Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education

By William W. Cutler

Who holds ultimate authority for the education of America's children—teachers or parents? Although the relationship between home and school has changed dramatically over the decades, William Cutler's fascinating history argues that it has always been a political one, and his book uncovers for the first time how and why the balance of power has shifted over time. Starting with parental dominance in the mid-nineteenth century, Cutler chronicles how schools' growing bureaucratization and professionalization allowed educators to gain increasing control over the schooling and lives of the children they taught. Central to his story is the role of parent-teacher associations, which helped transform an adversarial relationship into a collaborative one. Yet parents have also been controlled by educators through PTAs, leading to the perception that they are "company unions."

Cutler shows how in the 1920s and 1930s schools expanded their responsibility for children's well-being outside the classroom. These efforts sowed the seeds for later conflict as schools came to be held accountable for solving society's problems. Finally, he brings the reader into recent decades, in which a breakdown of trust, racial tension, and "parents' rights" have taken the story full circle, with parents and schools once again at odds.

Cutler's book is an invaluable guide to understanding how parent-teacher cooperation, which is essential for our children's educational success, might be achieved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226307930

Book preview

WILLIAM W. CUTLER III is associate professor of history and educational leadership at Temple University and coeditor of The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800–1975 (1980).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2000 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2000

Printed in the United States of America

09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-10: 0-226-13216-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13216-7 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-226-30793-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cutler, William W.

Parents and schools : the 150-year struggle for control in American education / William W. Cutler III.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-13216-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Home and school—United States—History—19th century.   2. Home and school—United States—History—20th century.   3. Education—Parent participation—United States—History—19th century.   4. Education—Parent participation—United States—History—20th century.   5. Educational change—United States—History—19th century.   6. Educational change—United States—History—20th century.   I. Title.

LC225.3.C86   2000

371.19'2' 0973—dc21

99-088447

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

parents and schools

the 150-year struggle for control in american education

WILLIAM W. CUTLER III

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

For Julia, Rosemary, and Rachel

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. From Adversaries to Advocates

CHAPTER 2. Home Rule or Ruled at Home?

CHAPTER 3. In Search of Influence or Authority?

CHAPTER 4. Heard but Not Seen

CHAPTER 5. Twenty-Four Hours a Day

CHAPTER 6. From Advocates to Adversaries

Epilogue: Recurring Themes

Notes

Bibliographic Note

Index

Illustrations

FIGURE 2.1. A Regulated but Reciprocal Relationship. Cover illustration, The American School Board Journal 70 (May 1925)

FIGURE 3.1. The Reformer. Cover illustration, The American School Board Journal 55 (September 1917)

FIGURE 3.2. The Matron. Cover illustration, The American School Board Journal 57 (August 1918)

FIGURE 3.3. The Young Mother. Cover illustration, The American School Board Journal 57 (December 1918)

FIGURE 5.1. Anna Beach Pratt, executive director of the White-Williams Foundation, 1916–32

FIGURE 5.2. The Good Parent and the Bad Parent. Cover illustration, The American School Board Journal 73 (October 1926)

FIGURE 5.3. A Healthy Mind in a Health Body. Cover illustration, The American School Board Journal 74 (March 1927)

FIGURE 6.1. Parents picketing against striking Philadelphia teachers, October 18, 1973

FIGURE 6.2. Happy Fernandez, cofounder of the Parents Union for Public Schools, c. 1973

Acknowledgments

When I began work on the project that eventually became Parents and Schools, I thought I was going to write a book dealing with the history of child care and early childhood education. But the more I read about this topic, the more impressed I was by the attention devoted in the literature to the relationship between the parents and teachers of young children. I began to wonder if the same could be said for the parents and teachers of older students. What did they think about one another in the nineteenth century? What did they expect of their relationship, and how did it change over time? These questions had not received much attention from social historians, but they struck me as both significant and timely, especially in view of the contemporary belief in the importance of the home to the school in American education. It seemed to me that they deserved a thorough historical investigation.

