Abstract
This article develops a longue durée study of Boston school governance based on the concept of strands of institutional development. The study identifies two strands of political development—rationalizing and democratic—that have operated on distinctly different logics in the formation and reformation of school governing arrangements. To explain institutional change in school governance, I adopt a conceptual framework that integrates structural (economic, social, and political context) and agency (local political actors) levels of analysis. This inquiry into political development conceives of governing institutions as instruments of collective problem solving, whose form and function are the product of the interactions between the urban environment and local political actors.
Historical institutionalism emerged in the 1980s as an attempt to provide state-centered explanations of political development, with such works as Bringing the State Back In, 1 to counter economically deterministic views such as the modernism school or Marxist analysis of developmental patterns. 2 Many of the new institutionalists have tended to portray the process of political development as one anchored in institutional stability, often referred to as path dependence, punctuated by realigning events that establish a new institutional pathway of stable development. 3 One school of thought, dubbed American Political Development (APD), among the historical institutionalists has challenged the punctuated-stability model by conceiving of political development as a far more complex and contingent process in its ordering and reordering of state organization and state-society relations. Leading proponents of the APD model, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, argue that “[I]nstitutional investigations of the historical constructions of politics have exposed government as a set of controls made up of disparate and impinging parts, an arrangement of authority with uncertainty at its many interfaces.” 4 Orren and Skowronek define political development as entailing “a durable shift in governing authority,” by which is meant a lasting “change in the locus or direction of control, resulting in a new distribution of authority, among persons or organizations within the polity at large or between them and their counterparts outside.” 5 They observe further that “[S]hifts in governing authority are important in historical inquiry because they are a constant object of political conflict and they set the conditions for subsequent politics, especially when shifts are durable.” 6 To explain institutional change, the APD school invokes the concept of intercurrence, which occurs “when institutional purposes ingrained in an earlier era encounter new and antithetical purposes later on” so that “political change, even at critical junctures, is accompanied by the accumulation and persistence of competing controls within institutions of government, the normal condition of the polity will be that of multiple, incongruous authorities operating simultaneously.” 7 In this way, the conflict that stems from intercurrence propels political development through collisions between and within governing institutions.
Until recently, APD studies focused on how intercurrence has shaped the institutional development of national politics. Over the last six or seven years, however, the APD approach has worked its way into the scholarship on urban politics. 8 As Joel Rast explains, intercurrence in urban politics occurs because, “[I]nstead of one political integrated system, we find instead multiple orders constructed at different times for different purposes.” 9 The application of the concept of intercurrence to the study of urban politics, however, may not be a fruitful line of inquiry. Two conceptual difficulties can be found in the APD analytical framework as applied to urban political development. First, a historical explanation of political change that is primarily state-centered allows the social, economic, and political context to recede too deeply into the background. In this sense, APD too narrowly adjusts the analytical focus on the interactions among and within governing institutions—the ill-fitting and uncomfortable arrangements of older and newer governing institutions jostling together within one polity. Just as important for local politics, however, is the interaction between governing institutions and the social, economic, and political environment in which they operate. From this perspective, the governing of cities and towns entails seeking solutions to the social and economic dislocations faced by urban populations. And, as such, the study of urban politics should incorporate analysis of how broad structuring and restructuring forces of urbanization drive institutional development by instigating debates and actions around social and economic problems that lead to adaptations or major overhauls of local governing institutions. For example, the establishment of professionalized fire and police departments and bureaucratic departments of public works and health in big cities of the nineteenth century were responses to the inadequacies of the quasi-public service organizations developed in the eighteenth century. 10 Also part of the larger context of institutional development is the intergovernmental system in which cities and towns are situated. In the United States, the legal station of local governments places them under the constitutional authority of state governments. 11 Therefore, when seeking to alter local governing institutions in significant ways, local actors must acquire approval from state governments. The relationship between states and their localities—hostile, friendly, indifferent—defines in large part the nature of the intergovernmental system in which local political development occurs. In the late nineteenth century, for example, state legislatures generally acceded to petitions from big cities to alter their governing systems, such as instituting strong-mayor forms of government. 12
Second, APD undervalues the role of agency in the process of urban political development. Efforts to reform local governing institutions revolve around the process of coalition-building around specific agendas in which local political actors mount challenges to existing political arrangements with sufficient capacity to overcome the opposition of those who seek to defend the status quo. Because governing institutions are instruments of collective problem solving, they are created, modified, and eventually disbanded and replaced to address difficulties and dislocations of urban life, such as crime, fire, disease, and so on. Thus, it is their purpose to improve the ways in which urban affairs are managed that motivates reformers to undertake the reordering of local governing arrangements. While intercurrence, in the form of institutional friction among older and newer governing authorities, may be generated by reform politics, it is not the primary source of urban political change.
This article, instead, adopts a conceptual framework that integrates structural (economic, social, and political context) and agency (local political actors) levels of analysis to explain the rise and development of local governing institutions. In contrast with the APD perspective, this approach treats governing institutions as explananda rather than as explanantia. That is, governing institutions are instruments of collective problem solving whose form and function are products of the interactions between the urban environment and local political actors. To illustrate how these interactions have driven and shaped the development of local governing institutions in time and space, this article adopts the research strategy of the longue durée, which Ferdinand Braudel describes as “a history capable of traversing even greater distances, a history to be measured in centuries this time: the history of the long, even very long time span.” 13 As such, the analytical focus of the study presented below is the development of public-school governance in Boston from the 1630s to the present. As the first American urban place to establish public schooling, Boston serves as a natural candidate for a longue durée study of school governance. As with APD, the development of school governance in Boston is tracked by identifying changes in governing arrangements that constituted shifts in authority over public education. Unlike the APD approach, however, explanation for the longue durée centers on how local actors sought to modify school governance over time to cope with the changing circumstances of public education.
Two sets of concepts are employed to explain the development of school governing arrangements in Boston over the 1630 to 2016 period. The first set conceives of change in governing arrangements as unfolding along strands of institutional development, each informed by a specific logic or design to address existing problems in managing local public education. Changes in school governing authority in Boston have involved two strands of institutional development: rationalization and democratization. Institutional changes meant to rationalize school governance have been designed to reorder authority arrangements internal to the (local) state apparatus by seeking to improve the management of the school system. Reformers have sought two sorts of modification in the internal organization of school management over time. The first entails efforts to eke out greater measures of efficiency and accountability, such as replacing decentralized committee systems with more centralized-bureaucratic systems of school administration. Educational reformers have also instituted changes with the purpose of professionalizing the management of the city’s school system, such as the appointment of superintendents that possess both expertise and experience in school administration. Although these two types of administrative reforms have sometimes been embodied in a single institutional change, such as the appointment of a superintendent of schools, the analytical distinction is a useful one for tracking the course of the rationalizing strand. Democratizing reforms, in turn, have aimed to reconfigure state-society relations and are conceived here as measures designed to strengthen the representative function of school governance. At its heart, democratic reform has intended to enlarge the role of elected bodies whose sole purpose is managing the local educational system. The creation of elected school boards exemplifies democratization in school governance.
A second set of concepts is used to describe the magnitude of institutional change in school governance over the longue durée. Reconstructive reform refers to the reordering of governing arrangements in fundamental ways, such as the replacement of elected school boards with a system of school governance based on mayoral control. This shifts authority dramatically from a governing body accountable to the local electorate to an appointed school board accountable to the mayor. Incremental reforms, in contrast, constitute small changes in the arrangements of governance, such as institutional changes that allocate new or reallocate existing administrative tasks within a central bureaucracy. Such an administrative reform does not alter the overall structure of the administrative system, it simply modifies some features of its internal organization.
Three Centuries of School Governance Reform in Boston
The narrative that follows divides the history of school governance reform in Boston into five periods of institutional development: the formative years (1636-1788); the emergence of complex systems of governance (1789-1834); school governance modernization (1835-1906); institutionalization of rationalized administration (1906-1970); and reconstructing democratic accountability (1971-2016). The democratizing and rationalizing strands of development are traced through these five periods to determine how and why school reformers reconstructed and adapted authority arrangements in response to the perceived problems of school governance generated by the social, economic, and political context in which public education was dispensed.
