Journal of Planning History
http://jph.sagepub.com
Re-Forming Schools and Cities: Placing Education on the Landscape of
Planning History
Domenic Vitiello
Journal of Planning History 2006; 5; 183
DOI: 10.1177/1538513205284622
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JOURNAL
10.1177/1538513205284622
Vitiello
/ RE-FORMING
OF PLANNING
SCHOOLS
HISTORY
AND
/ August
CITIES
2006
Re-Forming Schools and Cities:
Placing Education on the
Landscape of Planning History
Domenic Vitiello
University of Pennsylvania
Schools are among the most ubiquitous institutions shaping city and regional ecology,
policy, and everyday experience. In recent decades, planning historians have come to
define planning ever more broadly, focusing on a great diversity of urban activities. But
the design, development, and administration of public and private schools, from the
preschool to university level, have yet to be incorporated into our discipline’s debates
and discussions to a significant degree. This introductory article frames the articles
that follow within the broader history of American education and posits a variety of
opportunities and questions to explore as we incorporate the history of schools into
planning history.
Keywords: history of education; urban history; American history; eighteenth century; nineteenth century; twentieth century; school reform.
C
ity and regional planning owes its origins as a discipline to a variety
of initiatives to reform people and places. The flowering of an urban,
industrial society in mid-nineteenth-century North America
inspired a wide assortment of such movements. Ministers and temperance
advocates battled the evils brewing in saloons and brothels. Tuberculosis
societies fought the real and perceived filth of crowded immigrant neighborhoods, while their allies in the nascent parks movement worked to create green spaces where the urban poor could breathe fresh air and enjoy
“civilizing” surroundings. Poor relief and later settlement house workers
strove to instill healthy habits of work and domesticity.1 However, perhaps
the most prolific and lasting antebellum reform movement of all was the
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The project of assembling this themed issue was inspired by Michael B. Katz, who has
challenged urban historians to integrate education and school reform into our understanding of American cities and regions. Journal of Planning History Editor Chris Silver graciously shepherded this large
submission; and he and his anonymous reviewers helped strengthen each article and focus the entire
collection. This introduction also benefited from the generous feedback and suggestions of Katz, Michael
Clapper, and Mary Sies.
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 5 No. 3, August 2006 183-195
DOI: 10.1177/1538513205284622
© 2006 Sage Publications
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183
184
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
revolution in public schooling that would transform the population and
landscape of the entire nation, from its most rural districts to its greatest
metropolises.
In his “Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools
to the General Assembly of Connecticut for 1851,” Henry Barnard wrote,
“The condition and improvement of her manufacturing population in connection with the education of the whole people is at this time the great problem for New England to work out.” For Barnard, factories and their immigrant workforces contained the seeds of society’s undoing, “the elements of
corruption, of upbreak, and overthrow.” But with aggressive educational
measures, he argued, the energies of these people could uplift the region.
“Here are the capacities for social, moral, and intellectual improvement,”
Barnard affirmed, “and the productive forces for the creation of wealth and
material prosperity, which shall spread along every valley, beautiful and
prosperous villages, and through all her borders, a contented, moral, and
intellectual people.” Schooling held equally critical implications for New
England’s cities. “Here the wealth, enterprise, and professional talent of the
state are concentrated,” but “here too are poverty, ignorance, profligacy,
and irreligion, and a classification of society as broad and deep as ever
divided the plebeian and patrician of ancient Rome.” 2
As Barnard and his colleagues built schools to shape the moral, intellectual,
and economic lives of cities and towns, their efforts often intersected with
those of other reformers. But by the early twentieth century these movements became disciplines, compartmentalized in public bureaucracies,
professional societies, and academic departments. Parks advocates were
now landscape architects and municipal engineers. Antituberculosis crusaders and poor relief volunteers built—and found full-time jobs in—state
and city departments of public health and welfare. The task of managing
neighborhood and regional development through new tools of zoning and
building codes fell to people called “city planners.” And educational leaders
and managers pursued career paths that took them from university schools
of education to jobs as principals and school district administrators.
