This Day in Education History (Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott Part Ways in Experimental School Debacle)

Aug. 7, 1836— Elizabeth Peabody, a schoolteacher, editor and bookseller who boosted talented male intellectuals, withdrew from a school founded by another such figure—the genial but erratic father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott—once she sensed disaster arising over his unorthodox pedagogy.

Miss Peabody and Amos Bronson Alcott breathed books, and they figured in them as well, not just as biographical subjects but as characters in fiction (Alcott, as the absent Father March in Little Women; Elizabeth, as the elderly feminist reformer “Miss Birdseye” in Henry James’ The Bostonians). They shared a passion for enkindling young minds, and for a while it seemed that their educational venture would be one of the brightest points in the intellectual movement centered around Boston.

But their idealistic vision of an experimental institution headed by Alcott, Boston’s Temple School (pictured), ended in acute embarrassment and failure.

The lives of Alcott and Peabody had amply demonstrated that they were unafraid to strike out in bold new directions. Those experiences, however, also underlined the differences in temperament that would corrode their collaboration.

The son of a Connecticut farmer, Alcott had, through a rigorous program of self-improvement, advanced in learning enough that his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson thought he could converse with Plato.

By 1828, he was speculating in his journal how to take children on a similar journey of learning, observing that the “province of the instructor is awakening, invigorating, directing, rather than forcing a child’s faculties upon prescribed and exclusive courses of thought. He should look to the child to see what is to be done, rather than to his book or his system. The Child is the Book. The operations of his mind are the try system.”

Peabody was one of a trio of sisters who were a key part of intellectual circles in antebellum America—“The Flowering of New England,” as critic Van Wyck Brooks later termed it. (Mary Peabody, a reformer with literary inclinations, married politician and educator Horace Mann. Sophia Peabody, a talented painter, wed novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.)

Elizabeth assisted and advocated for a series of what literary scholar and philanthropist Millicent Bell called “husbands of the mind”—the minister William Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Mann. Along with Margaret Fuller, she was one of only two female members of the Transcendental Club who instigated a kind of intellectual American Revolution of the 19^th century.

The daughter of a schoolteacher, Elizabeth had been educating students herself since the age of 16. A biographer of her family, Megan Marshall, has observed that schools operated by women were freer than their male counterparts to experiment.

In Alcott, this selfless, even devoted, collaborator with innovators thought she glimpsed a kindred male soul working towards an enlightened alternative to the educational practices of their time.

It would take close personal and work encounters for her to discover the infinite frustrations that others discovered about this original, radical but eccentric thinker. Emerson captured both what drew people to Alcott and what annoyed them about him: he was “a good and guileless man,” but also “a man of genius with few talents.”

Impractical and improvident, Alcott continually drove his family to the brink of poverty with his schemes—and drove his followers to distraction. Among his dominant characteristics was a propensity towards being out of sync with his age. Depending on the strength and timing of this impulse, he could be a dreamer, an idealist, a visionary…or just a plain fool. He disregarded the counsels of caution—including entreaties from women with his best interests in mind, such as his wife Abby and Elizabeth—bringing his projects to repeated ruin.

The property he settled on in 1834 for his new ideas, a grand, converted Masonic Temple overlooking the Boston Common, was christened Temple School. His classrooms featured comfortable desks, slates and objects for handling and counting—all innovations of the time.

Remarkably for male teachers of the period, for instance, he preferred Socratic dialogue—or, as he called them, “conversations”—with young students to rote learning. Moreover, rather than resort to corporal punishment, he rapped his own knuckles rather than the youthful offender’s.

In their stress on this more open communication between student and teacher, Alcott and Peabody anticipated the theories of progressive education advanced by John Dewey.

With the same zeal she had devoted to Channing in transcribing the Unitarian minister’s diffuse sermon notes into a collection of coherent addresses, Elizabeth threw herself into the Temple School. She steered her own students to the school, and recorded the conversations of Alcott.

