synergies start having public schools in New England. Then Catholic schools start growing up. And you have some of the biggest debates and riots around parochial schools in the north in the

1840s and 1850s, because people say, I don't want the state educating my children into Protestantism. And I don't want them to be using books and Bibles that are prejudiced against my religion. And the people who, on the other side, well, we don't want Catholics gathering together outside of the common vocabulary and teaching about popery or whatever. Hey, guys, I never said they sang kumbaya together. I just said they came together to hash out some of these fundamental issues that, you know, are at the heart of our democratic republic. Well, but, Brian, these are not level playing fields. And we have an ocean of state neutrality, which I think we to an extraordinary extent live by in modern day America, but it's been a tough slog. And you can't take it for granted. And even today, you have to wonder, what are the implicit messages? This is what's being asked when people challenge the nature of education and the role of religion in education. What's being taught in schools? Yeah, well, I think it's time for some explicit messages, which is why we're

going to turn to our listeners. As we do every episode of backstory, we've been fielding your comments on today's topic on our website, backstoryradio.org. We've gotten a lot of great comments there and our producers have invited a few of you to join us on the phone today. We got Kathleen on the line from New York City. Kathleen, welcome to backstory. Hi, I've got a question for you guys. Let's hear it, Kathleen. These days, I hear a lot of complaints from my daughter about school. You know, it's too long. There's too much homework. And I want to know what the children in the 19th century think about school. The reason I asked it is both my grandmother's who were born in the 1880s. They loved school. They thought it was like, oh, it's so great. You know, I can get away from doing chores. Yeah, yeah. So what are the evidence? What kind of sources have you got and what are the kids of the 19th century think?

You know, what's interesting is how much this changed over the 19th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, they wouldn't think about school all that much because they didn't really go all that much. I think you would have seen that kids would not have complained about how long school went, but rather would have been struck by how sporadic it was and how short the day was and how little attention each individual student received because they were all together and one big classroom. Yeah, and I just want to say the 18th and 19th century guys that kids didn't really start going to school until the 20th century. That's right. Even as late as 1900, half the kids in the United States didn't go to school and the average number of years that people went to school was about five years. Okay. So, Frank, when would you say school began to present something like a total environment for children and they'd expect to go through it and they would see it as a fact of life, one that they didn't necessarily like very much.

If you're talking about northern urban schools, I would say by the 1920s, school is kind of a regular experience for most kids. Now we're not talking about high school, but we are talking about regular schooling at least through what we would call middle school age years. And one of the reasons for that was compulsory education laws and more and more states started imposing them beginning in the progressive era, but you know when they really took effect was during the Great Depression and why do you think that was, Kathleen? Keeping teachers employed. Keeping teachers employed, but also keeping kids out of the workforce, right? With so few jobs to go around, all kinds of measures were taken in order to preserve those jobs for adults, but that's really I would say somewhere between the 20s and the 30s, that's when kids started

complaining about school the most because they were in school the most. I will say having read quite a few letters and diaries and stuff from the 19th century, you don't have to go very far to find people complaining about oh my god I'm going to shoot myself if I have to sit here and read this Latin one more night. So I think you know that the point that I would make is it depends on everything else in which the education is embedded. If the contrast is you know shoveling out barns, school looks pretty good. So as we've ratcheted up the expectations of schooling, we've ratcheted down the expectations of everything else. And so kids entire you know experience of being young is now channeled and focused on school and so we invest it with a lot more significance that used to have including a lot more complaint about boredom and so forth. Do you agree Kathleen? Are you actually interested in this? I am very interested in it. I went to a New England school but had six grades in four rooms. Wow. You know

part of that work. Could you tell us more specifically how that worked? I'm a teacher didn't pay attention to you all the time because sometimes she was working with the other kids so basically you could spend your whole life you know either daydreaming or reading as in my case and they wouldn't necessarily know what was going on. So Kathleen you're saying you learned more because the teacher didn't pay attention to you and you actually could read. Yes. Yes. Okay here's a radical reform proposal. I like that. I like that very much. Hey Kathleen thanks for the great call. Thank you. Thanks Kathleen. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Well it's time for another short break. Remember we want to hear your stories about your own education. Did school facilitate your education or did it just get in the way? Leave your comments and questions at BackstoryReady.org or just give us a call. Our phone number is 888-257-8851. We'll be back in a minute. This is Backstory the show that turns to history to understand the world

