Abstract
Just days before Christmas in December of 1954, James W. Fifield Jr., a prominent minister of a large Los Angeles church, sent a letter to the associate superintendent of the Los Angeles city schools. In his letter, Fifield explained that he had been hearing “more and more reports about the breakdown of discipline” in the city’s schools, and was concerned.
I have heard stories of children swearing at their teachers all the way from San Fernando Valley to San Pedro. I have heard from teachers and others that they hate to see youngsters go into some of our Junior High Schools and High Schools because of the bad influence which they know will be brought to bear upon them there.
With a very sympathetic point of view and with understanding of the difficult time through which we are passing and the complications which confront you and your associates, I am writing this letter to express great concern, and to inquire whether in your judgment I have been unduly alarmed and whether things are really as bad as I have been led to believe.
Whatever else breaks down, the discipline in our schools must not be permitted to be destroyed nor undermined.
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Notes
This shift occurred alongside a large increase in the number of men entering the field of teaching, and some scholars have argued that the rise in teacher unionism that occurred in the 1960s was directly related to, and in part caused by, the masculinization of the teaching force. See, for example, Stephen Cole. The Unionization of Teachers: A Case Study of the UFT (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969), 87–92;
Marjorie Murphy in Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), challenges this gendered explanation for the rise in teacher activism, arguing that in demanding better pay and more control over their working conditions, teachers were merely returning to the same set of issues they had pursued since the beginning of unionization, 220–222. See also, 175–195.
David Tyack. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 274. On postwar enrollment rates, overcrowding, and teacher shortages, see also,
Benjamin Fine. Our Children Are Cheated: The Crisis in American Education (New York: Henry Holt, 1947); Murphy. Blackboard Unions, 180–181;
John Rury. “The Comprehensive High School, Enrollment Expansion, and Inequality: The United States in the Post-War Era.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society, Ottawa, Canada, 2006.
Los Angeles City School District. Los Angeles City School District Annual Report, 1958–59. Progress and Achievement: A Report Submitted to the Honorable Members of the Board of Education of the Los Angeles City School District by Ellis A. Jarvis, Superintendent of Schools (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City School District, 1959); “Teachers Pinpoint Pupil Problems,” Los Angeles Times (May 17, 1957), 2.
Ian Haney Lopez. Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003): 17;
Josh Sides. L. A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003): 95–130;
Jeanne Theoharris. “Alabama on Avalon: Rethinking the Watts Uprising and the Character of Black Protest in Los Angeles,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006): 27–53
Jackie Blount. Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873–1995 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 119–122;
Herbert Kleibard. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 205–230;
Martha Kransdorf. A Matter of Loyalty: The Los Angeles School Board vs. Frances Eisenberg (San Francisco: Caddo Gap Press, 1994); Murphy. Blackboard Unions, 175–195.
After extensive research, Gilbert concludes that “even if there was an increase in delinquency…the public impression of the severity of this problem was undoubtedly exaggerated.” James Gilbert. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 71.
Joseph Lohman, for example, in “A Sociologist-Sheriff Speaks out about Juvenile Delinquency,” Phi Delta Kappan 39 (1958): 206–214, reported that “Negroes” comprised only 9.7 percent of the total population but 18 percent of the delinquency rate. In Los Angeles County, African American youth were involved in over 10 percent of the juvenile court cases, while they represented only 4.2 of the population, and “Spanish speaking” youth (mostly Mexican) made up 13.9 percent of youth population but were involved in 34.9 percent of juvenile arrests. See also: Richard Clendenen. “Why Teen-agers Go Wrong,” U.S. News & World Report (September 17, 1954): 80–84, 86, 88.
Harrison Salisbury. The Shook-up Generation. (New York: Harper & Row, 1958): 117.
Judith Kafka. “Disciplining Youth, Disciplining Women: Motherhood, Delinquency and Racein Postwar American Schooling.” Educational Studies 44 (2008): 197–221.
For more thorough discussions of how these various factors were seen to contribute to juvenile delinquency, see Gilbert. A Cycle of Outrage. For explanations offered at the time, see Clendenen, in “Why Teen-agers Go Wrong,” Albert Cohen. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1955);
Benjamin Fine. 1,000,000 Delinquents (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1955).
National Center for Education Statistics. 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: GPO, 1993).
Daniel Perlstein. “Imagined Authority: Blackboard Jungle and the Project of Educational Liberalism,” Paedagogica Historica 36 (2000): 407–425;
Grace Palladino. Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 160.
Ibid. The term “slum,” while officially referring only to a poverty-stricken neighborhood with substandard housing, usually had racial connotations in the 1950s. See, for example: Bertram Beck. “Delinquents in the Classroom,” NEA Journal (Nov. 1956): 485–487; Clendenen in, “Why Teen-agers Go Wrong.” On the use of the term “slum” more generally, see: Lawrence M. Friedman. Government and Slum Housing (New York: Arno Press, 1978);
David Goldberg. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1993).
In 1957, the Associate Superintendent estimated that approximately 1.5 percent of the city’s 165,000 junior and high school students required placement at a special school.”Get-Tough Discipline Policy Urged for Problem Pupils,” Los Angeles Times (April 12, 1957): 1. If these students were evenly distributed across classrooms and schools, then most secondary school teachers would likely encounter at most one or two severe behavior problems a year; a more likely scenario, however, given that black and Mexican American students were labeled as discipline problems and placed in special schools at higher rates than white students, is that many of the district’s teachers never encountered a student labeled as having a serious behavior problem. Allan Pitkanen. “Discipline: What’s the Problem?” Los Angeles School Journal 41 (November 1957): 19, 30.
John Manning. “Discipline in the Good Old Days,” Originally published in Phi Delta Kappan (December, 1959). Reprinted in Corporal Punishment in American Education: Readings in History, Practice, and Alternatives edited by Irwin Hyman and James Wise (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 50–61. The Board of Education received letters of inquiry and requests for copies of the code from districts as far away as Alabama, Michigan and Washington, as well as from school districts within the state, such as Walnut Creek and Calipatria. Many of these letter-writers explained that they had read about Los Angeles’ policy in their local newspaper, DSF.
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© 2011 Judith Kafka
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Kafka, J. (2011). Bureaucratizing Discipline in the Blackboard Jungle. In: The History of “Zero Tolerance” in American Public Schooling. Palgrave Studies in Urban Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001962_3
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