A Matter of Standards: Infrastructure, Sanitation, and the School Construction “Boom” in Philadelphia, 1855-1875

After the release of Burrowes’s book in 1855, readers alternately scrutinized and accepted the sanitary principles it laid out, with state authorities pushing for higher standards to address overcrowding and ventilation. As humans breathe approximately 28 cubic feet of air per minute, state physicians and superintendents emphasized the need for ample ventilation, advocating for ceilings between 13 to 15 feet high and a minimum of 12 square feet of classroom space per pupil.Footnote ⁷² According to Wayne County superintendent E. O. Ward, less floor space would make students rebreathe the air they had already exhaled, and thus “endanger the comfort of the scholar and the order and progress of the school.”Footnote ⁷³

Burrowes himself had argued that school construction had to anticipate population growth.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Pennsylvania’s school enrollments grew at a yearly average rate of 2.18 percent between 1855 and 1866, the state (excluding Philadelphia) responded by constructing nearly three thousand new school buildings and increasing its facilities by 36 percent. Philadelphia lagged behind, so that although its school enrollments grew at 3.5 percent annually, only thirteen new school buildings were erected during those twelve years, with several others rented to the city and yet others lost to hurricanes or fires, as seen in figure 3. Many if not most of these new and rented buildings were too small to accommodate the growing number of students: Central Board president Leonard Fletcher noted in 1864 that in the small group of new school buildings, “most of the rooms” were inadequate for housing fifty pupils, which was the assigned number of students per classroom.Footnote ⁷⁵

Figure 3. Number of buildings constructed, rented, or acquired yearly for use as public schoolhouses in Philadelphia, 1855–1901. Source: Author’s calculations, based on information provided in Edmunds, Public School Buildings.

Despite triumphant claims that Burrowes’s 1855 book had “elevat[ed] the standards of school construction all over the state,” this was not true for early 1860s Philadelphia, as local conditions quickly deteriorated due to overcrowded and poorly ventilated classrooms.Footnote ⁷⁶ By 1861 the Pennsylvania School Journal expressed that most schoolhouses in the state were “wholly at war with every principle of Architecture.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Educators and authorities criticized the lack of proper school infrastructure, noting its detrimental effects on both students’ health and academic progress, as teachers got discouraged by the fact that they were put in charge of fifty pupils in “small dingy house[s]” where the air of the room was polluted in under seven minutes.Footnote ⁷⁸ Derelict houses were the rule, not the exception, in the 1860s, as J. F. Gayley showed when tasked with examining the sanitary conditions of the schools of Philadelphia’s Eighth Section in 1866. Classrooms with seventy-five pupils, where each one was allotted 33 square feet of air space, were not “exceptional case[s]” or “fancy sketch[es]” but pretty common. These unsanitary conditions gravely affected both pupils and teachers: in an address delivered the year following Gayley’s report, Edward Shippen, the president of the Central Board between 1864 and 1869, called the city’s schools “pest-houses” and blamed the buildings “for the destruction of health and life” and for sending teachers to an early grave.Footnote ⁷⁹

Despite these concerns, city councils repeatedly rejected the Central Board’s “frequent and earnest” requests for larger appropriations for new school buildings.Footnote ⁸⁰ In such a context, erecting schoolhouses at strategic locations in the school districts was, in Shippen’s terms, “impracticable.”Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, local school boards resisted relinquishing their executive authority and maintained their autonomy from external oversight, even after the consolidation of the city of Philadelphia in 1854.Footnote ⁸² According to the 1818 act and its latter iterations, county and state superintendents and Central Board members served merely as advisers: they could visit other cities to gain inspiration on school architecture and “profit by the improvements of the age,” as they did when traveling to Boston, Cambridge, Baltimore, and New York between 1864 and 1866.Footnote ⁸³ They were also free to share their views on ventilating schoolhouses and even propose their own designs if they so desired. But without the executive power and willingness of local school directors and controllers, any plan, design, or suggestion remained ineffective.Footnote ⁸⁴ “The State may supply Directors with the Pennsylvania School Architecture in countless volumes,” complained the Pennsylvania School Journal, but if local boards did not appropriate funds for new buildings, schools would continue to be “mansions of the early dead.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In 1864, after years of requests from the Central Board, the city councils authorized a $1 million loan for new school buildings. The Central Board required the buildings to be erected “at once,” but at the last minute the city councils unexpectedly turned the ordinance into “a dead letter” by adding a proviso that the loan could not be issued “at less than par.” When the loan was released two years later, labor and material costs had risen, resulting in a 30 percent depreciation of the loan’s value.Footnote ⁸⁶ Perhaps more importantly, the process by which Philadelphia implemented what was left of the loan departed completely from what by the 1860s was the “general pattern” of school construction in the US. Typically, in the conventional process, after a competition among various architects, the local state administration would appoint the winning professional. The selected designs would next be publicized in the specialized press and “put out to tender.” The commissioning body would then inform everyone involved about both the winning and unselected bids. Finally, the successful contractor would inspect the plans, prepare the site, and negotiate for supplies under the vigilance of the architect, who, working for the Board of Education or its committees, could sanction any deviation or dismiss underperforming workers.Footnote ⁸⁷

