Coming Apart and Coming Together:Formative Years of Three School Districts

By Claudia J. Keenan

Just like hundreds of American suburban towns and villages,

Eastchester, Tuckahoe, and Bronxville set forth on the shifting

terrain of public education in the years after World War I. Across

local, state, and national levels, educators faced new problems that

reflected major changes in the nation’s culture and society: How to

accommodate the swiftly growing student enrollment? How to raise money

to build a new school? How to teach immigrants to speak English?

Should the classic curriculum be diversified? Should all students

learn the same things? The issues ranged from the practical to the

philosophical. In response, between 1920 and the late 1930s the U.S.

Commissioner of Education and the leadership of the National Education

Association initiated big adjustments to a system that had largely

been in place for decades.1 They created more bureaucracy, more

regulations and requirements, higher expectations, and generally more

complexity that affected the largest urban systems and the smallest

rural districts. Some solutions were innovative and effective while

others led to chaos and frustration. The story of how the new

challenges of school administration and expansion were managed locally

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in Eastchester, Tuckahoe, and Bronxville illuminates not only the

business of education but also the culture and society of the three

communities.

By the early twentieth century, Eastchester, Bronxville, and

Tuckahoe had begun to evolve in different directions. Inevitably, the

concentration of wealth in Bronxville, the influx of Italian and Irish

immigrants to Tuckahoe, and Eastchester’s discordant constituencies

would influence the choices made by each school district. Notably,

that would include major school building construction and selection of

a superintendent. These items are routinized today. A century ago,

however, they were somewhat uncharted territory for school boards in

small communities, involving more money and greater dependence on

outside expertise than previously necessary. To parents and local

leaders, it may have seemed that teaching children was the last item

on the list in the new organization of school districts.

The 1920 federal census was the first in which the nation’s urban

population exceeded the number of people who lived in rural areas, a

trend certainly reflected in the small villages and towns that

prospered close to New York City.2 Although there were few shared

services, public schooling in the various communities of southern

Westchester County had been entwined since the late eighteenth

century, with some students traveling more than a few miles each way

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to school. In 1892, the City of Mount Vernon incorporated;

subsequently students within the town of Eastchester (known as

District 2) attended either Tuckahoe’s Jefferson Place School located

off Main Street east of Midland Avenue or Bronxville’s first

schoolhouse, a Victorian affair with a bell tower on Pondfield Road.3

However, the Village of Bronxville voted to separate its school from

Tuckahoe on June 12, 1903, thus becoming District 3.4 The split came

after assertions that a “ring” led by Henry C. Merritt, an engineer

and realtor prominent in Tuckahoe affairs, had conspired to make money

on the sale of land for a new school planned for both communities.5

“The fact of Bronxville separating itself from Tuckahoe naturally

leads everyone to stop and investigate . . . The reason is not hard

to discover. The residents simply got tired of being plundered by a

clique, or close corporation that dominated the affairs of the town

for self interest,” editorialized The Review, a Bronxville weekly owned

by the influential Lawrence family.6

When Bronxville became District 3, Tuckahoe and Eastchester then

constituted District 2. Students in Tuckahoe attended the Main Street

School, which opened in mid-1907, or the Waverly Union School on Hall

Avenue. Eastchester students attended the Wilmot School at the corner

of Wilmot and White Plains Road, built in 1909.7 In 1906, Bronxville’s

board of education commissioned the “Yellow Brick Schoolhouse” located

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on Pondfield Road. But by 1920, teachers and parents in all three

communities were complaining about overcrowded classrooms and pushed

for more space. The schools required updating, too; in function and

style they were more nineteenth than twentieth century, requiring, for

example, libraries, gymnasiums, and science laboratories. Further,

Bronxville and Tuckahoe residents called for high schools because

their students who wished to advance beyond 8th or 9th grade would need

to travel to Mount Vernon to attend A.B. Davis High School.8

Eastchester students attended Waverly High School, established in the

late nineteenth century. Building a high school constituted an

unprecedented commitment for a small community, requiring the issuance

of bonds and oversight of an architect and contractor as well as a

large number of subcontractors. Being a school trustee had never been

an easy position, but now greater scrutiny and taxpayers’ demands for

accountability created new tension.

The Need for Local High Schools

Community leaders in Bronxville, Tuckahoe, and Eastchester

recognized the need to follow the national trend and transition from

small schoolhouses to K-12 education. Between 1923 and 1929, all three

districts passed bond referenda and would boast separate high school

buildings within 2-1/2 miles of each other by the end of the decade:

Bronxville in 1924, Eastchester in 1929, and Tuckahoe in 1930. While

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finding money and support for a high school became a challenge in all

three communities, the Eastchester school board debated it longest,

with one trustee noting as early as 1917, “the high school is a losing

proposition . . . from 1900 to 1916, we have had a registration of 932

pupils and a graduation of 48 pupils and should look at the cost of

farming out students as opposed to building our own high school.”9

The prospect of new school construction created friction in

districts nationwide. Indeed, while Eastchester spent a decade divided

over the necessity, location, and design of its high school, the

Bronxville and Tuckahoe school boards also encountered resistance.