The Formative Years of School Governance, 1630-1788
Boston was founded in 1630 by a Protestant sect known as the Puritans as part of the Great Migration of emigrants who sought to practice their religion free from royal persecution in England. 14 In the earliest years of the colony, no clear legal distinction was made between provincial and town government. Nevertheless, unable to oversee the daily management of the colony’s various settlements such as Boston, the General Court (colonial legislature) intermittently ceded responsibility for organizing local militia, regulating wages, inspecting boundary fences, and so on to town authorities. 15 This occurred in Boston between November 1633 and September 1634, when the townsfolk began holding “a general meeting upon public notice” to address common concerns and created a formal committee of “10 to manage the affaires of the towne.” 16 This arrangement was eventually set on legal footings with the passage of legislation by the General Court that extended a measure of local self-government to Massachusetts towns. Boston’s townsfolk turned local government into a limited form of freeman participatory democracy unlike anything to be found outside the New England colonies. Two regular town meetings were held, one in March to elect town officials and representatives for the General Court and one in May to decide on town finances. 17 Special town meetings could also be called for addressing pressing issues. 18 In 1642, the assembly formed a board of “select men, chosen for the Towne’s businesse [sic].” 19 The Selectmen enforced Commonwealth laws and town by-laws and over the second half of the seventeenth century, acquired a large complement of executive duties including stewardship of the town’s public schools. 20
One of the most expensive and time-consuming responsibilities undertaken by the townsfolk of Boston was public schooling. In 1636, the wealthiest Bostonians contributed £40 to the founding of a privately funded and managed free school, the operation of which was financed by subscription. 21 Students received education in basic reading and mathematics, as well as an introduction to Greek and Latin. 22 Although free of cost to families of enrolled students, attendance tended to be light in the early years. 23 By the mid-1640s, however, school accommodations had become inadequate, and the town government began to take a more direct role in schooling. Schoolmasters had previously used their own houses as schoolrooms. 24 But, to furnish ample space for the growing number of pupils, in January 1642, the Town Meeting resolved to make improvements to Deer Island in preparation for a public-school building, although its construction was delayed for years. 25 In 1643, the town also made provisions for a land grant to establish a revenue source for funding of the free school, which came to be known as Boston Latin. 26 In 1652, the town furnished a schoolhouse and accommodations for a schoolmaster and, in 1655, a new schoolhouse was built. 27 By the end of the decade, upkeep of the schoolhouse and the schoolmaster’s salary constituted the town’s second greatest expenditure. 28 To generate a steady stream of revenues for schooling, the town dedicated rents from several town properties and enterprises to support the free school. 29
From the 1660s, development of school governance occurred in increments of institutional reform and in response to changes in the town’s school population. The organization of the public schools before the eighteenth century consisted simply of a master (teacher) and students. 30 Initially, the Town Meeting elected schoolmasters, but the task of appointing the masters was soon delegated to the Selectmen. 31 The Selectmen also appointed the first assistant to the grammar school master in 1666, and other assistants were added over time. 32 Town ministers also played a supervisory role, occasionally visiting the Latin school as observers to assess school performance. 33
The original reasoning behind Boston Latin was to prepare students to enter Harvard College. 34 However, by the 1680s, many Bostonians began to apply pressure for provision of a more general education purpose. 35 What is more, overcrowding at the Latin School made an expansion of public schooling an imperative. 36 Thus, it became apparent to Boston’s civic leaders that educating children beyond the objective of training for the ministry or university would be a valuable asset for the town. 37 As a consequence, in 1682, the Town Meeting formed two new schools for the purpose of teaching children to write and to cipher. 38 These schools admitted only boys—a policy that obtained until 1789. 39
Under these conditions, the scope of public education in Boston grew in concert with the town’s population in the eighteenth century. In 1700, the town created a writing school in the North End, and to meet the educational needs of the south side of town, the South Writing School was established in 1720.
40
Expansion of public education, in turn, led to incremental reorganization in the administration of the free schools. Until 1710, the Board of Selectmen alone supervised Boston’s free schools. In that year, however, recognizing that “public education required specialized administration,” the town meeting created a separate school visiting committee, composed of a Certain Number of Gentlemen, of Liberal Education, Together with Some of ye Revd Ministers of the Town to be Inspectors of the Sd Schoole under that name Title or denomination, To Visit ye School from time to time, when and as Oft, as they shall thinck fit to Enform themselves of the methodes used in teaching of ye Schollars and to Inquire of their Proficiency, and be present at the performance of Some of their Exercises, the Master being before Notified of their Comeing, And with him to consult and Advise of further Methods for ye Advancement of Learning and the Good Government of the Schoole [sic].
41
To streamline this administrative procedure, in 1728, the town government “Voted That the Selectmen and Such as they Shall desire to Acompany them be a Comitte to Visit the Publick Schools [sic].” 42
In 1740, the town devised a “double-headed system” of schooling, in which the space in school buildings was divided between grammar and writing school instruction. 43 One group of pupils attended grammar school in the morning, usually on the upper floor of the schoolhouse, while a second group was under the care of the writing master on the ground floor. 44 In the afternoon hours, the placements were reversed. 45 The wording of the town’s 1682 order on funding for the public education had allowed schools to charge an entrance fee for those able to pay. 46 In 1751, the town disallowed all such fees, making public education entirely free of cost to those families whose children attended. 47 The effect of these changes on public-school attendance was dramatic. The volume of pupils attending the town’s public schools rose sharply after the introduction of the double-headed system and the elimination of fees, rising from 521 in 1740 to 942 in 1771. 48 In 1753, to improve oversight of this expanding educational system, the town empowered visiting committees with a degree of supervisory authority over the free schools. 49
The Emergence of Complex Systems of School Governance, 1789-1834
In the period from 1789 to 1829, Boston’s townsfolk reconstructed school governance along both the democratizing and rationalizing strands in ways that created complex systems of governance. In the creation of the Boston School Committee in 1789, the two developmental strands intersected, while formation of the Primary School Committee in 1818 was solely rationalizing in character. The formation of both these governing institutions generated considerable political conflict locally.
Enter the Boston School Committee
The first reconstructive reorganization of school governance in Boston was initiated by the Massachusetts General Court (state legislature) through the passage of the Education Act of 1789, which required all Massachusetts towns to furnish elementary education at least six months of the year, but also stipulated that larger towns maintain year-round elementary schools. 50 The 1789 act also granted towns the authority to “appoint School Committees for the control of the schools.” 51 Under the auspices of the 1789 act, Boston’s townsfolk in October of the same year reconstructed school governance dramatically by establishing the Boston School Committee as a body separate from the selectmen and the town assembly that was authorized to “exercise all the Powers relating to the Schools and School Masters, which the Selectmen or such Committees are authorized by the Laws of the Commonwealth on the votes of this Town to exercise.” 52 In the creation of the Boston School Committee, the rationalizing and democratizing strands intersected to produce a more representative, but also a more administratively sophisticated form of school governance.
The beginning of the democratizing strand
Until the formation of the Boston School Committee, schools were managed by the town meeting, which set educational policy, and the Selectmen, who oversaw to the general management of the public-school system. Under the town meeting form of government in Boston, direct participation by the town’s freemen meant that voices from markedly different social stations and economic standing were heard in political debates about institutional reform. Boston’s political alignments in the Federalist era divided along cleavages of class and occupation. After the War of Independence, merchants and other wealthy members of society coalesced into a cohesive class eventually known as the Boston Brahmins. 53 Brahmin political luminaries included the Cabots, Otises, Lowells, and Quincys, who through intermarriage and continued economic success sustained their dominance in local and state politics well into the nineteenth century. 54 Professionals, artisans, and shopkeepers comprised a second political grouping, known as the Middling Interest, and became active when they perceived threats to their political interests. 55 These divisions in the local polity defined the conflict provoked by the politics of democratizing school governance in Boston in 1789.
The 1789 Education Act provided an opportunity to make school governance more directly accountable to the town electorate and, thus, a more representative form of school governance. The question of how this was to be accomplished, however, pitted Brahmins against the Middling Interest. At the town meeting convened on September 23, 1789, the matter “[T]o consider the proposals of a large number of the respectable Inhabitants of the Town, for the Instruction of the Youth of both Sexes, and for reforming the present System of public Education” was referred to a committee, composed of a representative from each of the town’s twelve wards, “for the purpose aforesaid and to consider the subject of Education at large & Report at the Adjournment.” 56
The class-based fissure in the town’s polity played a pivotal role in the structuring of governing arrangements for the town’s school system because the ad hoc committee was composed of activists from both the Middling and Brahmin political factions. The Middling leader, Samuel Adams, advocated a school board elected wholly by popular vote. 57 The Brahmin viewpoint was, in turn, represented by such members as the wealthy merchant, Stephen Higginson, and held that the Selectmen should serve as the new school board or at the very least appoint its membership. 58 The question of how the members of the school system’s governing board would be elected stimulated considerable debate outside the meeting house as well, with many freemen actively lobbying the committee to “exert more direct control over the operation of the schools.” 59 In the end, the committee worked out a compromise. When the Town Meeting reconvened on the afternoon of October 20, the freemen adopted the ad hoc committee’s compromise solution to form a school committee whose membership would be “annually chosen by ballot to consist of twelve in addition to the Selectmen.” 60 Although the compromise occasioned a shift in authority from the Selectmen to the School Committee, it did not, however, sever the institutional connection between town and school governance because the Selectmen served as ex officio members, and thus achieved only a partial reconstruction of the governing arrangements toward greater democratic accountability.