Yet the interests—and often the activities—of these various urban
reformers turned professionals intersected and fit into broader, “comprehensive” urban public agendas. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, for example, cast improvements in early childhood and secondary
education as integral parts of a federal program aimed at alleviating a deep
“urban crisis.” Appealing to the Eighty-ninth Congress for funding in 1965,
Johnson pointed to a long history of education in federal policy and
national planning. “In 1787, the Continental Congress declared in the
Northwest Ordinance: Schools and the means of education shall forever be
encouraged,” he reminded lawmakers. “America is strong and prosperous
and free because for 178 years we have honored that commitment.” 3
School district superintendents from the nation’s cities supported the
president’s call for $4.1 billion in educational spending. New York City
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Vitiello / RE-FORMING SCHOOLS AND CITIES
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Executive Deputy Superintendent Bernard Donovan told a House Subcommittee on Education, “The hope of the big cities for the future lies in the
adequate education of their disadvantaged children. Just as in a family
there is love for every child, it is also true that the love is deeper for that
member of the family who is handicapped.” In the mid-1960s, cities were
the disadvantaged, handicapped members of the American family. In the
minds of policy makers and much of the public, cities also still served a vital
national purpose. “Our city has long been the melting pot of the world,”
Donovan continued. “We have always welcomed the poor, the handicapped, and the disadvantaged and we have taken the necessary steps to
make them worthy, productive, and responsible citizens.”4 These steps
included everything from providing affordable housing and health services
to schooling—a web of public institutions that together enacted an urban
planning and policy agenda.
As historians and planners have broadened their definitions of “planning” in recent generations, it is no stretch to argue that schools and education represent a vital part of urban planning, policy, and history.5 At the
Tenth National Conference on Planning History in St. Louis in 2003, public
housing, parks, highways, and garden suburbs of course figured prominently in numerous sessions. But conference participants also explored the
planning of everything from department stores to children’s hospitals,
libraries to condominiums, historic districts to fish hatcheries. The articles
in this issue of the Journal of Planning History grew out of another session
in St. Louis, titled “Re-forming Schools and Cities: Public School Design
and Development—Retrospect and Prospect,” that attempted to add
schools and education to this rich landscape of planning history.
Schools consume most of the waking hours of a large proportion of the
world’s population. By 2001, school construction expenditures in the
United States topped $44 billion, while the total budget for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was about $33 billion. Yet schools
remain largely absent from the literature of planning history, as few historians and planning educators have framed schools and educational policy as
planning activities.6 Conversely, historians of education, class, and the
state have mostly ignored the design, development, and ecology of schools
and education.7 In professional societies and journals in the fields of architecture and construction, for which schools represent a large and important
market, design for education receives considerably more attention, though
typically with little historical context. Why does this matter? For our
understandings of urban history, schools represent one of the central institutions of planning, physical and economic development, and socialization.
For those invested in the social utility of planning history, a more troublesome issue lies in the lack of sophisticated historical and ecological contexts for historians to inform debates about school reform and the roles of
schools in community building.
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JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
This last concern inspired the Urban Studies Program at the University of
Pennsylvania to organize a “public conversation” on the past, present, and
future of school design and development when the School District of Philadelphia launched a $1.5 billion capital campaign. In February 2003, historians, architects, district administrators, teachers, parents, and neighborhood residents gathered at the city’s newest school building, the PennAlexander School (erected and operated in partnership with the university), to grapple with the legacies, challenges, and opportunities facing the
district’s diverse constituencies and the planners and architects interested
in shaping new educational environments.8 The conference session in St.
Louis included three participants in the Philadelphia forum—architectural
historian and preservationist George E. Thomas, historian of education and
former public school teacher Michael Clapper, and urban historian and
planner Domenic Vitiello—but expanded the discussion with the national
perspectives of architectural historian Amy Weisser and urban designer
Roy Strickland. This collection of articles represents a further attempt at
understanding school building as planning history.
The articles in this issue focus primarily on questions of public school
design, with some attention to site selection, community planning, and
educational administration. But schools and education hold many promising research directions for planning historians. A host of questions present
themselves:
• How have school design and planning shaped the physical and social fabric of city
and suburban neighborhoods?
• How does the history of schools intersect with the histories of other urban
institutions?
• What does public school planning tell us about citizenship, power, and the state in
•
•
•
•
neighborhoods, cities, and regions? What have been the meanings of “public” in
public school design and development? What does the history of education suggest
about the relationship between church and state in planning and policy?
How have race, class, and gender shaped the politics of education reform and
school development? (Since women have made up the vast bulk of the educational
workforce in the United States since the nineteenth century, the history of schools
represents an especially promising area for exploring the roles of women in
planning.)
