Why Some Reforms Last: The Case of the Kindergarten

Why Some Reforms Last: The Case of the KindergartenAuthor(s): Larry CubanSource: American Journal of Education, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Feb., 1992), pp. 166-194Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1085567 .

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Why Some Reforms Last: The Case of the Kindergarten

LARRY CUBAN Stanford University

This article explores the puzzle of how some school reforms survive and get institutionalized and others do not. The history of the kindergarten is used as a case study of how an intended reform aimed at fundamentally altering the conduct of public schooling at the turn of the twentieth century gets integrated into the formal structure by the 1930s and, in the process, becomes transformed into an incremental change. In this process of integration, however, distinctive features of the reform remain intact. The analysis suggests the power of one institution to adapt and reshape reforms.

The tides pouring in from the reefs and sweeping over the flats come to rest against the elevated coral rock of the shore. On some of the Keys (in Florida) the rock is smoothly weathered, with flattened surfaces and rounded contours, but on many others the erosive action of the sea has produced a rough and deeply pitted surface, reflecting the solvent action of centuries of waves and driven salt spray. It is almost like a stormy sea frozen into solidity, or as the surface of the moon might be. Little caves and solution holes extend above and below the line of the high tide. In such a place I am always strongly aware of the old, dead reef beneath my feet, and of the corals whose patterns, now crumbling and blurred, were once the delicately sculptured vessels that held the living creatures. All the builders now are dead-they have been dead for thousands of years-but that which they created remains, a part of the living present. [CARSON 1955, pp. 206-7]

That seawater and living things, over centuries, can turn rocks into a coastline is a testament to both change and durability. As reefs have grown by accretion, so have the structures and practices of schooling. The single most commonly used indicator of reform success is longevity. Not a mere year or two, or a decade, but a quarter- or half-century

? 1992 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0195-6744/92/0002-0002$01.00

166 American Journal of Education



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of survival of a reform offers partial evidence of sufficient durability to be labeled as a success in a society that counts its history as a nation in just over eight generations.

What is common to reefs and reforms is additions to a basic structure. The slow growth of a reef occurs on rock-hard surfaces left by billions of dead animals; some reforms enhance the institutional structures that were already in place for many decades. Both come together in the "living present" that is different from the original reform. What is puzzling, however, is not only why some reforms stick, that is, get integrated into the existing organizational arrangements of schooling, but how they get transformed as they become incorporated into the institution.

The kindergarten, an invention borrowed from Prussia and adapted by a legion of women reformers first, to middle-class children and then to the urban, immigrant poor in the late nineteenth century, is an instance of innovation that slowly spread from private schools to

public schools. Initially a curiosity added on to the elementary school in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, by the eve of World War II, kindergartens had become so integrated into elementary schooling that the standard designation of an elementary school was no longer grades 1-6 but K-6. The story of the institutionalization of kindergartens and its metamorphosis from a reform aimed at fun-

damentally altering the relationship between schools and the community to getting five-year-olds ready for first grade is one that contains within it answers to the question of how some reforms get altered as they survive within larger institutions.

Altering the Goals and Structures: Progressive School Reforms in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

The late nineteenth-century Progressive movement that swept across the nation seeking efficient and democratic practices in government also spilled across urban and rural schools. Because of dislocations

stemming from industrial and urban growth, city schools began to

LARRY CUBAN has been professor of education at Stanford University since 1981. Prior to that, Cuban served in the public schools of Cleveland, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia, as a teacher and administrator for 25 years. He has written widely on the history of

teaching in public schools, administration, and school reform.

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Why Some Reforms Last

assume a much larger role for the care of children, particularly those from poor and immigrant families. What drove this expansion of the school's role of "child saving" was the growing awareness among urban reformers that no other social institution had the capacity to take on what heretofore had been done largely by the family.

The idea that public schools were the "legatee" institution, the last resort of society to help build the next generation, was central to

Progressive ideology. While Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and other

mid-nineteenth-century reformers saw the common school as a solution to the urban poverty and crime, this generation of reformers extended

considerably these notions of schools as an agency for social improvement. In John Dewey's words "education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform" and the "teacher is a social servant set

apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth." In soaring words, Dewey's ends his Pedagogic Creed (1987): "In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God" (see Kaestle 1983; Tyack and Hansot 1982; Cremin 1961; Archambault 1946, p. 439).

The breadth of Progressive school reforms is stunning. By World War I, the following innovations had been partially or wholly installed in many city public schools: hot lunches, summer schools, community centers, vocational guidance, industrial education courses, kindergartens, health clinics and school nurses, social workers (or visiting teachers), sex education, playgrounds and organized physical education programs, after-school recreation, and Americanization programs for newcomers from other cultures. Their familiar ring to our late twentieth-century ears masks the fundamental shift that occurred in expanding the legatee role of the school in both rescuing and building children and youth. That such programs ring familiar to readers suggests the longevity of these reforms (Sedlak and Schlossman 1985; Tyack 1979).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s many of these reforms were im- plemented in varying degrees; they were viewed as benchmarks of a modern school district. Efficiency-minded Progressives drawn from the professorate, educational administrators, and foundation officials, anxious to spread these changes, often used the mechanism of formal surveys of school systems to convert superintendents and boards of education mildly interested in or indifferent to reshaping their districts (Tyack and Hansot 1982; Cohen 1990).

In these post-World War I decades, the belief that schools must take on legatee functions while becoming more efficient in serving society spread to rural schools also. The movement to consolidate rural schools accelerated in these years. The effort to standardize rural




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school curricula and services to both children and the community began in the 1920s and, fueled by the New Deal, spread in the 1930s (Anderson 1988; Link 1986; Tyack et al. 1984).

Many new urban and rural programs and services became incorporated into the regular school program so that by 1950 a school that lacked specially trained teachers and administrators, a physical education

program, classes in home economics, metal and wood shops, a kin-

dergarten and junior high school, a nurse, hot lunches, a gymnasium and playground, counselors, and summer programs would be considered inferior. What were once Progressive reforms by midcentury had become what the public considered to be minimum standards for schooling their children. Such institutionalization of programs, staffing, and facility requirements is potent evidence of reform success in altering the to-

pography of schooling and changing the public's perceptions of what constituted quality.

Yet there is a puzzle. Consider other Progressive reforms that entered and seemingly exited, leaving few traces like graffiti in snow. What

happened to the platoon system, the Dalton or Winnetka Plan, classroom radio, the project method, or a dozen other popular attempts to alter what occurs within schools and classrooms?