One other shift toward a more democratic form of governance occurred in the 1789-1830 period. The Boston Brahmins had sought on several occasions (1784, 1792, and 1815) to convince the townsfolk that municipal incorporation would increase the efficiency of local government, but could not overcome the Middling Interest’s strong attachment to town government. 61 In 1821, however, the Brahmins negotiated a number of compromises with the Middling Interests that enabled municipal incorporation to prevail in a referendum by a very large margin of the votes cast held in March of that year. 62 Focused mainly on establishing a municipal form of government, the 1822 charter also restructured the composition and representative function of the School Committee. One change incorporated the mayor and aldermen (which replaced the Selectmen as the city’s executive) as ex officio members of the School Committee. 63 More significant for the extension of representation was that the charter also called for the election of members by ward rather than as previously at-large. 64
The emergence of a committee system of administration
The public-school system governed by the School Committee involved more moving parts than its predecessor. The already complicated double-headed system required the daily rotation of children from grammar to writing schools, each with different teaching staffs. The extension of schooling to girls under the 1789 act posed further problems of accommodation. The School Committee opted to segregate the sexes, offering girls only a half-year of instruction from April to October, presuming that boys were likely to be working during these months. 65 Table 1 reports that the size of the school population more than doubled between 1791 and 1822 (the year of municipal incorporation). Much of this increase came from the admission of girls, as the rate of growth among female pupils was much greater than among their male counterparts. The number of schools to manage also grew from seven to thirteen over the same period.
Number of Boston Public Grammar Schools and Pupils, 1791-1822.
Source. Boston School Committee Meeting Minutes, January 7, April 27, May 2, 1791; August 12, 1822. Boston Public Library: MS Bos SC.1 Vol. 1: Boston Public Schools, Document No. 7: Annual Report of the Superintendent (Boston: Printing Department, 1929); Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Town Records of Boston, 1778 to 1783, Document 80. (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, City Printers, 1895); Quincy 1852, 22.
To manage this larger and more complex public-school system, the School Committee devised a system of specialized subcommittees to oversee the operation of the town’s schools. Consisting of three board members, each was tasked with the responsibilities of inspecting town schools and their operations at regular intervals, and reporting on the progress and behavior of pupils and the condition of school buildings. 66 These visiting committees also informed teachers of any complaints issued against them and mediated any such difficulties between schoolteachers and parents and pupils. 67 If a dispute could not be resolved through mediation, appeals could be made to the full School Committee for adjudication. 68 Teaching positions were filled by nomination from the visiting committee and approval by the full School Committee. 69 In addition to the visiting subcommittees, the School Committee appointed a three-member examining committee, which would test the knowledge of pupils each May or June and judge the performance of the instructional staff. 70 In 1792, the town government decided to subdivide the town into school districts as a means for allocating money for public education. 71 Although incremental adjustments to school administration were made over the course of the nineteenth century, the committee system form of administration endured until 1904, when the School Committee put all administrative decisions pertaining to school instruction in the hands of the school superintendent (see below).
The creation of a Primary School Committee
The question of whether provision of public education to children from four to seven years of age surfaced as a hotly contested issue in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The difficulty lay in the lack of opportunity for poorer children to enter the town’s free schools. Indeed, the 1789 Education Act stipulated that all children admitted to public schools were to have achieved at least rudimentary literacy prior to admission. 72 This meant that only those children whose parents could afford private tuition for primary education or were lucky enough to gain entry to one of the town’s charity schools could attend a public grammar or writing school beginning at age seven. 73
A petition was submitted to the Town Meeting on May 26, 1817, calling for the establishment of free primary schools in Boston. 74 Most of the signatories of the petition resided in Boston’s North End, an area once the center of maritime commerce but now an aging neighborhood of smaller merchant and manufacturing shops. 75 It was also an early destination for Irish immigrants. 76 The matter “was referred to the School Committee, with the addition of one person from each ward to be appointed by the Selectmen.” 77 A meeting of the two bodies on June 18 determined that a census of each ward should be undertaken to ascertain the social need for additional primary education before making any final decisions. 78 The census found that 2,365 children attended the town’s eight public schools, another 3,767 attended the town’s 153 private schools, and 365 attended the eight free charity schools. 79 This left 283 children aged four to seven and 243 children aged seven or older unschooled. 80
On May 26, 1818, a petition inscribed with signatures of 186 prominent citizens requesting a public meeting on the primary school question was presented to the Town Meeting. 81 The townsfolk decided to form an ad hoc committee, dominated by the town’s Brahmins, charged with the responsibility of assessing the need for public provision of primary education. Three members, Charles Bulfinch, chairman of the Selectmen, and two other Brahmins, Peter O. Thatcher and Henry J. Oliver, prepared a summary report of the data collected. 82 The report recommended against the establishment of public primary schools. 83 Written by Bulfinch, the report contended that although it is “[T]he duty of the town to provide the means of instruction for all the children,” it is a duty with “limits.” 84 As such, Bulfinch argued that the omission of 283 children under the age of seven from schooling constituted a “reasonable” limit to public obligation. As he explained further, “Considering the population of the town, which now amounts to about forty thousand inhabitants, together with the influx of foreigners and strangers, who are ignorant of our institutions, or who have not learned to value them, this is deemed to be a very small number.” 85 Bulfinch also attributed the failure of the 243 children between eight and fifteen years to attend school to neglectful parents, as the existing schools could easily accommodate them. 86 Bulfinch contended further that the cost of maintaining a system of primary schools (four to seven years) would prove far too onerous, particularly in light the $70,000 in debt obligations that the town had amassed during the War of 1812 and the current troubles that caused stagnation in the local economy. 87
Although the opponents of free primary schools thought that the Bulfinch report ended the debate over public primary education, the issue reignited a few months later. In February of 1818, local newspapers published a spate of editorials and letters from concerned citizens that objected to the findings of the report, and stressed the public and moral obligation to provide primary schooling to all of Boston’s children in need. 88 In addition to the newspaper campaign, a series of meetings were held on the matter, after which two leaders of the local primary school movement, James Savage and Elisha Ticknor (a former grammar school teacher), submitted a petition with more than 200 signatures of prominent citizens urging the Town Meeting to create a system of primary schools to teach the rudimentary literacy skills that would enable children to qualify for entrance into the grammar schools. 89 The petition also called for the formation of a separate committee, three men appointed from each ward by the Overseers of the Poor, to manage the primary schools. The Town Meeting turned the petition over to another ad hoc committee of nine members, eight of which had signed the petition (including Savage and Ticknor). 90
The ad hoc committee’s report on the petition was transmitted to the Town Meeting on June 11, finding “That in their opinion the opening of such schools for children under the age of seven years is highly expedient and necessary,” underscoring the many obstacles for many poor children to learn to read and write. 91 The committee also indicated that the Bulfinch committee had greatly underestimated the number of unschooled children in Boston and recommended that “the best mode of providing such schools seems to them to be by the guidance and direction of three Gentlemen from each Ward, of sufficient activity, firmness, discretion and energy, to be nominated by the School Committee” and that the town appropriate an additional $5,000 for maintenance of primary education. 92
Strong opposition arose against the ad hoc committee’s recommendations. 93 Indeed, most of the Selectmen and School Committee members stood against the proposal. The School Committee enlisted the aid of the prominent statesman and local Brahmin developer, Harrison Gray Otis, to put their objections before the freemen. 94 Otis argued forcefully before the Town Meeting that provision of free primary education would weigh far too heavily on the public purse. 95 Yet after Otis’s orations, Savage, Ticknor, and a “practical printer,” Thomas Waitt, spoke with such “clearness and effect as to render the eloquent arguments of the Honorable Harrison Otis Gray and the Honorable Peter O. Thatcher unavailing.” 96 Indeed, the townsfolk approved the committee’s report and recommendations by a majority that approached unanimity. 97
This expansion of public education in Boston marked a reconstruction of school administration in the form of the Primary School Committee (PSC). Under the town’s adopted plan, the town’s primary schools were divided into twelve districts, and the School Committee was given the responsibility of appointing three members of the PSC from each of these districts. 98 This established an interesting paradox for the governance by the PSC: its organization provided a representative component for the twelve wards, but this representation was not based on democratic accountability. Moreover, in practice, the School Committee provided little oversight over the PSC, which allowed its members to act with great discretionary latitude in the administration of the town’s (soon to be city’s) primary schools.
