The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston's Public Schools, 1950-1985 / Edition 2

by Adam R. Nelson

Overview

In recent years, federal mandates in education have become the subject of increasing debate. Adam R. Nelson's The Elusive Ideal—a postwar history of federal involvement in the Boston public schools—provides lessons from the past that shed light on the continuing struggles of urban public schools today. This far-reaching analysis examines the persistent failure of educational policy at local, state, and federal levels to equalize educational opportunity for all. Exploring deep-seated tensions between the educational ideals of integration, inclusion, and academic achievement over time, Nelson considers the development and implementation of policies targeted at diverse groups of urban students, including policies related to racial desegregation, bilingual education, special education, school funding, and standardized testing.

An ambitious study that spans more than thirty years and covers all facets of educational policy, from legal battles to tax strategies, The Elusive Ideal provides a model from which future inquiries will proceed. A probing and provocative work of urban history with deep relevance for urban public schools today, Nelson's book reveals why equal educational opportunity remains such an elusive ideal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226571898
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/10/2005
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America
Edition description:	1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Adam R. Nelson is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston’s Public Schools, 1950-1985 (also published by the University of Chicago Press), among other books.

Read an Excerpt

THE ELUSIVE IDEAL
Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston's Public Schools, 1950-1985

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By ADAM R. NELSON
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-57189-8

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Chapter One
Pursuing Federal Funds, 1950-1963

Boston has had a long history of involvement with the issue of special education for the disabled. As early as the 1840s, two reformers, Samuel Gridley Howe and his wife Julia Ward Howe, established a small school for twelve mentally and physically disabled children in nearby Malden. Chartered as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth, this school later moved into a wing of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Watertown, which had been founded in the late 1820s as the nation's first school for the visually impaired. Both of these early institutions received state funding for the first time in 1856, and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the City of Boston began to allow mildly handicapped children into its public schools-so long as they did not disrupt the "regular" classroom environment. These programs were far ahead of their time, but they did not include all the city's handicapped children, most of whom remained at home with their parents. Even in the state's publicly and privately supported asylums, handicapped students received only limited academic training-that is, if they received any at all. A proposal to include the city's most severely disabled children in its regular public schools did not emerge until 1940, when a group of mothers asked the Massachusetts department of mental health to recruit a teacher to work with their mentally retarded children in local neighborhood schools. This initial group of women, calling themselves the Boston Child Betterment Association, subsequently pushed to enroll all disabled children in the public schools. At the end of World War II, the Boston Child Betterment Association changed its name to the Boston Association for Retarded Children and set up offices at the Boston Street Health Unit. Over the course of the next half-decade-from 1945 to 1950-the association pressed for the integration of disabled children into the public schools and the provision of special services to facilitate their educational development.

The gentle persistence of the Boston Association for Retarded Children surprised the five-member Boston school committee, which prided itself on a decades-old network of special programs for handicapped children. As school superintendent Dennis Haley commented in his annual report in 1950, "Boston has for many generations pioneered in helping children who, for some reason, are not able to keep pace with their classmates. Many of these children have a physical handicap; some are slow learners; and others have difficulty in adjusting themselves socially. All need special assistance, and the Boston public schools have been far in advance in providing it." Certainly, compared with other states, Massachusetts was far ahead of the curve in providing educational services for the disabled. Hearing-impaired students attended the internationally renowned Horace Mann School for the Deaf, founded in 1869, while those with more serious physical or mental handicaps attended the Walter E. Fernald School for the Retarded (the successor to the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth, of which Fernald was the first superintendent). Emotionally disturbed and delinquent young men attended the Gertrude Godvin School for Boys, and in the late 1940s, Boston opened two new hospital centers for the handicapped, one for polio victims at the Haynes Memorial Hospital for Infectious Diseases and another for convalescent children and "spastics" at the Joseph P. Kennedy Memorial Hospital. Even students confined to their homes with illnesses such as rheumatic fever, epilepsy, tuberculosis, broken bones, or mumps received individualized instruction from "a well-trained corps of teachers" who made weekly house calls. All in all, Superintendent Haley noted, Boston's programs for disabled children were well above average for the 1950s. In his words, "By all these means, children who at one time might have known the discouragement of failure now have the hope of a normal education."

