Cooper was accepted and granted lodging with the family of a professor. To pay her way through a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s, she taught French, German, and classics during the summers at Wilberforce University, a black college in Ohio, and at Saint Augustine’s, her Raleigh alma mater. She became an active member of the North Carolina Teacher’s Association, which advocated more funding for colored schools and equal pay for black teachers. For a time, North Carolina was the only southern state with roughly equal-per-pupil spending regardless of race, and where the average black teacher’s salary was roughly commensurate with the average white teacher’s: $204 to $207 annually, about $5,028 in today’s dollars. (In the North, public school teachers of either race could earn five times more.) But North Carolina’s support for black teachers and schools depended on the political influence of new black voters enfranchised during Reconstruction. In 1900 the state legislature effectively disenfranchised more than half of these black voters, through poll taxes, literacy tests, and a “grandfather” clause that required prospective voters to prove a direct ancestor had been registered to vote in 1867. As in other southern states, white resentment toward public spending on black schools was so high that it was only after North Carolina disenfranchised blacks that the state amended its constitution to provide for the ongoing direct levying of school taxes, in a fashion that would guarantee disproportionate funding for white schools. By the time Du Bois conducted a survey of southern black public schools in 1908, he found black teachers in North Carolina earning only 60 percent as much as white teachers. Black children made up 32 percent of the school-age population, but received only 17 percent of the state’s education funding.
Cooper, like many other better-educated African Americans, chose to leave the former Confederacy as black political capital there declined after Reconstruction. In 1887, through Oberlin connections, she was hired as a Latin teacher at the most prestigious black public school in the United States: M Street High School in Washington, D.C. It was an attractive job for many reasons, not least of which was the relatively high pay, equal to that of almost any white public school teacher anywhere in the country. Charlotte Forten had taught at M Street after returning from the Sea Islands. The school sent graduates on to Ivy League universities each year, and alumni pursued white-collar careers in government, education, the law, and medicine. In 1899, M Street students scored higher on a district-wide exam than the students at any white public high school in Washington. The school’s faculty held more advanced degrees among them than the teachers at any white D.C. public school; some went on to become university presidents and judges.
M Street served the children of the city’s rapidly expanding black middle class in a grand Romanesque-style redbrick building in Washington’s Northwest quarter. Cooper excelled there as a Latin teacher and became principal in 1901 while continuing to teach—part of an early wave of women ascending beyond the classroom to leadership roles in schools. When the French priest and educator Félix Klein visited Cooper’s classroom in 1904, he found her leading a group of sixteen girls in a close reading of the Aeneid. The students eagerly translated Latin words and discussed with their teacher the relationship between history and mythology in Virgil’s epic poem. Klein had never before seen black children engaged in such feats of intellectualism, and he reported in his subsequent book that Cooper was one of the most skilled teachers he had ever met. He was also impressed with her strict disciplinary strategies. She required M Street’s 530 students to walk the hallways in military silence (a common practice at today’s “no excuses” charter schools). Each school day began with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Even while teaching full-time, Cooper built a national reputation as a public speaker and essayist. In lectures at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and in front of a convention of black Episcopal clergy, she sketched a vision for “the colored woman’s office,” claiming a special place for black women within the same missionary teacher ideology that Catharine Beecher had applied to an earlier generation of white female teachers. “The earnest well trained Christian young woman, as a teacher, as a home-maker, as wife, mother, or silent influence even, is as potent a missionary agency among our people as is the theologian,” Cooper said in an 1890 speech, “and I claim that at the present stage of our development in the South she is ever more important and necessary.”
