The Federal Role in Education and the Rise of Social Science Research

The Structure of U.S. Education Authority in Comparative Historical Perspective

A close look at 19th-century efforts to establish a national system of education in the United States yields important insights into the enduringly peculiar political logic of U.S. education reform and the role of social science research in that politics. Such a focus also places the project of nation building at the center of the account in a way that invites comparison with other nations. Comparative history highlights the distinctively decentralized structure of education authority in the United States (Beadie, 2010b, 2016; Caruso, 2010; Lindert, 2004; Miller, 1998; Sabato, 2001). As contrasted with most nations of Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the United States administers virtually every aspect of curriculum policy, accreditation, certification, and hiring at the state and local levels, rather than national. How and why did this decentralized system develop?

Historians of education have described the development of this distinctively decentralized structure in the United States. They have located its roots in the three or four decades before the Civil War, when Northern and Western states first established state school funds, state boards of education, state superintendents of education, state-based systems of taxation for education, and state constitutional provisions in support of schools (Kaestle, 1983; Tyack, James, & Benavot, 1987). Structured from the start to recognize, incorporate, and institutionalize already existing traditions of local school organization and funding, these systems operated with a high degree of local autonomy through the Antebellum Era (Beadie, 2010a).

Beginning in the Progressive Era, the significance of state government in education substantially increased (Steffes, 2012). As scholars working in the tradition of legal history have repeatedly noted (Hutt, 2012; Provasnik, 2006; Richardson, 1994, 1999), a substantial shift in the intervention of state governments in education occurred after 1890. Typified by the spread of compulsory attendance laws and, more importantly, by the determination of courts to enforce such laws, this shift encompassed an increasing willingness on the part of state legislatures, state courts, and state departments of education to assert public power over children and households through the agency of schools, to use state financial leverage to strengthen state supervision of teachers and standardization of curriculum and operations, and to broaden the purview of schools as official state agencies in matters of public health, labor regulation, child welfare, immigration, and “juvenile delinquency” (Steffes, 2012).

By this account, then, public education in the United States developed throughout as a distinctively state-based structure in a federated political system. For the most part, however, this account of the decentralized structure of education in the United States skips over the period from the beginning of the Civil War in 1860 to the rise of progressivism in 1890. As a result, it also skips over a period when education very much was a central focus of national policy in the United States, as a few scholars of congressional political history have noted (Hoffer, 2007; McAfee, 1998). During that period, as Peter Lindert (2004) has documented, systematic national-level investment in mass education increased substantially in many countries, including France, Japan, Germany, and England. Although the precise pattern of system development varied country by country, increases in national-level investment in schooling were generally associated with development of national-level capacity along one or more axes of educational standardization, such as facilities development and inspection, institutional accreditation, teacher certification, curriculum standardization, achievement examination, credentialization, and/or student admission, promotion, and attainment. Congressional leaders in the United States were very conscious of these contemporary developments in other countries and invoked concern about the competitive advantage that such systems conferred on those nations when promoting the development of a national education system in the United States.

Despite the aspirations of some lobbyists and the concerted efforts of some congressional leaders, however, the United States has never developed the kind of centralized national capacity for education funding or standardization that was developed by many other nations during this period. From a certain perspective it can be argued, as I have at length elsewhere (Beadie, in press), that the United States pursued its own distinctively “extragovernmental” model of system development at the national level. The result, however, is best described as a national system of policymaking rather than a national education system in the sense typically implied by that phrase. Even as compared with other federated systems developed during the same period, such as that of Canada, it lacks the infrastructure for effecting basic forms of standardization. And, perhaps more important, it lacks a formal mechanism by which the people who are responsible for schooling at state and local levels can directly influence the formulation of policy at the federal level.

The fact that U.S. efforts to establish a national education system failed at precisely the same time that similar efforts in other nations succeeded is intriguing and provides an important leverage point for analyzing the U.S. case. The failure of the U.S. effort should not be regarded as a foregone conclusion. This was the period, after all, of the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), which dedicated shares of federal public lands to the support of agricultural and mechanical education in the states. It was the period in which Congress established the National Bureau of Education (1867, discussed further below), and the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865), which for a brief 5- to 7-year period distributed federal subsidies to designated schools providing basic education to newly freed slaves. More broadly, this was the period of Southern Reconstruction (1867–1877), when Congress together with freedmen in secessionist Southern states established the first state systems of universal common education. It was also the period in which Congress developed a national system of Native American boarding schools (1875–1890), arguably the only truly national education system ever operated in the United States. During the same period (1875–1890), Congress considered multiple constitutional amendments that variously would have forbidden the use of public funds to support religious schools and required states to maintain public schools for all on an equitable, nondiscriminatory basis. In this context, the failure of the United States to establish a national education system despite multiple concerted attempts cannot simply be assumed; it must be examined.