Alcott would address the students in general terms in the morning, while Peabody—possessing the qualifications to teach Latin, geography and arithmetic that he lacked—concentrated on particular subjects in the afternoon.

As time went on, though, Peabody couldn’t help noticing that Alcott, though an advocate for open communication between teacher and student, didn’t practice this with her.

After she accepted his invitation to stay at the family’s boarding house, she found herself disagreeing with him, more often, more vigorously and more uncomfortably—and he did little to hide his journal rant that she was exhibiting “too much of the man and too little of the woman in her freedom.”

In particular, while Alcott was delighted by Peabody’s popular account of his pedagogy, Record of a School (1835), he overrode her qualms about a projected sequel, Conversations With Children on the Gospels. Her initial concerns about how these recorded conversations revealed his self-aggrandizement and manipulation of children’s thoughts and behavior soon gave way to outright alarm frank classroom discussions of sexuality.

One child’s answer to Alcott’s question on how the body is made—“by the naughtiness of people”—was bound to provoke controversy, both because of its precocity and its source: six-year-old Josiah Quincy, the grandson of the president of Harvard.

Tired of Alcott’s increasing disregard of her concerns, anxious about Abby’s occasional tempestuousness, and unable to continue her volunteer teaching, Elizabeth withdrew from Temple School at the start of August. The storm that erupted later that year with the publication of Conversations With Children on the Gospels confirmed the worst of her fears.

The outcry was widespread, with perhaps the sharpest reaction registered by Andrews Norton, a professor of sacred literature at Harvard, who called it “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene.”

In its fervor, the uproar over Alcott’s unusual teaching resembles a modern culture war. It provoked the same outrage over touching on sexuality (no matter how gauzily Alcott expressed it), and the same tensions between religious conservatism (in this case, traditional Calvinism) and less sect-based spirituality (Transcendental philosophy).

Then as now, there were limits to what the enlightened elite was prepared to tolerate. That boundary was breached the following year, when Alcott admitted a single black student to the school. This attempt at racial integration led the parents who had previously stood by Alcott to withdraw the remaining students.

Once Temple School finally closed in 1837, an entry in Alcott’s recently transcribed journal notes that he suffered a nervous collapse that lasted a week. Alcott operated another school for one more year until it, too, shut its doors. Thereafter, though he served briefly as superintendent of Concord Public Schools in Connecticut two decades later, he never taught again.

Peabody, tougher and more resilient than her former employer, survived the failure of their experiment in much better shape. Staying at the Concord home of the Emerson family revived her spirits. 

The Boston bookshop she ran in the 1840s did much to spread Transcendentalism to the reading public, and later she made her most lasting contribution to American education by helping to import the kindergarten movement from Germany to this country.

Over a decade ago, while visiting Concord, I stopped by Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. On that crisp autumn morning, I marveled that so many of the nation’s most prominent 19^th-century literary lights—including Emerson, Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott—were in as close proximity on this still hillside as they had been in life.

Now, however, thinking of two of those buried there—Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Peabody—what strikes me is not the quiet of their surroundings but the loud reverberations of their dialogues about Temple School—of the continuing debates over how to mold young minds and how to introduce innovation into a skeptical world.

This Day in Education History (Ike Signs Act for Sputnik-Spurred Student Loans)

September 2, 1958—President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), the second major piece of legislation passed by Congress following mass hysteria over the Soviet launching of their satellite Sputnik. 

Voters do not know what they’re getting when they elect a President simply by reading party platforms—and few instances demonstrate that more than American education policy. 

Two of the major developments in the federal approach to education occurred under Republican presidents ostensibly concerned with budget control. One was the “Nation at Risk” report, issued under Ronald Reagan 25 years ago; the other was NDEA.