How have students, teachers, neighborhood residents, and architects shaped education—together or in competition with district administrators and educational
pundits and reformers, the typical protagonists of educational histories?
How have the public and private economics of school building been organized in
divergent contexts of urban growth and decline?
What challenges and opportunities face planners engaged in school reform, and
how can planning historians contribute to current and future debates about school
reform?
The articles by Weisser, Thomas, and Clapper address many of these questions. Additionally, a large body of work by historians of education points up
various ways in which their research intersects with urban history. A necessarily brief and diffuse survey of this intersection occupies the remainder of
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Vitiello / RE-FORMING SCHOOLS AND CITIES
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this introductory article, framing the history of American education as
planning history.
Even before the flowering of public school systems in the antebellum
period, schools and other institutions of urban life hold important implications for colonial planning history.9 As suggested by George Thomas’s article on school design in Philadelphia, the numerous ethnic and religious
groups building their own schoolhouses and houses of worship in the American provinces represent a great diversity of early modern planning traditions. As colonial towns grew into cities, urban leaders from Boston to Baltimore used institutions of research and teaching to regulate and grow their
regions’ increasingly diverse metropolitan economies and societies.
Benjamin Franklin, to take one prominent example, responded to the rapid
growth of eighteenth-century Philadelphia by founding a complex of institutions that included not only fire insurance and fire-fighting companies
but also the Library Company, American Philosophical Society, Academy
and College of Philadelphia (later University of Pennsylvania), and Pennsylvania Hospital. In the Early Republic, Americans lumped these institutions
under the broad category of “internal improvements,” together with transportation, communications, and other planning initiatives. This term was
narrowed to denote turnpike and canal (and later railroad and telegraph)
infrastructure only in the 1820s.10 Thus, the Lancasterian schools established in the early nineteenth century from Albany to Detroit—the first
mass education initiatives in American cities—formed part of broader
public agendas.11
Although state and district bureaucracies have become ubiquitous in
American public education, a range of planning models competed to shape
emerging public school systems in the antebellum years. Historian of education Michael B. Katz has identified four prominent modes of mid-nineteenth-century school reform. Paternalistic voluntarism characterized
the Lancasterian and other elite-driven school systems, a top-down “means
for one class to civilize another and thereby ensure that society would
remain tolerable, orderly, and safe.” Democratic localism constituted a
bottom-up mode of social change, most successful in rural schools, which
rested on a faith in people and the notion that “legislatures should enact,
and not lead, the public will.” Private academies were the most common
form of corporate voluntarism, “the conduct of single institutions as individual corporations operated by self-perpetuating boards of trustees” resting on the “rational” assumption that “endowment lifted education out of
politics and assured it competent direction.” Finally, the incipient bureaucracy that came to control public school systems rejected democratic localism not only for its perceived lack of efficiency but also—as revealed in
Henry Barnard’s writing above—out of a fear of “the cultural divisiveness
inherent in the increasing religious and ethnic variety of American life.”12
These four paths of early school reform, which of course blended into one
another, have clear parallels in what planning historians have identified as
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JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
top-down, bottom-up, rational, and bureaucratic planning traditions. Historians of public housing, for instance, recognize a familiar theme in Katz’s
observation that the state school system’s “definition of its clients as inferior, so integral to bureaucracy” and the class perspective of its leaders,
“became entrenched even more deeply because quite early it acquired its
functional utility as a defense of bureaucratic failure.”13
While individual states built their own school systems in the mid-nineteenth century, the war between the Union and Confederate states opened
the door for the federal government to use public education in the service of
national planning. Indeed, education would prove significant in several eras
and initiatives of national planning. Part of a large package of Civil War laws,
in 1862 Republican congressmen pushed through the Morrill Act, “An Act
donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.” These
land-grant colleges would prove vital to agricultural and industrial development, particularly in the new states of the West. The attendant infusion of
capital for these new institutions would soon find its way not only into the
pockets of a growing class of university professors, but also into the coffers
of numerous architects and landscape planners such as McKim, Mead, and
White and Frederick Law Olmsted, who made academic design an
important specialty in their professions.
