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“No Crystal Stair”

This article uses Cleveland, Ohio, to examine educational reform by focusing on place, institutional change, motives, and results between 1900 and 1930. The study as well as the practice of public education in urban America has been a battleground for “the great school wars.” Despite the endless conflicts and debate, public education remains a popular panacea for the ills of urban America. Public schools expanded their programs to meet the needs of urban students, particularly immigrants from southern, eastern, and central Europe and black migrants from the American South during the era of this study. Progressive reformers also campaigned for reforms that would adapt the public schools to an environment that was changing from a commercial to an industrial city. Above all, they championed the next, all-powerful superintendent, enlightened by the “cult of efficiency,” to achieve progress and stability in the school system. Urban historians can analyze educational change and the validity of conflicting interpretations by studying local schools within their historical context. The results of progressive school reforms did not often match their promises, but failure and disappointment did not lead to introspection and analysis of their remedies. The majority of students still failed to graduate in the 1920s. Centralized management, social efficiency, vocational and technical education, recreation, Americanization, specialization, intelligence testing, tracking, and quantification became the popular national model for public education between 1900 and 1930. They still constitute the paradigm for public schooling in America.