Consider the platoon system, a Progressive innovation begun in the

Gary, Indiana, schools in 1906 that had elementary school pupils change classes for specialized instruction in academic, practical arts, and physical education rather than have them stay the entire day in self-contained classes. Such a work-study-play arrangement-a fundamental shift in school organization and curriculum-made it possible to have many more students attend school (which tended to be larger in size) since the schedule permitted every room, gym, and playground where different lessons were taught to have students. Platoon schools

spread swiftly across the nation in the next decade only to recede and

virtually disappear from the scene except in Gary, where it lasted in some form or another into the 1940s (Cohen 1990). Yet any informed observer of elementary schools knows that today pupils leave their self-contained classrooms for special instruction in art, music, reading, physical education, and the like. Have platoon schools, then, survived in a different form?

The issue, of course, resides in the loose use of the word "stick" as a synonym for "success" in school reform. Success is equated to the

longevity of a reform. But the original name of the innovation needs to last also. Vocational education, summer schools, and kinder-

gartens-all late nineteenth-century inventions-retained their name.

They are commonly viewed as reform victories. The example of the

platoon school, however, suggests another criterion, beyond survival,

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for defining success of a school reform. Have the original concepts embedded in the design lasted? No longer do parents and educators

speak of platoon schools, yet its core notions of a diversified curriculum

combining academic subjects, practical tasks, and play in which students move to various parts of the school building exist in modern elementary schools.

What happened to the platoon school, over time, was the steady absorption of its core concepts into the basic operations of elementary schooling. Did the platoon school survive? It did not, in name, but

key components have persisted in altered form. In effect, an innovation

geared to fundamentally change public schooling lost its original name and got transformed into an incremental change as it became institutionalized. Thus, when I ask which reforms have stuck, that is, survived, and why I will also consider whether central pieces of the original design have been changed by public schools in the process of their

integrating reforms into routine practices.

Which Reforms Stick and Why?

In investigating school reforms that have taken place over the last century and a half, I divide them into incremental and fundamental changes. Incremental reforms are those that aim to improve the existing structures of schooling; the premise behind incremental reforms is that the basic structures are sound but need improving to remove defects. The car is old but if it gets fixed it will run well; it has been dependable transportation. It needs tires, brakes, a new battery, and a water pump-incremental changes. Fundamental reforms are those that aim to transform, to alter permanently, those very same structures; the premise behind fundamental reforms is that basic structures are flawed at their core and need a complete overhaul, not renovations. The old jalopy is beyond repair. We need to get a completely new car or consider different forms of transportation-fundamental changes.

If new courses, new staff, summer schools, higher standards for teachers, and increased salaries are clear examples of enhancements to the structures of public schooling, then the introduction of the age- graded school (which gradually eliminated the one-room school) and the broadening of the school's role to intervene in the lives of children and their families (e.g., to provide medical and social services) are examples of fundamental reforms that stuck. The platoon school, classroom radio, and the project method, however, are instances of attempted fundamental change in the school and classroom at the turn of the century that were adopted, incorporated into many schools,




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and, over time, either transformed into incremental ones or slipped away, leaving few traces of their presence. Why did some incremental reforms get institutionalized and most of the fundamental ones either become incremental or disappear?

Some scholars have analyzed those hardy reforms that survived and concluded that a number of factors account for their institutionalization (Kirst and Meister 1985; Tyack et al. 1980).

They enhance, not disturb, the existing structures. -Many of the progressive reforms added staffing, particularly specialists, to deal with the variety of children that attended schools. Separate teachers for handicapped children and for vocational classes and counselors to help children

pick courses to take and to prepare for the job market expanded the numbers of adults in schools to help children. Similarly, additional

space for social services enhanced the school program. More staff and social services amended and elaborated current structures; they did not permanently alter them.

They are easy to monitor.-Many of the progressive reforms were visible. They could be counted and seen. The service was either available or it was not, for example, hot lunches, summer schools, health clinics, playgrounds, and courses in home economics and drafting. Such easy monitoring gave taxpayers evidence that the services were being ren- dered.

They create constituencies that lobby for continuing support. -New staff

positions such as counselors and vocational education teachers created demands for administrators and supervisors to monitor their work.

Newly certified educators, imbued with a fervent belief in their mission, argued for their share of the school budget. Other groups outside the school became deeply entangled in the reform and sought its continuation. Commercial interests serving new programs (e.g., for driver's education, car dealers and insurance companies; for physical education, sports equipment vendors) supported the new services. Finally, parents persuaded by the influence of the services and programs on their children joined educators and commercial groups to create informal coalitions advocating the continuation of these reforms.

This answer to the question of why some reforms stick has a superficial neatness that omits some progressive reforms that fail to fit nicely into the above categories. Moreover, there is a static quality implied in the notion of reforms that have longevity, that is, such reforms were in-

corporated into public schools and remained as they were as if frozen in time.

Studies of nonschool organizations offer richer clues that go beyond the crisp, static answers suggested here. For example, the theories of Robert Michels, Robert Merton, Philip Selznick, Alvin Gouldner, and

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their students produced numerous studies of organizations founded in the heat of reform movements whose original goals have been transformed over decades although their names remain the same. The

imperative for organizational survival vibrates strongly in Michels's (1949) study of Germany's Social Democratic party, Selznick's (1949) analysis of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Mayer Zald and Patricia Denton's (1963) investigation of the Young Men's Christian Association.

Other studies, closer to public schools, also document organizational adaptability in places founded to end social ills. These institutions maintained their professed goals yet shifted in what they did opera- tionally in order to survive. David Rothman's (1980) analysis of the

Progressives' inventions of rehabilitative prisons, juvenile courts, and reformed mental asylums records the painful journey of institutions established in a gush of zeal for improvement of criminals, delinquents, and the mentally ill; within decades, the reformers ended up pursuing scaled-down goals that maintained the interests of those who admin- istered the institution. Joseph Morrissey, Harold Goldman, and Lorraine Klerman (1980) examined a century and a half of the Worcester State Hospital (Massachusetts) and described shifts in goals and treatment of mentally ill patients. Barbara Brenzel (1983) analyzed a half-century's history of the first reform school for girls in the nation (State Industrial School for Girls in Lancaster, Massachusetts). Here, again, the initial goals of reforming poor, neglected, and potentially wayward girls through creating family-like cottages and separating younger from older girls gave way to goals that stressed order and control.

The point is that reforms last in many instances because of the capacity of the institution targeted for improvement to adapt its formal and informal goals, structures, and processes to an uncertain, ever- changing environment on which it depends for survival.

Where do kindergartens fit in the scheme of reforms? Promoted by Progressive reformers as a solution to serious national problems, this turn-of-the-century innovation promised fundamental, not incremental, changes in curriculum, instruction, and student outcomes. Between the 1870s and 1990s, it has become clear that kindergartens have become part of the formal structure of schooling. They have met the tough standard in minimally determining the success of a reform: longevity. Although they did have political coalitions pushing for their incorporation into public schooling, many educators were wary at first. Also, once established they were easy to monitor. But these reforms disturbed the existing structures initially. However, as they were absorbed into the existing system, did these reforms undergo changes?