While Bronxville cast about for land on which to build, its task was

made easier by the donation by local resident and philanthropist,

Frank R. Chambers, of the “pond field” where new elementary and high

schools rose in 1924.10 However, when the community learned that a

proposed junior high school would require additional construction, an

anti-tax group formed and pursued the case all the way up to the

United States Supreme Court, which refused to hear the 1926

complaint.11 Nonetheless, the case presaged opposition to Bronxville’s

generous school budget until the late 1930s when the second generation

of village leaders–inclined toward educational innovation–faded from

the school board and more conventional men replaced them.

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In Tuckahoe, pro-school residents were fortunate to have the

support of educator Samuel J. Preston in steering the high school

referendum through voters already ambivalent about providing

instruction to the children of immigrants.12 Preston served as

Westchester County’s first district superintendent between 1916 and

1933, in which position he reported to the New York State Department

of Education. (Every county had a district superintendent.) He appears

to have had special affection for the village of Tuckahoe. Since

Tuckahoe did not yet have its own superintendent, Preston’s authority

was important. The vote pitted older and younger generations against

each other, yet the village celebrated together when the bond issue

finally passed. “I remember my normally reserved mother, singing and

shouting at the top of her lungs, as she sat in a float in a

candlelight parade celebrating the passage of the referendum to build

a new high school,” recalled Martha Creamer, who graduated from

Tuckahoe High School in 1936.13

The Eastchester Board of Education minutes reveal that the delay

in building a high school was due to three problems during the 1920s.

Foremost, the trustees rarely reached consensus even on basic

decisions. Further, the district comprised not just “pro” and “con”

groups but various constituencies, each with its own agenda based on

the condition of the closest grade school or whether a grade school

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even existed within a reasonable distance of its neighborhood homes.14

Ongoing disputes discouraged the establishment of unifying goals and

revealed the pitfalls of operating without a superintendent of

schools. Finally, the Eastchester board of education simply did not

want to spend the money. After visiting the Bronxville School in 1926,

the Eastchester Building Committee reported: “how splendidly and

efficiently the thing worked there, relieving many duties devolving in

the district on the Trustees.”15 However, Eastchester would not hire a

superintendent for another twelve years.

The Imperative of the Superintendent

With expanding enrollment came unfamiliar bureaucratic tasks for

suburban school trustees, as districts nationwide faced a lengthening

list of standards related to public education. A new lexicon of

schooling emerged, including jargon like “inefficiencies,”

“adjustments and differentiations,” and “prescriptive and adaptable

oversight.”16 On the federal level, the U.S. Commissioner of Education

influenced curriculum by encouraging vocational or physical education,

for example. But state education departments exerted the most direct

control over graduation requirements, teacher certification, and

school construction. The state also dictated the proper sizes of

windows and student lockers, optimal lighting and preferred textbooks,

organization of school libraries and attendance records, appropriate

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extracurricular activities, and much more.17 Education literature

abounded: School and Society and Journal of Education were among must-read

journals for teachers, principals, and superintendents, not to mention

dozens of books about educational administration.18

This modern field of expertise known as school administration

enabled school boards to delegate executive decisions and planning to

superintendents and principals. Between the founding of Teachers

College of Columbia University in 1887 and that of the Harvard

Graduate School of Education in 1920, the proliferation of education

departments within American universities led to the rise of the

authoritative superintendent and the new science of managing a school

district. In Tuckahoe, Samuel J. Preston (A.B., A.M., Middlebury

College) informally guided the board until it hired Frank M. Buckley

(A.B., Holy Cross, A.M., Yale and Harvard) in 1931.19 Bronxville’s

first superintendent Alexander J. Stoddard (B.S., University of

Nebraska, M.A., Teachers College) arrived in 1922.20 In 1938,

Eastchester hired Joseph R. Gardner (B.A., Bucknell, M.A., Teachers

College) as superintendent.21 Superintendent Gardner replaced

Supervising Principal William McClelland who had functioned nominally

as superintendent since 1928.22

The professionalization of education during the 1920s and

1930s serves as an important backdrop to the stories of the

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Eastchester, Tuckahoe, and Bronxville school districts. The competent

superintendent would be worth every penny of his annual salary

somewhere in the range of $6,000. Well-connected with ready access to

consultants and top officials in state and national education

associations, he prided himself on having inside information and an

understanding of bureaucracy that a small-town school board lacked.

However, no superintendent commanded the respect of an entire school

board or community, as disturbances in Tuckahoe, Bronxville, and

Eastchester would demonstrate.

The Challenge in Tuckahoe

Even before World War I, the Tuckahoe public schools began to

assume responsibility for problems more often associated with urban

districts. These included English literacy among students and their

parents, healthcare, and acculturation. The schools shared the burden

with community groups, but the costs affected the budget and dominated

school board discussion.23

Among the earliest initiatives of the National Parents and

Teachers Association (PTA), formed as the National Congress of Mothers

in 1897, were medical and dental examinations and vaccinations for

elementary school students and child study groups for parents and

teachers.24 Tuckahoe’s demographics called out for these types of

programs. Further, in 1917 the Westchester County Chamber of Commerce

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asked the Tuckahoe Board of Education “for cooperation in the

Americanization of our foreign-born population.”25 As a result, the

Tuckahoe school district focused on the needs of the children of

immigrants. Fortuitously this early challenge fit neatly with the

philanthropy of local women.

