The Education Trap Quotes

“The fight over training was thus a fight over the ideological and cultural formation of both new workers and future foremen.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The Boston Central Labor Union (BCLU), the voice of organized labor in Boston, forged close ties to the Democratic Party. Democratic mayor Josiah Quincy IV, elected in 1895, launched a program of “municipal socialism” that included hiring union labor for public works projects and launching a union-run municipal printing plant.20 Irish and Canadian workers continued to dominate the building trades, while English and Scandinavians were significantly overrepresented as machinists.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The lack of entrenched craft unions, however, allowed the garment industry to pioneer some of the earliest industrial unions in manufacturing, based on solidarity across skill levels, gender, and ethnicity rather than control of the training process.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The primary reason for its failure was that organized interests—employers and unions—clashed as they vied for control of the training process. Because craft union power depended on controlling access to specific craft skills, the struggle over training was a struggle for workplace power.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Ultimately, private and public educational services did not significantly impact the status, pay, or conditions of low-wage work.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Civil service reform did not eliminate channels of patronage. Robert Woods noted in 1898 that labor appointments were still “distributed through the wards and allotted to the local politicians.”154 Ward bosses who dominated Boston politics at the turn of the century reinforced their support through these patronage channels.155 Woods estimated that in 1902 about one-third of Irish families in the West End included a breadwinner employed by the city.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The experience of African Americans should shatter historical illusions that education alone could open doors to better employment or improve one’s working conditions.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“In 1903, one student told a Boston newspaper that her textbook described African Americans as “slaves and niggers.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Black Bostonians made up over half of Republican voters in one city ward representing the West End, and through their local concentration could exert some political power.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“What benefits did elementary school offer students, especially those of lower-class backgrounds? A human capital explanation of the advantages of education would typically focus on the technical and academic skills offered. In 1922, the school committee sent a questionnaire to employers asking what 14–16-year-old youth workers in continuation schools should be taught, inviting “any other suggestions which would enable us the better to serve the employers of Boston.” Their replies suggest that indeed, academic skills were important, but basic literacy and numeracy were prioritized over specific job-related skills.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Rather than occupationally specific training, the most popular forms of education for the children of service workers and laborers was basic elementary instruction. After 1906, “primary” and “grammar” schools were merged into an eight year “elementary” school sequence, and growing youth enrollment in daytime elementary schools dramatically reconfigured the social class composition of Boston’s public school system.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The survey also suggests that the primary role of this school was support in basic primary school subjects: 90 percent of students surveyed said that the continuation school had helped them in English, and 85 percent in arithmetic. Rather than training for a specific occupation, these continuation schools provided students with basic academic skills.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“In his 1920 book Schooling of the Immigrant, Thompson argued that native-born Americans must “assume fundamental racial equality” and rid themselves of the “delusion” that they constituted a “superior race.” He claimed that recognition of the “virtues of other nationalities” was what “we offer to the immigrant when asking him to join the fellowship of our democracy.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The racial, ethnic, and gender divisions among those performing low-wage service work repeatedly undercut efforts to organize collectively.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“In 1910, on the grounds of health and safety, Contestabile supported a law that would have required every cook in Massachusetts to obtain a license.61 By erecting barriers to entry, the cooks revealed that the policing of boundaries to their occupation, rather than broader worker solidarity, was their preferred organizing strategy.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“In addition, the assumption that wages would reflect “skill level” in the labor market naturalized the political process that shaped what types of work were deemed “unskilled” or “skilled.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Professions such as law and medicine were able to be “elevated” because of their structural positions in the economy and the economic relevance of their specific knowledge base, which made it possible for practitioners to use advanced educational credentials to restrict access.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The increased training requirements for professions such as law and medicine, as well as new academic disciplines, were justified through appeals to scientific expertise and improved service to society.26 Success in these professions led reformers to imagine recasting the entire occupational structure in the image of the rising professions. Their numerous “professionalizing projects” were premised on a faith that the labor market would reward the acquisition of knowledge and skills.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The tendency of progressive reformers to focus on occupational skills was also informed by their professional orientation.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“They shared a hostility to partisan politics and championed civil service reform. Between 1880 and 1900, a segment of Boston’s reformist elite aligned themselves with the Democratic Party; however, the depression of 1893 and the growing power of Irish Democratic ward bosses eroded the stability of this alliance, and after 1900 most of Boston’s affluent reformers were associated with Boston’s Republican Party.19”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The Boston Overseers of the Poor, dating back to the seventeenth century, operated a lodge for unemployed men who were required to perform manual labor, and a temporary home for poor women and children in return for their household labor.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Chinese immigrants came to Boston in increasing numbers in the late nineteenth century, settling in a part of the South End known as South Cove.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“In 1920, Ellen’s family moved into a triple decker, or three-story multifamily home, in Dorchester, a clear sign of upward mobility. Mary entered the white-collar workforce as a stenographer in a grocery store, while Daniel worked as an elevator operator at a telephone company. John became a schoolteacher in a Boston grammar school.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The oldest public school in the United States, Boston Latin School, was founded in 1635 in the North End to give the sons of proper Bostonians a classical education (including the classical language of Latin) and prepare them for Harvard. As the North End became a working-class immigrant center, the school moved incrementally farther south, relocating to the South End by 1880.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“While early women teachers’ organizations faced hostility from both men teachers and the school committee,”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“The president of the National Retail Shoe-Dealers’ Association, I. B. Arnold, stressed practical experience first, observing “the man with a common school education [and] much knowledge of the world.… outstrips the man of high literary and scientific attainments.” Experience, rather than formal schooling, was the most important factor in business employment. At the same time, businessmen recognized the cultural power of colleges and universities. “I would not be understood to disparage literary education; far from it,” Arnold clarified. He admitted, “I desire all my children to take a course in college.” However, he still insisted that “a knowledge of men and things is fully as important as all they gain from text books.”120 Collegiate education was a sign of cultural prominence and prestige, which even a skeptical businessman might want for his child.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“An editorial in The Carpenter argued that the “mercantile and banking house education of our schools” trained youth to dislike the trades and believe that “the most respectable occupation is that in which a man becomes rich the quickest.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Building-trade workers also secured licensing laws beginning in 1885, specifying prerequisites to engage in construction projects, plumbing, and electrical installation, as another form of regulating entry.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“68 The Knights’ vision of an encompassing union across gender, race, and skill level quickly gave way to the craft union model of the building trades and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), based on limited membership among those who possessed specific craft skills.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston

“Most of Boston’s Irish Catholic families sent their children to public schools instead of parochial schools. Public schools were free and were seen by many lay Catholics as a means of accessing the status of more affluent Bostonians.”
― Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston