This historical-institutionalist account of the development of public education in early nineteenth-century New York State seeks to expand our understanding of American statebuilding by exploring a little-known, decades-long campaign, spearheaded by senior state officials, to increase citizen involvement in publicly supported schools. The episode is significant, in part because many of the issues regarding the purposes and processes of public education, and public administration more generally, that arose then are still being debated. Of these, perhaps the most interesting is the way the political leaders in charge of New York's publicly supported school system two centuries ago anticipated what is today the growing field of administrative theory and practice referred to as “participatory governance.”
The goal of participatory governance is not only to improve the quality of specific decisions by bringing more stakeholders to the table but also to alter public life going forward, changing the context for future decisions. Advocates of participation hope to nudge institutions toward consistently giving citizens more power to influence decisions and citizens toward more engagement with public life. Thus, whatever policy mechanisms are chosen in pursuit of participatory governance, they embody a hope to achieve what political scientists call policy feedbacks: results from policies, programs, institutional rules, or organizational structures that, in addition to their direct results, change the future political matrix in which political struggles or policy-making will take place.
In our story, policy feedbacks were central goals of the protagonist statebuilders. The institutional structure they developed, nurtured, and revised granted significant authority to the adults of each local school district, including how much to tax themselves each year to support their school. The leaders of New York's educational system in this era hoped that parents would spend time observing what went on in their one-room schoolhouses and become motivated to pay higher taxes in order to attract better teachers. More broadly, they hoped that both adults and students (when they grew up) would become more engaged and effective citizens in all spheres of public life. In the end, democracy would be richer.
The story begins in the first years of the nineteenth century, when the New York State legislature established a statewide, publicly supported, publicly governed system of primary schools that delegated substantial responsibilities to local communities, even the hyper-local communities of individual rural school districts. The design had important elements of participatory democracy from the outset. After it was up and running, state leaders began pushing for even more participation, employing persuasion, new educational programs, and eventually modification of the original organizational design.
New York's leaders were deeply committed to both quality education and wide political participation, going far beyond voting. They believed these goals to be interdependent. We see these commitments playing out in the career of Jedediah Peck, who chaired the commission that wrote the foundational 1812 law governing public education. Peck was a stalwart advocate of free speech. He publicly protested the US Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized writing or speaking negatively about the president and his administration, even though this resulted in his arrest and threatened trial. As a member of the New York legislature, Peck campaigned for years, unsuccessfully, for state-supported schools in the countryside. Finally, in 1812, after he had retired from the legislature, he was appointed by Governor Daniel D. Tompkins to head a commission to design the state's public education system. His commission's report, in addition to producing a bill laying out the structure of the school system, offered a lengthy rationale for government support of education. Its key point was that “in a government like ours, where the people is the sovereign power; where the will of the people is the law of the land; which will is openly and directly expressed; and where every act of the government may justly be called the act of the people, it is absolutely essential that the people be enlightened.”Footnote 1
The political leaders in charge of schools over the next three decades repeatedly expressed sentiments similar to those of Peck's commission: the new republic required active citizens who were, through education, intellectually equipped to think critically and independently about political issues and debates. Since a major goal of the institutional design was to encourage adults to become more active and effective citizens, we can see that the aspirations for the development of students and adults were homologous and part of a single ideology. Both Peck and the political leaders who oversaw the schools thought of central administrative structures as complementing citizen participation, rather than being in tension with it.
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As an account of political actors working to achieve their policy goals through the design and modification of governing institutions, this article seeks to contribute to recent historical-institutionalist scholarship that, as Richard R. John has explained, views government agencies in the US as “agents of change.”Footnote 2 Much of this historiography has called attention to the activism and efficacy of the federal government in the nineteenth century, in contrast to previously conventional beliefs that the national state in this period was essentially passive or at most a reactive distributor of material benefits.Footnote 3 This new institutionalist scholarship provides a more accurate portrayal of the development of the national government in the first decades of the nation's history.
State-level political development has received less attention, despite the fact that, as historian John L. Brooke argues, it was at the state and local levels that ordinary people encountered an “American State.”Footnote 4 The state and local governments that Americans encountered were decidedly activist. State governments often assisted farmers, provided infrastructure, and offered at least some aid to the poor and mentally ill. As time went on, local governments began providing fire protection, policing, street paving, outdoor lighting, water, waste disposal, and measures to protect public health. In a serious blow to the legend of the nineteenth-century US night-watchman state, William Novak has called our attention to the multitude of regulatory activities assumed by states and municipalities as they aggressively pursued “the people's welfare.” No wonder that Leonard White, credited with inventing the field of American administrative history, described nineteenth-century states and cities as “the busy workshops of administration.”Footnote 5
School systems, rooted in local communities but coordinated and increasingly financially assisted by state governments, constituted a major focus of these busy workshops. This is hardly surprising, given that education in this period was a “more universal and costly public service than any other.” Footnote 6 Despite the fact that schools, and the bureaucracies tasked with managing them, comprised the largest single part of the public sector, most scholars of early nineteenth-century education tell what might be called “society-centered” stories. These accounts take non-governmental life to be the prime causal agent, with state activity mostly a dependent variable. For example, economic historians Sun Go and Peter H. Lindert, citing the research of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz (also economic historians), assert that the expansion of schools and school enrollment in the first half of the nineteenth century was “largely decentralized and spontaneous.”Footnote 7
Robert Putnam's concept of “social capital” (defined as networks of trust and reciprocity) plays an important role in this historiography that valorizes the role of the private sector.Footnote 8 For instance, Nancy Beadie, in her influential case study of education and economic change in Lima, a rural upstate New York town, argues that the prevalence of social capital in the town, produced by familial and church ties, “helps to explain the high levels of school organization, attendance, and investment in schooling that townspeople had already achieved at the very beginning of state intervention in common schools.” She tells her readers bluntly that the “reference point” for explaining educational development “is the community and its members, not the nation-state.”Footnote 9
Even Johann N. Neem, a scholar who pays close attention to legislation and institutions (and arguably the current leader in the history of nineteenth-century education), has described his purpose as “bring[ing] attention to the role of civic labor in state formation.”Footnote 10 In his 2017 overview of the development of public education in the US in the nineteenth century, Neem asserts that: “By the 1830s, more children were going to more schools than ever before, because ordinary Americans had come together … without much aid from the state or from the likes of [educational reformers such as] Horace Mann.”Footnote 11
In contrast to the position articulated by Neem and Beadie, this article highlights the role of government in creating mass education in New York State and, equally important, in providing places and occasions for citizens to actively participate in public life. Additionally, the article breaks with the popular plotline in historical studies of nineteenth-century education that pits remote, centralizing elites against local residents.Footnote 12 The narrative presented here describes an attempt by policy-makers to create an administrative apparatus that integrated local management with centralized oversight and support. Indeed, central-state mechanisms—laws and administrative procedures—were employed to promote popular participation. For these statebuilders, citizen participation was not just a means by which to improve the schools but a core value, an end in itself.
As it happens, the early twenty-first century is another historical moment in which many perceive the need for deeper and more meaningful participation in public life. According to sociologists Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, large numbers of people currently find representative democracy and bureaucratic administration, at least by themselves, to be incapable of “accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics.” In response, they call for “real world experiments” in decision-making that “elicit the energy and influence of ordinary people.Footnote 13
That such sentiments are widely held is demonstrated by the global proliferation of practices that go under the rubric of “participatory governance.”Footnote 14 Specific participatory techniques—especially structured events for budgetary decision-making—have gained widespread popularity, but there has been little consensus about their meaning and results. While sweeping claims have been made for the potential of participatory techniques to achieve greater equality and social justice, some observers are skeptical.Footnote 15 They wonder if these techniques merely amount to a collection of good government best practices that produce transparency and efficiency—essentially a set of procedural innovations of the kind that Theda Skocpol calls “neo-Mugwump” reforms—with little ability to profoundly reshape societies.Footnote 16 Some observers even ask whether participatory practices are nothing more than “a friendly façade to neoliberal reforms, making communities feel responsible for problems beyond their control.”Footnote 17 Such questions reflect a contested field of discourse. In any case, the early history of the New York State school system offers a robust “real life experiment” of the kind called for by Fung and Wright, since the school system featured organizational mechanisms intended to engage ordinary people in public life similar to ones used by the contemporary participatory governance movement.
Since participatory democracy presupposes policy feedbacks, this story also manifests phenomena that are examples of processes described in the policy feedback literature. Four of these are particularly relevant to our story, although others have some applicability. The most obvious process is “policy learning,” a term that refers to the alteration of policies in response to practical outcomes and citizen or private-sector reactions.Footnote 18 Another kind of policy feedback occurs when policies and institutional arrangements lead to the acquisition, by members of the public, of new civic capacities, providing cognitive and/or material resources and increasing the ability of these citizens to influence future policy choices.Footnote 19 A third focuses on funding mechanisms for new policies that lead to reactions that change the political situation. Such reactions may make the new policy more or less likely to survive and also affect future policy choices in other areas.Footnote 20 The final one considers the ways in which other parts of the organizational ecosystem of the public sector—other agencies and other units, levels, or branches of government—react to new policies. Their reactions are based on their own institutional needs, priorities, and modus operandi, and they affect the policy-making matrix going forward.Footnote 21
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To reconstruct this episode, the article tells the story in six parts. We start by describing the blueprint created by the foundational 1812 law that set up the institutional structure for New York's publicly supported schools. The second part explains how it came about that leading politicians (secretaries of state) served as “superintendents of common schools,” taking the helm of the state's school system in addition to their other duties. Next we lay out problems that emerged and prevented the common school system from fulfilling some of the key hopes of the secretary-superintendents. The fourth part examines two ambitious programs—a statewide public library system and new teacher training institutions—that the secretary-superintendents hoped would solve the problems but which failed to do so. The fifth part relates organizational issues that were still deeper obstacles, and the sixth and final narrative part recounts the next approach these leaders resorted to, which was a significant change to the original organizational design. However, the new structure survived only six years, making it hard to gauge what success it might have achieved.
This account relies in part on New York's extensive and highly detailed school legislation, which created and refined the architecture of the school system, and on documents produced by the state secretary-superintendents, especially the reports they submitted to the legislature each year. These lengthy communications (some of which ran over one hundred pages) used detailed charts to present data on various quantifiable aspects of the system: financial information, number and location of schools, number of enrolled children, etc. The reports also included the secretary-superintendents’ personal evaluations of the overall quality of the schools, with suggestions for improvement, including recommendations for legislation. Quite often, these sections of the reports contained heartfelt statements from the secretary-superintendents aimed at convincing readers of the crucial role of universal education in a self-governing polity.Footnote 22
These more personal parts of the reports reveal an aspiration, shared across party lines, for a style of governance that was standardized in form and accountability but, at the same time, decentralized and participatory, offering wide scope for local variation in substance and broad opportunities for local citizens to participate in key decisions and even to become local government officials, usually unpaid, but with real powers and responsibilities. This model of governance at once presupposed and tried to create a highly engaged citizenry, similar to the energetic society that “governs itself for itself” that Alexis de Tocqueville believed he encountered when he visited the US during the period this article covers.Footnote 23
When the secretary-superintendents looked out over the thousands of schools under their watch, they were pleased with the way the participatory structure of local district meetings worked, giving citizens in each district direct democratic control over key practical decisions for their school. However, for reasons described above, they also wanted parents to become involved in the daily life of their schools and to develop ambition for improving their quality. On this dimension, in contrast to the social reality Tocqueville described, they saw apathy. Nevertheless, the superintendents were persistent and resourceful. Their hope—and their mission—was to change this situation.
1. The founding of the school system and its financial and administrative structure
Despite what a modern reader might assume from its title, New York's 1812 Act for the Establishment of Common Schools was not drafted with the primary intention of setting up new schools. Instead, it aimed at creating an administrative apparatus that would absorb, govern, and support already existing schools and provide consistent ways of setting up new ones. The statute did not seek to impose a standardized curriculum or a uniform pedagogical approach. The aim was to stabilize existing schools and provide a sound basis for forming new ones during this period of rapid population growth.
Well before the 1812 statute, common schools—“common” in the sense that they were open to children of all families willing to share the cost of hiring a teacher—were widespread. An incomplete enumeration carried out in 1798 listed 1,352 in operation within the state, with almost sixty thousand children enrolled.Footnote 24 Such schools were initiated and governed ad hoc by groups of local citizens. They might operate differently from year to year, even going in and out of operation, depending on resources and circumstances. This informal organizational pattern was prevalent in the lightly settled rural areas springing up throughout New York State in the years following the Revolution. Thousands of young white families were surging into the state's interior, settling on fertile lands that had been violently expropriated from the indigenous peoples of the Iroquois Confederacy.Footnote 25
The widespread creation of elementary schools through voluntary efforts in the nation's first decades is widely celebrated—with some researchers going so far as to contend that by the mid-nineteenth century, the US led the world in mass primary education. But the temptation to romanticize the extent of formal education that was taking place due to purely voluntary efforts should be kept in check. For one thing, we are cautioned by economic historian Carole Shammas that the US enrollment figures typically used by quantitative historical researchers overestimate actual attendance. She explains that closer investigation of the data reveals that “most of the superiority in America's percentage of youth enrolled in school can be attributed to educational sprawl,” by which she means attendance for “shorter terms spread out over more years.”Footnote 26 A second reason not to overstate the effectiveness of spontaneous, grassroots energy with regard to elementary education is that accounts from that time make clear (as one might expect given the organizational format) that many early common schools were shoestring operations. In his famous travelogue of the northeast US, Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, reported that, as he journeyed on horseback from Schenectady to Utica in the fall of 1799, he passed a number of “miserably-looking school houses.”Footnote 27
Thirteen years later, New York's state legislature enacted the 1812 school statute, creating a statewide agency that absorbed and standardized inconsistent volunteer energy into a permanent institutional framework. To structure the system, the legislature employed both financial and legal tools, providing public funds with administrative requirements attached.
With respect to financing, the statute foreshadowed the practice of grants-in-aid that the federal government began employing a century later to shape the behavior of state governments.Footnote 28 Every town (the New York term for a township) was offered a share of the annual investment income from the state's Common School Fund, but only on condition that it tax its residents at least an equal amount. Sales of lands confiscated from indigenous residents provided the bulk of the fund's capital.
The annual investment income from the fund was allocated to towns on the basis of population. After this, the combined state grant and town tax money was divided among the school districts within a town on the basis of the number of children aged five to fifteen (expanded to age sixteen in 1829). This money was earmarked exclusively for teachers’ salaries.Footnote 29 Even so, parents of children enrolled in school needed to pay tuition, called “rates,” because the public money typically covered less than half of a teacher's salary.Footnote 30 Meanwhile, each school district was required to levy taxes on all taxpayers within the district in order to cover the cost of erecting, equipping, heating, and maintaining a school building.