around us today. I'm your 18th century host Peter Onough. I'm your 19th century host Ed Ayers and I'm your 20th century host Brian Ballot. Today on the show we're looking at the story of public education in America and asking whether people have always worried about schools as much as they seem to worry today. We're going to take another call now. This one is from John in Modina, Virginia. John welcome to Backstory. Hi guys. How are you all doing? Well we're doing great. Well my question is when I think about the old one-room schoolhouse with the school mom who was paid by the parents of the students. When and why and how to remove from that consumer-based model to our current more socialized model. Now we're funding this big giant school system as opposed to saying okay we're watching the children go up to the one-room schoolhouse making sure they come out smarter and then paying for that. Yeah I think what you're getting at John is the levels between us and the education of our kids or other people's kids. It's so distant we don't really feel that we have much control over it though. You

have to say that the survival of PTAs and school boards that are responsive to local citizens. They keep alive that historic memory of having control over our children's education and over the way we govern ourselves. As has homeschool English has become quite popular recently but you know I want to address the elephant in the room the B word because I think it goes to the heart of John's question and that's bureaucracy and I think what John you tell me John but what you're really talking about is getting away from kind of direct parent control and handing over control of education to in essence all of these middle men and the funny thing is that all these superintendents etc. stuff were men and all the lower paid teachers were women as this transition took place in the late 19th and early 20th century. Am I on the right track there John or you is this what's really got your trouble the kind of intervention of all these

education bureaucrats all these people who know better than parents what's good for your kids. Right it was when did the states decide the localities weren't very good at it and needed to get involved and then when did the federal government decide the states weren't very good at it and they needed to get involved and it's done exactly as you said it's created this huge bureaucracy the amount of money we spend educating our children in the public sector is much more than private schools spend to educate a child and it's not because the teachers are so overpaid or because they have really you know fantastic books it's because we have these bureaucracies we have all these these upper level administrative people that we're paying and that it's consuming a lot of the funds that should be either going to education or not be collected in the first place thank goodness you didn't ask that question John because that it would have required actual historical knowledge to answer it but I'll take a crack at it anyway basically the states got involved in the early late 19th

century and early 20th century and by the 1920s and 1930s it was the states that started saying hey it's not cost-efficient to have all of these little one-room schools all over the place we're gonna build consolidated schools and of course at the same time states were building roads so it was easier to get to these schools it was easier to run school buses by the 30s and the 40s one did the federal government get involved well you'd have to point to the very important education act in 1965 passed by Lyndon Johnson in the great society and you know that was aimed at poor kids and where were most of the poor kids they were in the south and a very funny thing happened on the way to the schoolhouse states that were determined not to integrate southern states started accepting this federal money and along with money comes control and the

federal government said hey you know we're not gonna fund segregated schools and if you don't integrate this is separate from Brown v Board of Education separate from the courts the federal government said you know if you don't integrate we're gonna cut off all that money and you know what those states said God we're getting so much federal money we can't even think of not accepting it we better move towards integration the last thing I'll say John an answer to your question is none of us like bureaucrats bureaucrat itself is kind of a pejorative term and of course you can find examples of excess but I think that overall these bureaucrats have really been pretty impressive at raising the standards of American education at the same time that they have helped bring in virtually all kids to the education system it is not easy to

educate everybody and educate them well anyway that's I'll get off my soapbox now it's never too late in America and that distinguishes the American educational system from every other educational system in the world and it's never too late to learn something about history if you keep tuned to backstory that's what we're here for this is kind of a remedial education for grownups I truly appreciate the education that you have just given me you know that you're calling me a bureaucrat that's not a teacher thanks so much for calling John yeah take care I buy so Brian you mentioned the school funding from the federal government help lead to desecrigation in the late 60s right I think it's important to remember though that the big case that lead to desecrigation brown versus board of education occurred back in 1954 so there's a whole missing decade in between now what happened was this southern politicians led by Virginia senator Harry Bird basically said we don't care

