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Johann Neem: Before Jumping Aboard the Choice Train, Remember Why We Have Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2018 //
9

 

Johann Neem is the author of an important book about public education titled Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.

He recently wrote a post for the Brookings Blog in which he warned that anyone who races to embrace school choice should think hard about why public schools were created and what we lose if we abandon them. He reminds us that public schools are about much more than test scores.

He writes:

“Why do we have public schools? For Americans between the Revolution and the Civil War, the reasons were primarily civic. They wanted, first, to ensure that all Americans had the skills, knowledge, and values to be effective citizens. As North Carolina state Senator Archibald Murphey put in an 1816 report, “a republic is bottomed on the virtue of her citizens.”They wanted, second, to foster solidarity during a time of increasing immigration when, like today, Americans’ divisions often led to violence. As the Fond du Lac, Wis., superintendent of schools put it in 1854: In a society divided by religion, race, party, and wealth, public schools would “harmonize the discordant elements” as students “sympathize with and for the other.”

“Earlier Americans also argued that a democracy should develop every child’s potential. This required a rich curriculum in the arts and sciences. As the Rev. William Ellery Channing put it in the 1830s, every person is entitled to liberal education “because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nails, or pins.” Indeed, as one Alabama public school advocate argued, schools would not “weaken the self-reliance of the citizen” nor “destroy his individuality,” but “teach him to feel it.”

“Finally, earlier Americans wanted to equalize access. At the time of American independence, education had remained a family responsibility. How did it become a public good? Here, the past speaks directly to the present. Convincing Americans to pay taxes to support other people’s children was not simple. Pennsylvania Superintendent Francis Shunk noted in 1838 that it was no easy task to persuade someone that “in opposition to the custom of the country and his fixed opinions founded on that custom, he has a deep and abiding concern in the education of all the children around him, and should cheerfully submit to taxation for the purpose of accomplishing this great object…

“Historically, the most successful public programs have benefited a broad constituency. When policies are seen as “welfare,” taxpayers resent their money being spent on others. Public education—like Social Security—succeeded because most Americans benefited.

“The principles above guided public education’s advocates. And public schools were—and remain—among America’s most successful institutions. Our public schools struggle largely in places where poverty makes it difficult for students to learn. Our efforts to reform, then, must build on public schools’ immense historical success.”

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, History, School Choice, Trump

Max Boot: The Second Amendment Was Not Meant to Be a Suicide Pact or a License to Murder Children

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2018 //
33

 

 

Max Boot, foreign policy expert, wrote this article in the Washington Post about the NRA’s devilish distortion of the Second Amendment:

http://links.cfr.mkt5175.com/ctt?kn=1&ms=NTYwMDU4MTMS1&r=NjMxMjU1OTM2NTQS1&b=0&j=MTM0MjQxNTMwMAS2&mt=1&rt=0

He begins:

“In 1791, when the Second Amendment was adopted, the state-of-the-art firearm was a flintlock musket firing paper cartridges loaded with gunpowder and a lead ball. Given the laborious loading procedures, a skilled soldier could fire at most two or three shots a minute. The smoothbore flintlock lacked both stopping power and accuracy; hence the need for lines of soldiers to fire from point-blank range at each other.

“Nikolas Cruz did not come to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., toting a musket. Police say he came with an AR-15 rifle, which typically comes equipped with 30-round magazines and can easily fire 45 rounds per minute. And it fires not lead balls but .223 rounds that at close range could make the head of a Viet Cong soldier “explode” or turn his torso into “one big hole.”

“Little wonder that the AR-15 and its variants have become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. It was employed not only allegedly by Cruz but also (among other weapons) by Adam Lanza, who used it to kill 27 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School; by James Holmes to kill 12 people in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater; by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik to kill 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.; by Devin Patrick Kelley to kill 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; and by Stephen Paddock, who used a modified version which allowed near-automatic rates of fire, to kill 58 people in Las Vegas in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Three of these shootings — Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas and Parkland — have all occurred in the past five months. In other words, the danger is growing.

“No other country experiences this kind of terror on an ongoing basis — save places such as Afghanistan and Syria that are actually at war. The United States has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but, according to a University of Alabama researcher , between 1966 and 2012 it had 31 percent of all gunmen involved in mass shootings. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Americans own 48 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns, far more per capita than any other country. (Yemen is No. 2 but lags far behind.)

