Rockefeller Archive Center

Organizations founded and supported by the philanthropies of the Rockefeller family have had a seminal influence on the development of twentieth-century education, science, medicine, social science, agriculture, economics, conservation, and cultural affairs throughout the world. Material relating to these activities, and the personal papers of family members and other individuals associated with their endeavors, total some 20 million documents to date. They comprise an invaluable and irreplaceable reference source for modern historians and other scholars.

The Rockefeller Archive Center of The Rockefeller University has been established to protect these unique collections and to assemble them under one roof. This permanent repository offers convenient access and assistance to qualified scholars engaged in specific research projects. As more material becomes available from the Rockefeller family and from organizations they have supported, it will be added to the Archives.

The program of the facility includes seminars and conferences related to the contents of the Archives and the publication of selected documents.

Private Philanthropy and Public

Elementary and Secondary Education

edited by
Gerald Benjamin

Proceedings of the
Rockefeller Archive Center Conference
held on
June 8, 1979

ROCKEFELLER ARCHIVE CENTER

Copyright © 1980
by Rockefeller Archive Center
Library of Congress Catalogue Card No. 80-50652
ISBN 87470-033-7
eISBN 978-0-87470-102-9
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Private Philanthropy and Public Elementary and Secondary Education

Gerald Benjamin

THE HISTORICAL RECORD

Foundations and Public Education in the Twentieth Century

Robert J. Havighurst

Philanthropy and the Gospel of Child Development

Steven L. Schlossman

The Mental Hygiene Movement, The Commonwealth Fund, and Public Education, 1921–1933

Sol Cohen

RECENT FOUNDATION EFFORTS—STRATEGIES AND IMPACT

Philanthropy and Public Schools: One Foundation's Evolving Perspective

Edward J. Meade, Jr.

Agenda Setting, Assessment, and Impact: The Kettering Foundation and Education

Charles L. Willis

NEEDS AND PROSPECTS FOR THE NEXT DECADE—A ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION

Robert H. Connery, Chairman

Gordon M. Ambach

William M. Dietel

Peter D. Relic

INVITED PARTICIPANTS

PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY AND PUBLIC ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

GERALD BENJAMIN

Associate Professor of Political Science
State University of New York, New Paltz

The field of education has long been the principal interest of American philanthropic activity, and this interest has continued during the 1970's. A recent survey revealed that between 1972 and 1976 major foundations spent more money and funded more projects in education than in other important fields such as health, science, welfare, religion, or the humanities.[1] Of course, of the money spent by foundations on education, only a fraction has gone for projects on the elementary and secondary levels, and of that fraction substantial resources have been spent on private rather than public institutions and programs. Nevertheless, with the emphasis of philanthropic organizations on this field, the absence of a systematic record of their impact on public education is surprising. There is not now available an historical survey of the effects of American foundations on American education, nor is there an organized forum available for a general discussion of current foundation goals and priorities in education.

The principal reason for this state of affairs is the extreme fragmentation of both philanthropic and educational efforts in the United States. The list of organizations making grants in the area of education requires two full index pages in The Foundation Directory. There are hundreds of them, and when they act on a concern in elementary or secondary education they may deal with any of thousands of bureaucracies, institutions, and individuals—state governments; local school districts; universities; national, state, or local educational associations; individual researchers; or research organizations. The great diversity of potential loci for action, when combined with differing priorities, assures both the geographic dispersion and the low visibility of foundation funding activity in education. In short, a good deal is going on, but nobody knows what it is or whether it repeats what was done elsewhere.

One purpose of this conference and of the papers that were prepared for presentation to the participants, then, was to devote some attention to the history of philanthropic activities in education. Another was to encourage an exchange of views on current and future trends among a group of foundation executives, scholars, educators, and officials at every level of government who are committed to the improvement of public elementary and secondary education in the United States.

As the first essay in this collection by Robert Havighurst illustrates, the goals of foundation activity in education and the strategies for reaching these goals have changed dramatically during different periods of this century. At first, foundations set out to do things that government would not, or could not, do for lack of commitment or resources. Early attempts at providing education for Black students in the South, for example, were not demonstration projects designed to lure state and local governments into new fields. Rather, they constituted an absolute commitment to the delivery of basic educational services in an area in which government would not act.

From these beginnings, the idea of the foundation as the source for “social venture capital” began to take hold. It became apparent to the executives of even the larger philanthropies that they lacked the means for the direct delivery of educational services to any segment of the society, however limited, over an extended period of time. It became necessary, then, to discover what worked through the selective testing of innovative proposals, and then to disseminate news of their successes in order to attract or prod government, with its vast resources, into the field. The case studies that follow by both Professors Cohen and Schlossman illustrate that this model for foundation action had become established by the 1920's. And, although the fields of interest have differed in other decades, this is what foundations still do, or at least say they do.

The motivations for foundation entry into a field are complex and not always entirely altruistic. The Havighurst paper stresses that the major foundations established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were interested in education because it seemed to offer an opportunity for an attack on the basic problems of American society at their roots. (The assumption was, of course, that these problems were soluble.) But Charles Willis in his essay points out that, more often than not, the program choices of foundations are made on an ad hoc basis, reflecting at least as much the particular interests of foundation officers and trustees as a more general concern for “objective social needs.” And, in his paper on the Commonwealth Fund, Sol Cohen reminds us that in carving out an area of activity that can be uniquely identified with it, the definition of turf for later credit-taking may be more important to a foundation than what it ultimately accomplishes in that area. Thus, we get the puzzling result that a foundation may do something almost entirely because it is not yet being done elsewhere, with little regard for the eventual consequences of its program choices.

The entry of the federal government into the field of elementary and secondary education in a substantial way during the mid-1960's, and the expansion of its commitment over the past decade and a half, cannot help but have fundamental consequences for foundations interested in this area. Already, more funds for educational research are provided by the national government than by private philanthropy. Although foundations say they are leading government in developing educational policy—and sometimes they are—increasingly they are using their resources for action grants to “guard the guardians.” The program of one leading foundation in the field of education, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, is instructive. The Corporation has set out explicitly to—

…help groups outside the public schools to represent the interests of children less well served and to work with school personnel in seeing that educational resources and programs meet these children's needs. Various strategies toward this end include advocacy and litigation with respect to children's rights, monitoring the implementation of government programs serving minority and poor children and helping the parents of these children have a voice in educational decision making.[2]

In pursuit of these goals the Carnegie Corporation has funded a variety of groups to monitor federal, state, and local implementation of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the Education of All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142). Litigation, political action, and adversary processes supported by the foundation have been used to “see that funds are used for their intended purpose.”

Clearly, these efforts represent a shift of the locus of foundation intervention in the policy process. The purpose is no longer to lure government resources into new areas but to oversee the use of governmental resources already committed. But foundations are not the only institutions monitoring these programs. Indeed, local educational administrators are complaining bitterly about the extent of federal requirements. “An almost fanatical concern for accountability,” one superintendent has written, “results in a blizzard of the most complex reporting forms imaginable.”[3] One might ask whether it is the best use of foundation resources to add a few more snowflakes to this blizzard.

While an indicator of current trends, the priorities of the Carnegie Corporation do not reflect those of all foundations active in public education. As Lawrence Cremin, President of Teachers College, Columbia University, pointed out in his luncheon address at the Archive Center conference, the diversity of foundation interests and approaches is one of their most important strengths. There has been variety in the size, the focus, and the duration of grant programs. Some foundations have concentrated their resources on particular problems over long periods. Others have used small grants to large numbers of recipients to nurture a variety of ideas out of which a few truly important educational developments might grow. From both of these approaches, characterized by Cremin as the rifle and the shotgun, there have been successes and failures.

Foundation activity should also be viewed in the context of the range of available strategic choices. Should money be used for basic research, for demonstration projects, or for meliorating larger social and political problems that relate to education and the milieu of the school? Should the focus of intervention be in the home or the school? At what level in the education system—pre-school, elementary, or secondary—should resources be committed? Is there greater value in investing in people, through teacher education and in-service training and incentive programs, or in physical plant and resources? Is money best spent on educational technology or in developing basic materials not dependent upon sophisticated equipment? These questions suggest some of the choices foundations must make as they confront program options.

Choice should be guided by experience. Edward Meade, in his paper, discusses how systematic review by the Ford Foundation of its program in education led to its current concern with equity issues and its consequent commitment to reform in the American system of financing elementary and secondary education. In its approach to evaluating its program, however, the Ford Foundation may be the exception rather than the rule. Charles Willis is concerned about the costs of separate program evaluation. His organization, the Kettering Foundation, seeks to monitor its program continually as it develops, making incremental adjustments as necessary.

Kettering, unlike Ford, operates its own programs in-house, and this approach seems to serve it well. But foundations sometimes act without systematically considering the effect of their programs. This, at least, is the principal message of Sol Cohen's review of the Commonwealth Fund's sponsorship of the mental hygiene movement of the 1920's. Steven Schlossman's account of the parent education movement funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial during the same period suggests, too, that proponents of this currently popular approach might profit from a review and evaluation of the historical record.

When do foundation programs work? In commenting on several conference papers, Dale Mann, Professor of Educational Administration at Teachers College, identified the emergence of “a remarkable consensus about the most effective practices of school improvement.” There is a necessity to make the service delivery level—the teacher, the school building—paramount, and to make sure that the people at that level “own” the idea for a change to work. They must view it to be in their own self-interest. Proposed changes must be “user-driven,” with local staff participating in decision making. There must be a “freedom to fail,” a spirit of trial-and-error, and in the end, a good deal of patience and persistence.

Even with the massive involvement of the federal government, it was the consensus of the Rockefeller Archive Center conferees that a major role remained for foundations in the area of public education. During the afternoon round-table discussion, William Dietel argued for an increased future role for smaller, community-based foundations. Peter Relic stressed needs in school governance. Gordon Ambach agreed and suggested, in addition, a substantial agenda that included in-service training for teachers, equity issues in state educational administration, alternative uses for educational facilities, bilingual education, and education in the arts. To this list of potential areas where foundations might induce innovation, Dale Mann added the need to study why some places are resistant to change and how unplanned change—the kind forced, for example, by the fiscal crisis in New York City, or Proposition 13 in California—affects education processes at the local level.

The conference on “Private Philanthropy and Public Elementary and Secondary Education” was one of a series regularly sponsored by the Rockefeller Archive Center on subjects germane to its holdings. Thanks are due Dr. Joseph W. Ernst, Director of the Archive Center, for the center's support of this conference and the publication of these papers. I also appreciate the assistance of Helise Benjamin, Ernest Elliott and Madeleine Tierney, a member of the Archive Center staff, in the organization and implementation of the project. The papers presented here were prepared especially for this conference, although some may be parts of larger projects that the authors have in progress. The round-table discussion was taped and is presented here with minimal editing to preserve the informality of the exchange. All panelists and conferees, acknowledged elsewhere in these proceedings, contributed to making the day a useful and informative one.

REFERENCES

1.

The Foundation Center, The Foundation Directory (New York: The Center, 1978), p. xxiii.

2.

The Carnegie Corporation, List of Grants 1978 (New York: The Corporation, 1979), p. 23.

3.

William C. French, “Local Control Under Attack,” in Government in the Classroom: Dollars and Power in Education, ed. Mary Frase Williams (New York: The Academy of Political Science, 1978), p. 9.

FOUNDATIONS AND PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ROBERT J. HAVIGHURST

Professor of Education and Human Development
University of Chicago

From the inception of the first modern foundations at the turn of the twentieth century, education has been a principal field of activity. This was natural, for in the eyes of such men as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and those who advised them on philanthropic matters, the foundation was to be a means of attack on the root causes of social problems. The objective was to prevent or at least to reduce the problem and thus to permanently improve the human condition. Thus, before his death, Carnegie supported the Carnegie Institute of Technology, built 2,509 public libraries in communities across the country, and established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education. In a similar fashion, Rockefeller, in his lifetime, supported the University of Chicago, created the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and established the General Education Board.

Despite the vast growth in the numbers of foundations over this century, education continues to be the principal field of foundation activity because it is viewed as an instrument for directly promoting, human well-being. Although complete statistics are not available, and categories are not entirely comparable, it is interesting to note that in such disparate decades as the 1920's and the period between 1962 and 1973, education was the principal area for foundation giving (Tables 1 and 2). According to E. C. Lindemann, during the earlier era education was the object of 43.3 per cent of all grants, and while this was reduced to 32 per cent in the later years, the category remained twice as important as any other in the priorities of foundation directors and staff.

Foundation emphasis on education, however, has not necessarily been focussed on elementary and secondary education. A review of the efforts in the area of education of nine major foundations, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation of Chicago and published in 1976, demonstrated that, over time, they have spent an average of eight dollars on projects in higher education for every dollar spent on elementary and secondary institutions and programs (Table 3). And, of course, much support of pre-collegiate efforts has gone to private, not public institutions.

Although interest in education has been constant, foundation-supported activities are related to changing social conditions and changing needs. Priorities are affected as well by the increased involvement of the Federal government in education during the last two decades.

AIDING THE BACKWARD SOUTH: 1900–1940

Although the South is not now especially backward in technology or low in material standard of living, it was clearly the problem area of the country in 1900. Consequently, it would be expected that foundations would turn much of their attention to the South, aiming to help raise the material standard of living, through education, health service, and improved agricultural and industrial technology. The General Education Board (GEB), with Rockefeller support, made this a major goal for the first three decades of the century.

TABLE 1. CATEGORIES OF FOUNDATION GRANTS, 1921–1930 (dollars in thousands)*

*Corrected to constant (1967) dollars.

Source: E. C. Lindemann, Wealth and Culture. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).

Of the $161.7 million in Rockefeller Foundation grants for the South, $107 million were given before 1940. Since 1930, the relative proportions of foundation funds going into the South were decreased, although it still probably receives more aid per capita than any other region of the country.

The men who created the GEB had become interested and concerned about the low state of education in the South. The southern states were poor, compared with the northern states. C. Vann Woodward, a historian of the South, wrote that public schools in the South at the beginning of the century were “miserably supported, poorly attended, wretchedly taught, and wholly inadequate for the education of the people.”[1] Charles W. Dabney, president of the University of Tennessee, summarized the situation in 1901 in these words: “In the Southern states, in school houses costing an average of $276 each, under teachers receiving the average salary of $25 a month, we are giving the children in actual attendance 5 cents worth of education a day for eighty-seven days only in the year.”[2] There were a few poorly supported private schools and academies, financially shaky and generally poor in quality of education.

The condition of Negro schools was much worse, with salaries only a fraction of what was paid to white teachers. Booker T. Washington once wrote that he had seen a Negro teacher's contract that stipulated a monthly wage of $1.60. The GEB made no attempt to overcome the traditions or the laws of the Southern states which decreed separate schools for whites and blacks. Even then, some Southern leaders complained that the GEB was spoiling the Negroes with education.

Wallace Buttrick, president of the GEB from 1903 to 1923, set the example which staff members were to follow in the South for the next 40 years. He traveled all over the South, arranging for grants to individual counties and schools and to state departments of education. He quickly focussed attention on the need for public-supported high schools, which were almost non-existent at the time. He saw that teachers for elementary schools would have to come from high schools with supplemental training. And high school teachers would have to come from normal schools and colleges. Thus the GEB was bound to become involved in efforts to improve education at all levels. Buttrick and the presidents of several Southern state universities invented the position of a professor for secondary education, whose job it was to train high school teachers and to promote the establishment of public high schools. The job of “selling” the idea of state-and county-supported high schools was not an easy one. It was not until 1912 that as many as a dozen state legislatures in the South had passed laws providing for public-supported high schools. The GEB continued to pay the salaries of professors of secondary education in Southern universities until 1919. Its appropriations for secondary education in the South amounted to $950,000 by 1925.

TABLE 2. CATEGORIES OF U.S. FOUNDATION GIVING: 1962–73 (dollars in millions)*

*Corrected to constant (1967) dollars.

Source: Foundation Grants Index. (New York: Foundation Center, January, 1968—January, 1974).

Similar activity for Negro elementary and high schools was generated through the training of Negro teachers, and through the Board's payment of salaries for “State Agents for Negro Schools” in the state departments of education. The Southern states were reluctant to put money into schools for Negroes—especially high schools. In 1920, 85 percent of the Black school children in the Southern states were in the first four grades of the elementary schools. The state agents for Negro schools at first were Whites who knew the political situation and worked as skillfully as they knew how to expand high schools and teacher training for Black pupils and Black teachers. The GEB continued to support this kind of work until 1940.

EDUCATIONAL SURVEYS AND EVALUATIONS

Abraham Flexner joined the staff of the GEB in 1913 as assistant secretary at the age of 47. Before making the medical school survey, he had been a high school teacher of the classics and the director of a private preparatory school in Louisville, Kentucky. Although he worked in the medical education program of the GEB, he also maintained his interest in secondary and elementary education, and soon found an outlet for his energy in the making of school surveys with recommendations for improvement. The first opportunity came in 1914, when the Maryland legislature appropriated $5,000 for a commission to study the public educational system of the state. Members of the Maryland commission, being laymen, asked the Carnegie Foundation for technical assistance. When this was declined, they approached the GEB. Flexner urged the trustees to approve his participation in this project, which they did by voting an additional $8,700 to support the Maryland fund. Flexner chose Frank P. Bachman, a public school administrator who had studied the New York City school system, to work with him. Thus was created the survey team of Flexner and Bachman, which accepted other invitations and eventually made a number of evaluative studies of school systems in Delaware, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina, and a number of other Southern states. Bachman was Director for School Surveys and Public Education, from 1922 to 1928. By 1928, it seemed wise to the trustees to turn this role over to a university, and the George Peabody College at Nashville was given $800,000 to support a Division of Surveys and Field Services. Bachman joined the Peabody faculty to carry on this work.

TABLE 3. FOUNDATION EDUCATION GRANTS, BY LEVEL SERVED (dollars in millions)*

* Corrected to constant (1967) dollars.

EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTATION AND INNOVATION

From its beginning, the drive of the GEB and later the Rockefeller Foundation was toward innovation and experimentation. Teaching better farming methods in rural schools of the South; promotion of public high schools in the South; providing schools for Negroes in the South; providing full-time faculty members for medical schools; all of these were radical ideas at the time they were proposed by and supported with Rockefeller money.

A noteworthy case, which attracted attention and opposition, was the establishment of the Lincoln School at Teachers College, Columbia University. This came about through the actions of Abraham Flexner, secretary of the Board, and of Charles W. Eliot, ex-president of Harvard University and a trustee of the GEB. Flexner, although originally a teacher of Latin and Greek, had little regard for the then commonly held view that the mind could be made to grow, like a muscle, on exercises in the classical languages and mathematics. Eliot had similar views to those of Flexner and wrote a pamphlet for his fellow trustees in 1915, when they were discussing the quality of American high school education. Eliot said that American high schools restricted their curriculum to “memory studies…English, Latin, American history and mathematics, with a dash of economics and civics.” They gave “no real acquaintance with the sciences and the arts which within a hundred years have revolutionized all the industries of the white race….”[3] Flexner, in 1916, wrote a monograph entitled The Modern School, which outlined his ideas for a new kind of secondary school. The trustees authorized the officers of the GEB to work out arrangements with an appropriate institution for the development of such a school. In 1917, this was done with Teachers College, Columbia University. The GEB bought a site near Columbia University and paid for a building. Eventually, a total of $6 million was provided for the Lincoln School, including $3 million of endowment. The public announcement of the school was made by the GEB, an unusual procedure. The news release stated that the Lincoln School would “frankly discard the theory of education known as ‘formal discipline; and will undertake to secure training through the thorough and careful study of subjects which are in themselves valuable.” The educational establishment reacted negatively. Several Ivy League college presidents wrote letters of protest to the president of the GEB, as did teachers of Latin from all over the country. Even the New York Times editorialized that the project was an attempt to overturn the existing school system.

However, the Lincoln School attracted wide and favorable attention. More than a thousand educators visited the school in the year 1923-24. Graduates were welcomed in the selective colleges, some of which agreed to admit students though they had not studied Latin. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. sent four of his five sons to the school. Courses of study which later became standard for most high schools in the country were developed in the Lincoln School—especially in the social studies. Years later, after the Lincoln School had been discontinued, along with laboratory schools of several other university schools of education, Professor Lawrence Cremin, historian of the progressive education movement, wrote, “The Lincoln School was the most influential private school in the progressive movement; in fact it may well have been the most influential single school in the United States between 1900 and 1940.”[4]

EDUCATION OF ADOLESCENTS

Another initiative in the field of education was taken by the GEB, during the depression decade of the 1930's. By 1932, it was clear that the youth of the land were major victims of the unemployment and the general malaise of the Depression. Furthermore, since so few youths could find jobs, it was evident that the school system would have to find ways of interesting and holding a large group from working class youth who in previous years had gone to work at 15 or 16. At the same time, the progressive movement in education was flourishing, and the colleges were interested in reform of general liberal education. The senior officers of the GEB decided to make a survey of innovative practices and ideas at the senior high school and liberal arts college levels. They employed several young educators to visit colleges and secondary schools and to write reports with recommendations for action. By 1933, the trustees approved a program of support for experiments and innovation in the education of adolescents which might accommodate the great bulk of the youth population up to the age of 18 or 19, something unheard of in the United States or in any other country. The sum of $10 million was allocated for a 5- to 10-year program, which was to be carried on through national educational agencies which by that time were alert to the growing crisis for youth.

The program in General Education, as it was called, operated from 1933 through 1941, eventually appropriating almost $9 million. The major educational organizations which received grants under this program were: The American Council on Education, which created the American Youth Commission and the Commission on Teacher Education, for which $2.3 million was granted; the National Education Association and the American Association of School Administrators which created the Educational Policies Commission, a major deliberative and policy-recommending body which received $350,000 for its support; and the Progressive Education Association, which conducted the celebrated Eight-Year Study in which 30 experimental secondary schools were set free to work on new curricula independent of the long standing requirements of the College Entrance Examination Board. The Progressive Education Association also conducted a Study of Adolescents, and its report profoundly influenced educational theory. The director of the study, Dr. Caroline Zachry, was fortunate to get the assistance of several young refugees from Nazism in Austria and Germany, who have since made a major contribution to American scholarship and education. Among them were Erik H. Erikson, Peter Blos, and Fritz Redl.

Since the graduates of the 30 schools in the Eight-Year Study were to be admitted to college upon recommendation of the schools, rather than through college entrance examinations, it was desirable for the experimental schools to work out new methods of evaluating their students and studying their progress in college. For this a grant was made to support an evaluation staff, headed by Professor Ralph W. Tyler, then at Ohio State University. Tyler developed a model evaluation procedure which started a new style of educational evaluation that was widely influential over the next two decades. All told, the Progressive Education Association received $1.6 million for its work through this decade.

THE POSTWAR ERA

After World War II, generally conservative social trends were seen in the field of secondary and higher education. With a rapidly growing youth population, and increasing numbers completing secondary school and entering college, movements emerged to establish and maintain academic standards for high school and college programs. The major studies organized by James B. Conant and supported by the Carnegie Corporation had a far reaching effect, while the teacher training institutions were challenged by Conant's Study of Teacher Education to work out new and practical programs. The entry of the Ford Foundation into the educational field brought a great deal of added money to support experimentation and innovation, as well as some elements of controversy.

The coming of John F. Kennedy into the American presidency further stimulated a general resurgence of reform and innovation in many areas of life, with the emphasis on attacking poverty, race prejudice, and the notable disadvantages of some minority groups. Several of the foundations joined, although their appropriations were dwarfed by the monies provided by the Federal government. The Ford, Rockefeller, Danforth, and the Carnegie grants all were stepped up in this area during the 1960–1970 period.

A part of the War on Poverty, carried on by President Lyndon B. Johnson, was the explicit program to help Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians to secure their civil rights and to get more and better education. In the educational field this took the form of programs for equal opportunity and for compensatory education. Several foundations made strategic grants to support research, innovation, and training of minority personnel in the field of education.

TABLE 4. FOUNDATION GRANTS AT THE PRE-COLLEGIATE LEVEL, BY TIME PERIODS (dollars in thousands)*

*Corrected to constant (1967) dollars.

Note: Incomplete data on Mott (commenced with 1970) and on Carnegie (commenced with 1962).

RADICAL REFORM IN ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS: 1965–1974

The relatively conservative educational programs of the late 1950's gave way to a revival of the progressive education movement of the 1925-1940 period, with emphasis on “open classrooms,” “free schools,” and “alternative schools.” Mordant criticism of public schools became popular. Several foundations moved into this field with a degree of caution and generally through officially recognized educational organizations. The Federal government, through the Office of Economic Opportunity, instigated programs, such as the voucher scheme which would give parents a choice of schools for their children, with government financial support. At the same time, the Federal government placed more and more emphasis on participation of disadvantaged groups in decision making on local school matters. A broad movement for “decentralization” of administrative control and for “local community control” of the schools was fostered by certain foundations and by certain government agencies. What happened, in general, however, was that the foundations stood by the educational establishment, working to define and attack the problems which underlie poverty and low school achievement of disadvantaged groups.

During this period there was a major shift of foundation interest and support from higher education into the pre-collegiate level. Among nine foundations covered in a study sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, only two—Kellogg and Danforth—maintained a very high ratio of grants at the level of higher education to grants at the pre-collegiate level (Table 4).

The major example in the decade of the 1960's was the Ford Foundation's Comprehensive School Improvement Program (CSIP). The stated objective of the CSIP was to put to good use the innovative schemes that had been developed in previous years. Furthermore, it was not intended to encourage additional innovations or to expand further educational facilities but rather to orchestrate a series of activities across the educational horizon which hopefully would make school systems receptive to the changes which previous research and innovative development had deemed desirable. The Foundation reported that $30 million was granted for these purposes to some 25 school systems. In order to evaluate the impact of this spending, the Foundation commissioned an independent assessment by a Colorado educator, Dr. Paul Nachtigal. Professor Nachtigal's report was entitled A Foundation Goes to School.[5]

CSIP started from the assumption that it was necessary to reverse what was regarded as a decline in the quality of American education. It was felt that the new programs, instructional techniques, and curriculum developed in the 1950's represented in themselves a significant educational advance but had not been used effectively in reversing the downward trend in quality education. The educational practices promoted by the CSIP were 12 in number and included such things as team teaching, paraprofessionals, programmed instruction, and non-graded school programs. It was argued that what was needed was the joining together of such new practices as had been created in previous years to form a critical mass sufficient to overcome the inertia of traditional school systems and allow the introduction of the helpful but largely unimplemented projects of the past decade.

In order to obtain the necessary critical mass the Foundation sought to involve as many parts of any school system as possible, that is, all grade levels within a school and different types of schools in varied social settings. A few sites were sought where the likelihood was great that such innovations would be accepted and where sufficient sophistication could be found for their proper implementation, and where there was a high probability that financial resources to continue the programs would be forthcoming once the Foundation withdrew its support. The first awards were made to so-called “lighthouse” school systems which were thought capable of serving as guides to other community school systems. Early on in the CSIP the Foundation officers themselves saw that substantial demands were coming from the civil rights protest, placing in glaring relief the fact that little had been done to address the problem of inequality of educational opportunity. The “lighthouse” programs yielded ground to new types of “compensatory education” programs which were thought to provide approaches more readily transferable to the needs of disadvantaged children. This shift, early in the history of CSIP, refocussed attention from a general renaissance to an emphasis on the “disadvantaged.”

It is generally conceded that the main successes of the CSIP resided in its widespread or comprehensive influence on promoting change in professional teaching practice. The objective of the program to change traditional habits of teachers in school systems to what might be called a more broadly flexible system of group learning situations was unquestionably realized in many areas.

CULTURAL PLURALISM: 1966-1974

About 1966, there emerged a strong movement among Blacks for what some called separatism and others called pluralism. It was clear, by this time, that racial integration in the public schools of the big cities could not become a fact without a long drawn-out process of residential integration, upward mobility of Blacks, and cooperation of suburbs with central cities. Meanwhile, Blacks were becoming politically powerful in the major cities, and in certain Southern states.

Other minority groups, notably the Chicano and Puerto Rican groups and some American Indians, became more separatist or pluralist in their policies. This resulted in moves for minority-oriented college studies and for stress in the school curriculum on minority-group history and culture.

Finally, European ethnic groups became more self-conscious and put pressure on the educational system to work for pluralism rather than close integration of the many ethnic strains in the population.

The foundations with an interest in education have moved very uncertainly in this area, recognizing its importance, but not ready to adopt clearly defined policies. The general view of the major government-sponsored programs of compensatory education (Head Start, Upward Bound, and so forth) was pessimistic by the close of the 1960's. Several foundations supported careful analytic and experimental studies aimed at improving compensatory education. But others moved their attention to the earliest years of childhood as perhaps the crucial years for successful cognitive and emotional development. The Grant Foundation continued a long-term interest in this area. Ford entered as well, and the Carnegie Corporation in 1972 set up the Carnegie Council on Children to explore and develop foundation policy on the development of children “from conception to about age nine.”