The rest of this article examines how kindergarten reform sought to fundamentally alter existing school practices but, over the decades,




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became an incremental enhancement to basic school structures. Yet even with this metamorphosis, kindergartens retained some unique features that set them apart from just another addition to the structures of schooling. In describing and analyzing what happened to the kin-

dergarten, a more complex, deeper explanation for its longevity and transformation emerges.

The Kindergarten

The transition from child saving to time saving sums up the history of the kindergarten from its entry into public school systems in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to its institutionalization by the 1930s. Begun in the glow of Progressive urban reform, late nineteenth- century kindergartens sought to rescue children and their parents from poverty and ignorance and bring them into full-fledged citizenship.

As decades passed and kindergartens became a regular feature of public schools, pressure rose and fell to get five-year-olds academically ready for the first grade, to ease their transition from play and expression to academic work, and to compress the time taken to transform ir- repressible five-year-olds into obedient students. This downward press from elementary school to prepare kindergartners for the first grade peaked in particular periods and fell at other times. Yet such pressures still left unmarred the kindergarten's unique focus on the child's social, emotional, and intellectual development that continued to stamp it as fundamentally different from upper elementary and secondary school classrooms. Moreover, there is evidence that the influence of the upper grades on the kindergarten was not a one-way road; some, but not all, of the kindergarten's influence traveled upward into elementary schools, especially the primary grades.

Rather than recount the history of the kindergarten, I will analyze its original mission and describe what happened to the kindergarten program as this novel way of educating children became incorporated into public schools while retaining features that continue to mark it as unique in the present system of schooling.

Mission of Kindergartens

Child saving was the primary reason given by urban reformers who embraced Frederick Froebel's invention and adapted it to American cities. But it was child saving for many purposes: to rescue both adults and children from a life of poverty and crime while maintaining eco-

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nomic and democratic institutions in an efficient manner. In 1878, Felix Adler, a New York philanthropist who had financed "free kin-

dergartens" for immigrants, visited San Francisco to lecture and meet with reform-minded men and women. He was convinced that kin-

dergartens were a solution to grave urban problems. "If we apply the

spirit of preventive charity to our age, we must face the evil of pauperism, the root of which lies in a lack of education of the children. In the United States the social question is not yet acute, as it is in Europe, and we are called to prevent it from becoming a menace to our republican institutions, by building up an intelligent class of voters inaugurating the Kindergarten system of education, and so saving the rising generation from destruction" (Taylor 1879, p. 361).

Sara Cooper, an organizer of San Francisco charity kindergartens, put the matter of the social benefits of kindergartens more bluntly in 1883: "Hard-headed capitalists, who want to realize good per cents on their investments, need only to figure up the relative costs of supporting alms houses, and places of reform and refuge, and what it costs to run a kindergarten, to see where the balance would come"

(Shapiro 1983, p. 98). In kindergartens located in slums, the task that reformers set for

themselves was to build moral, healthy, and industrious children out of unhealthy, neglected four- to six-year-olds. William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, ex-superintendent of the Saint Louis schools, and consistent promoter of kindergartens, summed up the

importance of child gardening in city slums to a receptive audience at the 1903 convention of the International Kindergarten Union.

The kindergarten is really essential for the salvation of the children ... of the slums, that is to say, the children of the three weakling classes of society. There is the weakling in thrift, who lives in a home of poverty and squalor.... The moral weaklings are those which have been brought up in criminal households and associ- ations, and have not formed moral ideas or standards of opinion. Still another variety of this class is the weakling in intelligence, the child with some degree of imbecility.... The kindergarten with its powerful system of nurture makes easy the path of one of these weaklings to come to self-respect, to come to moral ideals, to industry, and to perseverance.... The kindergarten on this side proves a true blessing to the community, preparing the child with great success for a helpful participation in civilized modes of living. [Harris 1903, p. 631]

The kindergarten was also seen by some as a solution to the nation's "race problem." A prominent white, Mrs. John King Ottley, working




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with black women's clubs to start kindergartens for black children in the South, wrote: The "Negro must have at the earliest possible hour of his life continuous training which will suggest to and stimulate in him those moral qualities in which he is most deficient.... If we could

keep every Negro child, for three years, in a scientifically correct

kindergarten, I believe the race would leap forward a century's unaided

growth in one generation" (Cary 1900, pp. 462-63). Another advocate of kindergartens for black children pointed out

how many young blacks were in Georgia chain gangs (2,122 of 2,251 blacks in chain gangs were under the age of 35; 36 were under the

age of 16). "I am positive," she said, "that careful early training of this class, now totally blind with reference to God's purposes, would soon cause the abolition of the chain gang" (Cary 1900, p. 462).

Reformers sought more than child saving; they wanted to rescue

parents also. Religious groups, temperance organizations, and settlement houses in Boston, Chicago, New York, and other cities sponsored kindergartens. Kindergartens were viewed as places where children and their teachers would become emissaries into the home to transform

immigrants into citizens and hard-working parents. Often teachers in these charity or "free" kindergartens would visit the crowded apartments and homes to instruct parents in the ABCs of cleanliness and citizenship. Teachers would work with the children in the mornings and spend afternoons in the neighborhood, teaching mothers in classes, and car-

rying out in general what a later generation would call social work

(Beatty 1989; Lazerson 1973; Shapiro 1983; Vandewalker 1908). Finally, there was the hope that the kindergarten, with its emphasis

on the development of children, would soften, even melt the hard-

edged, uniform curriculum and instruction that had come to mark the elementary school in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Strong emphasis on inculcating academic skills for citizenship and work produced classrooms where silence, orderliness, and formal re-

lationships between teacher and students reigned (Finkelstein 1989; Rice 1893).

Such practices were targets for the International Kindergarten Union (founded in 1892) and individual partisans such as Louise Pollock, who urged in an 1890 article that "the opening exercises in the first

grade or lower primary school might well be the same as in the kin-

dergarten, namely, singing, conversation and stories.... In the primary school as well as in the kindergarten the observing and reasoning faculties of young children should be developed first by inspection and experiments" (Langdon 1933, p. 7; Vandewalker 1908).

The multifaceted mission of the kindergarten movement sought to rescue children and their parents from poverty and crime, turn non-

February 1992 175




English speaking immigrants into Americans, uplift illiterate and un- skilled blacks, build solid citizens and industrious workers, and relax the unbending uniformity of elementary schooling. The appeal of the

kindergarten with its focus on learning through doing, learning from and with others, and learning through play ("gifts and occupations," songs, and art, and group work) drew educators and outside reformers who saw a permanent home for this invention within the public schools.

