Rousmaniere, Kate. (1997) City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective. Reviewed by John L. Rury

Rousmaniere, Kate. (1997) City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press. 178 pp. + vii. ISBN 0-8077-3588-4 (paper) $20.95       0-8077-3589-2 (cloth) $44.00 Reviewed by John L. Rury DePaul University May 11, 1998 This is an engaging and generally well written book that provides many insights into teacher's lives and work during the third decade of the twentieth century. The principal focus of the book is teachers in New York City, although examples and data regarding the experiences of teachers elsewhere are considered as well. It is particularly well-suited for undergraduate teaching, as many students will find it accessible and stimulating. As a contribution to scholarship on teachers and school reform in the early twentieth century, however, the book raises as many questions as it provides answers. In this review I will try to identify areas in which City Teachers advances our understanding of these issues, and problems or limitations in its discussion of them. The argument Rousmaniere makes is that the work of teachers changed following the First World War, largely because of efficiency-minded (or command and control) administrative practices and the emergence of a "social efficiency" curriculum in New York's public schools. Using interviews with 21 former teachers and other sources, she suggests that the work of teachers intensified as new tasks were assigned to them, and that their working conditions deteriorated in other ways. At the same time, she also maintains that teaching became an "attractive" occupation for young educated women, and that New York offered an unusually liberal work environment for female teachers. Just when teaching began to hold promise as a profession for women, in that case, it also became more difficult and less fulfilling. This is an intriguing argument, and one which takes note of theoretical perspectives on changes in teaching and other forms of work offered by such prominent commentators as Michael Apple and Harry Braverman. The basic problem is that City Teachers really does not examine change in the lives or the work of teachers. To do so would require comparison of teachers in one point in time with those at another time. This simply is not provided in any clear-cut fashion. Likewise, Rousmaniere does not systematically examine changes in the curriculum and the organization of the New York public school system. The book has precious little information on how the schools operated prior to the 1920's, except to note that many of the circumstances which affected teachers at that time had existed earlier also. By all accounts, the administrative concerns with efficiency and order had been evident in New York and elsewhere for some time by the 1920's. And Rousmaniere offers only sketchy evidence that teachers there were affected by significant curricular changes during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Instead, judging from the evidence offered in the book, teachers in the twenties appear to have worked within a bureaucratic, differentiated modern school system quite similar to those that had evolved in a number of cities since the latter nineteenth century. The literature on the features of evolving urban school systems is replete with descriptions of administrative efficiency-mindedness and curricular change, particularly with regard to the development of "social efficiency." Rousmaniere aps little to this body of research, except perhaps to document the reactions of teachers to these features of school life in the twenties. Her discussion of curricular change, in fact, is a little puzzling, since she seems to identify social efficiency with a growing array of new tasks for teachers rather than with greater differentiation and specialization in instruction. Her characterization of the Cardinal Principles reform proposals as an exemplar of social efficiency is problematic in this regard. If social efficiency is taken to mean the alignment of the curriculum to specific occupational and social roles, she devotes little attention to it. The broadening of the curriculum to embrace a wider range of social issues, on the other hand, and to building links between the school, the home and other institutions, was often associated with pedagogical progressivism. As John Dewey and other contemporaries were quick to point out, this was not a perspective well suited to efficiency concerns. Indeed, the obvious contradiction between interest in efficiency and the growing complexity of teaching tasks is largely unapressed in City Teachers. In any case, Rousmaniere also notes that most teachers probably ignored curricular reform efforts, whether in the twenties or earlier. One wonders, in this case, just what difference in teachers' lives curricular mandates might have made, even if they were implemented in the twenties. But there can be little doubt about the role of bureaucracy. The book describes the large amount of paperwork city teachers were required to do, a facet of their lives they were quick to lodge complaints about. In this respect the lives of New York's teachers in the early twentieth century appears to have been quite similar to those of today's teachers. When Rousmaniere does discuss change, the effect is sometimes difficult to interpret. For instance, commenting on the poor condition of teachers' workplaces, she notes that a third of the city's six hundred schools were built before 1900, and half of those before 1880. This means, of course, that a solid majority (66%) of the school buildings were relatively new, twenty years old or less at the start of the twenties. Furthermore, she notes that the system undertook a massive building program in the twenties, apressing many problems that critics had pointed to in the older buildings. This is hardly a picture of teachers laboring under uniformly miserable working conditions. Some teachers and students undoubtedly were forced to endure old, dilapidated schools at this time, but for the most part New York's teachers in the twenties may have in fact enjoyed better facilities than any other generation of educators in the city's history. Other parts of the book raise intriguing questions, but do not provide fully developed answers. For example, Rousmaniere mentions surveys documenting a rise in extra-curricular duties for New York teachers, but does not provide details about the findings or the surveys themselves. Likewise, she discusses the apparently unique New York policy of employing married women as teachers, but does not fully explore the effect of such a policy at the time. There are no data on the age structure of the city's teachers; nor are there detailed data on the ethnic composition of the teaching force (information readily accessible from the census). While not essential to her argument, information of this sort would have helped to paint a more complete picture of New York's teachers at a particular point in time. In the end, Rousmaniere seems to want to suggest that teachers had a hard time in New York in the early twentieth century. Clearly, the teachers she interviewed noted problems they faced. But she also points out that teachers were well compensated in the city, and that for the educated daughters of immigrant families becoming a teacher was the very pinnacle of success. Rousmaniere speaks of teacher "resistance" to the administrative logic of efficiency, but many (perhaps most) teachers also undoubtedly identified with the school system and its goals— probably even with its leaders. As Rousmaniere notes, the movement for teacher unionism floundered at the time, for a variety of reasons. But if the daily existence of teachers was as unsatisfactory as she suggests, one would expect the unionization movement to have been more prominent (the largely female garment trades organized in New York during the twenties). The historical reality of teachers lives in this era was complex and nuanced, and the brief sketches that Rousmaniere provides of various facets of education at the time only begin to identify the factors that affected their work and their behavior. While this suggestive study points to interesting possible explanations to a number of questions, it is far from definitive. A good deal more work remains to be done on the historical reality of teachers' lives. About the Reviewer John L. Rury DePaul University John L. Rury is author of Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870-1930 (State University of New York Press, 1991).