Reconsidering the Power of the Superintendent in the Progressive Period

Abstract

Raymond E. Callahan’s Education and the Cult of Efficiency advanced the widely accepted notion about superintendents being extremely vulnerable to myriad pressures and criticisms of various special interest groups. To test this vulnerability thesis, we followed the career path of a single school executive in three cities between 1914–1922. As an active and long-time influential member of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, Ernest Clark Hartwell typified a stalwart, modern-day, career-bound superintendent who consistently controlled school affairs during his administration. More than merely surviving as a school executive, he built an educational empire by aligning himself with managerial elites and fellow career-bound superintendents. In our study of this first-generation progressive, we show how he won the right to dominate the affairs of schools, systematically applied a business ethos to his work, adopted antilabor practices to dash militant teachers’ hopes for democratic control, and enlarged a state-sanctioned school bureaucracy to shield himself from public criticism in different institutional settings.