(What about the No Child Left Behind Act, a significant element of George W. Bush’s domestic agenda? Please notice a key phrase in the last paragraph: Republican Presidents ostensibly concerned about budget control. As conservative Republicans of a certain stripe, such as Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley, will gladly tell you, the current President Bush is not at all concerned about clamping down on the budget, pointing to his unwillingness to wield his veto power as a weapon against out-of-control spending, not to mention involvement in a foreign war whose purposes they question.) 

Eisenhower’s lack of eloquence led many intellectuals to downgrade his brainpower, particularly in relation to his two-time opponent, Adlai Stevenson. Over time, however, historians came to see that this was an error, and his reputation has been growing slowly but measurably since then. 

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, Walter A. McDougall summarizes in a compelling way why the President was slow to embark on a pell-mell “space race” with the Soviets—and why he had a better sense of the long-range implications of defense-induced spending than his critics:

“He feared the economic and moral consequences of a headlong technology and prestige race with the Soviets; he feared the political and social consequences of vastly increased federal powers in education, science, and the economy; he feared, as expressed in his Farewell Address, the assumption of inordinate power and influence by a ‘military-industrial complex’ and a ‘scientific-technological elite.’” 

That resolution didn’t stand a chance—not after a second, larger Soviet satellite launched almost a month after Sputnik (this flight was termed Muttnik by smart-aleck American headline writers—the kind I love!—because of the presence of a canine aboard); and especially not after Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson recognized the political plum that had fallen into his hands. 

With his eyes set firmly on the White House, LBJ conducted the Senate’s Preparedness Investigation Subcommittee (i.e., the Johnson Subcommittee) with a flair for publicity and a talent for apocalyptic hyperbole: “Control of space means control of the world,” he warned, pointing to what the “masters of infinity” could command—controlling the earth’s weather, causing drought and flood, changing the tides, changing temperate climates to frigid. 

(Until I got to that last phrase, I thought I was reading an early draft of Al Gore’s Powerpoint lecture-as-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.) 

So Ike’s attempt to rein in the budget went Ka-Sput-nik, the victim of worsening relations with the U.S.S.R. 

On July 29, buffeted by charges that the Soviets had pulled ahead in the space race, he signed the National Air and Space Act of 1958, creating NASA, the agency that has overseen space exploration since then. 

In the past, conservatives had viewed education expenditures as best suited to local rather than federal control. Ike had had no trouble selling another major bit of domestic legislation as defense-related: the Interstate Highway System. (He’d been convinced of the value of roads in moving vast armies while being driven on autobahns on his way to conquering Nazi Germany). 

But education was another matter .

Though pressures to spend on education had been mounting since 1943, when President Roosevelt’s Commission on Higher Education set a goal of having one-third of Americans graduate from four-year colleges, Sputnik provided the most surefire means of passing legislation: the perception of a crisis.

NDEA opened the floodgates to the current role of American educational policy: 

* a student loan program to increase of the flow of talent into science, mathematics, and foreign language careers; 

* a “National Defense Fellowship” for entering a college teaching career; and 

* Programs to increase pre-college teacher training.

This Day in Education History (Columbia ’68 Protests)

April 30, 1968—With student protestors still occupying five campus buildings they’d taken over the week before, Columbia University President Grayson Kirk called in helmeted police, with predictably disastrous results—more than 700 arrests, hundreds injured, nearly 400 police brutality complaints, the eventual resignations of himself and Provost David Truman, and a decade-long decline in the university’s finances.

When I arrived on campus 10 years after the fabled demonstrations, two professors at Freshman Orientation recalled the events of that spring. 

Even for a group more politically active and fascinated by history than many of our peers, the discussion was useful and, indeed, needed. 

The passage of a decade meant that many of us knew the tumultuous event had occurred but not why. I imagine that now, with another 30 years past, the demonstrations will seem as hazy to today’s students as the stories of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg at the West End in the 1940s seemed to us.

I count myself lucky to have heard the discussion at freshman orientation. The faculty members (one, I remember, was anthropology professor Robert F. Murphy, still funny and charismatic despite already being incapacitated by the paralysis that would eventually result in his death) had a real appreciation for the swirl of events and the players involved in the crisis, with few ideological axes to grind. 