Historians of education have provided major comprehensive accounts of the extent and limits of federal support for freedmen’s schools during Southern Reconstruction (Anderson, 1988; Butchart, 2010; Williams, 2005) and of the development and consequences of the federal system of Native American boarding schools (Adams, 1995; Lomawaima, 1994). For the most part, however, these efforts have been understood as specialized policies focused on particular populations rather than as part of a broader national policy focus on education. A signal exception is Sarah Manekin’s 2009 prizewinning dissertation, Spreading the Empire of Free Education, 1865–1905, which traces connections between specific individuals, organizations, and strategies involved in U.S. education policy from the Reconstruction South to the Native American West, to the National Bureau of Education, and eventually to colonial Puerto Rico. Her study indicates that the grounds for understanding these and other projects as part of a larger national education policy are many and substantial. More recently, Clif Stratton (2016) examines connections among such policies and the content of citizenship education and Americanization in multiple colonial and imperial contexts in his book Education for Empire.

The present chapter examines the ways in which early social science research undergirded the formulation of this larger national project. In the process, it situates the history of education and education research as part of a larger literature in policy history dedicated to uncovering the invisible but nonetheless powerful ways that national social policy has been constructed and prosecuted in the United States, despite its formally decentralized federalist structure. Scholars of the new statism in American history have documented the development of a diffuse model of national governance and policymaking in the United States. This literature, which ranges across a wide array of policy areas, from water rights to welfare, highlights the interactive roles that state governments, universities, and a variety of nongovernmental organizations, including private corporations, allied philanthropists, professional societies, and federated citizen groups, have played in forging policies that are truly national in scope despite the formal weakness of centralized national authority (Baldwin, 2005; Balogh, 2009; Clemens, 1997; Loss, 2012; Novak, 2008).

In particular, the historical sociologist Elisabeth Clemens (1997) has described the rise of “interest group politics” as a historical phenomenon. In her account, the now-familiar practice of organizing politically around specific issues or policy demands was not a timeless characteristic of the American political system but a particular historical innovation that developed after 1890 in critical response to the calcification of the two-party system. Understanding the phenomenon in relation to the rise of bureaucratic administrative authority during the same period, Clemens’s study highlights the roles of various voluntary organizations in putting pressure on the legislative process and administrative structures. Framed as an attempt to understand the relative success of women’s groups, agrarian groups, and labor groups in effecting reforms despite their relative lack of formal political power, Clemens’s formulation explains how some pressure groups proved more successful at certain times than others. For example, in her analysis, the relative success of women’s groups in winning a range of policy measures in the Progressive Era derived precisely from the fact that the absence of formal political power forced them to excel in developing extrapartisan methods of mobilizing public opinion and putting pressure on legislative and administrative systems.

Viewed from the perspective of Clemens’s (1997) analysis, Lee’s (1949) study of the struggle for federal aid to education provides both an example to be studied and a challenge of chronology and conceptualization. Throughout his study, Lee focused his analysis on the political dynamics of popular, professional, political, and press support and opposition for various federal aid measures. As part of his analysis, he discussed many of the very same farmer, labor, and women’s groups that also figure prominently in Clemens’s study. Moreover, Lee’s frame of analysis was precisely that of interest group politics. Repeatedly in his account, Lee noted that the practice of pressure group politics was insufficiently developed in the 1870s and 1880s, effectively implying that this state of nascent development explains the ultimate failure of federal aid legislation in the late 19th century. In many respects, his study reads as a guide to more thorough and complete exercise of such political strategies in the legislative battles ahead.

That Lee should have invoked interest group politics in his 1949 study makes sense given Clemens’s (1997) account. According to Clemens, political scientists first recognized and normalized the phenomenon as a feature of the American political system circa 1950. Published in 1949, Lee’s analysis can be seen as representative of this frame of analysis. At the same time, Lee’s account also challenges the chronology and conceptualization of Clemens’s account in some ways. For starters, it pushes the story of how such politics developed back at least 20 years. It also poses the question of what role professional organizations played in the development of this new politics, a question Clemens does not specifically recognize or address.

In many ways, Lee stood too far inside the logic of interest group politics himself to be able to answer this question. He clearly saw his purpose in 1948 as that of advising professional educators of the role that “public and professional interest” would have to play in his own time for federal aid legislation to be successful in the future. Nonetheless, the evidence that Lee provided suggests that two professional organizations in particular were significant in formulating the arguments, marshaling the supportive data, and mobilizing support for the 19th-century effort to establish a national education system in the United States: the NEA, founded in 1857, and the ASSA, founded in 1865 (Haskell, 1977; Mattingly, 1975).

A Brief History of 19th-Century Efforts to Establish a National Education System

In Lee’s (1949) assessment, the late 19th-century effort to establish federal aid for education could be divided into three main stages. Lee’s account of these stages highlights important shifts in the logic of proposed federal legislation over the period from 1870 to 1890, summarized below. As part of his discussion, Lee also analyzed the levels and sources of “public and professional interest” mobilized in support of, or opposition to, the bills. These assessments are also summarized below.