Along with the state's financial contribution came accountability. To qualify for state money, towns were required to report statistics on the operation of their schools to Albany each year, data that needed to be gathered from the trustees of each of the thousands of school districts.Footnote 31
The arrangement was redistributive in that it favored families with children in common schools, given that property owners who had no school-age children or who sent their children to private schools enjoyed no exemption from school taxes.Footnote 32 In addition, people lacking property did not pay taxes, but their children had the same access to common schools as children of property owners, at least theoretically. Towns were instructed to cover the tuition of poor families from general funds, although, as it turned out, poor families generally managed without public assistance by sending their children to school only a limited number of days, or not at all.
The feedbacks from this funding system were clearly positive, with public funding and accountability of the common schools an accepted principle, evidenced by no sign of opposition appearing until the 1841 organizational revamp described in section 6. The use of earmarked funds, at the state level and to a limited extent at the town level, meant that no appropriations were required, making the financing relatively invisible. In addition, since the source of these funds was the expropriation of indigenous lands, the money had the appearance of being a free windfall. The financial responsibilities of towns and local districts were clear, stable, and moderate. The rules for allocation of resources to towns and then districts made the system seem fair.
In terms of administrative mechanics, the structure worked well, especially considering the size of the region it serviced, the challenges presented by existing conditions of transportation and communication, and the variety and complexity of the tasks involved. Even though it excluded New York City, with its completely different educational structure, the state's common school system covered a land area larger than England.Footnote 33 By 1830, almost half a million children attended one of the state's 9,030 common schools for some part of the year, and the system's total annual cost topped one million dollars. Over forty thousand district and town officials (uncompensated, in most cases) participated part-time in a series of interconnected tasks: raising sufficient tax money in the towns to qualify for the annual allotment of state funds; distributing these monies to school districts within towns based on stipulated formulas; establishing new school districts; drawing (and redrawing, as the population shifted) district boundaries; collecting taxes from property owners within districts to build and maintain schoolhouses; hiring and negotiating compensation packages of teachers; and collecting tuition from parents of students to pay the part of teachers’ salaries not covered by state grants and town taxes.Footnote 34 The reporting requirements created another very substantial task for each town and district. And yet, compliance was high. With understandable pride, John Dix noted that in 1833, his first year in office, over 90% of the 9,690 districts then in existence had submitted their required reports.Footnote 35
The structure provided by the law was especially participatory at the base level: the local school district. Every year, as the law required, residents in practically every one of the thousands of school districts (almost twelve thousand by 1854), no matter how small and isolated, gathered in their local schoolhouse to discuss their school and to collectively agree on how to keep it going for the following year. From their number, they elected three trustees and a clerk, who, with no expectation of remuneration, agreed to serve as business agents for their districts. Rural school districts taught an average of 51 students in 1825, increasing to 53 in 1835 and 60 in 1845. In many cases, two or more students came from the same family, so district school families would have typically numbered twenty-five to forty. Thus, over one-tenth of these families likely contained an office-holder, and even more would have contained one in the recent past.Footnote 36
In addition to choosing local district officers, community members debated and decided a number of other questions, such as the size of the next district tax levy (in order to maintain and heat their schoolhouses), what salary to offer teachers for upcoming school terms, and whether, or by how much, to extend the period of instruction beyond that required to receive state money. Since all this took place within what was to a significant degree a barter economy, part of the discussion had to deal with such questions as who would provide the teacher with room and board, who would supply the schoolhouse with wood for heating, who would do building repairs, and how to credit these in-kind contributions in monetary terms so as to calculate their worth vis-à-vis the district tax bills. The structure and responsibilities of these meetings did not change during the entire period considered here.
These regular public negotiations took place within a legally defined framework. The yearly school meetings took citizens out of the private spheres of work and family and into active involvement in this sphere of public life. Although we lack records of the discussions in particular meetings, involvement in such a complex and participatory process of governmental decision-making, with dispositive rather than just advisory power, must have affected the participants. Local residents in each district would have acquired cognitive resources related to budgeting, negotiating, collective prioritization, and keeping meetings on track. They experienced a model of democracy and presumably became more likely to think of themselves as capable citizens. These are feedbacks (from the basic institutional design laid out in the 1812 legislation) that had the potential to affect expectations and activity in domains beyond education.
2. How politicians became school administrators
The state legislators who were the original architects of New York's common school system never envisioned handing its management over to partisan actors. The 1812 Act for the Establishment of Common Schools specified that the official in charge would be determined by the Council of Appointment. This body, composed of the governor and delegates from the legislature, had been created by the state's original 1777 constitution with the intention of balancing diverse interests and ensuring responsible choices for appointed officials. In practice, however, the council soon devolved into a mechanism for blatant partisan patronage.Footnote 37
In 1813, the Council of Appointment, controlled at the time by De Witt Clinton's faction of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party, picked Gideon Hawley to serve as the first superintendent of the state's public schools. A twenty-seven-year-old graduate of Union College, Hawley was just embarking on a career as a lawyer after abandoning studies for the ministry. His only evident qualifications for the job consisted of his prestigious educational credentials and his connection to Clinton's political forces.
Nevertheless, Hawley proved to be an excellent choice. A naturally talented administrator, he set up clear procedures, devised standardized forms for internal reporting, and adeptly communicated the mechanics of the new organization to local school officials and state legislators alike. Contemporary observers and later superintendents lauded Hawley for the way he brought the basic structure sketched out in the 1812 statute to life as a functioning organization.Footnote 38
Despite his widely acknowledged managerial skills, Hawley, along with thousands of other officeholders, found himself out of a job in 1821 when Martin Van Buren's political faction (later to become Jacksonian Democrats) gained control of the legislature and the Council of Appointment. Of all the reshuffling that occurred, nothing proved as controversial as the termination of the highly regarded superintendent and his replacement by Welcome Esleeck, an obscure debt-collection attorney aligned with Van Buren's supporters. To quell the backlash, the legislature's new power brokers fired Esleeck after only six weeks, abolished the separate office of superintendent of the common schools, and transferred its responsibilities, on an ex officio basis, to the secretary of state.Footnote 39
In New York at this time, the office of secretary of state was a high-profile, powerful position sought by ambitious, well-educated politicians. Initially, the office had been conceived fairly narrowly: the 1778 oath of office obliged the appointee to affirm an intention to “justly and honestly keep the records, deeds, wills, testaments, parchments and instruments of writing … committed unto me.”Footnote 40 But as the state government took on more tasks, the secretary's portfolio expanded well beyond that of custodian of public documents.
Consider, for example, the myriad responsibilities assumed by Secretary of State John Adams Dix, a Jacksonian Democrat who served two three-year terms beginning in 1833. By this time, in addition to serving ex officio as the superintendent of common schools, the secretary was legally responsible for distributing copies of state laws, publicizing the dates of elections, administering the state census, and compiling annual statistics on pauperism and crime, as well as helping manage the Land Office and the Canal Fund, along with the Common School Fund. On top of all this, the legislature looked to the office of the secretary of state to handle one-off projects. A couple of years after Dix's appointment, the legislature tasked his office with coordinating a statewide geological survey.Footnote 41 Years later his son reminisced that his father took on this assignment with such fervor that, to the delight of his children, the family home was soon “knee-deep in rocks and minerals, organic remains and alluvial detritus, and the treasure of the animal and floral kingdoms.”Footnote 42
Not surprisingly, those who served as secretary of state often went on to higher office, including at the national level. Dix later served as US senator, secretary of the treasury in the Buchanan administration, US minister to France, and governor of New York. In addition, as a prominent Democrat who opposed secession (although not slavery), Dix was commissioned by President Lincoln as the senior major general of volunteers during the Civil War.Footnote 43
After the second state constitution, adopted in 1821, abolished the Council of Appointment, the state legislature elected the secretaries of state. Consequently, their political sympathies reflected partisan majorities in Albany at the time they were selected. With the further democratization of state politics ushered in by the new constitution of 1846, the general electorate voted directly on the office, and aspirants campaigned explicitly on a partisan basis. But as will become apparent in the following sections of this article, the prominent politicians who presided over the state's publicly supported school system, while deeply partisan in many issue arenas, were much less so when operating as superintendents of common schools, pursuing a quite consistent line of educational policy, regardless of party.Footnote 44
Table 1 lists the superintendents during the period covered in this article.