The same, I’m afraid, cannot be said for the panel sponsored by the university this past weekend.

Columnist John Leo has griped that the absence of non-leftists (let alone conservatives) assured a panel dominated by the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) group that spearheaded the strike. 

Even this exclusion would not necessarily have been fatal—the ’78 discussion my class witnessed was from a liberal perspective and did not suffer from it, for the tone throughout was wry, with a sweeping view of this event in the larger context of the university’s history. 

I also don’t think it’s possible to have any meaningful reminiscence of the riot without the involvement of some of the event’s participants.

Still, the overall impression of the three-day panel discussion just concluded, as reported by the New York Times two days ago, was of participants trading (anti-)war stories, with the dominant tone veering sharply toward the most self-congratulatory, smarmy, unreflective gathering I can imagine this side of Oscar night.

“You tried to be true to it,” the writer-researcher Susan Kahn remembered of the student strike. “You became a person who tried to be true to it for 40 years, who in one way or another tried to make the world better.” 

Edward J. Hyman, a professor of psychology, fondly recalled the late Ted Gold, who was killed nearly two years later when a bomb he was making for the Weathermen radical group exploded in a Greenwich Village town house.

Hmm…One wishes a bit more could have been said about what Gold would have done that night if fate had not intervened—like set that bomb off at a dance in Fort Dix, N.J., killing soldiers who had done him and the Weathermen no harm, leaving their survivors wounded for the rest of their lives.

I also read nothing in the post-mortems on the three-day consortium concerning an actual victim of the Columbia riot itself--Frank Gucciardi, a 34-year-old plainclothes police officer, who, while dealing with residual unrest the day after Kirk called in the cops, was jumped from behind by a protestor leaping from a second-story window. 

Gucciardi sustained a painful back injury that required three spinal operations over the next three years, and which eventually forced his early retirement because of disability.

Was I just being cantankerous in middle age? I went to the school newspaper (yes, the same one where I labored more than a generation ago), and found “Commentariat” blogger Armin Rosen squirming at the “single-minded and out of tone” temper of the proceedings, too.

Here, perhaps, some context about the eight days of turmoil four decades ago is in order. 

As Professor Murphy and his faculty colleague reminded us at orientation, the protest was not against the Vietnam War or any university officials’ part in its planning (indeed, both Kirk and Truman opposed American involvement there), but against the university’s decision to build a gym on public land in Morningside Park and against the school’s ties with a Pentagon research institute. 

(Not that the war had no role to play at all; as novelist Paul Auster, a protest participant, recalled in a Times op-ed piece last week, he, like many that week, was “crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs.”)

To be sure, the protestors were correct that the university needed to change its fraught relationship with its neighbors (the proposed gymnasium’s second entrance, on the south, lower side for the most African-American community, smacked of “separate but equal”) and that its Pentagon ties should be ended. 

But the events of the next eight days took on an almost hallucinogenic quality all too keeping with the times.

Protest leader Mark Rudd had visited Castro’s Cuba for three weeks earlier that year and reflected the growing S.D.S. Marxist-Leninist bent. He had gained control of the local SDS chapter by spearheading an “Action Faction” that clamored for direct confrontation against the Vietnam War. 

On April 23, he and his associate John Jacobs, after leading a protest group of 500 gathered at the sundial in the middle of the universal’s central quadrangle, attempted to take over the administration building, Low Library. 

Repulsed by conservative counterdemonstrators—a group consisting mostly of athletes and fraternity members that many students and faculty members doubtless were astonished to discover even existed—Rudd and his group seized control of nearby Hamilton Hall.

Not for long, however: another group of African-American activists from Harlem then ordered the SDS group out of Hamilton Hall and get their own building. 