When the federal government turned to replanning the Southern states
following the war, schools played a central part in Reconstruction. Northern
manufacturers such as Philadelphia locomotive magnate Matthias Baldwin
proved willing to fund educational initiatives, as schools promised to help
remake the agricultural South into a productive part of their industrial
nation. Sadly, concerted public and private campaigns to limit African
Americans’ access to quality education also formed a prominent means of
repression as whites consolidated their power in the post-Reconstruction
regime of Jim Crow. This struggle over schooling would remain a crucial element of African Americans’ claims to full citizenship up to the present day,
occupying a prominent place in the Civil Rights movement of the midtwentieth century as well as recent lawsuits seeking to equalize school
funding between poor, largely minority, urban districts and their more affluent, white, suburban counterparts.14 As Michael Clapper notes, the search
for access to education would also be a significant factor in many African
Americans’ choices to depart the South for northern and western cities in
the Great Migrations—a point that underscores the tragedy of Clapper’s
story of segregation and inequity in the Philadelphia School District. 15
As battles over schooling for blacks raged in the late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century South, northern cities accommodated a flood of
new immigrants and unprecedented industrialization. Historian of education Lawrence Cremin argues that metropolitan life in this period brought
new educational requirements. “Individuals came to be defined more by
the facts of race, class, ethnicity, religion, and occupation . . . and regulated
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Vitiello / RE-FORMING SCHOOLS AND CITIES
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more by the rules and policies of governments, professions, and formal
institutions than by the unspoken conventions of localities.”16 One set of
responses employed schools in the task of planning and managing increasingly segmented regional labor markets.17 This led to a great array of educational niches, while the mass scale of education spurred the standardization of curriculum at each level. To train the leaders of a professionalized
society, universities founded schools of business, architecture, education,
and social work. Industrialists and educators developed technical and vocational programs in primary and secondary schools to serve specific occupational trajectories. While some students learned basic mechanical proficiency they would later apply in factories, others—especially young
women—acquired the secretarial skills demanded by growing sectors of
office work.18 George Thomas argues that some urban schools reflected
these trends in their aesthetics and floor plans.
Addressing the social challenges of this diverse metropolitan society,
proponents of the Progressive movement founded or reformed a wide range
of institutions, from child care facilities to settlement houses to poor relief
societies. Progressive educational reform was a fundamental part of what
Susan Marie Wirka has termed a “City Social Movement” that both countered and complemented the City Beautiful and City Practical strands of
late nineteenth and early twentieth century planning.19 As Amy Weisser
notes in the article that follows this, John Dewey and other educators called
for schooling to be integrated with other sorts of social programs in a holistic reform agenda. According to Lawrence Cremin, the principal tenets of
American Progressive education advocated (1) “broadening the program of
the school to include direct concern for health, vocation, and the quality of
family and community life”; (2) “applying in the classroom the pedagogical
principles derived from new scientific research in psychology and the
social sciences”; and (3) “tailoring instruction more and more to the different kinds and classes of children who were being brought within the purview of the school.”20 Like their Progressive counterparts in settlement
houses, welfare societies, and church-based social reform organizations,
Michael Katz argues that Dewey and fellow “educational revivalists” shared
an “ideal of a moral and spiritual regeneration of American society through
the moral and spiritual regeneration of individual personalities.”21 Katz and
social historian Hal Barron further note that Progressive educational
reform expanded the influence of urban reformers far beyond metropolitan
regions. The consolidation of the myriad rural school districts in the United
States—fourteen thousand in Iowa alone—made administrative Progressivism, with its crusade for professionalism and systematic reorganization,
one of the most pervasive social movements of the era. 22
Even if the disciplinary boundaries between education, public welfare,
and community planning would soon become less porous, the marriage of
social science and social policy making and planning would be a lasting one.
As Progressive reformers built national professional associations, they also
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JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
fostered connections to cadres of architects and engineers. “It is more and
more apparent,” the Journal of Education noted in 1891, “that one of the
great American problems is how to ‘house’ the multitude of children in the
city schools.”23 Weisser examines how prominent architects such as Richard Neutra and William Lescaze elaborated the educational programs of
John Dewey in their Progressive school designs, just as Catherine Bauer
and Oscar Stonorov applied their architectural expertise to their advocacy
of public housing.
While professional associations lent a national perspective to educational and architectural practice, the Great Depression, World War II, and
the cold war again focused federal attention on education. As Weisser notes,
the Public Works Administration funded some 70 percent of new school
construction in the mid- to late 1930s. The Second World War sparked the
beginnings of large-scale federal investment in university research, and the
militarization of higher education in engineering and science escalated as
fear of communism and nuclear war heightened in the 1950s. All of this filtered down to primary and secondary schools in the form of fallout shelters
and air raid drills that sent students and teachers cowering under their
desks.
