What follows is the story of those schools and the men and women who fought over them. It stems from a question I couldn’t shake during my study of education law: Why is the only reference to ability grouping in my casebook a 60-year-old court case the book advertises as likely no longer being good law?1
I assumed, when I started my research into Hobson v. Hansen, that 1967 case on ability grouping in Washington, D.C. schools, that I would find a grim contrast to today, with bigots using tracking as a pretext to keep black students down. What I found instead is a story that cuts right to the heart of every education fight and many public policy fights of the past three generations, a tragic years-long wrestle between two remarkable men and their competing visions for what education ought to be, and the quiet catastrophe in its aftermath.
This is the story of Julius Hobson, Dr. Carl Hansen, and the world their conflict built.
Carl Hansen was already an experienced hand in education when he got a 1947 letter from the Washington, D.C. superintendent of schools inviting him to accept a position as the superintendent’s executive assistant. He had spent twenty years as an educator in Omaha, Nebraska, first as a teacher, then as the principal of an integrated technical high school. His Omaha superintendent warned him against the position: “Nobody ever succeeds in that school system. He merely holds on until he gets fired or retires.” But Hansen, only a few years out of a venture out to the West Coast to get a doctorate from Southern California University, was ready for another adventure. He accepted the job, packed up with his wife and two young children, and headed east.2
The Washington school system he was headed for was very different from the Omaha system he left: a southern school system, strictly segregated since its creation and managed not by the local city but by a school board appointed by the federal judges (part-time non-specialist volunteers, in charge of setting the overall direction for the school system), a board-appointed superintendent (in charge of carrying out the day-to-day operations of the district in line with the board’s directions), and Congress itself (in charge of funding and apportionment). All clashed repeatedly over questions of control and direction. Since 1906, the Board had been mandated by law to contain a mix of six men and three women; by tradition from that point forward, two of the men and one of the women were black. The superintendent position was usually stable, with Hobart Corning—the superintendent when Dr. Hansen joined—serving for twelve years from 1946 to 1958 and his longest-serving predecessor Frank Ballou serving from 1920 through his retirement in 1943.3
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A few years later, the psychologist Ethel L. Cornell cut through the mess. She noted in 1936 that two competing schools of thought had been in conflict in education since the earliest attempts to study it, and that the conflict was evident both in studies and in theory. One theory held that “a democratic education should offer the same content to all.” The other, that “education cannot be democratic unless it varies the educational pattern, the content, and the goal, as well as the speed and the method,” to fit pupils’ varying needs. In the first, people treated ability grouping simply as a refinement of grading, while in the second, people saw it as cutting across and supplanting the traditional grade system. Cornell noted that its results depended less on the fact of grouping, more on its philosophy, its accuracy, and willingness to differentiate content, and that both objective and subjective results favored grouping with adaptations.8
Against this backdrop, the white and black schools tended to use various schemes to group students by ability. Most notable within the black system was its decision to run a single academic high school, Dunbar High, for the most academically driven black students from around the District, while sorting those who were less academically inclined into one of the District’s two other black high schools. The decision bore fruit, with the school drawing a highly educated faculty, preparing generations of black leaders, and standing as a national model for black excellence.
Into this system came Hansen, a committed liberal institutionalist who believed in the public schools as America’s most important social institution, a “traditional” educator at a time when traditionalism was already out of fashion, an integrationist and believer in colorblindness in a segregated world. Hansen believed that professional educators should be firmly in charge of schools with outside forces staying out. He championed basic, skills-focused education, ability grouping, and phonics for reading—something he noted had fallen out of favor in the 1920s as having become too highly technical and an end in itself before “revolutionists” rejected it instead of reforming it. When he was later made director of elementary schools, he immediately set about bringing phonics to the white schools that scorned it.9
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