Between 1910 and 1920, the Relief Association of Eastchester,

founded by two prominent Bronxville women, developed an

“Americanization” program that included charity, adult education

classes, and baby clinics. Working with the Tuckahoe PTA, the

association hired a nurse for the Main Street School, instituted

school lunches, and arranged doctors’ visits. Like social settlements,

the program emphasized hygiene, socialization, and English fluency.26

Therefore, social services were in place by 1920 when Samuel J.

Preston told the Tuckahoe board that the results of the recent census

“revealed the names of illiterates and non-English speaking

residents.”27 Consequently, the district would face new state

requirements for English language instruction–the institution of a

special curriculum and separate classes, and the hiring of more

teachers. The new classes were highly successful although many

students continued to speak their native language at home.

The state mandate stretched the resources of the schools at a

time when Tuckahoe gravely needed to spend money on school

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construction. If some residents resented the investment in the

children of immigrants, the board of education also contended with

sentiment that was just plain anti-education. In 1922, just as

Tuckahoe stood on the threshold of planning a high school, an

editorial in the Eastchester Bulletin displayed the worst of conventional

thinking about public education. “The great majority in the average walks of life do

not need all these frills which are falsely called education. The training obtained in the primary

and grammar schools is fairly adequate for the carpenter, the blacksmith, the painter, yes, and

a hundred other callings in the school of life. The burdens of taxation for education are

becoming almost more than we can legitimately bear. . .We have been extravagant in the

quality of our school buildings and their artistic equipment. People are willing to pay for

primary education for the many, but not for the higher education of the few at a much greater

cost, particularly when the knowledge obtained is merely for ornamentation in the main.28

This disturbing perspective demonstrates the obstacles faced by

communities that hoped to modernize their schools, including a refusal

to accept the twentieth century’s demands for a more educated

populace, an abhorrence of taxes, and the minimal value placed on the

social importance of universal education.”

Diversity and Division

By the 1920s, Tuckahoe harbored disparate factions. Irish

immigrants had achieved a good measure of political power, yet Italian

immigrants continued to be marginalized especially after Hodgman

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Rubber, the town’s major employer, closed in the mid-1920s, and the

last of the marble quarries closed in 1930.29 Middle-class to wealthy

Presbyterians still felt most at home among Bronxville’s churches and

clubs, while African-Americans who arrived from the South after World

War I to work in the Hodgman plant were so disenfranchised that their

1932 petition asking the school board to hire a “colored” janitor was

denied.30 Following a 1927 lecture by Hazel Knight of the Institute of

Child Welfare Research at Teachers College, Tuckahoe mayor Walter D.

Crouch called on parents to “support the child study movement here.”31

The movement explored the development of children from infancy through

adolescence and was eagerly embraced by psychologists, educators, and

parents in affluent communities such as Bronxville, which regularly

presented speakers on education. With Tuckahoe divided about building

a new high school, however, there was little interest in child study.

Plans for the high school moved forward, however. After passage

of the 1928 high school referendum–the board specified a three-story

building to accommodate 600 students, an auditorium with capacity for

1,200, and a cafeteria for 400–the Tuckahoe trustees asked for and

received another $100,000 for a gymnasium (while the Italian-American

Civic Club reproached the board because the contractor had not hired

local labor).32 Then in 1931 with much hard work behind it, the board

of education celebrated the last graduating seventh grade class from

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the Main Street School and took the big step of hiring a

superintendent of schools.

Frank M. Buckley started his career in the town of Ansonia,

Conn., where he grew up. He earned a master’s degree in education from

Yale while serving as Ansonia’s superintendent and, subsequently,

received a second master’s degree from Harvard while serving as a

principal in Cambridge, Mass. In Tuckahoe, most residents praised his

work, which incidentally included sparring with Bronxville about

whether its sports teams would “play ball” with Tuckahoe’s teams.33

Suddenly, in June 1935, the school board demoted Buckley to a teaching

position and cancelled his contract. After students and more than

1,200 Tuckahoe residents protested, the trustees reinstated Buckley

for one year.34 But nine months later, the board hired John Chaney

Goff, superintendent of schools in Wappingers Falls, to replace him.35

Bearing a B.S. from St. Lawrence University, a B.A. from Western

Reserve, and a master’s degree from Teachers College, Goff would

preside in Tuckahoe until 1946 with a break to serve in the U.S.

Navy.36

During Goff’s tenure, the state imposed more standards and the

superintendent increasingly cited statistics in evaluating progress in

Tuckahoe High School, which brought together students who had

graduated from de facto segregated grammar schools in the village. The

13

Main Street School was attended largely by black and Italian students

while the Waverly School drew white middle- and upper-middle-students.

In high school, the students socialized happily together but Goff

worried they “might learn bad habits from each other as the less

motivated students infect more studious ones with their own careless

attitudes toward school.”37 Superintendent Goff may also have advised

the board not to permit the nomination of a woman as trustee, although

he did encourage the progress of the new PTA and spoke often at its

meetings. In Bronxville, women served on the school board as early as

1903, and Eastchester elected its first woman school trustee, Mildred

Mathews, in 1925. Insert note: TBE minutes, May 1925.

