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Tiffany Hanssen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Tiffany Hanssen in for Brian today, and we continue now with our WNYC Centennial Series. We are, of course, celebrating our 100 years, and so we are looking at a 100 Years of a 100 things. We are on thing number 86, 100 years of public education, meaning, publicly funded education, and mostly, the compulsory part, so elementary school through high school.

We're going to look at how schools are funded, who controls that funding, why they are funded? A bit of an echo here from our conversation earlier in the program. What those factors as well mean for civil society, as we go through the decades? Joining us again here on The Brian Lehrer Show is Jonathan Zimmerman, a Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. You might remember that he took us through the 100 years of school culture wars earlier in our Centennial series, so welcome back, Professor Zimmerman.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Good to be here again. Thanks for having me.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, let's start at the beginning. Why not? American public education back in the colonial days, started out very community-based, often church-based, but if we zip forward to the 1920s, schools were starting to get organized at the state level, which is essentially how it happens now, so just take us through that evolution a little bit.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, actually, the key juncture is a little bit before the period you talked about. It's in the antebellum era, the 1830s and 1840s, when figures like Horace Mann created these state school systems. At that time, they were called common school systems. The effort was to try to stitch together all of these tiny little schools, most of them one room, into something like a system.

To your point, it was a threadbare one. Horace Mann envisioned a system where everyone had the same curriculum, and the school was open for the same amount of time, and teachers had the same level of education or certification, and none of that actually happened until the turn of the century. That's when these state systems got actual teeth.

Tiffany Hanssen: What do we mean when we say, "Teeth"?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, it means, for example, to your earlier point, that there was actual compulsory education, meaning, compulsory education that was enforced, and that there were real teacher standards that were also enforced. You had to have certain degrees, you had to have certain certifications and so on.

Tiffany Hanssen: This is what we see in the '20s?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Really, starting in the 1890s, going through the 1920s, which is something we call the Progressive Era. What's significant about the 1920s is, because it was the boom era, you have more people going to high school, because they didn't have to enter the labor force. Then, ironically, in the Great Depression, you have still more for the opposite reason, which is they couldn't find jobs in the labor force.

Tiffany Hanssen: You mentioned those one-room schoolhouses. Just to backtrack a little bit, that folks might remember that as like, or think about it as kind of that Little House on the Prairie days, right? One room, bunch of kids, different grades, rural areas, all being educated in a single room. You wrote a book about this, so just tell us a little bit about what immigration and urbanization had, as far as impact on those little bitty schools.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, what happened is in the 20th century, as the population grows for the reason you're talking about, and most of all, is it urbanizes. Those schools which had been actually the majority experience, become the minority ones. In the 19th century, most people who went to school, went to a one-room school, but that's because the country was overwhelmingly a rural place.

As it urbanizes, those one-room schools become less common. Indeed, during the era we're talking about, the '20s and '30s, they become centralized. If you go to any rural part of the United States, you'll find a high school named Jonesville Central School, and what that is, is a school that was created, generally, in the '20s and '30s to unite all these small one-room schools.

Tiffany Hanssen: Listeners, teachers, administrators, are you on spring break? We'd love to hear your stories, your oral histories, and the changes that you've seen in public education. Anybody with grandparents who attended a one-room schoolhouse, taught in a one-room schoolhouse? How have you seen these major shifts in what's being taught, and being included in public education?

We want to hear from you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text us at that number. I will tell you, professor, that my grandmother was born in 1915. She attended in Davenport, Iowa. She attended a one-room schoolhouse situation up until, I want to say, about her eighth grade education. She was one of six siblings, and the only one to actually graduate high school. Now, this is after that sort of more unifying period that you're talking about, so to the point, I guess, that there were still stragglers though, even then, right?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Oh, absolutely. One of the things we discovered is that, into the '30s and '40s in the Dakotas, for example, that the majority of kids were still going to a one-room school. That changed in the 1950s for a number of reasons, including the baby boom which happened everywhere. These small schools couldn't sustain it, but to your grandmother's experience, I think it's really important to think about that experience when we think about public education.

Because these one-room schools like your grandma attended, they were often the only public building in a community. The pattern of American settlement in places like Davenport was, you arrive there, you name it after Jones or Smith, sometimes, alas, you remove, or eliminate the human beings who are already there, and you elect a school board. That's really how it worked.