It’s hard not to agree with one of the black activists, Ray Brown, that his group was fed up with “the 72 other tendencies of the New Left,” for the protestors were now feeding off the university administration’s remoteness from students (Kirk barely knew many of them) and the growing intoxication with microphones and cameras being thrust in front of them.

Events had now morphed way out of control. Kirk and Truman were dealing with a hydra-headed force featuring student revolutionaries, an African-American contingent with ties to Harlem activists, counterdemonstrators, faculty members who tried to act as go-betweens, and New York City police, edgy and feeling undermanned to deal with this force.

Rudd’s refusal to accept anything less than total amnesty for the protestors eventually moved the administration to call in the cops. The result is well-known, and the administration’s response was heavily criticized the next year by a commission headed by Archibald Cox.

The damage to the university in the next 10 years was severe, spelled out, in eye-opening detail (the kind sadly missing from this past week), by Barnard College Professor Robert A. McCaughey nine years ago. 

McCaughey’s analysis shows that a year before the disturbances, the university had only a small deficit. By the 1970-71 school year, following cleanup expenses, legal costs, falling tuition payments, and plummeting alumni donations, the university was running a deficit of $16.5 million out of a total budget of $170 million.

Now, 40 years later, this past weekend, current university president Lee Bollinger joked to panel participants, “I thought about making my office available to you all night.” Obviously, he did not appreciate some of the underlying paradoxes of his presence there that day.

To start with, he has strenuously pushed for the university’s expansion north into Manhattanville—a move that recalled predecessor Kirk’s arms-length relationship with the school’s Harlem neighbors. 

As a prominent First Amendment expert, did Bollinger adequately consider whether celebrating a takeover in which classes were disrupted and a college dean was forcibly detained really advanced the cause of academic freedom?

The Columbia student takeover would not have happened but for the administration’s total removal from any sense of what was happening in the lives of the students. 

At the same time, even though the protestors forced the university to abandon the proposed gym and end the Pentagon ties, they severely undermined the authority of a liberal university administration made to look impotent. They contributed to the images of disorder that led to the eventual national counterrevolution that autumn: Richard Nixon’s election as President.

This Day in Education History ("A Nation at Risk")

April 26, 1983—In one of its periodic fits of hysteria about why its children weren't learning, the American public embraced a Presidential commission's report, A Nation at Risk, that might (or might not) have correctly diagnosed what was wrong and might (or might not) have demonstrated why this problem represented a full-blown crisis. But the report unquestionably saved a major new federal department from the budget ax.

Too bad the report couldn't have been issued closer to Thanksgiving, when it could have enabled the Department of Education to earn a Presidential reprieve along with at least one lucky member of a prominent species that otherwise ends up on everyone's carving table in the holidays.

Somebody help me out here—can you think of another Presidential administration besides Ronald Reagan's that used Presidential commissions so often and with so much publicity? The Greenspan Commission, for instance, gave Reagan a veneer of bipartisan cover that allowed him to make adjustments in Social Security without Democrats making stick the usual charges that he was going to leave golden-agers out in the streets. The Rogers Commission, investigating the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, made famous the phrase "O ring" in its postmortem on that disaster.

The most famous of them all, the Tower Commission Report, explained how the Iran-contra affair could have taken place (because of Reagan's "management style," as laissez-faire, evidently, as his belief in economics) in a way that spared the American public from conducting yet another impeachment investigation of a President (only this time it wouldn't have involved a shifty-eyed paranoid who obsessed about everything in the White House, but instead a genial grandpa who acted a bit out to lunch whenever he talked about trees causing more pollution than automobiles or whenever he forgot that Samuel Pierce was his own Secretary of Housing and Urban Development).

But the 18 members of the commission assigned to look into education might have made an even bigger mark, because just about all Americans are concerned about schools, or should be. If you're not directly concerned because you have a kid in school, you're probably paying attention to it anyway because a healthy educational system makes your community (and, hence, your real estate) a lot more attractive, while an unhealthy one eats up your tax dollars with virtually nothing to show for it.