COOPERATION OF FOUNDATIONS AND GOVERNMENT

In the mid-1960's it began to look as though the federal government might move into the field of support for educational innovation and experimentation with so much money that the private foundations would become less important in this area. It began to support centers for research and development in education at a number of universities, and with such large sums as to dwarf the average foundation grant for a research project. Furthermore, the federal government moved to support a number of regional educational laboratories that were nearly independent of universities. These policies encouraged the creation of corporations for research and development by entrepreneurs, frequently university professors or administrators who saw an opportunity to establish such agencies free both of university financial problems and of the internal bureaucracy characteristic of government agencies.

Government support of educational innovation now probably exceeds the funds provided by private educational foundations. The research budget of the U.S. Office of Education (USOE) in 1970 was $135 million; $281 million for education came from private foundations. However, it should be noted that a considerable portion of the foundation money was for general support or endowment of educational enterprises, while the research and development budget of the USOE was independent of funds appropriated by the government for basic support of public and private educational systems.

There were and are other sources of government funds for educational research and development. The Office of Naval Research at one time supported some useful research on education, and the Department of Defense has made grants of this sort. The National Institute of Mental Health and the Institute of Child Health and Human Development have supported educational research. Recently the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have entered this field. When their funds for educational research and development were added to those of the USOE, the total was approximately $225 million for 1970.

At present the federal government is paying about 70 percent of the cost of innovation, experimentation, and the training of people for this kind of work, according to my estimates, while the foundations are paying about 21 percent. School systems, colleges, and universities are paying 9 percent, either directly through research budgets or indirectly by supporting faculty members who devote a portion of their time to research and writing.

In this situation, some foundation officers made explicit moves to work out procedures for cooperation between government agencies and private foundations. In 1965, the executive director of the Danforth Foundation, Merrimon Cuninggim, suggested to Francis Keppel, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, that he call a meeting of government and foundation officials. Said Cuninggim about his own foundation, “The foundation has decided not to abandon those interests that touch upon the areas of federal activities, but to adopt a policy of parallel action and, where feasible, collaboration.” His board of directors, in their meeting of January 5, 1966, voted to support him in those efforts. “Federal money, like foundation money, is automatically neither an ogre nor an angel,” stated Cuninggim, “and we must learn to live with it creatively.”[6]

Some foundation policies turned toward initial support of experimental ventures with the expectation that the federal government would come along with major support once the project had proved itself. This was noted by Fred Hechinger of the New York Times writing in Warren Weaver's U.S. Philanthropic Foundations. Said Hechinger, “With Washington's entry into education as the key priority in modern society,…the small-scale foundation experiment is more likely to turn rapidly into a federally financed national project.”[7]

To date, the growing concern of the federal government with education has drawn the government into cooperation with foundations which were already active in these fields. The foundations tend to innovate and take risks that government agencies are not ready to take. Public opinion tends to favor risk taking innovations by foundations, more so than it does risk taking by the federal government.

This collaboration between foundations and government seems to be developing on a trial-and-error basis, with foundations practicing a middle-of-the-road liberalism that is supported, or at least tolerated, by the majority of Congress. Meanwhile, the federal government is developing a number of government research foundations and institutes that may grow more and more like private foundations in their aims and procedures.

REFERENCES

1.

C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 398.

2.

Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 3.

3.

Ibid., pp. 213-214.

4.

Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 280 ff.

5.

Paul Nachtigal, A Foundation Goes to School (New York: The Ford Foundation, 1972).

6.

Danforth Foundation, Annual Report, 1965-66.

7.

Fred Hechinger, in U.S. Philanthropic Foundations: Their History, Structure, Management, and Record, ed. Warren Weaver (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 426.

OTHER REFERENCES

Orville G. Brim, Jr., “Do We Know What We Are Doing?”, in The Future of Foundations, ed. F. Heimann (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 216-258.

Merrimon Cuninggim, Private Money and Public Service: The Role of Foundations in American Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).

Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper & Row, 1952).

Robert Goldmann, Foundations and Evaluation: One Approach to Measuring Performance (New York: Ford Foundation, 1974).

Robert J. Havighurst, Donald B. Holsinger, and Erik S. Lunde, Education and Major Philanthropic Foundations. (Chicago: National Academy of Education, 1976).

Robert J. Havighurst and Flora M. Rhind, “The Program in General Education,” in The Annual Report of the General Education Board (New York: General Education Board, 1941), pp. 7-75.

Waldemar A. Neilsen, The Big Foundations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).

Jay Schulman, Carol Brown, and Roger Kahn, “Report on the Russell Sage Foundation,” The Insurgent Sociologist (1972) 2 (4): 2-33.

Warren Weaver, U.S. Philanthropic Foundations: Their History, Structure, Management, and Record (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

Paul Woodring, Investment in Innovation: An Historical Appraisal of the Fund for the Advancement of Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).

PHILANTHROPY AND THE GOSPEL OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT[*]

STEVEN L. SCHLOSSMAN

Research Associate
Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, Harvard University

Philanthropy in America has sparked numerous innovations in the fields of education, social work, and public health, but rarely has it been instrumental in generating and sustaining a popular social movement. In the post-World War I decade, however, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) did just that, subtly but aggressively nurturing and coordinating the long-since-forgotten parent education movement.[1] For hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans, principally young mothers, parent education provided not only a topic of everyday conversation and a structure for continuing education but also a genuine social cause.

Philanthropy alone did not create this crusade, of course. Many other factors were involved, some antedating the war, others originating in the twenties and reflecting their distinctive political and cultural spirit. Nonetheless, the modern field of child development owes its very existence as a respectable scholarly enterprise to LSRM's funding in the twenties of the “child study and parent education movement.”

In the 1920's much more than today, research on children was oriented unabashedly toward immediate practical application. To be sure, this generalization did not apply to every scholar, including some supported by LSRM. A number of “purists” downplayed, if they did not actually scorn, the search for immediate practical application of research findings. This was no way, they insisted, to build a true science of child development. Pandering to popular needs would jeopardize the long-range scientific legitimacy of research on children, and further alienate child psychologists from their parent discipline. Nonetheless, LSRM agreed to invest so heavily in this relatively uncharted scientific area only on the supposition that programs in parent education would be created concurrently to carry the latest findings to mothers for home use. Scholars in child development, in reflecting on their past, have naturally tended to recall most fondly LSRM's support of basic scientific research. But it must be emphasized that LSRM was in fact committed equally to research and to dissemination—to spreading what I call the “gospel of child development”—in easily accessible form to the lay public.

BURYING THE PAST

If one were to rely solely on the memories of participants in the parent education movement, one would scarcely know that child welfare had been a prominent concern in America since before the turn of the century. Postwar writers on children's needs, much like their more famous literary counterparts, tended to assume that the cataclysm of world war erased the historical record and created the world anew. All ideas were put forth as excitingly original. About the only legacy of the prewar period which the postwar generation readily acknowledged was the Children's Bureau, and even it never received more than grudging support. Ellen Key may have been prescient enough in 1909 to designate the twentieth century “the century of the child,” but according to postwar child advocates, it was up to them entirely to usher it in.

While it would require intolerable digression to explain why the postwar generation insisted on its unique historical role, one explanation is very much to the point: they wanted to disassociate themselves from potentially embarrassing precedents. The status of the parent education movement was heavily dependent on its purported foundation in scientifically controlled observations of children in laboratory and nursery school settings. It was consequently essential to distinguish this new research from an earlier tradition of amateurish noncontrolled research which dated back to the 1880's—a tradition closely identified with one of the nation's pioneering but, by the 1920's, largely discredited psychologists, Clark University President G. Stanley Hall. Equally important, it was essential to separate the postwar movement from a variety of earlier parent education programs, especially those associated with the National Congress of Mothers, which had claimed Hall as their principal scientific authority. In the eyes of the postwar generation, these precedents were embarrassing for their amateurism, their moralism, and their sentimentalism. (In the 1920's, it was complimentary to be described as “hardboiled.”)

Moreover, a fundamental theoretical cleavage separated the two generations. Hall's research had posited sharply differentiated stages of development which were governed largely by internal growth processes and which bore little organic relation to one another—the classic break being the onset of adolescent “storm and stress.” To postwar researchers, however—a viewpoint popularized most effectively by Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, which explicitly attacked Hall's theories—it was axiomatic that parents controlled the maturation process, that cultural rather than biological imprinting determined how much “storm and stress” children experienced as they passed through the various development stages.

Thus, it was not surprising that child advocates in the 1920's most often referred disparagingly to Hall, or. that they virtually ignored the existence of parent education programs in the prewar era. Nor was it surprising that LSRM never seriously considered Clark University as a potential center for child development research, despite its earlier pioneering role, or that it ignored the PTA (successor to the National Congress of Mothers) in its grants to parent organizations, creating thereby a rift in the parent education movement which the Spelman Fund tried to heal with a grant to the PTA in 1930. The leaders of parent education in the postwar decade felt they could generate more popular enthusiasm by advancing their ideas as something brand new under the sun. And, in the disillusioned, faddish, experimental culture that was the hallmark of the twenties, they were doubtless right.

LAWRENCE K. FRANK, LSRM, AND THE PARENT EDUCATION MOVEMENT

According to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Raymond B. Fosdick “had more to do than anyone else with planning and developing the work of the Foundation and its related organizations.”[2] How surprising, then, to find nothing in the relevant sections of Fosdick's The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation on LSRM's support for child development research and parent education programs, or even Lawrence K. Frank, chief administrator of these programs who, according to Margaret Mead, “more or less invented the behavioral sciences.”[3] Fosdick's omission points up how thoroughly the image of LSRM has been dominated by its remarkable chief, Beardsley Ruml, who delegated to Frank the bulk of responsibility for the Memorial's less prestigious programs for children and parents, while assuming more control himself over the flamboyant gambits in academic empire building for which he and LSRM are best remembered. Nonetheless, the parent education movement needs to be understood as integral to LSRM's overall plan to place all activities in social welfare on a firmer scientific foundation. Because Frank served as Ruml's main emissary and exerted enormous influence and control over parent education, his own background, ideas, and personality merit some attention.

Frank's early life and career were most unusual.[4] Born in Cincinnati in 1890 to upper-middle-class parents, his serene childhood world changed dramatically when, at age six, his parents permanently separated. Lawrence and his older brother moved in with their maternal grandmother and were forced to live at a radically reduced level of income. His mother began taking in boarders and, anticipating a better market for transients during an upcoming world's fair, moved the family to Buffalo when Lawrence was ten. Two years later she moved the family again to New York City, where she opened a boarding house in Greenwich Village. Living rather independently, Lawrence explored the city avidly on his own, read widely, and was a good enough student at DeWitt Clinton High School to qualify for Columbia College, which he entered in 1908. Though he had to work during his college days, his father, whom he had seen but rarely since leaving Cincinnati, agreed to pay the bulk of his educational expenses.

Frank was not an outstanding student—he received only one A grade, and this admittedly was a gift—but he used his educational opportunities wisely. He continued his wide reading, acquired a practical vocational skill in the new field of statistical economics, and served, during his last two years, as both volunteer and paid participant in municipal investigations (several of which were sponsored by Frances Perkins) on mortality, occupational diseases, sanitary conditions, and child labor in factories. After graduation Frank returned to Greenwich Village and kept up close contact with Perkins, who became for him a model of the new professional woman whom he would eventually be in a strategic position to assist financially.

Frank's first and only non-war-related job between 1913 and 1920 was with the New York Telephone Company. As a supervisor of methods, he developed new budgetary procedures to increase efficiency and make long-range planning possible. His work, though not especially challenging, deepened his commitment to empirical economics, facilitated personal contact with a number of famous economists, and served as a springboard for his first solo ventures into print. Frank's first publication, a letter to The Economic World in 1915 (which was printed as an article), argued the need to incorporate the latest statistical innovations in administrative accounting into governmental budgets so as to enhance efficiency, accountability, and public understanding—the classic reformist goals of prewar America, cast in the dry language of financial management.[5] Over the next several years Frank expanded his commentaries on accounting procedures and gradually expanded his theoretical expertise to include a variety of monetary issues. At the same time, demonstrating the first payoffs of a life-long habit of eclectic reading, he began appearing in print as a social and political commentator at large, starting in 1916 with a legalistic evaluation of how the police power could be interpreted to accommodate social legislation, and culminating in 1919 with articles in The Dial and New Republic on the causes of conflict between labor and capital and likely patterns of economic evolution.[6]

Frank married in 1917 and he and his wife had their first child during the war. While on the staff of the War Industries Board, he became very close to the brilliant economist Wesley C. Mitchell. In 1916, Mitchell's wife, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, had founded the Bureau of Educational Experiments (later the Bank Street College of Education), which included America's first laboratory nursery school. Throughout Frank's career his intellectual concerns shifted in rather obvious ways to incorporate new personal experiences and friendships. The experience of being a father and his close acquaintance with the Mitchells turned him systematically for the first time to educational issues. Probably reflecting Lucy's influence, he became a champion of nursery schools and “progressive” educational ideas generally. Frank's commitment to the field of education grew stronger in 1920 when Wesley, a founder of the New School for Social Research, asked him to become the School's business manager. During the same year Frank and his wife decided to send their child to Lucy's nursery school.

Frank remained at the New School for a little over two years, during which time he published a couple of popular articles on educational theory and practice. His initial piece on education appeared in the avant-garde periodical The Freeman, whose board of editors included such iconoclasts as Van Wyck Brooks and the anarchist Albert Jay Nock.[7] In earlier writing Frank had displayed a talent for altering his style and jargon to suit the occasion, and in The Freeman he sounded decidedly Menckenesque. A recent flap ovér public school history books was the ostensible reason for the piece. New York educators, responding to the impact of the “new history” on recent texts, charged them with subversiveness and asserted that the main purpose of history instruction was to teach patriotic respect for our national past. The controversy appealed to Frank, as it highlighted a more general tendency of public schools to teach conformity to socially approved ideas and behavior rather than “intelligence.” He therefore used it to advance a wholesale attack on American education.

Drawing in tone and substance from both Veblen and Dewey (with whom he had studied at Columbia), Frank equated “intelligence” with the scientific method, “the discovery of the causal sequences in things,” whereas public schools were concerned only “with inculcating ‘correct’ opinions and ideas.” He went on: “As a group we are fearful of intelligent behavior, as well we may be, for the bulk of our social institutions can not survive the test of intelligence.” What did Frank propose to rectify the situation? Nothing at all, he answered irreverently—at least at present—for such was the horrid nature of our school system that it could aim for nothing higher than conformity to the “group mind.”

Despite its negative and polemical character, Frank's initial foray into the educational field did in fact lay a groundwork for the future. Clearly, he was thinking in grand fashion about inherent limitations in the American school system, and of the need for fundamental rethinking of educational goals, methods, and agencies. Implicit throughout the article was the need to create new educational mechanisms imbued with the spirit of “intelligence” to circumvent the ingrained failures of the public schools.

Frank's second popular piece on education, which appeared in the sober pages of School and Society, was more positive in tone, conservative in style, and reformist in goal.[8] As previously, he condemned schools and colleges as “bulwarks of our institutions, the deliberate instruments for a social coercion of intelligence.” Now, however, he backed away from his previous extremist critique of public education and, following Dewey, argued the “necessity for divorcing the schools from this institutional safe-keeping.…The world has need of intelligence far beyond the possibilities of its occurrence, and we must insist upon the schools' undertaking the work of emancipating whatever intelligence exists.” In a sweeping Jamesian metaphor he proposed an “educational ‘equivalent of war’” to liberate individuals from the “mythical assumptions and conceptions of the past” and instill devotion to “science as the method of intelligence.” “Causality will operate in any case,” he concluded, “and intelligence will see to it that, as far as possible, the causalities that operate are the causalities of its choice. Only then can there be a technique for generating a chosen future out of a given present.”

In short, Frank held out a vision of a better world and how to create it. A revitalized school system would play its part, but Frank's ideas on the ultimate purpose of education far transcended anything that school reform alone could achieve. “The most formidable obstacle to the inauguration of such an educational procedure is the almost universal desire to guard the young against a knowledge of their elders' ineptitude,” he observed. Within a year Frank would conclude that truly radical change in education required that the elders themselves, as well as the young, acknowledge their own ineptitude and seek to overcome it by acquiring “the habit of intelligent behavior.” The parent education movement was already latent in his thought.

THE COMMITTEE ON CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND UNIVERSITY BASED RESEARCH

In the spring of 1923, half a year after taking over the reins at LSRM, Beardsley Ruml, responding to a request by his trustees, asked Frank to suggest how they might spend approximately a million dollars a year for the benefit of children, previously the sole beneficiaries of the Memorial. The trustees were apparently unhappy with results from the current policy of lump-sum grants to the general budgets of such organizations as the Scouts and the Boys' and Girls' Clubs. Frank responded with a basic outline of what became the parent education movement: a program of child study for mothers gathered in small groups and based on scientific research in child development, to be implemented by sponsorship of university-based research centers, fellowships for training scientists and practitioners, and parent organizations to supervise mothers on the local level. Frank's proposal was most astute, for it both retained and updated the Memorial's original mandate. Ruml gave Frank the go-ahead to develop the idea on his own and the assurance that he would support Frank before the trustees.

Frank's comprehensive plan reflected his principal intellectual strength as an integrator or, as he preferred, an “orchestrator” of unfocussed, half-formed ideas of others into fully formed and focussed programs of inquiry and action. Having committed himself to science as the key to social progress, to radical educational innovation as the key to liberating “intelligence,” and to the early childhood years as the key to molding healthy personalities, he was able to envision a social movement which, starting at rock bottom with child rearing practices in the home, would radiate outward and eventually transform all social institutions. Frank's contribution to postwar educational theory and practice merits comparison with John Dewey's and, indeed, was complementary to it. As Dewey was the apostle of the “progressive” school, Frank became the apostle of the “progressive” home.

The paucity of precedents circa 1923 accentuates the creativity behind Frank's vision. Aside from a number of scattered clinics dealing with abnormal and delinquent children, the principal research models were the skeletal, poorly funded group of scholars at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, Lucy Mitchell's shoe-string operation at the Bureau of Educational Experiments, the Merrill-Palmer School (which was just beginning to do research), and the occasional studies of young children under the supervision of kindergarten pioneer Patty Smith Hill at Teachers College, Columbia University. Frank's principal model for organized child study by mothers was the Federation for Child Study, a small, exclusive group of women formerly affiliated with the New York Ethical Culture Society, who sponsored occasional lectures, prepared bibliographies, and conducted regular meetings to provide guidance and a forum for discussing child rearing problems. With these few precedents at hand, Frank saw the basic elements of a comprehensive educational innovation. Except for the addition of a popular child-rearing journal, his vision of the parent education movement was essentially complete in his initial proposal to Ruml. What remained was to convince others of his cause, and with Rockefeller monies as inducement, that would presumably present few difficulties.

Frank proceeded slowly at first to make his vision reality. To overcome the scorn which most universities had traditionally shown toward research with children, LSRM agreed with his suggestion to fund a Committee on Child Development within the National Research Council, under the leadership of Columbia's prestigious psychologist, Robert S. Woodworth. The organizational arrangement followed Ruml's general approach to the social sciences: the designation of a permanent secretary to facilitate regular contact among participants, conferences to encourage communication and exchange of ideas in a pleasant setting, and fellowships to attract graduate students and build up a national network of specialized scholars. The conferences attracted leading figures from a variety of disciplines. In addition to providing an impressive historical record of the state of the art, these meetings enhanced the status of children's studies in the scholarly world and raised the self-confidence of scholars pursuing them. An avid conference participant, Frank used them to advance his expertise, to display his formidable powers of “orchestration,” and to appraise firsthand past and potential recipients of Memorial grants.

The prestige and scholarly value of these meetings notwithstanding, the Committee on Child Development mainly provided gloss for the educational movement Frank was engineering behind the scenes. Ultimate success would depend, he felt, on vast expansion of experimental research on children, and careful monitoring of the quality of intellectual exchange in child study groups. Trying to advance concurrently on both fronts, he decided upon Teachers College and the Federation for Child Study—both in New York where he could keep close watch on them—as the initial instruments for his venture.

Although it is impossible to say precisely when the idea of doing systematic research on young children first took shape at Teachers College, Patty Smith Hill, a student of G. Stanley Hall, had broached the subject early in the 1910's and was responsible for bringing the young Arnold Gesell to interview at Teachers College as a prospective candidate to guide such studies. Gesell was not hired, however, and nothing concrete came from Hill's continuing efforts in this direction except a brief statement on the kinds of projects a “child welfare clinic” might undertake.

In addition, a link between LSRM and Teachers College had earlier been established through the Rockefellers' support of the world-famous “progressive” Lincoln School. Ruml, it appears, had approached Lincoln School principal Otis W. Caldwell regarding a project on home-school cooperation involving the School's parents' association. But this possibility was quietly abandoned after Frank formulated his program and decided that Teachers College's main value to the parent education movement was in calling nationwide attention to the value of scientific research on young children.

LSRM's first grant to Teachers College, a small one to test the prospective relationship, was $10,000 for research on children of preschool age. This money supported several individuals and projects, one in particular which cemented the ties between the College and LSRM. Under the prodding of Edward L. Thorndike, Dean James E. Russell persuaded John B. Watson, then retired from academia and working in a New York advertising firm, to supervise a study of children to be conducted by a Columbia graduate student in psychology, Mary Cover Jones. Jones's study of fear conditioning and reconditioning, of course, became one of the most famous in the history of psychology, and Frank, who in those days was much more sympathetic to behavioristic learning theory than he would later become, recognized creative work when he saw it. Early in 1924 he made Russell a spectactular offer: LSRM would entertain a proposal from Teachers College to fund a research center on young children for five years, with a strong possibility of renewal. At first Russell was not too enthusiastic, but his faculty helped change his mind. Thorndike prepared a memo on the many important, unresolved issues in psychology to which the center could contribute, and Russell followed soon after with a full proposal accentuating the importance of the preschool age: “We realize that education begins far back of the school, and that the school at best is conditioned by influences beyond its control.”[9]

And so, mainly through Frank's initiative, the nation's first well-funded, university-based, research center on children—the Institute of Child Welfare Research—opened late in 1924. Otis Caldwell was the initial director, but it was understood that the Institute would seek a replacement whose research credentials matched LSRM's grand aspirations for it. This they did in 1925, persuading the nation's foremost woman psychologist, Helen Thompson Woolley of the Merrill-Palmer School, to take the position.

As it turned out, the Institute's administrative history was tumultuous, and it never quite realized its intellectual promise. Nonetheless, the Institute served Frank's purposes well: having persuaded the nation's leading school of education to sponsor child development research, and the leading woman psychologist to supervise it, other universities in which Frank was interested were more easily persuaded to cooperate. Thus, in short order, LSRM placed Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station on equal financial footing with Teachers College's, and during the next few years other institutes followed at Berkeley, Toronto, and Minnesota. As Frank had feared, prissy academicians at these universities sometimes resisted his initiatives, as somehow not worthy of serious intellectual effort. The founding of the research center at Minnesota was delayed, for example, partly due to an attack on the intellectual value of research on children and partly because the reigning academic departments wanted the Foundation money for themselves. And at Berkeley, the president and vice-president were at first cold to Frank's offer—until he went down to Stanford and began negotiations there, whereupon Berkeley warmed to the idea rather quickly. All in all, though, only Harvard dared turn down so sizable an investment in facilities and personnel (each center received $100,000 per year). Like Ruml, Frank successfully used large financial inducements to direct social scientific research in directions he considered “progressive.”

While research was the main goal of the child development institutes, each was initially to serve also as a training ground for a new profession of women parent educators. LSRM provided one-year and two-year fellowships to advance this goal, selecting experienced women in such fields as home economics, dietetics, nursing, social work, and teaching for additional study, with the expectation that they would form an elite corps of expert practitioners for whom there would be great demand by state and local governments and private educational organizations as the parent education movement spread nationwide. In fact, LSRM-sponsored students assumed positions of leadership in parent education programs throughout the country. Indeed, it was frequently lamented that the supply of trained parent educators—that is, those with firsthand experience at the research institutes—could not keep up with the demand.

At LSRM, Frank took close interest in the fellowship program, for it embodied his commitment to popularization of scientific knowledge as the key to social betterment. Somehow, he found time to communicate personally with applicants and with current and former fellows, to guide their choice of institutions at which to study and summer placements from which to choose, and to assist in finding the most advantageous channels for their vocational ambitions. While scholars in child development remember LSRM's fellowship program mainly for the famous researchers who benefited from it, to Frank the sponsorship of expert practitioners seemed as central to the immediate success of the parent education movement. For they, more than the researchers, were principally responsible for building local support and providing living proof of the value of science in child rearing. They were Frank's advance guard.

THE FEDERATION FOR CHILD STUDY

If Frank expected the institutes to help extend the gospel of child development to America's heartland, he was equally concerned to build the movement from the bottom up; that is, to instill in mothers the desire and capacity to apply scientific ideas wisely. Dissemination of information, however valuable, was not enough. To employ new knowledge to their children's best advantage and as a spur to their own continuing education, mothers had to approach the fruits of research “intelligently,” in the spirit of the scientific investigators themselves. Soon Frank began to fear for the very success of the parent education movement, as mothers throughout the nation showed a dangerous tendency to seek scientific advice on child rearing as if it were a religious lifeline to save their children from the damnation of emotional “maladjustment.” Would parent education become just another fad which, at the beginning, generated superabundant enthusiasm but disappeared quickly because its leaders were unable to prevent its vulgarization?

To forestall this possibility—or, in a more positive vein, to help parent education realize its full potential as a vehicle for revolutionizing American institutions—Frank proposed three major programs which significantly broadened the boundaries of traditional philanthropic involvement in educational innovation. First, as previously noted, he proposed to make a small but unusually sophisticated group of New York women (the Federation for Child Study) the exemplars for organized child study; second, he attempted to encourage women's colleges and women college graduates to incorporate child development into their definition of liberal education, and thereby to gain the prestige of their example for the movement as a whole; and third, he helped persuade LSRM to fund a popular magazine for parents to preempt the possibility of a more commercial venture. Each endeavor met with varying degrees of success, but each attested to the grand scale on which Frank had conceived the movement, and to the flexibility of LSRM in inventing new methods to achieve its goals.

LSRM proceeded cautiously before deciding to rely heavily on the Federation for Child Study. In 1915 the Federation had severed its official tie to Felix Adler and the Ethical Culture Society, but its members, like the Society's, remained primarily of German-Jewish origin. At this time period a genteel anti-Semitism was commonplace among America's Protestant upper-crust, a fact that became glaringly evident in the 1920's with the establishment of Jewish quotas in the Ivy League colleges. Federation members were, in the main, anything but Jewish in their religious orientations and not a little scornful themselves of lower-class Russian Jews who compounded the difficulty of their own quest for cultural acceptance. But they were widely perceived, like it or not, as a Jewish organization, and this presented a potential problem for the success of Frank's philanthropic strategy.

In April of 1923, shortly after Frank made his initial proposal to Ruml, an LSRM representative interviewed the President of the Federation, Bird Stein Gans, and a number of prominent individuals who could comment on the value of its work.[10] The representative was much impressed by the organization's leadership and the seriousness of its members, noting a half-dozen features which distinguished it from any comparable woman's organization. “The only unfavorable elements,” he felt, were “a slightly unbusinesslike way of managing their finances and the fact that the Federation is so consistently Jewish. They have affiliations with churches and with public charity organizations which are nonsectarian but the Federation is in Jewish hands.”

Additional interviews confirmed the representative's own judgments. While Thorndike of Teachers College—not surprisingly, given his highly professional orientation—did not feel that the Federation's study group methods could be spread nationwide because they were an “outgrowth of the Chautauqua idea which has gone out of style,” even he “said unqualifiedly that they were the best of the amateurs in the matter of child training.” If LSRM were intent on developing this form of parent education, the Federation was “by far the ‘best bet.’” On the other hand, Thorndike confirmed the representative's fear that it would “be hard to get away from the Jewish element” because they were simply too efficient to be ousted.

The opinion of Courtney Dinwiddie, speaking for the American Child Health Association, was similarly both favorable and cautionary. Calling the Federation “the best organization of its sort in the country,” he saw good possibilities for its expansion but “only if the Jewish element is not too great. The connections of the Federation with non-Jewish organizations in New York is of value but he is afraid they will be offset by the Hebrew element in the study groups and the executive force.” In conclusion, the LSRM representative praised the Federation's sincerity and work, held out hopes for its expansion, but argued that “the Jewish element very seriously limits the possibility of extending the work under the present management.” He therefore recommended that it be “subordinat[ed] to some other organization.”

One may suspect that this report caused Frank some consternation. In any event, a month later LSRM dispatched another investigator to evaluate the Federation.[11] Like his predecessor, he was most impressed by the quality of the Federation's work: “Whether or not the Federation realizes the height of their ambition, it actually does start mothers thinking intelligently and systematically about their children…. [T]hat the Federation allows the individual chapters to conduct their work in their own way as far as possible is an important feature of their system.…It makes the whole organization very adaptable and increases the possibilities of its extension throughout the country.” But what of the Federation's Jewishness, which might subvert its role as exemplar? Here the second investigator found fewer impediments to LSRM support. If the Federation agreed to hire a non-Jewish field secretary to travel throughout the country forming new child study chapters, concentrating on existing women's clubs which were Protestant-dominated, the Jewish “problem” would take care of itself.