“It simply beggars the imagination that Republicans, in thrall to the National Rifle Association, continue to insist there is no relationship between gun ownership and gun crime. Instead of effective regulations, they offer “thoughts and prayers,” as if mass shootings were acts of God like earthquakes and hurricanes that mere mortals are powerless to prevent. This was Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R.-La.) after the Las Vegas shooting: “I just hate to see this issue politicized. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, but they do in this world, and what happened in Las Vegas was terrible. But we can’t legislate away every problem in the world.”

 

 

Categories Guns in Schools, History

History Lesson: The Founders Cared about Education Before the Constitution Was Adopted

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2018 //
78

We often hear that the word “education” is not included in the U.S. Constitution. That is true, but it does not mean that the Founding Fathers were indifferent to the importance of education. The U.S. Constitution was written and signed in 1787. Before the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1789, the Congress passed Ordinances that expressed their commitment to the importance of public schools.

Congress enacted the Land Ordinance of 1785 to show how the new lands in the western territories should be settled. This ordinance laid out new townships into 36 sections. Section 16, in the center, was to be set aside in every township in the new Western Territory for the maintenance of public schools. (“There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.”) The committee that wrote the Land Ordinance included Thomas Jefferson of (Virginia), Hugh Williamson (North Carolina), David Howell (Rhode Island), Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts) and Jacob Read (South Carolina).

Two years later came the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This ordinance provided land in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions for settlement. (This region eventually broke into five states: Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Illinois [and a part of Minnesota]).

Of particular interest is Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance, which reads in part:

Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

These two ordinances were written by the Founding Fathers and the earliest Congresses, preceding the adoption of the Constitution. In addition to their central purpose, to lay out the rules for settlement, they were meant to encourage the development and proliferation of public schools in every township in every new state. The ordinances also prohibited the spread of slavery into the new territory and the new states after 1800.

While the Founding Fathers had high regard for religion, they did not want government to establish any religion. They incorporated this view into the First Amendment, which was part of the ten amendments included in the Bill of Rights, adopted on December 15, 1791. Responsility for the development and maintenance of public schools was left to the states, as is implicit in the Tenth Amendment.

The Founding Fathers were well aware of the history of religious warfare that had divided Europe for centuries and plunged the continent into chaos again and again. They wanted this new democracy to be a place of religious freedom, where each person could live in accord with his conscience without the interference or the support of government. In a land of many different forms of Christianity, as well as Judaism, the Founders wanted vigorous and successful public schools that neither favored nor opposed any religion.

It is ironic that four of the five states created under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance–Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin–have chosen to disregard the clearly stated wishes of our Founding Fathers. The Northwest Ordinance did not set aside a section for religious schools or private schools. Section 16 in every town was for public schools.

Categories History, Parents, Religion

John Dewey: My Pedagogic Creed

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2017 //
45

 

 

This seems to me like a good way to end a very difficult year.

Every so often, it is useful to remember the purposes of education.

It is not about test scores.

It is not about readiness for college and career.

It is not about readiness to be a global competitor.

It is the process of developing judgment, humanity, character, ethical and moral sensibility, one’s sense of self and sense of civic responsibility.

A journalist recently asked me what to read to learn about Dewey’s vision of education.

This was my recommendation.

Here is John Dewey’s creed.

What do you think?

Categories Character, Citizenship, Creativity, History, Real Education

Tom Birmingham: Our Schools Must Not Ignore History

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2017 //
34

Tom Birmingham was one of the fathers of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993. He writes here that the teaching of history has always been considered a foundational part of education in Massachusetts, the birthplace of public schooling. History is fundamental to citizenship, and citizenship is the main purpose of public schooling.

He writes:

“ABOUT 25 YEARS AGO, as a member of the Massachusetts Senate, I co-authored the Massachusetts Education Reform Act. Drafting a complex bill with such far-reaching consequences requires significant compromise, but one thing my counterparts in the House of Representatives and then-Gov. Bill Weld all agreed upon was the importance of educating students about our nation’s history.

“As a result, the law explicitly requires instruction about the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the US Constitution. We also made passage of a US history test a high school graduation requirement.

“Sadly, subsequent generations of political leaders have not shared our view of the importance of US history. It is now becoming an afterthought in too many of our public schools.