As I began to explore the history of parent-teacher relations, three colleagues gave me the encouragement that every researcher needs to hear at the beginning of any long-term project. Close to home, Temple’s Morris Vogel and Mark Haller proved to be good listeners when I encountered obstacles of one kind or another. Steven Schlossman of Carnegie Mellon University showed enough interest in my work to come to Philadelphia more than once to discuss with me what I was doing. He also provided access to funding that allowed me to hire Rodney Hessinger, one of my doctoral students, as a research assistant in the summer of 1993. I am also grateful to Temple University for both a study leave in 1991 and a summer research grant in 1993. The freedom that these awards provided allowed me to build much needed momentum.

Several scholars have commented on part or all of the manuscript, giving me the benefit of their knowledge and criticism. Steve Scholssman and Martha de Acosta helped me refine the argument in Chapter One. Robert Church, Herbert Ershkowitz, Margaret Marsh, Randall Miller, and Bill Pencak identified flaws in several drafts of the manuscript that appears here as Chapter Three. In 1996, it appeared in a somewhat different form in Pennsylvania History, and I would like to thank Bill Pencak, the editor of that journal, for permission to republish it here. I turned to Robert Taggart for reassurance that I had not made any mistakes in Chapter Four about the history of education in Delaware, and he saved me from some embarrassing gaffs. He also put his finger on some substantive and stylistic matters that I hope I have addressed successfully. Chapter Five is better for the suggestions that Anne Knupfer made after reading it in draft and John Rury offered in private conversations with me.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ronald Butchart, who read the manuscript when it was still unfinished and at a crucial stage. His frank and insightful criticism helped me to think through the structure of the book and the general argument that I was trying to make. John Tryneski, my editor at The University of Chicago Press, identified many ways to make this argument more explicit. Maris Vinovskis, who read the entire manuscript for The University of Chicago Press, gave useful suggestions that guided me as I put the finishing touches on a work that was by then in a well-developed state. I hope they will agree that I have made the most of what they had to say.

It is my special pleasure to acknowledge the many libraries and librarians, archives and archivists that made it possible for me to find the sources on which Parents and Schools is based. I would like to recognize the staff who helped me at the Boston Public Library, the Jenkintown (Pennsylvania) Library, the Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, the Delaware Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, the Special Collections Department of the Alexander Library of Rutgers University, the Pedagogical Library of the School District of Philadelphia, and the Interlibrary Loan Department in Temple’s Samuel Paley Library. In particular, I would like to thank Kathy Tassini of the Haddonfield (New Jersey) Historical Society and Dr. Joseph Serico, principal of Haddonfield Memorial High School, who made it possible for me to obtain access to the records of the Haddonfield Board of Public Education. I am also indebted to Kenneth Rose, assistant to the director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center in North Tarrytown, New York, and David Ment, director of special collections at the Milbank Memorial Library, Teachers College, Columbia University. Finally, I am grateful to the Schlesinger Library for giving me permission to quote from the Elizabeth Hewes Tilton Papers and The American School Board Journal for giving me permission to reproduce six cartoons that originally appeared as cover art in the 1910s and 1920s.

As every historian knows, some librarians and archivists deserve special recognition for going out of their way to help the eager but often fumbling researcher. In my case, this debt is owed to Gail E. Farr, who was a National Historical Publications and Records Commission Fellow at the Delaware Bureau of Archives and Records Management in 1991–92 and her supervisors, Joanne Mattern, Deputy State Archivist, and Howard P. Lowell, State Archivist and Records Administrator. They made it possible for me to find and use treasures that would otherwise have been out of my reach. If, as a researcher, I have a home base, it is the Urban Archives in the Samuel Paley Library at Temple University. Its director, Margaret Jerrido, and her staff—Brenda Galloway-Wright, Cheryl Johnson, and the recently retired George Brightbill—all supplied me with resources of every kind. I am very grateful to them.

When my labors on Parents and Schools were about half done, I became a school director in the community where I live. This experience has given an immediacy to my historical work, putting it into a different perspective. It was my wife, Penelope, who persuaded me to run for the school board. She has been a source of unfailing support in the preparation of this book. As both a teacher and a parent, she is an expert in her own right on home-school relations.