In June, 1923, shortly after the filing of this second evaluation, LSRM agreed to a small grant to help the Federation form chapters outside the New York area and to finance the publication of unique instructional materials it had assembled over the years. Eleven months later the Federation pointed proudly to its accomplishments: more than a dozen new chapters scattered as far west as Missouri and as far south as Virginia, plentiful correspondence with mothers' organizations throughout the country, and growing numbers of requests from mothers' groups for speakers on the science of child rearing. With LSRM's encouragement the Federation now submitted a more ambitious proposal for three years at $40,000 per year, which it received with several supplements. For the first time in its 36-year history, the Federation was able to hire a full-time staff, to issue a periodical (Child Study) of high quality for more sophisticated parents, to expand its extension work, and, by virtue of its support from the Foundation, to command respect and interest from behavioral scientists at home and abroad. LSRM literally re-created the Federation, and, appropriately, it changed its name to the Child Study Association of America (CSAA).

Over the next dozen years the Rockefellers increased their support of the CSAA substantially. LSRM never put much pressure on the CSAA to incorporate non-Jews into its leadership. A non-Jewish field secretary was indeed hired, as was recommended, but she spent most of her time working with Black mothers in Harlem rather than campaigning nationwide for non-Jewish affiliates. The CSAA took its mission as seriously as LSRM had expected, becoming a model of bold intellectual ecumenicism in the sciences of child development, an energetic and self-conscious elite in upholding standards of child study, and a practical guide to women's organizations interested in acquiring higher educational purpose. The CSAA's most important contribution to Frank's grand design, though, may well have come relatively early in the movement when in October, 1925 it helped organize—with a special grant from LSRM, of course—the first two formal meetings of scholars and practitioners of parent education. The first was a small, select, six-day conference in Bronxville, New York, which, as various participants later recalled, was crucial in building esprit de corps and self-conscious identity in a previously non-existent field. Of even greater impact was the three-day public conference at the Waldorf-Astoria which followed. Filled to overflowing by several thousand women from the New York area, the conference received tremendous publicity, resulted in a major publication (Concerning Parents), and all in all, put parent education on the nation's educational map.

Over the years Frank and the CSAA doubtless had some disagreements. By the early 1930's the organization decided not to expand further in order to maintain quality in affiliated child study chapters, and to concentrate once again on the New York area and leave active monitoring of nationwide activities to others. As a group, the CSAA never did feel comfortable in its popularizing and proselytizing roles, although its director, Sidonie Gruenberg, performed brilliantly in them. The CSAA considered itself an elite in parent education and intended to remain one. Nonetheless, Frank's generous support of the CSAA proved to be a remarkably shrewd philanthropic gamble. Virtually overnight it created one of the main sparkplugs of the parent education movement simply by liberating the latent energies and talents of a small, local, atypical organization to serve broader national goals. Rarely in the history of philanthropy, I suspect, has so much been bought for so little.

INVOLVING COLLEGE WOMEN

Central to Frank's design for the parent education movement was the allegiance of college women, both graduates and undergraduates. As he observed in an early policy memorandum, college women “occupy a more or less strategic position in the community” whose support would do much to raise the status of scientific child study by mothers.[12] Frank knew that while the CSAA's study groups could be expected to recruit some college women, the fact that their leadership was mainly Jewish, non-college educated, and New York-dominated would create a certain social distance between them and college women, especially graduates of the prestigious Seven Sister schools. Frank therefore pursued two strategies for using LSRM funds to entice college women into the movement. He sought to encourage women's colleges to adopt some form of pre-parental training for undergraduates, and urged the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which was dominated by graduates of the Seven Sisters, to sponsor its own study groups, parallel to but organizationally separate from those of the CSAA.

Of all Frank's efforts, his attempt to gain cooperation from the leading women's colleges was least successful. The tightly knit, predominantly liberal arts faculties of the Seven Sisters were understandably suspicious of curriculum changes proposed by outsiders, particularly those which threatened even vaguely to undermine their historic mission of providing women with the same education as men. But Frank—an avid “progressive” in educational theory and trained in one of the newer social sciences—viewed the traditional college curriculum as hopelessly backward and unrelated to current needs and opportunities. His ultimate goal was the thorough modernizing of the women's colleges with coursework in applied child development as the opening wedge. “Parent training in the colleges is particularly promising not only because of the character of the students,” Frank wrote, “but also because under this name and guise it should be possible to begin that long deferred process of revising the curriculum in women's colleges upon a more intelligent basis. Sooner or later this revision must be undertaken and its accomplishment must wait upon some method or device whereby the present rational, intellectualistic curriculum with its conceptual knowledge can be thrown into sharp contrast with the training in methods and techniques for meeting situations, which is the method of intelligence.”[13] Even in 1927, after ample experience had demonstrated the difficulties, Frank remained optimistic: “it seems clear that the establishment of a child study major in the women's colleges may be one of the major features in the parent education movement and that it will almost certainly come about either now or later.”[14]

Suffice it to say that child study in the women's colleges never did become a major component of the parent education movement: this was in part due to the general suspicions noted previously and to financial constraints, and in part, I suspect, to disappointment and/or confusion over the purposes of LSRM's initial venture in this area, the creation of the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests at Smith College in 1925. Although LSRM did later agree to support a more narrowly conceived but better focussed program in pre-parental education at Mills College, the Smith experience appeared to stifle general enthusiasm at the Foundation for involving the women's colleges in the movement, and Frank gradually, if reluctantly, gave up the fight.

Frank's defeat in the women's colleges was partially compensated for by his extraordinary success with the AAUW, which enthusiastically assumed a position of leadership in the parent education movement. By the early 1920's, quite independently, the AAUW was moving in directions consonant with LSRM's. During the previous decade, preliminary data seem to indicate that significantly larger percentages of graduates of women's colleges (the mainstay of AAUW) had begun to marry, marry earlier, bear children, and forsake careers. Women college graduates, it was widely observed, no longer seemed as self-consciously “different” in their family and work aspirations as did the earlier, pioneer generation of women in college. In addition, of those college women who pursued careers, growing numbers had entered fields such as child psychology, education, domestic science, and nursing, which assumed the legitimacy of intellectual endeavors focussed on child and family well-being. Thus, the AAUW was increasingly sensitive to and ready to serve the needs of married, home-bound women with a desire to make child-rearing intellectually stimulating.

To be sure, older elitist traditions of higher learning did not die overnight. When the psychologist Helen Thompson Woolley proclaimed the virtues of scientific study of the child before the annual AAUW convention of 1922, not a few of the classically-trained old guard felt betrayed. By the following year, however, her position found wide support, and the AAUW adopted an educational program encouraging individual branches to study scientific literature on preschool and elementary education. The AAUW, much more than the women's colleges, had evolved an education philosophy and a constituency in line with Frank's ideas on “progressive” education for women.

In October, 1923, AAUW President Aurelia Reinhardt came to speak to Frank about the possibility of obtaining LSRM funds to maintain the Association's recently expanded Washington office and to support its journal. While Frank saw nothing to commend the Association for such a grant, he noted the AAUW's developing interest in scientific child study and saw an opportunity to enlist it in his cause.[15] “The Association might be of particular service,” he observed, “because it can urge upon its members the desirability of child study, not merely because of the value of the study to the children, but also for the sake of providing an activity wherein college women can continue to study and learn. As Mrs. Reinhardt put it, women are prone to ‘return to the blanket,’ and after leaving college they frequently relinquish or lose all interest in further learning. A child study program, therefore, might, if properly presented, find a rapid and desirable growth among the members of this organization.”

Frank developed this possibility further over the next several months with Reinhardt and educational secretary Frances Fenton Bernard (who would soon become dean at Smith). Finally, the AAUW submitted a proposal for vast expansion of child study by its membership. Frank continued to emphasize “the strategic situation of this Association in the child study movement,” and held out the hope that they, along with the CSAA, would accept the special responsibility of training leaders for study groups throughout the nation.[16] One potential problem remained: the attitude of the AAUW's old guard to LSRM's involvement and to the project itself. To Frank's delight, however, opposition proved minimal. The AAUW's Committee on Educational Policies, which included Bryn Mawr's Martha Carey Thomas, the foremost advocate of equal education for men and women, “was entirely sympathetic with stressing the pre-school project and making it one of our major endeavors,” Woolley wrote to Frank afterwards. “Even Miss Thomas, who might, I thought, oppose it, was very cordial.…[F]urther child study is what impresses her as essential. The courses for the training of future parents do not appeal to her, largely, I think, because she is not convinced that we know enough to give them a real scientific content as yet. I did, however, find her, on the whole, very open-minded.”[17]

Shortly after LSRM's decision to fund the AAUW, Frank learned with considerable misgivings that Bernard had decided to leave for Smith. He wrote to make sure that the parent education plans would move forward, expressed concern over where they would find a replacement, and—uncharacteristically for Frank—had the temerity to ask that the AAUW “try to find a married woman with children, because every indication shows that she would be more effective in working with other mothers.”[18] In response, Bernard allayed Frank's fears, assuring him that consultations with Dr. Woolley regarding a replacement were already underway. But she said nothing regarding marital “qualifications” for her successor.

As it turned out, the AAUW chose a single woman for the position: Lois Hayden Meek, a former school teacher and a recent Teachers College Ph.D. in child psychology. Single or not, Meek proved remarkably effective at her work, devoting herself tirelessly to creating new instructional materials, giving speeches, writing popular promotional articles, and traveling the country several times over spreading the gospel. Meek's approach to parent education, as befit her own training and her special audience, was a good deal more bookish than the CSAA's. And if Frank had expected the AAUW and the CSAA to work together to serve a common cause, he was surely disappointed, for they had almost nothing to do with one another. Nonetheless, Frank could not reasonably have asked for more of a contribution from the AAUW. Until 1929, when Meek returned to Teachers College to assist Woolley in supervising the Institute, of Child Welfare Research, the parent education movement had a staunch ally in the AAUW, and Frank a partial victory in his effort to win college women to his cause.

PARENTS' MAGAZINE

By the summer of 1925 LSRM had disbursed well over a million dollars to foster the parent education movement. With the creation that fall of the National Council of Parent Education and the beginning of plans for a yearbook on preschool and parent education by the National Society for the Study of Education, the movement had become one of the most widely discussed and visible new forces on the educational scene. As yet, however, LSRM's most far reaching investment in parent education had not reached fruition.

The idea for what eventually became Parents' Magazine was George J. Hecht's. Hecht had attended the Ethical Culture School where he came under the spell of the famous ethics teacher John Lovejoy Elliott, who taught a secular imperative to “do something useful.” Hecht chose to attend Elliott's alma mater, Cornell, where he majored in economics. While in college, indications of Hecht's special genius surfaced early, as he competed for and won the position of business manager of the student magazine by securing more advertising for it than any other student publication in the country. Soon after graduation in 1917, Hecht entered the Army. There, in addition to other duties, he founded and supervised the Bureau of Cartoons, which in 1918 became part of George J. Creel's Committee on Public Information. Hecht initiated the idea of issuing weekly circulars to more than 750 of the nation's cartoonists listing patriotic themes which various government agencies wanted conveyed to build popular support for the war effort.

Upon returning to civilian life Hecht entered his father's lucrative hide-and-skin import business but, finding that it offered few outlets for his talents of salesmanship or his quest to do something useful, he began studying the city's charitable and social work agencies. As a result he founded in 1920 the periodical Better Times. In it he sought to increase communication and build esprit de corps among social workers and to encourage philanthropic gifts by supplying donors with concrete evidence of the good works which their contributions had made possible. By 1923 the periodical was secure enough for Hecht to hire an editorial staff and seek more ambitious avenues of service for himself. First, he founded and was secretary to the Welfare Council of New York City. Then, continuing his pursuit of the useful, he began attempting to drum up support among his well-to-do friends and acquaintances for a popular magazine to help parents rear children. At this point he decided to contact Ruml to see whether his venture might be integrated into the fledgling parent education movement and whether he could gain moral and financial support from the Rockefellers.

Discussions between Ruml and Hecht proceeded very slowly. Before contemplating LSRM involvement of any kind, Ruml asked Hecht to discuss his idea with individuals in a position to lend expert advice, including Sidonie Gruenberg of the CSAA and Marie M. Meloney, editor of the Delineator (then publishing more articles for parents than any other women's magazine). Both were enthusiastic about Hecht's proposal, although Meloney warned that he had vastly underestimated the financial backing necessary. Not $100 thousand but $5 million would probably be necessary to make it competitive, she advised.[19] Hecht dutifully reported the results of his meetings to Ruml and began soliciting contributions from such distinguished New York philanthropists as Robert W. deForest, Robert E. Simon, and Felix M. Warburg.

Frank was kept informed of these preliminary discussions and advised Ruml to maintain contact with Hecht in order to monitor the growth of his venture. The potential for distortion and commercialization of new scientific knowledge had long troubled Frank. In the spring of 1924, before discussions with Hecht had gone very far, he tried to anticipate the problem. Frank wrote:

As the number of women engaged in child study and in attending parent classes increases there will arise a host of potential readers for a periodical which will carry information, discussions, reports and the like, written for the lay reader. Inevitably this market will attract commercial capital which has already discovered the profitableness in women's magazines generally. The danger therefore of a meretricious or even vicious publication arising is very real. It can be averted by inaugurating a magazine for parents under the supervision and editorial direction of competent persons and established agencies in the field such as the Federation for Child Study and the Institute of Child Welfare Research at Teachers College. Such a publication would have to be subsidized for several years before it could be put on a self-supporting basis from subscriptions and carefully supervised advertising. The expenditure of funds for the promotion of such a magazine, however, could be carried out so as to give a real impetus to the parent training movement in the states.[20]

By June 1924, Ruml was ready to bring the matter to his trustees. At first he received no encouragement whatsoever. Fosdick (a trustee of LSRM before he became Rockefeller Foundation president) felt that “it would be almost impossible for either the Memorial or Mr. Rockefeller to get behind a publication of any kind.” Undeterred, Ruml appealed directly to LSRM Board President Arthur Woods. Hecht, Ruml argued, was given encouragement by many prominent educators and publishers, and had recently proposed publishing the magazine under the auspices of the PTA. “I thought that if you felt this might be an important thing to do, we might find some way of forwarding it,” he suggested most cautiously.[21]

Evidently Woods gave Ruml the go-ahead to continue discussions with Hecht. Ruml, though, continued to move deliberately, keeping Hecht largely in the dark while accumulating the opinions of others. LSRM secretary Willard S. Richardson, for example, offered a very positive appraisal of Hecht's idea, but raised some important questions.[22] Was it advisable, if Rockefeller funds were involved, to make the editor-in-chief responsible only to the publisher? Was the PTA the right organization to affiliate with, as its main concern was the school-age child, whereas the focus of new research was the preschool age? Perhaps, he suggested (as did Frank), the Federation for Child Study, assisted by selected faculty from Teachers College, ought to play the major supervisory role.

Finally Ruml—without making any specific commitment—advised Hecht that LSRM was genuinely interested in the success of his magazine, and asked him to plan several issues with which he could approach a commercial publishing house. The idea of working through the PTA was quietly abandoned; instead, LSRM planned to rely heavily on its New York beneficiaries, Teachers College and the CSAA, to guarantee scientific accuracy in content. This arrangement troubled Hecht somewhat, as he felt that he needed a freer hand to make the periodical commercially viable than academics were likely to approve. As Frank reported, Hecht was “rather apprehensive of the success of the publication if the conservative and academic attitude manifested by the Columbia people were to dominate the editorial policy.”[23] His reservations notwithstanding, Hecht proposed a meeting to make final plans with Ruml and Frank representing LSRM, Gans and Gruenberg representing the CSAA, and Russell and Caldwell representing Teachers College.

Though nearly two years would pass before the appearance of the first issue of Parents' Magazine (originally called Children, the Magazine for Parents), from this point onward Hecht was certain of LSRM's financial participation, whatever form it actually took. The eventual arrangement was extraordinarily complex and roundabout. It reflected LSRM's decision not to be publicly identified or officially connected with the periodical and to rely on its beneficiaries in the parent education movement to exercise quality control. First, Hecht had to gather $100,000 on his own to subsidize the publication. Then, LSRM offered to channel additional funds discreetly through Teachers College and later through Yale, Minnesota, and Iowa (due in part to Hecht's fears of a Teachers College monopoly) in order to create a separate business corporation in which the universities held a substantial majority of stock. The corporation agreed in advance to hire Hecht as president and publisher, to allow him considerable latitude in choosing an editor, and to appoint an advisory board of experts to write, solicit, and evaluate articles. In return for their participation, the universities were to receive corporate dividends for the purpose of advancing child development research.

In actuality, the universities' control of the magazine, while substantial on paper and exercised fairly effectively in the 1920's, diminished steadily thereafter. The corporate arrangement basically played into the hands of a brilliant publisher like Hecht, who knew that a good offense—booming circulation—was the best defense against academic conservativism. Periodically the universities threatened to resign from the enterprise and to forego possible dividends, but the magazine's brilliant success with the public (it soon became the largest selling educational periodical in the world) made it potentially embarrassing to do so.

Another complication was that while the universities technically owned the majority of stock, it was legally unclear whether they could sell it, or to whom, or how. LSRM had supplied the purchase money in the first place and its successors, the Spelman Fund and then the Rockefeller Foundation itself, refused to take back the stock, assume ownership, or intervene directly in the magazine's affairs. Furthermore, the universities had to proceed most cautiously with their threat to resign, lest they subvert the magazine's intellectual legitimacy and jeopardize future child development grants from the Rockefeller philanthropies. In short, the universities were boxed in, or at best, never adequately resolved basic dilemmas of control and editorial policy. It was several decades before they were able to extricate themselves from the arrangement and reap a financial reward for their participation—and this came only after Frank, who had long since left the Rockefeller Foundation, came to their aid and threatened to sue Hecht for reneging on the initial agreement.

Whether or not Parents' Magazine pleased its ostensible sponsors, the fact remained that LSRM's subsidization had made its existence (and the handsome fortune Hecht derived from it) possible. More than any other component of LSRM's program in parent education, the venture revealed the unconventional institutional arrangements it was willing to subsidize in order to spread the gospel of child development and foster a mass education movement.

CONCLUSION

This paper has attempted to highlight the role of a single philanthropy in a largely forgotten movement in American educational history and to offer brief glimpses of key actors in the process of making important policy decisions. Throughout I have kept evaluation to a minimum. In conclusion, however, I would like to suggest a number of interpretive issues surrounding LSRM's parent education program which require future elaboration and debate.

That the audience for scientific advice on child rearing increased enormously in the 1920's and that LSRM contributed substantially to its expansion, seem to me to be incontestable. But there is another dimension to the success or failure of any educational movement which I have intentionally slighted, a dimension evident in the issues explored by such diverse books as Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Daniel Calhoun's The Intelligence of a People, and Nancy Cott's The Bonds of Womanhood. The key question is how to account for the existence of an audience in the postwar decade so anxious to listen to, to reach out for, to put into practice the advice disseminated by the parent education movement. What made it possible for child psychology to become the basis of a major social movement in the 1920's?

Two conceptual models in general use by historians today—although diametrically opposed to one another—offer possible explanations. The first would find answers inherent in the phenomenon itself. That is, it would consider the presumed benefits available through parent education so obviously compelling and essential to children's well being, that the question seems senseless, to be answered, if at all, by a raised eyebrow rather than logical analysis. In contrast, the second model would find answers in the motives of the movement's sponsors and in its style of communication to the public. Indeed, the mere presence of Rockefeller millions in the parent education movement, from this point of view, makes it ripe for a conspiratorial interpretation, while the didactic nature of the 1920's advice literature to parents makes it vulnerable to charges of ideological imposition and manipulation. In my view, however, neither of these conceptual models offers nearly as much potential for enlightenment as a market model, which focuses on the preconditions of successful intellectual exchange and asks: why were middle-class women in the 1920's, the potential consumers of ideas, so eager to buy what Rockefeller-funded researchers, practitioners, and popularizers were producing and trying to sell?

A full explanation now would be out of place, but the general direction of my answer can be gleaned from my earlier comments on why the AAUW allied so enthusiastically with Frank and LSRM. The avid participation of educated, middle-class women in parent education, I believe, reflected their widespread malaise in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment: a feeling of lost purpose, of lost identification with causes beyond themselves. Child study groups became so popular in the postwar decade because they provided women with a new justification to leave the isolation of their households and a new forum through which to perpetuate the camaraderie which had infused the suffrage movement. In addition, the parent education movement embodied a common conceit that the woman's movement was now advancing to a new stage of maturity and potential appeal, offering educated women a challenging alternative to the traditional career/marriage dilemma by sanctioning full-time motherhood in the names of science and “progressive education.” Unlike their prewar sisters, it was argued, women need no longer deny themselves the emotional and sexual satisfactions of marriage, nor feel oppressed by domestic routines. Parent education promised to transform motherhood into an intellectual challenge as demanding as the boldest business adventures of men.

A convincing explanation of LSRM's contribution to the parent education movement, then, will have to take into account the evolving aspirations of its principal audience more than I have done in this essay. When this happens, I think we will conclude that the popularity of LSRM's program owed as much to the fact that it accurately gauged the manifest and latent needs of middle-class women in the postwar, post-suffrage era, as to the intrinsic scientific value of what it had to offer parents in helping them rear their children.

A second issue I want to raise concerns the view of science promulgated by LSRM and the parent education movement. In writing their own history, child developmentalists have emphasized how research in the 1920's contributed to the onward march of science, leading triumphantly to our current state of enlightenment. If there were limitations in early research and deficiencies in parent education programs, that is simply the method of science, the price that had to be paid. Luckily, LSRM was there to get the work started and help the field through hard times. While this interpretation of the past as a necessary stepping-stone to current wisdom may satisfy the child psychologist, it will not do at all for the historian, for it skirts issues which could shed considerable new light on the mind-sets of educational reformers and philanthropists in the postwar period.

One feature of that mind-set should already be evident: namely, the naive view of scientific progress implicit in the parent education movement and, indeed, in LSRM's entire funding program. This view, I believe, reflected a general tendency to invest science with the authority of religion as a means of coping with moral disillusionment following World War I. Lawrence Frank especially—at least in the 1920's, for his viewpoint grew more sophisticated later—exuded a boyish faith in social scientists as modern day oracles and in scientific method as containing within itself answers to all human problems. The social sciences, he felt, were all of a piece, though at different stages of development. Entranced early in his intellectual growth by the predictive possibilities of the new empirical economics, Frank in his thirties saw little difficulty in achieving comparable predictability in the new science of child development.

Alas, the data bases of economics and of child development were hardly comparable, nor were the predictions one dared to draw from the data. No doubt it was easy in the early twentieth century to be entranced by science and to believe that the science which perfected and popularized the radio, the washing machine, the automobile, and the airplane, the science which revealed the superstitions of Scopes's persecutors, the science which legitimatized sex, would lead to comparable perfection in popular understanding of human motivation and behavior. Perhaps, too, it was simply the case that one must be a true believer to generate an educational movement. Nonetheless, the gross inadequacies of the psychological advice so glibly offered an entire generation of mothers derived in no small measure from this cocksure vision of science as savior, science as the one true path to social progress, science as a substitute for the give-and-take of politics. The legacy of the parent education movement seems to me, in short, something less than an unmixed blessing.

The third and final issue I want to raise is of a different nature; it concerns the historiography of education in the postwar era. In examining LSRM and the parent education movement—an enterprise that neither sprang from nor relied heavily on public schools—I believe I may have stumbled upon a portion of our past which suggests the need for fundamental redefinition of the basic subject matter of educational history in the 1920's.

As Lawrence A. Cremin has observed, historians have too long tended to equate education with the narrower subject of schooling and, perforce, to equate the study of educational innovations with school innovations alone.[24] But why should issues in educational historiography concern us today? The main reason, I believe, is this: the parent education movement can be seen as one part of a nascent effort in postwar America to ask whether, as a matter of public policy, family-focussed interventions are more central than school-based interventions to children's development as happy, effective citizens. Of course, this is not an either-or proposition—neither in the 1920's nor today—but rather a matter of emphasis. However, what remains most striking to me about the parent education movement is the extent to which its sponsors, like many commentators in the past few years, saw the family as a more essential lever than the school for creating a more perfect social order. It may well be that the most original educational thinking in the 1920's focussed on the transformation of the family and its relation to a host of other educational institutions, rather than on the transformation of the school per se. As I reflect upon the parent education movement, I believe that its ultimate objective was to modernize and revitalize the family's role as educator, to make the scientifically trained, child-centered family the balance wheel of the twentieth century American republic. Grandiose hopes, these, but very much in the spirit of scientific social uplift which Lawrence Frank and LSRM brought to the task of “social reconstruction” in the 1920's.

(By common agreement, and in order to reach the widest possible audience, this article appears simultaneously in these Proceedings and The History of Education Quarterly.)

REFERENCES

1.

Readers may find it helpful to consult my essay, “Before Home Start: Notes Toward a History of Parent Education in America, 1897-1929,” Harvard Educational Review 46 (August 1976): 436-67, for systematic treatment of the ideas and organizations involved in the parent education movement.

2.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., “Foreword,” in Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), p. vii.

3.

Quoted in “Lawrence Frank, Child-Development Expert, Dies,” New York Times, 24 September 1968, p. 44.

4.

The following account synthesizes material from diverse published, unpublished, and oral sources, especially from The Milton J. E. Senn Oral History Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland.

5.

Lawrence K. Frank, “A State Budget and Administrative Accounting,” The Economic World 10 (August 14, 1915): 205.

6.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Social Legislation and the Police Power,” Case and Comment 22 (1916): 747-49; Lawrence K. Frank, “Economic Crux,” The Dial 67 (September 6, 1919): 180-83; and Lawrence K. Frank, “To Bring Down Prices,” New Republic 20 (September 10, 1919): 175-76.

7.

Lawrence K. Frank, “The Object of Education,” The Freeman 4 (March 8, 1922): 610-11.

8.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Two Tasks of Education,” School and Society 15 (June 17, 1922): 655-59.

9.

James Earl Russell to The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, April 3, 1924, Institute of Child Welfare Research (Laura Spelman Rockefeller), 1923-25, Institute of Child Welfare Research Files, Teachers College Archives, Teachers College, Columbia University.

10.

“Report. Federation for Child Study,” April 18, 1923, Box 28 (Folder 289), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

11.

S. F. Burton, “Report of Federation for Child Study,” May 16, 1923, Box 28 (Folder 289), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

12.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Memorandum. Child Study-Parent Training Program,” December 21, 1923, Box 30 (Folder 315), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

13.

Ibid.

14.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Child Study Work in the Women's Colleges,” April, 1927, Box 30 (Folder 315), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

15.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Memorandum of Interview with Mrs. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, President, American Association of University Women,” October 31 (?), 1923, Box 26 (Folder 268), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

16.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Memorandum of Interview with Mrs. Frances Fenton Bernard, Educational Secretary,” December 3, 1923, Box 26 (Folder 268), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

17.

Helen T. Woolley to Lawrence K. Frank, February 4, 1924, Box 26 (Folder 268), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

18.

Lawrence K. Frank to Frances Fenton Bernard, March 1, 1924, Box 26 (Folder 268), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

19.

Marie M. Meloney to George Hecht, April 1, 1924, Box 37 (Folder 390), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

20.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Training Personnel and Preparing Teaching Material,” Spring, 1924, Box 30 (Folder 315), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

21.

Beardsley Ruml to Arthur Woods, “Memorandum,” June 23, 1924, Box 37 (Folder 390), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

22.

Willard S. Richardson to Beardsley Ruml, “Memorandum,” July 14, 1924, Box 37 (Folder 390), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

23.

Lawrence K. Frank, “Memorandum of Interview with George J. Hecht,” November 6, 1924, Box 37 (Folder 390), Series III, Subseries 5, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archive Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.

24.

Lawrence A. Cremin, Public Education (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1976); and Traditions of American Education (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977).

[*] This essay represents work in progress; documentation has been kept intentionally to a minimum. It is more than likely that characterizations of individuals and interpretations of institutions and events will change somewhat as new data emerge and as the contours of the entire project become clearer. The research for this essay has been generously supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Incorporated, and graciously administered by the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. While I accept full responsibility for errors in fact or interpretation, I want to thank Joyce Antler, Nancy Cott, Lawrence Cremin, Lynn Gordon, Ellen Lagemann, and especially Ruby Takanishi for their helpful comments and criticisms.

THE MENTAL HYGIENE MOVEMENT, THE COMMONWEALTH FUND, AND PUBLIC EDUCATION, 1921–1933[1]

SOL COHEN

Professor, Graduate School of Education
University of California at Los Angeles

The mental hygiene movement was another expression of the concern for child welfare, confidence in science, impulse toward organization, and unbounded optimism that characterized the range of reform movements of the Progressive Era.[2] It began in a desultory fashion in 1908-1909 with the organization first of the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene and then of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH) in the next year. An early concern was with institutional psychiatry and in particular the amelioration of the treatment and conditions of institutionalized adult mental defectives and the mentally disordered.[3] It was Adolf Meyer who did more than anyone else to steer the NCMH into the field of prevention and thus into work with children.

