Cubberley, Ellwood

Considered one of the “founders” of educational administration as a discipline, Ellwood P. Cubberley (1868–1941) was born in a small town in Indiana, where his father was the local pharmacist. He attended Purdue University but later shifted to Indiana University, where he graduated in physics in 1891. He was greatly assisted in his development by David Starr Jordan, then president of Indiana University and later Stanford. Cubberley often accompanied Jordan on his lecture tours. On the recommendation of Jordan, Cubberley was offered the job of superintendent of schools of San Diego in 1896. Cubberley stayed 2 years and went to Stanford as an assistant professor of education. In 1901, Cubberley enrolled at Teachers College Columbia University, receiving his [Page 245]master's degree in 1902. In 1904, he received his doctorate from Teachers College.

In 1904, Columbia's Teachers College was the undisputed educational training center for scientifically based “progressive” education. Cubberley teamed up with other educational progressives to form a network of control and influence that changed American public education. This network of 19 colleagues, frequently called the “Educational Trust,” was most often referred to as the “Cleveland Conference.” The stated goal of the Cleveland Conference was to solve education's social and economic issues through scientific diagnosis and prescription. However, the Cleveland Conference was viewed by many as a private, perhaps even secret, selfappointed organization intent upon instituting “democratic” educational revisions that could occur only when education rid itself of the influence of local lay people, which would happen through a process of centralization.

Cubberley, a significant contributor to the power and influence exerted by the Cleveland Conference, portrayed American education as a progressive continuum toward improvement. His research primarily focused on reviews of public policy documents and depicted schools as institutions where equality had been attained. Critics note, however, that his research did not ask questions about who was excluded from education or what was lost when the state took education away from local entities.

“Consensus history,” also known as the “Cubberley tradition,” wrote of educational successes and improvements and painted a picture of education as equal to all. Critics, on the other hand, thought the writings of the consensus historians relied too heavily on the perspective of White male school leaders.

Cubberley and other turn-of-the-century educational historians were influenced by Frederick Taylor's efficiency movement and claimed that schools were a workplace; teachers were the factory workers; students were the raw material; and learning was the product. Children, raw products, who could not be “processed,” were considered scraps and were dropped from the assembly line; ergo the term dropout. Consensus historians also posited that product (learning) specifications should come from government and industry, not local lay persons. Cubberley believed a school's mission was to assimilate immigrants (and others) into an English-speaking nation. Cubberley also proposed that only men who were successful in the handling of large businesses were best suited to run schools.

Vestiges of Cubberley's principles remain ingrained in American schools, as exemplified by 50-minute class periods that limit social interaction of teacher and pupils and in norm-referenced testing that labels students at an early age as “defective material” that needs to be dropped from the production line.

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