Meantime, Tuckahoe High School expanded its extracurricular

program, producing Cyclone Sally, The Touchdown, and H.M.S. Pinafore, presenting

many concerts, and forming clubs as well as football, baseball, and

basketball teams.38 Student activities also included parking on a dirt

road dubbed “Lover’s Lane” that ran through a field in Bronxville

Manor, recalled longtime resident Harriet Hoblin Bianchi.39 Through the

1930s, the village and the schools continued “Americanization”

programs for second-generation immigrants.

Despite controversy, Tuckahoe’s collective investment in the new

high school helped bind the village together. The district’s success

was reflected in the fact that Tuckahoe High School graduates

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increasingly attended college through the 1930s and after World War

II.40

Eastchester’s Five Curriculums

During the decade following World War I, the Eastchester Board of

Education argued about–but ultimately acted upon–much-needed

construction projects. The district built an addition to the Wilmot

School, renovated the Waverly School, and constructed the J. Fenimore

Cooper School.41 In April 1927, Eastchester finally issued bonds for

the new high school which was dedicated in 1929. Long after the first

class entered, the trustees continued to pay close attention to

landscaping, safety, and modernizing facilities. Were there telephone

booths in the school? Did the auditorium curtains create sufficient

darkness for screening motion pictures? Did the fire alarms really

work? Did the sinks in the manual training room drain properly?

In the meantime, the faculty worked with the New York State

Education Department to create five separate high school curriculums.

This was quite an achievement, more typical of larger schools.

Students chose from classical, academic, scientific, normal, and

commercial courses of study. A high school guidance counselor,

Margaret Bittner, arrived in the late 1920s (before counselors became

customary) to advise students on continuing their education and

careers.42 During these years the school district annually spent around

15

$3,000 on textbooks from Houghton-Mifflin, Scribner’s, the Educational

Music Bureau, Rand McNally, and other publishers.43 The books, dictated

largely by the state education department, included the standard History

of the American People by David Muzzey, Brownlee’s Elementary Principles of

Chemistry, Business Writing by Palmer, and such English classics as The Last of

the Mohicans and A Tale of Two Cities.44 The students flourished, and graduates

attended the Eastman School of Music, New York University, Columbia,

Barnard, and the Colorado School of Mines, among other colleges.45 From

the class of 1933, the talented Helen Enser pursued French horn at

Juilliard and performed with the New York Women’s Symphony and

Orchestrette Classique on WNYC and with the WPA.46

During the 1930s, students participated in oratorical and essay

contests and the drama club presented Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, and

other plays. Class trips to the Metropolitan Opera, the annual senior

trip to Washington, D.C., the Junior High School Press Club’s visit to

The New York Times plant, and the Sewing Club’s visit to Macy’s Sewing

Department all reflected the progressive trend to extend learning

beyond the walls of the classroom.47 Eastchester administrators were

not strong adherents of progressive education, but some of their

initiatives demonstrate how aspects of the philosophy had become part

of the mainstream.

16

In 1936, Eastchester’s new Greenvale School opened its doors and

the Wilmot School, dedicated in 1909, was shuttered. The student

newspaper Greenvale Echo reflected on “twenty-seven years of progress,”

giving “Honor to those who have labored long and faithfully to make

our schools in the North End what they are today.”48 The commemorative

issue, edited by Greenvale teacher Gabriel J. Rescigno, saluted two of

Wilmot’s luminaries: Principal Irving E. Richardson and teacher

Margaret L. Leary, who arrived at Eastchester’s “Old School No. 2” in

1905 and 1903, respectively (Leary, less often realized, served as

principal between 1903 and 1905).49

The juxtaposition of the two beloved educators–neither well

enough to attend the festivities—and Gabe Rescigno, an energetic young

teacher who was Eastchester born and raised, is significant. It

demonstrates the continuity between generations of faculties in small

communities, less common in urban schools. Further, it suggests that

the strength of the schools often lies in the bond between teachers

and the community even in times of weak leadership from the board of

education. In 1939, the bond was affirmed when a committee of

Eastchester alumni erected a memorial to Leary and Waverly teacher

Elizabeth Fisher.50 Today, the stone monument stands on the front lawn

of Eastchester High School.

‘Hue and Cry’

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Eastchester’s population expanded with several middle-class

residential developments built during the 1930s: Scarsdale Manor

(three cooperative apartment buildings along Garth Road), Green Knolls

(private homes built just north of Leewood Golf Club off the Bronx

River Parkway), and the Glen Apartments, off White Plains Road on Glen

Road.51 As enrollment grew, the school physician, Dr. Weston, often

referred to the poor health of students, but it is not clear that he

singled out any particular group. In one meeting, he stated that “the

personal cleanliness of the children was disgraceful and that applied

to all the schools. Filthy sweaters likewise stockings and other

wearing apparel was a natural breeding ground for disease.”52 While New

York State required all public schools to provide medical, dental, and

eye examinations, it never asked the Eastchester schools to provide an

“Americanization” program, whose cost certainly would have irritated

the anti-tax trustees. In 1933, the board’s Finance Committee

announced, “The ‘Hue and Cry’ throughout this broad land is for a

reduction of the inescapable taxes which are sapping the vitality of

property owners.”53 Invoking President Roosevelt’s call to reduce

expenditures, the committee cut the school budget from $251,670.86 in

1931-1932 to $196,655.40 in 1932-1933.54

The trustees also saved money by postponing the hiring of a

superintendent of schools. Instead they opted for a “supervising

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principal” and in 1928 retained Dr. George Strayer of Teachers

