Journal of Planning History

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Re-Forming Schools and Cities: Placing Education on the Landscape of Planning History Domenic Vitiello Journal of Planning History 2006; 5; 183 DOI: 10.1177/1538513205284622 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jph.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/183

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JOURNAL 10.1177/1538513205284622 Vitiello / RE-FORMING OF PLANNING SCHOOLS HISTORY AND / August CITIES 2006

Re-Forming Schools and Cities: Placing Education on the Landscape of Planning History Domenic Vitiello University of Pennsylvania

Schools are among the most ubiquitous institutions shaping city and regional ecology, policy, and everyday experience. In recent decades, planning historians have come to define planning ever more broadly, focusing on a great diversity of urban activities. But the design, development, and administration of public and private schools, from the preschool to university level, have yet to be incorporated into our discipline’s debates and discussions to a significant degree. This introductory article frames the articles that follow within the broader history of American education and posits a variety of opportunities and questions to explore as we incorporate the history of schools into planning history. Keywords: history of education; urban history; American history; eighteenth century; nineteenth century; twentieth century; school reform.

C

ity and regional planning owes its origins as a discipline to a variety of initiatives to reform people and places. The flowering of an urban, industrial society in mid-nineteenth-century North America inspired a wide assortment of such movements. Ministers and temperance advocates battled the evils brewing in saloons and brothels. Tuberculosis societies fought the real and perceived filth of crowded immigrant neighborhoods, while their allies in the nascent parks movement worked to create green spaces where the urban poor could breathe fresh air and enjoy “civilizing” surroundings. Poor relief and later settlement house workers strove to instill healthy habits of work and domesticity.1 However, perhaps the most prolific and lasting antebellum reform movement of all was the AUTHOR’S NOTE: The project of assembling this themed issue was inspired by Michael B. Katz, who has challenged urban historians to integrate education and school reform into our understanding of American cities and regions. Journal of Planning History Editor Chris Silver graciously shepherded this large submission; and he and his anonymous reviewers helped strengthen each article and focus the entire collection. This introduction also benefited from the generous feedback and suggestions of Katz, Michael Clapper, and Mary Sies. JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 5 No. 3, August 2006 183-195 DOI: 10.1177/1538513205284622 © 2006 Sage Publications Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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revolution in public schooling that would transform the population and landscape of the entire nation, from its most rural districts to its greatest metropolises. In his “Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools to the General Assembly of Connecticut for 1851,” Henry Barnard wrote, “The condition and improvement of her manufacturing population in connection with the education of the whole people is at this time the great problem for New England to work out.” For Barnard, factories and their immigrant workforces contained the seeds of society’s undoing, “the elements of corruption, of upbreak, and overthrow.” But with aggressive educational measures, he argued, the energies of these people could uplift the region. “Here are the capacities for social, moral, and intellectual improvement,” Barnard affirmed, “and the productive forces for the creation of wealth and material prosperity, which shall spread along every valley, beautiful and prosperous villages, and through all her borders, a contented, moral, and intellectual people.” Schooling held equally critical implications for New England’s cities. “Here the wealth, enterprise, and professional talent of the state are concentrated,” but “here too are poverty, ignorance, profligacy, and irreligion, and a classification of society as broad and deep as ever divided the plebeian and patrician of ancient Rome.” 2 As Barnard and his colleagues built schools to shape the moral, intellectual, and economic lives of cities and towns, their efforts often intersected with those of other reformers. But by the early twentieth century these movements became disciplines, compartmentalized in public bureaucracies, professional societies, and academic departments. Parks advocates were now landscape architects and municipal engineers. Antituberculosis crusaders and poor relief volunteers built—and found full-time jobs in—state and city departments of public health and welfare. The task of managing neighborhood and regional development through new tools of zoning and building codes fell to people called “city planners.” And educational leaders and managers pursued career paths that took them from university schools of education to jobs as principals and school district administrators. Yet the interests—and often the activities—of these various urban reformers turned professionals intersected and fit into broader, “comprehensive” urban public agendas. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, for example, cast improvements in early childhood and secondary education as integral parts of a federal program aimed at alleviating a deep “urban crisis.” Appealing to the Eighty-ninth Congress for funding in 1965, Johnson pointed to a long history of education in federal policy and national planning. “In 1787, the Continental Congress declared in the Northwest Ordinance: Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged,” he reminded lawmakers. “America is strong and prosperous and free because for 178 years we have honored that commitment.” 3 School district superintendents from the nation’s cities supported the president’s call for $4.1 billion in educational spending. New York City Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Executive Deputy Superintendent Bernard Donovan told a House Subcommittee on Education, “The hope of the big cities for the future lies in the adequate education of their disadvantaged children. Just as in a family there is love for every child, it is also true that the love is deeper for that member of the family who is handicapped.” In the mid-1960s, cities were the disadvantaged, handicapped members of the American family. In the minds of policy makers and much of the public, cities also still served a vital national purpose. “Our city has long been the melting pot of the world,” Donovan continued. “We have always welcomed the poor, the handicapped, and the disadvantaged and we have taken the necessary steps to make them worthy, productive, and responsible citizens.”4 These steps included everything from providing affordable housing and health services to schooling—a web of public institutions that together enacted an urban planning and policy agenda. As historians and planners have broadened their definitions of “planning” in recent generations, it is no stretch to argue that schools and education represent a vital part of urban planning, policy, and history.5 At the Tenth National Conference on Planning History in St. Louis in 2003, public housing, parks, highways, and garden suburbs of course figured prominently in numerous sessions. But conference participants also explored the planning of everything from department stores to children’s hospitals, libraries to condominiums, historic districts to fish hatcheries. The articles in this issue of the Journal of Planning History grew out of another session in St. Louis, titled “Re-forming Schools and Cities: Public School Design and Development—Retrospect and Prospect,” that attempted to add schools and education to this rich landscape of planning history. Schools consume most of the waking hours of a large proportion of the world’s population. By 2001, school construction expenditures in the United States topped $44 billion, while the total budget for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was about $33 billion. Yet schools remain largely absent from the literature of planning history, as few historians and planning educators have framed schools and educational policy as planning activities.6 Conversely, historians of education, class, and the state have mostly ignored the design, development, and ecology of schools and education.7 In professional societies and journals in the fields of architecture and construction, for which schools represent a large and important market, design for education receives considerably more attention, though typically with little historical context. Why does this matter? For our understandings of urban history, schools represent one of the central institutions of planning, physical and economic development, and socialization. For those invested in the social utility of planning history, a more troublesome issue lies in the lack of sophisticated historical and ecological contexts for historians to inform debates about school reform and the roles of schools in community building. Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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This last concern inspired the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania to organize a “public conversation” on the past, present, and future of school design and development when the School District of Philadelphia launched a $1.5 billion capital campaign. In February 2003, historians, architects, district administrators, teachers, parents, and neighborhood residents gathered at the city’s newest school building, the PennAlexander School (erected and operated in partnership with the university), to grapple with the legacies, challenges, and opportunities facing the district’s diverse constituencies and the planners and architects interested in shaping new educational environments.8 The conference session in St. Louis included three participants in the Philadelphia forum—architectural historian and preservationist George E. Thomas, historian of education and former public school teacher Michael Clapper, and urban historian and planner Domenic Vitiello—but expanded the discussion with the national perspectives of architectural historian Amy Weisser and urban designer Roy Strickland. This collection of articles represents a further attempt at understanding school building as planning history. The articles in this issue focus primarily on questions of public school design, with some attention to site selection, community planning, and educational administration. But schools and education hold many promising research directions for planning historians. A host of questions present themselves: • How have school design and planning shaped the physical and social fabric of city and suburban neighborhoods?

• How does the history of schools intersect with the histories of other urban institutions?