Under the prodding of Meyer and the “psychiatric progressives” around him, August Hoch, C. Macfie Campbell, Stewart Paton, Thomas W. Salmon, and William Alanson White, the NCMH soon turned from adult psychiatry and amelioration to child guidance and prevention. When in 1917 Dr. Frankwood E. Williams, a protege of Dr. Meyers, was appointed associate medical director of NCMH and editor of its new journal, Mental Hygiene, the organization was ready to switch its emphasis from hospitals and asylums to other social agencies, especially the public schools. A few years later the “mental hygiene” movement had changed from a reform effort to improve the lot of the insane into a crusade for the prevention of “all forms of social maladjustment and even unhappiness.”![4] The optimism, not to say utopianism which permeated the mental hygiene movement was supplied by the new, “dynamic psychiatry” of Meyer, to which was added elements of psychoanalysis contributed by American exegetes of Freud.

Dr. Adolf Meyer was an extraordinary figure not only in the history of psychiatry and the mental hygiene movement but also in American intellectual history in general. When William James said that “the power of certain individuals to infect…others is to me almost the all in all of social change,” he might have had Adolf Meyer in mind. Meyer was at the spoke of a wheel of influence connecting psychiatry, child psychiatry, child guidance, psychiatric social work, pediatrics, and education. In a series of articles between 1906-1909, he gave American psychiatry a new orientation.[5] In the mid-1890's he had begun to work out his notion of “psychobiology,” an eclectic psychiatry of the “whole person” in his social milieu with his particular life history. By 1906 Meyer was ready to offer his own formulation of the aetiology of dementia praecox, then the most dreaded of mental illnesses. The psychiatrist rejected Emil Kraepelin's definition of dementia praecox as organic and irreversible, and redefined it in terms of defective adaptation, habit deterioration, and faulty ways of meeting life's problems. Those suffering from dementia praecox were persons who had failed to meet the test of life. Meyer identified some danger signs of incipient mental illness: evasiveness, seclusiveness, drifting away from concrete interests, daydreaming, refusing to cope with reality, and other “substitutive” forms of behavior (what Hoch subsequently was to label “the shut-in personality”).[6] The proposed cure was habit training and reeducation in better or more efficient and successful ways of adapting.

If dementia praecox were not so much a disease, not a brain disorder but a behavior disorder, not due to organic causes but a form of faulty social adaptation, of social inadequacy, of bad habits, then what new vistas were opened up! In short, the profound implication was that mental illness was “much more easily prevented than cured.” Childhood, when habits were very largely established, was the critical point of attack.[7] To involve the school was the next and inevitable step.

As early as 1895 Meyer was complaining that the line between the “pedagogue and psychopathologist,” between teacher and psychiatrist, was too finely drawn. The school was the place to detect manifestations of potential mental illness, that is shyness, seclusiveness, daydreaming. (Indeed, Meyer observed in 1908 that “the children affected are the very ones whom a former generation might have looked upon as model children.”[8]) First, school practice would have to be reformed. Retardation and failure were especially mentally unhygienic. Reality could not be made too harsh or difficult lest the children escape into a world of fantasy and daydreams. Education should be practical, active, and social. The school would have to give more emphasis to “actual play with others and for others” and less to “the play of mere rumination.” There was to be more emphasis on doing, less on knowing. As Meyer put it, “if the school gave more opportunity for doing things, and doing things successfully, then mere dreams of doing and accomplishing things would be less tempting.”[9]

Early extrapolations from psychoanalysis by the psychiatric progressives reinforced Meyer's sentiments. There has been considerable interest among historians lately on the impact of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis on American life and culture.[10] Indeed, Freud's influence on the theory and practice of American education has yet to be measured. The subject will be a difficult one; psychoanalysis has filtered into education in a roundabout way and in a severely attenuated form; the very use of psychoanalytic concepts or terminology is rare in the pedagogical literature.[11] The tendency in America, Freud predicted, would be to welcome his theories and water them down with equal enthusiasm. He was not disappointed.

Freud's work was used to supplement and to bolster what was becoming the dominant school of American psychiatry—the dynamic psychiatry of Adolf Meyer. Psychiatric progressives and active adherents of psychoanalysis like William Alanson White, J. J. Putnam, and Smith Ely Jeliffe domesticated or Americanized psychoanalysis by sloughing off its darker, more pessimistic, more biologically oriented side, and taking from Freud what suited their own more optimistic, environmentalist, reformist sentiments. Meyer had directed psychiatric interest toward childhood; his more Freudian-oriented colleagues made childhood central. Meyer directed their interest toward the entire life experience; they called attention to the overwhelming importance of the parent-child relationship. Meyer emphasized “habits”; they called attention to “instinct” and “emotion.” Meyer was interested in all social agencies impacting on the child; they focussed on the school.

The prime example is William Alanson White, a tireless advocate and interpreter of Freud and psychoanalysis to psychiatry and the mental hygiene movement. “Childhood,” in White's memorable phrase, was “the golden period for mental hygiene,” the period par excellence for prophylaxis. Childhood experiences, especially the frustration of the child's “needs,” had lasting effects on personality development. They were critical in the aetiology and symptoms of mental illness.

The inferences to be drawn were obvious. With the proper child rearing and educational practices, mental illness could be prevented. Home and school were the obvious points of attack in any program of prevention. But, observed White, the home offered the “least encouragement.” There “resided within its organization and as a part of its nature…disruptive tendencies.” The school was the most practical place to work for results: “education has been…too much confined to teaching, it needs to be developed as a scheme for assisting and guiding the developing personality.”[12] In the meantime, the mental hygiene movement already had a “change agent” inside the school in the person of the social worker.

Social work was early given a new orientation, thanks to the influence of Meyer, William Healy, and Dr. Elmer E. Southard. As early as 1911, Meyer introduced his new psychiatry of the “whole person” to social workers at the National Conference of Social Work. By 1917, Southard and his associate, social worker Mary C. Jarrett, were employing social workers at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, of which Southard was Medical Director, while introducing courses in mental hygiene and psychiatry for social workers-in-training at Smith College. Even earlier Healy had employed social workers at the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago.

In fact, William Healy was one of the few psychiatrists actually working with children at this time, delinquent children. As early as 1909, he demonstrated the value of social work practiced in connection with the new psychiatry, first at the Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic in Chicago, then with his associate, psychologist Augusta Bronner, at the Judge Baker Foundation in Boston. In his work with juvenile delinquents in Chicago and then in Boston, Healy worked out the “team” approach—psychiatrist, psychologist, and psychiatric social worker—in the treatment of delinquents on which the Commonwealth Fund's child guidance clinics were later modeled.[13] Healy brought to the study of delinquency the eclectic psychiatry Meyer had been propounding regarding dementia praecox, to which he added his own extrapolations from Freud.

Healy's path-breaking The Individual Delinquent (1915) described delinquency as due to faulty adaptation to life's circumstances, rather than to heredity, constitution, mental deficiency or social exigencies like poverty. There was no “born” criminal, no special quality of abnormality to the delinquent. The delinquent child was an individual with his peculiar life history and complex personality. Healy's Mental Conflicts and Misconduct (1917) revealed even more the influence of psychoanalysis. Here he stressed that delinquency was only a “symptom,” a form of maladaptive behavior, with its roots in “unsatisfied inner needs” or “unmet needs.” Healy especially singled out the early relationships within the family as critical in the development of personality, and the role of the school in detecting and treating predelinquent behavior.[14]

By 1917, Healy was convinced that working with the individual delinquents was futile; prevention was more effective than cure. But parents failed to understand the “needs” of children. So did teachers. Healy found evidence “in many cases” that delinquency was tied up to school dissatisfactions and subsequent truancy.[15] Nevertheless, he concluded that the school was the most promising agency through which to work for the prevention of delinquency. Healy called for more child psychiatric clinics, more psychiatric social workers, more teachers trained in the new “scientific” view of personality development and, in the meantime, more “visiting teachers” or school social workers trained in the new psychiatry.

In 1919 the new psychiatry “swept” the National Conference of Social Work.[16] Traditional social work—direct relief, even social reform—seemed sterile in comparison. Now, explained Miss Jarrett, social work was about to enter a new phase “when factors of personality rather than factors of environment” would dominate.[17] This was actually not altogether true. Factors of environment were still important to the psychiatric social workers, but these were limited to the environments of school and home, and the “attitudes” of parents and teachers. And between home and school, parent and teacher, again, the environment of choice was clear. Jessie Taft, a prominent psychiatric social worker explained, “Homes are too inaccessible. The school has the time of the child and the power to do the job.”[18]

The use of social workers or visiting teachers dated back to 1907, when this work was launched in New York City. The early visiting teachers had close ties to the social settlement movement and were supported jointly by the College Settlement, Greenwich House, and the Public Education Association of New York City. In 1916, the New York City Board of Education provided funds in its budget for six visiting teachers.[19] From the start, however, it was evident that the visiting teacher's real opportunity lay not with the few children whom she could help as individuals, but in the education of public school personnel in the mental hygiene point of view. By 1921, school social workers, inspired by the new developments in psychiatric social work, were becoming more and more expansionist or imperialistic in their aspirations. Jane F. Culbert, then president of the National Association of Visiting Teachers, in the course of an address given that year at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Social Work, identified the public school as the greatest child welfare agency. It reached practically all the children, and it had them under observation and, to a certain extent, control during their plastic period. Miss Culbert exhorted her fellow social workers “to push into the schools” and eliminate the need for social work at the source.[20]

THE COMMONWEALTH FUND

We know that the Carnegie Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board, and the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education have been extremely active in the field of public education at various times in this century. Not so well known, and perhaps more influential than any of the above, was the Commonwealth Fund. No history of the mental hygiene movement, the child guidance movement, child psychiatry, or psychiatric social work in the twentieth century would be complete without reference to the Commonwealth Fund. The Fund was the link in the 1920's between the extraordinary complex of organizations and activities which we call the “mental hygiene movement,” and public education. In the 1920's and into the 1930's the very raison d'etre of the Fund was to build that link. This was the primary objective of its principle activity, the “Program for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency.”

The Commonwealth Fund was established in 1918 by Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness. It was not only set up with a great deal of money by the standards of the day, but open-endedly. Mrs. Harkness' initial bequest, about $10 million, was an absolute one, “to do something for the welfare of mankind.” Under its first General Director, Max Farrand, on leave of absence as Professor of History at Yale, the Fund's earliest grants were for relief of war sufferers in Europe and the Near East, for charities and social work, for research into the legal field, and for educational research. (Under its Educational Research Committee, the Fund financed the Educational Finance Inquiry Commission [1923-25], and Louis Terman's studies of gifted children [1921-1930].)[21] But these activities were not very exciting or promising, nor did they require much money. The foundation had loads of money. It was interested in “pioneering and experimentation” not “playing safe.” Nor did the Fund intend to duplicate anyone else's efforts. As Professor Farrand observed, regarding the possibility of a commitment to medical research: “the farther inquiry is made into the general field of medicine and philanthropy, the more evident it becomes how large a portion of the field is already occupied. There is scarcely a subject which comes before the Commonwealth Fund which has not already been taken under consideration by some one of the other organizations.”[22]

The Commonwealth Fund needed to make a big impact and quickly. It was being swamped with applications for small grants, and Farrand was worried that its money would be frittered away “without accomplishing any large purposes.” Edward Harkness, Mrs. Harkness' son and the foundation's president, agreed. He urged Farrand to get on with the task of carving out a special niche for the Fund. Finally, in 1920 the Fund found the field it was looking for. It resolved to focus all its efforts on children as the most promising field for its endeavors, and upon the prevention of juvenile delinquency within the larger field of child welfare.[23] Delinquency seemed a promising field, and most of the agencies in the field were doing remedial rather than preventive work. But the subject was so large and complex that the difficulty was to find the best method of attack.

In November 1920, the Fund invited Dr. Thomas Salmon, Medical Director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH) to submit a program for possible funding. Salmon, anxious, indeed desperate, for financial support for the NCMH and interested in directing it into the field of prevention, responded within the month with a lengthy proposal for a program aimed at the prevention of juvenile delinquency.[24] The Fund responded with a call for a conference to be held at Lakewood, New Jersey, on January 30, 1921 for purposes of discussing Salmon's proposal. Among the participants were Dr. William Healy, of Boston's Judge Baker Foundation, Dr. Bernard Glueck, Director of the New York School of Social Work, J. Prentice Murphy of the Philadelphia Children's Bureau, Professor Henry C. Morrison of the School of Education at the University of Chicago, and Judge Charles W. Hoffman, of the Court of Domestic Relations, Cincinnati, as well as Dr. Salmon and his colleague, Augusta Bronner, and the Fund's Farrand.

The conference adopted Salmon's whole plan and rationale, and called for its speedy implementation. Now, they said, there was enough known about the causes of delinquency to focus on methods of prevention, and “the first steps in prevention must deal with the incipient conduct disorders of childhood.” Indeed, the importance of centering all constructive work in childhood could not be overemphasized: “the adult is what the child was.” There was an urgent need for adequately trained personnel, as well as for more psychiatric centers for the study and treatment of problem children. Furthermore, the public had to be educated in “scientific” methods of understanding children. “Adverse social conditions” and their impact on delinquency, however, were declared “outside the scope of this conference.”

In order to implement their purposes, the conferees decided to focus on the public school. It was the conclusion of the conference “that lack of knowledge by teachers and school authorities of existing information regarding disorders of conduct results in many instances in the actual causation of delinquency through mismanagement of incipient disorders…and, to a much greater extent, in failure to carry out preventive measures in an environment presenting many favorable opportunities.”

The conferees recommended “that schools greatly extend their activities with reference to disorders of conduct” and, as first steps to this end, that “a systematic attempt be made…to inform teachers, students in the field of education, and school authorities, of the present scientific conception of disorders of conduct and their treatment.”[25]

THE PROGRAM FOR THE PREVENTION OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

The Fund took no immediate initiative. Then in the spring of 1921, just when it seemed likely that the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation was about to enter (and preempt) the field of child welfare, the Fund acted.[26] In July, Farrand resigned as General Director to return to Yale. Barry C. Smith, a former social worker, was appointed to succeed him. On November 9, 1921 the Board adopted a five-year Program for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency.[27] It was one of the most comprehensive, best financed, and most influential efforts of its kind ever attempted in the United States, and has to be described in some detail. The Program's general objectives were: demonstration of the value of psychiatric study and treatment of “difficult, pre-delinquent, or problem children,” provision for the recruitment and training of psychiatric social workers, the nation-wide promotion of the “visiting teacher” or school social worker, and the dissemination among the public of the new, “scientific” methods of study, treatment, and prevention of behavior problems in children. For working purposes, the Program was organized into four divisions.

Division I: The New York School of Social Work (NYSSW). The NYSSW was provided with 15 annual full fellowships to enable it to recruit and train psychiatric social workers and visiting teachers, and further financial support to enable it to develop courses of training in the area of mental hygiene. Further, under its auspices, the Bureau of Children's Guidance, a child psychiatric clinic, was created for training purposes as well as to help demonstrate the most effective methods of treating “pre-delinquent” or “problem” children in the schools. The work of this Division was placed under the administrative direction of Dr. Bernard Glueck, assisted by Mr. Porter R. Lee, both of the NYSSW.

Division II: The National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH). Under the Division on the Prevention of Delinquency of the NCMH, the Fund provided appropriations for two mobile child psychiatric clinics to demonstrate, in an unspecified number of communities, the value of such psychiatric clinics, dubbed “child guidance clinics,” for “problem” children in relation with juvenile courts and schools. This Division was placed under Dr. Vivian V. Anderson of the NCMH. The two clinics were headed by Drs. Ralph P. Truitt and Lawson G. Lowrey, respectively.

Division III: Public Education Association of New York City (PEA). The PEA was assigned the task of carrying out the largest phase of the program: the national visiting teacher demonstration. A specially organized National Committee on Visiting Teachers was established under its auspices, placed under the direct supervision of social workers Howard Nudd and Jane Culbert, and assigned the task of locating 30 visiting teachers in 30 different communities around the country, for 3-year demonstration periods. The Fund was to pay two-thirds of the salaries of these teachers, and the demonstration periods were to be staggered so as to end in 1927, when the entire program was to end.

Why the emphasis on the visiting teacher? Barry Smith raised this question himself before offering an answer. The Fund's board, Smith said, had first considered traditional delinquency prevention techniques such as improved housing and organized recreation, but rejected them as “impractical.” They decided to concentrate the Fund's efforts “only at certain strategic points.” The school teacher, he continued, provided she was aware of it, had unequaled opportunities to observe the first signs of undesirable tendencies on the part of the child. Any child, who was tending in any way toward delinquency, invariably indicated that something was amiss by his school conduct, work, or attitude. “The public school,” Smith explained, “coming into close contact with the lives of over twenty million young boys, girls, and adolescents, is—or should be—our greatest social welfare agency.” The public school teachers of the nation, Smith continued, “if they can be socialized, can accomplish more to prevent delinquency than all the social workers together.”[28] But Smith disclaimed any intention on the Fund's part of adding to their burden. This was where the visiting teacher came in.

Division IV: The Joint Committee on Methods of Preventing Delinquency. The Commonwealth Fund established the Joint Committee, comprised of the directors of Divisions I-III, plus its own Barry Smith, to coordinate the various enterprises in the fields of child psychiatry, mental hygiene, psychiatric social work, and school social work. It was also to evaluate the results of the program; “one thing we have to do is…to measure results in a way that cannot be…challenged,” and to serve as a bureau of information and “extension work,” that is, community education in mental hygiene. As executive director of Division IV, the Fund secured the services of Dr. Arthur W. Towne, formerly general secretary of the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, succeeded in 1923 by Graham R. Taylor, and as chief investigator, Mrs. Mabel Ellis, formerly of the National Child Labor Committee.

In completing the announcement of the Program, Barry Smith stated that the Fund looked forward not to the total abolition of delinquency and crime, but to slow progress through “gradually changing the attitude of thinking people.” The Commonwealth Fund, he explained, “does not expect to reform the world. The definite measurable results of the program,” Smith said, “may even be difficult to ascertain.” But, he concluded, “if that program shall succeed in ever so small a degree in demonstrating the value of new methods of approach, and in pointing the way to what may be accomplished with the individual by the basing of adequate treatment upon adequate knowledge, the effort will have been worthwhile.”[29]

There are two observations to make here. First, it seems clear that at the outset the conception and scope of the Program was broader than its title. That is to say, through the principles of mental hygiene and child guidance, it sought to prevent mental illness as well as all forms of “maladjustment.” And second, the Program was comprised almost entirely of elements at hand in the pre-World War I decade. Or to put it another way, a body of ideas bequeathed by the previous decade outlined above constituted the materials of which the Program was built.

PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION

I intend to describe briefly the Program for the Prevention of Delinquency in the twenties. It is sufficient to say here that the Fund worked out the implications of policy formulated in 1921, and announced it in 1922. There were changes in detail, in personnel, especially in the focus of emphasis—but this too was implicit in 1921-1922; namely, a narrowing of focus onto the school and the teacher, along with a broadening of the conception of the responsibilities of the school.

Division I. In 1921 Dr. Bernard Glueck resigned as Medical Director of the Bureau of Child Guidance. He was replaced by Dr. Marion Kenworthy, one of the first American child psychiatrists to receive psychoanalytic training, while Porter Lee became Director of NYSSW. By 1927 the Bureau had trained 70 psychiatric social workers. But it became evident that there was a prior need—there was a serious dearth of child psychiatrists to train these psychiatric aides. In 1927, the Bureau was disbanded.[30] The Fund replaced it with an “Institute of Child Guidance,” a similar but more extensive undertaking, the major new task of which was the training of child psychiatrists, as well as study and research in the field of child guidance. The Fund meant business. Dr. Lawrence Lowrey was appointed the Institute's Medical Director; Dr. David M. Levy, Chief of Staff; and Dr. Kenworthy, Consultant in Psychiatry. In 1933, because of reasons of economy, the Institute was closed. In its six years of existence, the Institute treated about 2,600 children and provided training for 336 persons: 32 psychiatrists, 15 psychologists, and 289 psychiatric social workers.[31]

Division II. At the close of 1925, eight demonstration child guidance clinics were in operation—in Dallas, Memphis, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Norfolk, and Philadelphia. By 1927, when the Fund discontinued its demonstrations, more than 4,000 children had been treated. In seven of the eight above-named communities, child guidance clinics had been established on a permanent basis with local support. Although it discontinued its demonstrations, the Fund decided to continue its support of the child guidance movement but now more modestly in the capacity of an advisory, information, and field service administered through the Division of Community Clinics of the NCMH. In charge of this new phase of the Fund's work were Drs. George S. Stevenson and Ralph P. Truitt, with Clara Bassett, a psychiatric social worker, as field consultant. In 1933 this aspect of the Fund's work was phased out as well. When it entered the field the number of child guidance clinics could be counted on the fingers of one hand; by 1933 there were more than 230 such clinics around the country.[32]

Division III. By 1924 the National Committee of Visiting Teachers had its full complement of 30 demonstrations in operation. Thanks to the Fund, the visiting teacher was introduced to rural areas such as Boone County, Missouri, and Huron County, Ohio; and towns such as Chisholm, Minnesota, Hutchinson, Kansas, Pocatello, Idaho, Bluefield, West Virginia, and Rock Springs, Wyoming. About 15,500 children in all were served. In 1927, with the end of the Fund's visiting teacher demonstration, of the 30 demonstration communities work was continued at local expense in 24. When the Fund's program was launched there were perhaps 90-100 visiting teachers in about 20 American cities. In 1927 there were more than 200 visiting teachers in about 70 cities around the country.[33]

In one initial area of emphasis, the indoctrination of teachers about mental hygiene, the Fund renewed its grant to the National Committee on Visiting Teachers for another three years. But now the assignment was to educate the teaching force directly in mental hygiene principles and practices through lectures and courses aimed at teachers-in-service and teachers-in-training. In the summer of 1930, after eight years of involvement in the visiting teacher movement, this phase of the program was ended.

Division IV. The Commonwealth Fund's Annual Report for 1932 refers to the period when all the educational and social agencies of the community needed “to be educated simultaneously” in the principles and practices of mental hygiene. This educational objective was from the beginning one of the tasks of each division of the program; by 1924 it had become the major task. It was the responsibility of the “Joint Committee” to coordinate these efforts. In 1927 the Joint Committee was replaced by a more professional “Division of Publications.”

The Fund's promotional activities were extraordinary in scope. It was engaged in a truly vast educational “extension service”: monthly newsletters, reprints of articles and addresses, a service to inquirers, a speakers bureau, lectures to organized groups, personal contacts. The philosophy, aims, and methods of the Program were to be as widely disseminated as possible, in order that, as the Fund asserted in 1926, the community “may develop a consciousness regarding the value of mental hygiene.” Records were kept. Between 1922 and 1926, 2,345 talks and 120 lecture courses were given by staff members, who also in this time published 83 articles. The services of exactly 168 volunteers were utilized by various divisions. Of books and pamphlets describing various aspects of the Fund's program, 98,359 were distributed free.

As of 1926, we are informed, program material was being used in 80 schools, colleges, or university departments in courses in education, psychology, social work, and child study. This was no indiscriminate give away. The Fund made a systematic effort “to develop limited and carefully classified lists of persons in various walks of life…including leaders in education, teachers and professors in schools, colleges, and universities, physicians, social workers, judges, probation officers, writers, editors…and leaders of public opinion along many lines, and a wide range of organizations and institutions in the fields of education, public health, mental hygiene, and child welfare.” In the end, Division IV was the most important of the divisions of the Fund's Program for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency. Here, in the field of developing the “consciousness” of the community as to the value of mental hygiene, especially in the public schools, is the place to look for the real significance of the Commonwealth Fund's program.

THE MENTAL HYGIENE POINT OF VIEW

There was implicit in the Fund's literature, and sometimes made explicit, what we might call the parent-blaming doctrine. Mental illness arises out of harmful experience in childhood. Therefore, parents are largely to blame for the “problems” of children. Dr. Salmon observed that it was hard for him to think of the home as any kind of therapeutic institution; “be it ever so humble there is no place that isn't better than home.”[34] At the age of six or seven, explain Porter Lee and Marion Kenworthy in their influential textbook Mental Hygiene and Social Work, “we may describe the child as a symptom-complex of his parental handling.”[35] The faults of parents were many. The chief psychiatric social worker of the Fund-sponsored Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic, Miriam Van Waters, published a popular broadside in 1927 with the characteristic title Parents on Probation.[36] It wasn't so much that parents were deliberately bad, but that childhood “is charged with the greatest possibilities and fraught with the most imminent dangers,” and the “most consumate skill” was needed to properly rear children.[37] Parents, however, couldn't be required to take special courses or forced to obtain a degree to raise children. The public school and its teachers seemed to surpass by far the home and parents in its potential for preventive work.

If the schools were to live up to their potential, much remained to be done. Schools failed to “meet the needs” of children. Teachers concentrated exclusively on intellect and knowledge; they were ignorant of the child's “emotional life.” Failure and nonpromotion loomed foremost among the experiences children were exposed to in schools which violated mental hygiene principles and which had therefore to be eliminated.[38] A constant theme running through the Fund's visiting teacher literature was that school dissatisfaction and failure, which could lead to retardation, truancy, delinquency, and other problems of social maladjustment would have to be eliminated by providing wholesome experiences that could develop the child's emotional life. “By itself alone,” Howard Nudd wrote, “the intellectual appeal is inadequate in the training of personality. Feelings and habits of behavior must be constantly nurtured or corrected, as the case may be, in the entire daily life of the child.” However, Nudd went on, the growing acceptance of the visiting teacher by “progressive educators” was a hopeful sign that the schools were beginning to achieve a wider influence upon the “whole life” of the child.[39]

In the meantime, the classroom teachers needed to be educated in mental hygiene principles. Teachers were basically repressive and punitive, largely ignorant of the personality development of the child and of how their own “attitudes” powerfully affected children. Teachers were still dominated by “purely pedagogic attitudes.” They needed to develop more tolerant attitudes toward children's behavior. They had to be taught that children's behavior was “purposeful,” not “bad” or “good”; that it was motivated by a search for the satisfaction of some “need,” real or fancied, and was determined by experiences during the child's formative years. In short, the teacher had to pay attention to underlying causes, not overt behavior.

Dr. Bernard Glueck lectured visiting teachers in 1924 that the personality of the teacher was much more important than the method of teaching. He identified the “mechanism of identification” as of the utmost significance. Even the subtlest things about the teacher were important, such as “attitude, gesture, tone of voice, emotional display….” The most important teacher qualities, Glueck explained, were 1) “objectivity of attitude,” and 2) “understanding the personality of the individual child.” The teacher, Glueck continued, had to go beyond the overt behavior to get to know the child's “makeup.” Is the child “free and natural…or awkward and strained?…How does he take his successes and failure?…How much do I know about his daydreams?”[40] The teacher had to provide the sort of classroom climate that would encourage the child to “show himself for what he is” and not “deceive” for the sake of good discipline.

What gradually emerged was an example of what I have called the “medicalization” of American education: a conception of the school as a kind of child psychiatric clinic, the teacher as doctor or therapist, the student as “problem” or patient, and everyone, teachers and students, in a sort of permanent therapy. The teacher's responsibility was the “early study of the child out of adjustment,” the early detection of “inabilities, instabilities, and dissatisfactions.”[41] And hardly any child was immune from “more subtle evidences of non-adjustment.” It was not only children who overtly misbehaved who were “out of adjustment,” but the quiet, timid, or shy child, the “overconformer,” the so-called “good” child. They were “problems” as well. Dr. Ralph Truitt, of the Fund's Division of Community Clinics, identified seclusiveness, shyness, laziness, fearfulness, wanderlust, and quarrelsomeness as potential “signs of a disease process.” The child may outgrow these traits, Truitt warned, but maybe not….[42] Nudd described the types of “problem” children the visiting teacher dealt with: “the precocious and gifted, the irritable, the worried, the violent-tempered, and the repressed…and the indescribable, who are always in need of counsel.”[43]

Schools seemed to be filled with “problem” children. A study by the Fund's Minneapolis Child Guidance Clinic found that 39 percent of the children in the city's public schools needed psychiatric treatment.[44] But teachers were hardly aware of the urgency of the situation. Edwin K. Wickman's 1928 Fund-sponsored study, Children's Behavior and Teachers' Attitudes, has become a classic. Wickman reported a profound difference between mental hygiene professionals and classroom teachers in their attitude toward children's behavior problems. Teachers ranked transgressions against authority and order as the most serious behavior problems and shyness, daydreaming, compliant behavior as the least serious (and indeed “good”). Mental hygienists reversed this ranking, rating “withdrawing, recessive” behavior as “psychiatric danger signals,” and rating aggressive behavior as least serious. The moral: Teachers were overly concerned with the “troublesome” child; they overlooked the “troubled” child who was a serious mental health problem.[45] The remedy: The education of teachers-in-service and teachers-in-training in the principles and practices of mental hygiene.

