Dis-Coherence: Missing Educational Leadership Histories of, for, and by the People

• In Event: Troubling Omissions and Underplayed Issues in the History of Educational Leadership Research and Practice

Abstract

This paper will highlight a wide range of historical debates that have relevance for our understanding of the present. The intent is to introduce readers (and listeners) to a broader context in which to read current-day issues.
For each selected historical debate, three questions are posed: Whose voices dominated the historical narrative and why? Whose voices were (and still are) marginalized or deleted from the narrative, and why? How can educators, particularly school leaders, reclaim their knowledge of histories to inform decision-making today? The aim is to make history come alive, again, not through referencing seminal texts, but, rather, through the many voices speaking at the time – thus the subtitle, “of, for, and by the people.” Each historical vignette will begin with a discussion of an historical context (or contexts) and an educational problem that was controversial and debated in the past. The selected vignettes will be chosen using the criterion of contemporary relevance; that is, are we, in 2016, still debating the policy issue?
When appropriate, an issue will be explored over time within a range of different contexts. The issue of school finance and taxation to support schools, for example, was perceived differently at different times and in different places. In 1809, for example, New York City Congressman De Witt Clinton “argued against local taxation for the support of public schools on the ground that such taxation would set the people against education”(Maxwell, 1912, p.306). Arguing in opposition, a decade later, was Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster who believed that public schools served all the people. The great orator said, “We hold every man subject to taxation in proportion to his property, and we look not to the question whether he himself have or have not children to be benefited by the education for which he pays”(Webster, cited in Butler,1915,p.338). Yet, as the nation experienced the harsh realities of the Great Depression in the 1930s, schools faced a reduction in taxes, cuts in curricular offerings, teacher pay cuts, furloughs, or terminations, a severe lack of supplies, etc. (Baskin, 1971). In 2008, the US government turned to Dr. Ben Bernanke to guide the nation out of the Great Recession, largely on the basis of his historical knowledge of the economics of the Depression. To whom did educators, researchers, policymakers, practitioners turn to for guidance from 2008 to 2014? Clearly, our field’s ignorance of history limited the options and decisions on the policy table of today.

The inquiry process to develop the paper involves on-site and digital archival research ranging from readings of early dissertations of school governance, superintendent reports, bureau of education monographs, convention speeches, early association minutes and editorials (e.g., NEA; National Herbart Society), and forgotten journal articles no longer in publication. Although primary source material will be central to the paper, some secondary sources will be employed. The list of secondary sources to be used includes Cremin (1961), Bowers (1969), Spring (1972), Resnick (1981), Lagemann (1989), Zilversmit (1993), and Zimmerman (2002).

Author

• Ira E. Bogotch, Florida Atlantic University