• What does public school planning tell us about citizenship, power, and the state in

•

• • •

neighborhoods, cities, and regions? What have been the meanings of “public” in public school design and development? What does the history of education suggest about the relationship between church and state in planning and policy? How have race, class, and gender shaped the politics of education reform and school development? (Since women have made up the vast bulk of the educational workforce in the United States since the nineteenth century, the history of schools represents an especially promising area for exploring the roles of women in planning.) How have students, teachers, neighborhood residents, and architects shaped education—together or in competition with district administrators and educational pundits and reformers, the typical protagonists of educational histories? How have the public and private economics of school building been organized in divergent contexts of urban growth and decline? What challenges and opportunities face planners engaged in school reform, and how can planning historians contribute to current and future debates about school reform?

The articles by Weisser, Thomas, and Clapper address many of these questions. Additionally, a large body of work by historians of education points up various ways in which their research intersects with urban history. A necessarily brief and diffuse survey of this intersection occupies the remainder of Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


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this introductory article, framing the history of American education as planning history. Even before the flowering of public school systems in the antebellum period, schools and other institutions of urban life hold important implications for colonial planning history.9 As suggested by George Thomas’s article on school design in Philadelphia, the numerous ethnic and religious groups building their own schoolhouses and houses of worship in the American provinces represent a great diversity of early modern planning traditions. As colonial towns grew into cities, urban leaders from Boston to Baltimore used institutions of research and teaching to regulate and grow their regions’ increasingly diverse metropolitan economies and societies. Benjamin Franklin, to take one prominent example, responded to the rapid growth of eighteenth-century Philadelphia by founding a complex of institutions that included not only fire insurance and fire-fighting companies but also the Library Company, American Philosophical Society, Academy and College of Philadelphia (later University of Pennsylvania), and Pennsylvania Hospital. In the Early Republic, Americans lumped these institutions under the broad category of “internal improvements,” together with transportation, communications, and other planning initiatives. This term was narrowed to denote turnpike and canal (and later railroad and telegraph) infrastructure only in the 1820s.10 Thus, the Lancasterian schools established in the early nineteenth century from Albany to Detroit—the first mass education initiatives in American cities—formed part of broader public agendas.11 Although state and district bureaucracies have become ubiquitous in American public education, a range of planning models competed to shape emerging public school systems in the antebellum years. Historian of education Michael B. Katz has identified four prominent modes of mid-nineteenth-century school reform. Paternalistic voluntarism characterized the Lancasterian and other elite-driven school systems, a top-down “means for one class to civilize another and thereby ensure that society would remain tolerable, orderly, and safe.” Democratic localism constituted a bottom-up mode of social change, most successful in rural schools, which rested on a faith in people and the notion that “legislatures should enact, and not lead, the public will.” Private academies were the most common form of corporate voluntarism, “the conduct of single institutions as individual corporations operated by self-perpetuating boards of trustees” resting on the “rational” assumption that “endowment lifted education out of politics and assured it competent direction.” Finally, the incipient bureaucracy that came to control public school systems rejected democratic localism not only for its perceived lack of efficiency but also—as revealed in Henry Barnard’s writing above—out of a fear of “the cultural divisiveness inherent in the increasing religious and ethnic variety of American life.”12 These four paths of early school reform, which of course blended into one another, have clear parallels in what planning historians have identified as Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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top-down, bottom-up, rational, and bureaucratic planning traditions. Historians of public housing, for instance, recognize a familiar theme in Katz’s observation that the state school system’s “definition of its clients as inferior, so integral to bureaucracy” and the class perspective of its leaders, “became entrenched even more deeply because quite early it acquired its functional utility as a defense of bureaucratic failure.”13 While individual states built their own school systems in the mid-nineteenth century, the war between the Union and Confederate states opened the door for the federal government to use public education in the service of national planning. Indeed, education would prove significant in several eras and initiatives of national planning. Part of a large package of Civil War laws, in 1862 Republican congressmen pushed through the Morrill Act, “An Act donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.” These land-grant colleges would prove vital to agricultural and industrial development, particularly in the new states of the West. The attendant infusion of capital for these new institutions would soon find its way not only into the pockets of a growing class of university professors, but also into the coffers of numerous architects and landscape planners such as McKim, Mead, and White and Frederick Law Olmsted, who made academic design an important specialty in their professions. When the federal government turned to replanning the Southern states following the war, schools played a central part in Reconstruction. Northern manufacturers such as Philadelphia locomotive magnate Matthias Baldwin proved willing to fund educational initiatives, as schools promised to help remake the agricultural South into a productive part of their industrial nation. Sadly, concerted public and private campaigns to limit African Americans’ access to quality education also formed a prominent means of repression as whites consolidated their power in the post-Reconstruction regime of Jim Crow. This struggle over schooling would remain a crucial element of African Americans’ claims to full citizenship up to the present day, occupying a prominent place in the Civil Rights movement of the midtwentieth century as well as recent lawsuits seeking to equalize school funding between poor, largely minority, urban districts and their more affluent, white, suburban counterparts.14 As Michael Clapper notes, the search for access to education would also be a significant factor in many African Americans’ choices to depart the South for northern and western cities in the Great Migrations—a point that underscores the tragedy of Clapper’s story of segregation and inequity in the Philadelphia School District. 15 As battles over schooling for blacks raged in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South, northern cities accommodated a flood of new immigrants and unprecedented industrialization. Historian of education Lawrence Cremin argues that metropolitan life in this period brought new educational requirements. “Individuals came to be defined more by the facts of race, class, ethnicity, religion, and occupation . . . and regulated Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