The Kindergarten Becomes Part of the Public Schools

Superintendent William T. Harris of Saint Louis, in concert with Susan Blow, an early enthusiast of Froebel's innovation, introduced the kin-

dergarten on an experimental basis in 1873. By the end of the decade school board and community had endorsed the novel approach to

schooling (Troen 1975). The spread of the urban kindergarten occurred in a clear trend line, save for a slight drop during the Great Depression of the 1930s when cuts in kindergartens and a drop in the birthrate combined to halt their growth for a few years. By 1948, kindergartens were a regular part of urban elementary schools in 76 percent of almost 2,500 schools surveyed by the U.S. Office of Education (Bathhurst et al. 1949, p. 3; see fig. 1). As kindergartens became part of the familiar landscape of schooling a number of changes occurred in the mission, organization of the program, and curriculum and instruction.

Transforming the mission. -The initial aim for kindergarten teachers in settlement houses and private-funded schools to teach mothers to rear children properly lost ground slowly as more cities incorporated the once-private classes into their systems. Many districts altered teaching schedules, requiring kindergarten teachers to teach both morning and afternoon or to spend the afternoon in school working with upper- grade teachers. Of 867 cities reporting in 1911-12 to the U.S. Bureau of Education, 546 (63 percent) had already established double sessions of kindergarten. Also, some districts, propelled by both efficiency and social reform, began to specialize by establishing a new staff position of "visiting teacher" or school social workers. While the initial decades of district sponsored kindergartens still saw Boston and Philadelphia hold classes for mothers and Cincinnati teachers visit more than 2,000 homes a year, by World War I, the social reform impulse of the kindergarten in most cities had shrunk to occasional teacher visits, mothers' classes, and letters home (Shapiro 1983; Palmer 1915, p. 21; Sedlak 1985).

Such reorganization of the kindergarten schedule made it virtually impossible for even the most reform-minded teacher to spend much time in the homes of her children's parents. A shift to district and




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2,500,000 - 70

- 60

2,000,000 -

/-" / 50

1,500,000 - - 40

1,000,000 ._-., , / - 30

/- 20

500,000 - -10

0 -----' i X : : i

year 1900 1920 1928 1936 1944 1952 1960 1968

] = Number of children

I = Percentage of five-year-olds FIG. 1.-Kindergarten enrollments, 1888-1968

school-organized parents' clubs whose purposes were largely to support the school also occurred in these decades (Lazerson 1973; Schlossman 1976). As one federal report in 1914 put it, "In former days the

kindergarten teacher never rested until she brought into being a mother's

meeting and by this means joined the hands of the home and school. In these latter days the converse is taking place, and the mothers' club or parent-teacher association works ardently for the establishment of

kindergartens" (U.S. Bureau of Education 1914, p. 13). The impulse for the school to reach into the home shriveled as pressures to prepare five-year-olds for the first grade increased (Beatty 1989; Lazerson 1973).

Binding the kindergarten to the elementary program. -The tension between

preparing five-year-olds for the academic tasks of first grade and Froe- belians' notions about children's growth, the importance of learning through play, expression, and from one another and the role of teachers as quasi mother were present from the earliest days of public school

kindergartens. The limited choices available to educators to reduce that latent conflict and ease passage from kindergarten to first grade have been pursued since the 1870s: modify the kindergarten to imitate

primary grade tasks; merge the supervision, training, and curriculum

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of kindergarten and primary grades so as to align more closely their activities; create a connecting class between kindergarten and the first

grade-a boot camp of sorts-that will prepare five- and six-year-olds for the academic rigors of elementary school; remake the primary grades to resemble the kindergarten; or, finally, some combination of these.

Initially, however, the conflict among kindergarten aims was sub-

merged by the glowing comments of primary teachers. Many elementary teachers were enthusiastic over teaching children who had been in

kindergartens. A San Francisco elementary school teacher wrote in 1892 to Superintendent John Swett (an advocate of kindergartens since he served as a high school principal) describing the impact of these classes.

The children of tenement-houses and narrow streets still come in tens, fifties and hundreds to begin life in a new school at the

beginning of each school year. I hear no more, however, the wild phrases of the Barbary Coast or the mule-drivers' oaths. The little ones are clean, self-respecting, eager for knowledge. They have been taught to see, to observe, to tell about what they see and hear. They have been taught to respect older people, to be honest, and to tell the truth. It is a rare thing now to find a child that does not know it is wrong to steal. If you meet some you may be sure he has never been to kindergarten. [Swett 1892, p. 71]

Teachers reported that they found first graders who had been in

kindergarten "more alert and observant" than those who came to them without kindergarten. The kindergarten-trained children "have learned to be punctual and regular in attendance, to follow directions, to wait on themselves in the dressing rooms and lavatories" and "have been taught to play fairly and to be considerate and helpful in the schoolroom"

(Temple 1917, p. 24). Some veteran elementary teachers, however, expressed concern about

the lack of preparation, the inattention, and poor work habits that these children showed when they sat in first grade desks. One teacher scorned the "flabby kindergarten intellect of the kindergarten child." Another suggested that the five-year-old should spend the entire year in silence before entering the first grade (Shapiro 1983, p. 150). Other less harsh teacher-critics pointed out that kindergarten-trained children were too dependent on the teacher for direction. "The kindergarten children," one teacher said, "are accustomed to more help from the teacher than we can possibly give them on account of our greater number of pupils. If the kindergarten children could be made more independent workers, it would be a help to us" (Temple 1917, p. 24). The mix of praise and alarm over kindergarten-trained children entering




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elementary school revealed deep differences in teacher beliefs about children. Superintendents and school boards sought explicit ways of aligning and reducing these different orientations.

As districts incorporated kindergartens into their systems, efforts were made to bind them to the primary grade classrooms through supervision. The first generation of urban superintendents who brought kindergartens into public schools often took on the privately funded directors as supervisors reporting directly to them rather than to a deputy in charge of elementary schools. All kindergarten teachers reported to that supervisor. By 1910, this relative independence had eroded. A later generation of superintendents seeking bureaucratic efficiency placed kindergarten teachers under the supervision of their principals. Kindergarten directors in the district office would report to a superintendent's deputy or be merged into a kindergarten-primary unit. By 1922, over half of the 120 cities that reported on kindergarten supervision said that supervision was in the hands of the person who also was responsible for the primary grades (Winchester 1918; Davis 1925, p. 16).

Efforts were made to upgrade kindergarten teacher training to resemble more and more what elementary teachers received. To fill the need for securing qualified kindergarten teachers, private and public training agencies expanded. As early as 1880, Nina Vandewalker, movement activist and trainer of kindergarten teachers, reported that kindergarten departments were created in state normal schools in Wisconsin and Minnesota. By the end of the decade, normal schools in New York, Connecticut, Michigan, Illinois, and Kansas (and ones in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia) added kindergarten units that trained and certified teachers. By 1922 there were 83 state institutions of higher education (up from 39 in 1913) that gave kindergarten courses, and more than 60 were designated as kindergarten-primary courses (Vandewalker 1908, pp. 191-92).