Like the School Committee, the PSC devised a highly decentralized committee system of administration, which was enlarged and adjusted in response to changes and growth in the primary school population. 99 Once convened in 1818, the PSC elected three officers—Chairman, Secretary, and Treasurer—and using the extant district system of representation created ward committees composed of the three district members to supervise the schools in their designated jurisdictions. 100 The ward committees appointed the primary school teachers, visited the schools regularly to ensure the pupils received appropriate and effective instruction, and that the schools were properly equipped and ventilated. Primary school teachers were appropriated quarterly payments, out of which their wages, schoolroom rents, fuel for the winter, and furnishings were funded. 101 The ward committees also presided over annual examinations and admissions to primary schools. 102 In December 1829, a Standing Committee was created that met monthly and operated as the executive arm of the PSC. 103 Under the PSC, the number of schools grew steadily from eighteen in 1818 to 197 in 1855, with a commensurate growth in pupils from 815 to 12,172. 104 To facilitate work of the district committees, the School Committee enlarged the PSC membership so that by 1855, the total was 197 (one per school). The PSC further subdivided the city and added district committees to ensure adequate supervisory coverage of the schools as the number of schools and committee members rose. 105 In 1833, to improve communication and coordination of activities between the School Committee and the PSC, a Committee of Conference was formed, composed of three members from each body. 106 In the 1830s, specialized standing committees on schoolbooks and schoolrooms were created. 107 In short, from its inception, the PSC systematically adjusted primary school administration by increments and in response to a growing student population.
Modernizing School Governance, 1835-1906
The next three-quarters of a century of reform overhauled the organization of school governance along both the democratizing and rationalizing strands. During this period, the compass of the democratic governance was enlarged by the extensions of suffrage and representative forms of governance. The rationalizing strand of development moved slowly and by increments, punctuated by setbacks, toward greater professionalization and bureaucratization.
Completing the representative form
From its inception in 1789, Boston’s School Committee had been the province of socially and economically prominent citizens that formed the city’s governing oligarchy. 108 After municipal incorporation, however, members of the middling classes increasingly sought elective office, including seats on the School Committee. 109 This caused some civic elites and educators a good deal of consternation, as they feared that loss of control by the Brahmin elite would engender political instability. 110 One measure taken to ensure Brahmin governance was to enlarge the size of the Committee’s membership. This was accomplished in 1835, when Boston’s electorate approved the General Court’s Chapter 128, which recomposed the Committee to include the mayor, president of the city council, and two citizens from each ward, raising the total membership from twenty-one to twenty-six. 111 Facilitated by abysmally low turnouts in School Committee elections, the men of elevated social and economic standing continued to be elected to serve on the School Committee. 112 So, while potentially broadening representation in school governance, the actual effect of increased ward representation was to reinforce Brahmin dominance.
A more fundamental change in the democratic accountability of school governance was fashioned in the 1850s. City officials and the School Committee members coalesced around a reform agenda of eliminating the PSC and placing the management of the primary schools under the authority of a reconstituted School Committee. The concerns raised centered on the question of PSC accountability. Members of the Primary School Board were appointed by the School Committee, and decision-making power was concentrated in the hands of a few officials—the chairman, secretaries, and chairmen of the Standing Committee. 113 Moreover, although officially appointed by the School Committee, the nominations proffered by the PSC only rarely failed to gain appointment. 114
The effort to democratize primary school governance commenced in earnest in January 1850 when the mayor, John P. Bigelow, attacked the unelected PSC as an undemocratic form of government.
115
Bigelow intoned that “having charge of more than half the Primary School Committee public pupils, and of the expenditure of a very great amount of public moneys, is not chosen by the people, nor by the City Government.”
116
He noted further that, although appointed by the mainly elected members, the PSC “vacancies, as they occur, are filled by the remaining members, in the manner of close corporations—the people, over whose affairs they exercise such an important control, having no voice in the matter whatsoever.”
117
He concluded that there is no good reason why so important a Board (which is not even recognized in our charter), should not derive its power from, and be responsible to, the people, in the same manner as the Committee having charge of the Grammar Schools—and I recommend that adoption of such measures as shall remedy the defect.
118
The city’s Committee on Public Instruction echoed these sentiments in a report issued in October of the same year. 119
Bigelow’s successor, Benjamin Seaver, took up the cause in January 1852 by sending a memorandum to the City Council that called for reorganizing primary school governance for several reasons, which included the dubious legal basis of the PSC, the unwieldy decision-making processes of the overlarge body, the self-selection process for filling vacancies on the board, and the need for a more uniform system of education. 120 A report from the City Council’s Committee on Public Instruction reiterated these concerns about the PSC in 1852. 121 By 1854, the School Committee had weighed in on the condemnation of the “anomalous” structure of the PSC. 122 This momentum carried through to the revising of the city charter in 1854, which eliminated the PSC. The new charter put primary education under the authority of a reconstituted School Committee that was enlarged to seventy-four members to accommodate supervision of the city’s numerous primary schools. 123
Rationalizing school administration: A work in progress
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the expansion of Boston’s public-school population and facilities spurred reform aimed at professionalizing and bureaucratizing school administration. Professionalization entailed placing administration in the hands of professionals qualified by training and experience in education. Bureaucratization, in turn, involved replacing lay administration, carried out principally under the auspices of the subcommittee system, with full-time administrative personnel.
The rationale for professionalizing and bureaucratizing public-school administration derived from concerns about the increasing difficulties of managing a school system that was growing in size and complexity. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the student population rose steeply from 6,824 in 1830 to 90,645 in 1905, by which time, professional and bureaucratic forms of management had completely supplanted lay administration. What is more, waves of immigration posed new challenges to the education of Boston public students, with more than three-fifths of the student body composed of children of foreign parentage. 124 The range of specialization in schooling also broadened, with the School Committee adding intermediate school (1820, for children older than seven years of age without primary schooling), high school (1821), normal school (1852, to train teachers), evening school (1869), industrial school (1872), and kindergarten (1888) education, further complicating administration. 125 In short, the task of managing of the city’s schools was becoming more technical, time-consuming, and difficult.
Number of Boston public day school students, 1817-1904.
The first steps toward professionalizing school administration
By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, through the accumulation of rules and regulations, the School Committee had firmly entrenched school administration in a highly specialized committee system. There were fifteen standing committees (accounts, rules and regulations, drawing, evening schools, examinations, music, nominations, military drills, salaries, schoolhouses, sewing, supplies, textbooks, truant officers) with five members each and seven standing committees (annual report, elections, Horace Mann School for the Deaf, hygiene, kindergartens, legislative matters, and manual training schools) of three members. 126 Subcommittees, in turn, supervised the city’s schools within prescribed districts. 127 The PSC’s system of ward committees, as noted, oversaw the operations of the primary schools in their charge.