Table 1. New York Superintendents of Common Schools, 1813-1854
3. Problems with educational quality and financial support
Notwithstanding the efficient administrative machinery of the common school system, the secretaries of state perceived it to be providing, in Dix's words, “a low standard of education.”Footnote 45 Why? As early as 1827, Dix's predecessor, Azariah Flagg, another powerful Jacksonian Democrat, framed the problem in a way all his successors would echo. Granting that “other causes may have their influence,” he maintained that “the seat of the difficulty may be traced to the disinclination in the districts, to make adequate compensation for the required talents and services” of trained and experienced instructors.Footnote 46
Given that the other secretaries of state who served as school superintendents agreed with Flagg, it might be assumed that the obvious response would have been to advocate for an increase in state support, which after all had been earmarked exclusively for teacher compensation right from the start. Instead, Flagg and the others, at least in their public statements, deemed it a positive good that localities bore the major financial burden. With obvious pride, Flagg reported to the legislature that, for the year 1830, the state's grant of $100,000 mobilized the financing of an operation that cost over a million dollars, once town and district taxes, tuition, schoolhouses, and books were factored in.Footnote 47
As Flagg saw it, town and school district taxes operated as a “beneficial influence” on the mindset of ordinary citizens, whether or not they had children in school, spurring them into active involvement in the management of their local common schools. Town and district taxes functioned as tangible reminders of everyone's stake in education, given they were living under “a government which is based on the virtue and intelligence of the great body of the people.” He feared that if the state took responsibility for all or most of the support of the local common schools, those without school-age children and wealthy families who sent their children to private schools would likely withdraw from any involvement. Only partly in jest, Flagg remarked that taxes prompted “a punctual attendance of all the taxable inhabitants at the school meetings.”Footnote 48
Contrary to what one might predict based on their reputation as advocates of a more expansive and centralized public sector, New York Whigs were no more eager than their Jacksonian opponents to call for an increase in outlays for education from the state treasury. After sweeping state elections in the late 1830s—taking both houses of the legislature, plus the governorship, and installing their own candidate as secretary of state—the Whigs floated no proposals to increase state support of the common schools. The new secretary of state, John C. Spencer, was a noted intellectual as well as a major political figure. A host and informant for Tocqueville, Spencer wrote the preface and notes for the first American edition of Democracy in America. He would go on to serve as secretary of war and secretary of the treasury in the cabinet of President Tyler.Footnote 49 Despite his long history of opposing the policy positions of New York's Jacksonian Democrats, Spencer shared their view that the common schools were underperforming. Nonetheless, he was, if anything, more committed to the position that financial support of the schools needed to be primarily a local responsibility.
Funding for the New York common schools did increase after the federal government distributed its surplus revenues to the states in the late 1830s. At the urging of Governor William L. Marcy, a Jacksonian Democrat, the legislature decided to add $110,000 of the yearly income on the state's $4 million share to the state's annual common school grant, roughly doubling its size. Even so, this meant only 37¢ a year on average for each of the state's nearly six hundred thousand school-age children when the increased disbursements from the state began in 1839.Footnote 50 Despite what he saw as a critical need to pay higher salaries, Spencer bridled at proposals to use some of the federal money to bulk up the capital of the Common School Fund (then around $2 million), stating that he did not believe that the public schools should be made “charitable institutions.”Footnote 51 In an early articulation of big-government dependency theory, Spencer wrote in his 1840 report to the legislature that “when public beneficence is bestowed in such a degree as to stimulate individual enterprise it performs its proper office,” but in exceeding that limit it “necessarily relaxes the exertions of those who receive it.”Footnote 52
Thus, we see that political leaders of both parties were united in the belief that higher teacher salaries were essential and that the bulk of the money needed to come from local communities. A basic problem with this shared perspective was that the recently settled agricultural regions served by the common school system in the first half of the nineteenth century generated little monetary surplus. Even successful farmers were cash poor. Historian David M. Ellis estimates that, on average, a New York farm family cleared only around $30 a year in cash income during this period (although effective income was higher, once use-value products like food, clothing, and farm tools are included).Footnote 53
In the late 1820s, when Secretary of State Azariah Flagg began publicly calling for raising teacher salaries, he insisted that the additional expense of employing well-qualified instructors would be “trifling.”Footnote 54 In 1830, he put forward a concrete proposal for reshaping the educational labor market: keep the schools open for twelve months a year and pay teachers $25 a month ($300 a year). At this time, the existing pool of teachers consisted largely of poorly educated itinerant men who often hired out as manual laborers after their temporary teaching stints ended, college students who taught for a term or two while preparing for well-paying careers, and late-adolescent girls who were often employed (at about half the pay of male teachers) to provide childcare in summer months for children too young to help on the family farm. Flagg predicted that the changes he proposed would attract talented individuals willing to make investments in their own training.
At the time Flagg made his proposal, schools throughout the state were open an average of eight months. The various funds that paid instructors’ salaries—yearly disbursements from the Common School Fund, money from town taxes, and tuition payments from families of students—totaled $585,448.Footnote 55 This meant that, for each of the 8,631 school districts then in existence, pay for instructors averaged $8.48 per month for each of the eight months a school was in session, or $69 a year.Footnote 56 Implementing Flagg's plan would no doubt have dramatically improved the quality of education in the state's schools. However, it would have more than quadrupled spending for salaries—hardly a “trifling” increase, and given the resources of the population, probably unachievable. Thus, it is not surprising that Flagg's plan for much higher pay was never adopted.
The secretary-superintendents, as policy learners, saw clearly that without much higher teacher salaries their educational goals would not be fulfilled and that their goal of parental involvement in the daily life of their district schools was not being achieved. However, they did not appear to take in how difficult it would be for rural residents to pay significantly higher taxes, even if they wanted to do so. Perhaps it was because the secretary-superintendents lived most of their lives in a cash economy, first as lawyers or newspaper editors and later as salaried political professionals. Perhaps it grew out of the almost transcendent value all of them placed on education, which made them think citizens could afford more if only they were willing to dig a little deeper. In any case, they were almost willfully blind to the material barriers they faced.
4. Initiatives to motivate the public: libraries and teacher training
By the mid-1830s it became clear that the participatory-democratic structure of local districts and the fiscal responsibilities (thus taxes) of towns and districts were not having the positive effect on public attitudes toward educational quality, or willingness to pay higher taxes, that had been so confidently predicted. School districts continued to offer the same low salaries and employ the same sorts of instructors they had always hired. The secretary-superintendents responded to the stalemate by creating ambitious new programs they thought would change public opinion: the nation's first statewide library system supported by public funds and a state-supported teachers college.
