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This review has been accessed  times since May 11, 1998
Rousmaniere, Kate. (1997) City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in
Historical Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press.
178 pp. + vii.
ISBN 0-8077-3588-4 (paper) $20.95
0-8077-3589-2 (cloth) $44.00
Reviewed by John L. Rury
DePaul University
May 11, 1998
This is an engaging and generally well written book that provides many insights into
teacher's lives and work during the third decade of the twentieth century. The principal
focus of the book is teachers in New York City, although examples and data regarding the
experiences of teachers elsewhere are considered as well. It is particularly well-suited
for undergraduate teaching, as many students will find it accessible and stimulating. As a
contribution to scholarship on teachers and school reform in the early twentieth century,
however, the book raises as many questions as it provides answers. In this review I will
try to identify areas in which City Teachers advances our understanding of
these issues, and problems or limitations in its discussion of them.
The argument Rousmaniere makes is that the work of teachers changed following the First
World War, largely because of efficiency-minded (or command and control) administrative
practices and the emergence of a "social efficiency" curriculum in New York's
public schools. Using interviews with 21 former teachers and other sources, she suggests
that the work of teachers intensified as new tasks were assigned to them, and that their
working conditions deteriorated in other ways. At the same time, she also maintains that
teaching became an "attractive" occupation for young educated women, and that
New York offered an unusually liberal work environment for female teachers. Just when
teaching began to hold promise as a profession for women, in that case, it also became
more difficult and less fulfilling. This is an intriguing argument, and one which takes
note of theoretical perspectives on changes in teaching and other forms of work offered by
such prominent commentators as Michael Apple and Harry Braverman.
The basic problem is that City Teachers really does not examine change
in the lives or the work of teachers. To do so would require comparison of teachers
in one point in time with those at another time. This simply is not provided in any
clear-cut fashion. Likewise, Rousmaniere does not systematically examine changes in the
curriculum and the organization of the New York public school system. The book has
precious little information on how the schools operated prior to the 1920's, except to
note that many of the circumstances which affected teachers at that time had existed
earlier also. By all accounts, the administrative concerns with efficiency and order had
been evident in New York and elsewhere for some time by the 1920's. And Rousmaniere offers
only sketchy evidence that teachers there were affected by significant curricular changes
during the opening decades of the twentieth century. Instead, judging from the evidence
offered in the book, teachers in the twenties appear to have worked within a bureaucratic,
differentiated modern school system quite similar to those that had evolved in a number of
cities since the latter nineteenth century.
The literature on the features of evolving urban school systems is replete with
descriptions of administrative efficiency-mindedness and curricular change, particularly
with regard to the development of "social efficiency." Rousmaniere adds little
to this body of research, except perhaps to document the reactions of teachers to these
features of school life in the twenties. Her discussion of curricular change, in fact, is
a little puzzling, since she seems to identify social efficiency with a growing array of
new tasks for teachers rather than with greater differentiation and specialization in
instruction. Her characterization of the Cardinal Principles reform proposals as an
exemplar of social efficiency is problematic in this regard. If social efficiency is taken
to mean the alignment of the curriculum to specific occupational and social roles, she
devotes little attention to it. The broadening of the curriculum to embrace a wider range
of social issues, on the other hand, and to building links between the school, the home
and other institutions, was often associated with pedagogical progressivism. As John Dewey
and other contemporaries were quick to point out, this was not a perspective well suited
to efficiency concerns. Indeed, the obvious contradiction between interest in efficiency
and the growing complexity of teaching tasks is largely unaddressed in City Teachers.
In any case, Rousmaniere also notes that most teachers probably ignored curricular
reform efforts, whether in the twenties or earlier. One wonders, in this case, just what
difference in teachers' lives curricular mandates might have made, even if they were
implemented in the twenties. But there can be little doubt about the role of bureaucracy.
The book describes the large amount of paperwork city teachers were required to do, a
facet of their lives they were quick to lodge complaints about. In this respect the lives
of New York's teachers in the early twentieth century appears to have been quite similar
to those of today's teachers.
When Rousmaniere does discuss change, the effect is sometimes difficult to interpret.
For instance, commenting on the poor condition of teachers' workplaces, she notes that a
third of the city's six hundred schools were built before 1900, and half of those before
1880. This means, of course, that a solid majority (66%) of the school buildings were
relatively new, twenty years old or less at the start of the twenties. Furthermore, she
notes that the system undertook a massive building program in the twenties, addressing
many problems that critics had pointed to in the older buildings. This is hardly a picture
of teachers laboring under uniformly miserable working conditions. Some teachers and
students undoubtedly were forced to endure old, dilapidated schools at this time, but for
the most part New York's teachers in the twenties may have in fact enjoyed better
facilities than any other generation of educators in the city's history.
Other parts of the book raise intriguing questions, but do not provide fully developed
answers. For example, Rousmaniere mentions surveys documenting a rise in extra-curricular
duties for New York teachers, but does not provide details about the findings or the
surveys themselves. Likewise, she discusses the apparently unique New York policy of
employing married women as teachers, but does not fully explore the effect of such a
policy at the time. There are no data on the age structure of the city's teachers; nor are
there detailed data on the ethnic composition of the teaching force (information readily
accessible from the census). While not essential to her argument, information of this sort
would have helped to paint a more complete picture of New York's teachers at a particular
point in time.
In the end, Rousmaniere seems to want to suggest that teachers had a hard time in New
York in the early twentieth century. Clearly, the teachers she interviewed noted problems
they faced. But she also points out that teachers were well compensated in the city, and
that for the educated daughters of immigrant families becoming a teacher was the very
pinnacle of success. Rousmaniere speaks of teacher "resistance" to the
administrative logic of efficiency, but many (perhaps most) teachers also undoubtedly
identified with the school system and its goals— probably even with its leaders. As
Rousmaniere notes, the movement for teacher unionism floundered at the time, for a variety
of reasons. But if the daily existence of teachers was as unsatisfactory as she suggests,
one would expect the unionization movement to have been more prominent (the largely female
garment trades organized in New York during the twenties). The historical reality of
teachers lives in this era was complex and nuanced, and the brief sketches that
Rousmaniere provides of various facets of education at the time only begin to identify the
factors that affected their work and their behavior. While this suggestive study points to
interesting possible explanations to a number of questions, it is far from definitive. A
good deal more work remains to be done on the historical reality of teachers' lives.
About the Reviewer
John L. Rury
DePaul University
John L. Rury is author of Education and
Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban
America, 1870-1930 (State University of New York Press, 1991).
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