what you say we're not going to integrate it was a movement that came to be known as massive resistance in 1958 the governor actually closed down the white schools and three Virginia cities so they wouldn't have to integrate yeah and one of those cities was around Charlottesville yeah and one of the students who graduated from Charlottesville's black high school that year was a young woman named Alicia Lugo we're gonna hear her story in just a minute but first let me give you just a little bit of background on her Alicia Lugo went to college got her teaching degree and came back to Charlottesville she was assigned to teach in the same school where she'd been a student now this is 1965 and even though segregation had officially been outlawed the student body at that school was still all black two years later the city closed that school and moved her over to another school that had been integrated after all those years Walker school and years later she went on to chair the city school board for more than a decade Miss Lugo died last year but in 2010 I had the chance to

talk with her about her experiences in the Charlottesville city schools I was born in Charlottesville all my public school education was here in Charlottesville first at all black Jefferson elementary school and then all black Burleigh high school which was an excellent school I think that people have some erroneous feeling that because we had fewer supplies and less resources and our teachers were fighting over one film projector and that sort of thing that we were somehow receiving an inferior education I find that laughable from the standpoint of 50 60 years later did people not resent though the fact that they might have multiple film projectors and better supplies and things at Lane well projectors and supplies don't make the excellent educational experience you have to make a child want to learn and that's what we came up

under to my way of thinking having been a student at all black Burleigh feeling safe knowing that there was a definite connection between my home and my teachers my parents were intricately involved in fact many more black parents than now were supportive of both our teachers and our schools and Burleigh students excelled everywhere why do you think that so many people then would work through the courts and sacrifice so much in order to bring about integration of the schools because they recognize there is no such thing as separate but equal that for many minority children the segregated school system was a farce when children had to walk two miles pass an available school to go to school those things were jokes but even though the separate but equal

schools were crushed by the courts if you walk down the halls of the average school today you'll see situations where classes are either all black Hispanic and poor white and other classes that are all white with perhaps a token black person or Asian person in there so why do you think that integration did not turn out the way that people dreamed of because I think that there were those people who had no intention of letting it turn out that way the only way systems change is that you treat them like a rubber band as long as you keep the tension on the rubber band you can change its shape but once you let go that tension once you let go that scrutiny it drops right back into its original ball that's a great metaphor may I steal that I like it so it's your sense that

the tension left the schools when there was not really a direct connection between the teachers in their community and the students in their community is that what happened exactly and the scrutiny was gone because who can come plain now we have the desegregated school so you got what you asked for but we've got in Charlottesville a majority African-American school board we have an African-American female superintendent an African-American assistant superintendent female and we have a 13% dropout rate what's wrong with that picture and what do you think is wrong with that what what's driving that well I guess to my way of thinking when school is not interesting when you don't see any relationship between school and your future when you feel you're in a

hostile environment when you feel that you're not safe in that environment when you feel that people don't have the level of expectations for your performance that they do for other students performances school doesn't seem to make much sense does it well if we can go back to your story a little bit it makes me wonder you know when I think about what great changes that you saw and experienced and helped lead did we lose a generation or do we lose some continuity or some tradition of our teachers that the people said look this is just so ridiculous if the states can be playing games like with massive resistance and you know if you're not going to be really giving every kid a chance instead doing this tracking and so forth that the people just become disgusted and said like I'll just put my energies and something else which is exactly what I did I stated walk a one year and I realized with numbers of

minority children dropping out of school getting pushed out of school somebody needed to be out there to help reclaim them and so for the next 35 years I worked in nonprofits that worked with kids trying to help them get themselves on track well I'm really grateful for your time today and your insight and a couple of metaphors I'm gonna steal but also very grateful for keeping the faith over all these years and doing the very best that you can with whatever history is handed you so thank you so very much for joining us today really appreciate it I enjoyed it a lot thank you that was Alicia Lugo former teacher and a school board chair right here in Charlottesville Virginia you know there's a deep irony in that interview that had teased out which is that