The Boston Association for Retarded Children did not discount the value of these programs, but it believed that all disabled children should be permitted to attend the same public schools as nondisabled students-and, increasingly, others throughout the country agreed. In 1952, the Boston Association for Retarded Children joined twenty-three other groups to form a Massachusetts state chapter of the two-year-old National Association for Retarded Children, which had become a prominent advocate for the mainstreaming of disabled children in public schools. Also in that year, the Boston public schools joined the Perkins Institute for the Blind in developing a regional plan for students with various physical disabilities. As Edward Waterhouse, the director of the Perkins Institute, commented, "it is now apparent that New England public schools must adopt programs for the education of the handicapped." The John Greenleaf Whittier Elementary School in Dorchester was the first to designate one of its classrooms specifically for the use of blind pupils. As the Boston Post reported just before the beginning of the fall semester, "The classroom will be equipped with special furniture, Braille materials, and all special supplies necessary for the education of the blind." Calling this classroom an intriguing and novel experiment, Superintendent Haley remarked in his annual report for 1952-53 that "the most interesting classroom in the whole City of Boston is the Braille class at the John Greenleaf Whittier School, the only one of its kind in New England. Here, in its second year of operation, the pupils are not segregated, but move about, run errands, and deport themselves like their seeing friends. The pupils learn to read and write Braille with ease, Braille books paralleling the reading books used in regular grades. The class is filled to capacity and has attracted many visitors, particularly nurses, social workers, and others interested in this phase of public school work."

When Haley commented that blind students were "not segregated" in the Whittier School, he meant that they were not isolated in a completely separate institution as they had been in the past; he did not mean that blind students sat side-by-side in classes with sighted peers. Like most of his contemporaries, Haley insisted that the best way to ensure equal educational opportunities for all students was to place disabled students in isolated classes suited to their needs. Moreover, he drew a distinction between physically disabled students, who were capable of average academic achievement within regular schools, and mentally disabled students, who were not. This distinction made sense to Haley, but it did not make sense to the parents of mentally disabled students, who persuaded the state legislature in 1952 to create a "special commission to make an investigation and study relative to the training facilities available for retarded children." This commission began work in 1953 with six members: Philip Bowker, a state senator; Meyer Pressman, a state representative; Philip Cashman, state supervisor of special schools, who represented the state Department of Education; Malcolm Farrell, director of the Walter E. Fernald School, who represented the state Department of Mental Health; Helen Freeman, president of the Massachusetts Special Class Teachers Association; and Mrs. David Hurwitz, president of the Massachusetts Association for the Retarded. Over the next two decades, the special commission issued sixteen major reports, each of which stressed the idea of integrating retarded and nonretarded students into regular schools, if not into regular classrooms. It sponsored research on the educational needs of the retarded and gathered data from both teachers and administrators. As one observer noted, "Most legislation concerning special education from 1952 onward was first proposed by the commission," which saw itself as a veritable "state seminar on the rights of handicapped children."

The commission's first report, written in the fall of 1953 and released in January 1954, outlined its primary objectives: "It is the hope of this commission to interpret to the legislature the rights of handicapped children, more particularly mentally handicapped children, to their rightful share of education in their local communit[ies]. It is the hope, further, to demonstrate to the legislature the responsibility ... to implement this right so that cities and towns will provide these rights for mentally retarded children." For the special commission, including retarded children in the public schools was a fundamental right that no tax-supported education system could legally deny. In its words, every child in the public schools was "entitled ... to every aid we can give him to function within his handicap as a child; that is, whatever special facilities the law can set up to develop him to [his] maximum capacity." This argument was not lost on Massachusetts's legislators. In 1954, after receiving the commission's first report, the legislature amended Chapter 71 of the Massachusetts General Laws (one of three chapters dealing with public schools) to guarantee every mentally retarded child the right to a free education in a public school-provided that he or she could sit still in class and provided that his or her presence would not distract nondisabled pupils. This amendment accompanied another new law, Chapter 514, which established a separate division of special education within the state Department of Mental Health and allocated funds to reimburse up to 50 percent of local costs associated with special services for all "educable mentally retarded" students. Chapter 514 also required annual reexaminations for children placed in special classes to make sure their original diagnoses were valid-the presumption being that special classes hindered rather than helped students who were not "truly" disabled. In this way, the state legislature promised all retarded pupils access to the state's public schools.

Taken together, these new laws marked a substantial increase in Massachusetts's commitment to school aid for the disabled. They did not, however, increase the level of interaction between disabled and nondisabled students in public school classes. In 1955, a year after the passage of these new laws, Superintendent Haley commented proudly that the Boston public schools were already "living up to the letter of the law that 'all public school children of school age found to be retarded in mental development shall be placed in special classes.' ... Children who are not at home in the regular classroom or whose ability deters them from average achievement are given special consideration and instruction in subjects that eventually will lend them to become self-supporting and useful citizens. This work is now carried on in 105 special classes and 17 sub-special classes." While services for the disabled were undoubtedly expanding and improving in Boston's schools, Superintendent Haley's emphasis fell squarely on the provision of isolated rather than integrated programs. He continued to insist that retarded students benefited from the "special consideration and instruction" they received in physically separate classes designed to meet their unique educational needs. Such classes were necessary, he contended, for students whose disabilities rendered them "incapable" of average academic achievement. Indeed, for him, incapacity for average achievement was the very definition of disability and the basic justification for "special" or supplemental services. And, yet, it was this view-the view that mentally disabled students were fundamentally incapable of average academic achievement-that generated the most trenchant controversy over time. If Haley was prepared to include physically disabled students in regular classrooms in the public schools, critics asked, then why not include mentally disabled students in regular classrooms, too?