But urban schools had far greater problems in the postwar decades. As
social historian Ira Katznelson argued in his 1981 study of Great Society
programs in New York City, concerns about federal policies and programs,
social mobility and welfare, race and labor relations, and urban spatial and
economic restructuring all intersected in debates over the planning and
management of inner city public schools. Urban historian Wendell
Pritchett has recently reasserted the importance of clashes over school
reform for historians’ understandings of urban race relations and neighborhood change in this era.24 Struggles between the courts, legislatures, mayors, teachers unions, boards of education, parents, neighbors, and students
erupted in often violent conflicts such as the 1957 battle over desegregation
at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, the 1968 Ocean Hill–
Brownsville teachers’ strike in Brooklyn, and the antibusing protests of ethnic whites in South Boston in 1974. The failures of this period’s great experiments in racial integration, public welfare, and urban renewal are as evident in the educational narratives of Weisser, George Thomas, and Michael
Clapper as they are in the public housing histories of John Bauman and
Lawrence Vale.25
Katznelson’s metaphor of “city trenches” has broad implications for
planning historians, as we strive to understand the relationships between
the “trenches” (or subfields) of housing, transportation, environmental
design and regulation, and education in this and other periods. In his analysis of the “new genre of institutions” of localized planning spawned by the
Great Society, including “little city halls, offices of neighborhood govern-
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Vitiello / RE-FORMING SCHOOLS AND CITIES
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ment, decentralized school boards, and neighborhood service councils,” he
uncovers a deep irony in the broader planning process. These initiatives, he
argues, sought “not only to overcome the threatening gap between citizenry
(especially black citizens) and government, but to reinvolve them in the
terms of the traditional” system of “city trenches” wherein people’s reformist energies were channeled into separate bureaucratic arenas that stymied
more comprehensive, systematic reforms of public administration.26
If schools offer an important window into the urban crises and planning
crusades of the post–World War II decades, they are equally significant for
understanding the era’s mass suburbanization—a theme explored in the
articles by Weisser and Clapper. The search for “better schools” is frequently cited as a motive for moving to the suburbs. Recent work by religious historian John McGreevy and political scientist Gerald Gamm suggests that parochial schools may have also helped retard the urban exodus
of certain religious groups—particularly Catholics.27 For people who did
depart the inner city—even to the most racially, ethnically, and economically homogenous suburbs—schools and home-school associations
remained forums through which residents expressed their deepest personal
desires and visions for society. In his classic study of 1950s suburbanites,
The Levittowners, Herbert Gans found that voluntary associations such as
churches could exclude—or in Gans’s terms, “extrude”—people who did
not agree with the dominant viewpoints in the congregation. “The school
system, however, like all public agencies served the entire community and
had to provide for its diverse demands within a single institution.”28
The same remains true today, as school reform has attracted renewed
attention in city and suburban districts across the United States. Michael
Katz’s models of antebellum school reform have important parallels a century and a half later. On one hand, there appears to be a resurgence of democratic localism, as charter schools have proliferated to serve a great diversity of communities and constituencies across the country. For some cities
and suburbs with large populations of recent immigrants, this has offered
an opportunity to accommodate the multilingual and multicultural concerns of parents and students. Local strategies have even been adapted in
some of the largest reform efforts of the 1990s, as when Chicago revived the
Great Society–era strategy of community control through neighborhood
school councils.29 How “democratic” or “localistic” such efforts prove to be
in the face of the state legislatures that fund them and the teachers unions
and school district bureaucracies with which they compete remains an
open question. (In Chicago, District Superintendent Paul Vallas succeeded
in recentralizing most authority in the later 1990s.)
Running counter to these community-focused strategies is a renaissance
of corporate (sometimes paternalistic) voluntarism, part of a broader proliferation of market models of public policy and planning. Public education
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JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
authorities are contracting with private educational providers to run individual schools and sometimes even entire districts. In addition to these providers, private companies such as software giant Microsoft are pushing their
own visions of education, economy, and society as they erect, design, and
manage “public” schools in urban and suburban districts (for many districts, corporations’ promises of cash, new technology, and innovative
teaching programs are hard to resist). Many elected representatives and
private and parochial educators are also pushing voucher programs that
would introduce a limited measure of school choice for families interested
in seeking educational options outside of the public schools. All these market models are highly controversial. Their supporters point to the old cry of
operational efficiency as well as the chance to push the rigid boundaries of
an outdated public educational system. Detractors view these trends as
dangerous manifestations of the broader privatization of the public sphere.