Introduction

Few Americans today doubt the importance of good relations between the home and the school. Educators and parents alike say that successful schools communicate well with the home. Caring parents, mothers in particular, cooperate with schools. Such views go unquestioned, if not unspoken. They inform discussions of educational policy and practice; they contribute to the process of decision-making. Equally important, they obscure a host of competing assumptions that deserve careful examination. For example, many Americans behave as if parents and teachers are at best distant relations.¹ Performing different functions that derive from the distinction between professional and moral authority, they must make a special effort just to establish contact, let alone work together to raise children. Faced with these disparate views, Americans are understandably confused. How should the home and the school interact? Their relationship has a long and complex history, which may provide some useful clues. Have these two institutions been at odds from the beginning? Have parents and teachers from different backgrounds been able to work together to achieve common goals? How has our thinking about their relationship changed over time, and in what ways has it affected public policy and private behavior regarding families and schools?

Parents and teachers have interacted since the inception of schooling in the United States, but their relationship has changed significantly over time. In the nineteenth century, the balance of power shifted from the home to the school. An all-purpose institution, the colonial family dominated the school, but between 1800 and 1850, when middle-class mothers began to concentrate on procreation and nurture and the urban poor seemed increasingly less able to care for their own, educators assumed more responsibility in the cognitive and even the moral domains. By century’s end, this shift was well established and unmistakable to social scientists like Frank Tracy Carlton. The scope of school work is being gradually extended, Carlton wrote in 1905, as a direct result of the decrease in functions of the home and the changing status of women.² In turn, the social contract between the home and the school was also transformed. What once was informal and unstructured became self-conscious, legalistic, and bureaucratic—the object of studied attention and systematic organization. Institutional frontiers that were porous and indistinct grew more secure and well defined. The home and the school still share responsibility for the education of the young, but their relationship is far from spontaneous. Instead, it is contrived, being shaped and directed by men and women with different perspectives even when they possess the same expectations, values, and goals.

The functional and conceptual gap that separates the home from the school is not inconsequential. It affects how we think about the extent and nature of lay involvement at school. Parents may not be the teacher’s natural enemy, but they are usually unwelcome in the classroom. Armed with professional certificates and advanced degrees, educators believe they have the authority to manage parental inquiries and even dismiss complaints about the judgments they make or the methods they use. Such autonomy carries a high price, justifying parental ignorance, apathy, and detachment. Even middle-class mothers and fathers may decide not to get too involved if the school is a world apart.³ Seizing on this disequilibrium, reformers have argued that giving parents more control will improve education by breaking the monopoly of the school.

But parents and teachers are attracted to each other even as they push apart because they preside over common ground. Distinct and yet necessarily interdependent, parents and teachers have a symbiotic relationship. Were one to yield to the other, both would be transformed. This is not to say that parents and teachers have always accepted their reciprocity. In fact, the two generalizations that have emerged from this historical study point toward a more complex conclusion. First, the relationship between the home and the school in America has been political for a long time. Since at least the 1840s, parents and teachers have often vied with each other for influence and authority, and both have made alliances, sometimes with one another against a common foe and sometimes with other parties interested in controlling the schools. Second, this relationship has often served as a conduit for educational and social reform. Like kin in an extended family, parents and teachers have seldom been willing to leave well enough alone.

The political nature of the home-school relationship owes its vitality at least in part to the expansion of schooling in the nineteenth century. As the home lost ground to the school, parents found themselves jockeying for position with teachers in their children’s lives. Commuters in social space, children learned to deal with two sets of masters. Over time, this balancing act became more and more problematic because parents and teachers enhanced their respective claims to different terrain in the landscape of childhood. Facing each other across an increasingly clear-cut boundary, adults maneuvered for advantage, often casting the relationship between the home and the school as a struggle for the hearts and the minds of the next generation.

School bureaucratization helped educators take control of their relationship with the home in the second half of the nineteenth century. Contrary to what many educational historians have maintained, bureaucracy did not drive parents and teachers completely apart.⁴ Instead, the professional identity and occupational opportunity that it fostered gradually gave many teachers, principals, and superintendents the self-confidence to reconsider the home-school relationship. It did not have to be as antagonistic as the first public school officials frequently thought. Bureaucratic reform led educators to contemplate how parents could be transformed from vocal adversaries to loyal advocates by building them into the school’s organizational framework. Properly sorted and arranged, mothers and fathers could be an integral and valuable part of the American educational system.