Cooper’s 1892 book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, was a groundbreaking articulation of black feminist thought. That same year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton delivered a valedictory lecture titled “The Solitude of Self.” In the speech, seventy-six-year-old Stanton advised every woman to get an education and work outside the home in order to take “personal responsibility of her own individual life.” Cooper, then thirty-four, argued for a more communitarian type of feminism. She expected black women to fight for gender equity not only to enrich their own lives, but also so they could better “uplift the race” as teachers, volunteers, or within their families. “ ‘I am my Sister’s keeper!’ should be the hearty response of every man and woman of the race,” she wrote, “and this conviction should purify and exalt the narrow, selfish and petty personal aims of life into a noble and sacred purpose.” There could be “no shirking, no skulking” in the face of the “Race Problem,” Cooper wrote. Stanton’s white feminism looked down upon low-paid teachers. But Cooper’s black feminism idealized teachers as leaders in the fight for racial and social equality.
Cooper lived out these ideals. In addition to teaching, she helped establish a settlement house in the mode of Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago. The house, located in Southwest Washington, included a day nursery and kindergarten for young children, as well as a “milk station” that fed sixty babies per day. Volunteers visited poor young mothers at home to instruct them on good parenting methods, and provided adults with a “savings club,” library, music lessons, and arts and crafts classes. Like the contemporary education reformers, such as Harlem Children’s Zone visionary Geoffrey Canada, who advocate for “wraparound” social services as an integral complement to effective schools, Cooper saw direct antipoverty work as part of her teaching mission. She used the term “sympathetic methods” to describe her practice of researching each of her students’ home lives in order to better understand and address potential limitations on their academic success, such as unemployed parents, inadequate housing, or sick siblings.
Even so, Cooper’s major goal as principal of M Street was strictly achievement oriented: the admission of students into elite colleges. During Cooper’s tenure as principal, M Street graduates were accepted to Oberlin, Harvard, Brown, and Yale, and several alumni received Ivy League doctorates.
This display of black intellectualism provoked a moral panic in white Washington and among some black advocates for vocational education who were allied with Booker T. Washington. The coalition Du Bois dubbed the “Tuskegee machine” challenged M Street early in Cooper’s principalship, when she successfully fought off an attempt by the city’s white director of high schools to replace the school’s classical curriculum with more vocationally oriented classes. In 1901 Washington personally intervened—perhaps with President Teddy Roosevelt himself—to prevent Du Bois from being appointed assistant superintendent in charge of the city’s black schools. By 1906 the battle between the Washington and Du Bois camps had become openly hostile. Members of the D.C. school board launched a campaign of character assassination against Cooper, whom they likely perceived as aligned with the Du Bois “talented tenth” agenda. They first accused her of managerial incompetence. When those trumped-up charges didn’t stick, white school board members claimed—probably erroneously—that she was having an affair with her young adult foster son. The Washington Post covered the scandal. Cooper was dismissed.
After nineteen years at M Street, this setback was emotionally and professionally devastating. Cooper was eventually rehired as a teacher at the school, but she never again enjoyed the full support of her
supervisors. She went on to earn a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris, at the age of sixty-six. Her groundbreaking dissertation was on attitudes toward slavery during the Haitian and French Revolutions.
Over the next half century, vocationalism remained the ascendant education reform ideology among philanthropists and politicians, not just for black students, but for the children of white immigrants from eastern and southern Europe as well. In the North, white female teachers began to organize in opposition to this agenda. Their protests sparked one of the United States’ most powerful and controversial labor movements: the unionization of public school teachers.
* * *
*1 The nineteenth-century honorific for students, “scholars,” is back in vogue today, especially at charter schools.
*2 This question remains at the crux of today’s debate over charter schools. The best charters demonstrate off-the-charts college attendance rates but serve only a tiny percentage of low-income students.
• Chapter Four •
“School Ma’ams as Lobbyists”
THE BIRTH OF TEACHERS UNIONS AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY AND SCHOOL EFFICIENCY
One evening in the 1870s, in the prairie town of Morris, Illinois, Michael Haley led his three teenage daughters to the first row of the town’s auditorium. They were there to hear a lecture by a famous phrenologist. Maggie, Jenny, and Eliza Haley did not know quite what to expect, only that phrenology was an exciting modern science, and that it had something to do with deducing people’s inner qualities by examining the bumps on their heads.
