November 14, 2006
Schools and Historical Change II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST Fred Smoler’s post on James Madison High School raised some interesting issues. As Fred points out, when the new Congress is sworn in next January, James Madison will count among its alumni three sitting members of the U.S. Senate (Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and Charles Schumer of New York) and one associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Fred also notes that James Madison has produced three Nobel laureates, as has its nearby competitor, Abraham Lincoln High School.
Fred explores several possible explanations for the tremendous success of these two public schools in churning out high achievers. One quite plausible explanation is that “public schools were better when they were staffed by extremely capable women denied the chance to work in many other places, and that nursing care in public hospitals was once better for the same reason. If so, good public schools—a crucial ingredient of one vision of a just political order—depended on a linked injustice.”
Another explanation is ethnicity. In her influential history of interwar American Jewry, At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews, Deborah Dash Moore, a professor at Vassar College, looks particularly at Abraham Lincoln High and nearby Thomas Jefferson High and finds that the schools’ student bodies, teaching staff, and administrators were overwhelmingly Jewish by the 1930s. This remained the case well into the 1960s, when most of the aforementioned notables were in high school. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that all of these notables are, in fact, Jewish.
Scholars have long debated the roots of American Jews’ obsession with education. Some of their explanations have verged on the chauvinistic, while others are less offensive and more plausible—for instance, because Jewish immigrants arrived in America with a particular set of skills, pursuing a high school and college education was simply a rational economic strategy.
Whatever the causes of the American Jewish love affair with education, it’s hard to deny a pattern. In my forthcoming book on postwar ethnicity, I find that as early as the 1930s Jews composed between 80 and 90 percent of the student body at City College, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College, over 90 percent at New York University, and 22 percent at Columbia University. And many Jews understood this last figure to be the result of aggressive anti-Semitic restrictions (in 1920, the proportion of Jews at Columbia had been 40 percent). As late as 1963 almost half of all Jews in New York City had continued their education beyond high school, compared with 27.5 percent and 18.2 percent in the Irish and Italian communities, respectively. Over half of all Irish New Yorkers and 60 percent of Italians did not finish high school, compared with 35 percent of the city’s Jews and only 21 percent among the native-born.
Fred invoked an amusing anecdote about his time at Cambridge University, and as a faculty member there, I have a few of my own. When I interviewed for my lectureship, a member of the hiring committee asked me why New York’s public schools were once a national gem but are now a national nightmare. Of course, this isn’t exactly right; many of New York’s high schools remain exemplars of scholarship and achievement. I suspected that he wanted me to answer, “because the schools were predominately Jewish then, and aren’t now,” but I didn’t oblige. I’m still not sure that’s the right answer, but it’s not the wrong answer, either.
|
