Chicago radical educators

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The Danger of Radical Educators by reopeningtheusmind Earlier this year, I posted about teacher activist groups. Like this: Like Loading Published: September 21, Filed Under: Uncategorized. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. She maintained that many women entered teaching as a means of being economically independent. This independence of teachers, Goggin believed, functioned as a positive role model for young women and created a positive female image.

For Goggin, a woman teacher "learns to govern, not to be governed" Murphy , The central early issue for these two Chicago teachers was the fight for "equal pay for equal work. Anthony to pursue her campaign of "equal work for equal pay" as well as her demand for equality within the National Education Association NEA.

Haley and Goggin raised issues central to the lives of women teachers: economic exploitation, the imposition of standardization of methods and curriculum, and the involvement of business in education. It was a time when urban schools were increasingly adopting an assembly-line, factory model, which emphasized "social efficiency," through curricular control, standardization, and reliance on experts Pinar et al.

This centraliztion, through top-down administration, threatened the democratic nature of schools by restricting the curriculuar autonomy of teachers, taking decision-making out of teacher's hands and severing schools from their communities. Haley cited in Hoffman , This resistance to the de-skilling or, as Haley referred to it, the "factoryizing" of teaching was central to her vision of social change in which teaching was to function as a form of democratic practice.

The reform efforts of Haley and Goggin focused on shaping educational institutions, on the basis of democratic practices. Haley wrote in her autobiography, Battleground:. Young among them, had recognized that democracy in education, either in methods of teaching or administration, could not be secured while the public mind was vitiated by the ideal of the industrial factory system, which made the man at the top the only possessor of directing brain, and the thousands below him the mere tools to carry out his directions.

They realized that educators could not stand alone and that if the ideal of democracy were to be secured in one field, it must be secured in all. That ideal meant freedom to the human mind. Reid , 86 Haley quoted educator John Dewey: "How can the child learn to be a free and responsible citizen if the teacher is bound?

At the time, teachers' organizations and unions were forming around the country to resist lower salaries as well as the centralization of schools that subordinated teachers to supposed "experts" in the school hierarchy.

Haley and Goggin co-founded the Chicago Teachers Federation CTF , the forerunner of the American Federation of Teachers AFT , to address economic inequities as well as resist incursions into the classrooms and promote teachers' autonomy as curriculum decision makers.

According to Murphy, these "new teachers' unions were not just woman-led, they were feminist" , The promotion of women teachers' rights in schools was a cause that had a natural link to advocacy of women's rights in society as a whole.

Suffrage was only one tool. The real goal was a complete social revolution. By , Goggin and Haley were respectively President and Vice-President of the CTF, engaged in a "tax fight" aimed at forcing Chicago corporations to pay their taxes so the city would have the necessary revenue to pay promised salary increases for teachers.

Harper's proposed bill called for a centralized administration of the Chicago school system, which, in effect, undermined Goggin and Haley's commitment to a non-hierarchical, democratic, decision-making process. He proposed to require a college education for all teachers, at a time when college was beyond the reach of most women, especially those from the lower class. The bill called for efforts to hire more men, pay them higher wages, and promote them more rapidly within the school system.

Fearful that the feminization of teaching would destroy the minds of bright young men by , 86 percent of the nation's teachers were female , the bill conveyed the sense that masculine authority would cure the schools of all ills Murphy , Organized opposition to the Harper Bill among women teachers was swift. They mobilized actions with other women's organizations, such as the Women's Clubs of Chicago, for which teachers gave afternoon teas in neighborhood schools.

For Haley and Goggin, women's emancipation was inseparable from the war on privilege and the strengthening of labor. Margaret Haley recalled in her autobiography that it was not easy to convince teachers to ally with non-teaching neighbors over whom they felt a certain social superiority. She recounted how on November 8, , at the general meeting of the CTF now 5, members strong , Jane Addams "electrified our members by telling them that they were already a union. The only question now before them, she said, was whether they should avail themselves of the help they could get from other unions.

Gentle Jane was so respectable and aristocratic that they had to swallow their prejudice and join the parade" Reid , Within the next three years, the CFL focused on organizing women and industrial workers including chorus girls, laundry workers, domestic servants, department store workers, garment workers, and glove workers and launched its first consistent lobbying effort through the work of Haley, who was elected union lobbyist.

