At the end of two decades of rapid growth in enrollment after World War II, Newton Public Schools (NPS) was led by a pioneering Superintendent who oversaw major changes in curriculum that drew nationwide attention. Back then, the NPS had more power in determining its budget allocation, and the budget grew over 7% annually.
NPS enrollment peaked in 1964 with 18,286 students, an increase of 7,254 students since 1945. Part of the increase came from the rising high school graduation rate, which went from less than 50% to 98%. During this same time period, over 20% of children attended private schools.
Superintendent Charles E. Brown
In 1960, Newton had a young new Superintendent, Charles E. Brown. Superintendent Brown had been a teacher at Newton’s Meadowbrook Junior High, and after his premature death in 1974, teachers lobbied to have the school renamed in his honor. Time Magazine called him “one of U.S. education’s genuine whiz kids–a reformer who believes that schools themselves must launch curriculum ideas rather than wait for university brainstormers.”
Time Magazine noted that Superintendent Brown oversaw ”the nation’s first complete overhaul of high school social studies.” High School department head Wayne Altree, working with college professors and organizations such as the American Anthropological Association, created a new curriculum “to get students thinking anthropologically, to discover the dynamics of human culture, or patterns of adaptation, throughout the world. The three-year course begins, for example, with the problem of how a boy becomes a man—moving from the fiction of such writers as James Baldwin and Arthur Miller to a study of Eskimos and Winnebago Indians. It proceeds to urban cultures in the ancient Near East, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the life of St. Paul, and thence to Luther, seen partly as a son in conflict with his father.”
In his 1964 Atlantic Journal article, The Schools in Newton Experiment with Flexibility, Superintendent Brown stated, “the basic philosophy underlying Newton’s program of studies is a recognition that students are not all alike. Therefore, in order to have a mathematics course appropriate for each student in our senior high schools,” high school had six different tracks: New Math (honors or regular), School Mathematics Study Group (honors or regular), Curriculum II Math, and Basic Math.
New Math
“Mathematics is shunned by most students as a joyless exercise.” NPS Annual Report 1957
In 1950, President Eisenhower created the National Science Foundation (NSF) “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense.” NSF funding trickled down to Newton through a University of Illinois program designed by Professor Max Beberman called New Math. Newton was one of seven school districts nationwide that piloted the program in 1957, beginning with a group of “highly gifted seventh graders” and college-preparatory 8th- and 9th-graders.
New Math focused on conceptual understanding and discovery learning. Teachers worked closely with Professor Beberman’s group to create and revise the course. Its textbook was “custom-tailored”. The goal was to inspire future mathematicians by teaching math as a creative, living subject. The initial students were followed through college with positive results.
Sputnik and More New Math
“Sparked by the successful launching of the first earth satellite by the USSR in October 1957, a focus of public attention on education developed to a point unparalleled in our history. As was to be expected, many persons disappointed because the United States was not first to probe outer space, sought to place the blame on the schools.” Owen Kiernan, 1958 Massachusetts Commissioner of Education
Sputnik shattered America’s educational confidence. Congress rushed through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 giving the States a billion dollars over four years ($10+ billion today) to be spent on science, math, modern foreign language (no Latin or Greek), technology, and guidance to identify gifted students. Newton High School began “instruction in data processing” on a computer on loan from MIT, and twenty “select juniors” started studying Russian. Biology, chemistry, and physics classes were added to the Junior High curriculum.
The NSF formed the School Math Study Group (SMSG) to design a New Math curriculum for elementary and junior high school students. Because the NDEA funds were immediately distributed, commercial publishers began producing ‘new math’ textbooks before SMSG finished their curriculum. Professor Beberman criticized the commercial textbooks as money-making schemes with “excessive and unskilled emphasis… on esoteric branches of mathematics at the expense of fundamentals.” He argued for a slower pace of new math adoption, with more training for teachers who lacked a strong math background.