In the end, the heavy burden of responsibility for the mental hygiene of children fell on the teacher and the school. During the summer of 1927 the staff of PEA's National Committee on Visiting Teachers introduced pioneer courses on the behavior problems of children to teachers and teachers-in-training at Harvard, George Peabody College for Teachers, the University of Washington, the University of Kansas, the University of North Carolina, Western Reserve University, and Michigan State Normal School. In 1929, there were courses given at all these centers and also at the Universities of Alabama, California, Minnesota, Missouri, Wyoming, and New York University.[46] The Commonwealth Fund bowed out of the picture finally in 1933, leaving it to the Progressive Education Association and the Rockefeller Foundation's General Education Board to continue the work of “socializing” public school teachers through the 1930's.

THE RESULT

Between 1922 when the Commonwealth Fund launched its Program for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency, and 1933 when for all practical purposes the program was terminated, Fund expenditures for the program amounted to about $5 million. There are figures on the number of child guidance clinics, psychiatric social workers, and visiting teachers before and after. They have already been cited. That the Fund profoundly influenced the growth and development of child psychiatry, child guidance, and psychiatric social work cannot be denied. It was the midwife at the birth of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. It is clear that it succeeded in putting across the message of mental hygiene to public school personnel and especially to a broader public of parents and professionals who facilitated its acceptance by schools. Equally clear is its contribution to the crisis of the family and the “inner revolution” of our time, depicted by Thomas Cochran, Phillip Rieff, and Christopher Lasch.

What about the prevention of delinquency or mental illness? In an interesting article published in 1915, Healy and Bronner described a long-term educational project for the rescue of delinquents. They admitted their project was complex and difficult, but they assured us it was worth the effort: “We are told,” they said, that “in Heaven there is much rejoicing over even one delinquent saved.”[47] Barry Smith, in his brief wrap-up of the Project for Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency, stated: “much has been learned as to the technique of applying the principles of mental hygiene to the individual child…many workers have been trained…that the work has been well done and that sound results have been secured here is ample evidence.”[48] There are some figures on the number of “problem” children treated in the program, most of them, we are told, successfully “saved,” or “adjusted.” Even if only a small percentage of the children involved were “saved” from juvenile delinquency or from the effects of crippling shyness or constant failure, it would be to the credit of the program. But the irony remains that if some children were saved, it would seem to involve luck or intuition or the passage of time, or homey, practical forms of social intervention (what the French used to call “psychiatrie du concierge”) rather than any “science” or special professional expertise.

Here we turn to the Commonwealth Fund's own literature, which provides a record of progressive disillusionment and finally a trenchant critique of its program. The program was initially conceived as one in which research and evaluation were to be essential components. In 1926, as the program headed toward the end of its original five-year term, the Fund pointed out the dangers involved in the enormous interest in mental hygiene and child guidance—that the latter would be seized upon as a fad and promoted without adequate scientific guidance from psychiatry and medicine. The oustanding need, Barry Smith warned, was for trained personnel and for research “so that the scientific basis of the work may become more accurate and definite.”

But as it turned out the Fund could never obtain the critical evaluation it sought. For instance, it was “difficult to record in black and white the methods followed by visiting teachers; it is even harder to evaluate the results they have obtained.”[49] As far as the child guidance clinics were concerned, the results with individual children “were hard to measure.” There was, as late as 1933, still “no methodology for evaluating results.”[50] In 1930, Smith pointed to the failure of psychiatry to keep pace with the enormous interest in mental hygiene by carrying forward basic research into the etiology of personality disorders. In 1935, in some post-program reflections, Smith observed “it is not so easy to change the child as enthusiasts have sometimes thought.” In 1936, he reflected that the mental hygiene movement is built “upon a type of psychiatry which…has grown far from its roots.” Finally, in 1940, in a volume commissioned by the Fund, Helen Witmer's Psychiatric Clinics for Children, “the critical evaluation” called for in 1926 was finally produced. Miss Witmer explicitly questioned the basic assumptions underlying child guidance and mental hygiene, as well as, implicitly, the Program for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency. The potentially criminal or psychotic, she said, cannot be identified in childhood: “it would seem that the prevention of psychosis must be abandoned as a primary objective of child psychiatry.” So far as the prevention of delinquency was concerned, social and legal factors were so central that the goal of prevention of delinquency “would seem to be an even less tenable aim” than the prevention of mental illness.

Miss Witmer further pointed out that the attempt to identify pre-psychotic and pre-delinquent traits in children has had some unintended consequences. It stigmatized children whom it would serve. It gave lay and professional persons a weapon which enabled them to affix labels to children and to avoid seeing them as individuals. It justified all sorts of aggressive intervention in the child's (and parents') lives. And finally, it held out false hopes and thus fostered skepticism as to the value of all mental hygiene programs.[51]

The Fund stayed with the project to fulfill a commitment; it got out as soon as it decently could. By the time Miss Witmer's report came out, the Fund's priorities had shifted from “wholesale” reform to “retail” reform, or small-scale projects, and from the study and treatment of “problem” children to the training of their doctors, its major emphasis to this day.[52]

Current interpretations of child-saving or “doing good,” like those of John Burnham, Anthony Platt, or David Rothman, with their emphasis on “social control” are, I think, a dead end as far as historical usefulness is concerned.[53] Of course if a therapeutic milieu could be created in schools, frustration and resentment would be reduced and with them a potent source of hostility to the social order. But there is much more involved. The real issue raised by the Fund's program lies, I think, elsewhere—in some melancholy or ironic reflections in the area of the harm that men of good intentions sometimes do. Altruism is as “real” a motive as self-interest. Let us admit the altruism of the Fund, that the Fund was trying “to do something for the welfare of children,” trying to “do good.” But the truth is that the Fund really didn't know what it was doing. It was armed with money and solutions looking for a problem. For more than ten years, the Fund devoted a large share of its apropriations to the furtherance of the mental hygiene movement. A program was launched with a minimum of research and a maximum of promotion and publicity.[54] But why not? The program was a product of “expert” opinion, the best thought of the time in science and medicine. Who could have known how flimsy the foundation on which the Program was erected would, with the benefit of hindsight, turn out to be?

REFERENCES

1.

Besides these references, which I have tried to keep to a minimum, this paper is also based on the following unpublished sources: the “Reports of the General Director of the Commonwealth Fund,” 1919-1937; the “Minute Book” of the Fund's Joint Committee on Methods of Preventing Delinquency, 1922-1927; and the Fund's “Staff Newsletter,” 1922-1927, all in the Archives of the Fund, at the Fund's headquarters, One East 75th Street, New York City.

2.

John Chynoweth Burnham, “Medical Specialists and Movements Toward Social Control in the Progressive Era: Three Examples,” in Building the Organizational Society, ed. Jerry Israel (New York: Free Press, 1955), pp. 19-30. Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 1-13.

3.

D. B. Klein, Mental Hygiene (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955), pp. 26-28. See also Albert Deutsch, The Mentally Ill in America (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1937), pp. 318 ff; Walter Bromberg, Man Above Humanity (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1971) chap. 10; and Barbara Sicherman's useful dissertation, The Quest for Mental Health in America, 1880-1917 (Ann Arbor, Mich., University Microfilms, 1971).

4.

William Alanson White, “The Origin and First Twenty-Five Years of the Mental Hygiene Movement,” Science 52 (July 25, 1930).

5.

Henry Alden Bunker, “Psychiatry as a Specialty,” One Hundred Years of Psychiatry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), pp. 490 ff; and in general see Theodore Lidz, “Adolph Meyer and the Development of American Psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 123 (September, 1966): 320-332.

6.

“Fundamental Conceptions of Dementia Praecox,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 24 (1906): 331-336.

7.

“What do Histories of Cases of Insanity Teach Us Concerning Preventive Mental Hygiene during the Years of School Life?” Psychological Clinic 2 (June 15, 1908): 95; quoted in The Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer, ed. A. Lief (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1948), p. 236.

8.

Ibid., 242-245. See also Meyer's “Modern Conceptions of Mental Disease,” in Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education, ed. H.S. Jennings (New York: Macmillan Co., 1917).

9.

Sentiments like these are pervasive in the popular writing of the psychiatric progressives. Salmon declared in 1918, “practically all the hopeful points of attack…exist in early childhood, and if the psychiatrists are to take up such work, they must be permitted to enter the schools.” Quoted in Sicherman's Quest for Mental Health, p. 280. See also C. Macfie Campbell, “Nervous Children and their Training,” Mental Hygiene, 3(January, 1919): 16-23; Stewart Paton, “Essentials of an Education,” Mental Hygiene 4(April, 1920); and E. Stanley Abbott, “Program for Mental Hygiene in the Public Schools,” Mental Hygiene, Ibid., 320-321.

10.

Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Shakow and David Rappaport, The Influence of Freud on American Psychology (New York: Universities International Press, 1964); Hendrik M. Ruitenbeck, Freud and America (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966); John Chynoweth Burnham, Psychoanalysis and American Medicine, 1894-1918 (New York: Universities International Press, 1967); and Fred H. Matthews, “The Americanization of Sigmund Freud: Adaptations of Psychoanalysis before 1917,” Journal of American Studies 1(April, 1967): 39-62.

11.

See Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960) pp. 207-15. He observes on page 214: “The really pervasive influence of Freudianism on pedagogy came rather indirectly through gradual public acceptance of the psychoanalytic image of the child.” I think mental hygiene image of the child would be more precise.

12.

“Childhood: The Golden Period for Mental Hygiene,” Mental Hygiene 4(April, 1920): 256-267. The article was also published as a special pamphlet by the NCMH, going through at least five printings by 1925. See also White's The Mental Hygiene of Childhood (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1919).

13.

George S. Stevenson and Geddes Smith, Child Guidance Clinics: A Quarter-Century of Development (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1934), chap. 3; Helen L. Witmer, Psychiatric Clinics for Children (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1940), pp. 46 ff; David M. Levy, “Beginnings of the Child Guidance Movement,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 38(October, 1968): 799-780; Murray Levine and Adeline Levine, A Social History of Helping Services (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), pp. 51 ff. See also Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825-1940 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973), pp. 161-171.

14.

William Healy and Augusta F. Bronner, “The Child Guidance Clinic: Birth and Growth of an Idea,” in Orthopsychiatry. See also Joseph M. Hawes, Children In Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 248 ff.

15.

“The Child Guidance Clinic,” 26-27; “Mental Conflicts and Misconduct,” 67 ff; and “The Treatment and Prevention of Delinquency,” in The Child, ed. M. V. O'Shea (New York: The Children's Foundation, 1924).

16.

Lois Meredith French, Psychiatric Social Work (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1940), chap. 2; Kathleen Woodroofe, From Charity to Social Work in England and the United States (Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1962), pp. 129 ff; Virginia P. Robinson, A Changing Psychology in Social Case Work (Chapel Hill, N.C.: U. of N.C. Press, 1930), pp. 21-23, 30-37, 54-61; and Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965), Chap. 3.

17.

Mary Jarrett, “The Psychiatric Thread Running through all Social Case Work,” Proceedings, National Conference of Social Work, 1919, p. 587; Mary Jarrett, “Psychiatric Social Work,” Mental Hygiene 2(1918): 288; see also Elmer E. Southard, “Mental Hygiene and Social Work,” Ibid., 388-406.

18.

Quoted in Virginia P. Robinson, Jessie Taft, Therapist and Social Work Educator (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), p. 63.

19.

Julius John Oppenheimer, The Visiting Teacher Movement (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1925), chap. 1; Sol Cohen, Progressives and Urban School Reform: The Public Education Association of New York City, 1895-1954 (New York: Teachers College Publications, 1964), pp. 74-78.

20.

Jane F. Culbert, “The Public School as a Factor in the Training of the Socially Handicapped Child,” Proceedings, National Conference of Social Work, 1923, p. 362.

21.

Commonwealth Fund, The Commonwealth Fund: A Historical Sketch, 1918-1962 (New York, 1963), pp. 1-2; Commonwealth Fund, Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 1943, p. 2; Commonwealth Fund, Annual Report, 1947, p. 1; Robert L. Duffus, “Knights-Errant, Inc.: Millbank and Commonwealth,” The Independent 115 (July 25, 1925): 104-105.

22.

The Commonwealth Fund: A Historical Sketch, p. 4.

23.

Commonwealth Fund, Annual Report, 1920.

24.

Earl D. Bond, Thomas W. Salmon: Psychiatrist (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1950), p. 188. Nina Ridenour, Mental Hygiene in the United States: A Fifty-Year History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1961), pp. 35-36.

25.

Bernard Glueck, “Thomas W. Salmon and The Child Guidance Movement,” Journal of Juvenile Research 13 (April, 1929): 79-89; George S. Stevenson, “Child Guidance and the National Committee on Mental Hygiene,” in Orthopsychiatry, pp. 53-54.

26.

At the same time, the Fund launched a “Program for Child Health” aimed at the delivery of health and medical services, especially to infants and pregnant women, in rural areas of the nation. In 1923, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial did enter into the field of child welfare via child research centers and institutes.

27.

Fourth Annual Report, 1922, pp. 8-25; The Program is also described with certain changes in nuance in Barry C. Smith, “The Commonwealth Fund Program for the Prevention of Delinquency,” Proceedings, National Conference of Social Work, 1922, pp. 168-174; and School and Society 18 (July 28, 1923): pp. 109-110.

28.

Commonwealth Fund, Fourth Annual Report, 1922, pp. 21-23.

29.

Ibid., p. 25; Proceedings, National Conference of Social Work, 1922, p. 174.

30.

The story of the Bureau of Children's Guidance is related in Porter R. Lee and Marion Kenworthy, Mental Hygiene and Social Work (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1929).

31.

See Lawson G. Lowrey and Geddes Smith, The Institute for Child Guidance, 1927-1933 (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1933); also Lawson G. Lowrey, ed., Institute for Child Guidance Studies (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1938).

32.

See George S. Stevenson and Geddes Smith, Child Guidance Clinics: A Quarter-Century of Development (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1934); and Helen L. Witmer, Psychiatric Clinics for Children (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1940).

33.

Lois Meredith French, Psychiatric Social Work (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1956), pp. 63-66. The title “visiting teacher” was not a helpful term. It was superseded in 1941 by the more accurate term “school social worker.” In 1942, the National Association of Visiting Teachers changed its name to the American Association of School Social Workers.

34.

Quoted in Bond, Thomas W. Salmon, Psychiatrist, p. 218.

35.

Mental Hygiene and Social Work, p. 65.

36.

See especially Chapter 4, “Nineteen Ways of Being a Bad Parent.”

37.

William Alanson White, “Nervous and Mental Hygiene of Childhood,” in O'Shea, The Child, p. 203.

38.

Annual Report, 1923, p. 14.

39.

Howard W. Nudd, “Social Work Enters the School,” Survey 54(April, 1925): 32-34; “The Purpose and Scope of Visiting Teacher Work”; in Problem Children In School, ed. Mary B. Sayles (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1927); and “The School and Social Work,” Proceedings, Conference of Social Work, 1927, p. 42. As William Healy put it, the primary question is not “What does the child learn in school?”, but rather, “How does the child feel because of school?” William Healy and Augusta Bronner, “How Does the School Produce or Prevent Delinquency?” Journal of Educational Sociology 6(April, 1933): 470.

40.

“Some Extra-Curricular Problems of the Classroom,” School and Society 19(February 9, 1924): 143-149. See also Ralph Truitt, “Barriers to Mental Hygiene Teachers,” Proceedings, National Conference of Social Work, 1925, pp. 426-430.

41.

Commonwealth Fund, Annual Report, 1939, p. 60.

42.

Ralph P. Truitt, “Community Child Guidance Clinics”; in The Child Guidance Clinic and the Community, ed. Ralph P. Truitt (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1933), p. 13. See also Ernest R. Groves and Phyllis Blanchard, Introduction to Mental Hygiene (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1930), pp. 98-99, 187-193.

43.

“The Purpose and Scope of Visiting Teacher Work,” p. 258.

44.

M. E. Haggerty, “The Incidence of Undesirable Behavior in Public School Children,” Journal of Educational Research 12(September, 1925): 102-122.

45.

See also E. H. Dexter, “Mental Hygiene in Schools: Attitudes of Teachers Towards Behavior Problems,” Proceedings, National Conference of Social Work, 1929, pp. 443-448; and “Characteristics of Problem Children Based on Judgments of Teachers,” Journal of Juvenile Research 13(April, 1929): 124-127.

46.

Commonwealth Fund, Annual Report, 1928, p. 58; W. Carson Ryan, “The Preparation of Teachers for Dealing with Behavior Problem Children,” School and Society 28(August 18, 1928): 208-215. At Western Reserve University there was a seminar described as “intensive study of several types of problem children, such as the dull, normal, superior, emotionally unstable, neglected and socially maladjusted.” Ryan, p. 210.

47.

“An Outline for the Institutional Education and Treatment of Young Offenders,” Journal of Education Psychology 6(1915): 316.

48.

Commonwealth Fund, Annual Report, 1927, p. 43.

49.

Mabel Brown Ellis, The Visiting Teacher in Rochester (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1925), p. 132.

50.

Stevenson and Smith, Child Guidance Clinics, pp. 147-151; Commonwealth Fund, Annual Report, 1930, p. 60.

51.

Witmer, Psychiatric Clinics for Children, Chap. 10, especially pp. 257-259, 273 ff.

52.

Since 1918 the Fund has expended about $218,000,000 in grants, the great bulk of it, since 1933, to medical research and education.

53.

See for example, John C. Burnham, “The New Psychology: From Narcissism to Social Control,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America, eds. John Braeman et al. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1968), pp. 396-398; Anthony M. Platt, The Child-Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and Williard Gaylin et al., eds., Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). See especially the essay by David Rothman.

54.

One publicist of the mental hygiene movement complains that before World War II, professionals in the movement didn't know public relations. They distributed pamphlets, but few were dressed up, attractive: “no one thought about white space, coated paper, headings, color, or layout.” Ridenour, Mental Hygiene in the United States, p. 96.

PHILANTHROPY AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS: ONE FOUNDATION'S EVOLVING PERSPECTIVE

EDWARD J. MEADE, JR.

Division of Education and Public Policy
The Ford Foundation

Over the past 20 or so years, the Ford Foundation's role in public education and the importance of that interest to the Foundation have varied a good deal. Still, while the level of activity, the strategies employed, and the activities supported have changed over this period of time, a constant view about improving public schools has generally prevailed. That view has to do with what some might call the essence of schooling or the core objective of schooling. Considering how complex today's issues in public education are—mainstreaming the handicapped, desegregation, financing, governance, to name but a few—that essence or core objective is sometimes forgotten in our quest to improve schooling.

John Blackie, a British educator with whom we have worked, put it this way:

The one essential point in the whole educational system is the point of contact between teacher and child. It is to make the contact as fruitful as possible that anything else—authority, administration, curriculum—exist. If the system fails to work at this point of contact, it fails everywhere.

The Ford Foundation's activities in public education have not all been close to or on this point of contact. But ultimately, whatever is done should be expected to improve the quality and equality of that central encounter. Just as those who serve in the public schools need to view this as the central mission, so must those who serve in foundations understand it, for in the final analysis, that is what one hopes to do if one claims to be improving schools.

Still, let me not be taken too literally. Sometimes the child is a young adult; sometimes the teacher is another student, a counsellor, a parent, an aide. In a more limited sense, the teacher may be a book, a film, or a computer. Also, there are times and circumstances when it is necessary to take what seems to be a most indirect route or to take up what seems to be an unrelated task in order to assist the improvement of that encounter. Strategies will and should vary, depending on a variety of circumstances. Usually these circumstances are organic to public education and to the schools rather than to the funding source, or at least they should be. Sometimes activities are supported to redefine or make more clear what should be the outcome of the encounter—what to teach, for example, or how to find what is learned. Nonetheless, the encounter between student and teacher—its richness and its effectiveness—is key to improving learning in schools; it is the objective to constantly bear in mind.

FROM THE MORE DISTANT PAST TO THE MORE RECENT PAST

With that in mind, I would like to quickly review the past activities of the Ford Foundation in the area of public education for two reasons. First, such a review gives a better understanding of how the core objective was viewed in earlier days and how strategies and activities evolved as a result. Second, it will also show how matters seem to get more complex or at least cover a broader canvas on the one hand, while on the other hand, the core objective becomes clearer, if not necessarily easier, to reach. One caveat, please. In no way should this brief and selective review be considered a complete or thorough analysis. Rather, it is aimed to reveal a few lessons learned within a context that grows increasingly complex. I shall barely touch on many of the larger political, social, and economic issues that have surfaced over the past generation both in this country and, for that matter, across the world. Such issues, and the changes in our lives and our society that result from them, undoubtedly have affected our schools in ways we have not yet fully comprehended. And, consequently, they have influenced our efforts at improving schools as well.

I start around the time when the Ford Foundation's major arm for education, the Fund for the Advancement of Education, was becoming integrated into the Ford Foundation itself, namely, the late 1950's and the early 1960's. For those who want to know more about the roots and the evolution of the Fund, I commend to you Paul Woodring's book, Investment in Innovation: An Historical Appraisal of the Fund for the Advancement of Education, published in 1970.

Recall, if you will, the setting of public education just before the decade of the sixties. The country was in the midst of dealing with the baby boom and Sputnik. It was the time when “excellence” was being urged by some and demanded by others. Indeed, the Rockefeller report, The Pursuit of Excellence, in many ways was shaping the tone for thinking about education.

At the Fund, these circumstances of burgeoning numbers of school-age children and the mood of excellence, fit together very neatly. Leaders of the Fund viewed schools as having to deal primarily with a student's academic and intellectual development. Let me be clear, however, about the Fund and what had been emerging as a national objective; namely, equal educational opportunity. In its earliest days, the Fund was dealing openly with the issue. It was deeply involved with it in 1954 when the Supreme Court made its historic Brown decision. It supported school desegregation early and, looking back, it occupied a leadership position among foundations in that regard.

Nonetheless, equal educational opportunity was viewed largely as access to schooling—schooling aimed primarily to yield knowledgeable and thinking persons who could effectively participate in the society, individually and collectively. Such a view was not intended to discount or deny remediation, if necessary, or compensatory education, if useful. Neither was it intended to create another system of schooling to parallel or compete with the public schools. Rather, it was intended to strengthen and improve both the quality and equality of what we might call the traditional basic and general education provided by the public schools.

The swelling numbers of people to be served and the demands of excellence required a response that provided for both. Putting it too simply, there were three F's that needed attention: funds, faculties, and facilities. Through various activities, the Fund helped build public support for improving the level of finances for public education. Some will remember the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, which later expanded into similar but state-based citizens councils that aimed to increase the states' fiscal responsibility for schools. Dealing with faculties meant production—production of quality teachers—teachers who had “something” to teach and who would largely learn how to teach on the job. Thus, the Teacher Education Breakthrough Program was conceived and funded to an ultimate level of about $30 million. By and large, this effort consisted of producing teachers by way of Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) programs. These most often enrolled liberal arts graduates and gave them about a half year's worth of education courses and a half year's supervised teaching internships in schools. To further the use of effective teachers, the Fund turned to technology, primarily television, the emerging electronic medium of that time. Two themes dominated the use of television: the transmission of knowledge directly from the TV screen to the student and the extension of the effective teacher to more students.

Finally, facilities. The Fund gave birth to a remarkable agency, the Educational Facilities Laboratories (EFL), whose mission it was—and in part still is—to create space for education that facilitated effective and humane learning experiences. All of us who labor in the schools know well the impact of EFL, from multi-use facilities to carpeted schools, to aesthetically pleasing environments for children (and adults as well), to modernized and rehabilitated buildings constructed earlier for different forms of education.

From these efforts grew an age of educational innovation in other areas of public education as well. The Fund and other public and private agencies helped give birth to a variety of new curricula. Sometimes these curricula of the early 1960's were called the “new deal” in education because of their alphabetic-like identity: PSSC, BSCS, SMSG, CBA, MACOS, and the like. These curricula, largely in mathematics and the sciences, were the products of substantial effort by scholars in the disciplines involved. As a result, they represented major overhauls in the content expected to be taught and learned in their respective school courses, for example, physics, biology, and the social sciences. The deployment of teachers in schools was also subjected to changes, perhaps most dramatically by team teaching and staff utilization projects (sometimes called the Trump plan, for Lloyd Trump, who was a major architect of this movement in secondary schools). Grade levels were altered by multi-grade grouping and dual progress plans, advanced placement classes, and even early admission to college.

The use of time in school also was the object of innovation. In order to accommodate such matters as large group instruction, small group seminars and independent study, and to have time follow instructional function, flexibility of scheduling was required. Human calculation of schedules gave way to the computer, the next electronic miracle. And, in fact, computer technology neatly fit another later learning strategy that emerged, i.e., programmed instruction and computer-assisted instruction.

All over the country in the earlier 1960's, and in some measure because of the Fund and Ford Foundation initiatives, innovations in schools proliferated—often for good reason, sometimes for no other reason than for getting on the bandwagon of change. Most of the innovations were based on premises about changing the use of basic resources—time, space, facilities—in order to better achieve the core objective as I have defined it. But, sometimes, perhaps often, plans for these innovations failed to take into sufficient account the effects on other aspects of the schools in the broader sense—the school context, the clients, and the general community.

THE MORE RECENT PAST

Early in the 1960's, Fund and Foundation staffs in education (who, by that time, were the same people) made decisions about the earlier work in public education. First, the M.A.T. had spread itself well beyond the Foundation's projects, and curriculum development projects were becoming public in their funding (for example, the National Science Foundation), so Foundation activities in these areas were scaled down and later phased out. Second, it was decided that while individual innovations in schools were useful, they were also limited in what they could deliver for the improvement of schools in general. Rather, attempts should be made to deal more comprehensively with school change so that, at the very least, several innovations should be brought together in the same setting. As Clarence Faust, the president of the Fund and later a vice president of the Foundation, said: “The effect of each of these innovations is like pulling a single strand of a spider's web; you pull one and you shake the whole web. Let's deal with the web.” From this decision came the Comprehensive School Improvement Program (CSIP), a program about which I shall have more to say later.

A third and important decision was to move directly into education in the cities within the context of what other parts of the Foundation had identified as the “gray areas,” an early term used for the decaying sections of the inner city. Out of this came the Great Cities Schools Program—projects located in school systems in some of the nation's larger and older cities and aimed at improving the opportunity of disadvantaged children in the public schools. This was not the first venture by the Fund or Foundation into the issues of equality of educational opportunity in the cities. Early in the 1950's, for example, the Fund was involved with school desegregation in urban areas and with the education of Hispanics in New York. Nonetheless, the Great Cities Program is particularly instructive because it was so directly relevant to the later course of public education efforts at the Ford Foundation.

The Great Cities effort helped to bring to the fore remedial and compensatory education activities and pre-school education. By and large, it developed supplementary programs and set the stage for later direct public investments into the mainstream of city schools through such federal programs as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and elements of Headstart and Upward Bound, to name only a few. This program also forged school links with communities informally through the use of community parents as aides, and formally through shared programs with other municipal services, for example, health and recreation. Furthermore, some of the projects in this program began to focus on the individual school and its neighborhood and encouraged participation by community persons in school affairs.

Later, community participation became part of the core of the decentralization movement. Initiated in New York City by actions of community groups and the Mayor's office, with the cooperation of the city school board, decentralization first sought to make “community participation” in school affairs more formal, then later raised the issue of “control” among various parties of interest in the schools: parents, teachers, administrators, and state agencies. Ultimately, one result was a change in the state education laws for New York City which established community school districts under a central board of education.

School decentralization in New York also was illuminating nationally as it drew attention not only to community participation in school affairs, but also to such other matters as collective bargaining in education and to the larger social and political contexts in which schools must operate. Suffice it to say that the controversy that ensued over this issue in New York City dramatically and powerfully underscored the governance aspects of public education and the need to attend to them in the nation's public school systems.

Let me now return to the Comprehensive School Improvement Program (CSIP), which ran throughout the 1960's with some 25 projects and cost some $30 million. The projects were carried out in a variety of school systems, large, small, and medium, urban, suburban, and rural, rich and poor, segregated and desegregated. They were focussed on a variety of levels from early childhood education through to the secondary schools, and each one was linked with one or more colleges or universities for technical assistance, research, and training. In short, CSIP projects were tried in settings that provided a fairly representative sampling of American public elementary and secondary schools.

The essential feature of CSIP was the deliberate introduction all at once of a variety of innovations—in curricula, in staffing, in instructional grouping, in uses of space, time, and technology, and in teaching methodology—many of which had been tried elsewhere, almost always in isolation from any others. To quote one of the program's architects: “Maybe the sum will be greater than the number of parts.” No two projects were alike; no project could claim to be more comprehensive than the rest; some projects engaged in activities throughout the school systems, others were limited to certain age or grade levels or to selected schools within the system.