A third trend in contemporary education reform involves changes to
state and school district bureaucracies. Some state legislatures have taken
over major urban districts, including Philadelphia’s. In other states, courts
have mandated revision of education funding formulae, highlighting the
role of the judiciary in shaping school systems and regional equity.30 One of
the most prominent of these cases, New Jersey’s Abbott v. Burke decisions,
allocated considerable public funds for the renovation and construction of
school buildings in twenty-eight mostly inner-city districts with “special
needs.” It is this opportunity that has allowed Roy Strickland, who participated in the St. Louis panel, to help several New Jersey cities reshape the
ecology of education and develop his City of Learning model of school
planning for community revitalization.
Strickland’s work points to important (though exceptional) efforts to
integrate school reform into broader urban planning initiatives. University
studios taught by the likes of Strickland and MIT landscape planner Anne
Spirn offer models for integrating public school design and programming
into graduate planning education.31 Yet many challenges and opportunities
remain for professionals and academics to explore in the development and
application of innovative planning and educational models in districts
across the country. Clearly, schools can be critical tools for neighborhood
revitalization and empowerment, particularly when designers, teachers,
and administrators link their work to the wider world of planning and social
action. Yet exceptional schools can also function as engines of gentrification, driving up property values and rents within their catchment areas and
reinforcing the segregation that characterizes American cities.
Historians of education and planning and policy have only begun to
weigh in on contemporary school reform. Many weighty—and sometimes
loaded—questions remain to investigate. Planning historians are uniquely
positioned to contribute geographic and ecological perspectives to the history of education in the United States and around the world. And schools
and education hold fertile ground for planning historians to excavate as we
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Vitiello / RE-FORMING SCHOOLS AND CITIES
193
fashion ever more complex understandings of city and regional development. Hopefully, the articles in this issue will inspire some planning historians to include schools and education in our exploration of urban pasts and
futures.
1. For a survey of urban moral reform associations across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978).
2. Henry Barnard, “Sixth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools to the General
Assembly of Connecticut for 1851,” American Journal of Education 5 (1865): 293-310, partially
reprinted in Michael B. Katz, ed., School Reform: Past and Present (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 17-8.
3. President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Education Message to the Eighty-ninth Congress of the United
States, January 12, 1965,” in Enactments by the 89th Congress Concerning Education and Training,
First Session 1965, partially reprinted in Katz, School Reform, 23.
4. Aid to Elementary and Secondary Education, U.S. House of Representatives, General Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labor (Washington, D.C., January 23, 1965),
partially reprinted in Katz, School Reform, 30.
5. The broadening of this definition is treated in Gail Dubrow and Mary Corbin Sies, “Letting Our
Guard Down: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Planning History,” Journal of Planning History 1,
no. 2 (August 2002): 203-14.
6. Important exceptions to this trend include studies of industrial education and segregation. See,
for example, Angel David Nieves, “ ‘We Gave Our Hearts and Lives to It’: African-American Women
Reformers, Industrial Education, and the Monuments of Nation-Building in the Post-Reconstruction
South, 1877-1938” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2001); Leigh Joseph Altadonna,
“The School, Curriculum, and Community: A Case Study of the Institutionalizing of Industrial Education in the Public Schools of Philadelphia, 1876-1918” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College, New York, 1983); see also Lawrence Joseph DeFeo, “The Transformation of a Community: A
History of the Development and Education of Woodbine” (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, Rutgers,
NJ, 1979); Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Gregory S. Jacobs, Getting around Brown: Desegregation,
Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998).
7. An important exception to this is historian of education John Rury, who has explored the geography of American schooling. See, for example, John L. Rury, “Urbanization and Education: Regional Patterns of Educational Development in American Cities, 1900-1910,” Michigan Academician 20, no. 3
(1988): 261-79; and John L. Rury, “Urban Structure and School Participation: Immigrant Women in
1900,” Social Science History 8, no. 3 (1984): 219-42. See also Claudia Goldin, “America’s Graduation
from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 2 (1998): 345-74; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Origins of
State-Level Differences in the Public Provision of Higher Education, 1890-1940,” American Economic
Review 88, no. 2 (1998): 303-8; and Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure
among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
8. For an overview of the Urban Studies Program’s yearlong series of public conversations, including
links related to the School District’s capital campaign, see http://www.sas.upenn.edu/urban/
schoolreform.html.
