Today we look at the ideology of social efficiency, its roots in organizational and psychological theories, and its hold on the imagination of the administrator progressives. These elite reformers aimed at nothing less than the transformation of the American schooling system. To educate as efficiently and economically as possible, the offspring of millions of immigrants in the decades before World War I. The so-called New Immigrants of the progressive era originated primarily in Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Russia, and Poland, and included my Slovak grandmother, arriving from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Old stock Americans, those of northern European providence, regarded the New Immigrants with disdain, suspicion and fear. Hence the urgency of education reformers of different persuasions, many of whom shared their middle class peer's low regard for Europe's so called dregs. To educate and assimilate the hordes of immigrant children. Quickly and expeditiously as possible. The question was how to manage a massive surge in school enrollments. >> Applying social efficiency principles the administrative progressives designed what David Tyack calls quote the one best system for this explicit purpose. We are particularly interested in the cult of efficiency that gave the American high school more or less, it's modern form. It has been an enduring system, one that was not casually inserted, nor one that can be easily purged. But first we must explain what social efficiency meant in the context of the Progressive Movement. Social efficiency as applied by the administrative progressive schools, had two theoretical wellsprings. The first was a theory of organization and management that educational leaders imported from big business. In 1910, Frederick W., Taylor published a seminal book. The Principles of Scientific Management, which specified principles for creating optimally efficient labor productivity. These principles were drawn from Taylor's experiments at industrial work sites. He brought down industrial tasks into their component parts. Timed the performance of each task by a first weight worker and through a calculated system of positive reinforcement achieved, after several iterations, an optimal performance in an optimal amount of time, thus creating a standard for each task he studied. >> So called tailorism, the theory of managerial efficiency dovetailed neatly with the discipline of behaviorist psychologists, in particular, with Edward Lee Thorndike's psychology of individual differences. At Teacher's College, Thorndike developed a theory called, connectionism. He envisioned the mind as a switchboard of neuro connections governed by what he called the law of practice and the law of effect, laws that can only work in tandem. Thorndike's psychology would have every learning goal broken down into its component parts, each to be learned in the sequence that achieves the learning goal. The law of practice holds that each part must be reformed, performed repeatedly if it is to be learned. The law of effect holds that each successful repetition must be rewarded or positively reinforced. In combination, the application of the two laws would seal the new learning in the learner's brain. Administrative progressives found in Taylor's principles and Thorndike's psychology a warrant for behavioral objectives. In Thorndike they also found a warrant for differentiating curriculum and instruction. Thorndike believed that as each learner's mental apparatus was different, educators would need to differentiate curriculum to align as much as possible with the different learning needs of individual children. >> The psychological testing movement, in which Thorndike played no small role provided the middle measures and achievement tests for classifying and sorting children along the lines of their probable career destinations. Because the tests were based on statistics, they were judged to be scientific, hence objective and value free. Sorting school children on this bases was assumed to be meritocratic. Totally free of bias. That each child would receive an education appropriate to his or her capabilities was presumed to be democratic. There's no denying, however, that Thorndike and others of his ilk were mesmerized by numbers and insensitive to the biases that infused their work. Educational researchers trained or influenced by Thorndike and his circle created the so called science of educational administration. They wrote textbooks for the field. Created placement at their home Universities and orchestrated school surveys in cities across the country. Designating templates and score cards for measuring efficient school operations. And they helped to create city bureaus to manage all the minutiae. Career-minded superintendents far and wide adopted the administrative progressive survey instruments, their score cards and templates, with great enthusiasm. More than eager to establish au courant credentials for their schools and themselves. By no means were they vulnerable. They were outwardly complicit in building the one best system. >> Mm-hm. In our next two episodes, we'll turn to the creation of the comprehensive high school, which emerged in the Progressive Era and became ubiquitous after the 1920s. The comprehensive high school is and remains to this day the quintessential expression of administrative progressivism in a by-gone era. It has been a durable institution. Even as it has come increasingly under fire as a model. We start first with the Blue Ribbon Panel Report that was the last hurrah for the traditional academic high school as the standard of American secondary education. [SOUND]