In its later stages, CSIP also included aspects of earlier projects under the Great Cities Program. In one instance the introduction of kindergarten in one city used techniques and programs derived from pre-school projects of some of the Great Cities. Still others engaged in compensatory education using lessons learned from remedial projects also started in the Great Cities. In fact, the majority of funds expended in CSIP was spent in cities where the focus was generally on students and schools that could somehow be defined as disadvantaged.

CSIP was viewed as an effort to extend the capacity of school systems to initiate and implement changes of their own design or that of others. It also was expected to shed some light on the general capacity of schools to meet changes in external conditions and clients. At the very least, CSIP was a demonstration of a substantial and sustained commitment to schools by a private funding agency—a commitment undergirded by a conviction that children count in our society and that public education represents a vital and necessary service for all children.

THE FOUNDATION GOES TO SCHOOL

In 1972, just two years after CSIP finished its last payments to grantees, the Ford Foundation published an assessment of the Program in a report entitled A Foundation Goes To School. The report was based on a lengthy study and analysis of the Program by a team headed by Paul Nachtigal, a former CSIP project director and later a Foundation consultant. It was not intended to assess projects one by one, but rather to focus on the role played by the Foundation and how it played it, its assumptions, strategies, tactics, decisions, and the like. This method was a departure from earlier assays of large-scale programs, which generally were project-focussed and used more limited forms of analysis. The altered focus was deliberate, for the Foundation intended to learn from its experience.

A Foundation Goes To School represented an evolutionary jump in the Foundation's thinking about the extent to which it could successfully address the issues of quality and equality in public education. Since the assessment explicitly found the CSIP strategy wanting in a number of aspects, some observers ignored the insights and lessons of the report and pointed only to a picture of failure. Others, including some well-known news analysts and commentators, were astonished that a major foundation would concede to any shortcomings whatsoever, much less make such concessions in print. A then prevailing public attitude seemed to be that one could not or did not learn from institutional failures but only from institutional successes.

In fact, A Foundation Goes To School did not frame its analysis in terms of success or failure. Rather, the study considered lessons that could be learned from a sustained, well-funded, and thoughtful effort to improve schooling by means of a coherent set of innovative strategies. The study found that despite remarkable individual efforts, generally the projects did not firmly establish innovations in practice or produce widespread improvement in the quality of educational programs. Moreover, it concluded that even if the programs had adopted an even more “comprehensive” and coherent approach, they would have been unlikely to achieve more than they did.

But more important, the report challenged some cherished beliefs and assumptions about education and institutional change. For one thing, the study found that it was much more difficult to put the products of educational research and development into practice in schools than had been thought—especially in urban settings. Applying university-based academic expertise to the very different world of public schools and their teachers rarely led to lasting or significant improvements—or even changes. Also, the team discovered that more money per se does not necessarily guarantee better results.

On the whole, it seemed that these diverse efforts underestimated the complexity of improving schools. Some features of this complexity are not surprising to us today, for the lessons included many that the American society as a whole was learning for the first time during the sixties. In particular, all of us learned that to improve schools we must take into account variables such as organized teachers, the community, parents as well as students, and the range of social conditions. During the sixties, such broad and volatile social issues as civil rights, social justice, and Vietnam all had an impact on the day-to-day and long-range work and vitality of public schools.

The report brought into sharp focus the effects of the broader community on the affairs of the school. It also showed clearly that changing school programs cannot be accomplished effectively—or, in some cases, at all—without attention to the political, social, and economic forces that make up the greater school community. And, as was the case with some projects, issues larger than in-school improvement such as school desegregation had to take precedence. Certainly, the study made us more sensitive to matters of equality in educational opportunity. Furthermore, and in other communities, it meant paying as much attention to the governance of schools as to the performance of the schools. And, in the instance of projects in urban school systems, the report revealed the inequities in the ways in which such school systems were financed.

During the course of the period culminating in A Foundation Goes To School, the Foundation moved gradually from the relatively confident and knowledgeable posture that characterized the earlier era of the Fund For the Advancement of Education to one that emphasized planning and learning from experience. Previously, the Foundation was relatively confident about cause and effect. It reacted to what projects would presumably do, given certain conditions. New insights enabled the Foundation to adopt increasingly a spirit of inquiry—a new perspective on evaluation. There was a shift from asking whether a project worked or failed, to asking what could be learned about achieving enormously complex objectives, often by exploring a range of approaches.

Later, support of efforts with alternative schools both within and outside of public school systems and support of models for teacher re-training, including a handful of teacher centers across the country, also reflected this growing attitude. In supporting alternative schools with strong and active community ties, the Foundation encouraged experiments with a range of options; it realized that such alternatives were not necessarily affecting the practices of the so-called typical schools whose offerings were not meeting the needs of many students attracted to the alternatives. Similarly, the work with teacher centers mainly addressed the needs of highly motivated, volunteer teachers but rarely reached many who might need help even more. Yet despite doubts and concerns about this matter, the Foundation was convinced that much could be learned about the nature of teachers' learning generally—the very notion of which was fresh and provocative, and still is. The Foundation supported these efforts with the understanding that the aim was not to install new orthodoxies, but to discover what might further be needed to do a better job in reaching the core objective of all schools.

One view which emerged from these efforts as well as from A Foundation Goes To School was that the ultimate innovator in schools was the teacher. The CSIP report, for example, attributed changes in practice to the training of teachers. The report stated: “In all the projects, the teacher was seen as the key to school improvement. The teacher's skill and attitude were identified as the central factors in improving a school beyond the status quo.” At the same time, the report, confirmed by experiences in programs for staff development, or teacher re-training, indicated that teachers were often overburdened by enormous expectations of new programs and social pressures for rapid change. Teachers needed consistent support in order to develop their capacity to meet new demands, especially in attempting to provide education of quality for all children.

The report also put instructional technology into clearer perspective. No matter how rich the potential value of any technology, including TV, it became apparent that such technology was largely complementary to the human teacher. Likewise, curriculum packages produced by research and development teams were limited. Usually their success depended upon the understanding and support of the teacher.

Indeed, a major result of the CSIP study was that lasting and significant changes would not occur unless teachers were directly and actively involved in the planning and development of the desired changes. For example, team teaching, the use of different organizational schemes, and new institutional partnerships depended to a large degree on the support and active participation—in planning and implementation—of the teachers who were involved and affected.

A Foundation Goes To School set a trend in the Foundation's thinking about the nature of institutional change in education. The question was no longer what innovations “work” but what works for whom, and in what kind of context? Further, the importance of the individual school itself—rather than the school system—emerged as the proper focus for effort to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Indeed, the report repeated over and over again this last lesson, namely, that scale is a major factor in improving the quality of what takes place in schools. It was the school not the school system, the teacher not all teachers, the pupil not all pupils, and the teaching unit not the packaged curriculum—the “micro” and not the “macro” perspective that most critically affected the success of most ventures to improve the quality of teaching and learning.

Also related to the individual school was its community context. Rarely was a school “better or worse” than the community in which it was located and which it served. The attitudes, activism, and support of community leaders and parents often affected what could happen in the school, how it could happen, or, in some cases, whether it could happen at all.

THE IMMEDIATE PAST

Results from A Foundation Goes To School took effect along with the activities that grew from the Foundation's increased concern for equity during the seventies. During this time, the Foundation's activities in public education have been addressing two broad areas of concern: the equity of the educational enterprise and the quality of teaching and learning in schools. There has been a consistent commitment to each, along with an awareness of the tension that can sometimes exist between them—often resulting from the extraordinarily rapid advances in public policy, particularly with the entry of the federal government into educational policy in the early sixties and continuing today. In the past 20 years, these advances have often found their most visible and immediate expression in school policies which, in turn, have placed high—a few might say unrealistic—demands on the capacity of the schools to meet increasingly difficult and diverse needs. In 20 years, for example, the roles of teachers and principles have changed drastically in response to many of these new mandates.

At the same time, there has been an awareness that many of the Foundation's activities in equity on the one hand, and quality of teaching and learning on the other, have been concurrent rather than actually synchronized, which they ideally should be. The reason for concurrent activity rather than synchronized work is due largely to differences in opportunities, timing, maturity of ideas and organizations, and phases of development rather than to an inherent conflict between equity and quality.

Most of the Foundation's work in public education in the 1970's has been aimed at equity. It was this concern that undergirded the Foundation's interests during this decade in school finance, school desegregation, women's rights, affirmative action, and the rights of citizens and children in relation to schools. Why, equity? First, and most important, is the fact that justice for the broader society is simply right. Also, the quality of justice in the broader society inevitably affects its schools. Finally, improving the quality of schooling depends substantially on the equity present in the schools and in the system itself.

Concern for equity in education leads to many paths. In the area of school finance, and given the legal responsibility of states for public schools, it has led the Foundation into support of activities aimed largely at the state level, primarily at changing education tax systems. Equity, in this instance, means developing systems for generating and distributing tax revenues to school districts to meet defined state constitutional requirements of educational opportunity and equal protection.

In the area of school desegregation, the concern for equity has led the Foundation to assist others in implementing various plans as ordered by courts or as designed voluntarily. By and large, the Foundation has supported the efforts of various technical assistance agencies, including research, analysis, and training, that help parties involved in school desegregation—courts, communities, economic and business leadership, and, of course, school officials and teachers who are affected by the plans.

Foundation attention to matters of sex discrimination and women's rights in public schools was largely derived from the requirement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Here again the Foundation's role entailed support of technical assistance plus monitoring, data gathering, and training. It also meant support to review and revise curricula and school programs that discriminated between the sexes by content or course offering, tests and guidance, and the like.

The rights of citizens and children in relation to schools flowed more directly from federal constitutional requirements and, of course, from the simple understanding that the public schools are the public's business. A wide variety of projects have been supported—from assistance to community-school governance arrangements to improvements in the relation between labor and management in schools, to advocacy for the rights of children and parents in school matters.

Finally, each of these areas clearly leads to public policy in education. Since most of the equity issues are based on legal mandates, public policy flows directly from them. Policies consistent with these legal requirements are developed and implemented in schools, and the public expectation is that they will carry forward the intent of the law. Obviously, many of these policies of equity as they are carried out in schools affect teachers and learners; that is, they bear on the core objective of improving the contact between teachers and learners, and the context and climate in which that contact occurs. Thus, the traditional notion of the school as an environment for learning—an almost wholly internal pedagogical climate—must today take into account the complex external climate. This includes the shared governance, the civil and human rights and, of course, the political, social, and cultural factors of the constituencies and communities served, and those who do the serving, such as teachers, administrators, and school board members.

Along with working on educational equity issues during the seventies, the Foundation continued to work on issues of educational quality. In this instance, the effect of A Foundation Goes To School profoundly influenced two major program interests that emerged. One dealt with training teachers on the job, or school staff development; the other dealt with the quality, understanding, and utility of knowledge—about learning, about learners, and how better to assist learners to learn.

The rationale for school staff development grew directly from the lessons of the CSIP. Although the report about CSIP assessed the program as one for teacher development, in fact the most successful components of teacher training were limited in their intent. Typically, program-connected teacher training was used as a means to launch desired education innovations. CSIP projects rarely extended to training activities for teachers that were aimed at general improvement of their own teaching. Since the emphasis was on having teachers accomplish complex, carefully designed tasks in a coherent fashion, there was little effort to help teachers learn how to help themselves accomplish general pedagogical goals. Reflections about such matters by the Foundation led to a series of projects in school staff development—including work with classroom advisors, the use of teachers as consultants, and the creation of independent teacher centers—that treated teacher development more as an end than as a means.

Still, these exploratory efforts were indirect attempts to improve schooling. For instance, the first centers for staff development—often called teacher centers—were for the most part independent of the control of school systems, affording them enough autonomy to explore and refine concepts and practices that could prove useful to teachers. Foundation work in staff development included few guidelines: that participation of teachers would be voluntary, that work should focus on teachers on the job, that teachers themselves must take part in shaping and developing these new resources, and that projects should remain as free as possible from specific curriculum and staffing mandates determined by others. While Foundation and project staff devoted some attention to enabling these often fragile institutions and unfamiliar roles to become accepted and financially supported by school districts that acknowledged their value, the main purposes of the work were to nurture new forms of instructional leadership and to enrich the growing dialogue about the importance and nature of teachers' learning.

Although less direct, the interest in research about learning also grew from the CSIP assessment. That assessment called attention to the kinds of knowledge essential to the core objective—the interaction between teachers and students—which included: knowledge about how children learn, knowledge about how children develop generally, and knowledge about what is to be learned and how it might be learned. And, most important, it called attention to the need for these kinds of knowledge to be synthesized for and by teachers in ways that help learners to learn, or putting it another way, that help teachers become more effective as teachers.

The research interest was complicated by the very nature of research about education. At its worst, a good deal of it is fragmented, not cumulative, poorly conceptualized, and produced for researchers and not policy-makers or practitioners. At its best, some of it is vividly illuminating, policy guiding, and action provoking, but only if its limits and utility are well understood. Still, research about learning is essential to better understanding of the core objective and how to achieve it. We need to know better what content and context of experience both teacher and learner bring to the interaction; we need to know what knowledge is essential and what needs to be learned; we need to know ways by which such knowledge can be acquired and by whom. Finally, we need to know how all this can take place to produce learners and thinkers within the larger context of equity and the democratic community.

THE PRESENT

What does all of this past experience tell us? How, for example, does it enlighten us about the original view of Fund and Foundation staff in the 1950's, namely, that improving schools meant primarily helping children develop academically and intellectually? If, by that they meant—as I believe they did—assisting all children to acquire knowledge and to know how to acquire knowledge in order to think and to participate actively and productively in the larger society, then the Foundation experience in public education over the past 20 years has been reinforcing.

What that experience unmistakably reveals is that in order to deal effectively with that goal more must be taken into account than was thought necessary in earlier times. Neither student nor teacher can be viewed apart from his or her circumstances of development, cultural context, environment, and the like. Similarly, the content or knowledge to be learned is changing constantly, both in its substance and in its forms. In short, we need to broaden our understanding of pedagogy but not in an isolated fashion, as was so popular in the 1950's and 1960's in the world of education research and development. Rather, we need to view pedagogy more comprehensively as the synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines about what is to be learned, who is to learn, and how who can learn what.

In addition, the experience has made more evident the social context in which this society expects its public schools to function. At the very least, we fully expect that the overarching values of equality and equity are to be served and fulfilled by our public schools perhaps even more than we expect this of other public services. Clearly over the past 20 years or so, this society has made equity a major public policy issue for schools—equity in whom they serve, in what they do, and in how they deal with both. This concern for equity in the democratic state calls to mind how prophetic were the words of James Bryant Conant in the close to his book, The Child, the Parent, and the State, published in 1959.

I believe historians in the year 2059 will regard the American experience in democracy as a great and successful adventure of the human race. Furthermore, as an essential part of this adventure—indeed, as the basic element in the twentieth century—they will praise the revolutionary transformation of America's treatment of its children and its youth. They will regard the American public school, as it was perfected by the end of the twentieth century, not only as one of the finest products of democracy, but as continuing insurance for the preservation of the vitality of a society of free men.

Also, the experience of the 1960's and 1970's in improving schools taught the lesson of community—the community context for the school itself. Rarely was a school able to be effective without a solid understanding and usually active participation in the community it served. Often, the school needed to reach out and use community resources—human, material, and financial—to broaden and enrich its learning opportunities for children or to insure greater equity among them. It was as if the school needed to extend beyond its borders in order for its in-school efforts to be truly successful.

This 20-year span has further confirmed that the core objective of public schooling is indeed the essential business. That core objective is, as Blackie put it, the improvement of the point of contact between teacher and learner. It confirms that if philanthropy wants to help improve schools, then foundations need to support activities that somehow—directly or not—will make the point of contact more effective. Certainly, our view of how to go about that has evolved over this time, but we also have learned that the objective is more clear than ever before.

We also know that it is more complex than we had thought it to be and that it is undoubtedly more important than we ever thought it was. Further, improving the core objective or the essence of public schooling does not lend itself easily or directly to the “macro” strategy or to grand designs. Instead it lends itself to strategies and designs that take into account the larger state of society, especially the context of equity our society demands and deserves, but which at the same time are also sensitive to the “micro” nature of the point of contact, with all its subtleties and differences among teachers and learners.

Another lesson about equity and quality has to do with the rights of all constituencies to share in the definition and design of what is “quality education” and why it is so. Whether the constitutent be parent, teacher, student, administrator, school board member, state official, federal bureaucrat, or citizen-at-large, each has a role and a responsibility to participate in what probably is and needs to be a continuing process. In short, equity in decision making is as important as is equity in services.

As with other sanctioned and supported public services, the schools are and should be subject to the pulls and pushes of the body politic. Today, the issue of what schools should and can do is more complex than was the case in earlier times, primarily because society is more complex and constantly changing. Furthermore, we know more about the interdependence between society and its services. Thus we once again face the question, “What are or should be consistent purposes, shifting purposes, temporary purposes, and roles of schools for their constituents and their communities?”

Foundations can assist the public in examining this difficult question in at least two ways: First, they can help to assure that knowledge is produced and brought to bear on the issue. This includes knowledge about human development, knowledge about learning, knowledge about ways to teach, and knowledge about communities and society (what they want, what they need, what resources are available, what schools can do, what other service areas can contribute, and so forth). Second, foundations also can help to insure that all of the involved parties who are served by and who serve the schools have appropriate access to and roles to play in the processes by which these issues are discussed, debated, and resolved.

And last, among the findings of A Foundation Goes To School—the turning point in our thinking about public schools—was that outcomes depended in no small part upon agreement in understanding between the grantor, in this instance the Foundation, and the grantees about each project's objectives, strategies, and methods, and about the spirit of the enterprise. The likelihood of mutual learning from the experience was highest when the purposes and goals were well understood and shared by the grantees and the Foundation. How like the classroom, where learning improves as a result of clear and mutual agreements and understandings. Whether between teacher and learner or foundation and grantee, the terms of the understanding must be clear in order for mutual progress to occur. As we discovered gradually over the years with the Fund, the Great Cities' effort, and the CSIP, the aim is not only to achieve specific results—to try out some educational innovation, for example—but at the same time to learn how to do a good job of addressing a tough problem of fundamental social importance, that of improving schools.

In summary, we are more certain than before of the ultimate goal: improving the quality of contact between teachers and learners within a context of equity and humanity. But we have learned. And as real learners are bound to be, we are much less certain of exactly how to reach the goal. Therefore, we need to continue to learn, and we will.

REFERENCES

Since this paper relates to the Fund for the Advancement of Education and the Ford Foundation and especially to the activities of both agencies in the area of public schools, the following selected documents may be useful to readers interested in knowing more about those activities.

BOOKS

Richard Magat, The Ford Foundation at Work: Philanthropic Choices, Methods, and Styles (New York: Plenum Publishing Corporation, 1979).

Paul Woodring, Investment in Innovation: An Historical Appraisal of the Fund for the Advancement of Education (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970).

REPORTS OF THE FORD FOUNDATION

A Foundation Goes To School: The Ford Foundation Comprehensive School Improvement Program, 1972.

Matters of Choice: A Ford Foundation Report on Alternative Schools, 1974.

Paying for Schools and Colleges, 1976.

Untitled and unpublished manuscript on School Staff Development, April 1979.

FORD FOUNDATION REPRINTS

Harold Howe, “Citizens, Schooling, and Education,” 1977.

Edward J. Meade, Jr., “Foundations, Schools, and the Public Good,” 1965; “Expanding the Community of Education,” 1967; “Accountability and Governance in Public Education,” 1968; “Improving Schools: Looking Back to See Ahead,” 1973; “Models for Reforming Education in the City,” 1973; “On Training Teachers: Trust in the Classroom,” 1975.

AGENDA SETTING, ASSESSMENT, AND IMPACT: THE KETTERING FOUNDATION AND EDUCATION[*]

CHARLES L. WILLIS

Senior Planning Officer
The Kettering Foundation

The Charles F. Kettering Foundation is a non-profit, privately endowed organization with programs in four mission areas: education, international affairs, urban affairs (administered through a Social Sciences Division), and food plant sciences (administered through a Science and Technology Division). The program missions are directed by staff members and implemented through a combination of internal staffing and contracts with other institutions. About one-third of the Foundation's staff of 137 persons supports its activities in education.

The objective of the Foundation's education missions is to foster improvement in elementary and secondary schools through development of programs by an affiliate, the Institute for Development of Educational Activities (I/D/E/A/). Missions in education include:

1. Research to better understand the process of change and the ways schools function. In concert with several other foundations, I/D/E/A/ is now conducting a study of schooling that involves an extensive analysis of schooling in the United States.

2. Developing and applying approaches to school improvement. I/D/E/A/'s Change Program for Individually Guided Education (IGE) is in use in a network of elementary, middle, and high schools across the country, and related development efforts are under way.

3. Inquiry and dissemination of information to help educators and the public understand educational issues and possible ways of responding. I/D/E/A/ has sponsored and handled staff work for the National Commission of the Reform of Secondary Education, the National Task Force on High School Reform, the National Task Force on Citizenship Education, and the National Commission on Youth. Seminars on selected critical issues are conducted each year to define problems more explicitly and recommend responses. I/D/E/A/ sponsors the Annual Gallup Poll of Public Attitudes Toward the Public Schools and conducts a week-long summer program each year for school administrators, the I/D/E/A/ Fellows Program.

This paper focuses on these educational missions and seeks to answer five major questions:

How did education become a major program area of the Kettering Foundation?

Why was an operating approach chosen over grant-making?

How have recent Kettering Foundation missions in education been selected?

How are education mission efforts of the Foundation assessed and what impact have they had?

What is likely to be the nature of Kettering education missions in the future?

HOW DID EDUCATION GET ON THE KETTERING FOUNDATION'S AGENDA?

The history of what was to become I/D/E/A/, the entity which has carried out the Kettering Foundation's education programs since 1965, began on August 22, 1963, with a meeting of the board of trustees at which the idea of selecting a new program effort emerged (see Figure 1). There was no quorum at the August, 1963, meeting and no official business was transacted. There was, however, extensive discussion about the role of the Foundation and its programs. Out of this discussion a consensus developed about the desirability of finding a better and more significant way to use its funds rather than continuing to make grants to many recipients for a variety of largely unrelated projects. The staff was informally urged to study ways such a purpose might be accomplished.

Following this meeting, Foundation staff members worked to develop a response to the trustees' request. After nearly nine months of consultation with trustees, officers, staff members of other foundations, leading educators, and other individuals, education was recommended by the officers as an area for increased Foundation concentration. Education was a topic of central concern to Foundation officers and to a number of trustees. Whether or not this interest alone would have been sufficient for its being selected as an area of increased emphasis is questionable. There were, however, other circumstances which provided support for the selection.

The years after World War II had seen growing interest in education. Enrollments at all levels were going up. Local, state, and federal outlays for public education were increasing. This was the era of post-Sputnik criticisms of American education and of major federal investment in a social service that had been regarded as the nearly sacred preserve of state and local government. The early sixties constituted an era of nationwide enthusiasm for education reform. This time of optimism and of rising expectations, however, was also a time of concern for careful observers of schools. There continued to be what many considered unreasonable gaps between what was known about teaching and learning and what was practiced. The Kettering Foundation, other foundations, government agencies, schools, school districts, and numerous universities were caught up in finding ways to help narrow this gap.

The recommendation that educational research and innovation become the Kettering Foundation's second primary program[1] was approved by the board of trustees in May, 1964. Subsequent to this approval, the staff began a series of personal visits to individual trustees and others, seeking guidance. They discussed in what way the Foundation would respond to the needs of education. These visits with trustees were to accomplish several purposes:

1. Further clarification of each trustee's views on new program directions.

2. Sampling of the trustees' reactions to staff suggestions for possible education programs.

3. Use of trustees' knowledge to identify additional sources of information for staff planning.

The staff also met during this six-month planning period with professional educators, research center personnel, other foundation officials, directors of government agencies, members of the business community, and journalists involved in education reporting.

In November, 1964, the staff reported the results of its preliminary research on proposed education programs for the Kettering Foundation. The general idea was to create an independent national commission dedicated to the improvement of education,[2] the purpose of which would include the stimulation of support for educational research and for development of creative processes to institutionalize educational improvement. It was decided that the results of this research should be implemented in a number of school districts, through school administrators affiliated with the commission. Several model or demonstration situations would be established as a base from which to launch dissemination efforts. Areas of interest included basic and applied research, curriculum, pedagogy, school organization and operation, demonstration programs and model schools, communication with school administrators, the politics of education in local, state and federal governments, school staff training, and public relations.

FIGURE 1. TIMELINE AND PROGRAM OPTIONS SUGGESTED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF /I/D/E/A/

It is interesting to note that in this staff report it is mentioned that the U.S. Office of Education would “soon be funneling…large appropriations into the public schools through a variety of programs and devices.” Planning of educational laboratories and research and development centers was cited, and the staff report stated “there is reason to believe the nation can accomplish substantial alteration to traditional ways of doing things in the public schools.” The anticipated expanded role of the federal government in elementary and secondary schools helped motivate the Foundation to become more intensely involved in education.

The board approved (November, 1964) preliminary plans for implementing a major new project in education, and the staff began planning a conference of national leaders from both the public and private sectors. The conference was held on January 27, 1965, to explore the advisability of forming a new national commission. Twenty-five participants attended, including one trustee.

The consensus of the conference was that a national education organization designed to disseminate and market new ideas and innovations should be created. It suggested appointment of a steering committee to guide development of such an organization under Kettering Foundation leadership.

The steering committee met immediately following adjournment of the main meeting and by April 1, 1965, a detailed prospectus for forming a new organization was produced. This prospectus identified 15 program possibilities in four major areas (see Figure 1, column 6).

This original document was distributed to members of the conference and to others for review and comment. A second and materially revised draft was prepared based on responses to the initial draft (Figure 1, column 7). The second draft was sent to steering committee members for review and was discussed at a meeting of the steering committee on May 10.

During this period, the Foundation staff also put together its ideas about how to organize and operate the Institute. A staff document released on March 3, 1965, identified the entity to be established as “The American Corporation for Education” and included seven general activities or programs which the new organization might undertake (Figure 1, column 5).

At the meeting of the steering committee on May 10, the name first proposed—Kettering Institute for the Advancement of Education—was changed to its present name, Institute for Development of Education Activities (I/D/E/A/). The committee recommended that, in addition to organizing and financing the project, the Foundation should undertake to operate it under Foundation leadership. The committee also suggested that it would not be practical for the Institute to carry out all 15 programs. As a result of this meeting, the revised prospectus, dated April 30, 1965, recommended eight programs for the first year (Figure 1, column 8).

These recommendations were presented to members of the board on May 12, 1965. The board unanimously resolved “to initiate this activity and appropriate up to $200,000 as the officers shall determine for moving ahead and developing a series of the specific projects.” Two individuals who had participated in the January, 1965 conference were employed on a part-time basis to begin planning and implementing these activities, and exploration in cooperation with several others got under way.

By October, 1965, it was felt that members of the steering committee, others actively associated with the I/D/E/A/ project, and those with possible future connections should meet with the board of trustees' education committee. This was done and, after an overall review of the I/D/E/A/ concept, members of the education committee agreed to recommend to the full board appropriation of up to $1 million for calendar year 1966 “to continue the projects budgeted for I/D/E/A/.” The board approved the education committee's recommendation at its meeting on November 11, 1965.

By this time the I/D/E/A/ project was envisioned as three clusters of activities:

1. A basic research center to focus on the following: what should be taught and when; matters relating to the students' ability to learn; materials and techniques to aid the growth of moral, ethical, and personal development; and the validation of good education experiments.

2. A multimedia instructional system center designed to develop ideas and to distribute them through a consortium of demonstration schools, a core of consultants, and a training program for change agents.

3. An information services project to include a film to inform the public about education; a study of public goals; a conference of high school students on improving education; monitoring of major activities and organizations that affect education; telephone lectures on subjects of current interest; case histories of successful innovation; a publication series on school organization and operation; and a study center for school administrators.

Most advanced were plans for the information service operation. It was to include:

1. Summer institutes for school administrators in one-week sessions designed to stimulate innovation and change—a program subsequently called the “I/D/E/A/ Fellows Program” that continues to this day.

2. A film on education innovations, subsequently called Make a Mighty Reach. (This film program continued through the mid-1970's.)

3. A student curriculum conference in early 1966 to obtain constructive criticisms from students on schooling.

4. The Gallup Survey on Public Attitudes on Education, an effort that has continued under sponsorship of several organizations over the past 10 years.

5. A newsletter on innovation.

The idea that materials and ideas would move from the Research Division through the demonstration and information units was not achieved until several years after the Institute began. The information and services unit was the first to begin operations, focussing on the tasks indicated above. Next to get under way was the Demonstration Schools Project.

The Research Division in 1966 began with a study of educational change and school improvement. The aim was to design and test a more powerful approach to change than those attempted in the past. Products of this research did not begin to emerge for dissemination by the Information and Services Division until early 1968.

