Remembering Two Historians: David Tyack and Michael Katz

            If we’ve ever needed clarity of thought, and a respect for knowledge, and an ethical commitment to understanding history and its consequences—if we’ve ever needed these virtues, we need them now. Two historians of education whose work embodies intellectual rigor and moral sensibility died before the 2016 presidential election, David Tyack in October, 2016 and Michael Katz several years earlier in August, 2014. David would be appalled at the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, and Michael, who wrote brilliantly on urban history and on poverty as well as on education, would have observed with horror the prospect of rolling back protections for the vulnerable to pre-FDR levels. And both would have much to say about a looming Second Gilded Age. As we prepare for the next few years, it could help us to keep these historians’ books close at hand.

            In my blog of August 25, 2014, I posted a eulogy for Michael Katz as well as an earlier commentary I wrote when he updated his fine book, The Undeserving Poor. You can access that post here http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-tribute-to-historian-michael-b-katz.html, and I also quote some of it now to give you a feel for what makes The Undeserving Poor so terribly fitting for our time:

The Undeserving Poor [I wrote] is not so much a history of poverty in the United States as a history of ideas about poverty, and the ideas are complex and, for the most part, troubling. I began to understand how it is that poor people are so often categorized and characterized in such one-dimensional and insidious ways: as shirkers, or passive, or morally defective, or stupid—as people responsible for their poverty because of some damning personal or cultural quality. I also began to understand the reasons behind various interventions aimed at poverty—or refusals to intervene. I had never read a book quite like this, one that demonstrated just how much the ideas and language in the air matter in the construction of public policy.

            I read the first edition of The Undeserving Poor in the early 1990s and wrote Michael Katz a long fan letter that sparked a lasting friendship. My introduction to David Tyack began in an even more personal way.

           

            Though my first year of college was pretty bumpy, I eventually found my way with the help of some exceptional teachers, and was fortunate to be in the running for a fellowship awarded by a national foundation. The process involved an interview, which was scheduled in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, several bus transfers from my home. I was green as chlorophyll, and this world of high-powered academics and high-stakes interviews in hotels I had never seen from the inside was new territory for me. To make matters worse, the buses were running late, so I showed up at my interviewer’s door in a sweat and nervous. Thank God the interviewer was David Tyack, then a young professor from Reed College. I didn’t know anything about him, let alone about Reed College, but the guy couldn’t have been nicer. He put me at ease immediately, and we talked for over an hour. (Anybody reading this who knew David wouldn’t be at all surprised.) Years later when I was trying to educate myself about the history of American education, I kept running across this David Tyack fellow. The little educational history I had read up to that point was mostly in textbooks, and, to be honest, was dry and antiseptic. Tyack’s rendering was vivid, human, full of memorable characters and events, richly interpreted.  I wrote David Tyack a letter reintroducing myself and the result was another long-lasting friendship.

            David wrote or co-authored so many fine articles and books, it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll limit myself to four: The One Best System: A History of Urban Education; Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 and Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (these last two are co-authored with the political scientist Elisabeth Hansot, David’s wife); and, with Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. David took on big topics and always looked at the societal and systems level of things in his analysis of schooling—though his analysis is also laden with specific detail, with classroom scenes, with quotations from administrators and teachers and parents, and with snapshots of communities. A reader comes to understand both the particulars of time and place and the many forces that influence those particulars. One of the many things I appreciate about David’s work is his refusal to simplify. You come away from his books with a rich and complex understanding of schooling. He avoids simplification in the lessons we can take from history, though he very much wants us to benefit from what history can teach us. “The way we understand [the] past,” he writes in the Prologue to The One Best System, “profoundly shapes how we make choices today.” He also deeply believed in the civic purpose of the public school, its central place in a democracy. Yet, and here’s the nuance again, he was clear-eyed as well about the ways our schools have historically contributed to inequality.

           

            Reading David Tyack and Michael Katz provides models for interpreting complicated, even baffling, phenomena, models as to how to systematically sort through a flurry of information, how to shape a careful argument, how to weigh and honor evidence that contradicts that argument, and, finally, how to do all this in the service of telling a story about the world we live or have lived in, a story that is as intellectually and morally legitimate as we can make it.

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