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⁴ For illustrations of curriculum differentiation in Atlanta, see Atlanta Constitution, 13 Nov., 18 Dec. 1927, 1, 8, 22 Jan., 19 Feb., 11 Mar. 1928.Google Scholar

⁵ Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 29 June 1915, 6: 317; ibid., 30 July 1915, 6: 330; ibid., 22 June 1916, 7: 43.Google Scholar

⁶ Atlanta Board of Education, School Directory, 1920–1930. The two special classes for black children in existence in 1920, one at Carrie Steele School and the other at Pittsburg Night School, were closed the following year and replaced by two classes at Storrs School. The next year, however, those classes were also closed. There were no other special classes for black children until 1929. For a discussion of special education for blacks in Georgia, see Vivian Mack Strong, Jane, “A Study of Educational Facilities Available to Atypical Negro and White Children in Georgia” (, Atlanta University, 1949).Google Scholar

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¹¹ The definition of the state used in this essay derives from Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), 3–37; and Carnoy, Martin, The State and Political Theory (Princeton, 1984). For a discussion of the role of the state as an actor in policy formation, see Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In.” I am indebted to Joseph Tropea for the suggestion that I look at special classes from this vantage point. For his attempt to use a state-centered interpretation for examining the development of special classes, see Tropea, Joseph L., “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s–1940s,“ History of Education Quarterly 27 (Spring 1987): 29–53; and idem, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1950s–1960s,” ibid. (Fall 1987): 339–61.Google Scholar

¹² Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 24 Sep. 1908, 4:273.Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid., 21 Nov. 1908, 4: 285; Atlanta Constitution, 26 Nov. 1908.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 26 Jan. 1911, 5: 123.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid., 4 Jan. 1912,5: 286.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., 27 June 1912, 5: 356; ibid., 25 July 1912, 5: 361; Atlanta Constitution, 28 June, 27 Sep. 1912.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 15 Dec. 1914, 6: 246–47; ibid., 8 June 1915, 6: 295.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Ibid., 29 June 1915,6: 317.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., 30 July 1915,6: 330.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid.; Atlanta Constitution, 31 July 1915; Atlanta Board of Education, School Directory, 1915–1919, 19, 39.Google Scholar

²¹ United States Department of the Interior, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 30, 1916 (Washington, D.C., 1916), 24.Google Scholar

²² Kunzig, Robert, Public School Education of Atypical Children United States Department of Interior, Office of Education Bulletin no. 10 (Washington, D.C., 1931), 14, 25.Google Scholar

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²⁴ Urban, , “Educational Reform,” 118–19; idem, “Progressive Education in the Urban South: The Reform of the Atlanta Schools, 1914–1918,“ in The Age of Urban Reform: New Perspectives on the Progressive Era, ed. Ebner, Michael H. and Tobin, Eugene M. (Port Washington, 1977), 137–38.Google Scholar

²⁵ Atlanta City Council, “Evidence and Proceedings before a Special Committee of Five, Appointed under a Resolution of City Council,” 12 June 1918, 386–89 (located in Office of City Clerk, Atlanta).Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid., 263, 316–17.Google Scholar

²⁷ I examined on a daily basis the Atlanta Independent, Atlanta's principal black newspaper, between 1916 and 1925 and the Journal of Labor, the official newspaper of the Atlanta Federation of Trades, between 1914 and 1921, and found no mention in either paper of low achieving children or special classes. I only found one reference to special classes in the papers of the Atlanta Public School Teachers’ Association. At the February 1920 meeting of the Association's Board of Directors, Brenner, Gussie, principal of Fair Street School, noted the need for a “centrally located” facility to provide for the city's handicapped children. See Atlanta Public School Teachers’ Association, Directors’ Meeting, Feb. 1920, folder 3, box 2072, Atlanta Education Association Collection, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections Department, Georgia State University.Google Scholar

²⁸ Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 4 Jan. 1912, 5: 288.Google Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., 8 Apr. 1914, 6: 147–48.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ecke, Melvin W., From Ivy Street to Kennedy Center: Centennial History of the Atlanta Public School System (Atlanta, 1972), 14, 16–17, passim; Atlanta Constitution, 25 Oct. 1914, 3, 4, 7 Feb. 1915.Google Scholar

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³² Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 22 Oct. 1914, 6: 228–29; Atlanta Constitution, 23 Oct. 1914.Google Scholar

³³ For a discussion of how school reformers saw curriculum differentiation as a means of reconciling the public school's historic democratic goal of accessibility with the demands of a capitalist economy for selectivity in admissions, see Labaree, David F., The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, 1988), 7–8, 70–72, 161–62, 173–77.Google Scholar

³⁴ Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol note that “government officials (or aspiring politicians) are quite likely to take a new initiative, conceivably well ahead of social demands, if existing state capacities can be readily adapted or reworked to do things that will bring advantages to them in their struggles with competitive political forces.” See Weir, Margaret and Skocpol, Theda, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,“ in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Evans, Reueschemeyer, and Skocpol, , 115.Google Scholar

³⁵ St. Paul Board of School Inspectors, Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Annual Reports of the Board of School Inspectors of the City of St. Paul, 16 June 1906, 67.Google Scholar

