Newton Schools history, Part 5: Public Schools expand their mission – 1860 to 1900

In colonial Newton, the public school mission was clear: protect children against Satan by teaching them to read the Bible. After the Civil War, the school day still began with devotional activities, but there were more demands on the curriculum. The government wanted civics and heroic American history to unite the nation; educational leaders wanted child-centered methods for the head, heart, and hand; and industrialists wanted a skilled workforce. On top of all that, Newton’s schoolhouses were filled to bursting with the children of Irish immigrants.

Population growth

In 1860, Newton had 1,627 students and 36 teachers in its 11 schoolhouses. By 1900, Newton had 5,025 students, 21 school buildings, and 187 teachers. The high school population had grown from 72 to 690 pupils, and its building had been enlarged twice. School Committee reports were filled with requests for more funds and descriptions of overcrowded, unhealthy schoolrooms:

“Nearly one hundred of our children are doing their school-work in rooms which necessitate frequent resort to gaslight, and in an atmosphere which has been justly pronounced as “poisonous.” [1]

“The [Claflin] school building is now too small for the number of pupils in attendance. The attic rooms are not proper places for the children, and the rooms on the first and second floors are already over-crowded.” [2]

Per-pupil expenditures rise

In 1860, the town spent $14,000 on its public schools, $10.35 per pupil, the tenth-highest per-pupil expenditure in Massachusetts. The School Committee explained the higher-than-average school expenses by the need to compete with Boston for teachers and the village nature of the town, which scattered students and made it challenging to balance the schoolhouses. By 1900, Newton’s school budget had increased to $176,840, or $35 per child, and was the ninth-highest per-pupil expenditure in the State. During these forty years, inflation had averaged to zero.

Some of the increased costs were self-imposed, such as evening school for illiterates. Others were imposed by the State.

In 1860, Newton had one evening school that was “kept about three months, in a manufacturing village”[3] to teach men basic literacy and numeracy. The evening schools were under the supervision of the School Committee and staffed by regular teachers supplementing their income. The 1890 superintendent’s report on evening schools stated:

“Of the 93 illiterates, 35 were minors in the employment of the Nonantum Worsted Company. The attendance of these pupils at an evening school is made compulsory by a recent statute (Chapter 433 of the Acts of 1887).”[4]

By then, women were allowed to attend, and there were evening schools in Nonantum and Newton Upper Falls.

Concern about graduation rates

Newton’s schoolhouses varied widely. In 1890, nine schools ended in the third or fifth grade.  Students were expected to transfer to the nearest school with higher grades. Oak Hill was a two-room schoolhouse with two teachers and 39 students. Seven of the students were 5-year-olds in the first grade, and seven were 15-year-olds in the eighth grade. The rest fell in between. The Rice, Adams, and Franklin schools averaged 42 students to a teacher, and some high school recitation classes had over 50 pupils. Students had to pass a test, given by the Superintendent, in all subjects to advance to the next grade. They were frequently held back, creating larger class sizes in the early grades. 

In the late 1800s, few students graduated from grammar school, and even fewer graduated from high school with a four-year degree (158 during its first 15 years). From the 1880 School Committee report:

“The number who leave school before completing the whole grammar-school course is large, as shown by the small number who enter the High School, … This strongly urges the importance of making the grammar-school course more useful to that large number who have to leave school so early to earn a living for themselves, or to help support the family, struggling hard to make some headway against poverty.”[5]

Expanding the curriculum

The School Committee attempted to improve high school graduation rates by adding a 3-year diploma (1873) and a mercantile (business) track (1875). It restricted the Latin entrance requirement to the Classical track, which prepared “for admission to any American college”[6] with lessons in Greek, Latin, and a bit of advanced math.

The high school hired special teachers for girls’ calisthenics (gym) and boys’ military drills (a reaction to the Civil War).[7] The 1887 School Committee report noted 175 boys in the high school battalion, “more than the supply of muskets” and requested “a few light guns be obtained for the smaller boys.”

The earlier grades added practical skills, such as sewing, woodworking, and bookkeeping, as well as vocal music, nature study, and gym to improve student engagement, attendance, and, it was hoped, graduation rates. 

Teachers and parents began to protest an ever-growing list of subjects:  

When the City Charter was revised in 1897, responsibility for the schoolhouses was transferred to the newly created Department of Public Buildings. The Mayor was removed as Chair of the School Committee and taken off the committee. The President of the Board of Aldermen was added, and the School Committee chose its own chair. The School Committee kept the power to manage school finances, set policy, select school texts, and hire and fire staff, including the Superintendent. School Committee Meetings were open to the public. Residents could petition the City Council or write to the local newspapers. As they did in 1899 after a popular superintendent was let go without explanation.