Unlike other commissions that waste acres of national forests with policy pronouncements in the form of MEGO ("my eyes glaze over") prose and appendices, this one endeared itself instantly to harried editors (desperate for a headline) and their reporters (desperate to find someone who agreed with them without having to put words in their mouths), with a dramatic—I would argue, hyperbolic—opening:

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."

A high-school teacher at the time who helped write the report, Jay Sommer, told USA Today recently, "In order to move a nation to make changes, you have to find some very incisive language."

Well, with language like what I just quoted, or the commission's warning that the educational system was being engulfed in "a rising tide of mediocrity," the report sure used that kind of apocalyptic lingo. It reminds me a bit of Senator Arthur Vandenberg's sage advice to the Truman Administration on how to win support for his plan to resist communism from a Congress still filled with isolationist mossbacks: "Scare the hell out of the American people."

The martial rhetoric also calls to mind the national handwringing that occurred after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957. For nearly a century and a half after Congress greeted John Quincy Adams like a skunk in a perfume factory for proposing a national astronomical observatory, our nation's capital wanted nothing, nothing, to do with funding science and or math/science education. But the thought that we might be losing the space race put the fear of God into our nation's lawmakers, and like a dam breaking, money gushed out to teach kids about integers and molecules and planets in the form of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

Not that there wasn't anything wrong with our nation's schools 25 years later, and—let's give A Nation at Risk some credit here—the report documented a number of them. Things like dropping SAT scores; the fact that only one-third of 17-year-olds could solve a math problem requiring several steps; the inability of four-fifths of teenagers o write a decent persuasive essay; and, most tragically, because of the quiet economic prison sentence they received, the illiteracy of millions of adults. The concentrated focus on these and similar facts undoubtedly led education historian Diane Ravitch to call A Nation at Risk "the most important education reform document of the 20th century."

All of this assumed suddenly larger proportions because of the backdrop of the times, however. Not only was the Soviet bear still growling in 1983, but now there was another menace: Japan, whose economic competitiveness had helped put out of work millions of Americans in smokestack industries during the recent recession. What did Japan have that we didn't? Smarter kids, for one, according to A Nation at Risk and other experts at the time. Okay, let's get smarter kids, came the American response.

Was there such a clear connection between smarter Japanese kids and smarter Japanese economic performance? After the Japanese economy tanked in the mid-1990s (taking with it foreign bestsellers like The Japan That Can Say No and American jeremiads like Michael Crichton's highly problematic techno-thriller Rising Sun), beleaguered American teachers weren't shy about disputing this notion. One might also argue that, relatively speaking, A Nation at Risk didn't highlight as much as it could have the decisive importance of stable families in ensuring the community vitality and individual psychological health necessary to sustain student performance.

The situation was not as clear-cut as the NEA or the '80s educational "reformers" claimed, though. In his memoir of his life in government, In History’s Shadow, John Connally bragged about something decidedly unconservative: getting the Texas legislature to fork up more money for education—or, at least, for the state's college and universities. His explanation was simple: a strong college system, particularly in the sciences, will attract more businesses, especially in high-tech areas.

Now, the lanky Texan had his share of character defects (after the longtime "Tory Democrat" joined the Nixon Administration as Treasury Secretary and even endorsed his Republican boss for a second term, wags in his home state claimed that at the Alamo he would have formed a committee called "Texans for Santa Ana"). But I believe he was onto something here. Certainly, Massachusetts' generous funding of its collegiate system has helped ameliorate the effects of a tax system that in other ways can be confiscatory.

But, no matter how flawed the education commission might have been about the link between education and competitiveness, it did at least one thing: Save the Education Department.