The issue of professionalization arose first when, in the late 1830s, the Massachusetts Board of Education called for the appointment of a superintendent of primary schools. The PSC, however, resisted adoption of this form of administrative centralization, arguing that school-based management through district committees allowed the primaries to be more receptive and sensitive to neighborhood concerns. 128 Later, the Board of Education’s 1843 annual report, penned by its secretary, Horace Mann, advocated the adoption of a more centralized system of school administration akin to the Prussian system. 129 Spelling out in detail the advantages of a more centralized organization for Boston, Mann made clear his sense of the inadequacies of grammar school masters and subcommittees as administrators. 130 Meanwhile, several of Mann’s Whig allies—Samuel Gridley Howe and six others—sought to reform the school system from within by mounting campaigns for election to the school board in 1845. 131 Aided by a heavy voter turnout, five of the six Whigs won seats on the committee and immediately set about laying the groundwork for a more centralized system of school management. 132 Three of the centralizers took up the task of conducting the annual school examination and reported their findings in August of 1845. 133 The report stressed the inadequacies of the decentralized system of administration and urged that reorganization was needed to govern a public-school system in a city the size of Boston. 134 In particular, the report emphasized that members of the School Committee possessed no specialized knowledge of school affairs and, thus, lacked sufficient expertise in education to make effective administrative decisions. 135
Howe embarked on a campaign to convince the School Committee and the state legislature to create the position of a chief executive officer, in the form of a superintendent or school commissioner, to be appointed by the City Council but to serve under the authority of both the Council and the School Committee. 136 The recommendation, however, was not welcomed by all. The Democrat and radical reform advocate, Orestes A. Brownson, warned that centralized authority in the public-school system would give rise to autocratic administration. 137 The recently elected governor, Marcus Morton, a Jacksonian Democrat, also construed centralization in school authority as a threat to local democracy. 138 Even the Democratic-leaning Boston Times derided Howe’s 1845 annual report as replete with “errors and mis-statements.” 139 Howe’s criticism of some teachers and masters also provoked their enmity, adding to the forces arrayed against the appointment of a professional superintendent. 140 The size and vehemence of the opposition to Howe’s proposals proved sufficient to bump him and his allies from the Democratic slate in 1845, which temporarily lay to rest the question of professional administration. 141
Having lost the initial battle over professionalism within the School Committee, Howe and his compatriots appealed to Boston’s businessmen, reasoning that efficiencies gained from expert administration would lessen the expense of public education. 142 The reformers also found an ally in the recently elected mayor, Josiah Quincy Jr., who exhorted Bostonians to petition the state legislature for the power to appoint a school superintendent. 143 In 1846, the chair of the Visiting Committee, Edmund G. Loring, joined the reformers in insisting that full-time professional administrators would be better equipped and could expend the time necessary to carry out the management tasks performed by the lay School Committee members in their spare time. 144 His successor, George B. Emerson, added weight to this argument in his Visiting Committee report of 1847, urging the School Committee to adopt a professional system of administration. 145 Succumbing to political pressure from both inside and outside its chamber, the School Committee dispatched a special committee in January 1851 to the City Council to broach the subject of appointing a superintendent for Boston schools. 146 The two governing bodies subsequently formed a Joint Committee of Conference, which issued an extensive report that recommended unflinchingly and with unanimity the appointment of a superintendent to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school system management. 147 On March 31, the City Council demonstrated its approval by appropriating $2,500 to enable the School Committee to appoint a superintendent, which was achieved on May 13 with the hiring of the experienced educator and school administrator, Nathan Bishop. 148
The seesaw battle over bureaucratization
Largely a product of conflict over administrative turf, bureaucratization of school administration advanced slowly through a political process marked by fits and starts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the middle 1870s, community leaders rallied around a reconstructive reform agenda of improving the coordination of school system management through further centralization of administration. 149 The rationale, ironically, was to alleviate the perceived organizational rigidity and mechanistic operation of the subcommittee system that reformers argued stifled the learning processes and creativity of the pupils. 150 In the name of greater efficiency, the reformers submitted a proposal to the state legislature to establish a board of supervisors that would act as an intermediate level of administration between the superintendent and the schoolmasters (who served as primary school principals as well as heads of the grammar schools). 151 Viewed as overly cumbersome for effective administration, the bill also reduced the size of the School Committee membership from 118 to twenty-four. 152 The long-serving superintendent, John D. Philbrick (1856-1877), who was undertaking a large-scale overhaul of the public-school system to achieve greater uniformity in the various curricula, welcomed the proposal as an administrative staff would be needed to devise and implement new courses of study that were likely to encounter stiff resistance from teachers. 153 Opponents of the legislation, in contrast, voiced fears about the effect it would have on governing processes. 154 Catholic leaders, in particular, saw the move to reduce the size of the School Committee as a veiled attempt to exclude them from the governing process. 155 Despite these concerns, the state legislature passed the bill with dispatch.
The first major task of the reconstituted School Committee was to appoint a new superintendent, as the incumbent, Philbrick, tendered his resignation to give the new board the option of choosing a new superintendent. 156 Nevertheless, Philbrick tossed his hat in the ring of potential candidates, and after a contentious debate, the School Committee reinstalled him as superintendent. 157 The legislation, however, left vague the specific duties assigned to the supervisors, so the School Committee first undertook the task of defining responsibilities of the supervisors. 158 These included conducting examinations of each school biannually, frequent visits to schools to evaluate the standards of discipline and instruction maintained, preparation of comprehensive school reports, examination of the evening schools upon instruction by the School Committee, and any other instructions designated by the School Committee. Once completed, the School Committee filled the newly minted supervisor positions. 159
With the superintendent serving as the chair, the Board of Supervisors was given wide latitude in determining how their duties were to be discharged. 160 The relationship between the superintendent and the supervisors, however, remained underdefined by the law or by School Committee directives. 161 Four of the six supervisors appointed by the School Committee possessed little experience with public education (minister, lawyer, philanthropist, and unknown occupation), which turned out to be a recipe for internecine conflict in school administration between Philbrick, an advocate of the masters and teachers, and the supervisors who were suspicious of the masters. 162 This suspicion stemmed from the supervisory methods practiced by the supervisors. The supervisors based teacher evaluations on a numerical scale and recorded the findings in a black book not open to public scrutiny. 163 Teachers, thus, felt inhibited about openly voicing any objections as they were subject to annual appointment, and opposition to school policy could result in loss of employment. 164
Philbrick got off on the wrong foot with the new School Committee when he inserted in his semiannual report a section, titled the “New Departure,” that severely criticized the work plan developed by the supervisors. 165 Infuriated by these criticisms, the School Committee enjoined Philbrick to exorcise the offending section. 166 Unbowed, Philbrick continued to complain that school administration lacked clear lines of accountability, and he, as superintendent, required the “power and authority to render him in reality the responsible head and chief executive officer of the system.” 167 Under the rules of the School Committee, it was the superintendent’s responsibility to advise teachers on methods of instruction. 168 But armed with the black book enshrouded in secrecy, supervisors held great sway over the teachers’ actions. 169 Moreover, the superintendent held no authority to direct the actions of supervisors, so they rendered administrative decisions in relative autonomy. 170 The School Committee continued to back the supervisors in their conflicts with Philbrick, rendering the superintendent administratively isolated. 171 To ease tensions, in 1876, Philbrick asked at one of his monthly meetings with the grammar and high school masters for their cooperation in trying to accommodate the supervisors, and, thus, extended an olive branch to them and the School Committee. 172 This and other attempts at compromise, however, failed to dampen the reformist zeal of the supervisors and most School Committee members. In 1878, when it came time to select a new superintendent, the School Committee appointed Francis Parker, a man that more closely fit their model of school superintendency. 173 The School Committee’s decision to replace Philbrick angered the masters and teachers, as he had been a strong ally and supporter. 174
The 1878 election further strengthened the hand of the centralizers by tipping the balance on the School Committee in their favor. 175 Led by the energetic young committeeman, Brooks Adams, the reformers placed two items on their political agenda: achieve economies in school administration and create a more flexible system of school management. 176 The School Committee set up a special committee to undertake a comprehensive review of the Boston school system and tender recommendations for its improvement. 177 Adams, who sat on the special committee, tackled these tasks with gusto, authoring several reports that identified areas for savings, including the elimination of public kindergarten classes, intermediate schools, and special school instructors. 178 He also recommended pedagogical reforms, such as a more parsimonious curriculum, adoption of a completely new grammar school curriculum, and for the normal school, stricter admission standards and an additional year of experience in the practices of teaching. 179
The recommendation offered by the special committee that stirred the most controversy, however, was the one to transfer supervision of the primary schools to the supervisors. 180 The reasoning behind this reform was that masters, who were still appointed by the School Committee as specified by the 1789 Education Act, could not perform adequately both the tasks of running the grammar schools and supervising the primary schools in their districts. 181 Furthermore, one special committee report described the schoolmasters as “proverbially dogmatic” and “arbitrary” in their administration of the primary schools. 182 Given the degree of criticism leveled at the masters, and the sensitivity of the issue, the School Committee handed the reports over to a different special committee for a second opinion on the matter. 183 This committee echoed the sentiments of the Special Committee and reaffirmed the recommendation to relieve the masters of their duties as principals of the primary schools. 184 Still, the School Committee proceeded with caution. 185 By way of testing the idea, one primary school district was placed in the care of a supervisor. 186 The results of this experiment convinced the School Committee to transfer supervision of all primary schools to three designated supervisors. 187
Appointed in 1880, the superintendent, Edwin Seaver, began to maneuver behind the scenes to undo the reforms that had been instituted in the late 1870s. He conducted a personal study of the primary schools, visiting each schoolroom at least once. 188 Seaver’s reports found that primary school performance under the supervisors lagged behind performance during the time when masters served as primary principals. 189 Based on this evidence, Seaver put a case before the School Committee to reinstate masters as principals because the responsibility of overseeing the primary schools had overburdened the supervisors. 190 Tactfully, he offered a compromise on the issue; restoration of the masters as principals, but allowing the supervisors to remain involved in primary school management and examinations—but not the oversight of instruction. 191 His labors bore fruit in February 1882, when the School Committee voted to restore masters as principals of the primary schools and to place them under direct authority of the superintendent. 192
Despite this setback, bureaucratization gained ground by accretion through the remainder of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, with some of the purposed changes igniting new turf battles over shifts in authority. The School Committee appointed a special committee in 1894 to study the matter of the superintendent’s responsibilities. The special committee recommended endowing the superintendent with even greater authority and responsibility, which the School Committee subsequently adopted. 193 Then, in 1897, the School Committee voted to transfer the authority to appoint teachers from the subcommittees to the board of supervisors. 194 Then, in the next year, the power to hire and fire teachers was transferred to the superintendent, contingent on School Committee confirmation. 195 School subcommittees chaffed at the loss of their control over schools, so much so that a contingent of reformers on School Committee moved to secure dissolution of the subcommittees. 196 Not only did this ouster fail, but the subcommittees regained some lost authority over school administration in 1899 when the School Committee gave them the power to exercise a veto on all hiring, transfers, and dismissals of instructional staff in their respective districts. 197 In 1902, the School Committee endowed the superintendent with full authority over teacher hiring, firing, and transfer, only to backslide in 1904 by restoring to the subcommittees some power to check these decisions. 198 The School Committee finally put an end to the perpetual skirmishes over personnel administration by abolishing the subcommittees later in 1904 and emplacing the full authority to appoint, remove, and transfer all directors, principals, and instructional staff in the office of the superintendent, again with the approval of the School Committee. 199 In short, a high degree of bureaucratization in school administration had been achieved, albeit through a highly contentious political process that pitted centralizers against those who wished to preserve the highly decentralized system of district committee school management.