“The Founding Fathers believed that to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship, Americans had to understand our history and its seminal documents. They also saw it as the role of public schools to pass on what James Madison called “the political religion of the nation” to its children. As the great educational standards expert E.D. Hirsch said, “The aim of schooling was not just to Americanize the immigrants, but also to Americanize the Americans.”

“Without this, they believed the new nation itself might dissolve. They had good reason: Until then internal dissension had brought down every previous republic.

“According to Professor Hirsch, the public school curriculum should be based on acquiring wide background knowledge, not just learning how to learn. This belief is diametrically opposed to the view held by many that the main purpose of public education should merely be to prepare students for the workforce. As it turns out, the evidence is fairly strong that students who receive a broad liberal arts education also tend to do better financially than those taught a narrower curriculum focused on just training students for a job.

“The role of public schools in creating citizens capable of informed participation in American democracy was particularly important in a pluralistic society like ours. Unlike so many others, our country was not based upon a state religion, ancient boundaries or bloodlines, but instead on a shared system of ideas, principles, and beliefs.”

Some people think that the way to reinvigorate history in the curriculum is to require standardized history tests. I disagree. History must be taught with questions, discussions, debates, theories, and curiosity. Standardized tests would reduce history to nothing more than facts. Facts matter, but what makes history exciting is the quest and the questions, the controversies and the uncertainty.

Categories History, Ignorance, Massachusetts, Standardized Testing

Timothy Egan: Blame Our Civic Stupidity on Failure to Teach Civics and Government

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2017 //
112

Timothy Egan writes a regular column in the New York Times. I usually find myself vigorously nodding in assent as I read whatever he writes. I went to a wonderful conference at Oberlin College this week, and he gave a talk that is reflected in this column.

He blames our current national stupidity on schools and teachers because they are not teaching civics, Government, and history. He acknowledges that these vital courses may have been casualties of the standardized testing hysteria.

But that can’t be the only reason so many Americans can’t tell the difference between fake news and facts, why so many Americans don’t bother to vote, why so many accept outright lies without question, why so many know so little about our government or our history.

Teachers, what do you think?

Read what Egan writes and speak up.

Categories Citizenship, Civics, Fake News, History, Ignorance, Lies

How to Decipher and Detect Fake News

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
14

Jack Hassard wrote about the use of social media to spread fake news. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have become facilitators of fake news.

We know it is there. What can we do about it?

This is a very good analysis by a group of scholars at the Stanford History Education Group about civic reasoning, which explains how to avoid being hoaxed by fake news.

The questions that must always be present in any discussion is: How do you know? Who said so? What is the source? How reliable is the source? Can you confirm this information elsewhere? What counts as reliable evidence?

Many people use Wikipedia as a reliable source, but Wikipedia is crowdsourced and is not authoritative. I recall some years back when I gave a lecture in North Carolina that was named in honor of a distinguished senator of the state. The Wikipedia entry said he was a Communist, as were members of his staff. This was obviously the work of a troll. But it might not be obvious to a student researching a paper.

They write:

“Fake news is certainly a problem. Sadly, however, it’s not our biggest. Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact can help us detect canards invented by enterprising Macedonian teenagers,3 but the Internet is filled with content that defies labels like “fake” or “real.” Determining who’s behind information and whether it’s worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy.

“For every social issue, there are websites that blast half-true headlines, manipulate data, and advance partisan agendas. Some of these sites are transparent about who runs them and whom they represent. Others conceal their backing, portraying themselves as grassroots efforts when, in reality, they’re front groups for commercial or political interests. This doesn’t necessarily mean their information is false. But citizens trying to make decisions about, say, genetically modified foods should know whether a biotechnology company is behind the information they’re reading. Understanding where information comes from and who’s responsible for it are essential in making judgments of credibility.

“The Internet dominates young people’s lives. According to one study, teenagers spend nearly nine hours a day online.4 With optimism, trepidation, and, at times, annoyance, we’ve witnessed young people’s digital dexterity and astonishing screen stamina. Today’s students are more likely to learn about the world through social media than through traditional sources like print newspapers.5 It’s critical that students know how to evaluate the content that flashes on their screens.