The school became not just the place where people were educated, because it was the only public institution, it was also place where voting happened, where funerals, and weddings happened, where Christmas celebrations happened, and my guess is that, your grandmother encountered all those experiences in her school, so it wasn't just a school, it was the center of the community.

Tiffany Hanssen: I'm wondering what, as we talk about the evolution of the-- The consolidation of these schools, and the evolution of public education, one thing we have to focus in on, I think, is the use of taxes to pay for education, so when did that happen, and what was the effect?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, there have been schools in North America since white people came here, well before Horace Mann. I mean, the Puritans established them in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and they were funded by the community. They were funded by local property taxes, and that has been the primary mechanism, because these institutions were so local, because they were really the essential locus of the community. It made sense that the community would pay for them.

Now, it's changed in recent years because the federal government got into the act in the 1960s during the Lyndon Johnson era. More recently, states have started to pick up a bigger part of the bill, so it used to be that schools were almost entirely funded by local taxes, and now that's not the case. The federal government is about 10%, and now between local and states, depending on when we're talking about, it's about equal. Equal, in the sense that, the locality and the state are picking up an equal fraction of the cost.

Tiffany Hanssen: When taxpayers were informed, "Hey, by the way, we're going to start using your taxes to pay for public education." How was it received?

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, I mean, this has always been the dilemma, because people are much more likely to approve a tax, if it's for their own community, rather than as opposed to somebody else's. That's a pattern and a fact we've seen play out over and over and over again. In fact, the most likely predictor of whether you'll vote for a tax increase, is how directly you feel you can affect the policy of the school, i.e. how locally it's controlled, and this is an erstwhile dilemma.

Local control is two-headed. It's been both a great source of community, and of enthusiasm for education, and commitment to it, but it's also been a source of enormous inequality and inequity. It's both.

Tiffany Hanssen: Listeners, we're talking about public education as part of our 100 years of a 100 things. This is thing number 86, which is 100 years of public education. We're talking with Professor Jonathan Zimmerman from the University of Pennsylvania about these 100 years, and we'd like you to join our conversation. Do you have a story about your own education. and how you've seen the shift in public education throughout the years?

You can call us, you can text us. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's start and bring some callers into our conversation. Professor, how about Laura in the Bronx? Good morning, Laura.

Laura: Good morning. I'm calling to let you know that I was an assistant teacher in what I think is the last common school in the country. It was in Terlingua in West Texas, and I was there in around 19-- What is this? Well, let's see, I would have been 30, '83, '82, 1982, '83, and it was really amazing. It was like an oversized barn, basically, with a tin roof. We had to start early in the summertime, because it got so hot.

It had about 40 students in it. It had three or four teachers for the whole school, and the principal had to teach also. She would teach supplementary subjects which she liked, and if somebody was out, she would cover their class. It was-- We had to start very early in the morning, usually because of the heat. They had a bus that would circle around the hills, and pick up all the students who couldn't get dropped off by their parents, and it was bizarre, because it was like three or four students in each grade level, and they would have two or three grade levels in a room. They had maybe two rooms.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. Laura, thank you so much for your reflections there. To your point, professor, you know that this was in the Dakotas, et cetera. This was going on for Laura in the '80s.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Oh, yes. There still are one-room schools in this country. I mean, Laura referred to her school as a common school. I would call it a one-room school just to distinguish it from others, but I think there are two really interesting parts in Laura's story which I really appreciate her sharing. I think the first is just the communalism of the one-room school.

The fact that it did provide a bonding mechanism for all kinds of different people in the community, and that solidified their commitment to education. Americans have enormous faith in education still. Despite some of the hits its taken. I think the historic pattern that Laura is describing is a big part of it. There's a huge symbolic dimension to this. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was really the first big infusion of federal dollars into this system.

This is in 1965, he returned to the one-room school that he had attended as a kid to sign it, and even had his teacher come out, and then made creepy remarks about sitting in her lap, which is a whole other thing, but there's a reason that he went down there to his one-room school. It's because of the symbolic power of it. The other thing I found fascinating about Laura's story was that she mentioned a bus bringing kids to the school.

I think that was probably quite uncommon. In fact, the school bus, and in general, automobility was part of the reason that the one-room school went away, in the sense, or I should say it was the enabling factor. You can't make that central school I referred to earlier that binds together these one-room schools, unless you have buses and cars that can take people some distance. Because for the most part, one-room schools, they drew kids who could walk there, and once we have buses and cars, that enables a more centralized system.

Tiffany Hanssen: Professor, let's bring another caller in, Don in Brooklyn. Good morning, Don.

