Kenneth M Gold - School's in (Book Review - History of Education Quarterly - Srping 2003)

8/3/2019 Kenneth M Gold - School's in (Book Review - History of Education Quarterly - Srping 2003)

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I Book Review H istory of Ed ucation Q uarterly , 43 .11 Th e H istory Cooperativeage 1 of 3Vol. 43, No.ournalsearcha r t n e r sn f o r m a t io nSpring 2003 Previous Table of contents Next

Book Reviews

Kenneth M. Gold. School 's In: Th e H is tory of Sum mer E ducat ion in A mericanPubl ic Schools . New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 315 pp. Paper $29.95.Kenn eth Gold in no w ay makes so bold a c la im as to say that one cannotfully understand the institutional development of public schooling in thiscountry w ithout understanding the chan ging historical role of publicsummer education. However, reading School 's In, one could w ell think sucha bold claim w ould not ha ve been entirely out of line. Gold's serious, wellresearched, and well documented scholarly work on the changing nature ofsumm er education in United States public schools presents a numb er offindings that revise and deepen ou r understanding of how public schoolingdeveloped institutionally.

Gold sweeps aw ay the enduring myth that schools in Am erica havetraditionally been closed during the summ er because children's labor w asneeded on the family farm. Not only does this myth m ake no sense for urbanschool calendars but it also ignores the reality that farm life is most intenseduring spring and fall (at planting and harvest t ime), when ru ral schools didtypically close. Sim ilarly, Gold revisits the enduring perception that sum merschooling has never b een of equal caliber as schooling at other times of theyear. Looking at records from New York, M ichigan, and Virginia, he findsthat rural and urban schools generally enrolled about as m any students,taught the same types of subjects, and hired abou t as many teachers duringthe summ er and winter terms. During sum mer terms in rural areas, howev er,young girls were more o ften hired to teach than during w inter terms.

Based on these findings that summ er terms were an integral part ofurban and ru ral schools from early to mid nineteenth centuryG old askswhat happened to them. Why were summ er terms eliminated? The answerGo ld offers differs for rural and urb an areas. In rural area s, he argues, theybecam e a "casualty of efforts to lengthen and standardize school terms" (p.19), while in urban areas they disappeared because of: the emerging m iddle-class habit of taking summ er vacations; school budgetary crises; and schoolofficials' beliefs: (1) that "school conditions in the summ er w ere inferior,despite the availability of statistics that contradicted this view" (p. 72), (2)teachers could develop professionally during the summ er, and (3) studentsand teachers needed rest lest they be overtaxed .

Gold's most interesting chapter is the third ("'S chool's Out for S umm er': 4Ideology and the Creation of Sum mer V acation, 1840-90"), which providesa plausible (and convincing) exp lanation for how, in the absence of anycentralized n ational authority or coordinating agency, school calendars

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I Book R eview I History of Education Qu arterly, 43.1 I The History Cooperativeage 2 of 3coalesced across the countryin both rural and urban areas, regardless ofregion with sum mer as a time for vacation. This chapter 's explanation restson a rhetorical and sociological analysis showing how conventionalnineteenth-century understandings of how the mind worked and of time hadopposite effects upon rural and urban school systems as they und erwentcalendar reforms. In urban areas wh ere the school year was lon g (rangingfrom 240 to 259 days in major cities in the 1840s) these understandingsmade it logical to reduce the length of the school year to around 200 days bythe century's end so as not to overtax students' and teachers' mentalcapacities. In rural areas, where the school year was often irregular, theseunderstandings made it logical to increase the length of the school year toreduce students ' "setback," i.e., the loss of learning an d m ental agility thatcan occur over long vacations.

For most readers, these first three chapters may be the most interestinghalf of G old's book because they provide an innovative slice throughfamiliar (and some unfamiliar) territory. The next three chapters are moreconventional. They explain wh y the school year became shorter over the endof the nineteenth century; how nonacademic summer "vacation schools"emerged in cities around the turn of the century to fill the lengtheningsummer break; and how vacation schools became transformed into academicsummer school in the early twentieth century.

G old provides detailed case studies with abundant statistical evidence of 6the development of vacation schools in Providence and Newark and of theinstitutionalization of acad emic sum mer school in Detroit. He identifies fourdistinct stages in the dev elopment o f vacation schools and their transitioninto summ er schools: (1) vacation schools w ere founded by ch aritableorganizations, (2) vacation schools w ere partially public funded, (3)vacation schools were com pletely public funded, and (4) academic classesfor credit were introduced into vacation schools and eventually took over thesumm er curriculum, turning the schools into extensions of the regular pu blicschool or into "summ er schools". G old's analysis reveals that while vacationschools largely served their target population immigrant and lower-classstudents, for whom they actually served as a form of summ er day carewhen they became summer schools, the student body changed in ways notanticipated by school officials: the summ er schools became filled w ithstudents seeking or pushed to skip ahead.When summer school became largely a means of getting "studentsthrough the graded system"(p. 204), summer schools came und er harshcriticism: "administrators judged them by the standards of the regularschools, . .. [and] deemed them insufficient: they adm itted too manymarginal students, they promoted students too easily, and they lacked

enough time to cover a school subject fully" (p. 208). These criticisms, G oldconcludes, were most likely well-founded. However, Gold contextualizessuch concerns about sum mer school by p ointing out the role administratorsand educators played in relegating summ er school to a subordinate place inthe public school system: "Educators set up a system in which credentialismmattered as much as learning and then com plained when students blatantlyused summ er school to obtain such credentials and summ er staffs loweredlearning standards for them" (p. 206).G old concludes the book w ith an epilogue that tells the story of summ er 8

http://www.historycoopemtive.org/journals/heq/43.1/br 8.html/26/2004Published byThe l i is tory ofEducation Society


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Publ ished byThe H is tory of-Education So ciety

Presented onlineIn association withthe Ilistory Cooperative

0 2003The History ofEducation Society

IBook R eview I H istory of Ed ucation Q uarterly , 43 .1IThe History Cooperativeage 3 of 3school after it became institutionalized as an extension of the regular pub licschool. The epilogue traces how the federal governm ent incorporatedsumm er school into the National Defense Education Act of 1958,comp ensatory education programs in the 1960s and 1970s, and edu cationexcellence in the 1980s and 1990s. In doing so, he contends, the federalgovernment encountered the same problem s that run throughout the historyof summ er education. Gold ends by drawing out the pol icy implicat ions ofusing summer education and recommend ing that "sum mer can and shouldplay a vital and special role in pub lic education today" (p. ?).

This is a f ine study that is accessible , well organized, and draw s broadly 9from m ultiple case studies across the country. It can be criticized for notdrawing enough on w estern sources , for not bringing out the exp erience ofsum mer school or its content at different historical mom ents, and in a fewpoints for seeing a little too much through the lens of sum mer ed ucation. Forexamp le, the claim that " Innovations like consolidated districts, free schools,graded classes, and an official school year were all designed in p art toincrease the length of the school year and to decrease the use of summ er forschooling" (p . 27) seems to stress a "part" that w as a very m inor if at all partof the original purpose of m aking schools free and instituting graded classes.However, such criticism would miss one of the main contributions of thiswork: it tills new ground an d p rovides a broader historical foundation for theemergin g wave of scholarship that seeks not to criticize or place blame forproblems w ith the institutional development of pub lic schooling, but rather,to explain the development in a way that adequ ately accounts for the sameinstitutional changes occurring across the country, in h istorical proximity,under very different political and social conditions

Stephen ProvasnikAmerican Institutes for Research

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Kenneth M Gold - School's in (Book Review - History of Education Quarterly - Srping 2003)