Their father had been working since he was ten years old, when he was hired as a “jigger carrier” to deliver whiskey to thousands of fellow Irish laborers as they dug the muddy Illinois and Michigan Canal. Since then, Michael Haley had survived a malaria epidemic, learned the skill of stonecutting, and gone on strike for higher wages. Now Haley had a successful cement-manufacturing business, but he hoped for a different life for his six children. They would go to school. Their labor would be easier than his had been.
As a proud Irish American republican, Michael Haley believed in the promise of utopian socialism and equality before the law. So when the phrenologist that night launched into a reactionary attack on the women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, Haley did something that shocked and embarrassed his daughters. He marched them out of the theater, in full sight of the lecturer and audience. Just outside, he lined the three girls up and addressed them solemnly. “I don’t know Susan B. Anthony and I suppose I never shall,” he said, “but she’s a woman who is working for a cause, a just cause, and I will not allow my children to listen to any half-baked nincompoop who sneers at her.”
In three decades’ time, Susan B. Anthony would refer to Haley’s oldest daughter, Maggie, as a “dear friend” and would publicly hail her for continuing the fight Anthony had begun in the 1850s: the feminist organization of women schoolteachers. As the most prominent leader of the nation’s first teachers-only union, the Chicago Teachers Federation, Margaret Haley succeeded where Anthony had failed. She won higher pay and significant political power for female teachers, in large part because of her canny ability to forge alliances with male unions, just as organized labor exploded in power at the turn of the twentieth century. Seven years after Anthony’s death, in 1913, Haley even played a crucial role in winning Illinois women the right to vote.
But first, Maggie Haley was a teacher. At sixteen she graduated from a Catholic girls’ boarding school, then taught in the countryside for several years. Frustrated that she earned only $35 per month (she thought she deserved $40) and eager to improve her teaching practice, she enrolled at the famed Cook County Normal School, where she studied with Francis Wayland Parker, the pedagogue John Dewey would celebrate as the “father” of progressive education. Parker, a Civil War veteran, believed that instead of reading aloud listlessly from textbooks, teachers should create their own teaching units and lesson plans, and that students should take classes in art, music, and drama. Haley left behind few written recollections of her teaching years, but she did express pride in belonging to the intellectual community gathered around Parker, which later included other educational leaders she admired, such as Dewey and the progressive Chicago schools administrator Ella Flagg Young.
In 1884 Haley was hired to teach sixth grade at the Hendricks School in the foul-smelling Packingtown neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, the area immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his muckraking novel about slaughterhouses, The Jungle. There she finally earned $40 per month, but like many Chicago teachers, she began to feel she was vastly underpaid. Chicago was a prosperous, expanding city; between 1890 and 1904 it would gain 830,000 residents. After the economic crash of 1893, business boomed again. The city was home to a thriving reform scene, driven by innovative thinking in the social sciences and progressive politics, much of it coming from the newly established University of Chicago. Yet you would not have known any of this from looking at the city’s schools. Haley’s students—between forty and sixty cramped in a classroom, sometimes with too few chairs and desks to go around—were the children of Irish- and German-born butchers; some spoke little English, and, in the absence of child labor laws, most would leave school permanently at the age of eleven or twelve to go to work. Each subsequent year brought a more challenging student population into Chicago public schools, from Italy, Russia, and Bohemia. Yet annual pay for entry-level elementary school teachers, 97 percent of whom were women, had been frozen for twenty years at $500 (about $13,300 in today’s dollars). The school system’s budget was so strapped that teachers were sometimes paid not in wages, but in “warrants” promising future pay, which teachers had to cajole grocers and landlords to accept in lieu of cash. Education policy was set by a school board appointed by the mayor, and board members were lobbied aggressively by Chicago’s business and media elite, who resisted taxes that paid for “fads and frills” like foreign language classes. The Chicago Tribune editorialized against the preposterous idea of preparing “the children of working men” for college, and called summer school courses for poor students “alluring luxuries.” The situation in Chicago was similar to that in other American cities at the turn of the century. Prominent education reformers across the country, such as Columbia University philosophy professor Nicholas Murray Butler, the founder of the school that would later be known as Teachers College, lobbied to replace teachers’ and politicians’ judgments on curriculum with education policies set by college-educated bureaucrats. These administrative progressives forged an alliance with business leaders, who liked the idea of top-down, expert management of schools, yet deplored paying higher taxes to fund public education.*1
In Chicago the most prominent reformer was William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago. Harper chaired a mayoral commission tasked with centralizing the curriculum, pedagogy, and administrative structure of the public schools. Like Charles William Eliot, the Harvard president, Harper believed Horace Mann’s feminization of teaching had been a major misstep. His commission hoped to freeze a planned $50 annual raise for female teachers, saying the city should instead prioritize hiring and promoting male educators. When a group of female teachers complained to him, Harper responded that they should be happy they earned as much as his wife’s maid.