Don: Good morning. I had my elementary education in Europe, and university education here. I had American children, and it seemed very strange that from K through 12, they get a certain education, which is also K through 12 in Europe, but in Europe, after you finish high school, you go to university. Here, after you finish high school, you go to college.

The dropout rate in college in the first year, I understand from many readings, is about a third, because they're not prepared for the amount of material, and the intensity of college education. I wonder why that's the case? Why American students have to have four years of compensation for 12 lost years of education? Those 12 years were not even ready for them, because they drop out.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, go ahead, professor.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes. Well, there's a lot in Don's question which I also appreciate. First, I think it's interesting he said that people in Europe go to university, and people in the United States go to college. I think he's right about that, and that speaks to a whole other pattern in the United States, which is the idea of college being a residential experience. Now, of course, it isn't for everybody, right?

Community colleges are almost entirely commuter, but we do imagine in the United States this four-year experience as something that is residential, and that is isolated from the rest of society. In some ways, it's a full service station. It's not like university in Europe, where you take a bus there, you go to your classes, and you go back to your flat. No, here we imagine is much more all-encompassing.

Now, to the thrust of Don's question about preparation. He's right about that. I think that what that speaks to, is just the enormous inequality in our system. Many people are prepared exquisitely for college. I was because I went to a very well-funded public school in an American suburb. When I got to college, I felt as well prepared as any of the prep school kids.

If I had gone to a public school elsewhere that didn't have the same resources and advantages as my own school, I would not have felt prepared, and maybe I would have been one of those dropouts, so that's the heart of the problem.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, I wonder if, as we talk broadly about the history of public education, if that-- Was that the point of this whole thing to begin with? Was the point to prepare kids for college/university, or was the point to simply make sure that we have an educated democratic society? I wonder how that has changed, and how perception of that has changed over the years.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, this is hugely important because the answer to your question, is in the 19th century, the civic purpose was foremost. Look, almost nobody went to college then, just a tiny handful of white men, so Horace Mann did not create common schools to send people to college. Almost nobody was going to college. Why did he think we needed a common school system with shared standards, and he hoped, eventually, shared resources, although that never happened.

Here's the reason, because we were going to be a republic, and in a republic, people are self-governing. People in Mann's generation referred to schools as pillars of the republic. Pillars of the republic, because it was imagined that we needed these institutions to uphold the republic, and specifically, to prepare people for republican citizenship, so they needed literacy and numeracy, and they needed history and the sciences, in order to govern themselves, to participate in the processes of democratic self-governance.

I still think they serve that purpose, but I do feel that, that purpose has been either attenuated, or ignored. If you ask most people today, why we have schools, it's to prepare people for the workforce, or for college.

Tiffany Hanssen: We don't hear as much that answer of, we need an informed electorate.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Right. I mean, I think we're hearing it a little bit more now because of, let's just say, the events of the day, but I think it's important to realize that, that was the raison d'être, that was the founding purpose of these institutions, and I do feel that in many instances, and many times we've lost sight of that.

Tiffany Hanssen: Professor, you mentioned that you went to a particularly well-funded suburban high school. I think that this is a peculiarity of American education, and what I'm referring to is schools funded by property taxes, so talk to us about the evolution there when it comes to funding schools, funding public education by via property taxes.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Well, because we live in an unequal society. If you fund schools via property tax, you're going to end up with very, very different outcomes in different places. Some places are wealthier than others. They're going to generate more tax revenue.

Tiffany Hanssen: Was it like that from the beginning?

Jonathan Zimmerman: It absolutely was. Horace Mann himself was very concerned about it, but couldn't figure out a way to change it, because people did not want to vote for a tax increase, unless those taxes were going to benefit their schools. This has been a huge, huge obstacle ever since. Now, like I mentioned earlier, there have been changes, and changes that I would describe as salutary.

I mentioned Lyndon Johnson earlier. It's not until the 1960s and the Johnson administration that you see significant federal dollars going into public education, and I think this is very significant. Many of those dollars, in fact most of them are designated for schools that were losing in the local taxation sweepstakes, that is schools that were, to use the language of the day, disadvantaged, underprivileged.

If you look at the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Title 1, and it's these numbers matter. Title 1 is aid for disadvantaged and underprivileged schools, and I think, historically, that's been the major role of the federal government to try to assist schools in the that way. Now, obviously, 10% is just 10%, and it has not made the difference that a lot of people hoped it would, but at the same time, state governments have also been picking up a bigger part of the bill, so it is not equal in any way, but I would argue that it is more equal than it's been at other times in American history.

