Parents and School: The 150 Year Struggle for Control in American Education. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by Stephen Lassonde

Parent-teacher associations could also be used as avenues to further political ends. "Between 1900 and 1930," Culter points out, "the National Congress backed such reforms as mothers' pensions, a national child labor law, and a constitutional amendment to standardize public policy on marriage and divorce in the United States." (105) These streets, of course, ran north and south. Educators had their own interests to protect and ambitions to promote. If at its inception schooling represented an attempt to standardize the inculcation of skills, habits, and culture in children, during the first half of the twentieth century educators increasingly fastened their attention on the deficiencies of the home and parenting. If the child's environment itself could be molded, the teacher's job would be easier and the way would be prepared before the child even entered the school building. Parent education was vital if the schools were to combat nagging problems like truancy, attrition, and subpar performance--problems, wh ich, it seemed to teachers overwhelmingly coincided with being the child of parents who were poor, black, or foreign born. Political support for parent education was solicited through the NOPT during the 1920s and sanctioned outreach by "specialists trained in nursing and social work," says Cutler, inducing a significant expansion in the mission of schooling. By 1930, he says, educators "had shifted to a more comprehensive concern with social and psychological adjustment." (135) This shift, he argues, brought them to the brink of an issue that surely worries reformers like Corner today: if the aims of schooling and other forms of social welfare become indistinguishable from one another, are schools then also accountable for the failings of family life as well as the intellectual undernourishment of America's children?

The latter half of Parents and Schools addresses the neglect suffered by African-American children in segregated schools nationwide, the effect of white flight from America's inner cities, the decline of public education, and the degeneration of advocacy for public schooling into interest-group politics, pitting parents against teachers in bitter disputes over goals and culpability. The 1970s were pivotal in Cutler's account--a time when PTAs were often seen as puppet organizations that did the political spade-work of teachers and administrators. Indeed, the rancor and tumult of the decade all but spelled the end of any kind of constructive partnership between parents and teachers. Nonetheless, the most important story of public schooling since World War Two has been the impact of desegregation. Cutler details the ways in which racism persisted among school administrators and in groups representing parents, teachers, and tax-payers. And he thoughtfully addresses the continued relegation of African-American an d other minority children to sorry, decaying facilities and demoralized teachers but his sources don't allow the kind of treatment this chapter in his narrative deserves. After all, PTAs were as exclusionary of minorities as faculty lounges, boards of education, and school district boundaries. Little wonder then that the most salient issue in the last decades of the twentieth century should fail to turn up in the minutes of the meetings of local PTAs or even the pronouncements of their national organ.