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more by the rules and policies of governments, professions, and formal institutions than by the unspoken conventions of localities.”16 One set of responses employed schools in the task of planning and managing increasingly segmented regional labor markets.17 This led to a great array of educational niches, while the mass scale of education spurred the standardization of curriculum at each level. To train the leaders of a professionalized society, universities founded schools of business, architecture, education, and social work. Industrialists and educators developed technical and vocational programs in primary and secondary schools to serve specific occupational trajectories. While some students learned basic mechanical proficiency they would later apply in factories, others—especially young women—acquired the secretarial skills demanded by growing sectors of office work.18 George Thomas argues that some urban schools reflected these trends in their aesthetics and floor plans. Addressing the social challenges of this diverse metropolitan society, proponents of the Progressive movement founded or reformed a wide range of institutions, from child care facilities to settlement houses to poor relief societies. Progressive educational reform was a fundamental part of what Susan Marie Wirka has termed a “City Social Movement” that both countered and complemented the City Beautiful and City Practical strands of late nineteenth and early twentieth century planning.19 As Amy Weisser notes in the article that follows this, John Dewey and other educators called for schooling to be integrated with other sorts of social programs in a holistic reform agenda. According to Lawrence Cremin, the principal tenets of American Progressive education advocated (1) “broadening the program of the school to include direct concern for health, vocation, and the quality of family and community life”; (2) “applying in the classroom the pedagogical principles derived from new scientific research in psychology and the social sciences”; and (3) “tailoring instruction more and more to the different kinds and classes of children who were being brought within the purview of the school.”20 Like their Progressive counterparts in settlement houses, welfare societies, and church-based social reform organizations, Michael Katz argues that Dewey and fellow “educational revivalists” shared an “ideal of a moral and spiritual regeneration of American society through the moral and spiritual regeneration of individual personalities.”21 Katz and social historian Hal Barron further note that Progressive educational reform expanded the influence of urban reformers far beyond metropolitan regions. The consolidation of the myriad rural school districts in the United States—fourteen thousand in Iowa alone—made administrative Progressivism, with its crusade for professionalism and systematic reorganization, one of the most pervasive social movements of the era. 22 Even if the disciplinary boundaries between education, public welfare, and community planning would soon become less porous, the marriage of social science and social policy making and planning would be a lasting one. As Progressive reformers built national professional associations, they also Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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fostered connections to cadres of architects and engineers. “It is more and more apparent,” the Journal of Education noted in 1891, “that one of the great American problems is how to ‘house’ the multitude of children in the city schools.”23 Weisser examines how prominent architects such as Richard Neutra and William Lescaze elaborated the educational programs of John Dewey in their Progressive school designs, just as Catherine Bauer and Oscar Stonorov applied their architectural expertise to their advocacy of public housing. While professional associations lent a national perspective to educational and architectural practice, the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war again focused federal attention on education. As Weisser notes, the Public Works Administration funded some 70 percent of new school construction in the mid- to late 1930s. The Second World War sparked the beginnings of large-scale federal investment in university research, and the militarization of higher education in engineering and science escalated as fear of communism and nuclear war heightened in the 1950s. All of this filtered down to primary and secondary schools in the form of fallout shelters and air raid drills that sent students and teachers cowering under their desks. But urban schools had far greater problems in the postwar decades. As social historian Ira Katznelson argued in his 1981 study of Great Society programs in New York City, concerns about federal policies and programs, social mobility and welfare, race and labor relations, and urban spatial and economic restructuring all intersected in debates over the planning and management of inner city public schools. Urban historian Wendell Pritchett has recently reasserted the importance of clashes over school reform for historians’ understandings of urban race relations and neighborhood change in this era.24 Struggles between the courts, legislatures, mayors, teachers unions, boards of education, parents, neighbors, and students erupted in often violent conflicts such as the 1957 battle over desegregation at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, the 1968 Ocean Hill– Brownsville teachers’ strike in Brooklyn, and the antibusing protests of ethnic whites in South Boston in 1974. The failures of this period’s great experiments in racial integration, public welfare, and urban renewal are as evident in the educational narratives of Weisser, George Thomas, and Michael Clapper as they are in the public housing histories of John Bauman and Lawrence Vale.25 Katznelson’s metaphor of “city trenches” has broad implications for planning historians, as we strive to understand the relationships between the “trenches” (or subfields) of housing, transportation, environmental design and regulation, and education in this and other periods. In his analysis of the “new genre of institutions” of localized planning spawned by the Great Society, including “little city halls, offices of neighborhood govern-