The Role of Professional Associations and Social Science in the Campaign to Pass the Blair Bill

Born of similar impulses but different networks, the NEA and the ASSA were both rooted in the practical work of government. The origins of the NEA lay in the National Teachers Association (NTA), an organization founded in Philadelphia in 1857 by men who were already engaged in the work of cultivating and strengthening the teaching corps for the expanding common school systems of their states through the promotion, development, and administration of normal schools, teachers’ institutes, teacher journals, and associated systems of teacher credentialing. Initially composed of 43 men from 13 states, the organization imagined itself from the start as a translocal professional body that would give leading members of already existing state-level teacher organizations the opportunity to trade professional knowledge, concerns, and ideas with their counterparts in other states—and to help build the capacity for systematic support of such work at the federal level (Wesley, 1957).

Although cosmopolitan by standards of the day, the NTA was far from the only translocal network of “schoolmen” active in the Antebellum Era (Mattingly, 1975). In the decade following the founding of the NTA, however, the disunion of the country paradoxically provided new opportunities for national consolidation of leadership and influence in the field of education, as the secession of Southern states in 1860, their defeat in the Civil War, and their continuing disbarment from Congress for 3 to 5 years following the war, made possible the enactment of several education acts at the federal level that representatives from Southern states had previously opposed, including a proposal to establish a federal department of education to collect and publish education data from the states and territories of the nation. This idea, which by most accounts originated with Henry Barnard and a few other close colleagues in 1837, influenced the first collection of data on education and illiteracy of the national population in the U.S. Census in 1840. Barnard himself continued to advocate for the idea through his work as state superintendent of education, first for Connecticut, then for Rhode Island, and eventually through his founding and editorship of the American Journal of Education, which, beginning in 1855, collected and published education data, legislation, and news from throughout the nation (D. Warren, 1974).

Building on the same wave of thinking as the American Journal of Education and many of the same networks within the states, the NTA focused, from its founding in 1857, on lobbying for a federal department of education. Thus, when Barnard became the first U.S. commissioner of education in 1867, the new department was already in direct communication with the NTA and its members. The establishment and funding of the Department of Education (soon demoted to the status of a bureau within the Department of the Interior) created, in turn, a need for a more fully national body of state-level leaders and policymakers to advise, support, and implement the data collection process. Responding to this new national context, the NTA merged with three other interstate organizations to form the renamed NEA in 1870. In this way, the National Bureau of Education and the NEA were effectively cocreated in the years surrounding the Civil War. Moreover, the development of social science data and knowledge about education and the development of national education policy were at the core of the work of both organizations from the start. Consolidated apparently at the suggestion of John Eaton, the new commissioner of education, in 1870, just as the last secessionist Southern state was readmitted to the Union and the question of whether the Freedmen’s Bureau should be renewed or replaced by some larger national apparatus was being debated in Congress, the NEA purposefully developed itself as a national policy organization. From that point forward, it worked closely with commissioners of education and education-minded members of Congress to provide the intellectual and political manpower for identifying categories and strategies of education policymaking at the national level. ⁷

The NEA did not fulfill this function alone, however. Even as the lobbying efforts of its parent organization came to fruition in 1867 with the establishment of a federal department of education, Henry Barnard, in his new role as commissioner of education, formally presented his plans for the department at a meeting of the ASSA. Founded in Boston in 1865 by a group of 100 institutional leaders and reformers, the ASSA, like the NTA/NEA, had roots in the practical responsibilities of state-level leaders charged with designing, legislating, and administering the work of state-level institutions and organizations. In the case of the ASSA, however, the institutional locations of its members were different and more various. The early ASSA was organized into four departments representing four main professional domains and branches of government activity, each with its own vice president. The four departments were Jurisprudence, Health, Education, and Finance, the last including subsections on Trade and Social Economy. Reflecting this broad scope, members had diverse institutional affiliations. The core membership and leadership of the organization included directors of the various reformatories, asylums, prisons, orphanages, and institutions for the feeble-minded that had been founded in several states over the previous two or three decades with some combination of philanthropic and state support. Another group of members consisted of doctors and social reformers concerned with issues of urban sanitation, public health, and disease prevention, while a third group consisted of a mix of political economists and businessmen concerned with issues of trade, tariffs, currency, and labor (Haskell, 1977).