“Unfortunately, our research at the Stanford History Education Group demonstrates they don’t.* Between January 2015 and June 2016, we administered 56 tasks to students across 12 states. (To see sample items, go to http://sheg.stanford.edu (link is external).) We collected and analyzed 7,804 student responses. Our sites for field-testing included middle and high schools in inner-city Los Angeles and suburban schools outside of Minneapolis. We also administered tasks to college-level students at six different universities that ranged from Stanford University, a school that rejects 94 percent of its applicants, to large state universities that admit the majority of students who apply.

“When thousands of students respond to dozens of tasks, we can expect many variations. That was certainly the case in our experience. However, at each level—middle school, high school, and college—these variations paled in comparison to a stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about information on the Internet can be summed up in two words: needs improvement.

“Our “digital natives”† may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they’re easily duped. Our exercises were not designed to assign letter grades or make hairsplitting distinctions between “good” and “better.” Rather, at each level, we sought to establish a reasonable bar that was within reach of middle school, high school, or college students. At each level, students fell far below the bar.”

They offer specific examples of hoaxes to show how easily people are duped.

They conclude:

“The senior fact checker at a national publication told us what she tells her staff: “The greatest enemy of fact checking is hubris”—that is, having excessive trust in one’s ability to accurately pass judgment on an unfamiliar website. Even on seemingly innocuous topics, the fact checker says to herself, “This seems official; it may be or may not be. I’d better check.”

“The strategies we recommend here are ways to fend off hubris. They remind us that our eyes deceive, and that we, too, can fall prey to professional-looking graphics, strings of academic references, and the allure of “.org” domains. Our approach does not turn students into cynics. It does the opposite: it provides them with a dose of humility. It helps them understand that they are fallible.

“The web is a sophisticated place, and all of us are susceptible to being taken in. Like hikers using a compass to make their way through the wilderness, we need a few powerful and flexible strategies for getting our bearings, gaining a sense of where we’ve landed, and deciding how to move forward through treacherous online terrain. Rather than having students slog through strings of questions about easily manipulated features, we should be teaching them that the World Wide Web is, in the words of web-literacy expert Mike Caulfield, “a web, and the way to establish authority and truth on the web is to use the web-like properties of it.”13 This is what professional fact checkers do.

“It’s what we should be teaching our students to do as well.”

Categories Civics, Education Reform, History, Research

What is Populism? Why Trump, Bannon, and Breitbart Are NOT Populists

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2017 //
30

Words matter.

Trump has been called a “populist.” The Brexit movement has been called “populist.” Marie LePen, who ran for president of France on an anti-immigration platform, was called a “populist.” Bannon and his anti-Establishment movement funded by the billionaire Mercers are called “populists.” No doubt, someone thinks the Koch brothers are “populists.”

None of these people are populists, not in the literal sense of representing ordinary folk, nor in the historical sense of connecting to a movement that surfaced in the late 1890s.

Populism as a movement means “for the people,” for the ordinary people, for working people. It should not be confused with appeals to nationalism, racism, and chauvinism. Demagogues appeal to base instincts, but they are not populists by doing so.

If you support a plan to take away health insurance from millions of people, you are not a populist. If you support tax reform that cuts the taxes of the richest people in society (for example, by eliminating the estate tax and by reducing the tax rates for those with the highest income), you are not a populist. If you support the privatizing of public services so that they can be transferred to private ownership, you are not a populist. If you support the privatization of public education, you are neither a populist nor a progressive, because both movements fought to expand government services, not to privatize them.

The Populist Party of the late nineteenth century emerged to fight against the rich and powerful interests of the day on behalf of working men, farmers, and the powerless. The Populist movement of a century ago–also known as the People’s Party–genuinely wanted leftwing reforms that favored the great mass of people, not the rich. It wanted the protection of government, not its destruction. It defended common folk and farmers against the bankers, the railroads, and powerful capitalists. It allied with the labor movement. It was a leftwing movement for the empowerment of the voiceless. The Populists were part of an agrarian revolt against the powerful interests that ruled their lives, especially the banks and the railroads.

Bannon and his billionaire buddies, including Trump and Mercer, are subversives who want to destroy the government and destroy programs that protect the neediest among us.