Of course, the efficacy of more and better schooling was not immediately self-evident. For many parents, the opportunity costs of an extended education seemed a high price to pay for the promise of later gain, and American educators failed to turn this attitude completely around in the nineteenth century. Teaching inspired limited loyalty even among its own practitioners, let alone much esteem in the lay community. The American tradition of local control placed teachers at the mercy of parents and taxpayers, especially in rural areas, and the defensive posture that resulted from this imbalance often stood in the way of cooperation between the home and the school. However, the bureaucratic reforms that went into effect between 1890 and 1930 did as much to break down such barriers as reinforce them. Compulsory school laws may have betrayed a lack of respect for parental judgment, but together with the growth of state aid, they strengthened the hand of local public schools. The introduction of standards for entry into teaching and the development of systematic methods for the assessment of pupils and the management of schools placed teachers and principals on what appeared to them to be more solid footing, giving them good reason to be more tolerant of parents and open to the community.

By the end of the nineteenth century, superintendents, principals, and even teachers were learning to cope with parents by organizing the school’s relationship with the home. Individual parents or small groups of families were more difficult to manage than mothers’ clubs or parent-teacher associations. Such organizations first appeared in rural America in the 1880s, spreading to many cities and suburbs soon thereafter, and school officials often collaborated with parents on their founding. These associations gave the home a recognizable but limited presence in school. They institutionalized the idea that parents had at least a small stake in educational policy-making, while acknowledging the home’s role in cultivating student learning. These two activities were not necessarily complementary; organized interaction between parents and teachers to improve student learning often left school governance unaffected and sometimes devolved into a power struggle driven by disagreements about educational goals and methods. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was considerable optimism. Neither decision makers nor troublemakers, mothers and fathers were now to be the allies of the teacher and advocates for schools and schooling.

The bureaucratization of the home-school relationship did more than just prepare educators to deal confidently and systematically with the home. It forced parents to be more conscious of themselves as an interest group and provided some with an orderly and occasionally powerful means by which to interact with the school and other economic or political institutions. The mothers’ club or home and school association focused parental attention and created a swift channel for the flow of parental energy. However, educators and most school board members preferred to think of the parent-teacher association as an extension of the educational establishment, an auxiliary to the public school, as the Los Angeles County Board of Education put it in 1908.⁵

In the 1920s, school administrators, policy makers, and professors of education took the bureaucratization of the home-school relationship to another level. The rapid expansion of secondary schooling at the beginning of the twentieth century made the proficient management of schools increasingly important. With more and more Americans remaining in school past the eighth grade, budgets were soon stretched to the limit.

During and immediately after World War I, educators also had to contend with spiraling costs brought on by inflation. Justifying burgeoning budgets was no easy task, and those in charge decided that they could ill afford to neglect their image. Not surprisingly, they focused on their relationship with the home. Parents might be willing allies, but their support was not guaranteed. The school’s carefully cultivated professional image worked to its disadvantage, encouraging parental disengagement and indifference. Consequently, the men and women of what historians David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot have called the educational trust turned the school’s interaction with the home into an exercise in public relations.⁶ When the Great Depression threatened to bankrupt many school systems, the nation’s educators became even more convinced that parental loyalty and approval had to be manipulated for the school’s ends. But they had to contend with many families facing economic crises of their own.

In the new politics of the home and the school, there was one important constant. Social class continued to shape parental attitudes and behavior about child development and schooling, but even here, there were subtle changes after 1900. While middle-class mothers and fathers continued to think of their children as moral and emotional dependents, they also began to regard them as distinct personalities in the making. Commencing in the 1920s, they looked to the school for help with their children’s psychological health and socialization. Most working-class parents, on the other hand, did not have the time to worry about their children’s mental hygiene. For them, the relationship among the home, the school, and the workplace had changed, becoming more, not less problematic. By 1910, a new generation of more effective compulsory school and child labor laws had placed the state squarely between them and their children. The public school now took primary responsibility for preparing working-class children to be wage earners and citizens. It was the source of common learning, the basic skills and values that everyone needed to know. No longer in control, working-class parents had to be content with lobbying for their children in school or on the job. Across this functional and conceptual divide, parents and teachers continued to meet. The power relationship between them had changed, but many among them realized that they could not afford to be enemies or even strangers. Theirs was a marriage between distinct but reciprocal institutions.