Finally, the single largest group of ASSA members, according to the historian Thomas Haskell (1977), consisted of professional educators. As compared with membership of the NTA/NEA, however, the professional educators who constituted the core leadership of the ASSA’s “Education Department” had quite different institutional affiliations. Instead of coming primarily from the leadership of state normal schools and common school systems, as did NTA/NEA members, the professional educators of the ASSA came primarily from the presidencies and professorships of colleges and universities. That the presidents of leading colleges and universities should have concerned themselves with the practical work of government in this way is not strange when one remembers that, at the time, the concluding experience of a BA degree was typically a course in moral philosophy and political economy taught by the college president, which took up just such matters of education, labor, charity, trade, and finance as became the core work of the ASSA. The most common and influential textbooks for such courses in the North by the 1850s, moreover, were those written by Francis Wayland Sr. of Brown University, and carried on by his sons, Francis Wayland Jr. and Heman Lincoln Wayland, after their father’s death in 1865 (the year the ASSA was founded). Francis and Heman were founding members and subsequent presidents of the ASSA. Also important in the early history of the ASSA were presidents of the new “modern” universities emerging in the decade immediately following the Civil War, including Andrew Dickson White of Cornell, William Barton Rogers of MIT, James Angell of the University of Michigan, and Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins.

These institutional affiliations, in turn, shaped the types of issues with which the ASSA was most concerned. With early sponsorship from the Massachusetts Board of Charities and other leadership coming from New England colleges and universities, the early ASSA was simultaneously more geographically parochial and more intellectually ambitious than the NEA, seeking to link institutions of learning and networks of college-educated doctors, lawyers, ministers, and educators more directly and powerfully to the work of government. Like the NEA, the ASSA emphasized statistics as one means of making this work more scientific and authoritative and its results more effective. Modeled in part on the British National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, founded in 1857, and informed by ties with leading members of the American Statistical Association, founded in 1839, the ASSA promoted the systematic collection, analysis, and dissemination of data on all aspects of national life, with the aim of influencing legislation to improve economy and society. Beyond this generally positive orientation to the culture of empiricism and the value of science for the practical work of public administration, the ASSA also exhibited a broader, intellectual interest in how far the traditional domains of mental and moral philosophy and political economy might come to parallel those of natural science. This broad intellectual interest directly shaped how the ASSA framed educational issues. At the very first meeting of the ASSA, in October 1865, for example, the one formal paper presented was, according to Haskell (1977, p. 111), a “plea for an inductive science of education.” Strangely enough, the author of the paper, William P. Atkinson, was a professor of English and history at the just-opened Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What he chiefly had in mind was not the future behavioral psychology of G. Stanley Hall (though he did gesture toward the need for a more empirical “science of the mind”), or the basic learning of young children, but a more modern and scientific history for the education of professionals that was grounded not in the rote learning of classical rhetoric but in direct analysis of the evidentiary record of past societies and governments. Such knowledge, he believed, might become a useful and solid training for professional civil service, a notion that he explored 2 years later in a paper titled “Competitive Examinations for the Civil Service” (Haskell, 1977, p. 112). The vision that Atkinson articulated of a professional civil service certified in definite bodies of scientific and historical knowledge and methods of analysis became a central mission for the ASSA in subsequent years and the chief object of its lobbying efforts.

What the ASSA brought to the specific project of federal aid for education in the 1870s and 1880s, then, was something quite different from what the NEA brought to the project, though the interests of the two organizations temporarily dovetailed in what proved to be critical ways. While members of the NTA/NEA were concerned primarily with the explicit objects of the legislation—that is, with the categories and amounts of federal funding that would be allocated for support of common education—the ASSA brought two other somewhat broader concerns and domains of expertise to the business of forging federal education legislation, which, as we will see, would have an important impact on the way the legislation was formulated and promoted rhetorically in Congress and more broadly to the public. The first of these was a body of expertise in what it called “jurisprudence,” but that can more fruitfully be understood as the philosophy of law, or ideas about the proper role of public law in regulating and structuring society. The central thrust and significance of this intellectual domain are reflected in the title of the first formal paper from the Department of Jurisprudence presented to the ASSA in 1867: “The Sphere of Law in Social Reform.” The second distinctive concern that the ASSA brought to the project of promoting federal aid for education was civil service reform. That agenda would be embodied in part by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which established a system of civil service examinations for government service, limited the number and types of jobs that could be allocated on the basis of political appointment and patronage, and restricted the direct solicitation of party contributions from government officials. More broadly, however, the idea of civil service reform can be understood as an effort to take the politics out of government administration and establish a more merit-based system of governance, leadership, and policymaking. Although this project would seem to bear only a tangential relationship to that of ensuring universal access to common education, it in fact had a significant and far-reaching influence on the rhetorical logic and long-term impact of the campaign for passage of the Blair Bill in the 1880s.

A close look at the elements of this campaign illuminates the distinct but complementary roles that the NEA and ASSA played in the strategic development and promotion of the Blair Bill. The efforts of the NEA and ASSA focused first, on formulating an argument for the federal aid bill that would overcome frequent objections to the constitutionality of federal involvement in education; second, on marshaling statistical data in support of that argument; and third, on mobilizing support for the bill throughout the nation. Together, these elements of the Blair Bill campaign constituted an essential logic that in many ways continues to shape federal education legislation and the role of social science research in education to this day. Specifically, the Blair Bill campaign reveals how social science data and arguments were used to address the problem of federalism.