By 1962, commercial SMSG textbooks were in use in all grades in Newton (though not in all schools due to their autonomy). Eugene Ferguson, NHS Math Department Head, gave a PTA talk titled: Mathematics for Parents Under Pressure. He explained that new math was needed for “a space-age population” and added the “toughest problem in the new math is training the teachers.” “For parents who asked for a course in the new math for themselves, Mr. Ferguson suggested that they request lessons from their own children.”
Outside Analysis of NPS
The Newton school system was critiqued in 1960 by Columbia University professors Harold McNally and Harry Passow in their book: Improving the Quality of Public School Programs.
The professors noted the disparate achievement levels in elementary reading. About two-thirds of students were ‘overachieving’ and one-third ‘underachieving’. “Problems cluster generally in such areas of skill and ability in which the school can and should furnish instruction: word analysis, articulation and speech rhythms, association of sounds with symbols. No statistically significant relationships were found between underachievement and many factors which are often suspect – rate of early motor development, personality adjustment, warmth of family relationships, methods of discipline, age at school entrance, time spent with TV and movies, indoor or outdoor play.”
The professors summarized NPS’s strengths as strong community support and an “unusual freedom to initiate, invent, and experiment” supported by school principals’ “major role in curriculum planning, policy development, and personnel selection.” They listed “too much attention to the spectacular, the newsworthy”, problems with “communication and planning at the top staff level,” and too little attention to “careful scientific evaluation of projects.”
Reading Projects
The November 1963 patterns newsletter reported a second-grade teacher’s new reading project with “group procedures for individualized reading instruction. …This teacher was designated to organize a program of workshops, discussions, analyses, and visits. Later, provision was made to evaluate the acquired reading skills both through objective tests and subjective reactions. No detailed report can be made, at this time, of those objective test scores and their interpretation, for the study of that data is not completed.”
Despite the incomplete evaluation, the program was expanded to include 12 teachers in grades 2, 3, and 4.
The January 1964 patterns described the high school reading study clinic created for “the pupil who has slipped along with a minimum of interest, effort, and achievement”…”whose reading skills are inadequate to meet the rigorous academic requirements in all of the high school curricula.” The reading clinic “offered remedial courses in all phases of reading from eye movement to study methods.” During the 1960s, dyslexia was a debated, undefined, and relatively unknown concept. There was no educational consensus on how to teach reading.
School Buildings
After debating the issue of a second high school in the southern part of Newton since the 1850s, the City decided to build one on a floodplain in 1957. Newton South High School opened in the fall of 1960.
Between the end of World War II and 1964, ten new schools were built and eleven were renovated. NPS had 33 school buildings: three high schools (Newton, South, Voc/Tec), five junior high schools, and 25 elementary schools. Then, as today, school buildings and their mechanical systems were part of the budget of the City’s Building Department.
The student population was roughly one-third Protestant, one-third Catholic, and one-third Jewish, and the School Committee had added Jewish and Asian members: Judge Haskell Freedman (1949, Ward 6) and Dr. Way Dong Woo (1964, Ward 8).
School Budget
“It is impossible for me to subscribe to the premise that a Newton School Budget of $9,000,000 … is incapable of even the slightest reduction”. Mayor Donald Gibbs, 1961 Inaugural Address
NPS was 37% of the City budget in 1961. The School Committee determined the annual school budget. If the Mayor or Board of Aldermen cut the NPS budget, ten or more taxable inhabitants could petition the State Superior Court to overturn the decision. If the City lost the court case, it was required to give the schools 125% of the disputed amount. In 1959, the Board of Aldermen cut $1,100 from the NPS budget (travel expenses to a School Committee convention in San Francisco). The School Committee sued and won back $1,375.
In his 1965 letter to Mayor Gibbs, School Committee Chair Haskell Freedman attributed the 7.7% budget increase to competitive salaries and the need for “certain specialized personnel” (librarians, reading specialists, curriculum developers, and student services). He notes that there are “Still 43 elementary classrooms in Newton with thirty or more children” and that “the case load for our guidance and psychological [sic] the increased problems associated with college admissions.” The NPS accounted for roughly 37% of the City Budget until population growth began to slow in the 1960s, when NPS’s share of the budget began to grow.
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