Effects+of+Depression+and+War+on+American+Education

Overview: ​ media type="youtube" key="gplaqa2yRgg" height="366" width="528" align="center"

The Great Depression and School Finance:
 * Depression effects were not immediately felt by public schools
 * Ways to save money included increasing class sizes, closing smaller schools, cutting teacher salaries and asking businesses for loans
 * Chicago vs. Detroit
 * Chicago only paid teachers for 4 of the 9 months they worked while Detroit never owed back salary
 * Chicago closed junior highs, a junior college and cut kindergartens while Detroit's schools went relatively unscathed
 * Chicago laid off teachers while Detroit laid off very few teachers
 * Chicago eliminated non-core academic programs while the Detroit school board refused to do so
 * Rural schools hit the hardest with the majority of their funding drying up

Educational Radicalism and the Great Depression:
 * Great Depression paved the way for the development of teacher unions
 * Columbia's Teachers College leaders began initiatives to alert teachers to changes occurring because of the Great Depression
 * George Counts and other Teachers College radicals shake things up with //Social Frontier// and //Dare the School to Build a New Social Order//
 * Progressive Education Association is challenged by Counts' "Dare Progressive Education to be Progressive"
 * Teachers responded to Counts and began joining unions such as the AFT and the NEA
 * Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education (JCEE) formed to investigate education crises during the Depression
 * JCEE established the Educational Policies Commission (EPC) to help prepare schools for future crises

Child-Centered Progressivism in Theory and Practice :
 * The Eight Year Study is conducted and its results are:
 * effectiveness of schools judged by how well graduates in the experimental schools did in college compared to traditional schools
 * development of the core curriculum
 * Essentialists criticized Progressivists for experimentalism and child-centered approaches and claimed a common set of understandings and ideals was more important
 * Robert and Helen Lynd conduct the Middletown studies to examine the effects of cultural conservatism on pedagogical change

The Federal Government as Educator : media type="youtube" key="ChbQI-k5-QQ" height="369" width="520" align="center"media type="youtube" key="efZpSeifX20" height="352" width="515" align="center"
 * State educational reform was also triggered by the Great Depression
 * Educational reform, in essence, failed at both the state and national levels during the Great Depression

Teachers and the Great Depression:
 * Willard Waller concluded that teacher mediocrity was a viable characterization of the life and work of most teachers
 * Waller listed qualities of many Depression-era teachers: inflexibility, reserve, lack of spontaneity, artificial sense of dignity, and frequent alternation between dominance and subordination
 * Richard Quantzfound a lack of fit between union's female members and their organizations
 * Teaching was seen as a profession for single woman's profession; any social or political activism was to be done out of sight
 * Larry Cubanshowed that teachers failed to adopt radical reform movements during the Depression era.

Education and World War II:
 * High schools began offering vocational courses to prepare boys for military life
 * High schools showed low dropout rates
 * Schools put a moratorium on replacements and improvements for schools and on other types of school spending
 * Teacher quality was diluted as many women steered away from education for more traditionally male careers
 * Women teachers began pursuing a salary schedule with help from the NEA
 * The NAACP begins fighting the "separate but equal" battle

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