College, whose $300 fee included evaluation and recommendation, to

find a candidate.55 Dr. Strayer, one of the best-known educational

consultants in the field, developed the “survey movement” through

which he researched and produced voluminous reports on public school

systems (including Bronxville in 1923 and 1926).56 The Eastchester

school board ignored Strayer’s recommendation and instead chose

William H. McClelland, who had just been fired from the post of

Irvington, N.Y., superintendent of schools.57 A native of New York

State with a B.A. from Syracuse, McClelland had served previously as

high school principal in the small towns of Pike, Perry, and Port

Gibson, N.Y.58

William McClelland hardly calmed the district. He soon became a

subject of gossip in the community for reasons that remain unclear,

and the board perennially threatened to replace him.59 During

McClelland’s first year at Eastchester, when several trustees warned

they might break his contract, the principal filed a $50,000 libel

suit against them. The United Citizens School League sprung up,

aligning itself with the minority faction and McClelland.60 After such

turmoil, it came as no surprise that the Eastchester Board of

Education ended the 1936 school year with the announcement that the

high school principal had been “discharged.”61 “The board’s action is

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expected to stir up the greatest controversy yet known, in a district

that has become widely known for its school board fights,” noted one

newspaper story.62 Quickly, the board appointed Assistant Principal

Douglas S. MacDonald to replace McClelland.63

As further evidence of Eastchester’s turmoil, board meetings

were watched closely by representatives of the Eastchester Forum, the

South Scarsdale Civic Association, the Green Knolls Community

Association, the Residents Association, the Parkview Heights Property

Owners Association, the Waverly Taxpayers Association, the California

Ridge Civic Association, the Westchester Park Civic Association, and

the Westchester Park Women’s Group, as well as the United Citizens

School League.64 Compared with Tuckahoe and Bronxville, the number of

organizations with grievances loomed large and grew over the years.

Residents complained largely about unresponsiveness.65

Those feelings were reasonable, based on a review of the board of

education minutes of the 1920s and 1930s. It appears that trustees

consumed hours discussing contested elections, school busing, whether

community groups should be allowed to use the new high school

auditorium, and insurance claims made by parents whose children were

injured on school grounds. Some board members complained about crowded

classrooms and too many teachers in the same breath.66 An argument

about annual versus semiannual student promotion raged across several

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years, the decision changing back and forth with the composition of

the board.67 The board also created several committees comprised of

just one member.

Eastchester at the Crossroads [Is this heading necessary since it

cover only one paragraph?]

In 1938, the board of education announced the appointment of

Joseph R. Gardner as Eastchester’s first superintendent of schools.

Gardner came to Eastchester from Valley Stream, N.Y., where he had

served as supervising principal since 1929. Earlier, Gardner had been

principal and sports coach at two elementary schools in East Rockaway,

N.Y. He held a B.A. from the Bucknell University Department of

Education and a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia

University.68 The year after Gardner was hired, enrollment in the

Eastchester schools topped 2,800. With three elementary schools and a

junior and senior high school, the district emerged as the largest in

the town. With Superintendent Gardner in place, the community hoped

that the school board would begin to let go of the pettiness and

rancor that had long dominated its interactions in order to earn back

the trust that had declined for so many years.

Bronxville and the Trials of Progressive Education

“Well young man, what are you going to do with this expensive

toy?” demanded village doyenne Amie Dusenberry of Bronxville’s new

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school superintendent in 1926.69 Posed to Willard W. Beatty soon after

his arrival, the question may not have intimidated the imaginative,

independent 35-year-old educator, but it set the tone for his bumpy

relationship with factions of the community during the coming decade.

Ever since the Progressive Education Association was founded in

1918, the philosophy of progressive education has been subject to many

interpretations. Initiated as a set of reforms–notably the demise of

“lockstep” in which all children in the classroom were expected to be

on the same page at the same time—progressive education represented a

teacher-directed, child-centered approach that enabled individualized

learning. Progressive educators also expanded the curriculum to

include laboratory science, manual training, fine and performing arts,

and field trips. They emphasized creative expression and “the

development of the whole child.”70

Progressive education found a home in Bronxville in 1922,

welcomed by Republican school trustees who wanted their children to

receive a superb education that would preclude sending them to

boarding school as tradition dictated. The board sought superintendent

recommendations from Teachers College, which was an epicenter of

progressive methods; Alexander Stoddard soon arrived, having studied

with the aforementioned Dr. Strayer and others prominent in

educational administration. Bronxville would be his first

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superintendency. Across four years, he hired several longtime teachers

and principals, including the innovative Julia Markham who presided

over the elementary school for thirty-one years and Edith Penney, its

incisive high school principal for twenty-three years. Superintendent

Stoddard oversaw the construction of a modern grammar school and high

school with water fountains, playground equipment, classroom radios,

and movie projectors. In the high school, he instituted “The

Individual Method,” which abolished class recitation, encouraged

student initiative and responsibility through the use of a personal

“goal sheet,” and required extensive one-to-one collaboration between

students and teachers.71

In addition to Stoddard’s professional accomplishments, he and

his family participated enthusiastically in village life. In

Bronxville, Stoddard took up golf, attended church, and developed

lasting friendships with the faculty as well as business executives

who increasingly populated the village’s mansions. His successor,

Willard Beatty, would rarely socialize in Bronxville and, though

devoted to the school’s success, seemed overly focused on national

issues. Though Beatty urged teachers to read the local newspapers, he

disregarded his own advice about forging ties between the school and

the community.72

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Following a childhood of hardships, Beatty’s interest in

education began during high school with the idea that manual training

and academic courses complemented each other.73 After graduating from

the University of California, Berkeley, Beatty eventually made his way

to the San Francisco State Normal School where he studied with

President Frederic Burk, a proponent of individualized instruction.