When Trump rails against the elites, it is a joke. He is a billionaire, not a farmer or a dispossessed laborer. He does not speak for the poor or for working people, though he sometimes pretends to. A populist does not live in mansions with a large staff of servants. A populist does not own golf clubs, hotels, and casinos. A populist does not play to ethnic and racial hatreds. A populist seeks to unite the common folk to advance an economic agenda that protects them from being preyed upon by people like Trump and Bannon and the Koch brothers and the Mercers.

Calling them “populists” not only distorts the actual and historical meaning of the word, but gives them the veneer of sympathy for the working poor that they cynically manipulate.

In Europe, those who are wrongly called “populist” are more accurately referred to as nationalists, or in extreme cases, as fascists who want to purify the ethnic stock of their country.

Disagree if you will, but read more about Populism before you do.

Here is the Populist Party Platform Of 1892.

Categories Education Reform, History

Study: NAEP Does Not Assess Critical Thinking Skills: No Standardized Test Can Do That

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2017 //
40

The link was left off. It is here.

Valerie Strauss reports on an important new study by a group at Stanford University led by historian Sam Wineburg.

NAEP supporters say that the tests are able to measure skills that other standardized tests can’t: problem solving, critical thinking, etc. But this post takes issue with that notion. It was written by three Stanford University academics who are part of the Stanford History Education Group: Sam Wineburg, Mark Smith and Joel Breakstone.

Wineburg, an education and history professor in the Graduate School of Education, is the founder and executive director of the Stanford History Education Group and Stanford’s PhD program in education history. His research interests include assessment, civic education and literacy. Smith, a former high school social studies in Iowa, Texas and California, is the group’s director of assessment; his research is focused on K-12 history assessment, particularly on issues of validity and generalizability. And Breakstone, a former high school history teacher in Vermont, directs the Stanford History Education Group. His research focuses on how teachers use assessment data to form instruction.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered the “gold standard” of education testing because it is the only national longitudinal measure that goes back to 1970; no one can practice for it; no one knows which students will take the test; no single student takes the entire test; samples of students in every state take portions of the tests.

But when it comes to standardized testing, there is no gold standard. It is all dross, especially now that almost all standardized tests are delivered online. Online testing is popular because it is cheap and supposedly fast. But online testing by its nature allows no room for demonstrating thoughtfulness or for divergent thinking or for creative responses. It is the enemy of critical thinking.

Wineburg’s group tried to determine whether NAEP actually tested critical thinking, and they found that it did not.

But what would happen [they asked] if instead of grading the kids, we graded the test makers? How? By evaluating the claims they make about what their tests actually measure.

For example, in history, NAEP claims to test not only names and dates, but critical thinking — what it calls “Historical Analysis and Interpretation.” Such questions require students to “explain points of view,” “weigh and judge different views of the past,” and “develop sound generalizations and defend these generalizations with persuasive arguments.” In college, students demonstrate these skills by writing analytical essays in which they have to put facts into context. NAEP, however, claims it can measure such skills using traditional multiple-choice questions.

We wanted to test this claim. We administered a set of Historical Analysis and Interpretation questions from NAEP’s 2010 12th-grade exam to high school students who had passed the Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History (with a score of 3 or above). We tracked students’ thinking by having them verbalize their thoughts as they solved the questions.

What we learned shocked us.

In a study that appears in the forthcoming American Educational Research Journal, we show that in 108 cases (27 students answering four different items), there was not a single instance in which students’ thinking resembled anything close to “Historical Analysis and Interpretation.” Instead, drawing on canny test-taking strategies, students typically did an end run around historical content to arrive at their answers.

Their analysis is fascinating.

It is past time that we relinquished our obsession with standardized testing.

Categories History, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Ariela Rosen: A Whisper in an Age of Shouting

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
5

Ariela Rosen is a high school senior in a public school in New York City. She wrote a beautiful article that was published on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

It is the story of a man you have never heard of: Charles Stover. There is a bench in Central Park in New York City dedicated to him. But only a bench.

She writes:

“Under his name a simple inscription proclaims him “Founder of Outdoor Playgrounds.” When I read that for the first time, I laughed. How could one person be the founder of playgrounds? And shouldn’t he get more than a bench?

“Even more absurd was what I found when I looked him up. His Wikipedia page was barely two paragraphs long and made no mention of playgrounds at all. The article mainly concerned the day in 1913 that Stover, after three years as New York City’s parks commissioner, went out to lunch … and didn’t come back. For 39 days.

