1 Parts of this essay are adapted from a forthcoming book, The Promise of Progressivism: Angelo Patri and American Education, (New York: Peter Lang, in 2005); from previous articles by the author in Vitae Scholasticae, 13 (Fall 1994) and 16 (Fall 1997); Educational Studies, 28 (Summer 1997); and from a chapter in Italian Americans in the Twentieth Century, eds. Sensi-Isolani, Paola and Tamburri, Anthony (Chicago Heights, IL: Italian American Historical Association, 2001), 87–109.Google Scholar

2 I thank Patri's grand-nephew, Merolla, Dr. Frank Lewes, DE and Pepe, Giuseppe Salerno, Italy, for information about family names and history.Google Scholar

3 Patri, “Roses and Drums,” undated typescript, Box 81, Angelo Patri Papers [hereafter Patri Papers], Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Vincent Franklin discusses Italian-American resistance to education in “Continuity and Discontinuity in Black and Immigrant Minority Education in Urban America,” chapter two of Educating an Urban People: The New York City Experience, eds. Ravitch, Diane and Goodenow, Ronald (New York: Teachers College Press, 1981), 44–66.Google Scholar

4 Evaluations of Patri's principalship from 1907–1913 were all G (good) or H (high). Evaluation form, 1913, Patri Papers. On Patri's course with Dewey, see Teachers College, Registration Book for Angelo Patri, Patri Papers.Google Scholar

5 Patri, Angelo Schoolmaster of the Great City (New York: Macmillan, 1917).Google Scholar

6 Bourne, Randolph review of Schoolmaster of the Great City, The Survey, 11 August 1917, 422–423.Google Scholar

7 Patri, unpublished memoir, Box 83, Patri Papers.Google Scholar

8 Tyack, David and Cuban, Larry Tinkering Toward Utopia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5. I have combined these questions into one paragraph.Google Scholar

9 Cremin, Lawrence The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Knopf, 1960), chapter 6.Google Scholar

10 Kliebard, Herbert The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, (New York: Routledge, 1995 edition), 106–7, 231–251.Google Scholar

11 Rugg, Harold and Shumaker, Ann for example, describe mostly private schools in The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education (Yonkers, New York: World Book Company, 1928).Google Scholar

12 Cohen, Ronald and Mohl, Raymond interpret various assessments of the program in The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1979), chapter 8 and “A Note on Sources.” The Deweys and Bourne described the program positively. See John, and Dewey, Evelyn Schools of Tomorrow (New York: Dutton, 1915), chapter 7, and Randolph Bourne, The Gary Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916). Robert Westbrook explains Dewey's attraction to the child-centered and reformist elements of the plan in John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 179–182.Google Scholar

13 Callahan, Raymond Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962), 136.Google Scholar

14 Cremin, Lawrence American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 237; Ravitch, Diane The Great School Wars: A History of the New York Public Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 227; Cohen, and Mohl, The Paradox of Progressive Education, 60, 198.Google Scholar

15 Canfield, Dorothy Fisher in 1940 noted the continued use of workshops, studios, and gardens in the school. “Angelo Patri's Public School,” Reader's Digest, June, 1940, 101–105.Google Scholar

16 One can trace changing school configurations in the annual volumes of the Directory of the Board of Education of the City of New York, 1897–1940.Google Scholar

17 Dewey, John “Ethical Principles Underlying Education,” in Third Yearbook (Chicago: National Herbart Society, 1897); The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899)Google Scholar

18 John Dewey uses the phrase “learning by doing” in Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 217.Google Scholar

19 Patri, “Educational Forces Outside of the Public School, Considered From the Standpoint of School Administration,” (MA thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1904.) I thank Ment, David former Archivist of the Special Collections, Milbank Memorial Library, Teachers College, for sending me a copy of this thesis.Google Scholar

20 Taylor, Joseph M. Memorandum, 15 May 1914, Patri Papers.Google Scholar

21 Wilsey, Frank D. letter to Stephen Wise, 23 June 1914, Box 1, Patri Papers.Google Scholar

22 The phrase comes from the title of David Tyack's book, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

23 Berrol, Selma Cantor Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now (New York: Twayne, 1995), 69.Google Scholar

24 Mitchel was elected on the Fusion ticket, running against a “Republican, a Tammany Democrat, and a Socialist.” Ravitch, The Great School Wars, 222.Google Scholar

25 Diane Ravitch describes this visit to Gary in The Great School Wars, 197.Google Scholar

26 In similar language Patri wrote from Gary an enthusiastic letter to his students, published in a PS 45 school newspaper titled The Children, June, 1915, Patri Papers.Google Scholar

27 Ravitch notes the Wirt-Dewey connection on page 197 of The Great School Wars.Google Scholar

28 In The Great School Wars Ravitch identifies the Gary school struggle as the third of her four “wars,” and analyzes it at length on pages 187–230.Google Scholar

29 Patri's supervisor, Taylor, Joseph S. described in positive terms the first seventeen months of the Gary program in PS 45: “A Report on the Gary Experiment in New York City,” Educational Review 51 (January-May, 1916): 8–28. Taylor claimed (pages 21–22) that the Gary and Montessori approaches were very similar, particularly in terms of discipline and science teaching.Google Scholar

30 “Send Dr. Muck Back, Roosevelt Advises,” New York Times, 3 November 1917, 22.Google Scholar

31 Political evaluations of the Gary plan are explored in “The Social Context of Evaluative Research: A Case Study,” by Adeline, and Levine, Murray Evaluation Quarterly 1 (November, 1977): 515–542.Google Scholar

32 Ravitch describes and analyzes these political developments in chapter 20 of The Great School Wars.Google Scholar

33 Patri tactfully avoids identifying his administrative critics. He was defended by Taylor, J. S. who supervised him during his six years at PS 4, from 1907–1913, and his first four years at PS 45, from 1913–1917. His good friend and colleague Anthony Pugliese was his district superintendent from 1927–1935. Opposition to Patri came largely from the central office, not from Patri's administrative district. The dates are derived from the Directory of the Board of Education, 1907–1935.Google Scholar

34 Ravitch, The Great School Wars, 236. Directory of the Board of Education January, 1929, 111. The kindergarten remained at the school only for the 1929–30 school year.Google Scholar

35 In spite of its demise in New York, the platoon system spread to many districts, partly because of its economic advantages. See Agnes de Lima, Our Enemy the Child (New York: New Republic, 1925), chapter VIII; also Spain, Charles L. The Platoon School (New York: Macmillan, 1929).Google Scholar

36 Wirt, Willard letter to Patri, 1 June 1920, Patri Papers.Google Scholar

37 The role of immigrants in the Gary struggle is explored by Cohen, and Mohl, The Paradox of Progressive Education, 50–60, and by Ravitch in chapter 20 of The Great School Wars.Google Scholar

38 Patri was continuing the pattern of community involvement he had begun in PS 4. Paula Fass describes his activities there in Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 57. Bullough, William says that Patri made PS 4 into a “community center.” See his Cities and Schools in the Gilded Age: The Evolution of an Urban Institution (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1974), 127.Google Scholar

39 Patricia Graham notes Path's alienation from the elitist private school orientation of the Progressive Education Association in Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe—A History of the Progressive Education Association, 1919–1955 (New York: Teachers College, 1967), 163.Google Scholar

40 Cuban, Larry chapter 8 of Reconstructing the Common Good in Education: Coping with Intractable American Dilemmas, eds. Cuban, Larry and Shipps, Dorothy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

41 Newsweek, 25 September 1944, 82–3.Google Scholar