Depoliticizing school governance
While school administration was undergoing a process of professionalization and bureaucratization, Boston’s polity was being riven by interethnic and religious conflict in the electoral arena. As with many major American cities, a decades-long influx of European immigrants partitioned the city’s population into a patchwork quilt of ethnic enclaves. The Irish comprised the largest cohort of these immigrants, with nearly a third of Boston’s population claiming Irish parentage. 200 By the 1870s, Irish voters formed the core constituency of the Democratic party in Boston, which enabled them to challenge the dominance of the Brahmins in local politics. 201 Boston’s Gilded Age politics, as a result, was defined by conflict between the Yankee-Protestant dominated Republican Party and the Irish Catholic-bossed Democratic machine. 202 Interethnic rivalries infected not only municipal governance in the late nineteenth century, they roiled Boston school politics as well.
This interethnic conflict was complicated in the 1880s by the introduction of women into school politics. In 1879, the Massachusetts legislature passed the School Suffrage Act, which entitled women to vote and run in school committee elections for the cities and towns in which they lived. 203 Women’s suffrage not only greatly enlarged the representative function of school governance, it altered the dynamics of education politics by sparking a culture war between Protestants and Catholics. Catholic members of the School Committee charged that the high school curriculum evinced a clear anti-Catholic bias. 204 Although the question of curricular bias was resolved within the confines of School Committee through the adoption of mutually acceptable textbooks, the compromise provoked a reaction among the recently enfranchised women of Boston. The Independent Women Voters, a nativist group, mobilized Protestant women voters en masse in the 1888 and 1889 school elections, which resulted in the ouster of all Catholics from the School Committee. 205 The politicization of Protestant women, moreover, kept Catholics off the School Committee for the remainder of the century. 206
Protestant control of the School Committee and the absence of entrenched corruption in school politics meant that Progressive Era school reform centered on administrative issues. 207 Progressive school reform activists, such as the lawyer-educator Lawrence Lowell, banker-philanthropist John F. Moors, lawyer-activist Louis Brandeis, women’s rights leader Mary Morton Kehew, and social worker Robert Woods, formed a nonpartisan organization, the Public School Association (PSA), in 1898, to run a slate of candidates for the School Committee. 208 School administration had not attracted much attention from the press, given the paucity of “muck” to rake in this arena. 209 Nevertheless, the PSA characterized the School Committee as dominated by politicians who were “unfit” to direct the city’s school system. 210 Highlighting the few cases of mismanagement available, the PSA amplified the misdeeds of School Committee members and contrasted these with the “moral superiority” of their candidates. 211 The PSA’s aggressive campaigning paid off in the short run, with their candidates gaining a majority of seats on the School Committee by 1901. 212
Now in firm control of the School Committee, the PSA committed the political blunder of intertwining their good government reform agenda with a religious one. 213 As good government reformers, the PSA sought to modernize the school system by placing administration of the school in the hands of professional educators and by insulating the decision-making process from partisan politics. 214 However, the PSA also sought to maintain Protestant domination of the School Committee. Joining forces with the Protestant Independent Women Voters, the PSA ran a slate of candidates, of which more than 90 percent were Protestant. 215 An alliance of incensed Catholic activists, like the former schoolteacher Julia Duff, and a coterie of Catholic politicians who felt threatened by the reforms, persuaded the Democratic City Committee to put forward an “anti-reform, anti-PSA” slate of candidates. 216 Indeed, Democratic party leaders, bowing to political pressure from the Catholic alliance, allowed Duff to choose the slate herself. During the 1902 and 1903 campaigns, under the banner of “Boston Schools for Boston Girls,” Duff emphasized the issue of job discrimination against Irish female teachers. 217 In a complete turnaround from the 1890s, Duff’s candidates won a majority on the School Committee in the 1903 election, and quickly replaced the long-time Protestant school superintendent, Edwin Seaver, with his deputy, the Catholic George Conley. 218 The anti-reform majority, thus, put religion center stage in school politics. 219
In response, the PSA sought to neutralize the religious issue by renouncing its association with the Independent Women Voters and slating a “balanced ticket” of Protestant and Catholic candidates, including four Yankee Protestants and four Irish Catholics in the next election. 220 The Democratic City Committee endorsed the PSA slate, rebuffing Duff’s cries of “betrayal.” 221 Duff and the Independent Women Voters organized their own separate slates, but ultimately failed when the PSA-Democratic ticket swept the 1904 election, which meant that they now held sway on the School Committee. 222
The banker-philanthropist, James Storrow, first elected on the PSA ticket in 1905, gained a reputation as a member of the School Committee who pursued a policy of “equity and merit” in hiring and curriculum, in contrast with some of the other PSA members. 223 He won support from the Catholic community and was endorsed by the Irish Catholic newspaper, The Boston Pilot, as the Democratic nominee during the 1905 election. 224 Storrow burnished this reputation further by sponsoring, with his wife, school-based activities such as using schools for neighborhood meeting places and vocational education. 225 Storrow used his accumulated goodwill to alter the direction of school reform. 226 He applied to the State Legislature for a charter revision that reduced the School Committee to five members elected at-large. 227 The voters adopted the reforms in 1905 with little fanfare and no controversy, religious or otherwise. 228 By eliminating partisanship and district representation from school elections, the 1905 law (Acts of 1905, Chapter 349) had the effect of reconstructing the democratizing strand by narrowing representation in school governance for the next eight decades.
Institutionalizing Administrative Rationalization, 1906-1970
The basic framework established for governing Boston’s schools underwent no fundamental reform in the period from 1907 to 1970. The democratic strand remained unchanged, with the five-member School Committee, elected at-large, remaining in place until the 1980s. School administration, however, proceeded along the trajectory of incremental rationalization.
The advance of administrative specialization
In 1906, Storrow reactivated the Progressive reform alliance to lobby for legislation that would set in law the professional-bureaucratic model of school administration. 229 The Massachusetts legislature complied by enacting legislation (Acts of 1906, Chapter 231) that dissolved the Board of Supervisors and in its stead created the Board of Superintendents. The School Committee acted as the legislative or policy-setting body of the system with the superintendent sitting at the head of a hierarchical organization with assistant superintendents and other school administrators overseeing the day-to-day operations of Boston’s public schools. Under the law, the School Committee appointed a superintendent for a term of six years and six assistant superintendents for six-year staggered terms. 230 Subject to School Committee affirmation, the superintendent wielded appointment power for all educational administrative staff (except the assistant superintendents) and all instructional personnel. 231 Educational administration was organized largely on a geographic basis, with the school system divided into sixty-four elementary school districts that fed into the junior high and high schools within their respective jurisdictions. 232 Each assistant superintendent was assigned supervisory responsibility for a group of high, intermediate, and elementary schools as well as one or more specialized schools, such as Boston Latin or the Normal School (see Figure 2). In these early years of the twentieth century, two assistant superintendents also supervised several specialized programs (see Figure 2). Administrative work that lay outside the superintendent’s educational remit fell to separate officials appointed by the School Committee. Fiscal management was divided between the auditor (a position created by state legislation in 1875), and the business manager, a product of the 1906 reform act, while the schoolhouse custodian took care of the housekeeping chores of the city’s schools. 233 Finally, the Board of Apportionment, composed of the Board of Superintendents, auditor, and business agent, served to bridge the divide between educational and financial management of the school system. 234 Monthly meetings were designed to allocate funding across the school system in the most effective manner. In short, the 1906 law completed the shift to professional administration by putting it on firm legal footing, as the School Committee could no longer undo advances in professional management.
Administrative organization of Boston public schools, 1907.
Although this basic structure of school governance remained largely intact over the next six decades, some features of the governing institutions were altered incrementally. The direction of these shifts moved toward greater differentiation and specialization in administrative tasks (see Figures 3 and 4). In particular, the job of assistant superintendent underwent stepwise revisions. Within a decade of the 1906 law, in addition to supervision of a host of schools, each of the assistant superintendents had been entrusted with oversight of a variety of departments and functional areas of education. 235 By the 1930s, these functional educational responsibilities had ballooned enormously, with each assistant superintendent supervising a dozen or more departments and programs (see Figure 3). In 1949, the School Committee abandoned the geographic dimension of school administration entirely by reorganizing assistant superintendent tasks on a purely functional basis. That is, each assistant superintendent assumed responsibility for a specialized area of the educational process (e.g., elementary, secondary, special, and so on). 236 As Figure 4 reports, this administrative organization persisted into the seventh decade of the century.
