People
The reformers, administrators, litigators, and teachers whose documented careers bent the system one way or another.
Twelve annual reports, 1837 to 1848.
Photo: Phil Evenden / Pexels
5 pieces in People
Everything →- The Secretary Who Went to Prussia and Came Back CertainHorace Mann's twelve annual reports as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education (1837–1848) are the founding documents of American common-school theory; his Seventh Report, based on a tour of Prussian schools, made the case for trained teachers, age-graded classrooms, and a longer school year.
- The Partnership That Built Nearly Five Thousand SchoolsThe working relationship between Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, and Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, produced the Rosenwald Fund school-building programme — documented in the Tuskegee records and the Fund's own annual reports.
- The First Woman to Run a Major American School SystemElla Flagg Young became superintendent of Chicago Public Schools in 1909 — the largest school system in the country at the time — and was elected president of the National Education Association in 1910, the first woman to hold either post.
- The Argument He Kept Making Until It HeldThurgood Marshall argued school desegregation cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund across the South from 1938 before the consolidated Brown cases reached the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953; his strategic shift from challenging the 'separate but equal' conditions to challenging the doctrine itself is documented in the LDF case files and the oral argument transcripts.
- The Union President Who Proposed the Charter SchoolAlbert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, outlined the concept of the charter school in a 1988 speech to the National Press Club and a subsequent column in the New York Times — a publicly accountable school freed from some district rules in exchange for meeting specific performance goals, initiated by teachers.