Tiffany Hanssen: Professor, I'd like us to zip forward here in our 100 years to the '50s, and we've been talking here a little bit about how things are getting funded, how people are being educated, and now let's maybe shift a little bit, and talk about who gets educated, which changed dramatically in the '50s, so talk to us about that era.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes. Well, the 1950s, like the '20s is another era of prosperity. It's actually the first decade that a majority of Americans graduated from high school. High school in the 1950s becomes a ubiquitous experience, in the same way that, say, elementary school had been in earlier eras. Now, you also have, because there are so many people coming into the system, there's a lot of debate about what these people are going to do with their lives.

Some of them were being prepared for vocation endeavors. A small fraction was being prepared for academic endeavors, and then there was this big group in the middle. What are we going to do with them? A lot of them are women who formerly didn't go to high school. They're probably not either going to go to college, or into a factory. What are we going to do?

Well, we're going to give them social guidance, and life adjustment. These were words from the term. We're going to give them courses in hygiene, courses in family life, which we would call sex education.

Tiffany Hanssen: Home ec.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Courses in home ec. Yes. Driver's ed. These are all legacies of '50s. [crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: Typing. I took typing.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Oh, yes, there you go. All that stuff, but then at the so-called top end, at the academic end, there's also enormous, enormous anxiety that we're falling behind the Soviet Union in what today would be called the STEM fields. Remember, in 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, which was the first satellite, and this creates a major freak out in the United States, and also, one of the first federal acts that really affected K to 12 education, which is a National Defense Education Act.

What that was, it was money to improve science curricula, but also to try to identify the best in brightest students who we would funnel into the STEM fields. There was also money for foreign language instruction, which was also a Cold War imperative, because we wanted people to learn Russian and other languages, and--[crosstalk]

Tiffany Hanssen: Professor, to that point, I'd like to bring a caller in here, Cheryl in SoHo. Hi, Cheryl.

Cheryl: Hi. Yep, that was my experience.

Tiffany Hanssen: Let's hear it.

Cheryl: Okay. When Sputnik went up, a little later, that same-- I believe it was same year, whatever. I'm from Buffalo, so New York City. Thank you for your money, because I got a great education out of it. Yes, they started us with core languages, five languages in one year, where we learned the similarities in Romance languages, and we went from the beginnings of Latin into Italian and French, and Spanish eventually.

Then, we switched early English and German, and then at the very tail end, they got us into the beginnings of Russian, but of course, that was spring, and who cares when it's spring anyway? Reality. The other point, which is crucial is, when I was growing up, we all learned how to write. Palmer method, knowing how to handle a pencil, et cetera.

Tiffany Hanssen: You mean the physical act of writing? Not the--

Cheryl: Yes, the physical act of writing. Those of us, whether we were going into college or not, some of us picked up shorthand, or speed writing, simply to get through college because there was so much writing, or the tail end of high school, because there was so much writing. Anyway, my point is, now when I go into an office, and I-- Or wherever, and I look at kids trying to write, and they can't even hold whatever it is they're trying to write with.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, Cheryl, I think we could probably start a massive debate about learning cursive, and not learning cursive. Professor, but I mean, to her point, what's being taught, how things are being taught is definitely changing, but I do want to, for the moment, get back to who is being educated, specifically, in the '50s. I want you to touch on Brown v. Board of Education.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes, I mean, just thanking Cheryl for her call. I mean, her point about languages is really important, because that was a Cold War imperative. I want to emphasize that the National Defense Education Act was very much a best and brightest operation, so I think it sounds like Sheryl got a fantastic education in languages, but my strong sense is that majority of Americans weren't affected by that.

Now, the other thing that's happening to your point is, obviously, Brown v. Board of Education. This is in 1954, where the Supreme Court says that separate cannot be equal, but it's really important for listeners to understand that the schools don't really start to desegregate until another decade later. The former confederate states resisted Brown quite directly. I mean, it was called massive resistance.

Later in the '50s, there was a manifesto that was signed by almost all the senators from the former confederate states, just saying, "We don't believe in Brown, and we're not going to follow it." Incidentally, three of the senators didn't sign it, and we should celebrate them. They're Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Al Gore Sr. of Tennessee, and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, all heroes in my book, but most of them did.