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ment, decentralized school boards, and neighborhood service councils,” he uncovers a deep irony in the broader planning process. These initiatives, he argues, sought “not only to overcome the threatening gap between citizenry (especially black citizens) and government, but to reinvolve them in the terms of the traditional” system of “city trenches” wherein people’s reformist energies were channeled into separate bureaucratic arenas that stymied more comprehensive, systematic reforms of public administration.26 If schools offer an important window into the urban crises and planning crusades of the post–World War II decades, they are equally significant for understanding the era’s mass suburbanization—a theme explored in the articles by Weisser and Clapper. The search for “better schools” is frequently cited as a motive for moving to the suburbs. Recent work by religious historian John McGreevy and political scientist Gerald Gamm suggests that parochial schools may have also helped retard the urban exodus of certain religious groups—particularly Catholics.27 For people who did depart the inner city—even to the most racially, ethnically, and economically homogenous suburbs—schools and home-school associations remained forums through which residents expressed their deepest personal desires and visions for society. In his classic study of 1950s suburbanites, The Levittowners, Herbert Gans found that voluntary associations such as churches could exclude—or in Gans’s terms, “extrude”—people who did not agree with the dominant viewpoints in the congregation. “The school system, however, like all public agencies served the entire community and had to provide for its diverse demands within a single institution.”28 The same remains true today, as school reform has attracted renewed attention in city and suburban districts across the United States. Michael Katz’s models of antebellum school reform have important parallels a century and a half later. On one hand, there appears to be a resurgence of democratic localism, as charter schools have proliferated to serve a great diversity of communities and constituencies across the country. For some cities and suburbs with large populations of recent immigrants, this has offered an opportunity to accommodate the multilingual and multicultural concerns of parents and students. Local strategies have even been adapted in some of the largest reform efforts of the 1990s, as when Chicago revived the Great Society–era strategy of community control through neighborhood school councils.29 How “democratic” or “localistic” such efforts prove to be in the face of the state legislatures that fund them and the teachers unions and school district bureaucracies with which they compete remains an open question. (In Chicago, District Superintendent Paul Vallas succeeded in recentralizing most authority in the later 1990s.) Running counter to these community-focused strategies is a renaissance of corporate (sometimes paternalistic) voluntarism, part of a broader proliferation of market models of public policy and planning. Public education