Tapped as assistant school superintendent in the affluent Chicago

North Shore community of Winnetka, he served three years before

Bronxville hired him away in 1926.74

Soon after arriving at Bronxville, Willard Beatty gave his first

public remarks at a PTA meeting, enunciating his plan for the school.

First, he would expand the curriculum to include classes in sex

education, physical education, the arts, and social awareness “without

which [students] would be devoid of creative interests and perhaps

imagination.”75 Second, Beatty asked the community to pay higher

salaries for top teachers. Third, he looked forward to the day when

the New York State Regents and College Board exams would be abolished.

Finally, it would be necessary to build a separate junior high school.

Perhaps anticipating resistance, he stated: “The new superintendent

will at all times welcome just and fair criticism on the part of the

parents, provided they will come to him at the beginning of the game

and state frankly wherein the carelessness, if there be any, is to be

24

found, instead of spreading propaganda among themselves about

situations of which they lack a complete understanding.”76

During the first five years of Beatty’s tenure, the school board

and the community largely supported his initiatives. While fending off

a challenge to the new junior high school–ultimately it connected the

two L-shaped buildings that already existed–he also requested two new

gymnasiums and art rooms, a music room, a larger cafeteria, and an

additional kindergarten room. Though wildly controversial, the bond

issue passed.77 With the junior high school in place, Beatty proceeded

to organize its collegial faculty to be led by Principal Howard P.

Funk who with his wife Margaret lived in Tuckahoe and became active in

school affairs there.78 Seventh grade sex education classes, which

Beatty wrote later were a condition of accepting the Bronxville

superintendency, drew nervous attention from parents but remained in

place.79

However, around 1930 the board of education began to face

complaints related to the high cost of progressive education, the

absence of class ranking, the merits of progressive education versus

classical education, and Beatty’s politics. These came largely from

local Democrats.80 At this time, a Bronxville parent began writing

negatively about the schools in the Bronxville Press, using the name

“Village Vagabond.” In one column, she asked why the school would not

25

provide information about where her son stood compared with his peers.

“There is no ‘bottom of the class’ in Bronxville,” Beatty replied.81

Soon enough, unhappy Bronxville residents invited guest speakers

who denounced progressive education from the stage of the high school

auditorium.82 For the first time since 1920, the village elected school

trustees who sought to rein in costs and questioned Beatty’s

philosophy, including Edmund E. Day, a more conservative thinker who

would later become president of Cornell University and declared that

there were “educational problems in the Bronxville schools.”83 The

shift in sentiment accompanied the view that Beatty, as president of

the Progressive Education Association, had become too involved in

public debates about teachers and indoctrination; at a national

convention the superintendent called for a boycott of Hearst

newspapers and clashed with the American Legion.84

Meanwhile the schools received enthusiastic coverage in popular

and scholarly publications and accolades from educators nationwide.

Bronxville’s teachers and principals continued to revere

Superintendent Beatty. “He was an innovator and a pragmatist,”

recalled one longtime teacher. “He came to faculty meetings with ideas

he did not hesitate to delineate, adding to these a degree of

enthusiasm for what might transpire.”85 Among Beatty’s ideas were the

introduction of manuscript writing to replace print and cursive, a

26

class in “Social Economics Mathematics,” and “exploratory courses” in

which students built boats, carved sculpture, and cast bronze

statues.86

Importantly, the superintendent also enabled Bronxville High

School’s participation in the Eight-Year Study, an ambitious

collaboration between thirty public and private high schools and more

than two hundred colleges and universities to monitor the performance

of students who were exempted from the SAT and other College Board

exams .(Ratings, recommendations, and school exam scores were

substituted.) The study’s findings demonstrated higher grades, greater

interest in world events, and better vocational focus among

participating students. However, the study fell out of favor during

World War II and, like progressive education generally, languished in

the postwar world.87

In February 1936, Willard Beatty left Bronxville to take up a

new job in Washington, D.C. He would become Director of Indian

Education in the Department of Indian Affairs, a logical step given

his longtime concern about Native American youth. “White children’s

loss will be Indian children’s gain,” observed Progressive Education

magazine.88 In Bronxville, Beatty’s successor, Frederick H. Bair, spent

the next decade quietly maintaining the educational program with new

emphasis on financial accountability. He assured parents that there

27

was plenty of drill and discipline in the school and initiated a

comprehensive study of the school conducted by the University of

Pennsylvania Educational Service Bureau, whose recommendations

included a review of the curriculum, increased guidance, modernization

of the facilities, and hiring teachers with less experience to keep

down costs.89 The trend toward conventional teaching and learning

continued in Bronxville, although the school has retained vestiges of

its progressive program across the years.