Getting states to require more college preparation to teach kindergarten and expand their categories of certification to include both primary and kindergarten as a single credential moved slowly. By 1946, 19 states required four years of training beyond the high school (in college or elsewhere). Of these, nine had adopted combined kin-

dergarten and primary certification. Fourteen states required two years of training, nine demanded one year of training beyond high school, and the rest had fewer requirements. Although slow in developing, the trend toward more college education and combined certification was evident by the mid-twentieth century (Vandewalker 1908, pp. 191-92; Bloch 1988; Forest 1927; Shapiro 1983; Davis 1925, p. 16; Almy and Snyder 1947, pp. 229-30).

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Finally, efforts were made to tie the written curricula of kindergarten and the primary grades together. Districts' syllabi urged teachers from the different units to cooperate in providing a smooth transition for children as they moved into the first grade. New York City adopted a new kindergarten syllabus in 1905. In the section on "relation to primary grades" teachers were urged to change the work assigned to five-year-olds as the time for promotion to the first grade neared. "There should be periods of silent work," the syllabus suggested, "and a greater proportion of independent work in the advanced group" (Merrill 1908, p. 13). By 1919, Denver kindergartens, according to Grace Parsons, "give from fifteen to thirty minutes daily to very simple reading, taught from large cards and charts, and associated with pictures, and toys, and games. This is done only in the advanced class and is called transition work. No child is forced to do this, in fact, our definite aim is to introduce reading in a place where if the child is not ready there is to be found much other interesting and helpful work and play" (Parsons 1919, p. 74).

Curriculum and instruction. -An official kindergarten curriculum de- scribes what a state or district intends for its teachers to teach in their classrooms. It is usually encased in a syllabus or course of study. There is also the taught curriculum, that is, what teachers choose from the intended curriculum to teach in their rooms once they close the door. Finally, there is the learned curriculum, that is, what knowledge, skills, and attitudes-intended or not-students take with them when they leave class. The distinctions among curricula drawn here are analogous to the differences between a script for the play (the intended curriculum), the actors' performance (the taught curriculum), and what the audience leaves with (the learned curriculum). There is a great deal of evidence available on the intended curriculum, some on the taught, and very little about the learned (Cuban 1991).

The content of the kindergarten's intended curriculum shifted de- cidedly in the decades after its introduction to urban schools. A struggle emerged between those (e.g., Susan Blow) who adhered to the Froebelian principles of the child's nature, the heavy symbolism in the methods and materials of gifts and occupations (art, music, and handicrafts), and those (e.g., Patty Smith Hill) who wished to adapt these principles to the American setting and the emerging research on how children developed. The struggle pitted those (soon to be labeled "conservatives") trained in the fixed sequence of materials presented to students, the teacher's scripted responses, and a Froebelian orthodoxy against those (labeled "liberals" or "progressives") who saw much merit in Froebelian materials and processes but, deeply influenced by the work of psychologists G. S. Hall and later Edward Thorndike, sought more prag-




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matic, scientific approaches to teaching five-year-olds. More experimental, less teacher-centered approaches to kindergarten curriculum and instruction pioneered in the 1880s by Lucy Wheelock in Boston, Anna Bryan and Patty Smith Hill in Louisville, Kentucky, Frederic and Carolyn Burk in Santa Barbara, California, and John Dewey at the University of Chicago in the 1890s seriously divided the kindergarten movement. Conference proceedings and struggles for control of com- mittees of the International Kindergarten Union in the decade before and after the turn of the twentieth century reveal the intensity of the curricular debates (Hill 1970; Forest 1927; Shapiro 1983; Weber 1984; Beatty 1989).

By 1920, the liberal wing-both the child-centered reformers and their cousins, the administrative progressives eager to make education into a science and schools into efficient social instruments to fit graduates into society-had triumphed and left their marks on the kindergarten's intended curriculum. Patty Smith Hill, Anna Bryan, Nina Vandewalker, Alice Temple, and other Progressives had already captured leadership posts (including the important Committee of Nineteen) in the Inter- national Kindergarten Union and the publishing agendas of current journals. By this decade, a realignment in the intended curriculum had occurred, that is, a new ideological balance had been struck between the competing impulses in the mission of kindergartens of preparing children for first grade, individual development, social adjustment to schooling, and reforming society (Weber 1969; Bloch 1988; Beatty 1989).

A child-development perspective anchored in the discipline of psychology pursued by G. S. Hall, his student Arnold Gesell at Yale, Edward Thorndike of Teachers College, and like-minded researchers came to dominate the curricular ideas of researchers and practitioners. In the public press, tradejournals of the day, and to historians, shorthand phrases for a developmental perspective as it applied to schools became the "whole child" and the "child-centered curriculum."

Focused on the natural unfolding of each child's abilities at the appropriate time, the developmental perspective attended to children's emotional growth, social and interpersonal skills, creative expression, sensory awareness, oral language skills, and intellectual ripening. Har- nessed to John Dewey's ideas of social learning, the developmental perspective incorporated group learning and cooperation as essential to a democratic society.

Also a growing interest in behaviorism spurred by the work of John Watson and Thorndike had merged the developmental perspective with the notion of social adjustment. In summarizing what he felt were appropriate goals for kindergarten, Thorndike, in "Notes on Psychology

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for Kindergarteners" in 1903, urged "making as a chief duty of childhood the establishment of worthy habits, especially of obedience, self-help, cheerfulness, modesty, and courage" (Weber 1984, p. 69). Under the leadership of Patty Smith Hill and other academics and practitioners, a new vocabulary of habit formation, conditioning, stimulus, and re- sponse entered the language of informed kindergarten advocates.

In their concentration on building proper habits in kindergartners, academics and practitioners overhauled the intended curriculum to include activities that would lead to desirable changes in five-year-olds' behaviors. For example, in block building the teacher would read in a typical syllabus the experimenting with blocks (piling them atop one another or placing them lengthwise) would lead to such desirable changes in thoughts, feelings, and conduct as "pleasure in activity, pleasure in using blocks, satisfaction in vigorous use of whole body." Curriculum developers compiled lists of proper habits, rated children to determine how adjusted they were, and introduced testing to evaluate the degree to which the kindergartners had altered their behavior (Weber 1984, p. 70).

By the end of the 1920s, the intended curriculum for kindergartners blended the quest for efficient application of current scientific thinking and the developmental perspective (Cavallo 1976). In doing so, the lists of habits and concern for social adjustment-called in some quarters the "conduct curriculum" moved the intended curriculum of the kindergarten much closer to that of the primary grades. Although the language and intent differed from orthodox Froebelians, the impulse to socialize children in appropriate behaviors was also very much evident in what they labeled "character" or "moral development of the child." Modern psychology of the early twentieth century, however, had con- verted the familiar language and aims of late nineteenth-century kindergartens into a new vocabulary and altered purposes (Bloch 1988; Beatty 1989).