9. For a synthetic treatment of colonial education, see Lawrence Cremin, American Education:
The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (New York: Harper, 1970).
10. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular
Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
11. Karl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
12. Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 27-47. See also Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational InnovaDownloaded from http://jph.sagepub.com by João Caramelo on November 29, 2007
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JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2006
tion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 18201980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
13. Katz, Reconstructing American Education, 48. For a parallel in public housing history, see, for
example, Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
14. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1988); William Preston Vaughn, Schools for All: The Blacks and Public Education
in the South, 1865-1877 (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Louis R. Harlan, Separate and
Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 (New
York: Athenaeum, 1968); Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South from 1619 to
the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); and August Meier, Elliot Rudwick, and
Francis L. Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1972).
15. See, for example, James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great
Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
16. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), 521; see also Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), xv.
17. On the roles of schools in “labor market planning,” see David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market & the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); and Domenic Vitiello, “Engineering the Metropolis: The Sellers
Family and Industrial Philadelphia” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, University Park,
2004), esp. chaps. 2 and 5.
18. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States,
1880-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), chap. 1; Raymond E. Callahan, Education
and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Harvey Kantor and David B.
Tyack, eds., Work, Youth, and Schooling: Historical Perspectives on Vocationalism in American Education (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982); Walter Licht, Getting Work, Philadelphia 18401950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Andrew Dawson, “The Workshop and the
Classroom: Philadelphia Engineering, the Decline of Apprenticeship, and the Rise of Industrial Training,
1878-1900,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 2 (summer 1999): 143-60.
19. Susan Marie Wirka, “The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social
Planning,” in Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-Century American
City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55-75.
20. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education,
1876-1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961), viii-ix; see also Marilyn Gittell and T. Edward Hollander, “The Process of Change: Case Study of Philadelphia,” in Marilyn Gittell and Alan G. Hevesi, eds., The Politics of
Urban Education (New York: Praeger, 1969).
21. Katz, Reconstructing American Education, 50.
22. Michael Katz and Mark Stern, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming), chaps. 1-2; and Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The
Second Great Transformation of the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997), chap. 2.
23. Quoted in Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School, 11.
24. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States
(New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the
Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. chap. 8. Pritchett’s perspective on schools and school reform adds an important dimension to explanations of mid-twentiethcentury urban change elaborated in such works as Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis:
Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Gerald
Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
25. John Bauman, Public Housing, Race and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects; see also Ronald
P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Peter Binzen, Whitetown, U.S.A. (New York: Random House,
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Vitiello / RE-FORMING SCHOOLS AND CITIES
195
1970); and Jon S. Birger, “Race, Reaction, and Reform: The Three Rs of Philadelphia School Politics,
1965-1971,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 120, no. 3 (July 1996).
26. Katznelson, City Trenches, 135.
27. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the TwentiethCentury Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Gamm, Urban Exodus.
28. Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community
(New York: Knopf, 1967), 90.
29. For a historian’s treatment of Chicago school reform in the 1990s, see Michael B. Katz, Improving
Poor People: The Welfare State, the “Underclass,” and Urban Schools as History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), chap. 3.
30. For discussion of school districts’ roles in shaping regional inequality and metropolitan politics in
one bistate region, see Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), The Future of First
Generation Suburbs in the Delaware Valley Region (Philadelphia: DVRPC, 1998); see also Myron
Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, MA: Brookings and Lincoln, 1997), esp. chap. 3.
31. Strickland’s work in one New Jersey city is discussed in Roy Strickland, ed., Designing a City of
Learning: Paterson, N.J. (n.p., 2001); Spirn’s work is profiled at http://web.mit.edu/wplp/index.html.
Domenic Vitiello is a historian and planner with broad interests in the roles of institutions
in shaping cities and regions. In addition to his consulting practice in community development and historic preservation, he teaches urban history and planning in the University of
Pennsylvania’s Urban Studies Program. There he has organized yearly series of “public
conversations” on civic issues in Philadelphia, including neighborhood revitalization,
school reform, arts development, vacant land, and immigration.
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