In the mid-1880s it seemed possible, even likely, that some version of the Blair Bill would eventually pass. In 1887, in what appears in retrospect as a last-ditch attempt to bring it to fruition, the bill’s chief sponsor, Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire, published a densely packed pamphlet of material including congressional committee reports, departmental studies, speeches, endorsements, transcripts of debates, texts of various versions of the bill, data, and analysis in support of the bill. From this material it is possible to see the role that the new and newly self-conscious social sciences played in the effort to establish a federal role in education in the 1880s (Blair, 1887).

Lessons from the History of 19th-Century Efforts to Establish a National System of Education

In a two-part conclusion to his study, Lee (1949) first provided an overview of his findings regarding 19th-century efforts to establish federal aid for education. He then followed with a section titled “The Contemporary Significance of the Early Attempts to Grant Federal Aid to the Common Schools,” in which he delineated lessons for his own time.

The main lesson Lee (1949) drew from this analysis was the essential immutability of the constraints to which the 19th-century legislation responded. In the first point of his enumerated summary of significance, Lee effectively naturalized such conditions as fundamentally inherent to the American system of government. “There exists among the American people,” he declared, “a powerful and lasting tradition of states’ rights and local prerogative.” Accepting the reality of this tradition was, in his analysis, the first step in making contemporary use of the lessons from history. In deference to that reality, the question for his own time was how best to keep federal involvement in education “within proper bounds and limits.” Specifically, the record of the 1870s and 1880s indicated the unlikelihood of passage of federal aid legislation “which embodies any federal controls other than details of fiscal administration” (Lee, 1949, pp. 166–167).

As an analysis of the realpolitik of his own time, Lee’s (1949) assessment may well have been justified, as is illustrated by the ultimate defeat of the eminently noncontrolling general aid legislation under consideration at the time of his writing. As an assessment of the historical significance of the 19th-century campaign, however, Lee’s characterization of the states’ rights tradition of U.S. education as immutable fails to recognize the extent to which that “tradition” was actively being created both during and through the 19th-century campaign for federal aid.

Lee’s (1949) assumptions regarding the immutability of local and state limitations on federal power led him to characterize the Hoar Bill’s effort to enforce the educational provisions of Southern state constitutions as essentially frivolous. At one point, Lee further suggested that Hoar himself was not seriously interested in education per se, but in some other purpose. This assessment of the weak political prospects of the Hoar Bill was no doubt true to some extent, though Hoar’s “other purpose” may have been a genuine concern for political equality for African Americans, for which he consistently advocated throughout his long political career (as he also did for that of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, women, and eventually Cubans and Filipinos). The Hoar Bill certainly agitated the fundamental problem of federalism that would be vociferously debated over the next 20 years (Hoffer, 2007) and eventually decided, by 1890, largely in favor of state’s rights. No doubt, given the terms of Reconstruction, the bill’s prospects for passage even in a modified form were dim after the readmission of the last of the Southern states in July 1870. In addition, it is fair to ask, as Lee did, whether at that important political moment, when Radical Republicans still dominated Congress, a more moderate proposal, acceptable to more Northern educators if not to White Southerners, might have achieved what no subsequent federal education bill could.

Nonetheless, to really come to terms with the significance of the historical moment, it is essential to point out that all historical evidence suggests that some sort of compulsion was indeed necessary for anything like universal common school systems to be established in the South. However limited the funding, support, and oversight provided by the Freedmen’s Bureau, and however essential the initiative and self-help of Black communities (along with missionary organizations and mission-minded individuals) were to the development of Black education in the South in the immediate postwar period (Anderson, 1988; Foner, 2005; Span, 2009; Williams, 2005), the scholarship also shows how absolutely devastating the withdrawal of federal funding, enforcement, and protection was for schools and educators of all kinds after 1870. As has been documented with numerous examples by Williams (2005) and Butchart (2010), acts of terrorism against schools, schoolteachers, and Black education were ubiquitous throughout this period. Teachers, according to one correspondent from Alabama, were “advertized as subjects of assassination,” and hundreds of schoolhouses were burned. The withdrawal of federal support meant the abandonment of Black education to such fates. As Butchart (2010, p. 172) noted, “The freed people understood the link between political efficacy and literacy, and even as early as 1870 they knew that they had been betrayed.”

A close look at the dynamics between congressional and state action in this period suggests that the step-by-step compromises and failures of federal legislation and enforcement were read very closely within states and responded to accordingly. In 1872, just 2 months after the Perce Bill passed in the House of Representatives, with its compromise principle that states with segregated schools systems would still be eligible for federal funds, the border state of West Virginia, which had not been under military rule, effectively sent up a trial balloon by approving a new state constitution that required racial segregation in its schools. West Virginia thus became the second state (after Tennessee, which had been admitted to Congress before the requirements of the Reconstruction Act) to include such a provision in its constitution. ¹⁰ Within 5 years, five more states had revised their constitutions to require racial segregation in public schools. The remaining Southern and border states followed. ¹¹

More broadly, a reassessment of provisions of the Blair Bill reveals the complex and highly contingent context into which such legislation proposed to intervene. Scholarship in the history of education reveals that the decade of the 1880s was precisely when the future contours of education for Native Americans in the West and African Americans in the South were most hotly contested by reformers and policymakers. At that time, the subject was still open to debate.