We don't really see widescale desegregation until Lyndon Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and that's because money talks, and you know what walks. Once there's money on the table that you can take away, you have a new kind of leverage, and that's really the story of desegregation in the United States. We're seeing another version of that money talk story right now in higher ed, because there was so much research dollars pumped in during the Cold War.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, we had that conversation at the beginning of the show.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Right. That gives the federal government enormous leverage, for good or ill, depending on one's politics, but even though Brown v. Board of Education 1954, we don't see broad scale desegregation until the mid and late-'60s, because of the money factor I'm describing. Also, one of the great ironies of history is, there's much more desegregation in the south than in the North.

The schools are segregated everywhere, but they were segregated by law in the South, and because of the way the court doctrine unfolded, the court said that, you couldn't actually compel people to desegregate, and you couldn't create compulsory desegregation plans, unless you could show that the schools had been segregated by law, and that occurred primarily in the South.

Tiffany Hanssen: Professor, before I let you go, we need to zip ahead here a little bit, and I want you to touch kind of quickly here on No Child Left Behind. We're coming into the early 2000s at this point.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes. Well, No Child Left behind is without a doubt the most important federal law, and the most-- The one where the federal government exerts the most power over schooling, insofar as, as per the name, it required every school to test kids grades three through eight. It required the schools to report, and also disaggregate those results based on race.

It required schools to hire, "highly qualified teachers," and most remarkably, it said that by 2014, everyone would have to be proficient, which, by the way, they weren't, which is why we eventually changed the law. Here's why I think it's important historically. The earlier federal intercessions, like Lyndon Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Schools Act, had been targeted mostly at kids who were disadvantaged, or who were different in some respects, so you have poor kids, then you have special ed kids with special needs, bilingual kids, and also Title IX girls who had been left out of sports, and all kinds of other things.

In all those examples, you had the federal government trying to exert its power to assist a group that had been, in some ways, discriminated against, held back, left behind. No Child Left Behind, look at the name. It addresses every school. It was much more universal in its scope, and radical at the time. The idea that the federal government could require all this of school districts, there are huge ironies in that, because it was actually signed by a Republican president, and 20 years earlier, Ronald Reagan, Republican president, had said that we don't need a Department of Education, which by the way, is what the current president says too, but they're both Republicans, but a very different orientation towards schools.

Tiffany Hanssen: I want to remind listeners that you did talk with Brian about culture wars in schools. You had a 100 years of school culture wars. Listeners, you can find that online. Listen to that conversation between Brian and Professor Zimmerman, if you haven't already done so. Now, as you mentioned here, what's happening with the current administration, as it relates to the Department of Education. One of the other current things that's happening right now is around vouchers, so really quickly, around vouchers. Tell us where we are with that.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Yes. Well, here's where we are. Different states have been giving taxpayers' vouchers, which means, you get a tax break, or you actually get money that you can use on the, "open market" to, say, attend a private school, or if the courts approve this, a parochial school, but what's really important is, up until now, that's been kind of a blue state, red state for thing, insofar as the red states have been much more likely to have those kinds of voucher plans.

Texas, of course, just approved a huge one yesterday. I think what's really important is, now Congress is debating a plan that would essentially allow, or even require that everywhere. That is, it creates tax cuts for private organizations that provide money that you could eventually use. Everyone would essentially have a voucher, or have the chance to, at least in theory, patronize a private school using public money.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, to your point, professor, I don't think we have seen the end of the evolution of public education in this country by any stretch of the imagination. Any predictions for the next 100 years? [chuckles]

Jonathan Zimmerman: [chuckles] Well, I study dead people, which is hard enough, and I don't have a crystal ball, but I will say that, I do think that public education is under enormous strain at this time, and there's enormous contradiction in that strain, so you mentioned the Trump administration, essentially, gutting the Department of Education, because it says that, that's a state and local concern.

That same administration has been issuing executive orders that exert enormous federal power over K through 12 schools around things like trans athletes or DEI, so they're trying to have it both ways. They're trying to say, "We don't need a federal part of education, because this is a state and local concern, but at the same time, we're going to draft these unprecedented executive orders that exert new federal powers over local schools."

Tiffany Hanssen: Professor Zimmerman is an education historian at Penn. He's also the author of several books, including Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn. Yes, I can say, "Damn".  Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, and a new edition of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. Thank you so much, Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, for your time, and for going down these very quickly, these 100 years with us of public education. We sure do appreciate it.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Thank you. It was fun.

 

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