“In attempting to do so much, do we not hazard all? … Parents tell us that their children, after the grammar school, cannot read, or write, or spell. Businessmen complain that their sons are deplorably ignorant of arithmetic – of its practical application – that they leave the school without being able to tell whether Sicily oranges grow in Europe, Asia, or Africa.”[8]

State laws required some of the new subjects. In 1869, a group of businessmen petitioned the State legislature “for instruction in drawing in the public schools.” American-manufactured goods had had poor showings at the World Fairs since 1851. “Our manufacturers therefore compete under disadvantages with the manufacturers of Europe; for in all the manufacturing countries of Europe free provision is made for instructing workmen of all classes in drawing.”[9] The legislature agreed and in 1870 passed the nation’s first art education law requiring drawing instruction in public schools and industrial (technical) drawing “to persons over 15 years of age, either in day or evening school.”

Newton’s adult evening schools in industrial drawing were never very successful, struggling to attract and keep students after a day of work, but its grade school artwork regularly received accolades from the Board of Education as being among the best in the State.  

Truancy

The State also required Newton to provide free textbooks to students (1884) and legislated stronger truancy laws. Children between the ages of seven and sixteen “wandering about the streets without attendance upon school” were “pursued and captured daily” and brought to school. Disobedient, incorrigible, and immoral children, “who require a stricter discipline,” could be confined for up to a year in a “suitable lockup.”[10] In 1886, Newton’s first Truant Officer, Martin C. Laffie, investigated 374 cases and convicted seven boys as habitual truants. Three were sent to Lawrence Industrial School, and four were put on probation. Average attendance rates went from 80% in 1860 to 95% in 1900.

There were exceptions to the truancy law. In another Massachusetts first in the nation, the Supreme Judicial Court allowed School Committees to ban children with intellectual disabilities at their discretion. The 1885 Superintendent’s report found 154 children not in school and unaccounted for. Most likely, these were children with disabilities. Deafness caused by scarlet fever was common. The 1875 state census of people under 20 years old lists three times as many people with deafness (including deaf mute) as blind or intellectually disabled. There were private and state schools for blind, deaf, and intellectually disabled children. Indigent parents could appeal to the Governor for their child’s tuition to be paid by the State, but even these schools had restrictions. The Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth would not accept children who were incurably hydrocephalic, paralytic, epileptic, or insane. Epilepsy was believed to be contagious.

In 1875, Newton’s superintendent recommended creating ungraded classes for pupils who had fallen behind because they were out sick or who “hinder the work in the regular classes.” Nothing appears to have come of the recommendation.

Reining in expenses

The City Council and Mayor frequently asked the School Committee to rein in expenses. During the long recession of 1873-1879, economizing led to the dismissal of the music teacher[11] and “three principals to a ‘storm of protests’ since they were well-liked and the remaining four principals added duties left them no time to teach.”[12]

The Newton Free Library was considered “a valuable auxiliary” to education and delivered daily baskets of books to the schools (3,882 books in 1889), although the School Committee  had some qualms regarding the arrangement:

“It is necessary again to ask parents to do something to check this excessive indulgence in the reading of books that add but little to the permanent benefit of their children.”

Next in the Series: Newton High School in Look Magazine’s National Honor Roll 

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1. City of Newton 1881 Reports (Boston: Franklin Press, 1882) 266. [back]
2. City of Newton 1883 Reports (Boston: Franklin Press, 1884) 268. [back]
3. 1861 Board of Education Report, 85. [back]
4. City of Newton, 1890 City Reports, 568. [back]
5. City of Newton, 1880 City Reports (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill) 313. [back]
6. City of Newton, 1880 City Reports (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill)  283. [back]
7. Francis Foster, 24. [back]
8. Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Newton 1880. (Boston: Rand, Avery & Co.) 15. [back]
9. Bolin, P. E. (2006). Drawing on the Past for Insight and Direction: Ten Considerations in Legislative and Policy Development for Art Education. Studies in Art Education, 47(4), 326–343. [back]
10. An Act Relative to School Attendance and Truancy, Acts, 1989, Chapter 496, 459. [back]
11. City of Newton, 1880 City Reports (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill) 260. [back]
12. Francis 16. [back]