With respect to Native Americans, this policy debate took shape at the first meetings of the Indian Rights Association in 1882, the very year that the Blair Bill was first introduced in Congress. The following year, in 1883, the first of the Lake Mohonk Conferences brought together reformers seeking an alternative to the militarized approach to federal Indian policy and the dependent, and often degraded, status of Native American life on reservations. In the meantime, in 1879, Richard Pratt’s experiment with the federal off-reservation boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, commenced, followed by the founding of the second federally sponsored institution, Chemawa Indian School, in Forest Grove, Oregon. Four more schools were founded in 1884, the year the Blair Bill received its first favorable vote in the Senate. ¹²

Throughout this period, according to Adams (1995, p. 58), policymakers continued to debate the role that off-reservation boarding schools should play in federal Indian policy, with reformers promoting a general program of education expansion for Native American populations rather than a specific institutional model. Real and substantial alternatives to a federal system already existed, moreover, among the sovereign nations of Indian territory, which had been developing their own schools and schools systems under their own authority since the 1830s (Steineker, 2016; Wickett, 2000). In Adams’s analysis, it was not until the mid-1880s that policymakers became committed to the idea that some sort of boarding school experience (whether on- or off-reservation) would be an essential part of a broader national education policy for Native Americans, combined with a system of Native American day schools. Reflecting this policy trajectory, attendance rates at both boarding and day schools increased substantially after 1880 and especially between 1885 and 1890. It was not until 1887—as Henry Blair made his last-ditch effort to save his bill in Congress—that a somewhat settled national education policy for Native Americans became linked to the Indian land allotment policy in the Dawes Act.

Similarly, in his detailed analysis of the development of Black education in the South, Anderson (1988) emphasizes that the model of education that would be promoted for African Americans remained very open to debate through the 1880s and well into the 1890s. Although the Hampton Institute had been founded in 1868, under the auspices of the American Missionary Association, it was not until the early 1870s, after the demise of the Freedmen’s Bureau, that Armstrong wrested pedagogical control of Hampton from Lucelia and Philomea Williams, who had been operating it on a liberal model (Butchart, 2010, pp. 90–91). Even after Armstrong assumed leadership of the institution, the industrial model of education for which it became known took time to be established. The heart of Hampton’s manual labor program, according to Anderson, was established in 1879, when Armstrong created the night school with Booker T. Washington as principal (Anderson, 1988, p. 54). Washington then went on to establish a similar program at the newly founded Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881.

According to Anderson (1988), “The most significant expansion of industrial education in black normal schools and colleges occurred during the 1880s” (p. 66), in large part through the influence of the Slater Fund. Other philanthropists, such as Robert Ogden and Peabody, also became associated with the Hampton–Tuskegee model of industrial education during this period. Despite the growing ties between Armstrong, Washington, and business philanthropists, however, the missionary model of liberal education remained influential. Moreover, missionary advocates remained strong and effective advocates for liberal education and strong critics of the system of industrial education for African Americans throughout the 1880s and well into the 1890s and beyond. As recounted by Anderson, missionary leaders attacked the “reviving Negrophobia” and the self-interested promotion of manual labor education by industrial philanthropists at a meeting of the ASSA in 1895 (Anderson, 1988, pp. 66–68).

In this context, the curricular provisions of the Blair Bill, which specified that states receiving federal funds must provide a strong curriculum of academic study for all students equally, “without distinction of race or color,” stand out as a deliberate intervention in an ongoing debate. Moreover, the fact that this definition of “common education” was explicitly distinguished from the industrial education to which funds could be applied in the territories suggests that the somewhat unusual decision to detail the contents of common education was in fact a deliberate effort to ensure that the system of common schools established in the South with federal aid would indeed be “education for citizenship.”

Drawing on student accounts from correspondence, memoirs, and oral histories, Adams (1995), Anderson (1988), Lomawaima (1994), and others have amply detailed the experience of industrial education at Hampton and various Native American boarding schools in strikingly similar terms. In both contexts, the domestic work required to support the institution, including laundry, kitchen work, cleaning, sewing and mending of uniforms, and the agricultural and mechanical work necessary to feed the occupants and maintain the institution’s operations, filled most hours of the day for both female and male students, leaving little if any time for study and then typically of only the most rudimentary skills. Moreover, as Anderson thoroughly documented, and an earlier literature also established (Bond, 1934; DuBois, 1910, 1935; Woodson, 1933), after 1900 the industrial model became “the” model promoted by educators and philanthropists through the “Southern movement” conducted by the Southern and general education boards, though often resisted by African American students, parents, leaders, and communities. When it comes to African American education, however, this eventuality was as much a result as a precondition of the failed campaign for a national education system.