Administrative organization of Boston public schools, 1938.
Administrative organization of Boston public schools, 1965.
Creeping Bureaucratization
The structuring and restructuring of Boston’s public system from the beginning of the twentieth century to 1970 reflected the changing social, economic, and intergovernmental circumstances in which schools were situated. Table 2 tracks the changing size of Boston’s student population and the shifting accommodation for different types of schooling. Student enrollments in the city’s day schools grew steadily into the 1930s, dropping substantially after the mid-1930s due to the pressures to find work during the Great Depression, the call to arms during World War II, and population declines in the city in the 1950s and 1960s, as many Bostonians fled to the suburbs.
Number of Boston Public-School Students by Type of School and the Number of Teachers and Students per Teacher, 1905-1969.
Source. Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the School Committee, School Document 1905, Document 11-1905, Boston Printing Department 1905, 4-5; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston 1910, Document 14-1910, March 1905. Boston Printing Department 1910, 4; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston 1910, Document 14-1910, Boston Printing Department 1910, 4; Boston Public Schools, Annual Statistics of the Boston Public Schools: Calendar Year 1919 and School Year 1919-1920, Document 10-1920, Boston Printing Department 1925, 7-8; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the Superintendent School, Document 11-1925, October 1925, Boston Printing Department 1925, 7; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the Superintendent School, Document 13-1930, December 1930, Boston Printing Department 1931, 4; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the Superintendent School, Document 15-1935, December 1935, Boston Printing Department 1935, 4; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the Superintendent School, Document 12-1937, December 1937, Boston Printing Department 1937, 231; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the Superintendent School Document 6-1940, December 1940, Boston Printing Department 1940, 17; Boston Public Schools, Annual Report of the Superintendent School, Document 7-1944, December 1944, Boston Printing Department 1944, 153; Boston Public Schools, 1965 Annual Report of the Superintendent, Boston Printing Department, 1965, 30; Boston Public Schools, 1969 Annual Report of the Superintendent, Boston Printing Department 1969; Finance Commission of the City of Boston, Report on the Boston School System, City of Boston Printing Department, 1911.
Before 1960, these were listed as Opportunity Schools, which first opened in 1930.
In the first four decades of the twentieth century, immigration and industrial development fueled rapid growth of the city’s population growth, from 560,892 in 1900 to 781,188 in 1930. 237 As Table 2 reports, a commensurate rise in the city’s public-school enrollments ensued. From 1890 to 1920, immigrants constituted about a third of the city’s population. The School Committee responded to these circumstances by providing and enlarging educational services to immigrants, such as the creation and expansion of evening courses and schools for teaching English to foreigners and eventually even elementary education for the illiterate immigrants. 238 The School Committee also opened a day school for immigrant children. Enrollments in the evening academic schools dropped after the opening of the Continuation School (see below), which probably absorbed many of the evening students after its opening in 1914. Nonetheless, evening-school enrollments rose steadily into the 1930s, reaching a peak of more than 13,000 students in 1940 (see Table 2).
The public-school system also sought ways to adjust its offerings to accommodate commercial and industrial development of the local economy. For example, in 1906, under the auspices of a state enabling law, the School Committee opened the High School of Commerce. 239 In 1909, the School Committee replaced long-standing evening drawing schools with industrial ones. 240 Also, after years of advocacy by the city’s business leadership to introduce industrial workforce training in the public day schools, the School Committee, with the aid of then Governor William Douglas, obtained state legislation in 1911 permitting the establishment of the Boston Trade School, for boys, and the Girls’ Trade School. 241 Similarly, the School Committee developed courses of study for commerce and salesmanship in 1916. 242 These vocational schools in the 1910 to 1940 period provided training for hundreds of students annually (see Table 2).
The intergovernmental environment encouraged the development of education in Boston in the years from the early decades of the twentieth century. The Massachusetts General Court tended to be permissive when it came to the establishment of new schools and programs, furnishing the School Committee the enabling legislation when requested by local officials. 243 The state also occasionally imposed new requirements that forced school districts to set up new schools or programs. For instance, in 1913, the state legislature raised the age for compulsory education to sixteen years. 244 To accommodate those aged fifteen to sixteen years who left school to join the workforce, the School Committee opened the Continuation School in 1914 to allow these adolescents to continue working while taking courses to complete their mandatory schooling. 245 The state paid half the cost for Boston’s Continuation School. 246 The Continuation School educated more than 3,000 students annually (see Table 2).
Boston’s public school system accommodated far fewer students in the post-World War II era. After 1940, enrollments dropped across the gamut of day, evening, and special schools, reducing the total student population from its peak of more than 148,000 in 1940 to just over 97,000 in 1969 (see Table 2). A number of demographic trends contributed to the shrinkage of the public-school system. Congress enacted immigration restrictions in the early 1920s that attenuated the flow of European immigrants to Boston to a mere trickle. 247 The war effort also drew students to its cause and, on their return afterward, many of the GIs moved to the suburbs rather than back to the central city. Indeed, the outward migration of people in the metropolitan area eroded the city’s population, from more than 800,000 in 1950 to about 640,000 in 1970. 248 Economic shifts also made their mark on Boston’s demography. The postwar period witnessed growth in the service sector, with commensurate declines in manufacturing and other segments of the blue-collar workforce.
Bureaucratic development in the 1906 to 1970 period unfolded as a process of central administration expansion and differentiation relative to the changing social, economic, and political pressures on teaching and learning in the city’s public schools. That is, the addition and reshuffling of central administrative departments occurred in large part as responses to circumstances of the urban context in which education took place. Two distinct waves of bureaucratic formation were fashioned by school officials. The first wave was designed to manage the effects of immigration and industrialization on the city’s public schooling, the second to address the changing educational circumstances in the post-World War II era. Overall, the rationalizing strand of development followed a pattern of creeping bureaucratization.
Table 3 reports the changes in the size and character of the public-school bureaucracy by identifying central-line departments (those with directors) in operation in the period from 1907 to 1965. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, because administrative development occurred in a socioeconomic context of large-scale industrialization and immigration, the first wave of bureaucratization entailed the formation and modification of central administrative departments related to workforce development and the education of immigrants (departments of Manual Arts, Evening Schools, Licensed Minors, Vocational Guidance, Practice and Training, Salesmanship, Commercial Education). Also during this period, the growing size of the public-school student population prompted the addition of administrative capacity to manage schools and students more effectively (departments of Attendance, Educational Investigation and Measurement, School Hygiene, Special Classes, Administration Library, Lip Reading Classes, Speech Improvement Classes, Classes for the Conservation of Eyesight). Overall, the number of central administrative departments rose markedly from six in 1907 to twenty-three in 1938.
Bureaucratic Development of Boston Public-School System, 1907-1965.
Source. Boston Public Schools, Manual of the Boston Public Schools 1901, 1907, 1917, 1927, 1938, 1947, 1956, 1965.
The changing context of the post-World War II era engendered different forms of bureaucratic development. Some shifts pertained to the emerging postindustrial economy (departments of Business Education, Audio-Visual Instruction, and Science). Others reflected changing administrative priorities in managing a changing school population (departments of Pupil Adjustment Counseling, Health and Safety, Program Development, Teacher Placement, School Buildings, School Lunches, Publications and Informational Services, Statistics, and Data Processing Center; see Table 3). Because many of the older educational and social management concerns persisted, new departments were added to the extant complement of agencies, producing a pattern of greater differentiation in bureaucratic development and a widening in the range of administrative activities performed. The growth in the number of central departments in this period of declining student enrollment, however, was far less dramatic, rising from twenty-eight to thirty-one between 1948 and 1965.
Reconstructing Democratic Accountability, 1970-2016
In the last period of school governance covered by this study, local reformers and their allies first strengthened and then seriously attenuated the democratic strand of school governance. The rationalizing strand, however, continued on the path of specialization and centralization of authority.
A last gasp for democratic reform?