From day one, Reagan had been eyeing the department, one of the major innovations of his predecessor Jimmy Carter, much like the “meek little wives” of Raymond Chandler’s classic short short “Red Wind,” as they “feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”

Education Secretary Terrel Bell also seemed at that point just the way he pictured himself in the title of his memoir, The Thirteenth Man—i.e., the junior member of the Reagan cabinet and, hence, the low man on the totem pale. The report, however, gave him and his department a reason for existence, because it argued that there was indeed a federal role for education. Despite the strongest efforts of conservatives such as Ed Meese, the Education Department escaped its planned demise—and, in the hands of Bell's successor, William Bennett, even became something of a bully pulpit for those of his mindset.

I don't share conservatives' instinctive distrust of all government, but I wonder if liberals' audible sighs of relief—and even self-congratulation—after A Nation at Risk might not have been a bit premature. The increasing involvement of the federal government in education is not an unalloyed good.

Some years ago, a local dentist explained why he had become such a gadfly at board of education meetings (and, eventually, why he came to serve on one such institution). Americans, he thought, had come to feel powerless to effect change—Washington was simply too big, too far away. Local government, and especially local education, was the one area where one person could still really make a difference and see it, though.

Today, that's becoming increasingly hard to argue. Federal K-12 education spending has grown from $16 billion in 1980 to nearly $72 billion in 2007, and with increasing federal money has come increasing federal interference in how districts use the money.

One of my friends, in her days as a former teacher, railed against the No Child Left Behind Act and its prime mover, President George W. Bush. Among the law's effects, she argued convincingly, was that it made educators teach to the test and that it unfairly penalized teachers who were stuck with the worst students.

Complaints about the legislation have been so universal that I have little doubt that, aside from the administration's disastrous performance during Hurricane Katrina, this piece of well-intended but misbegotten legislation will eventually be seen as the worst aspect of domestic policy during the Bush Administration. But it also makes one agree with Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

So liberals might ask themselves: Which do you prefer tangling with--a local board of education that you can defeat at the next election--one that at least knows you and your problems--or Dubya, who doesn't know you from Adam and might not care?

The defense rests.

This Day in Education History (Lottery Started for Future Columbia University)

January 12, 1747 – As befitting its location amid the financial capital of New York and the media center of the nation, the history of Columbia University began in money and controversy on this date, as the New York Gazette announced a lottery to raise funds to establish a college in the colony. The notice came a month after a New York assembly bill to raise funds by public lottery for the school of higher learning.

It took a couple of more attempts at a lottery, along with controversy on the college’s location and religious affiliation, before the proposal becomes a reality. Proposals were made to locate the college in Newburgh, Rye, and Hempstead before the final selection: a new schoolhouse next to Trinity Church, near what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. 

The site was not surprising, given that the overwhelming majority of the lottery commission members consisted of Trinity Church and Dutch Reform members.

In 1753, a newspaper war broke out after commission member William Livingston – the only Presbyterian in the group – attacked the proposal as a plot to create an Anglican college with public funds (an impression not discouraged when the lottery commission accepts Trinity’s demand that the new college would be headed by an Anglican and always use Anglican services). 

To alloy concern concerns over this, the college posted a notice in the Gazette stressing that all will be welcome – all Protestants, that is.

With a royal charter in hand, King’s College opened in 1754. During the American Revolution, it will be divided into Tories (school president Myles Cooper) and several prominent patriots (students Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert Livingstone). In 1784, in a gesture to the new spirit of republicanism overtaking the young country, the school reopened as Columbia University.

In the nineteenth century, Columbia moved uptown to 49th Street and Madison Avenue before settling on its present location, in Morningside Heights, at 116th Street and Broadway, in a more spacious campus designed by Charles McKim, in 1897.

More than a century later, Columbia University in the City of New York still argues with the city about location (a proposed expansion into Manhattanville), as well as religion and its presidents (Lee Bollinger’s hosting of a university appearance by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). 

Despite my republican (small “r”) sympathies and Irish heritage, I continue to wear proudly every day my class ring, which not only signifies my long-ago attendance at the school but, with its crown set amid the blue background, the university’s beginnings as King’s College.