Reflections on Three Districts

The two decades that followed World War I saw greater regulation

and formalization of public education. As teachers and administrators

became more professionalized, they raised their expectations of

students’ performance. In turn, parents raised their own expectations

of what schools could deliver. Perhaps that leads to the most

significant lesson to be drawn from the formative years of the

Tuckahoe, Eastchester, and Bronxville districts.

In all three communities, residents were asked to contribute far

more money than ever before to the improvement of the schools. Taxes

went up rapidly to pay for new construction and landscaping, classroom

furniture and supplies to accommodate greater enrollment, sports

equipment, furnishings for extracurricular activities, higher salaries

for teachers, unforeseen salaries for new administrators, mandated

28

programs like “Americanization,” and educational endeavors such as

progressive education.

In Tuckahoe, Bronxville, and Eastchester, citizens’ ideas about

the purposes of education, and their presumptions about what schools

should provide, varied as they did across the nation. During the 1920s

and 1930s, school boards everywhere struggled with how to be

autonomous in a time of bureaucratic oversight and whether to be up-

to-date in communities where more than a few residents held

nineteenth-century convictions about schooling.

These decades became a time of conflict but ultimately generated

a new kind of reciprocity in the relationship between school boards,

administrators, and local residents. Out of World War II and into the

modern era, the Eastchester trustees realized it was destructive to

approach their district as a group of small neighborhoods with special

interests. Bronxville installed a nonpartisan committee – a panel of

residents who nominated board of education candidates, which

effectively prevented the board from being commandeered by political

parties. Insert note: BBE minutes, September 1936. Tuckahoe organized

a pro-school coalition that united formerly opposing groups. Insert

note: Claudia Keenan, P.T.A. Business: A Cultural History of How

Suburban Women Supported the Public Schools, 1920-1960 (PhD diss., New

York University, 2002), 326-339. In this way, the trials and

29

tribulations of the 1920s and 1930s brought forth reforms that

continue to guide all three communities.

30

1 For an overview of public education in post-World War I America, see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education, The Metropolitan Experience 1876-1980 (NY, 1988), especially chapter II.2 US Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920 (Government Printing Office, 1921), Vol. 1, Table 28, 44.3 Configuration of school districts in “Notes on Eastchester Schools” (1964) and “Organization of School Districts after 1892” both prepared by the Eastchester Historical Society (EHS) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York State Free School Act (1967), Folders #6 and 7, EHS.4 “Notes on Eastchester Schools.”5 “Merritt Responsible,” The Review, 23 April 1903, 1.6 “The School Question,” The Review, 9 April 1903, 2.7 Background on schools: American College and Public School Directory (C.H. Evans & Co.), 1893-1906; “Tuckahoe’s New School Building,” Bronxville Review, 8 August 1907; Eastchester Board of Education (EBE) minutes, 2 December 1921 and 24 March 1922; Tuckahoe Board of Education (TBE) minutes, May 1925; “Local School Expanded as Bronxville Grew,” Bronxville Reporter, 6 May 1945, 4-5.8 In 1892, the National Education Association appointed a Committee of Ten chaired by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, which issued a report affirming the importance of high school and urging the expansion of the science curriculum. See Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893-1958 (NY, 1995).

9 EBE minutes, 1 May 1917.10 Claudia Keenan, Portrait of a Lighthouse School, Public Education in Bronxville, New York (McNaughton & Gunn, 1997), 20.11 Keenan, Portrait, 45-46.12 TBE minutes, 1928.13 Martha Creamer, telephone interview by author, February 2000.14 Perennial discussion in EBE minutes, 1917-1927.15 EBE minutes, 7 April 1926.16 Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public School Administration (Cambridge, 1916).17 Among professional journals published in New York State alone were the New York State Education Department Bulletin, Journal of the New York State Teachers’ Association,School Bulletin, and New York State Educational Journal.18 See, for example, the monolithic three-volume Educational Administration & Supervision edited by Charles Hughes Johnson, Lotus D. Coffman, and David Snedden (Baltimore, 1917).19 “Samuel J. Preston, A.M.” in American Education from Kindergarten to College (March1902), 403; “Samuel J. Preston” (obituary), The New York Times, 7 September 1933; and “Frank M. Buckley” in Yearbook and List of Active Members of the National Education Association (Minnesota, 1910), 106.