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³⁷ Callahan, , Education and the Cult of Efficiency ch. 8; Tyack, David and Hansot, Elizabeth, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York, 1982), 106–14.Google Scholar

³⁸ For a discussion of the symbolic role of educational policy in legitimizing the educational professions, see Kliebard, Herbert M., “Curriculum Policy as Symbolic Action: Connecting Education with the Workplace“ (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, Calif., 27 Mar. 1989).Google Scholar

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⁴⁰ Atlanta Board of Education, Minutes, 1 Jan. 1912, 5: 286; ibid., 28 Mar. 1912, 5: 309; Atlanta Constitution, 1 Jan. 1912.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Schiesl, Martin, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America 1880–1920 (Berkeley, 1977), chs. 6–7.Google Scholar

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⁴³ Parrish, Celeste S., Survey of the Atlanta Public Schools (1914; reprint, Atlanta, 1973), 22.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Ibid., 27.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Atlanta Constitution, 25 Feb. 1915.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Ecke, , From Ivy Street 107–109; Atlanta Constitution, 6, 29 June 1915; Atlanta Journal, 29 June 1915; Orr, Dorothy, A History of Education in Georgia (Chapel Hill, 1950), 387.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Atlanta Constitution, 25 Mar. 1928.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Ibid.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Atlanta Public Schools, Curriculum Suggestions for Ungraded Classes-Junior High Schools (Atlanta, 1938).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Ibid., 32–33.Google Scholar

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⁵² PTA Association, Lee Street School Enrollment, 1921–22, 1922–23, box 2, Lee Street School Collection, Atlanta Historical Society; Strayer, George D. and Engelhardt, N. L., Report of the Survey of the Public Schools of Atlanta, Georgia (New York, 1921–22), 2:117.Google Scholar

⁵³ Adanta Board of Education, Minutes, 27 July 1916, 7: 59.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ This information could, of course, have been recorded elsewhere, but the manager of the Atlanta Public Schools Record Center was unaware of the existence of any other records for these students.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ To protect the identity of the Lee Street special class students, I have given them pseudonyms that indicate their gender. For a discussion of the meaning of the scores on this first version of the Stanford-Binet Test, see Terman, Lewis M., The Measurement of Intelligence: An Explanation of and a Complete Guide for the Use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale (Boston, 1916), ch. 5.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ In 1914, the Atlanta Board of Education adopted the following grading system: A (excellent), 90–100; B (good), 80–89; C (satisfactory), 70–79; D (fair), 60–69; E (unsatisfactory), below 60. In 1918, the board introduced a new grading system: A (excellent), 90–100; B (good), 80–89; C (fair), 70–79; D (unsatisfactory), below 70. See Ecke, , From Ivy Street 101, 129.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920: Population (Washington, D.C., 1922), 4: 1053–55.Google Scholar

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⁶⁰ The cumulative records of thirteen of the Lee Street special class students listed the occupations of their fathers. I categorized those occupations according to Thernstrom's Socio-Economic Ranking of Occupations as follows: high white collar–owner of a furniture factory (1 child); low white collar–foreman (1), insurance agent (1), postman (1), shipping clerk (1), skilled–railroad engineer (1), carpenter (2), plumber (1), semiskilled/unskilled–packer (1), textile worker (2), waiter (1). I combined semiskilled and unskilled because it was not possible to tell from the information on the cumulative record in which of these categories the occupations fell. See Thernstrom, Stephan, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1979 (Cambridge, 1973), 289–302 (Appendix B). Although this data set is exceedingly small, I have decided to report the results. I am doing so because after three years of searching records in Atlanta, I have not been able to identify any other special children.Google Scholar

⁶¹ To determine the class background of children from Lee Street's regular classes, I selected every fifth unduplicated name for which school cumulative records could be located from the 1921–22 class roster of 591 children and from the 1922–23 class roster of 568 children. Using Thernstrom's Socio-Economic Ranking of Occupations to categorize these students, I found that 15 (12.1%) of the children's fathers held high white collar occupations; 55 (44.4%), low white collar occupations; 31 (25%), skilled occupations; and 23 (18.5%), semiskilled/unskilled occupations. For the population of Atlanta, I again used Thernstrom's rankings with the occupations of white males reported in the 1920 census. This analysis indicated that 6,349 (16%) of white males held high white collar occupations; 17,728 (44.6%), low white collar occupations; 7,511 (18.9%), skilled occupations; and 8,160 (20.5%), semiskilled/unskilled occupations.Google Scholar

⁶² For a discussion from a Marxist vantage point of how the initiative of state bureaucrats may be independent of the interests of business classes yet ultimately advance capital accumulation, see Block, Fred, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,“ Socialist Revolution 7 (May 1977): 6–28.Google Scholar

⁶³ For a discussion of how Progressive Era school reforms undercut the ideals of the common school movement, see Reese, William J., “Public Schools and the Common Good,“ Educational Theory 38 (Fall 1988): 431–40.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Kaestle, Carl, “Conflict and Consensus Revisited: Notes toward a Reinterpretation of American Educational History,“ Harvard Educational Review 46 (Aug. 1976): 390–96.Google Scholar