The demonstration schools experiment, which began with 12 schools and was later enlarged to 36, was phased out after several years of operation. The project, however, was the forerunner of a much more successful network of schools supporting the IGE program.

In retrospect, it is clear that circumstances, as well as planning, led the Foundation to choose education as a major effort. Program directions, selected from an ambitious list of possibilities, grew out of a coming together of the priorities of the board of the Foundation and the interests of the people hired to do the work. During the process of selecting education as an area of concentration for the Foundation and then in choosing initial program efforts, members of the Foundation's board were kept informed in a comprehensive way. Once decisions were made about education and specific programs, however, involvement with trustees tended to revert to regular meetings and periodic written progress reports. Trustees have been involved more intensely at times of major shifts in program emphasis.

WHY DID THE KETTERING FOUNDATION CHOOSE AN OPERATING PROGRAM TYPE OF ORGANIZATION?

Although its educational planners had originally conceived plans for an independent national commission on education, the consistent recommendation received from a variety of individuals was that I/D/E/A/ should be kept as an operating part of the Foundation. Consultants argued that:

a novel venture such as I/D/E/A/ would experience great difficulty in securing financial support from outside sources for some time to come,

the prestige of being associated with a foundation would be helpful in obtaining acceptance for innovations in the educational community,

the I/D/E/A/ concept would more likely maintain momentum and efficiency under Foundation leadership, at least in the initial stages,

beginning I/D/E/A/ as a Foundation operation would be easier than incorporating a new entity, and

an independent I/D/E/A/ might have to compromise its ideals, assume a far different organization, alter its objectives, and ultimately become far less important and effective than it was originally intended to be.

While the arguments were persuasive in themselves, there was also a successful precedent for an operating subdivision within the Foundation; it is more than likely that the precedent provided by the Charles F. Kettering Research Laboratory influenced the decision. Virtually from the beginning of the Foundation in 1927, its staff had included a substantial number of scientists doing experimental work in the disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics. At the time a decision was made about I/D/E/A/ as an internal operation, these efforts had been institutionalized in the Charles F. Kettering Research Laboratory, which employed some 65 researchers and technical and support personnel in a 40,000 square-foot, well-equipped laboratory building owned by the Foundation in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Shortly after I/D/E/A/ began program operations, however, a new long-range plan was developed. This plan projected a development pattern for all Foundation projects that would ultimately remove them from organizational and funding control by the Foundation to complete independence. In accord with this perspective and to accommodate income-generating activities of the education program, I/D/E/A/ was incorporated in March, 1968, as an affiliate of the Kettering Foundation. Membership on the board of trustees for the Foundation and for I/D/E/A/ was identical, and certain officers held identical positions in the two organizations.

The question of moving toward fiscal and program independence, however, was not so easily resolved; it was a subject of intense staff discussion from the time it was again proposed in early 1967 until 1971. A decision was finally made in 1971 to keep I/D/E/A/ as the educational operating arm of the Foundation and to retain fiscal and program control.

HOW HAVE RECENT FOUNDATION MISSIONS BEEN SELECTED?

Directors of the major education missions of the Foundation, along with many of the staff, have been in the organization for more than a decade. Program recommendations submitted to the trustees arise primarily out of areas of concern identified by the staff in consultation with others. Research that helps aid the process of change in education has been among the topics of concern since the formative stages of I/D/E/A/.[3]

One mission is the Study of Schooling—an in-depth analysis of curriculum, methods of planning and teaching, approaches to decision making in schools, and relationships between school and community—and it grew out of a longterm interest of I/D/E/A/'s director of research. It was discussed on numerous occasions in the I/D/E/A/ Program Council—made up of the Foundation's three education program directors together with the I/D/E/A/ executive director and program officer—well before the Study of Educational Change was concluded. It was also discussed with representatives of other foundations.

The Study of Schooling is now underway, supported by the Kettering Foundation and 11 other organizations. Information collected from 38 schools in seven states across the country is being analyzed by the study's research team, and reports and recommendations on priorities for school improvement are being prepared for release over the next two years.

Growing concern over the aims and purposes of public education in the 1960's led the Foundation and I/D/E/A/ to begin a series of inquiries through seminars, task forces, and commissions in an effort to help bring about more effective problem solving by the educational community as a whole. The first report of what was later to become the Annual Gallup Poll of Public Attitudes Toward Schools was a part of this effort along with seminars and special reports to the public and profession on topics ranging from decline in achievement-test scores to declining enrollments.

Over the past decade, I/D/E/A/ also has contributed to a national inquiry into the aims and purposes of education, sponsoring a series of national commissions and task forces on critical issues in education. The Reform of Secondary Education, a report of the Kettering Foundation-sponsored National Commission on the Reform of Secondary Education, was the first in this series. This report was followed by The Adolescent, Other Citizens, and Their High Schools, the product of a year-long inquiry by Task Force '74.

The student responsibility section of the Task Force '74 report led to an in-depth study of citizenship education, sponsored by the Kettering and Danforth Foundations. This report by the National Task Force on Citizenship Education, Education for Responsible Citizenship, was published in 1978 by McGraw-Hill. It includes recommendations for inculcating principles of citizenship in children and youth, along with suggestions for increasing youth's involvement in the affairs of government and public institutions.

Another outgrowth of Task Force '74 was the National Commission on Youth, formed to study and recommend more effective ways of helping young people move into adult roles. The Commission's report, which deals specifically with issues of education, employment, and service opportunities for youth, was published in 1979.

In 1966 I/D/E/A/ began a week-long summer training program for selected school administrators. This program, the I/D/E/A/ Fellows Program, focuses on new developments in curriculum, teaching and learning, administration, and other issues relating to education. Specific topics for seminars and the attention of commissions are discussed by the Education Program Council of the Foundation. More than 600 administrators throughout the country and from the Department of Defense schools overseas will participate in the program this summer. The growing network of I/D/E/A/ Fellows includes nearly 4,500 educators, several of whom have participated in two or more of the summer sessions.

HOW ARE EDUCATION MISSIONS OF THE FOUNDATION ASSESSED AND WHAT IMPACT HAVE THEY HAD?

Kettering Foundation officers and staff view evaluation as an integral part of each mission and project. It is done to serve both program and project needs and the needs of management and trustees. Project staffs rely heavily on internal, day-to-day, peer review and evaluation which is supplemented with periodic surveys, by others who are either nationally recognized as experts in one of the program areas or have special knowledge, experience, and expertise in evaluation. The total education program is periodically reviewed by outside panels of distinguished leaders in education and related fields.

Because continuous project evaluation is preferred over evaluation of a completed project only, staff members continuously analyze, critique, and modify projects. The Foundation cannot afford, either from a humanitarian or a financial standpoint, to find at the end of a 10-year program that it should have been pursuing a different course of action.

A more specific understanding of the Kettering Foundation's approach to evaluation emerges from an overall review of the IGE development effort, given below. Such a review is helpful for two reasons: First, there is a great deal to say about evaluation as it relates to this program. Second, this approach to Foundation program development in education may offer some suggestions about the unique role foundations can play in the future of education.

DEVELOPING AND APPLYING APPROACHES TO SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

The I/D/E/A/ Change Program for Individually Guided Education (IGE) is a process for tailoring learning programs to individual students and for guiding continuous improvement of the school and staff. Decision making about such matters occurs in every school so the I/D/E/A/ Change Program is simply an approach to staff development designed to aid implementation of these improvement processes. Some guidelines and processes of implementing IGE came from the Study of Educational Change and School Improvement which was begun by I/D/E/A/ in 1966 in a league of cooperating schools in Southern California. I/D/E/A/ also drew on the efforts of other programs, such as the Ford Foundation-sponsored Harvard Teaching Teams' Projects (1959-1964). Another source was the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning. Through an agreement in 1969, results of the Center's experience with a multi-unit organization up to that date were combined with I/D/E/A/'s research and development efforts to prepare in-service materials relating to IGE.

The elements of IGE are identified in the 35 “outcomes” listed in Appendix A. This list describes conditions which I/D/E/A/ staff members and others believe to be important in a vital, dynamic school that is capable of continuous growth. Recently, the IGE staff members were interviewed regarding the context and processes they felt had contributed significantly to the development of IGE. Their responses emphasized several important characteristics.

Members of the project staff must have a high level of competence, a clear sense of mission goals and directions, and a strong sense of ownership of the project.

There must be openness to diverse points of view—a collegial feeling among staff and a corresponding respect for both objective and subjective data.

Finally, there must be the freedom to take risks and the protection of staff members from pressures that distract them from doing what they believe to be best.

The interview also focussed on the processes the staff had used during this 10-year project. Staff members said they have relied on:

1. Clearly stated mission goals for longterm consistency in the project.

2. A shared decision-making process for identifying project goals, objectives, and activities.

3. Careful exploration of a variety of alternatives, including clarification, discussion, and consideration of the anticipated consequences of each decision.

4. Shared accountability for all aspects of the project.

5. Continuous critiquing and modification of projects to reflect the group's best thinking.

6. Continuous analysis and improvement of group processes.

There was a strong feeling among those interviewed that the above contexts and processes are essential for effective, continuous, peer evaluation.

The development of IGE included four phases,[4] each having an evaluation component. The first phase involved specifying the outcomes desired. Definition of the problem, identification of conditions which would help solve the problem or fulfill the need, and selection of strategies to achieve these conditions were accomplished through literature search, consultation with experts, and dialogue among staff members. This phase resulted in our being able to say, “This is the problem (or what is needed) and this is what we can and should do about it.” A process of evaluation was at work even at this early stage, as the Kettering staff decided what to accept or reject in the Harvard and Wisconsin studies noted above, and as they reduced the desired outcomes for IGE from over 100 originally listed to 35 through feedback from selected experts and by staff discussions and refinement.

The second phase consisted of a series of pilot trials. Beginning in 1968, staff members from I/D/E/A/'s office in Dayton began working directly in selected schools to find ways of using findings from the Study of Change and other sources to develop tactics and strategies for individualized student learning programs. These programs, it was believed, should also provide for continuous improvement of the staff and school. The focus of I/D/E/A/'s work was on developing processes that could be applied to any goals that a school and community might adopt rather than setting up neatly packaged outlines.

Under a project called Enhancing Differences, I/D/E/A/ staff members devoted more than two years to working in 20 elementary, middle, and junior high schools in Ohio, Florida, New York, and Michigan. The Enhancing Differences project was guided by several basic concepts about teaching and learning that had been documented through many years of research and practice, but that had been implemented only in a limited number of schools and classrooms. Information was collected on a day-to-day basis through observations, interviews, and small group discussions with participating students, teachers, and others. The purpose was not to test the validity of IGE objectives or outcomes, but to find ways to implement them. Results of these pilot experiences were combined with the research and development efforts of several cooperating educational institutions to create the I/D/E/A/ Change Program for Individually Guided Education (IGE). Materials (books, filmstrips, film, and study guides) and training strategies were systematically evaluated. The key questions asked were:

1. Does the document or film do the job for which it was designed—inform about a concept? Motivate? Provide specific illustration of an application?

2. Was the participant able to demonstrate the behavior the training was intended to produce?

3. Did the training strategy achieve its goals?

Many other individuals, organizations, and institutions analyzed various aspects of the IGE project, and the education staff often consulted these findings, in addition to internally conducted evaluation, in refining its training strategies. For instance, the education staff participated in in-depth studies of the I/D/E/A/ program conducted by such outside agencies as Belden Associates, the University of Nebraska, the University of Missouri, the Center for New Schools, and the Center on Technology and Society. Training materials and in-service activities have undergone continual revisions as a result of these studies.[5]

Finally, after achieving the defined outcomes within schools in the Enhancing Differences Project and after developing training materials and strategies for teachers, the I/D/E/A/ staff identified other institutions which could field test and disseminate the program. A three-part training program for IGE facilitators—who would implement IGE in a number of schools—was developed. During the first part, participants learned how to work in small groups and how to teach small-group techniques to others. They developed an understanding of IGE methods for planning, organizing, and helping each other improve. In the second part of training, participants planned instructional programs for students and worked with them under typical school conditions. The third part was a follow-up session that was given two weeks after the second part. In this session participants learned about their unique roles as facilitators and developed plans for implementing the IGE program in their schools.

Schools that participate in the IGE program are motivated by the expectation of growth in the areas described by the 35 outcome statements. The amount of growth they are able to achieve in these 35 different areas is considered to be the measure of their success in staff development efforts. The outcomes are also used as independent variables in studies on the effects of IGE.

A vital part of the development of IGE was monitoring IGE schools in order to assess their progress in using these fundamental processes of education. I/D/E/A/ staff members have done this on a wide scale by using teacher self-assessment questionnaires. These have been used since September, 1973, and were developed and tested for validity and reliability between 1970 and 1972.[6]

Each year teachers from IGE schools are asked to judge the degree to which each of the 35 outcomes has been implemented in their schools. Responses received during the first year serve as a baseline against which a school's progress in implementing each of the IGE outcomes is measured. We have learned that even small increases in outcome achievement levels result in positive changes in student and teacher attitudes about teaching and learning. From the staff's experience and the recommendations of facilitators, however, an average outcome score of 60, based on a scale of 0-100, is probably necessary to produce measurable changes in student achievement.

Recent data indicate that slightly less than half the approximately 2,000 schools in the program have achieved average outcome scores of 60 or above. Schools that have achieved scores above 60 show a significant increase in benefits and have more positive attitudes toward IGE than do low implementing schools.[7]

A recent trend toward more rapid adoption of the outcomes may be the result of improved materials, training, and implementation strategies. A national survey divided IGE schools into categories according to when they began implementation, and the data revealed that more teachers from the recently implementing schools had special training for IGE, and more of these rated their training as “excellent” or “good.”[8]

Schools do not implement all outcomes at the same rate. Most concentrate on a few selected outcomes initially, postponing the others until they achieve noticeable progress with the first group. Those outcomes which are most often implemented early relate to school organization and district support for the concepts of IGE. Those with the lowest level of implementation during the first two years have to do with student responsibility, effective use of community resources, and interaction among IGE league schools.

No group of schools in any given start-up year has achieved an average implementation score much above a score of 60; however, the data are based on composite scores. Individual school scores range from 30 to 84. Average scores tend to approach a plateau rather rapidly, because the first outcomes selected for implementation are more easily achieved than others. The rate of change levels off as schools attempt to achieve more difficult outcomes.

IGE schools have changed significantly during their participation in the I/D/E/A/ Change Program. The most dramatic changes documented have involved procedures used to make decisions and the methods used to effect change in schools. Significant growth also has taken place in education management practices of IGE schools and in relationships among teachers, students, and parents. In addition, participating schools have improved their abilities for gearing the learning environment to the individual student.

Research reports on IGE published during the last several years underscore the importance of measuring the degree to which a program is implemented before reporting conclusions about its merit. Using self-assigned labels such as “IGE” or “non-IGE” to classify schools has invariably resulted in findings of no significant difference.

Much evaluation of IGE remains to be done. We have not seen a research study that differentiates between the degrees to which IGE processes are implemented by each teacher within a school. All studies to date have used composite school scores, rather than individual teacher scores. Neither have we seen a study sensitive to the possibility that IGE processes are applied with varying degrees to different students within each classroom. While studies of individual students are logistically difficult, they might be necessary to adequately evaluate any instructional program based upon processes of individualization.

Today, nearly 250 colleges, universities, local school districts, other education service centers, and state departments of education are helping schools throughout the country implement the IGE program. The total number of schools involved exceeds 2,000 in the United States, and there are more than three dozen American-sponsored schools in other countries participating.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED ABOUT THE PROCESS OF HELPING SCHOOLS TO IMPROVE?

Here are several lessons:

1. What happens in a school happens as a result of the commitment and collective action of a critical mass of individuals in that school. The circumstances within a school and associated with a school are likely to be more powerful determinants of commitment than impressive sales pitches about the logic and benefits of a new program.

2. Information conferences and other dissemination efforts are necessary for educating people about new program opportunities. However, a limited number of individuals and institutions will be willing to invest time, effort, and money in joining a new approach.

3. It is necessary to provide opportunities for teachers to become involved in a process that enables them to look at what they are doing and what is possible, and then to reach out for new possibilities.

4. It is necessary to provide opportunities for teachers to learn how to implement a program, rather than merely to provide information about the program itself.

5. It is necessary for teachers and others associated with a school to be clear about the benefits of implementing a new program and to have the means of getting feedback on how well a school is doing in reaping those benefits.

6. Some schools and districts feel a need to cite a “prestigious sponsor” for any program they have adopted, while others find it necessary to avoid references to an outside agency entirely. A school or school district must decide itself who will get credit for an effort.

7. A substantial period of time is necessary before a program is implemented in a given school to any significant degree. The usual support for an innovative program of two or three years, with the hope that it will go on its own after that, is probably far from adequate.

8. Outside money for schools is not essential. We do not pay people to become involved in IGE, in the I/D/E/A/ Fellows Program, or in our various research efforts.

9. The impact of a program label like Individually Guided Education changes over time. It appears to be a necessary element in the beginning; subsequently, it becomes troublesome for some, yet continues to be beneficial for others.

The systematic and longterm inquiry leading to the present status of IGE in schools throughout the country was not something I/D/E/A/ did alone. Participation by numerous schools, local school districts, regional education service centers, colleges and universities, state education agencies, and other institutions has been critical to the accomplishment of IGE objectives over the past 10 years. Furthermore, numerous components of IGE were conceived and tested by many others over several years.

WHAT IS LIKELY TO BE THE NATURE OF KETTERING FOUNDATION MISSIONS IN THE FUTURE?

In 1965, the people who provided the guiding concepts of I/D/E/A/ identified “two general themes [that] seem to stand out as one surveys the current education scene….” One of these themes was excellence. The other was individualization.[9] Today, recognition of the problem of individualizing learning in ways that still maintain desirable standards of pupil performance continues to run ahead of the means of implementing such programs in schools. Numerous local school districts and a number of state agencies have moved in recent years to adopt requirements relating to individualization. Similar expectations are reflected in some federal legislation relating to education.

The pursuit of excellence and individualization will continue to be a high priority in public education, and the need for effective ways to build staff skills to work toward these goals will be much in demand during the years ahead. The Kettering Foundation intends to continue participation in these efforts.

The fact that the federal government may be involved in an area of our interest need not, as a matter of course, be a deterrent to our own involvment. Even though research on educational change has been a federal government interest for years, we believe that we have made a significant contribution to both theory and practice in this area. It may well be that federal interest in elementary and secondary education can serve to open opportunities for cooperative efforts between government and foundations in the public interest. Support for individualizing learning is reflected in many areas of federal funding, and it has been a primary thrust of the Kettering Foundation for more than a decade. Kettering has the usual assets of a foundation when it comes to responding to social needs or problems: flexibility, the ability to move quickly, and freedom from the constraints of a constituency. Also, over the years we have developed a much more sustained effort than is typical of many government-funded programs in education. Often, the idea of promoting innovation gets caught up in a psychology that suggests giving something a push for two or three years and then going on to something new. Our experience suggests that such short attention is of limited usefulness.

All of this implies that more effective relationships between government and foundations in the interest of elementary and secondary education are desirable and possible. We have, however, identified no magic formula by which this cooperation might proceed.

We are mindful of the dictum that foundations should use their resources to start new waves; in fact, such an attitude is part of our creed. We also believe that we can help make significant contributions to waves already started, and, on occasion, we might help shift some waves in slightly different directions.

Specific Kettering Education Program areas in the future will continue to focus on helping to make a difference directly in schools. New topics on our agenda over the next several years have been selected from critical issues in education identified through:

Our experience with IGE and feedback from participating agencies and schools.

Feedback from the I/D/E/A/ Fellows Program.

Topics of annual meetings of professional and education-related organizations.

Issues being given attention in the professional literature and news media.

Furthermore, we have selected our program targets for the future based on the extent to which our skills and resources will enable us to help do something about them. Problems of accountability, in-service training for principals, and exceptional children relate very closely to what we are trying to accomplish with IGE. In addition, we have been involved with global education for some time and plan to continue this emphasis.

The character of our efforts in the future is reflected in these excerpts from Kettering Foundation President and Chairman Robert G. Chollar's message in the Foundation's 1978 annual report:

…it is essential to realize that the number of groups necessarily involved in the solution of broad social problems has multiplied in recent years…. The scope and complexity of today's problems cannot be confronted successfully by isolated, homogeneous groups. Issues aren't strictly compartmentalized; nor should be the efforts of those who intend to address them.
As the complexity of society increases, more attention must be given to the proper level at which specific problems can best be addressed—and to ways of integrating activity among those different levels….
…[T]he nature of power and effective leadership has been altered significantly by the growing interrelationship among different elements of our society. “Clout” today is not the ability to go it alone, but rather to muster and support those who—working together—are able to get the job done; responsibility for the successful confrontation of critical issues must be broadly shared.

REFERENCES

1.

Science had been an area of primary emphasis within the foundation for many years.

2.

Unless otherwise indicated, this and other source documents are unpublished materials on file at the Kettering Foundation.

3.

Results of the Study of Educational Change and School Improvement have been reported in six publications by McGraw-Hill Book Company. See the summary volume, Jon I. Goodlad, The Dynamics of Educational Change, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), p. 267.

4.

Information for descriptions of these phases was adapted from “The Role of Evaluation in a Mission Oriented Foundation,” an invited paper by Jon S. Paden of the I/D/E/A/ staff, presented at the AERA annual meeting in April, 1978.

5.

A comprehensive report by Jon S. Paden on the development, implementation, and evaluation of IGE called Reflections for the Future was recently released.

6.

Jon S. Paden, The Validity and Reliability of IGE Implementation Questionnaires: A Technical Report, (Dayton, Ohio: Institute for Development of Educational Activities, Inc., 1975).

7.

A general picture of IGE implementation is based on the average level of implementation of five groups of schools starting the IGE program at different times since 1971. As time passed, all groups improved their scores, but schools beginning IGE in 1974 and 1975 attained mean scores of 50 or above within two years, while groups starting earlier took three or four years to reach a similar level.

8.

Jon S. Paden, A National Evaluation of the I/D/E/A/ Change Program, (Dayton, Ohio: Institute for Development of Educational Activities, Inc., 1975).

9.

An unpublished report from a meeting of leading educators and other citizens convened by the Kettering Foundation in Chicago on January 27, 1965.

APPENDIX

Individually Guided Education Outcomes

1.

All staff members have had an opportunity to examine their own goals and the IGE outcomes before a decision is made to participate in the program.

2.

The school district has approved the school staff's decision to implement the I/D/E/A/ Change Program for Individually Guided Education.

3.

The entire school is organized into Learning Communities with each Learning Community composed of students, teachers, aides, and a Learning Community leader.

4a.

Each Learning Community is comprised of approximately equal numbers of two or more student age groups. (Ages 5-11) or

4b.

Each Learning Community is comprised of approximately equal numbers of all student age groups in the school. (Ages 10-19)

5.

Each Learning Community contains a cross section of staff.

6.

Sufficient time is provided for Learning Community staff members to meet.

7.

Learning Community members select broad educational goals to be emphasized by the Learning Community.

8.

Role specialization and a division of labor among teachers are characteristics of the Learning Community activities of planning, implementing and assessing.

9.

Each student learning program is based on specified learning objectives.

10.

A variety of learning activities using different media and modes is used when building learning programs.

11.

Students pursue their learning programs within their own Learning Communities except on those occasions when their unique learning needs can only be met in another setting using special human or physical resources.

12.

The staff and students use special resources from the local community in learning programs.

13.

Learning Community members make decisions regarding the arrangements of time, facilities, materials, staff, and students within the Learning Community.

14.

A variety of data sources is used when learning is assessed by teachers and students, with students becoming increasingly more responsible for self-assessment.

15.

Both student and teacher consider the following when a student's learning activities are selected:

Peer relationships

Achievement

Learning styles

Interest in subject areas

Self-concept

16.

Each student has an advisor whom he or she views as a warm supportive person concerned with enhancing the student's self concept; the advisor shares accountability with the student for the student's learning program.

17.

Each student (individually, with other students, with staff members, and with his or her parents) plans and evaluates his or her own progress toward educational goals.

18.

Each student accepts increasing responsibility for selecting his or her learning objectives.

19.

Each student accepts increasing responsibility for selecting or developing learning activities for specific learning objectives.

20.

Each student can state learning objectives for the learning activities in which she or he is engaged.

21.

Each student demonstrates increasing responsibility for pursuing her or his learning program.

22.

Teachers and students have a systematic method of gathering and using information about each student which affects his or her learning.

23.

The school is a member of a League of schools implementing IGE processes and participating in an interchange of personnel to identify and alleviate problems within the League schools.

24.

The school as a member of a League of IGE Schools stimulates an interchange of solutions to existing educational problems plus serving as a source of ideas for new development.

25.

Learning Community members have an effective working relationship as evidenced by responding to one another's needs, trusting one another's motives and abilities, and using techniques of open communication.

26.

The Program Improvement Council analyzes and improves its operations as a functioning group.

27.

The Program Improvement Council assures continuity of educational goals and learning objectives throughout the school and assures that they are consistent with the broad goals of the school system.

28.

The Program Improvement Council formulates school-wide policies and operational procedures and resolves problems referred to it involving two or more Learning Communities.

29.

Students are involved in decision-making regarding school-wide activities and policies.

30.

The Program Improvement Council coordinates school-wide inservice programs for the total staff.

31.

The Learning Community maintains open communication with parents and the community at large.

32.

The Learning Community analyzes and improves its operations as a functioning group.

33.

Teacher performance in the learning environment is observed and constructively critiqued by members of the Learning Community using both formal and informal methods.

34.

Learning program plans for the Learning Community and for individual students are constructively critiqued by members of the Learning Community.

35.

Personalized inservice programs are developed and implemented by each Learning Community staff as a whole as well as by individual teachers.

[*]

I am indebted to my colleagues at the Kettering Foundation for their helpful comments on this manuscript. I am particularly indebted to Patricia Piety and Carl Feller of the foundation staff for their advice and assistance.

NEEDS AND PROSPECTS FOR THE NEXT DECADE

Round-Table Discussion

CHAIRMAN: Robert Connery, President, Academy of Political Science

Gordon M. Ambach, Commissioner of Education, New York State
William M. Dietel, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Peter D. Relic, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education,
U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

CONNERY: We are going to have something of a change of pace in this panel. Rather than summaries of papers as we had this morning, this is going to be what our last speaker called the “noise of a free society.” It's going to be more or less a give-and-take. Each of the panelists will have five minutes to discuss whatever he wants to discuss, and then we'll try to involve some of you. Now, I would warn the panelists, and you also, that under recent Supreme Court decisions, with which I'm sure you're all familiar, when a police officer goes about arresting a criminal, he's bound to warn him that he need not speak, but that if he does speak, anything he says may be used against him. We are being taped, gentlemen, and we have had the experience of some of our leading politicians, in the last few years, of the dangers of taping. Also, in a sense you're on the air, and you can expect to be broadcast at any time in the future. With those few remarks, let me push ahead.

The topic for the afternoon is very neatly put, but I'm going to suggest the real topic; the real question that we're going to discuss, and that we need to discuss, is whether there is any place for private philanthropy in the area of public elementary and secondary education in the future. Now, we've heard much about history, and history is valuable, of course, in telling about the past, the lessons we've learned. But the real question we're facing isn't that simple. It's what about the future, the next decade, the next couple of decades, and is there really any place in our future democratic society, this noisy society we've heard about, for private philanthropy? There has been a tremendous development of foundations, and isn't it really true that it's just a way rich men avoid equitable taxation? To be sure we've been talking about some big ones, but there are thousands of them. And can we permit, in a democratic society, our rich individuals to escape their obligations in taxation by simply setting up a foundation? Isn't it inevitable in the decades ahead that you will have more and more government control and more and more regulation of foundations? And will there be a place for them as the federal and state governments pour more and more money into education? Will there be a place for foundations at all? I think we ought to give some consideration to that.

One of our speakers asked this morning, opening up the question, “Isn't the give-and-take of democratic politics a better means of shaping America's future than letting the executives of private foundations determine where our society is going? In effect, aren't the elected representatives in Congress and in the legislature, representatives of the whole people, better judges of our social needs than foundations?” We heard this morning, for example, that foundations frequently act on “soft” data. They frequently don't know what they are doing on a certain program. They have unexpected results and spin-offs. Can that go on?

And then, the other thing is that we have a neater bureaucracy here that wants to take over this field completely. Some years ago, at a meeting sponsored by the Board of Regents of the State of New York to which all the presidents of the private colleges were invited, a vice chancellor of the State University got up and said, “Let's face it, gentlemen, our job is to put you out of business.” I must say he was silenced after that. I wanted him to write an article for me, and he said, “I can't say a word. I have been talked to.” Well, fortunately, today we have the Commissioner of Education and we have representatives of some leading foundations here, and so, perhaps, we will have some debate and discussion of this. Mr. William Dietel has the first five minutes, and we'll call time on him. As you know, he is the President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and he's observed educational policies not only in the United States but also in other parts of the world. Mr. Dietel, what do you have to say at this moment? Remember, you're on tape.