Since the introduction of public education in the 1830s, social issues and economic interests have increasingly affected the association between the home and the school. Constituencies like management and labor, immigrants and natives, taxpayers and naysayers have pressed their views on schools. Shifting coalitions and ideological positions have confounded educators and policy makers by defying predictability.⁷ Parents and teachers have interacted within this unstable environment. They have often worked together toward a mutual goal, but sometimes as accidental allies, collaborating despite differences about their reasons for moving in the same direction. For example, their common support for local control has usually not been motivated by the same set of hopes and concerns. Courted by others, both parents and teachers have also leveraged influence by cooperating with those beyond the inner orbit of the school. Teachers made common cause with physicians and social workers against the home conditions of their pupils. After joining with organized labor to oppose budget cuts in urban public schools, they became a part of the labor movement themselves, a decision that cost them the trust and support of many parents. Divided by socioeconomic and ethnic loyalties, parents have sometimes sided with businessmen and reformers in support of improvements like comprehensive high schools and vocational education or fought against them over such innovations as the medical inspection of schoolchildren and the teaching of foreign languages in the public schools.⁸

Shaped by the politics of interest, the relationship between the home and the school has entailed considerable ambiguity and possessed a sizable potential for conflict born not so much of fundamental differences as misunderstanding. Both parents and teachers have often misinterpreted what the other expected them to do. Not always deserving of parental respect, most teachers, for example, have expected it nonetheless. As early as the 1850s, they insisted that, no matter what, mothers refrain from criticizing them in front of children. The status of parents turns out to have been even more enigmatic, for once bureaucratization occurred, they qualified as both insiders and outsiders at school. Because it was a son or daughter they entrusted to the teacher’s care, parents have always had a legitimate claim to influence—more so perhaps than anyone else—but after 1900, their personal stake in their child’s classroom performance carried less and less weight with the professionals who were now in charge of America’s schools. Classifying parents as outsiders, educators invited mothers and fathers to get involved with homework or special events without giving them any authority or even making serious work for them to do.

Gender, ethnicity, and social class enhanced the ambiguity of the relationship between the home and the school. In charge at home, middle-class women were also very important at school, far outnumbering the men in parent-teacher organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century. As mothers, women spoke for the home at school, bargaining with the men who served on boards of education and engaging those in positions of administrative responsibility. As teachers, they modeled the knowledge and objectivity of the educational establishment, but it was their gender that really qualified them to work with other people’s children, especially the very young. Gender bias, on the other hand, diminished their credibility as representatives of the scientific and bureaucratic school.

Beginning in the 1870s and accelerating rapidly after 1900, some women competed for places on urban and suburban boards of education. Their moral authority carried considerable weight outside the home, but until after World War II, they often met with resistance when they tried to assert themselves in local school management or reform. Meanwhile, many women and men had to contend with racial, ethnic, and social class as well as gender bias at school. In the nineteenth century, school officials often oversimplified the relationship between parents and teachers by treating the home as if it was as monolithic as the school. But they gradually began to discover that families in the United States were not all the same. Fortified by their new-found professionalism, teachers, principals, and superintendents now questioned the competence of immigrant and blue-collar parents, paving the way for physicians, nurses, and social workers to enter the schoolhouse after 1910 without absolving the low-income family of responsibility for the welfare of its children. Even after being redefined as a partnership between two different but complementary institutions, the relationship between the home and the school never completely lost its adversarial dimension. Complicated by gender, ethnicity, and social class, the ambiguities of the relationship made it increasingly difficult for Americans to think through an acceptable division of labor between the home and school, let alone establish it. Deciding which one was in charge or when the two should share child-rearing and educational obligations became more and more problematic, leading to role conflict and confusion.