The idea of including all disabled students in regular classes was still new in the mid-1950s, and it was not universally welcomed. To many, the notion of placing disabled and nondisabled students in the same class seemed absurd-a disservice to both groups. Most educators continued to believe that the best way to raise academic achievement for all was to provide special services for the disabled in isolated classrooms tailored to their specific needs. Yet, the principle of integration was slowly gaining ground-not only in the schools but also in the federal courts. The recent case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954 dealt not only with racial segregation, but also, less directly, with the issue of segregation among any group found to have "special educational needs." In fact, the defense attorneys in this case explicitly warned that court-ordered integration might eventually lead to a situation in which public schools would be required to include all students in the same schools-despite varying individual needs-in order to meet the vague standard of equal educational opportunity. In the attorneys' words, "if segregation of black children was unconstitutional, [then] surely it will be found that segregation of children defined as disabled is also unacceptable." By advancing this line of argument, the defense hoped to convince the court that integration per se was ultimately irrelevant to pupils' academic achievement and, thus, to their educational opportunities. This point backfired, however, when the justices accepted the notion that black and white students had different educational needs but rejected the notion that different needs among different races necessitated different schools. Instead, they stated unequivocally that, where race was concerned, "separate schools are inherently unequal" and, in their remedy-phase decision in 1955, Brown v. Board of Education II, held that the only way for all students to enjoy equal opportunities was to integrate them into the same schools-and even the same classrooms-"with all deliberate speed."

The full complexity of this decision was not obvious in 1955. Few predicted the extent to which "the segregation of children defined as disabled" would be tolerated (or even applauded) in the future, and few predicted the extent to which integrated classes themselves could be considered "discriminatory" if they treated all students in exactly the same way and overlooked individual differences. Instead, most observers saw the court's rulings in Brown v. Board of Education as a victory for those who advocated integration for all students-regardless of differences-in the same learning environment. Certainly, Massachusetts's special commission for the retarded saw the court's rulings this way. In its second report, in 1955, the commission asked that special programs for the retarded be incorporated into regular classrooms. "Programs for helping retarded children are based on the belief that [these children] need extra help so that they can have equal opportunity with normal children," the commission wrote. If a principle of integration could apply to black students despite their special needs, then, according to the special commission, the same principle could apply to disabled students despite their special needs. The special commission argued that "the objective is not to transform those of limited mental capacity into geniuses.... The goal ... is to allow them to function as well as possible at their own level of intelligence." Responding to Superintendent Haley's view that full integration was appropriate only for students who were capable of average academic achievement, the commission held that students' academic potential could not be ascertained until after their placement in integrated classes. (The commission failed to realize, however, that Haley could use the same reasoning to argue that disabled students' academic potential could not be discerned until after their placement in isolated classes.)

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Evolution of School Reform in Boston
1. Pursuing Federal Funds, 1950-1963
2. Defining Disadvantage as Disability, 1963-1966
3. Aggravating Racial Imbalance, 1966-1968
4. Seeking Program Effectiveness, 1968-1971
5. Making "Appropriate" Placements, 1971-1974
6. Reconfiguring School Finance, 1974-1977
7. Evading Local Accountability, 1977-1980
8. Compelling Better Results? 1980-1985
Conclusion: The Complex History of American School Reform
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The Elusive Ideal provides much-needed context for understanding the events in Boston and, in so doing, provides a usefuol history of federal education policy. . . . A well-researched history of the evolution of policies for and approaches to educating children with special educational needs. Although the book concentrates on Boston's story, its lessons are more general. It will be of great interest to historians and economists who study the development and effects of educational policy in the United States."

Journal of Economic Resarch - Sarah J. Reber

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only makes a significant contribution to the literature but also enlarges the playing field on which future discussions of the issues will take place. Such is the import of . . . [Nelson's] timely study. . . . What emerges from Nelson's book is a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of urban school reform and a deep appreciation of the various obstacles that stand in the way."