This new scientific wisdom on how to socialize little children saturated the intended curriculum and left teachers trained in older traditions or unaware of shifts in knowledge and isolated. Yet they still had to construct practical daily compromises out of the dilemmas they faced in a classroom filled with 30-50 squiggling five-year-olds.

Determining what of the intended curriculum teachers taught and how they taught is far more difficult that determining what the intended curriculum was. Archives are filled with syllabi, courses of study, conference proceedings on curriculum, manuals of what should be taught and how, and the like. But to look behind the classroom door requires sources of information that no longer exist or were seldom collected. Teacher and student memoirs, journalists' accounts, photos, daily




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schedules of kindergarten activities, teacher reports to their superintendents, occasional magazine and journal articles by teachers, principals' accounts of what they saw, and parents' recollections, letters, and testimonials to local and national kindergarten organizations are raw data for describing the taught curriculum. Such data exist but few historians have yet mined or collected it prior to the 1920s. Since then, some systematically collected evidence of how teachers taught has accumulated. Occasional studies of teaching practices appear. But even these are methodologically flawed or restricted to narrow topics since most were doctoral dissertations. The rich complexity of teacher- student exchanges and life in these quasi-family settings still lack their historians.

The Froebelians and the Progressives wrote extensively about how

kindergarten teachers should teach and provided classroom accounts of teachers doing what was desired. Generalizing from these selected accounts or suggesting that how classrooms should be taught is what, indeed, did occur is out of the question. Because no history of how

kindergarten teachers taught yet exists, how much adaptation of the intended Froebelian or conduct curriculum occurred and what hybrids evolved in thousands of kindergartens is impossible to determine. Given these severe restrictions in the amount and quality of data available, I offer seasoned guesses as to how much overlap there was between the intended and taught curricula and how both moved closer to the academic and social demands of the primary grades by the 1920s.

What one can say with some confidence is that the intended Froebelian curriculum with its heavy emphasis on teacher direction and a prescribed order of introducing balls and blocks, colored paper and scissors, songs and games, the "occupations" of drawing, weaving, and the like dom- inated teacher training and operation of private kindergartens in the

post-Civil War decades (Wiebe 1869). Diverging from the Froebelian

scripts for presenting "gifts and occupations" and songs may have occurred privately, but, once publicized, it became risky business leading, on occasion, to expulsion from the devoted cadre of followers adhering to the principles of the founding father. Lucy Wheelock, Anna Bryan, the Burks (Carolyn Frear and Frederic), and other teachers in the 1880s and 1890s who experimented with more student-centered activities, "free play," and using Froebelian materials out of sequence were severely criticized as have been others who have tried to depart from orthodoxies (Beatty 1989; Burk and Burk 1899).

How widespread such adaptations in the taught curriculum were in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is guesswork. What I can

say with some confidence is that the taught curriculum probably diverged increasingly from the intended Froebelian curriculum as more kin-

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dergartens moved into public school systems and teachers faced steady pressures to prepare large groups of five-year-olds for first grade while being asked to teach double sessions. The press toward institutionalization and increased professional status through more training from those who themselves questioned the Froebelian orthodoxy probably encouraged many teachers to depart from published manuals. Neither the intended curriculum nor the training of teachers in Froebelian principles could withstand very long classroom and school pressures to modify the official curriculum (Warner 1892; Kindergarten Magazine 1900).

By the mid-1920s a new wisdom anchored in the Progressives' views drawn from psychologists had emerged over what a kindergarten curriculum should contain. A mix of Froebelian materials and concepts married to the pragmatic and increasingly behavioristic approaches recommended by leaders in the field gradually came to dominate official beliefs about how kindergarten should be taught. What teachers did, however, was hidden except for anecdotes passed around among educators, uncritical partisans, and an unusual doctoral dissertation. Mary Dabney Davis's study, also published by the National Education Association, was the first systematic examination of kindergarten teaching practices (Davis 1925).

To get a sense of dominant teaching practices, Davis analyzed stenographic reports of observations done in 131 kindergartens in 1924. These descriptions of 449 lessons in these kindergartens form the basis of the analysis. Of the selected kindergartens, three-quarters were located in public schools. Geographically, the sample was drawn from 34 states from every region of the nation. More than 60 percent of the children were American, 37 percent were foreign-born (Italian, Jewish, German, etc.), and 3 percent were black. While uncommon efforts were undertaken to get a cross-section of teachers, it was not a random sample since the list of participants was drawn from the records of the National Educational Association and classrooms were chosen on the basis of the superintendent's or principal's recommen- dation of teachers who were both exceptional and average. Nonetheless, what Davis did represents a giant leap beyond the fragments of data and anecdotes that researchers and policymakers had available then.

Davis constructed a five-point scale that tried to measure degrees of control in the classroom. At one end is the teacher-directed control and, at the other, student-directed control. Headings for each point on the scale are as follows:

1. The teacher plans and directs the program activity 2. The teacher carries out her plan with the cooperation of the

children




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3. The children suggest and carry out the plans under teacher guidance

4. The children make the plans and program under pupil leadership with teacher guidance

5. The children make the plans and program without teacher guidance

To analyze and rate these descriptions, Davis went through all of them and rated each on the scale. Of the 449 lessons, Davis found the dominant modes of practice to be mode 1 with 32 percent and mode 2 with 52 percent. She found 14 percent of the lessons were in 3 and 2 percent were in 4. No lesson was rated a 5. She then secured nine experienced teachers and had them independently rate the lessons on the scale. She reports that there were identical ratings for 155 of the lessons; a half-step difference in rating 76 and a one-step difference in 136 with the balance showing more than a one and a half step discrepancy. (This level of interrater reliability would not meet current standards.) To supplement these data she secured additional information on classroom practices from a survey of 535 kindergarten teachers and 162 administrators on subject matter, activities, aims, and teacher methods. This survey corroborated the observations of classrooms being largely teacher directed with different activities being more or less child centered (Davis 1925, pp. 23, 27, 67-71).

To give a clearer sense of what a kindergarten session was like, Davis assembled typical schedules that emerged from the stenographic reports of kindergarten practices.

From a public school with large enrollment of foreign-born students, the typical schedule was as follows:

8:10-9:20 Self-adopted activity 9:20-9:30 Period for replacing material 9:30-9:50 Conversation. Discussion of problems in connection

with work, health habits, nature study, the need for being careful in crossing streets, and so on

9:50-10:10 Luncheon 10:10-10:20 Rest 10:20-10:30 Games and rhythms 10:30-10:45 Songs and stories

From a large public school, the schedule was as follows: 8:50-9:00 Inspection 9:00-9:15 Conversation and greetings 9:15-9:55 Group work 9:55-10:10 Housekeeping 10:10-10:35 Games 10:35-10:50 Milk

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10:50-10:55 Rest 10:55-11:30 Varied activities as, Monday and Tuesday, music and

dramatization; Wednesday, stories and rhythms; Thursday, stories and music; Friday, stories and rhythms

Cryptic as these schedules are and confining as they appear when combined with the analysis of 449 lessons and a survey of experienced kindergarten teachers, these examples of two calendars suggest in a crude way how teachers constructed various classroom compromises in trying to finesse two common curricular dilemmas: should the content of kindergarten focus more on the child's social and emotional needs or on academic subject matter (i.e., language, science, arts); or should the content of kindergarten stress more individual than social adjustment, that is, getting children ready for the first grade (Davis 1925, pp. 58-60).