Parents, reformers, and educators now pursued an alluring but ambitious goal that contributed to uncertainty and invited conflict about institutional roles and responsibilities. They behaved as if cooperation between the home and the school could facilitate educational and social reform. At first, any such cooperation between parents and teachers was neither the expectation nor the norm. In the nineteenth century, most teachers, principals, and superintendents were too preoccupied with their own domain to worry much about changing the home. Parents took a more active interest in school reform. As early as the 1840s, some parents, especially mothers, acted on their own to express dissatisfaction with their children’s public schools. They badgered school authorities, filing petitions about attendance, discipline, facilities, and curriculum.⁹ By the end of the nineteenth century, the ideology of maternalism was magnifying their voice, projecting the virtues of motherhood across a wide social agenda.¹⁰ But in the politics of American education, mothers seldom escaped the limits imposed by their gender role. Animated by specific problems at the local level, they exercised modest influence with male school directors and educational professionals in suburban settings.

But the natural connection between parents and teachers attracted the attention of educational and social reformers looking for a way to transform schools. Although bureaucracy and professionalism insulated educators against unwanted intervention, parent-teacher contact allowed outsiders at least some access to the inner workings of the school. Reformers like Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge could at least get the attention of educational decision makers when they spoke on behalf of mothers and teachers in the name of school reform. On the other hand, the school-home relationship now began to serve as a wide channel for educators and reformers to move in the opposite direction, recommending modifications in the behavior of families and the reorganization of community priorities, practices, and institutions. After World War I, for example, schools began to offer pediatric examinations, parent education, vocational guidance, and the teaching of worthy home membership, one of the National Education Association’s Seven Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.

Many school directors and superintendents made a conscious choice to welcome the right kind of parental involvement in the politics of schools. After all, mothers and fathers could be persuasive advocates for the interests of public education. Their votes could mean the difference between victory and defeat in school board elections or bond referendums. Educators counted on them when confronted with diminished resources, especially during the Great Depression. Of course, parents were unpredictable and often fickle, turning suddenly on teachers or losing interest once their children left school. Even parent-teacher associations were inconsistent advocates for public education not only because there was constant turnover in their membership but also because educational policy was not necessarily their main concern. But parents and their organizations had a vested interest in adequate accommodations and sufficient, even generous, educational appropriations. Pointed in the right direction, they could be enlisted to support many structural, legal, and methodological innovations, such as kindergartens, building codes, and vocational education. The school often persuaded parents that they should work together toward common ends.

Twentieth-century educators and reformers were not the first to hope that the relationship between the home and the school could be a conduit for social as well as educational reform. In large cities like Boston and New York, truant officers and home visitors appeared as early as the 1820s, making outreach to families a small part of their original mission.¹¹ After 1900, a rising tide of cultural diversity and social dysfunction called for a more comprehensive approach. Encouraged by middle-class reformers and private benevolent organizations, public schools in many cities became social welfare institutions. Between 1905 and 1930, visiting teachers, vocational counselors, and school nurses joined the professional team. It was up to them to save the American family by dispelling maternal ignorance about the nature of childhood and the principles of homemaking. It was their job to keep dependent and neglected children off the streets, preparing them for useful employment, while preventing idleness, delinquency, and the social burdens created by unwanted children. Combining scientific knowledge with traditional values and beliefs, these outreach workers spoke for the school in the home.

Educators often claimed that by adding social welfare functions to the work of the school, they strengthened the teacher’s hand. Knowledge of the home informed and improved instruction. However, the addition of such new and demanding tasks sometimes brought the school into conflict with the home. Parents did not always welcome advice on how to raise their children. At the very least, it complicated and confused the mission of public education and increased the risk that educators might be held accountable for what went on at home. The rewards for such ambition might be great, but there were many uncertainties. Of course, anointing the public school a social service station and an all-purpose panacea was not just up to educators; it required no less than the tacit approval of the general public, including many parents, who did not know where else to turn. Americans have long resisted government involvement in family life.¹² Off-limits to the makers of most public policy, the family has been accessible to the school nonetheless. By 1925, most middle-class Americans at the very least accepted the school as a partner with the home. They even allowed it to reach into the home, but by accepting this additional obligation, educators exposed themselves to new kinds of conflict and criticism.

