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The Politics of Educational Retrenchment in Detroit, 1929–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jeffrey Mirel
Jeffrey Mirel*
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois Univerity
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Extract

In recent years it has become commonplace to speak of the declining support for public schools as an unprecedented break in nearly 150 years of educational expansion. Acutally, public backing for the schools has waned and the educational enterprise itself has been called into question at various times in American history. The political controversies surrounding several of the nineteenth century challenges to the public schools have, in fact, been well researched. However, the politics of educational retrenchment in this century, particularly the struggles during the Great Depression, have received little attention. Such studies as Sol Cohen's Progressive and Urban School Reform and Julia Wrigley's Class Politics and Public Schools have described the retrenchment battles in New York City and Chicago respectively but merely as secondary events highlighting more significant trends. Cohen's study of the Public Education Association, for example, sees the budget battles of the early thirties as the last flurry of excitement before the decline of the organization. Wrigley uses her comprehensive discussion of Chicago's school crisis to illuminate the power of the newly emerging political machine. Unlike those studies, this paper will focus on the retrenchment controversies specifically as they influenced school policy and as they related to changes in educational politics in Detroit.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Fall 1984 , pp. 323 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

Mr. Mirel would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues for their criticism of earlier versions of this article. They include Virginia Brereton, Frederick Goodman, Diane Ravitch, David Tyack, and Maris Vinovskis. Special thanks go to David Angus and Sidney Fine who worked with him on the penultimate draft, and Paul Mattingly whose editing improved the final copy. Mr. Mirel is responsible for all errors and inaccuracies.

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198. Detroit Education News 1/9/37.Google Scholar

199. Detroit Teachers Association News 2/6/34; 4/11/34; Detroit Board of Education” Financial Statements, 1936–1940; Detroit Board of Education” Cost Reports, 1937–1941.” Google Scholar

200. Detroit News 2/27/35 in Detroit News morgue; Detroit Labor News 2/14/36.Google Scholar

201. Chicago and Baltimore were below Detroit in a ranking of the ten largest cities in the United States. Detroit Teachers Associations-Executive Council Bulletin, p. 13.Google Scholar

202. Between June 1930 and June 1934 prices in Detroit fell approximately 25 percent. U.S. Department of Labor, “Changes,” p. 56. According to Lester Chandler, the purchasing power of the dollar rose about 33 percent between 1929–1933, and people whose incomes fell by less than 25 percent “actually gained in real income.” Chandler, , America's Greatest Depression 1929–1941 (New York, 1970), p. 33.Google Scholar

203. Alexander, S. Rippa makes a similar point in “Retrenchment,” p. 81.Google Scholar

204. Detroit Board of Education Proceedings, 1934–35, p. 250.Google Scholar

205. For examples of that position see Bowles, and Gintis, , Schooling, pp. 191–195; Katz, Michael, Class, Bureaucracy and Schools (New York, 1971), pp. 120–123; Lazarson, Marvin, Origins of the Urban School (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. x–xvii; Spring, Joel, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, 1972), pp. 149–150; Violas, Paul, The Training of the Urban Working Class (Chicago, 1978), pp. 100–109, 124–143, 320–233.Google Scholar

206. Bowles, and Gintis, , Schooling, p. 5.Google Scholar

207. Prickett, James R., “Communists and the Automobile Industry in Detroit Before 1935,” Michigan History 57 (Fall, 1973):193–208.Google Scholar

208. Examples of the business community's stand on school aid can be found in Detroit News 1/26/33; 6/15/33; The Detroiter 6/12/36; 12/18/33; 12/15/33; 1/8/34; 6/4/34; Detroit Saturday Night 12/2/33; 12/16/33; 12/23/22; 11/3/34; 1/12/35; Detroit Free Press 2/4/33; 2/7/33; 4/2/33; 11/4/34; Detroit Free Press 4/16/37 cited in Male, George, “The Michigan Education Association as an Interest Group, 1852–1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1952), p. 468. As late as 1940, Male argues, major Michigan corporations and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce were fighting for reduced state appropriations for education, pp. 476–484.Google Scholar