4.1. A library system based in local school districts
In creating a library system, the secretary-superintendents were inspired by the international movement of the time in support of popular education, especially through expanding access to books. In contrast to the format of previous library-type organizations, such as the membership model made famous by Benjamin Franklin or commercial lending operations, New York's library network was supported by state grants and local taxes, and patrons could borrow books for free.Footnote 57 Since the libraries were based in school districts, the program was often mistaken for a program to supply children's schoolbooks. But as Superintendent Dix explained, the libraries “were not established with so narrow a design.” Rather, they were set up “as an instrument for elevating the intellectual condition of the whole people.” Dix and other library proponents assumed that convenient access to books would encourage a widespread “taste for reading,” leading to a more intellectually sophisticated public—one that would insist upon “furnishing each school district with a competent teacher.”Footnote 58 This initiative was, like other parts of the secretary-superintendents’ policy work, intended to generate feedback: a public with more civic capacities and a greater interest in political participation, making them better citizens in every aspect of public life, not just education.
The new institution got off to a slow start. An 1835 law permitting school districts to tax their inhabitants in order to acquire books elicited little response.Footnote 59 However, after a decision by the legislature three years later to allocate $55,000 a year from the state's share of the federal surplus to finance the system, the program took off.Footnote 60 With thousands of school districts acquiring books, holdings grew rapidly. At its height, in 1853, the state's vast network of district libraries contained over 1.6 million volumes.Footnote 61
The scope and pioneering character of this library system represent a remarkable achievement. However, the institution failed to thrive. One problem was that most district libraries were hardly patronized. For this, some blamed the austerity of the collections (the secretary-superintendents discouraged all fiction, even Shakespeare!), while others denounced the “mental torpidity” of citizens who allowed their libraries to “rest in forgetfulness.”Footnote 62 According to twentieth-century library experts, the basic problem was that the individual libraries were simply too small and under-resourced to succeed. Given that there were about twelve thousand districts in the 1850s, the 1.6 million books statewide translates into an average of 133 books per district. Moreover, there was often no place to keep the books that was convenient for district residents and provided appropriate storage conditions, and no paid librarian to keep up-to-date records on who had borrowed them. As a result, books deteriorated and were lost. Whatever the reason for their unpopularity, the district libraries proved incapable of ushering in the sea change in public opinion regarding education that the secretary-superintendents were trying to effect.Footnote 63
4.2. Teacher training
At roughly the same time as the district library program was taking shape, the secretary-superintendents began exploring ways of developing a cadre of accomplished instructors who would demonstrate the benefits of employing a higher grade of teachers. Faith that public attitudes could be changed in this way crossed party lines. The Jacksonian Democrat John Dix maintained in his 1835 report on the schools that “a supply of well trained teachers” would influence public opinion “by the superiority of their methods of instruction over those in common use.”Footnote 64 Likewise, when the Whig John Spencer became secretary of state and therefore head of the common schools, he assured the legislature that “parents who have once had the opportunity of perceiving the effect upon the minds and habits of their children, produced by a really competent teacher, will never withhold the small additional sum required to secure such services.”Footnote 65 Since, as we have seen, the “small additional sum” was not actually “small,” one might question whether the plan as envisaged would have had the desired effect, but in any case, there were implementation problems.
The question faced by the superintendents and their allies became how to produce the pool of educators whose skills would sway public opinion. Debate on the question took place within a larger transatlantic conversation regarding the ends and means of mass education, touched off by Prussia's 1819 decision to establish state-supported teacher training institutes. Such institutions existed in Europe before this time and had been experimented with on a limited basis in the US. What was new was that the Prussians integrated these training schools into the core of their centralized mass education system. Prussia provided those studying to be teachers with free tuition and living expenses and required a certificate of successful completion of the full course of study from those who sought positions in the nation's twenty thousand elementary schools. The policy drew foreign visitors whose laudatory reports about the high educational standards in even the most humble rural schools circulated among the American intelligentsia.Footnote 66
In 1826, Governor De Witt Clinton, himself an active participant in national and international discussions of education, recommended that New York establish its own “seminary for the education of teachers.” Many agreed in theory but shrank from the costs involved. Rather than setting up a whole new institution, with its own buildings and staff, they advocated utilizing the already existing, privately run, state-subsidized college preparatory schools called academies. Efforts to transform the academies into effective training grounds for common school teachers proved frustrating, however. One reason was that the state board that supervised and subsidized the academies incentivized them to focus on elite education, distributing grants based on the number of students enrolled in the classical studies courses needed as preparation for attending the colleges of the period. Even after the legislature, in 1834, authorized special grants for academies that set up teacher training departments, observers noticed little change. In 1841, Superintendent Spencer commissioned Alonzo Potter, vice president of Union College and a leading expert on education, to investigate the situation at those academies receiving the state subventions for operating teaching departments.Footnote 67
After visiting several academies, Potter concluded that there were “inherent” problems with “engrafting” teacher training departments onto institutions originally established for very different purposes. Thus, he identified a feedback effect resulting from a mismatch of institutional priorities: academies would have had to change their practices to be useful teacher training institutions, but the funding of academies provided incentives at odds with such a shift. To explain his position, Potter recounted his interview with the long-serving principal of the prestigious Kinderhook Academy in Columbia County. The principal estimated that over the past several years as many as 140 students had enrolled in the academy with the intention of teaching “and not unwilling to take a district school.” But of these, the principal guessed that perhaps only ten were actually teaching at the time of Potter's visit. And of these ten, he doubted that half could be found in a district school. The reason, according to the principal, was that a student arriving at the academy with the expectation of teaching in a common school “associates with those who expect soon to repair to college, or to enter at once on a course of professional study, or whose views are directed towards select and classical schools, as teachers of which they can command wages nearly twice as great as those usually paid to instructors of common schools.”Footnote 68
Given the incentive structure described by Kinderhook's principal and the fact that the academies were unable to offer students opportunities to observe or practice teaching in model classrooms with real children, Potter recommended that the state establish a teacher training institute with “especial reference to country common schools.” In such an environment, students would develop an “esprit de corps” as future teachers, undistracted by other career options. Spencer balked at the proposal, because of the expense, but his successor, the Democrat Samuel Young, sided with Potter.
In the spring of 1844, Young convinced the legislature to appropriate funds to establish the New York State Normal School in Albany, the state capital.Footnote 69 Each county was allotted the same number of tuition-free places as it had representatives in the state legislature, with grants for books and living expenses included. Before the year was out, school classes started in an abandoned train depot in Albany with 29 students. Over its first four decades, it graduated an average of 65 a year.Footnote 70
The school received high marks for its curriculum, but the number of graduates was too small to make a meaningful impact on a school system with thousands of school districts (11,789 the year the school opened). Compounding the problem, most of those who completed their publicly subsidized education did not choose to become common school teachers.Footnote 71 While the school required all entering students to sign a pledge declaring that their “sole object” in enrolling was to devote themselves “to the business of teaching district schools,” there were no enforcement mechanisms.Footnote 72
Clearly embarrassed, the school's administrators, in 1851, expressed to the legislature their “sorrow and anxiety” over “the violations of faith” by students who went on to “other and more lucrative pursuits” after obtaining some or all of a college-level liberal education at state expense.Footnote 73 Some called for laws mandating that students who failed to teach for a specified period be forced to pay tuition retroactively. Others called for the normal school to narrow its curriculum to focus almost entirely on pedagogy so as to discourage those who sought to gain higher education at “a cheap rate.”Footnote 74 The legislature never acted on these sorts of proposals, and it's unclear whether they would have been effective. In any case, as with the libraries, the state normal school failed to make the hoped-for impact on public opinion—at least as demonstrated by any noticeable hike in the teacher compensation packages offered by districts or in the quality of education perceived by the secretary-superintendents.