In reaching out to the home, professionals in education had to deal with important differences among themselves—some teachers, after all, were first-generation Americans—and especially with their clientele. Many teachers and school social workers disdained the people they professed to be helping, failing to distinguish between the real and imagined deficiencies of African-American, immigrant, and working-class parents and children.¹³ Day care workers, school nurses, and visiting teachers found it difficult to understand why poor families often neglected their children’s health or gave in so easily to the school-leaving temptation. Before World War I, they concentrated on reducing the incidence of such behavior, but soon raised their sights as they became more familiar with the American home. With help from the Commonwealth Fund in the 1920s, they turned from managing the school-to-work transition toward counseling the maladjusted child, regardless of his or her social class, and in the following decade broadened their scope still further, focusing on the relationship between academic success and mental hygiene. However, school nurses and visiting teachers were usually among the first to be laid off during the Depression. When faced with this unpleasant prospect, they appealed to their colleagues’ sense of professional pride by reminding them that public schools should provide comprehensive services for poor families with school-age children.¹⁴ But their argument did not stand up well against the widespread assumption that the home and the school were distinct, albeit reciprocal institutions.

School-based leadership in social reform was not confined to teachers, social workers, and other professionals in education. From its inception as the National Congress of Mothers in 1897, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (NCPT) relied on its members to advance the cause of social reform. While urging all women to become better informed about household economics and the raising of children, NCPT Presidents Hannah Kent Schoff and Margaretta Willis Reeve steered their organization into the open waters of economic and social change in the 1920s, asking state and federal policy makers to reorganize the American juvenile justice system, regulate the practice of child labor, and improve the delivery of educational, recreational, and health services to children. They understood the relationship between the school and the home to entail a national agenda based not on conflict between parents and teachers but on cooperation.

Compared to some of their peers like those in charge of the United States Children’s Bureau or the National Women’s Party, the leaders of the NCPT held conservative views, especially about the status of women.¹⁵ But for those middle-class, white women who comprised the vast majority of its rank and file, membership in the NCPT, one of its state affiliates, or even a local parent-teacher association (PTA) exposed them to a world of new ideas, problems, and concerns. It required them to measure their personal priorities against the more cosmopolitan and, in some respects, elitist standards of their regional and national leaders. It induced some to enter into an uneasy alliance with other women, educators and reformers alike, on behalf of social change. It provoked a few to confront and even reconsider the parochialism of their middle-class, white American homes. But parenthood, while a common bond, was not necessarily an antidote to the divisive effects of gender, culture, class, or race. White, middle-class mothers could be insensitive to cultures other than their own and undemocratic in their relations with black, immigrant, and working-class women. Along with the NCPT, state and local PTAs were almost always segregated during the first half of the twentieth century, and white, middle-class mothers often assumed a condescending attitude toward women from backgrounds other than their own. The National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers offered black women the chance to lead themselves. But in its institutionalized form, the relationship between the home and the school often reinforced the inequality and injustice it was meant to overcome.

Cooperation between the home and the school has always been weaker at the secondary than the elementary level. Perhaps it is a question of age; more independent than their younger siblings, adolescents can be indifferent, even hostile, to parental involvement at school. Elders back away in part because they do not know how to help their children solve the academic and social problems posed by high school. Educators since the 1920s have been tempted to deal directly with adolescents, especially when it comes to personal behavior and matters of social hygiene. By expanding the right to privacy and due process for those under twenty-one, legislators and jurists in the last thirty years have given the professionals in public education greater freedom to cut parents out of the home-school equation. But not all parents have been willing to accept irrelevance. A desire to retain control may explain why some have always chosen to send their children to independent or parochial schools. By dealing unilaterally with teenagers on birth control or drug abuse, the public school has not reduced its exposure to role confusion and has increased the possibility that disillusionment will result from elevated but unfulfilled expectations.

Compared even with the 1960s, the relationship between the home and the school generates heated debate in the United States today. The presumption of reciprocity and trust between parents and teachers that characterized educational thought and practice after World War II gradually gave way as Red-baiting, white flight, and teacher strikes changed the climate of opinion and the balance of power between the home and the school. Convinced that their voice was muted or silent, many parents, both low-income and middle-class, began to insist they had rights at school. Once again, the home became the adversary of the school, but modern parents, unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts, had to overcome bureaucratic precedents against their having any influence. Rejecting the claim that parent education was a prerequisite for parents’ rights, they argued instead that their right to be involved derived from who they were, not what they knew.

There is still no consensus about what steps to take or what benefits to expect from getting parents more involved in the education of their children. Improved student achievement is the most desired outcome, but advocates of school-based management or parent advisory councils often disagree with