The most lasting effect of this affiliation was the Board of Education approval of salary increases for teachers. She began teaching in Chicago in , became principal of the New Practice School of the Chicago Normal School in , and was appointed assistant superintendent of Chicago schools in According to her biographer, John T.

McManis , Young, in addition to being an educator, superintendent, scholar, and intellectual, was a recognized club woman and advocate of the women's movement. Although she worked tirelessly for women's suffrage, Young committed her life to bringing democratic practices into educational institutions. In order to teach democratically, teachers needed full participation in decisions affecting their work. If the schools themselves were not models of democracy, teachers could not be effective in teaching democratic values to the children.

Young's doctoral dissertation focused on articulating participatory forms of leadership in which teachers would have a central voice. Entitled "Isolation in School Systems," it was completed, with Dewey as her advisor, in at the University of Chicago. It embodied a "philosophy of learning by experience and of social freedoms for a school community through a democratically run administration from superintendent down to student" Smith and Smith , As an active participant at Hull House, Young was engaged with other leading intellectuals of the progressive reform movement Jane Addams, John Dewey, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and George Herbert Mead in debating the link between schooling and a democratic society.

Dewey himself, with whom she co-taught and published at the University of Chicago, claimed that she "was a practicing pragmatist long before the doctrine was ever in print" Smith and Smith , , and that he got more ideas from her than anyone else when it came to education.

In , shortly after leaving her teaching position at the University of Chicago, Young was appointed superintendent of Chicago schools. In obtaining this position, she benefited from the support of Jane Addams, who was on the school board at the time, John Dewey, and the Women's Clubs of Chicago. Becoming the first woman to head a large urban school system in the United States, Young announced that her administration would be characterized by democratic efficiency.

A critic of the "social efficiency" movement, Young warned that schools would develop a system comparable to a "great machine" if not checked Reid , xxi. Her goals as superintendent focused on the recognition of teachers as democratic decision makers and the broadening of their responsibilities in the major policy goals of her office. She removed the "secret marking system" a form of teacher evaluation and began to involve the teachers in decisions that affected their professional lives.

In , Young was elected by an insurgent group of women to be president of the NEA, the first woman to hold that office. As president of the NEA, she directed her efforts toward "increasing attention to classroom teachers and endorsing higher salaries, equal pay for equal work, women's suffrage, and advisory teachers' councils" McManis , Increasingly, however, the Chicago school board emerged at odds with Young.

The board sought to consolidate control of the schools by dictating curriculum, choosing textbooks, and taking control of the teachers' pension fund.

In , both Haley and Young became the subjects of a state investigation in which Young's policies were decried as "Frenzied Feminine Finance" Murphy , According to Murphy, critics depicted Young as "virtually giving away the store to public school teachers out of her feminist sentimentality, her Catholic sympathies, and her alleged near-senility" , Haley was accused of taking advantage of innocent teachers by convincing them to join the unions and then forcing them to conform to the dominance of the female leaders of the CTF.

The assault against Young and Haley, who were both accused of breeding rebellion and lack of respect for the school board authority, resulted in the Chicago Board of Education ban of the CTF and the eventual crippling of the union.

Although Young stepped down as superintendent, she continued her activism in the women's suffrage movement and became chairperson of the Woman's Liberty Loan Committee.

Wells as teacher activists is to reclaim the work of women in the settlement houses as a major, although neglected, contribution of women to American education. Wells were dynamic social experiments and curriculum innovations that were designed to critique the emerging factory model of schooling through the provision of alternative forms of education to migrants and immigrant.

Addams recalled, "We used to say that the settlement had a distinct place in the educational field and we were even bold enough to compare ourselves with universities and colleges" Addams a, Although settlement houses have traditionally been associated with providing social services, Linda Kerber suggests that they were pioneering, even radical, educational institutions.

She maintains: Teachers at settlement houses undertook to teach people who were not welcome in the usual schools. It puts them in a state of survival mode, and in some cases, can make their need to establish connection and trust with a teacher manifest in rebellion. Teachers from parts of the state with less racial diversity say other dynamics can lead to divisions.

Eichenlaub said she builds on that to drive conversations about unconscious bias, which can bridge a deeper understanding of what structural racism looks like. The restorative justice principles embraced by MaineCORE are often directly contrasted with the growing movement to increase police presence and surveillance inside schools, in Maine and nationwide, which can have adverse effects on students of color and bring young people into contact with the justice system for often minor offenses.