These teaching dilemmas showed up in the survey where teachers were asked what the aims of kindergarten were. Davis could find no consensus among teachers. She found a mixture of goals that sought "social behavior and habit formation; development of skill and technique (motor and physical, intellectual and thoughtful); factual information and aesthetic appreciation" (Davis 1925, p. 113). Similarly, teachers were conflicted over authority. Teachers who believed in a developmental perspective encouraged identifying and using children's needs to guide children in planning each day. Yet to guide children to act as independent individuals, teachers must exert authority in the child's behalf.

Another dilemma that emerges from the stenographic reports involves choices between academic and behavioral preparation for the primary grades and holistic activities that blend reading, writing, arithmetic, and other skills matched to the students' intellectual, social, and emotional maturity. Davis states that integrated skill work appeared naturally in quartering apples, counting napkins, and straws needed for lunch or writing on the blackboard the names of the fruit and vegetables that the children brought to school. The dilemma was not made easier by the isolation of kindergarten from the primary grades. She found only three kindergartens in 137 schools where explicit cooperation occurred between the first grade teachers and kindergarten teachers (Davis 1925, p. 99).

The picture that emerges from this snapshot of kindergarten teachers in 1924 is one that shows both continuity and change. What appears to have been a strict, by-the-Froebelian-book, teacher-directed kindergarten at the turn of the century had softened into a more informal, flexible combination of play and teacher-centered activities. The de-




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velopmental perspective with its mix of science and pragmatics cham- pioned by the Progressives since the early 1900s penetrated the thinking and language of many teachers who shed Froebelian vocabulary (few teachers used the phrase "gifts and occupations" by the 1930s) and even some principles but continued to work in a highly teacher-centered mode of instruction mixed with play. This pragmatic mix was familiar to closet Froebelians who had always aimed at getting children to act in ways socially and individually acceptable in school and in the family (Beatty 1989).

Finally, by the 1920s, some, but by no means all, of these differences between the kindergarten and primary grades had narrowed and a tiny two-way traffic between kindergarten and the first grade began to flourish in some city school districts. From the elementary school such practices as ability grouping and testing entered the kindergarten and the lower elementary school grades incorporated, to a degree, kindergarten materials, furniture, and activities (Vandewalker 1908; Langdon 1933; Beatty 1989).

With increasing knowledge about children coming from the bur- geoning science of psychology, it comes as little surprise that the intense involvement of psychologists in World War I testing of draftees and the earlier work of Lewis Terman, Edward Thorndike, and others should spill over the kindergarten. Assessing the intelligence of five-

year-olds to place them in separate classes in order to provide for their individual needs was a basic tenet of Progressives who saw such testing for group placement as evidence of fitting the school to the child rather than the other way around.

Prior to this, teacher judgment was the primary tool for assessing intelligence and for placement. Compared with the new science of

testing, teacher judgments, in the words of Margaret Holmes of New York City public schools in 1922, "are too unreliable for determining the child's mental ability. Therefore," she concluded, "mental testing is a necessity in kindergarten." Ethel Salisbury, director of Kindergarten and Elementary Schools in Berkeley, California, stated the policy of her district on testing kindergartners (Holmes 1922, p. 169).

Believing that we must go to the source of the stream and locate misfits, retarded children either permanently or temporarily, we test whenever possible all kindergarten children ... using the Binet-Simon test. On the basis of the results of these tests our first grade children are divided into average moving and slow moving groups. Those who belong in a fast moving group are dealt with individually, being advanced as fast as is wise. All children who are found to be below six years of age mentally, and for whom achievement in regular first grade tasks is impossible, are

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segregated into a small group of not more than twenty, which we term a sub-primary group. [Salisbury 1921, p. 196]

By 1919, forjust kindergarten and primary grades there were already 84 standardized tests (Cavallo 1976, p. 182). Intelligence testing in kindergartens for placement in groups there and in the first grade was enhanced by the invention of readiness tests that aimed at sorting those five-year-olds that could make the transition to the first grade from those who could not. The creation of subprimary classes, mentioned above, became common ways that Progressive educators managed those five-year-olds who were unready for the first grade. By the end of the 1920s, any elementary school that considered itself modern invested staff time and money in testing and ability grouping in kindergarten and first grade (Bloch 1988).

If testing and grouping reached into the kindergarten the kindergarten's unique environment and ideology infiltrated slowly into the lower grades of the elementary school. In 1907, Nina Vandewalker, probably in an excess of enthusiasm for a movement in which she was a prime activist, attributed many changes in elementary school curricular and instructional practices to the introduction of the kindergarten. There were, as she knew, many other entwined influences on the elementary school in these decades that preceded the kindergarten such as the introduction of drawing, music, physical education, and manual arts to the schools. Part of the "New Education" or "Progressive Education," these innovations dated back to Francis W. Parker's work in Quincy, Massachusetts, Edward Sheldon's teachings at Oswego Nor- mal School, Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi, and other reformers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Where all of these seemed to come together in a tangible, visible setting was the kindergarten. Too noticeable to be ignored by Vandewalker and other passionate reformers were the spread into first grade classrooms of art and song activities, increased physical movement in the classroom, manipulative activities with balls and blocks, little hammers and materials to weave and draw, small chairs and tables arranged in a quasi-home setting rather than bolted-down desks, and dozens of other kindergarten activities (Van- dewalker 1908; Beatty 1989).

By the early 1930s there was a web of organizational, curricular, and instructional ties binding both kindergarten and the primary grades sufficiently to argue that the invention of the late nineteenth century had been fully institutionalized into the public schools within a half century.

Kindergarten enthusiasts seeing that the inculcation of proper habits needed to begin earlier were also advocates for bringing three- and




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four-year-olds into the orbit of the public school. "For the moment," Yale University psychologist Arnold Gesell wrote in 1926,

the question of the adjustment of the kindergarten to the primary school has become overshadowed by the question "What shall the kindergarten do about younger children of nursery age?" In prin- ciple the older question of kindergarten-primary readjustment may be counted as solved-a primary school no longer considers itself modern unless it is imbued with the spirit and method of progressive education.... The whole period from birth to the first molars is basically an educational period quite as consequential for social welfare as the years of public school attendance. ... The great goal ought to be a unification of policy for the whole sphere of early elementary education from the lower primary to the nethermost level. [Langdon 1933, p. 17]

Beginning in the 1920s, expanding dramatically in the next two decades because of the Depression and World War II, and exploding in the 1960s and since in the surge for more nursery and preschools for four-year-olds, kindergarten and nursery school leaders became enthusiasts for "early childhood education."