Albert L. Samuelsn Historical Review

"By tapping a broad array of sources, especially legislation, educational reports, and newspaper articles, [Nelson] ably uses the history of federal aid to the Boston public schools as a means of probing the complex interplay between school integation and student achievement. . . . Thorough and well-researched. It makes a valuable contribution to the fields of both history and educational policy, specifically because it pulls so many ideas together in a new way."

Journal of African American History - Amy Rutenberg

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only makes a significant contribution to the literature but also enlarges the playing field on which future discussions of the issues will take place. Such is the import of . . . [Nelson's] timely study. . . . What emerges from Nelson's book is a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of urban school reform and a deep appreciation of the various obstacles that stand in the way."

American Historical Review - Albert L. Samuels

"Nelson is breaking new ground by comparing different equity reforms in education against the background of local / federal relations. Historians of education and policy analysts will find The Elusive Ideal very illuminating."

David Tyack

"The Elusive Ideal is a first-rate, important contribution to our understanding of cities and education practices and policies in the recent past. It presents an original interpretation of the interaction of different definitions and proposed solutions for providing equal education opportunities. Well-organized and clearly written, this book will appeal to a broad audience."
--Maris Vinovskis, author of History and Educational Policymaking

Maris Vinovskis

"Packed with insight and carefully grounded in a meticulous understanding for both detail and institutional interaction, Adam Nelson demonstrates how the half-century goals of integrated education and student achievement operated at cross-purposes in the Boston public schools. Federal mandates that were designed to support the goals only made the problems worse and confused the issues. Nelson is wisely nonjudgmental, but he raises troubling questions that no proponent of equal educational opportunity can afford to ignore."

Dennis J. Hutchinson

Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only makes a significant contribution to the literature but also enlarges the playing field on which future discussions of the issues will take place. Such is the import of . . . [Nelson's] timely study. . . . What emerges from Nelson's book is a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of urban school reform and a deep appreciation of the various obstacles that stand in the way.

— Albert L. Samuels

American Historical Review

By tapping a broad array of sources, especially legislation, educational reports, and newspaper articles, [Nelson] ably uses the history of federal aid to the Boston public schools as a means of probing the complex interplay between school integation and student achievement. . . . Thorough and well-researched. It makes a valuable contribution to the fields of both history and educational policy, specifically because it pulls so many ideas together in a new way.

— Amy Rutenberg

Journal of African American History

The Elusive Ideal provides much-needed context for understanding the events in Boston and, in so doing, provides a usefuol history of federal education policy. . . . A well-researched history of the evolution of policies for and approaches to educating children with special educational needs. Although the book concentrates on Boston's story, its lessons are more general. It will be of great interest to historians and economists who study the development and effects of educational policy in the United States.

— Sarah J. Reber

Journal of Economic Resarch

"The Elusive Ideal is a first-rate, important contribution to our understanding of cities and education practices and policies in the recent past. It presents an original interpretation of the interaction of different definitions and proposed solutions for providing equal education opportunities. Well-organized and clearly written, this book will appeal to a broad audience."
--Maris Vinovskis, author of History and Educational Policymaking

--Maris Vinovskis

"The Elusive Ideal provides much-needed context for understanding the events in Boston and, in so doing, provides a usefuol history of federal education policy. . . . A well-researched history of the evolution of policies for and approaches to educating children with special educational needs. Although the book concentrates on Boston's story, its lessons are more general. It will be of great interest to historians and economists who study the development and effects of educational policy in the United States."--Sarah J. Reber "Journal of Economic Resarch"

"By tapping a broad array of sources, especially legislation, educational reports, and newspaper articles, [Nelson] ably uses the history of federal aid to the Boston public schools as a means of probing the complex interplay between school integation and student achievement. . . . Thorough and well-researched. It makes a valuable contribution to the fields of both history and educational policy, specifically because it pulls so many ideas together in a new way."--Amy Rutenberg "Journal of African American History"

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only makes a significant contribution to the literature but also enlarges the playing field on which future discussions of the issues will take place. Such is the import of . . . [Nelson's] timely study. . . . What emerges from Nelson's book is a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of urban school reform and a deep appreciation of the various obstacles that stand in the way."--Albert L. Samuels "American Historical Review"

"Nelson is breaking new ground by comparing different equity reforms in education against the background of local / federal relations. Historians of education and policy analysts will find The Elusive Ideal very illuminating."--David Tyack, author of Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society

"Packed with insight and carefully grounded in a meticulous understanding for both detail and institutional interaction, Adam Nelson demonstrates how the half-century goals of integrated education and student achievement operated at cross-purposes in the Boston public schools. Federal mandates that were designed to support the goals only made the problems worse and confused the issues. Nelson is wisely nonjudgmental, but he raises troubling questions that no proponent of equal educational opportunity can afford to ignore."--Dennis J. Hutchinson, University of Chicago Law School

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