5. Underlying issues plaguing the school system
The initiatives just described, while significant accomplishments and harbingers of future institutional developments, failed to solve the school system's quality problems. In the view of the secretary-superintendents, they did not create a more intellectually sophisticated public committed to educational excellence or a useful number of better-educated teachers. In their opinion, these initiatives also failed to increase citizen engagement with schools and willingness to pay taxes to fund higher salaries. Thus, in the eyes of the secretary-superintendents, intended policy feedbacks did not materialize. Faced with this dilemma, the secretary-superintendents now examined the structure of oversight of local schools and found it wanting. Section 6 narrates their attempted solution.
5.1. Overload and the difficulty of relying on semi-voluntary officials
New York's common school system, as first designed, was extremely decentralized. Superintendent ex officio John Dix, in his 1836 report to the legislature, explained that the original design of the common school system was based on the premise that it was “emphatically, an institution for the people.” This was, he wrote, the reason local residents were “allotted a large share in its administration.”Footnote 75
One difficulty in this model was workload: the “large share” of control came with heavy responsibilities for local officials. Many of these fell on town-level officials called school commissioners. The school commissioners, three of whom were to be elected in each town, confronted a daunting, even overwhelming, list of duties, especially considering that their positions were considered part-time and came with little remuneration. Commissioners were required to examine and decide on the acceptability of candidates for teaching positions for every one of the districts in the town before they could be hired (although the actual hiring was done by the trustees of districts). In addition, the commissioners were required to define the boundaries of school districts, to supervise the initial election of each district's trustees, and to distribute the state and town money allocated to each district in the town. Annually, they had to compile reports with statistics on attendance, finances, and period of operation for every one of the town's schools. These reports had to be submitted to the state superintendent, by a deadline, in order for their town to qualify for its yearly share of state funds.Footnote 76
Perhaps most burdensome was the requirement that the commissioners make in-person visits to each of the many schools in the town “quarterly or oftener.”Footnote 77 This task, if done faithfully, involved traveling to each of the town's schoolhouses to observe lessons, check the condition of buildings, and offer input to teachers and school district trustees. The frequency of required visits was later dropped to “at least once a year,” but the task remained challenging.Footnote 78 In 1833, the year John Dix took over as superintendent, the average number of schools in each of the state's 820 towns was about twelve, but the schools were not distributed equally across towns. In eleven towns, there were over thirty schools.Footnote 79 Newer, more lightly settled towns meant fewer schools to visit but worse roads to get to them. Thus, it was hardly surprising that when state-appointed visitors surveyed the schools in the late 1830s, they found that over half of the common schools had never received an official visit and that the visits that had taken place tended to be “slight and superficial.”Footnote 80
Help with the job of making visitations was to come from three school inspectors, another class of officials created by the 1812 school statute. However, the inspectors failed to solve the workload problem. In large part this was because most of the inspectors—like the commissioners—already held more than full-time jobs running their family farms and also because, like so many others who held official roles in the school system, they could expect for their services “no fee or reward.”Footnote 81
In addition to creating new government positions, the school statute assigned new duties to many who already held government jobs—such as county treasurers, county clerks, town supervisors, and town clerks—and these officials were not awarded any increase in their salaries to compensate for the increased workload. Local residents elected by their neighbors to serve as trustees and clerks for the school districts were also expected to provide their labor pro bono. Indeed, the common school statute mentioned payment for only three positions: the state superintendent (a yearly salary of $300, soon raised to $700),Footnote 82 collectors of school taxes (the customary 5% of the money they gathered),Footnote 83 and town school commissioners (a maximum of 75¢ for each full day of work).Footnote 84 That towns might have trouble filling the demanding school commissioner positions was tacitly acknowledged within the text of the statute by the specification of a fine of $5 to be levied against individuals who, having been chosen by the voters, refused to serve (even if they had not declared themselves to be candidates). Those who did agree and failed to do the job were subject to a fine of $10.Footnote 85
Looking back, how can we make sense of a plan to deliver an essential public service that was based so heavily on what was essentially volunteer labor—especially when it was assumed upfront that some of this labor might have to be coerced? The answer has to do with the limited fiscal capacity of New York State at the time, of course, but also with the fact that the state's publicly subsidized and coordinated school system began during a fluid moment for administrative practices throughout the North Atlantic world. This was a time when traditional forms of management were losing legitimacy and new ones had yet to crystalize. Scholars have proposed various explanations for the shift away from earlier methods based on patronage and family ties, including the rise of democratic ideas and the emergence of new technologies that gave managers new tools by which to measure effectiveness. Whatever the impact of technology elsewhere, the main driver in the US was clearly ideology.Footnote 86 Staffing civil administration with unsalaried individuals who obtained their positions through patron-client relationships and supported themselves with fees and bribes could hardly appear legitimate in a new kind of polity that justified its existence on the principles of equality and self-rule.
As New York lawmakers searched for administrative practices appropriate for a republic, they were attracted to what legal historian Nicholas R. Parrillo has described as the “utopian ideal of honorary service.” In this model, individuals were expected to take on governmental responsibilities out of a “disinterested obligation” to the common good, rather than an expectation of monetary reward. Revolutionary leaders, rejecting ascriptive claims to authority, adopted the classical aristocratic code of honorary service as a way of demonstrating their fitness for leadership. George Washington famously modeled the ideal when he refused a salary for his services as commander of the Continental Army.Footnote 87 For New York's political leaders looking to craft new structures of governance, honorary service meshed well with their hopes for an engaged public actively managing its governing institutions.Footnote 88
As it turned out, however, honorary service was a poor fit with the daily life of rural New Yorkers. Unlike the wealthy, slaveholding plantation owner General Washington, the majority of people who lived within the territory served by the common school system (all of the state except New York City) were personally engaged in the arduous and time-consuming work of running small farms.Footnote 89 Few, particularly the kinds of individuals whose neighbors would choose as local officials, had extra time on their hands.
5.2. Quality issues and lack of connection to educational reform discourse
Unrealistic workload expectations go far in explaining the inadequacy of oversight of individual classrooms, but the state-appointed inspectors reported not only that visits were few but also that they were “superficial” when they did take place. The charge of superficiality points to other problematic aspects of the original, highly decentralized organizational scheme. In remarks during his term as head of the literature committee of the state senate in the mid-1820s, John Spencer noted that a lack of sophistication about education hampered the effectiveness of school commissioners. He bemoaned the fact that the responsibility for credentialing applicants for teaching positions was assigned to individuals who, in general, were “incompetent to determine upon the qualifications of candidates.”Footnote 90 The requirement—included in the original design of the system—that town-level officials screen teachers and inspect schools reflected a belief that there might well be insufficient expertise at the district level. But after only a few years it began to strike the secretary-superintendents that expertise was often insufficient at the town level as well.