Yet the assimilation of the kindergarten into public schools and the expansion of nursery schools should not hide the insulation of these programs from the upper grades of the elementary school. In 1948, for example, three-quarters of a century after kindergartens were introduced into public schools in Saint Louis, only one of 100 cities reported a nongraded K-2 unit (Bathhurst et al. 1949, p. 38). For every consolidated primary unit there were hundreds more that kept kindergartens at arm's length for its emphasis on toylike materials, play, the whole child, and an apparent nonacademic climate.

In summary, then, there have been both substantial changes (e.g., the goal of child saving being transformed into time saving, shifts in the intended curricula between the Froebelians and the Progressives) and continuities (goal of developing proper social and individual behaviors and the dominant instructional practice of teacher-directed classes) in the introduction and incorporation of the kindergarten into the elementary school. Moreover, the institutionalization of the kin-

dergarten created many ties with primary grades while it redefined the elementary school as a unit that now included five-year-olds.

Yet even with these ties to the early grades, there remained a distance, a separation in style, content, and beliefs between kindergarten and the upper elementary school. Even with the similarity in teacher- centered instruction within kindergartens over the decades, the teaching that emerges from these 1924 data remain very different in the use

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of space, allocation of time, organization of groups, furniture, varied materials, and activities from the upper elementary grades and, of course, the secondary school. The intended and taught curricula of the kindergarten reveal strong differences between the dominant beliefs of kindergarten and upper elementary and secondary teachers. These beliefs were the basis of what have come to be called a developmental perspective: how children are viewed (they are more than a mind; they are individuals who have feelings, interests, and concerns that need attention beyond academic skills); how learning occurred (learning through individual play, through working in groups); how knowledge is construed (wisdom is not told, it is constructed by each person; understanding of ideas and things is more important than the accu- mulation of facts); and how teaching should occur (the teacher's role is guide and helper not source of all intellectual and formal authority; a teacher's role is to help children learn how to learn as individuals and within groups).

Although every kindergarten teacher may not have acted consistently with these beliefs and much variation in practice occurred across classrooms, this developmental perspective appeared more often than not in the schedule, materials, teaching practices, and arrangement of

space. If the kindergarten had moved a few notches closer to the

elementary grades, by the end of the 1920s, it was still substantially different from upper elementary school grades and, clearly, from the

secondary school. What may be puzzling is how this fundamental reform got transformed

into an incremental one. Its mission both to rescue children and their

parents from poverty and to Americanize immigrants shifted; its impact dissipated by both an imposed and welcomed semi-isolation from the rest of schooling. In reducing its reach and becoming an addition it has become a familiar part of the structure of schooling.

How Did Kindergartens Get Institutionalized and Transformed?

If longevity is a measure of a reform's success, the kindergarten, existing within public schools for almost 125 years, is a victory for reformers. Even its sharpest critics would hesitate in suggesting that kindergartens be abolished.

The features of those reforms that lasted also fitted the kindergarten. Kindergartens, even in starting five-year-olds to school a few years earlier hardly disrupted their careers in schools. Easily monitored- a district either has or has not a kindergarten-the addition also has




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powerful inside and outside constituencies supporting its continuation. Teachers and administrators trained in early childhood education believe in the importance of imprinting children early in their student careers. Parents, particularly as more and more mothers entered the work force, see the school as a helpful or, at the least, as a benign influence in their children's lives that can reinforce or introduce what the family desires. Finally, public officials and corporate executives, especially since the 1960s, concerned about the growing negative impact of deteriorating cities, unemployment, and irregular surges of immigration, have come to see in the kindergarten and public nursery school an antidote to urban ills and a solution to public school problems. Again, self-interest merges nicely with altruism.

The incorporation of kindergartens into the elementary school, however, adds another criterion to the list for those reforms that stick: ambiguities in purpose. The kindergarten met pressing social needs defined by late nineteenth-century urban reformers about immigrant and impoverished children who needed Americanizing and early training in social and civic responsibilities. The diffuseness of its mission to save children, immigrant families, and southern blacks, and to solve other pressing social problems made it possible for groups and individuals from foundations, settlement houses, women's groups, unions, and universities to join educators and create political coalitions that initiated and sustained kindergarten programs. Its popularity, aided by politically active lobbies at the city, state, and national levels, spread from its initial roots in cities to a growing need of educated middle- class mothers to find earlier social experiences for their toddlers and for mothers who slowly began to enter the labor market in the decades after World War I.

But the criteria that may explain why kindergartens were solid can- didates for being integrated into the public schools fail to explain the internal changes that occurred within kindergartens and the lower

grades of the elementary school as it was institutionalized. From a child-saving mission the aim shifted to time saving. The power of the

grades above kindergarten slowly, irrevocably trimmed distinguishing features that had made kindergartens what they were. In making these

changes, the kindergarten nonetheless retained unique traits that set it apart and kept it separate from most schooling beyond the primary grades.

Over time, organizational imperatives buried within the institution of schooling molded the kindergarten to better fit the topography of the organization while simultaneously insulating it from totally reshaping the lower grades. The institutional imperative to survive in the face of an unpredictable environment (e.g., social movements, wars, economic

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depressions, shifting public attitudes) sharpens considerably a capacity to adapt and reshape innovations to better fit the contours of formal schooling.

The same phenomenon also accounts for the slow erosion of each reform's potential in making fundamental changes. The dominant

imperatives of established roles, rules, and structures tailored social reformist aims to make a trimmer fit between novel programs and

existing ones. For example, in the process of becoming institutionalized the kindergarten's multiple and conflicting aims-particularly helping impoverished families from different cultures-narrowed as the innovation increasingly became focused on preparing five-year-olds for the first grade. If the kindergarten affected how upper grade teachers

taught, the upper grades surely cast a long shadow over kindergarten teachers' choices of what to teach. In accommodating to these irresistible

organizational pressures, the kindergarten nonetheless retained its unique developmental perspective on children, learning, and teaching that set it apart from most schooling beyond the primary grades.

These organizational transformations of intended fundamental reforms to incremental improvements speak directly to the quiet, insistent influence of the institution, like a reef, to mold and adapt to its environment in ways independent of reformers' designs. The coral reef of schooling expanded with the addition of the kindergarten. The coastline of schooling was altered by these changes; niches were filled. The reef was different and yet "all the builders now are dead . . . but that which they created remains, a part of the living present" (Carson 1955, p. 207).

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Why Some Reforms Last: The Case of the Kindergarten

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