at the very moment when real opportunities were opening up for African Americans in society yeah as Lugo seems to suggest the teachers were giving up on students and students were giving up on school yeah I think that was so upsetting to me about this interview that sense that you won the big struggle you thought over integration but there's a bigger struggle over what we now call racism yeah and that's the fundamental tension or tragedy in the heart of all this on one hand you can't just say we're going to have separate but equal because obviously they showed the separate but equal reason work on the other hand when you do that you insert several layers of necessary bureaucracy between parents and students in the schools and I'm not exactly sure well we do know what happens is that some people spend the money to create

little schools over which they have control which are a little private school which are dedicated to young women or dedicated to people in different religious backgrounds so I don't know that segregation in fact it's not it it's a trivialization of that word to talk about people looking for various kinds of affinities but I think that what Ms. Lugo would say is that real integration was never given a chance and that economic inequalities were inserted in place of racial inequalities and as a result we have a sham yeah I think the point is that community which we get nostalgic about is a double age sword that is on the one hand of course in many ways that's what we strive for a sense of identification with each other of nurture and care yet communities are also inevitably throughout history exclusive and they want to define themselves according to their own image or that is according to the

group that dominates within that community so it's a highly volatile situation and I think maybe the only upbeat message of all this is there have been such massive dislocations that maybe a new sense of community will emerge out of all this which will at least move forward in terms of our expectations of our students who's going to succeed and there's some reason to hope that we can overcome that self-perpetuating notion of discrimination and superiority in racism well and I don't think we should underestimate the importance of daily contact and interaction within the schools yes there may be tracking within certain classes but I don't think we should underestimate the interaction between racial groups starting in kindergarten yeah yeah even if those relations are not smooth or you know out of Disneyland at all times well Brian I think what we got here is an example of schools which we expect to take the

lead in social change right but in many ways social change is going to register last in schools I mean it's a it's a real paradox those are all really good points I guess you know looking at it from the viewpoint of history which may that be a great idea for radio show yeah let's do it I'm struck that we've had 300 years almost 400 years of slavery and injustice and I wouldn't want us to despair too soon when we're only 25 years into a new more expansive inclusive order there's no doubt that what Ms. Lugo said is true but if we lose faith that we can make that change we've lost faith in America and I think that's a good way to sum up and it's a good thing too because that's all the time we have for today but remember we want to keep the conversation going visit us online and tell us what you think about the past present and future of public education in America you can find us at backstory radio dot org don't be a stranger today's episode of backstory was produced by Tony Feele Rachel

Quimby and Catherine Moore we had helped from Bart Elmore Lydia Wilson and David Barringer our production staff also includes just Angerbredson Eric Mendel Ellison Quants and Neil Bechensstein Jamal Milner is our technical director back story's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham major support for backstory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation the University of Virginia Weinstein properties and anonymous donor in the history channel history made every day Peter O'Neal and Brian Ballot are professors in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities hey guys Eric Metal here one of the associate producers for backstory and I'm coming to you because we need a little bit of help we're working on an episode about emancipation a full hour

about what emancipation meant in the 1860s and what it means today and as part of that hour we've been looking around and we've been wondering why aren't there any memorials to emancipation nothing modern at least and there was one memorial bill to 1876 but if you google it you'll see that it's outdated in a lot of ways and very controversial and so we've been thinking what would a modern memorial to emancipation look like if we could design our own memorial to one of the greatest moments in American history what would that memorial look like and we thought maybe you the listeners would like to help us out so if you can just shoot an email to backstory at virginia.edu or if you go to our website backstoryradio.org you'll see there's a page for our show on a emancipation on that page leave a comment let us know this is my design for the emancipation memorial this is a delicate task and it's something that I think a lot of people would like to have input on so help us out thanks