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authorities are contracting with private educational providers to run individual schools and sometimes even entire districts. In addition to these providers, private companies such as software giant Microsoft are pushing their own visions of education, economy, and society as they erect, design, and manage “public” schools in urban and suburban districts (for many districts, corporations’ promises of cash, new technology, and innovative teaching programs are hard to resist). Many elected representatives and private and parochial educators are also pushing voucher programs that would introduce a limited measure of school choice for families interested in seeking educational options outside of the public schools. All these market models are highly controversial. Their supporters point to the old cry of operational efficiency as well as the chance to push the rigid boundaries of an outdated public educational system. Detractors view these trends as dangerous manifestations of the broader privatization of the public sphere. A third trend in contemporary education reform involves changes to state and school district bureaucracies. Some state legislatures have taken over major urban districts, including Philadelphia’s. In other states, courts have mandated revision of education funding formulae, highlighting the role of the judiciary in shaping school systems and regional equity.30 One of the most prominent of these cases, New Jersey’s Abbott v. Burke decisions, allocated considerable public funds for the renovation and construction of school buildings in twenty-eight mostly inner-city districts with “special needs.” It is this opportunity that has allowed Roy Strickland, who participated in the St. Louis panel, to help several New Jersey cities reshape the ecology of education and develop his City of Learning model of school planning for community revitalization. Strickland’s work points to important (though exceptional) efforts to integrate school reform into broader urban planning initiatives. University studios taught by the likes of Strickland and MIT landscape planner Anne Spirn offer models for integrating public school design and programming into graduate planning education.31 Yet many challenges and opportunities remain for professionals and academics to explore in the development and application of innovative planning and educational models in districts across the country. Clearly, schools can be critical tools for neighborhood revitalization and empowerment, particularly when designers, teachers, and administrators link their work to the wider world of planning and social action. Yet exceptional schools can also function as engines of gentrification, driving up property values and rents within their catchment areas and reinforcing the segregation that characterizes American cities. Historians of education and planning and policy have only begun to weigh in on contemporary school reform. Many weighty—and sometimes loaded—questions remain to investigate. Planning historians are uniquely positioned to contribute geographic and ecological perspectives to the history of education in the United States and around the world. And schools and education hold fertile ground for planning historians to excavate as we Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


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fashion ever more complex understandings of city and regional development. Hopefully, the articles in this issue will inspire some planning historians to include schools and education in our exploration of urban pasts and futures.