Beginning in the early 1970s, federal court intervention convulsed Boston school politics in a series of battles over school desegregation. The state legislature passed the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, which set out guidelines on how all Massachusetts school districts were to proceed in the preparation of their racial desegregation plans. 249 The Boston School Committee, however, had demurred until 1974, when the federal district judge, W. Arthur Garrity, ruled that the school board had violated state and federal statutes prohibiting school district policies deemed to encourage racial segregation in public schools. 250 In July 1974, Garrity ordered the Boston School Committee to carry out the state-imposed desegregation plan, but the School Committee simply ignored the order. 251 Judge Garrity issued a contempt order and then, in September 1975, drew up a desegregation plan of his own that called for busing 3,000 students. 252 The Garrity plan was challenged through an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Court elected not to review the case, thus giving the go-ahead to the desegregation order. 253 The Garrity plan, however, incited strong opposition from the affected white neighborhoods. Louise Day Hicks, a long-time School Committee member, became the iconic figure and chief spokesperson for the antibusing movement in Boston. 254 Hicks founded Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) to mobilize opposition to busing. 255 ROAR sought support from the Ford administration to end busing in Boston, but the Justice Department refused to review the legality of Garrity’s order. Having failed to enlist the federal government’s help, Boston’s busing opponents turned inward, resorting to sometimes violent methods—such as stone-throwing, beatings, firebomb throwing, and even shootings—to persuade the courts to rescind the busing plan. 256 Rather than caving in to these pressures, however, city and state police were called in to maintain order, escorting buses to their destinations and patrolling schools and school environs. 257
The racial tensions that roiled school politics in the 1970s and early 1980s eventually spilled over into the electoral arena. Democratic reform activists mobilized support in the early 1980s by taking aim at the underrepresentation of minorities on both the City Council and the School Committee, arguing that white dominance on these two governing bodies worked to the detriment of minority neighborhoods. 258 At-large elections had long ensured an all-white membership for both governing bodies. The democratic reformers persuaded the state legislature to put a charter revision proposition on the ballot that would replace the five-member School Committee with a two-tiered election system for a thirteen-member board. 259 Under this reform, four members would be elected at-large, while nine seats would be filled by district-based elections. In a November 1981 referendum, the voters adopted the two-tier election reform measure that took effect in 1984. 260 Each of the Committee members served two-year terms and elected a president of the body from within their ranks. 261 This democratic system did achieve its purpose of enabling minority representation on the School Committee but proved short-lived—it was replaced by a mayor-appointed board in 1992. 262
Rolling back representative democracy
The failure of the elected School Committee to address the challenges of school governance in the late 1980s occasioned the establishment of mayoral control in Boston. Two issues drove the effort to dismantle the representative governing arrangements established in 1984. The first was the constant wrangling between the city and the School Committee over school district budgets. 263 The mayor and city council were responsible for delivering the annual allocation to the school district, but the superintendent and School Committee devised district budgets. Because the superintendent and School Committee bore no responsibility for financing school expenditures, and generally overspent the budgeted allocations from the city, the district perennially engaged in deficit spending. 264 These circumstances generated often intense conflict at budget time between the mayor, Raymond Flynn, who set the maximum amount of funding for the school district, and the superintendent and School Committee. 265 Performance accountability of the School Committee was a second issue that provoked governance reform. The school district had operated under Federal court-imposed desegregation orders since 1975, but in 1987, a U.S. Appeals Court ruling lifted the long-standing district court orders that set racial guidelines in school assignments. 266 Although the authority to devise an assignment system was returned to the Boston School Committee in 1987, little headway was made. 267 Only when Mayor Flynn intervened in late 1988, by convening a panel of experts to devise a new assignment plan for the school district, did the School Committee finally move to adopt in 1989 what became known as a “controlled choice” system of school assignments. 268 The issue, however, caused deep rifts among School Committee members, civic leaders, and parents along racial lines, infusing the process of fashioning a new governing system with considerable controversy. 269
To remedy what critics of the School Committee saw as entrenched ineptitude, a reform coalition composed of Mayor Flynn, the city’s business leadership, and leading members of the City Council crystallized around an agenda of restructuring the district’s governing arrangements. 270 In May 1991, over the boisterous protests of a coalition of black politicians, civic leaders, and parents, the City Council approved a home-rule petition for establishment of an appointed school board. 271 After a two-month legislative battle, the Republican governor, William Weld, signed the legislation to replace the elected School Committee with one appointed by the mayor. 272
The school governing system centered on mayoral control has been in place since 1992. It was Flynn’s successor, Thomas Menino (1993-2013), however, who was largely responsible for reconfiguring the contours of authority within the school district. 273 What is more, under Menino’s leadership, mayoral control remained the voters’ choice, surviving a 1996 referendum that proposed the reinstitution of an elected school committee. 274 Menino and his allies mounted a vigorous campaign in opposition to the measure, which garnered an overwhelming 70 percent of the votes cast against the proposition. 275
Changes in the school system’s authority structure relieved many of the tensions between the city and school district that had obstructed education reform in the past. Moreover, the new governing arrangements centralized decision-making considerably, with Menino leaving the strategic and day-to-day decision-making to the appointed Boston School Committee, and the School Committee, in turn, generally following the lead of the district’s superintendents. 276 Also, as revealed by Figure 5, mayoral control centralized administrative decision-making in another way. Previously (see Figures 2, 3, and 4), administrative tasks not directly implicated in the educational process were carried out by school officials (e.g., business manager and schoolhouse custodian) that were appointed by and answering directly to the School Committee. Even the assistant superintendents were School Committee appointees. Under mayoral control, in contrast, all school officials are appointed by and answered directly to the superintendent, thus completing the centralizing process that had commenced in the middle years of the nineteenth century.
Boston public schools administrative organization, 2016.
Conclusion
So what lessons are to be learned from the story of the longue durée of school governance in Boston? Adopting the longue durée approach in the study of school governance in Boston has provided several insights into the nature of urban political development not availed by studies of particular periods or instances of institutional reform. Three are worth mentioning by way of conclusion.
The first redounds from the application of the longue durée method that has shown how strands of rationalization and democratization of school governance developed in accordance with a specific logic or design tailored to address existing problems in the management of public schools. What is more, these strands in Boston have followed quite different paths of institutional development over time. The reordering of administrative arrangements, for instance, were undertaken as responses to the growing size and/or changing demographic character of student populations and the attendant increase in the complexity of public schooling. As Table 4 indicates, the pattern of rationalizing reform in school governance has been to develop increasingly specialized and hierarchical forms of administration, first through systematic reorganization in the formative period of institutional development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then through the processes of professionalization and bureaucratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course of the democratizing strand, in turn, was not one of a continuous movement toward more representative forms of school governance (see Table 4). Advances in representative forms of school governance, such as the creation of the Boston School Committee in 1789, the elimination of ex officio members from its ranks in 1875 and 1885, were periodically interrupted by setbacks in the democratizing process, such as the adoption of at-large elections in 1906 and mayoral control in 1992.
Summary of Institutional Changes in Boston School Governance, 1660s to 2016.
The longue durée of school governance in Boston has also uncovered differences in the nature of institutional reform between the democratizing and rationalizing strands of development. The long durée of rationalizing reform unfolded as a pattern of reconstructive development often followed by stretches of incremental change in governing institutions, while democratic reform occurred primarily as reconstructive change with little or no modification in the interim periods (see Table 4). School reformers, for example, reconstructed public-school administration in fundamental ways in the 1790s by creating a subcommittee system, the appointment of a superintendent of schools beginning in 1854, and the formation of the Board of Supervisors in 1876. Rationalizing reform in the period from 1906 to 1970s was manifested in incremental shifts in bureaucratic development toward greater and greater task specialization and differentiation within the central administrative organization. In sharp relief, all of the institutional changes along the democratizing strand of development emerged as reconstructive reform (see Table 4). These different patterns probably derive from the differing institutional loci of administrative and democratic governance reform. That is, the democratic strand provides the institutional connective tissue that binds state and society and, therefore, is more fundamental to urban politics. This means changes in its character of the democratic strand tend to require greater mobilization of political resources to accomplish. The rationalizing strand, in turn, flows through the state apparatus and, thus, more often does not require mass mobilization to achieve. Substantiation of this proposition is fertile ground for the study for urban political development, and, thus, must await further, comparative research.
The final insight derived from the long durée study of school governance in Boston bears on the nature of the politics of institutional development. On this question, the patterns of reform along the rationalizing and democratizing strands do not diverge (see Table 4). That is, conflictual and consensual politics played roles in shaping the contours of institutional reform in both strands of development. What is interesting about this is the fact that consensual politics, in which opposition to reform does not emerge, has been as much a part of institutional change as political conflict in the development of school governance in Boston. It is often thought that conflict is the main driver of urban politics. This is certainly the case with the APD’s explanation of political development as a product of intercurrence. Moreover, consensus prevailed in reconstructive as well as incremental reforms, such as the adoption of at-large, nonpartisan reform of School Committee elections in 1906 and the creation of the Board of Superintendents and other administrative positions in 1906. It must be said, however, that reconstructive reform most often arose out of throes of political conflict, where those seeking to maintain the status quo fought long and hard against fundamental school reform. Incremental change in school administrative organization, however, was more often produced of the politics of consensus, as exemplified by the bureaucratization of school administration in the 1906 to 1970 period.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Thomas Halper and the Journal of Urban History reviewers for their helpful comments and constructive criticism.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article was partially funded by aPSC-CUNY Research Foundation grant.