20 “Alexander J. Stoddard is Dead; Headed Schools in Major Cities,” The New York Times, 19 October 1965.21 EBE minutes, January 1938; State University of New York Bulletin to the Schools (September 1938).22 EBE minutes, April 1928.23 TBE minutes, 1918-1920.24 National PTA, The PTA Story, A Century of Commitment to Children (1997), 45-50.25 TBE minutes, 19 April 1927.26 FCS Since 1908, undated brochure published by Family & Community Services, Inc. (Eastchester, NY) and The History of Family and Community Services, undated pamphlet published by Family & Community Services, Inc., FCS history file, EHS.27 TBE minutes, 26 November 1920.28 “How Tuckahoe Sees It,” Bronxville Review, 11 February 1922, 12 (reprinted from an editorial in the Eastchester Bulletin).29 Robert Creamer, ed., The Story of a Town: 1664-1964 (Town of Eastchester, Tri-Centennial 300, 1964), 16, 18.30 TBE minutes, 16 March 1932.31 “Village President Walter D. Crouch Asks Support for Child Study MovementHere,” Tuckahoe Record, 21 April 1926, 1.32 TBE minutes, 11 November 1928.33 “Accuse Bronxville of Snobbishness,” Bronxville Review, 10 March 1934, 8.34 “School Ouster Dropped,” The New York Times, 4 July 1935; “Petition Hits Buckley Ouster as School Head,” Herald Statesman, 28 June 1935, 13; “Buckley Given Post Again With Year Limit Set,” Herald Statesman, 3 July 1935, 11, and “Buckley Kept After Protests, Lacks Contract,” Herald Statesman, 19 July 1935,13.35 “Wappingers Falls Educator Will Head Tuckahoe Schools,” Herald Statesman, 4 March 1936, 12.36 “Degrees Conferred,” Columbia University Catalogue, 1933-1934 (eBook).37 Remarks by Superintendent Goff and Miss Petrillo, TBE minutes, 1 March 1938.38 “Tuckahoe Schools Scrapbook,” 1936.39 Harriet Hoblin Bianchi, interview by author, May 2000.40 Le Souvenir (Eastchester High School yearbook), 1932 and subsequent years.41 EBE minutes, 1925-1926.42 Who’s Who in American Education (1962).43 Proposed and actual budgets, EBE minutes, 1925-1938.44 “Eastchester Public Schools 1931-1932” (pamphlet).45 Le Souvenir, 1932.46 “Helen Enser, 1916-1983,” http://www.jmartz.com/horns/Enser/ [11-12].47 Le Souvenir, 1930-1934; Eastchester Eagle (student newspaper), 10 November 1937, 8 February 1938, and 9 March 1938.

48 The Greenvale Echo (Commemoration Issue), 13 May 1936, 4.49 Ibid.; “Miss Margaret Leary Made Principal of School in Upper Tuckahoe,” Scarsdale Inquirer, 9 April 1903, 1.50 “Former Eastchester Students To Erect Teachers’ Monument,” Herald Statesman,1 April 1939, 1.51 EBE minutes, 1930s, passim.52 EBE minutes, November 1927.53 EBE minutes, January 1933.54 “Proposed School Budget for 1932-1933 and Comparison With Previous Year,”EBE minutes, 1932-1933.55 EBE minutes, January 1928.56 Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, 1962), chapter 5; BBE minutes, 1923-1924.57 “Pupils End Strike at Irvington, N.Y.,” The New York Times, 7 March 1928; EBE minutes, April 1928.58 Alumni Record & General Catalogue of Syracuse University (1904); Patterson’s American Educational Directory (1910-1918); Bulletin of the US Office of Education (1898, 1913, 1916, 1922).59 EBE minutes, May 1928.60 “School Board Union Sought” Daily Argus, 16 January 1936, “Vicinity.”61 EBE minutes, July 1936.62 “Eastchester School District Drops Principal McClelland and Two Others,” Herald Statesman, 30 May 1936, 1.63 EBE minutes, July 1936.64 EBE minutes, 1918-1940; “Board to Hold Budget Talks,” Daily Argus, 2 February 1935, “Vicinity.”65 EBE minutes, 1930s, passim.66 EBE minutes, 1928.67 EBE minutes, 1931-1933; “Longer Trial for Half-Year Scheme Urged,” Herald Statesman, 9 July 1932.68 Bulletin to the Schools, University of the State of New York (1938), Vol. 25, No. 2; Bucknell Alumni Monthly (March 1938), 16.69 Mary Sanders, interview by author, 1995.70 The classic history of the progressive education movement is Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School, Progressivism in American Education 1876-1957 (NY, 1961).71 Hudson G. Stoddard, telephone interview by author, 1995.72 Mary Sanders interview.73 Dr. Walcott H Beatty to author, 1995.74 Carleton W. Washburne & Sidney P. Marland, Winnetka, the History & Significance of an Educational Experiment (NJ, 1963).75 “Mr Beatty Wins Favor of Parents and Teachers Ass’n,” Bronxville Review, 16 October 1926.

76 Ibid.77 BBE minutes, 1927-1930.78 Margaret S. Funk, oral history interview by Frieda Riggs, 1980.79 Willard W. Beatty, “Sex Instruction in Public Schools,” Education (March 1934).80 “Democrats at Rally Assail School Board,” Bronxville Review, 16 March 1935.81 Quoted in Bronxville Schools Bulletin #15 (December 1930).82 “Dr. Dennett Finds Method Secondary in Education,” Bronxville Review, 12 January 1935.83 “Men Divided on Educational System,” Bronxville Review, 19 January 1935.84 Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Later Years, 1911-1951 (NY, 2007), 196; “Radical Ideas Are Denied By New Educators,” New York Herald Tribune, 2 March 1934.85 Helmuth W. Joel to author, 9 May 1995.86 Willard W. Beatty, “Creative Living in the Bronxville Public Schools,” Progressive Education (September 1929).87 Wilford M. Aikin, ed., Thirty Schools Tell Their Story (NY, 1934) and “Bronxville High School” in Thirty Schools, 94.88 Progressive Education (February 1936), 77.89 The Report of the Survey of the Public Schools of Bronxville, New York made by The Educational Service Bureau, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania (June 1944).