“Naturally, this made me more than a little curious about the man. I’ve been looking for him ever since.

“The first thing I discovered was that almost nobody — not my parents, not my high-school teachers — knew who Stover was. This seemed strange to me because he was an enormously important figure. In 1886 he was a co-founder of the University Settlement House — the first settlement house in the United States — from which he spearheaded the growing reform movement in New York City. Stover was also involved in efforts to preserve Central Park and develop more parks and playgrounds in poor neighborhoods. In 1898 he founded, together with Lillian Wald, the Outdoor Recreation League, which sponsored the construction of playgrounds as a substitute for unsupervised street play. As parks commissioner, Stover created the Bureau of Recreation, which built dozens of playgrounds in its first three years, including DeWitt Clinton Park, Seward Park and Jacob Riis Park….”

“When Stover died in 1929, he left only a few books and papers, but his legacy went far beyond his possessions. He spent his time and money providing playgrounds, gardens, housing and other services for poor immigrant children and their families, all the while battling his depression…

“Stover believed — and his life proves — that it is possible to make a difference in the world without yelling. It is easy to get caught up in the shouting of politicians, or to want simply to walk away from it all. That is why it is more important than ever to listen to the stories of those around us.

“I plan to go on looking for Stover, but his bench has already taught me an important lesson: Sometimes the most powerful words are the ones that are whispered.”

What a lovely essay.

Ariela Rosen roused my curiosity, so I checked Stover’s Wikipedia entry. It was five paragraphs long.

It reads:

“Stover was born in Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, on July 14, 1861. He attended Lafayette College and graduated in 1881. He studied to become a Presbyterian minister at the Union Theological Seminary and graduated in 1884. He also took classes at the University of Berlin, before moving to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“In 1886, Stover founded the Neighborhood Guild on Forsyth Street, the first settlement house in the United States. In 1898, he and Lillian Wald, director of the nearby Henry Street Settlement, founded the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL), whose mission was to provide play spaces and organize games for the children of the densely populated Lower East Side. The ORL opened nine privately sponsored playgrounds and advocated that the City itself build and operate playgrounds. In 1902 the City assumed the operation of the ORL playgrounds, and in 1903 opened what is presumed to be the first municipally built playground in the nation, Seward Park in Manhattan’s Lower East Side; the ORL had opened an outdoor gymnasium there in May 1899, on city-owned land.

“In January 1910, Stover was named parks commissioner for Manhattan by New York City’s newly-elected mayor, William Jay Gaynor. Stover’s tenure was controversial; in July 1911 The New York Times reported that he was being asked to hand in his resignation. He did not resign and was not fired; in August 1911 he announced major plans were underway for Central Park and Riverside Drive Park. In April 1913 Stover said “I do not believe in the policy that the parks are merely places people to walk through and look at the trees and gaze at the landscapef from a distance, nor do I believe that any one should be permitted to destroy anything, but I take the position that certain parks of the asphalt and the lawns should be open most liberally to the young people for amusement, proper athletics, and recreation, under proper circumstances.

“In October 1913, Stover told his staff and coworkers that he was going out for lunch then he disappeared. In mid-November he was erroneously thought to have died in Delaware when a body resembling him was found. A week later, he was seen in Washington, D.C., by a former city official. In late November, a nationwide search began, which included sending a short film clip to 10,000 moving-picture places across the United States. Shortly thereafter, Stover mailed his letter of resignation from Cincinnati, and Ardolph Loges Kline, the Mayor of New York City, replaced Stover with Louis F. La Roche, Stover’s deputy. On January 28, 1914, Stover returned to the University Settlement House.[10]

“Stover spent the rest of his life developing a summer camp at Beacon, New York, operated by the University Settlement House. He died at the University Settlement House on April 24, 1929, at the age of 67, leaving an estate valued at only $500.”

I recommend that Ariela continue her search by reading about Mayor Gaynor, who appointed Stover as Parks Commissioner. He was shot in the neck by a discharged city worker, but survived. Gaynor was put into office by the Tammany Hall machine, but to the surprise of all, turned out to be an honest and dedicated public servant. I have a published collection of letters that he wrote to constituents, and they are masterpieces of wit and irascibility.

Categories History, New York City, Play, Real Education
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