To understand Spencer's concerns, we need to remember that this was a time when new ideas about the nature of children, how they learned, and the best ways to teach them were circulating among transatlantic educated elites.Footnote 91 As with teacher training, Prussia was often a model. American visitors’ reports on developments there found an eager audience back home. The writings of the young travel writer Henry E. Dwight provide a good example. Taking a cue from the travelogues of his famous father, Timothy Dwight, Henry toured northern Germany in the mid-1820s with the goal of introducing this “terra incognita” to an American audience. His letters to friends, later published in book form, portrayed the contemporary state of elementary education in Prussia in rapturous terms. Dwight told his readers that Prussian schoolmasters were able to move their pupils far beyond the rote memorization of low-level skills typical of America's common schools. These teachers, he maintained, were molding children into “thinking, reflecting being[s]” capable of making independent judgments and so imbued with curiosity that after their school days ended they would make “subsequent inquiries” on their own.Footnote 92
Needless to say, few busy New York farmers were reading commentaries like Dwight's and participating, even vicariously, in international conversations about turning children into critical thinkers and lifelong learners. Also, as discussed above, volunteer and semi-volunteer governance required more time than citizens were able to give. Thus, both workload and quality-of-officials problems were obstructing the fulfillment of the goals of the secretary-superintendents.
6. Restructuring the common school system
Having decided that the participatory character of local district governance had not translated into daily involvement in the operation of schools or willingness to pay more taxes to get education of higher quality, and seeing that the two initiatives described in section 4 had not solved the problem, the secretary-superintendents, as policy learners, pondered a key question: what policy changes, in the face of the constraints just described, could bring about the desired outcomes? John Spencer, secretary-superintendent from 1839 to 1841, decided that the answer was a significant change in the architecture of supervision. Starting in the mid-1820s, when he headed the literature committee in the state senate, he advocated that the “general superintendence of the schools” be moved from the town commissioners and inspectors to county superintendents of education—in other words, from very part-time and underpaid officials to adequately remunerated public employees. These new officials, he hoped, would be a catalyst for increased and more effective citizen involvement rather than replacing citizen governance at the level of the individual district. Spencer's idea seemed too extreme when he first proposed it, but it gained credibility as other efforts to raise standards proved unsuccessful.Footnote 93 Essentially, Spencer was proposing to centralize and to some extent professionalize the administrative structure of a system that was proving too decentralized to achieve its purposes, at least as these purposes were understood by the secretary-superintendents. But in pursuing a certain kind of centralization and professionalization, the superintendents retained their allegiance to maximizing citizen participation.
Spencer based his plan on the assumption that counties would provide a deeper pool of suitable candidates for oversight positions than what was reasonable to expect in the smaller political unit of the town. County seats, compared with other areas of the county, would have more lawyers, perhaps a printer, a banker, or an insurance agent, and so on—persons more in contact with people and events outside the county, better educated, and not fully occupied by farming. These better educated, more cosmopolitan individuals would be familiar with and able to convey to rural citizens the new ideas about teaching and subject matter. In addition, such individuals—chosen from a larger geographic area—would be less personally enmeshed in the lives of people over whom they were expected to wield authority. Greater social distance would make it easier to resist pressures to credential poorly qualified job candidates willing to work for low pay in order to minimize school district expenses. During Spencer's time in the state senate, no action was taken, but as secretary of state in 1841 he succeeded in getting legislation enacted that implemented his ideas.
The law sponsored by Spencer altered the school system's administrative structure considerably. The responsibility for oversight of local districts, previously assigned to town-level personnel, was handed over to a new class of county-level officials called county superintendents, chosen by the boards of supervisors in each county. These new officials were charged with making firsthand observations of as many of the county's schools as possible and inquiring “into all matters relating to the government, course of instruction, books, studies, discipline and conduct of [the common] schools, and the condition of the school houses, and of the districts generally.” After inspecting each school, they were to make recommendations for improvement to the teacher and trustees. In addition, the county superintendents were to “generally, by all the means in [their] power … promote sound education.” The position was essentially full-time, as the new officials were to be paid $2 for every full day spent on the job, up to a maximum of $500 per year, with the state and the county splitting the cost. (For comparison, state senators and assembly members in this period were paid $3 for each day the legislature was in session, and the court reporter of the state's highest court received a salary of $500 a year.)Footnote 94
The new design also enlarged the authority of the state superintendent. Before, the secretary-superintendents had functioned as financial managers who distributed state funds according to predetermined formulas, as reporters who crafted statistical information from towns into integrated reports for the legislature, and as commentators who shared their impressions about the operation of the system and what aspects needed to be changed. In the new system, with the state paying half the cost of employing the county superintendents, these new officials were required to respond to directives from the state superintendent. In the words of the legislation, the county superintendents were to be “subject to such general rules and regulations as the superintendent may from time to time prescribe.” State superintendents now had the means to press for county-by-county implementation of statewide policy through an agent who was salaried, potentially full-time, on the ground, and who had oversight powers in relation to local districts. This gave the superintendents, who formerly had no real tools to influence local educational practices, a small degree of power.Footnote 95
Spencer does not appear to have advocated these structural changes out of an aspiration to impose a hierarchical authority structure on the common schools. As he saw it, the county superintendents would actually invigorate local involvement. Adding effective professional staff who were, unlike town and district school officials, paid a good salary and expected to work more or less full-time would have the feedback effect of energizing and educating citizens, parallel to how community organizers often focus their efforts on teaching rank-and-file participants to become more active and effective in public life. He felt sure that supervisory officials with a background in education would have “a most beneficial effect on public sentiment” through their ability to communicate, by way of personal conversations and public addresses, an appreciation for a more sophisticated curriculum and the use of newer methods of instruction. Well-educated, articulate county superintendents “could not fail to imbue the public mind with the importance of good schools,” he contended.Footnote 96 In part, Spencer seems to have envisaged a program of adult education about education and conceptualized county superintendents as catalysts for citizen engagement.