DIETEL: That's a provocative beginning, Bob, not altogether new to anybody who works for a private foundation. And I would think that many of us who occupy positions in foundations have heard those charges now for a good many years, and in many respects, we take them very seriously and see some validity to some part of the challenge that is being presented by those who see the foundations in the light in which you depicted them in your comments. I guess I think it's possible to make a very positive response, however, and the kinds of comments that were made this morning and the remarks that Professor Cremin made really do help to make the case for the importance in the future of the private foundation. Now let me see if I can make that a little more explicit.

I think it is true that as we face the future, in a society in which one-man one-vote really begins to take effect and in which there is going to be increasing decentralization of power to the local level, there is going to be a new or a newer role for foundations to play. Perhaps there will be a less important role than in the past for a handful of major foundations and a far greater role for those smaller foundations, which are increasing in number, to play in assisting local communities as they tackle very serious local education problems.

Now, by and large, I think the historical record doesn't show much evidence of that in the past. But I strongly suspect that, as the community foundations increase and as corporate philanthropy increases—and if the Internal Revenue Service and the Congress doesn't destroy the capacity of Americans of wealth to set up new foundations, new and smaller foundations—we will be increasingly locally focussed. Those philanthropic institutions are going to be attracted to the world of education but not for major studies of a research character. They are not going to try to take an overview. They are not going to be interested in comprehensive change in the educational system. But they are going to be very responsive to local needs.

In the past the field of education was dominated, as you can tell from the discussion thus far today, by a handful of large foundations. But there are a large number of foundations which were never mentioned in the course of our commentary today, which have been involved on the edges of social change and have been particularly interested in what was happening at the local level. So that, number one, I would say, No, I don't think foundations are going to disappear. Number two, they're going to be more needed than they were before in the field of education because they are going to be able to provide that risk capital, unless we squeeze them off at the tax gate, that the larger foundations cannot afford to place in the hands of a multiplicity of local communities which are taking seriously the peculiar local needs of their school districts. And so there is, I think, going to be a new alliance struck between increasingly active local community people concerned with the local school system and these smaller foundations. That's where they are going to find the kind of financial assistance to undertake change that they are not going to be able, because of the complexity of the bureaucracy at the federal level, to get out of the federal government. Nor are they going to get it out of the foundations traditionally active in the field of education, because they have other roles to play. So, in summary, I see the prospect for the future of private philanthropy in the field of public education as being very bright, but being, by and large, of a rather different character, with a different focus, and with a far larger role being played at the local level.

CONNERY: Well, we are fortunate in having not only a foundation man on the panel but also two men who can speak for government. Certainly no one can speak for education in the State of New York better than the Commissioner. Commissioner, I hope, after my previous insults, you won't start off by saying, “But some of my friends are foundation men.”

AMBACH: I won't start that way. I'll start by saying that I really came to testify for the foundations, and very strongly so, in response to your first question. I'm pleased to join you. Frank Macchiarola apparently could not come, and I might exercise the State perogative and comment also on behalf of local school districts in his absence.

After the profound analysis we heard this morning about impacts of foundations, I'm a bit hesitant to see us, and to see me in particular, tell you how next to spend your dollars. But it seems to me that this is one of the purposes of this afternoon's panel, and, perhaps, one of the key purposes of having representatives of government agencies here.

The fact of the matter is that my colleagues and I daily make multimillion dollar decisions with respect to how we are going to see educational resources allocated. We need a great deal of help from outside regarding how those decisions should be made. In my view, one of the very important sources of those ideas has been the experiences and activities of the foundations.

I might make two observations on this morning's discussion. One is that not all foundations or governmental ventures are going to succeed. Some of them, perhaps most of them, are going to fail. But that doesn't mean they weren't worth it in the first instance. Let's not dwell just on the failures, but let's be sure that we also look at the successes. The second observation is to pick up on a point Larry Cremin made about the unanticipated consequences of various funding decisions by the foundations.

I represent not only elementary and secondary educational interests in the State of New York but also the entire educational enterprise. Our department has been very closely associated with many foundation efforts, and we have solicited funds from several different foundations. We've probably received grants from some 15 foundations over the course of the last 10 years—and in multimillions of dollars.

The three most innovative programs in higher education that we have underway in New York right now have all been started by funding from foundations. One is a program concerned with placing those who have Ph.D's in the humanities in business and industry because there is a shortfall now of positions available for them in academia. The Regents External Degree Program, a second innovative effort, has been funded almost entirely by foundation grants. A third effort has been our assessments of credits in non-collegiate institutions that offer a vast array of academic programs. This is funded, also, by foundations.

Let me shift to the elementary and secondary area. I want to comment about a project through which very substantial foundation funds have been coming to our department to develop a new concept of testing reading power. The single most important activity in the State of New York right now, with respect to shaping education in the next few years, is competency testing. At the heart of the competency testing movement, as we are now working at it within the State of New York, is the concept of testing “degrees of reading power,” reading comprehension. The interesting thing, which Fritz Mosher would bear out, is that we never started to develop the test with any idea that this would be used for purposes of competency testing. We began by trying to find a better measure of the assessment of reading ability or reading comprehension so that we could use it as a way of strengthening instruction. The tests still can be used that way and many other ways. But they have now become the heart of our approach to competency testing and reading comprehension and a model for our concept of testing writing and mathematics. I couldn't get the money from the state legislature in 1972 or 1973. Not because it wasn't a good idea. It's time hadn't yet come. I hope these examples indicate the importance of foundation funding.

It's interesting to look back at mistakes and successes of the past, but I know that everyone sitting in this room is concerned with how we are going to make the best judgments for the future. We have funds to commit; we have decisions to make. I can give you a short list or I can give you a long list with respect to what areas should be funded. I might come back to the long list later, if anyone is interested.

To introduce the next item, I pick on a comment Dale Mann made earlier. Foundation funding, at this point, should have a direct connection with the actual impact made between teacher and learner. There is a great concern with respect to basic skills and so on, and one of the very important things that needs to be done right now is to look at the very basic elements of schooling. Are the pupils in fact in the classroom? Is there any kind of meaningful contact going on? What is being done to improve what I would call instructional management at the school level?

If you look at the demographics for the next several years, you see that New York State will lose 90,000 students a year for the next four years. The trend has been that way, and it will continue for a while. Then consider the relatively slight intake of new teachers. In upstate New York there were fewer than 2,000 new teachers employed last year out of 230,000 teachers. That's not a substantial turnover. Add the fact that the pressure on local budgets will be joined by increasing pressures with respect to teachers' rights to their positions, and one is drawn to the conclusion that the most important need for the next decade is to strengthen the capacity of the teachers who are already there. This means not only certain in-service programs but also consideration of how instruction is organized so that current deficiencies may be overcome.

We have launched projects in this direction. We encourage other efforts to identify performance that is not going well, to look at the school as a system, and to work on the principal's role in managing the resources within that system. This is the one place where, in my view, there should be the greatest effort made. As I said, I have some others, but let me stop at that.

CONNERY: After you discuss the role of private philanthropy in public education, Mr. Secretary, perhaps you can tell us whether we will have a new Department of Education by the end of the year, and what this will mean for educational policy.

RELIC: The answer has to be, Yes, that private philanthropy has a role to play, as it long has. Let me just take a look at a couple of issues that cry out for involvement, if anyone chooses to be involved. I'm not certain how much we are spending in the entire area of youth employment and training at the federal government level. I think it's probably over $6 billion when you add it all up. And yet, we have no real cogent federal or national policy about youth employment. And then we're hit with a massive reality that certain populations in our cities, such as Black teen-aged females, are unemployed at the rate of 40 to 50 percent. Do we have to look at each other and say, “Should we be involved?” There can't be any question that anyone who wants to take the leadership and be part of a partnership, through conscience, has to be involved.

When you look at the whole area of teacher training and administrator training, we're doing a great deal of talking today in education about the diagnostic/prescriptive approach. And for some reason, thank goodness, we seem to be having some success in the training of elementary school special education teachers. We almost seem to know what we are doing. And yet, when we take a look at the high school curriculum in the language arts, and the development of that curriculum, and the training of those teachers, it's a quantum leap from the logic of the training of special education elementary teachers to what we're doing or not doing, for whatever reasons, in the training of language arts teachers in the high school.

We took a look at administrator's training, and Dale Mann was part of a group two weeks ago that attempted to bring the local and state agencies, the colleges of education, and the professional associations together. We asked, “Do we know what we're doing? Do we intend to have the outcomes that we have in administration training?”

Take a look at the budding principal today, going in with all the enthusiasm for leading a community, for being involved with children, with teachers, with parents, and with curriculum development. Yet, in those first few weeks on that job, that person is told, “One, you are responsible for Title I, not only in your school, but you're part of the entire district Title I team. And you have a plan for energy management that has to be produced by September 15th. And of course, because we have decentralized budgeting, you're totally responsible for the budget of your school. Congratulations, you are also on the management collective bargaining team.” And that principal says, “Who's training me for this? Not only pre-service, but am I going to get any training for this in-service?” And the probability is no. It's called on-the-job experience. Who's leading, the local agency, the state agency, the federal government, the universities, the foundations? To say one has to be more involved than the others, exclusive of those other delivery systems, seems to me to be a logical absurdity.

When we take a look at the problem of integration in this society's education—not desegregation but integration—we're nowhere close to that in our 16,000 school districts. Who's going to take the lead to move from desegregation to true integration in the school system, in the school building, and in the classroom? The research isn't there, the leadership isn't there, and we certainly haven't forged the partnership to make all of this happen.

Take a look at communications. We have a joint review dissemination network developed in the federal government. Because we think that with what success we have in Title I and the success we have in innovative projects in Title 4C, perhaps if we can disseminate the findings of the successful and effective models, other people will learn. And yet we spend only a few million dollars on it, we have no real partnership, and we constantly are asking the foundation community and the universities, “What role can you play with us in the dissemination of the effective models that in fact do exist in these United States?”

My remarks have to be tempered, though, by the reality that I've been part of the federal government for less than three years. My previous 19 years were all in elementary and secondary education. I don't know if that's a disadvantage. I think it's actually a great advantage.

Now, Mr. Chairman, you asked about the Department of Education, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say something. I think our greatest strength and our greatest weakness is the tremendous turnover that exists at the policy levels in federal government. There isn't much continuity, and yet there is the opportunity for new ideas constantly to come in. But I think too often we have grandiose ideas of what we can accomplish. If we can only make more effective what already exists, then we'll accomplish something. I think that's what Ernie Boyer means by this Bureau of School Improvement, and I hope that's what we mean by this cabinet-level Department of Education, whose time will come now or it won't come for a long time to come. If we can just cut that regulation writing and distribution time from 500 to 300 days; if we can just make more effective the communication between theory and practice; if there can be some more logical continuum from local agencies through state agencies through the federal government, then, maybe, the time has come for a separate cabinet-level Department of Education.

Several people have asked, “Come on, what are the odds? What are people saying?” The White House says we're going to win by 40 votes, and the opposition says we're going to lose by 40 votes. So, it's still up in the air. But I think it should come to a vote early next week.

CONNERY: Well, speaking as a political scientist, and in all seriousness now, it seems to me that we are in a decade, certainly one or two decades, where the ballgame is going to be a different kind of a ballgame than we've had in the past. There are massive amounts of money coming in—federal, and state, too. There are growing bureaucracies. And so the question is, “How is this going to affect our school system?” Somebody this morning referred to the watchdog undertaking of a foundation, and I would suggest that in these decades ahead, this, too, would be a very good thing for a foundation to do—to be a watchdog of federal programs, and state programs, and city programs for that matter.

Now let me very briefly define what I mean by watchdog. That doesn't mean simply a critical role, but I think the approach should be: We're not going to question what you want to do, except to see whether you define your goals. Really, we're going to accept that you want to do this, but how can we help you do the job better, and more efficiently, and more effectively? What is the goal of this program? Do you know what the goal is? Has it ever really been stated in legislation? And given this goal, how can you effectively carry it out? That isn't just criticism, it's building something there. And I think foundations offer great possibilities, not solely for educators, not solely something for political scientists, or economists, or historians, but a joint approach—and it's a management study here, too, a management approach. How can you do what your democratic society wants to do and do it better? And of course we'll be critical of part of it, but we'll also suggest better ways of doing it.

DIETEL: On the watchdog matter, I would make this comment. Foundations, in other parts of their work, have had extensive experience as monitoring agencies. I think that when the story is told of what occurred with respect to the federal legislation having to do with civil rights, one of the brightest chapters in that story is going to be the role of foundations in monitoring the government agencies to make sure that they in fact carried out the will of the people as expressed through the law. And the day is going to come in other areas, and maybe education is one of those that will come to the forefront, when that kind of monitoring activity, which is to make sure that the will of the populace, as expressed in legislation, is in fact carried out.

BENJAMIN: I couldn't coax Mr. Mosher onto a panel. He's in the back there. He's been very reticent. But in getting ready for this session, I reviewed the annual report of the Carnegie Corporation. It seemed to me there has been a major reversal. Formerly, the foundations were in the lead and the government then followed. They showed that something would work, and then the government came in and said, “Okay, we're going to put resources into this.” It seems to me that, from your annual report this year, what you're really doing is checking up to see if the government is doing what it said it was doing. Now this is what both Mr. Connery and Mr. Dietel have been talking about in terms of a watchdog role. I put this in the context of the book that we distributed to you all, in which person after person is saying that, in local school districts, the Feds are asking them to be too accountable. They can't cope with the redtape. They can't cope with the paperwork. And there may be too many watchdogs. A lot of resources are being spent watching somebody struggling to try to do something. And it seems that the federal government is so concerned with accountability that the foundation, in building on another level of accountability, is in a way enhancing the conflict and may not be optimizing. I was wondering if you'd comment on that; perhaps some of the other members might.

MOSHER: Well, I was about to try to comment on adding another watchdog—one on foundations. Because listening to the morning discussions, particularly to Larry on the history of some of these things, led me to realize that if you take history seriously you have the disadvantage of becoming humbled and ambivalent. And to hear about the confidence with which people in the twenties were pushing foundation programs, I realize that we should have that disadvantage. I realize that there is a substantial chance that we may be wrong if we buy into some line of work, and I've found—I can give you an example of a way—a mechanism by which we are now expressing that ambivalence.

Gordon Ambach referred to competency testing. I can think of no other movement in this country that one has more reason to be ambivalent about, and that can cut a lot of different ways—many of them harmful. And, yes, we (Carnegie) have been involved in funding the development of the test which he thinks is good, and which the State is now turning to use for competency testing. But at the same time, we will probably support the people who will sue the State for using that test.

AMBACH: You are. Not on that case but….

MOSHER: Yes. But the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund (which Carnegie supports) is complaining to the Office of Civil Rights, at least, about the way that that is being implemented. The Law and Education Center is suing Florida and will probably be here in the state later. And in a way I'm not sure that that's such a bad thing.

AMBACH: It's not.

MOSHER: .…Although it does increase the noise and some of the confusion and maybe reduces efficiency. On the other hand, we've got a feeling that the people who are affected by these programs ought to have some power to express their interest in the face of them. And maybe the mix—in an analogue to the political process—will come out slightly better all the way around. But it is an irony, and we cannot escape those kinds of ironies.

ESTY: I'm John Esty, President of the National Association of Independent Schools. And since I'm neither from the public system nor a foundation person, at least now, I have no ax to grind one way or another. Formerly, I was a grant officer with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. What I'm going to say sounds facetious, but I don't mean it to be. We've heard this morning that one of the things that came out of the Ford Foundation's study, A Foundation Goes To School, (and it was picked up by Mr. Mann again), was that the greater the distance hierarchically between the inventors of some new wonderful scheme and the practitioners, the less likely it is to work. We've also heard that what happens in the classroom, not surprisingly, between teacher and student is finally the measure of all things. We've also now been talking about who's watching the watchdogs, and what are the watchdogs watching, and so forth. Here is my question, and again, it is not meant to be facetious, “Could you tell me honestly that all of the foundations' programs that we've been looking at and talking about have a greater impact than if the foundations, at least the major ones collectively, were to give to every public school teacher in this country $150 a year? There would be no accountability whatsoever. The superintendent wouldn't have a say in it; everyone would simply have a drawing account of $150….”

DIETEL: It would do less harm and less good.

AMBACH: It's an engaging notion because it's so simple, but I think its simplicity is its defect. We've been talking about trying to get the focus on contact between learner and teacher. That doesn't necessarily mean the thing to do is provide $150 per teacher. I would carry your analogy beyond that, as others did back in the sixties, and say, “Why don't you put it all into the families?”

Your suggestion makes us think, and that's the reason for your point. It's not just a matter of what can be done for each and every teacher. I talked about what I called instructional management in school. That is more than what each teacher does. There are other things that have to be done to make sure the teacher is able to perform as we would like the teacher to perform. There is a particular need in this next decade to provide special supportive assistance to the teacher, which I think teachers would not buy if they had the money to spend themselves. There is a certain need to stress the organization of what has to be done in school. There's a need for developing shared objectives, with a monitoring system to determine whether the children are on target with their studies. There is a need for a system for the principal to change the allocation of resources, not just at the end of the school year but within the school year, in order to realize objectives.

ESTY: The public monies go precisely to those kinds of things. I was trying to make a clear distinction between what the private sector could do versus the public sector. The public sector clearly has a lot more accountability….

AMBACH: I know of no enterprise in this country that spends less on the attempt to internally change itself than the educational system. This is a very serious problem, especially if you recall the demographics of contraction in the next several years. It is extremely difficult, either at the state or at the local school district level, to get the earmarking of a percentage, two percent, three percent, five percent, of the funds to be used for purposes of renewing the teachers, or trying changes within the system—the kind of R & D money that anybody expects a corporation or a business operation to spend. We need funds for the purpose of freeing certain people already in the system to learn how to do something different.

ESTY: And do you see that to be the role of private philanthropy or one key role?

DIETEL: I see that to be a key venture activity of the foundations. It is, of course, impossible to do it across the board. But to do it in enough places so that there can be a model that can be a demonstration—that this is, in fact, the way for other public funds to be used, in part, to get the same results.

RELIC: I hope that $150 per teacher does not mean a total disaggregation of the potential for leadership. When we look at what has been achieved at the federal level, for better or for worse, in the Arts and Humanities, in the Great Cities, in Early Childhood and Head Start, somebody had to take the lead and it didn't come from Washington. I hope that if you give the $150, one hundred teachers have the good sense to pool their total of $15,000 and do something that will have some impact rather than buy $150 worth of Magic Markers. And that means training for themselves, that means curriculum development. Who is going to develop the curriculum in energy? Who is going to do the research and development in that critical area? Whatever else we do won't count unless we get to the knowledge and the skills and the values and the attitudes of what those kids are going to do or not do. It's a good idea, and in fact, let's sit down, John, and begin negotiating right now.

ESTY: I don't have any money any more.

RELIC: But if we do, lets build the one-third in for fringe, because others will get involved too.

CARALEY: I, too, am a political scientist, and I'm kind of upset and shocked. Whom do the two gentlemen up there claim they are unable to persuade? A cabinet official? State legislators? When you say you can't get $2 million to circulate the successful innovations through some kind of a publication, I'm absolutely shocked. Can't someone just squeeze out several million dollars to do these things?

AMBACH: No, the answer is a flat, No. You have a program budget in operation in our state. But each of the pieces of that program budget is explicitly reviewed for its own purposes. I can tell you, after 12 years of battles in an attempt to find R & D funds, that it is extraordinarily heavy going.

CARALEY: The legislature just doesn't understand the concept, won't buy it?

DIETEL: There are a lot of concerns about the length of time that it takes to bring home a package or a result. There is also skepticism that if you do put any front-end money into R & D work, it's only going to lead to increased cost at a later time. I would say that those are the two key factors that tend to lead to a reticence.

KLEINMANN: I'd like to comment on that, if I may. Successful government leadership in the area of innovation is generally based on getting out in the field; witness the farm bureaus and the farm agents. That was, I think, the last successful government program in terms of dissemination. To have $2 million or $10 million to publicize an innovation is not necessarily going to get the innovation dispersed and disseminated across the country. It takes a lot more. We were talking earlier about investment in the practitioners of the product. We're going to have to do a lot better in terms of getting the teachers interested in what we're doing at the national and state levels in order to get a good innovation disseminated. I'd like also to make a small pitch for the teachers' organizations, the NEA and the AFT. These are the organizations to which the teachers belong. And these are the organizations that can most effectively help you disseminate the kind of innovation that you want moved across the country.

CONNERY: In speaking about the future and planning for the future, one doesn't necessarily need to argue that foundations should not do what they have done in the past, that is, support innovation. But, looking at the change that is taking place, the great complaint in universities today is about the amounts of money spent on answering government questionnaires, filing reports, and keeping records. The same thing is now appearing in the elementary and secondary school systems. Here is the place that foundations can come with management studies. Isn't there some better way of doing it? That's the kind of monitoring or watchdogging that I was suggesting be done.

AMBACH: I'm intrigued by the move to the local level for foundations, and I agree that this would appear to be a very important future movement. I would like to suggest, also, that there must be foundations working on state levels. Quite frequently the states, as states, need as much help as the locals do, as locals. There may be the possibility of consortia of local foundations working on state problems. I think that would be a very interesting development in cooperation with state government.

MEADE: All I want to suggest is that the nature of the problem at the state level often is a lot different from the kind we were talking about vis-à-vis improving schools. It is largely an equity issue at that level, equity in finance, equity in resources….

BENJAMIN: Which very strongly impinges on local concerns.

MEADE: No question about that. We recently made a grant to a group of policy researchers in a university to somehow understand the consequences in schools and classrooms of a federal mandate that was not intended to improve instruction but rather, one intended to undergird civil rights, human rights, and due process. What is the implementation doing to teaching in the schools? Obviously, if the effect is negative, just to be presumptuous, you cannot and should not throw out such legal mandates. Somehow the school must adapt to them and provide solid instruction as well. Furthermore, what's more important—human rights, civil rights, or reading scores?

BAIRD: I'm George Baird, Education Research Council. Local foundations can have state and national interests, too. Americans are a great group of people, and they are concerned with the kids of this country. I happen never to have had any federal funds. But I have a small organization that builds curricula. We have been able to get funds from local school area foundations to build curricula. But they're not interested in building a program for Cleveland, or Shaker Heights, or someplace like that. They want something that will be compatible with the greater idea of what it is that a functioning good American citizen needs to know. That's about as broad a point of view as you can take. Neither Ford nor Carnegie nor anyone else can get much broader than that. And yet that does exist, and I think it exists all over the country.

CONNERY: Larry, do you want to comment?

CREMIN: I don't want to, but I will.

CONNERY: Good.

CREMIN: I'm not eligible to comment about Carnegie supporting both sides of one or another issue, but I can say that Carnegie has put money into different histories from my own. And I make the statement not merely to praise Carnegie but to point out that the way in which you look at the history has everything to do with the way in which you see the future. Dale Mann's comment about the fashionable neo-conservative idea that you can't get anything done refers, at least in part, to the kind of history that has come out. And one of the nice things about this conference, which after all takes place in an archive, is the link between the kind of history that is written and the assessment it makes of the past and the kind of propulsion or reluctance that history gives with respect to what can be accomplished in the future.

CONNERY: In closing, where is there a better place to hold a conference of this kind than in archives which have a history of the past? I had a professor years ago. He used to say that when you walk into the Columbia University library there you see before you the thoughts of mankind for 5,000 years. All you've got to do is reach up and take the books down.

AMBACH: I didn't know you were going to close off. I said I had a short list and a long list—here is a very quick list of hot issues in education. First is the issue of equalization. The Ford Foundation has been funding several projects on that. The question in my mind is whether we are talking about equalization of expenditures or equalization of results. Second, if a foundation is interested in facilities, consider the decline in enrollment and a freeing-up of schools, particularly in major cities. What is the potential use of those facilities, particularly for adult services? Third is youth employment. Potentially, we're seeing the new community based organizations and the movement of the Youth Employment Act and the CETA programs as developing a whole new education system for job training. Can the foundations help in weaving together a use for facilities that are becoming empty, with new funding and new programs? Fourth is work with microcomputers. Major producers do not produce new technological advances for schools, but they sure do produce them for homes—video tapes or the long-playing record. What is the microcomputer going to do, not just for schooling, but indeed for our society? Fifth, a very key area for review is the question of the current role of school board members. There is a very deep emerging concern with respect to who is now interested in serving on the school boards, and why they are interested. Why are so many people who used to be interested in serving on school boards no longer doing so? An analysis of the time, the pressures, what it means to be on a board is needed. An analysis of what decision making is being done by these people would be timely. Sixth, I have a very particular interest in music, art, and physical education or the preparation for physical fitness and health. There has been considerable attention to foundation skills: reading, writing, mathematics, and so on. Foundations might focus on what is to be done in the area of the arts and creativity, and what is to be done with respect to how children learn to care for themselves and to develop their own physical capacities. Finally, the issue of bilingual education, which has been looked at, by and large, in negative terms. Bilingual education programs have been designed to raise the educational potential of children whose native languages are not English. It's high time we turned the point around and looked toward a multilingual society by taking advantage of the fact that we've got many children in our land who have a ready capability of developing competence in more than one language. This is an asset. How do we capitalize on it?

That's my checklist. These are very key issues that I work with day in and day out, as do my colleagues in other states. There may be just an idea or two some of you involved in foundations might find interesting.

CONNERY: Well, I want to express our appreciation to you, Mr. Secretary, and Mr. Commissioner, and may I also say, our appreciation to you, Joe Ernst, for sponsoring a conference of this kind. This day has been an enjoyable and informative one for me and, I am sure, for all of us.

INVITED PARTICIPANTS

George L. Aguirre

Contributions Advisor

Exxon Corporation

Gordon M. Ambach

Commissioner of Education

New York State

George H. Baird

President

Education Research Council of America

Charles W. Bell

Special Features Editor

The New York Daily News

Gerald Benjamin

Conference Coordinator

Chairman and Associate Professor

Political Science

State University of New York at New Paltz

Helise I. Benjamin

Speech Pathologist

BOCES—Ulster County

Board of Cooperative Educational Services

Demetrios Caraley

Editor

Political Science Quarterly,

Professor and Director,

Graduate Program in Public Affairs and Administration

Columbia University

Roselle Chartock

Monument Mountain Regional High School

Great Barrington, Massachusetts

Linda Chavez

Editor

American Educator

American Teacher

Sol Cohen

Professor, Graduate School of Education

University of California at Los Angeles

Joel Colton

Director, Humanities

The Rockefeller Foundation

Robert Connery

President, Academy of Political Science

Professor Emeritus of Public Law and Government

Columbia University

Dana S. Creel

Chairman, Governing Council

Rockefeller Archive Center

Lawrence A. Cremin

President

Teachers College, Columbia University

Richard H. Dana

Secretary, Governing Council

Rockefeller Archive Center

William M. Dietel

President

Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Peggy Dulany

Co-Director, STEP Program

Arlington Public Schools

Arlington, Massachusetts

Joseph W. Ernst

Director

Rockefeller Archive Center

John C. Esty, Jr.

President

National Association of Independent Schools

Marion Faldet

Secretary

The Spencer Foundation

James Guyot

Department of Public Administration

Baruch College

City University of New York

Robert J. Havighurst

Professor Emeritus of Education and Human Development

University of Chicago

J. William Hess

Associate Director

Rockefeller Archive Center

Patricia A. Keegan

Education Editor

Gannett Westchester Newspapers

Owen Kiernan

Executive Director

National Association of Secondary School Principals

Jack H. Kleinmann

Executive Director

National Foundation for the Improvement of Education

Ellen Condliffe Langemann

Assistant Professor of History and Education

Teachers College, Columbia University

Dale Mann

Chairman and Professor

Department of Educational Administration

Teachers College, Columbia University

Peter H. Martorella

The Rockefeller Family Fund

Paul H. Mattingly

Editor

History of Education Quarterly

New York University

Edward J. Meade, Jr.

Program Officer

Education and Public Policy Division

The Ford Foundation

Frederic A. Mosher

Program Officer

Carnegie Corporation of New York

Mrs. George D. O'Neill

Governing Council, Rockefeller Archive Center

Trustee, Rockefeller Brothers Fund,

Director, Family Service Association of Nassau County

Peter D. Relic

Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education

Department of Health, Education and Welfare

Saul Richman

Council on Foundations, Inc.

Steven L. Schlossman

Research Associate, Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute,

Radcliffe College, Harvard University

Eli Silverman

Associate Dean of Faculty

John Jay College

City University of New York

Thomas Sobol

Superintendent

Scarsdale Schools

Anne B. Speirs

Vice President and Secretary

College Entrance Examination Board

Robert Spillane

Deputy Commissioner for Elementary, Secondary and Continuing Education

New York State Education Department

Esther Stamm

Assistant Secretary

The Rockefeller Foundation

Richard Varbero

Department of History

State University of New York at New Paltz

Bruce E. Williams

Assistant Director, Social Sciences

The Rockefeller Foundation

Charles L. Willis

Senior Planning Officer

The Kettering Foundation

Lois Wilson

Special Assistant for Education

New York State Division of Budget and Management