These were the events that motivated, in 1897, the founding of the Chicago Teachers Federation, the precursor to today’s American Federation of Teachers. The National Education Association, in which Susan B. Anthony had organized New York’s female teachers, dated back to 1857 and included teachers, administrators, and even college professors and presidents. The NEA was genteel. It conducted research on education and advocated politely for school funding. From the start, the Federation intended to be a totally different animal: a militant organization modeled after the male labor unions to which the fathers and brothers of Chicago teachers belonged.
The purpose of the Federation was to aggressively advocate for higher teacher pay and f
or teachers’ freedom on lesson planning and student discipline; the organization sought to counter the influence of school reformers who believed non-college-educated women were unqualified to make autonomous choices within their classrooms. The Federation held its first meeting on March 16, 1897, and by June had attracted over 2,500 members, about half of the elementary school teaching force. Two years later, after a painstaking organizing campaign throughout Chicago neighborhoods, Margaret Haley presented the Illinois state legislature in Springfield with a fifty-thousand-signature petition against William Rainey Harper’s school reform bill. The legislation would have given the school superintendent the exclusive right to hire and fire teachers for neighborhood schools, while keeping teacher salaries frozen and assigning every Chicago child to either the vocational or academic track, which would have been segregated from one another. The bill was defeated. Teacher unionism had arrived as a potent force in American civic life.
At her 1899 inauguration, the Federation’s longtime president, Catherine Goggin, sketched a vision of a political, not just an educational, organization:
The Federation should have a broader outlook. It should consider all which properly comes with the scope of intelligent citizenship. Its endorsement should be a powerful aid, its disapproval equally mighty. It should so educate public sentiment that a newspaper which attempted to lower the teachers of the city in the estimation of the public should immediately feel the result of the attempts in its decreased circulation and depleted advertising columns.
Goggin’s explicit threat to the city’s moneyed interests—that they should support teachers or be made to pay—captured the spirit of early teacher unionism. While the stunted pre—Civil War efforts to empower female teachers had been led by women like Anthony who were born into relatively privileged and well-educated families, the Irish Catholic–dominated Federation had a more innate feel for working-class politics. Haley, in her job as the Federation’s business representative, was known as the union’s heavy, a five-foot-tall “lady labor slugger” with penetrating blue eyes, unafraid of knocking heads at city hall or in the state capitol. At the turn of the century, before women could even vote, it was shocking to see female schoolteachers organize into a fighting force for higher wages. The Chicago Chronicle editorial board typified the reaction of the popular press, calling the Federation “impertinent” in its demands for better pay, and complaining that “school ma’ams as lobbyists left an unfavorable impression.” Observing the Federation from afar, the Atlanta Constitution wondered, “Does Unionism Make Girls Masculine?”
The Teacher Wars Page 8