The one place where Lee (1949) directly addressed these racial dynamics was in the penultimate paragraph of his conclusion and thus of the study as a whole. Acknowledging the antidemocratic position of “those who maintain a ‘morality of white supremacy,’” Lee engaged the question of whether, in his own time, federal legislation should include mandates that disqualified from federal aid any states “in which racial segregation [was] a legally established practice.” Taking the position that no such mandates should be included, Lee offered several explanatory arguments. Starting with a statement about the limits of the law as a means of changing social attitudes, he articulated a logic of gradualism in improving Black school conditions, saying that a “growing social consciousness, supported by progressive tendencies of contemporary judicial decision, is gradually producing reform in the established pattern of race relationships, notably in the area of educational equalization” (pp. 169–170).

As we know from the work of Anderson (1988) and Margo (1990), however, the gap between funding for Black and White schooling in the South began in 1890, when the Blair Bill finally failed. In the period from 1870 to 1890, levels of funding for Black and White schools in the South, though low, were essentially equal. Similarly, it was only after it became clear that no federally funded national campaign to promote or guarantee universal literacy would be conducted that Southern states decided to make literacy a qualification for Black suffrage (Whites were largely exempted from meeting such qualifications), a condition that itself eventually reinforced and widened the gap in school funding. Furthermore, it was only after Southern states had perfected this strategy for suppressing Black education without federal response that Plessy v. Ferguson confirmed it as constitutional. Hence, when Lee (1949) himself concluded that the attitudes of those “who maintain a morality of ‘white supremacy’ would be unlikely to be changed by federal mandates” and that any legislation which would be inapplicable to states with racial segregation “would be ineffective,” he was addressing a reality that had been institutionalized in the 60 years since the final failure of the Blair Bill in 1890.

Lee’s (1949) study is invaluable as a record of the legislative efforts and actions on federal aid for education from 1870 to 1890. Despite the fact that the study was conceived and executed in the interest of future success for a comparable legislative effort, it exhibits admirable detachment in its evaluation of factors that contributed to or inhibited the “struggle” and the relative success or failure of various strategies. Nonetheless, of course, the context of the study’s creation did color its analysis in certain respects—chiefly, perhaps, with regard to the strength of its hopes. Shaped by a faith in future success, as well as by lingering assumptions of progress, Lee’s account insufficiently reckoned with the consequences and significance of past failures, which in many ways created and explained the conditions of his present that he regarded as normal. The very fact of Lee’s self-conscious effort to mobilize professionals in support of federal legislation derived from the failure of the earlier effort to empower the Bureau of Education with the authority to provide national direction in education itself. Similarly, the very virulence of the “states’ rights” dynamic in education, which Lee had taken pains to recognize in the past in order to better strategize around it in the future, was confirmed, strengthened, and indeed stimulated by the ultimate failure of the Hoar, Perce, Burnside, and Blair bills of the 1870s and 1880s.

The Significance of Professional Associations and Social Science Research in National Education Policy

Substantively, the failure of the Blair Bill and of the larger campaign for a national system of education meant that the authority to define the terms of access to, and the regulation of, both education and suffrage returned to the states. But more than that, authority returned to the states with a new level of permission to discriminate in the distribution of both education and suffrage and, more specifically, to use educational qualifications as a means of discrimination with respect to voting rights. In other words, the final failure of the Blair Bill had effects well beyond the simple absence of its promised provisions. It took a set of issues about the extent and limits of federal authority in education and suffrage and settled them, and it settled them in favor of state prerogative. In a few Western states, such as Wyoming, this new permissiveness led to state provisions that expanded access to political rights for some—especially women—at the same time as it also emboldened some Western states to restrict access for others—for example, Chinese in Oregon and California, Indians in Washington, and citizens not fully literate in English in Oklahoma and Arizona (Beadie, 2016; Beadie et al., 2016; Bottoms, 2013). In the South, by comparison, the defeat of the Blair Bill spelled out a more fully restrictive logic. Note that it was only after the final defeat of efforts to achieve universal literacy through a federal system of funding for education for all that Southern states undertook literacy-based approaches to disfranchisement. And, as the historians Jim Anderson (1988) and Robert Margo (1990) have amply demonstrated, it was only after disfranchisement that Southern states began radically undermining principles of equal funding for Black schools.