1. For a survey of urban moral reform associations across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 2. Henry Barnard, “Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools to the General Assembly of Connecticut for 1851,” American Journal of Education 5 (1865): 293-310, partially reprinted in Michael B. Katz, ed., School Reform: Past and Present (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 17-8. 3. President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Education Message to the Eighty-ninth Congress of the United States, January 12, 1965,” in Enactments by the 89th Congress Concerning Education and Training, First Session 1965, partially reprinted in Katz, School Reform, 23. 4. Aid to Elementary and Secondary Education, U.S. House of Representatives, General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor (Washington, D.C., January 23, 1965), partially reprinted in Katz, School Reform, 30. 5. The broadening of this definition is treated in Gail Dubrow and Mary Corbin Sies, “Letting Our Guard Down: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Planning History,” Journal of Planning History 1, no. 2 (August 2002): 203-14. 6. Important exceptions to this trend include studies of industrial education and segregation. See, for example, Angel David Nieves, “ ‘We Gave Our Hearts and Lives to It’: African-American Women Reformers, Industrial Education, and the Monuments of Nation-Building in the Post-Reconstruction South, 1877-1938” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2001); Leigh Joseph Altadonna, “The School, Curriculum, and Community: A Case Study of the Institutionalizing of Industrial Education in the Public Schools of Philadelphia, 1876-1918” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College, New York, 1983); see also Lawrence Joseph DeFeo, “The Transformation of a Community: A History of the Development and Education of Woodbine” (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, Rutgers, NJ, 1979); Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Gregory S. Jacobs, Getting around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). 7. An important exception to this is historian of education John Rury, who has explored the geography of American schooling. See, for example, John L. Rury, “Urbanization and Education: Regional Patterns of Educational Development in American Cities, 1900-1910,” Michigan Academician 20, no. 3 (1988): 261-79; and John L. Rury, “Urban Structure and School Participation: Immigrant Women in 1900,” Social Science History 8, no. 3 (1984): 219-42. See also Claudia Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 2 (1998): 345-74; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Origins of State-Level Differences in the Public Provision of Higher Education, 1890-1940,” American Economic Review 88, no. 2 (1998): 303-8; and Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 8. For an overview of the Urban Studies Program’s yearlong series of public conversations, including links related to the School District’s capital campaign, see http://www.sas.upenn.edu/urban/ schoolreform.html. 9. For a synthetic treatment of colonial education, see Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper, 1970). 10. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 11. Karl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). 12. Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 27-47. See also Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational InnovaDownloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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tion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 18201980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 13. Katz, Reconstructing American Education, 48. For a parallel in public housing history, see, for example, Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 14. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); William Preston Vaughn, Schools for All: The Blacks and Public Education in the South, 1865-1877 (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Louis R. Harlan, Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (New York: Athenaeum, 1968); Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); and August Meier, Elliot Rudwick, and Francis L. Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1972). 15. See, for example, James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 16. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 521; see also Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), xv. 17. On the roles of schools in “labor market planning,” see David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market & the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); and Domenic Vitiello, “Engineering the Metropolis: The Sellers Family and Industrial Philadelphia” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, University Park, 2004), esp. chaps. 2 and 5. 18. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), chap. 1; Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Harvey Kantor and David B. Tyack, eds., Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982); Walter Licht, Getting Work, Philadelphia 18401950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Andrew Dawson, “The Workshop and the Classroom: Philadelphia Engineering, the Decline of Apprenticeship, and the Rise of Industrial Training, 1878-1900,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 2 (summer 1999): 143-60. 19. Susan Marie Wirka, “The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning,” in Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55-75. 20. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961), viii-ix; see also Marilyn Gittell and T. Edward Hollander, “The Process of Change: Case Study of Philadelphia,” in Marilyn Gittell and Alan G. Hevesi, eds., The Politics of Urban Education (New York: Praeger, 1969). 21. Katz, Reconstructing American Education, 50. 22. Michael Katz and Mark Stern, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming), chaps. 1-2; and Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation of the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chap. 2. 23. Quoted in Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School, 11. 24. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. chap. 8. Pritchett’s perspective on schools and school reform adds an important dimension to explanations of mid-twentiethcentury urban change elaborated in such works as Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 25. John Bauman, Public Housing, Race and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects; see also Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Peter Binzen, Whitetown, U.S.A. (New York: Random House, Downloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.


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1970); and Jon S. Birger, “Race, Reaction, and Reform: The Three Rs of Philadelphia School Politics, 1965-1971,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 120, no. 3 (July 1996). 26. Katznelson, City Trenches, 135. 27. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the TwentiethCentury Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Gamm, Urban Exodus. 28. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Knopf, 1967), 90. 29. For a historian’s treatment of Chicago school reform in the 1990s, see Michael B. Katz, Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the “Underclass,” and Urban Schools as History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 3. 30. For discussion of school districts’ roles in shaping regional inequality and metropolitan politics in one bistate region, see Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), The Future of First Generation Suburbs in the Delaware Valley Region (Philadelphia: DVRPC, 1998); see also Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, MA: Brookings and Lincoln, 1997), esp. chap. 3. 31. Strickland’s work in one New Jersey city is discussed in Roy Strickland, ed., Designing a City of Learning: Paterson, N.J. (n.p., 2001); Spirn’s work is profiled at http://web.mit.edu/wplp/index.html.

Domenic Vitiello is a historian and planner with broad interests in the roles of institutions in shaping cities and regions. In addition to his consulting practice in community development and historic preservation, he teaches urban history and planning in the University of Pennsylvania’s Urban Studies Program. There he has organized yearly series of “public conversations” on civic issues in Philadelphia, including neighborhood revitalization, school reform, arts development, vacant land, and immigration.