Illustrating again the nonpartisan character of educational policy-making in antebellum New York, the biggest booster of Spencer's organizational reform initiative turned out to be his long-time political rival, the staunch Democrat Samuel Young. The two had first confronted each other in a three-way race for the US Senate in 1819 (in which no candidate secured the required majority).Footnote 97 The late 1830s found them on opposite sides of the rancorous debate over whether, during the economic downturn that followed the panic of 1837, the state should continue to launch debt-financed infrastructure projects or retrench and aim for balanced budgets.Footnote 98 Spencer took the position that construction of public works should continue, while Young advocated curtailing this kind of spending. That did not mean, however, that Young eschewed all forms of state activism. An ardent supporter of mass education, he maintained that “the entire success or absolute failure of the great experiment of self-government [is] wholly dependent” on “the cultivation in our schools of the minds of the young.”Footnote 99
The legislature chose Young to be secretary of state following Spencer. In his first report to the legislature as school superintendent, in 1843, Young candidly admitted that as a state senator he had opposed Spencer's proposal for county superintendents, seeing the plan as just another extravagance of the kind that was pushing the state toward bankruptcy. He wrote that he had come into office with “a decided predisposition to exercise whatever influence he might possess, to save the expense by an abolition of the system.” However, after meeting with the currently serving county superintendents, he came away impressed with their “intelligence, zeal and capacity for usefulness.” As a result, he reversed course. He enthusiastically predicted that Spencer's initiatives promised “to supply the deficiencies of supervision, to point out the extent of existing evils, and to suggest the most feasible remedies, [and] to allay the bitter feuds and animosities which often mar the peace and retard the prosperity of school districts.” Above all, he felt certain that the new county superintendents would “rouse and inspire” parents to become actively involved with their local schools.Footnote 100
In early 1844, after the reorganization had been in effect for less than three years, Young reported to the legislature that he discerned a “revolution in public sentiment.” The “trustees and inhabitants are … beginning to visit the schools of their districts.”Footnote 101 Was it true that the new supervisory practices were having such a powerful effect in so little time? We have to wonder, given Young's intense desire for the kind of change he maintained was taking place. Moreover, we have to keep in mind that his only evidence came from reports submitted by the county superintendents, who were in essence grading themselves. Nonetheless, these reports do contain a convincing degree of detail about the positive response of local communities and teachers to the new practices. The reports told of high attendance at public lectures on education, enthusiasm of parents at events celebrating student achievements, openness of district trustees to being persuaded to upgrade the physical condition of their schoolhouses, and eagerness among teachers to participate in countywide teaching institutes, even when they had to pay the cost of travel and lodging out of their meager pay.Footnote 102
Despite enthusiastic endorsements from acting superintendents from both parties, education experts based in the state and beyond, and legislative leaders, not everyone welcomed the new administrative structure.Footnote 103 Some objected to what they believed were higher costs. Others complained that their county superintendent was simply a political hack. In vain did Young and other proponents attempt to dispel cost worries by providing figures showing that the shift to county-level officials might actually be less expensive or at worst cost-neutral.Footnote 104 In addition, Young and his allies, while conceding that some counties made poor appointments, argued that the problem was that those boards of supervisors put patronage ahead of finding qualified appointees. This argument also got little traction.Footnote 105 The public was unappeased, and protests continued against what later generations would call “unfunded mandates,” a new burden, to be paid by county taxpayers, that was all the more odious given that in many counties it was being used to support manifestly unqualified individuals. In 1847, only six years after adopting Spencer's plan, the legislature abolished the office of county superintendent. However, it did not restore the full status quo ante by reinstituting the full slate of town offices that had been abolished under Spencer's reorganization, thus leaving little oversight or support for local districts in place.Footnote 106
What explains the backlash that swept away Spencer's reforms? The proximate cause was the international economic crisis that hit New York State at about the same time as the county superintendent plan was introduced. New York had long used massive debt financing for infrastructure projects. This investment paid off handsomely in the case of the Erie Canal, which generated so much revenue that it largely paid for state government for more than a decade. However, the international Panic of 1837 led to a long depression, causing fiscal stress for individuals and governments around the world, including many US states. In 1842, eight states, plus the Florida Territory, defaulted. New York avoided that fate by passing the drastic Stop and Tax Act of 1842, which abruptly halted the big infrastructure projects then underway and imposed a statewide property tax. In an environment of austerity, the new county superintendent positions became a good target for cuts.Footnote 107
The impact of the economic emergency cannot be ignored. Yet there were likely other factors in play, particularly policy feedbacks. One was the reaction against unfunded mandates, imposing taxes on subsidiary units of government—in this case, counties—without any choice by that unit's voters. Another was the organizational misfit between a common school system that required skilled county superintendents and county governments needing to maintain their political support by handing out patronage jobs. Now, the school system's funding mechanisms came under scrutiny after being taken for granted since the founding of the system in 1812.
6.1. The end of school leadership by secretaries of state
In 1854, the legislature withdrew the common schools from the portfolio of the secretary of state and established a new department to oversee the common schools. The head was to be a specialist in education, chosen by the legislature. Why the legislature took this step is unclear. Publicly, the justification was that the secretary's responsibilities were too heavy, but that had been the case for decades. Historian L. Ray Gunn suspects the real motivation for making the change at this time stemmed from a power struggle within the Democratic Party, which was split on the slavery issue.Footnote 108
Whatever the impetus, the creation of a department of education independent of the office of the secretary of state signaled the end of the decades-long, bipartisan effort by the politically powerful secretaries of state to socialize the state's residents into a mode of citizenship the secretaries deemed essential for the well-being of the state's common schools and the republic at large. The education professionals who replaced the secretaries of state at the top of the education system took a much narrower approach to their job, and, in any case, they lacked the political clout to initiate large-scale public programs.
7. Conclusion
The story just recounted shows how a series of thoughtful and resourceful statebuilders in antebellum New York State constructed, enlarged, and revised a statewide public education system. The protagonists in this story were important politicians with varying party allegiances, but their statebuilding work with regard to education was nonpartisan, with no significant shift of direction when a secretary of state from a different party took office. The system combined financial support, governance, and reporting systems. It was highly scalable, starting by absorbing and standardizing an already large but disorganized and often fragile collection of pre-existing common schools and then accommodating the more than fourfold growth in the number of school districts from 1816 (the first year for which we have data) to 1854.Footnote 109
The episode illustrates the activism state government was capable of in this period: not just providing order, infrastructure, and public support for private enterprise but also providing direct public services. The vast system of public primary schools that resulted was fundamentally state-created, rather than an outcome of voluntary community efforts. Some of the leaders’ fondest hopes, particularly for higher parental participation in the daily operation of their local schools and for significantly increased educational quality, were never realized. Nevertheless, the New York State common school system was an impressive edifice, especially given the context of limited state capacity, a far-flung and thinly populated territory, and only partial transition to a cash-based economy.
A key characteristic that sets this episode apart from many other instances of statebuilding is the ideology of participatory democracy that permeated the intentions of the founders and leaders of New York's educational system and manifested itself in their decisions about organizational structure. As we have seen, the root level of the system, overwhelmingly comprised of districts with one-room schools, was extraordinarily participative. Annual meetings made the key local decisions, and a significant proportion of residents would, at some point, have had a family member holding a local office with real powers. More diffusely, statewide leaders wanted students to get a higher quality of education, less to serve the needs of the economy than to equip students to become active, intelligent citizens when they grew up. The leaders also wanted district residents to become similarly energetic and thoughtful citizens in spheres of public life beyond district meetings. These leaders took steps intended to advance the more diffuse goals. They rejected the idea that centralized coordination and local power were zero-sum, attempting to provide structures—even centralized ones—that would enhance citizen participation.
From a policy feedback perspective, one can describe the goals of the secretary-superintendents as crafting policies and organizational structures that would help create a new politics that was more robustly democratic or would at least sustain the participatory-democratic strands of the politics of that period. The data from this story strongly suggest that rural New Yorkers acquired new civic capacities through their participation in governance of their district schools, but provide only limited evidence of broader new-politics effects.
Thus, New York's public schools in this period can be considered a “real world experiment” in participatory governance, providing insights for efforts to deepen democracy in today's world. The local district meetings were if anything deeper experiments than the deliberative assemblies promoted by today's advocates of participatory governance, in that the districts were public agencies, the trustees and clerks elected at them were public officials, and the meetings wielded state power, even the power to tax, albeit in a small geographic area and with many constraints, both legal and practical.
These constraints, the secretary-superintendents’ disappointments, and the fact that few comparable instances of participatory democracy can be found today illustrate the point made by historical institutionalists Nicolas Barreyre and Claire Lemercier: that particular policy regimes operate within particular political economies.Footnote 110 Antebellum New York's rural political economy was an important factor favoring local participatory structures and simultaneously a factor frustrating some of the leaders’ hopes. The paucity of contemporary full equivalents of the district meetings stems from the current political economy and would require creativity and institutional change to overcome. Nonetheless, the statebuilders in this story and modern advocates for participatory governance share a long-running and probably unquenchable thirst in American life for a more profound and expansive democracy.
Funding and Institutional Support
No funding supported the research for this article. Dr. Radford did parts of the research under a sabbatical for calendar 2015 and a research leave in Fall 2019.
Conflict of Interest
Neither author has any competing/conflicting interest in relation to this article.
Acknowledgements
For aid in producing this article, the authors thank Andrew C. Maines, Johann N. Neem, Paula T. Silver, Justin Simard, Mark Wilson, Richard R. John, and especially Andrew Komula for insightful research assistance and Gregory Epps for meticulous and thoughtful copy-editing and proofreading.
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