Although it would certainly be an overstatement to say that the failure of the Blair Bill somehow caused the rise of suffrage restrictions in the South and some areas of the West, the failure of the bill and of the larger campaign of which it was a part did play a more central role in constructing the suffrage restrictions of Jim Crow than has generally been recognized (Beadie, 2016). As the legal scholar Alfred Avins (1965) pointed out in a somewhat curious 1965 Washington Law Review article on literacy tests, some radical Republicans in Congress recognized and worried from the outset of Reconstruction about the potential for education to become a proxy for race in the restriction of Black voting rights. ¹³ During debates over the first Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and the 14th Amendment, these Congressmen cautioned their colleagues about the educational loopholes that insufficiently strong civil rights provisions would leave for Southern states to exclude Blacks from voting. In 1866, for example, Congressman John Farnsworth of Illinois noted,

A State may enact that a man shall not exercise the elective franchise except he can read and write, making that law apply equally to the whites and blacks, and then may also enact that a black man shall not learn to read and write, exclude him from their schools, and make it a penal offense to instruct or to teach him, and thus prevent his qualifying to exercise the elective franchise according to the State law. (Avins, 1965, p. 438)

Similarly, Congressman Hamilton Ward of New York anticipated that Southern states would

readily publish some ground of exclusion from suffrage other than of “race or color.” They may require them to read and write, and yet keep alive the black code against disseminating knowledge among them. Indeed, they may require them to have a collegiate education, or something else equally absurd. (Avins, 1965, p. 438)

Concerns like these were precisely what led radical Republicans to argue (unsuccessfully), first, that the right of suffrage should be unconditionally guaranteed by the federal government; second, that equal access to education should be guaranteed in a federal civil rights bill; and third, that a system of federal aid and oversight of universal common education should be established at the national level. Thus, in 1890, when the last of these efforts failed, the rhetorical and conceptual ground had already been laid for using literacy as a qualification for suffrage. In other words, the same logic once used to promote the success of the Blair Bill was inverted by defeat into a logic justifying contingencies exactly the opposite of those intended. If federally funded common education was necessary to ensure the literacy required for suffrage—and ultimately to ensure the very survival of self-government—then the failure to provide such federal support required restriction of suffrage based on literacy. In this way, the rhetoric used to legitimate a federal system of support for universal education and thereby prevent education from being used as a proxy for race doubled back on itself. It became a tool for legitimating exactly the suffrage restrictions the originators had hoped to prevent. ¹⁴

Moreover, and perhaps more important, as Congressmen Farnsworth and Ward had recognized, the failure of the Blair Bill and the consequent return of state responsibility, power, and prerogative in education effectively provided an incentive for White supremacists to limit Black access to education as a means of limiting Black access to voting rights. In this way, the inability of the federal government to legislate in the domain of education and the disability of non-Whites as voters were co-constructed after 1890. The failed Blair Bill campaign was in effect the “lost wax” of state literacy restrictions on voting and unequal state education provisions that structured the Jim Crow edifice. ¹⁵

The value of looking closely at this consequential defeat is that it illuminates some of the historical pitfalls of federalism that still plague efforts at national education policymaking in the United States today. In particular, the campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s show how traditional limits on federal authority over the states contribute to shaping policies framed in terms of deficiencies of the people rather than deficiencies of the states. In the process, it also shows how the difficulties of forging grand bargains across states can lead to policies solicitous of local and regional prejudice, and how those same dynamics can incentivize sponsors of such policies to lump together quite different populations and issues in one racialized problem or class. Finally, a close look at the campaigns for a national system in the 1870s and 1880s shows how the search for a usable national discourse of education reform can double back on itself and effectively reproduce the very problems it once was intended to solve. Or, to use the more recently salient language of Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006), the case of 19th-century efforts to establish a federal system of education shows how the historical limits of federalism repeatedly transform the “education debt” into an “achievement gap.”

Finally, to return to the analysis by Elisabeth Clemens (1997), the case of the 19th-century campaign to secure federal funding for education illuminates the peculiar historical role and significance of professional associations like the NEA, the ASSA, and eventually, the AERA, in a national context of decentralized government authority. According to Lee (1949), the federal assistance question of the 1870s and 1880s marked the beginning of effective legislative activity within the education profession. In his analysis, however, the education profession during the 1870s and 1880s was extremely weak as a pressure group on the national scale. In particular, he critiqued professional educators of the past as “utterly unable to unite in recognizing the urgent necessity of federal aid.” Using that critique as a point of departure for addressing the professional educators of his own time, Lee then went on to advise that “no federal legislation is likely to be enacted without aggressive professional organization representing approximate solidarity of professional support for such legislation” (p. 167). In effect, we can say that Lee was right. What the NEA and the ASSA did in the 1870s and 1880s was to work closely with the commissioner of education and members of Congress to shape legislation, formulate arguments, collect and interpret data, and mobilize “public and professional interest” in support of a national system of education. With the failure of the Blair Bill and the consequent stimulation of administrative power at the state level, the capacity to redefine educational issues in national terms became even more crucial. In effect, the culture of expertise became a substitute for federal authority itself. The significance of professional associations and social science research came to lie in their intellectual and organizational capacity to categorize education conditions in ways that turned them into politically actionable national “problems.” Following the pattern laid down during the Blair Bill campaign, social science data and research would repeatedly be turned to as the means of redefining as “deficiencies of the people” what were really “deficiencies of the states.”