In Philadelphia, there was no tendering for plans under the new process. The solicitation of bids on designs was suppressed “so as to permit those who are most familiar with the wants and requirements of the Schools [local school boards] to obtain them” without prior competition. After the money was appropriated by the school sections or wards, central controllers were compelled by law to award contracts to the lowest bidder, “not to the lowest and best bidder,” as Shippen wryly noted. This forced the construction of buildings “with marked economy.” Finally, Lewis H. Esler, the carpenter and merchant who was appointed to the newly created office of inspector of school buildings and who held the office until his death in 1883, had no executive power whatsoever. His duty was reduced to “constant visitation” of school sites, overseeing the progress of each building and even proposing plans that local boards were not compelled to adopt.Footnote ⁸⁸

On occasion of the disbursement, superintendents and members of the Central Board warned that choosing a spot for a school building and implementing a specific design was to “influence the destinies of generations yet unborn.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1867 Shippen himself exhorted builders to go beyond Burrowes and Ward’s minimum standards when he observed that a “complete” and “adaptable” school building provided for at least 12.5 square feet of floor space and about 174 cubic feet of air space per pupil.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although still lagging behind the country as a whole, this rise was in agreement with the nation’s broader trends, which, as can be seen in figures 1 and 2 above, entailed an expansion of its recommended sanitation criteria. But although contemporary authors and later historians have accepted Shippen’s claim that no other city in the union had been “blessed with such educational facilities” at face value, a different picture emerges when examining the actual performance of the schools based on their real dimensions and their effective average daily attendance.Footnote ⁹¹ Based off a sample of twenty-four buildings, most of which had been built during the recent “boom,” by 1869 almost 60 percent of the city’s schools fell below the minimum recommended per-pupil square and cubic footage of floor and air space set by local and state authorities, and as a group they failed to exceed the average recommended values, as shown in figures 4 and 5.

Note: Compliance is analyzed by comparing the average cubic feet of air space per pupil in the buildings in each decade with the standards recommended in each respective decade, as suggested by sanitary standards discussed in fifteen primary and secondary sources directly addressing the state’s schools. N=4 (1840), 6 (1847), 11 (1855), 24 (1869), 31 (1875), 31 (1881), 34 (1886), 39 (1891), 39 (1896), 39 (1901).Source: Author’s calculations, based mainly on data provided in the following sources: Annual Reports of the First School District of Pennsylvania; Burrowes, PSA; Shippen, “Improvements in the Plans and Construction”; and Edmunds, Public School Buildings.

Figure 4. Compliance of air space in forty public school buildings erected between 1821 and 1889 in Philadelphia.

Note: Compliance is analyzed by comparing the average square feet of classroom space per pupil in the buildings in each decade with the standards recommended in each respective decade, as suggested by sanitary standards discussed in sixteen primary and secondary sources directly addressing the state’s schools. N=1 (1820), 3 (1830), 4 (1840), 6 (1847), 11 (1855), 24 (1869), 31 (1875), 31 (1881), 34 (1886), 39 (1891), 39 (1896), 39 (1901).Source: Author’s calculations, based mainly on data provided in the following sources: Annual Reports of the First School District of Pennsylvania; Burrowes, PSA; Shippen, “Improvements in the Plans and Construction”; and Edmunds, Public School Buildings.

Figure 5. Compliance of classroom space in forty public school buildings erected between 1821 and 1889 in Philadelphia.

As in the 1840s, postbellum Philadelphia stood in sharp contrast with New England and the rest of the Northeast, where most of the changes in school construction and administration recommended by common school reformers had taken hold by 1860.Footnote ⁹² Central authorities and some school directors criticized the 1866 “boom” as “bad economy,” acknowledging that the loan had not been used efficiently. During his one-year stint as president of the Central Board, Shippen’s successor, Daniel Steinmetz, lamented in 1869 that these contracts had been often unprofitable for builders, leading to minimal responsibility in their execution.Footnote ⁹³ Lacking the authority to enforce a uniform plan for each different type of school prior to construction, the board was unable to prevent contractors from prioritizing cost-cutting measures, thereby compromising the quality of materials and ventilation systems.

Local boards’ laissez-faire policy extended beyond school construction to the supervision of both old and new schools. While the Common School Law mandated monthly visits by local directors to assess needs and oversee teachers, complaints from superintendents and administrators suggested these visits were infrequent.Footnote ⁹⁴ The 1818 act set limits of fifty pupils per primary school teacher and forty-five per grammar/secondary school teacher, but local boards dismissed teachers from their jobs as soon as ratios dipped below these thresholds, as reported with amazement by a visiting committee of Baltimore school officials to Philadelphia in 1866.Footnote ⁹⁵ As Philadelphia’s population grew, this policy exacerbated overcrowding and prevented stable pupil-teacher ratios. Finally, sectional boards also restricted children from crossing district lines and attending less crowded schools in adjacent wards, thus isolating each ward and perpetuating infrastructure plights. Central authorities objected to these policies and increasingly placed the blame on local directors for the decline of school conditions.Footnote ⁹⁶

Steinmetz echoed the views of most other superintendents and central officials when he absolved the Central Board of accountability for any of the new schools’ structural or functional shortcomings. Given that the authority to design, build, and populate schools relied on sectional boards and their independent powers, which were “exercised at their pleasure,” he questioned, “By what rule of justice shall your Board be held responsible for the details of the schools, which, under existing laws, are entirely beyond its control?”Footnote ⁹⁷

Dampness, Stiffness, and Nosebleeds: The 1875 Sanitary Report and Administrative Strife in the 1880s

Despite the growing urgency surrounding public schools, during the late 1860s and early 1870s, various educational authorities expressed pride in the city’s schoolhouses. Steinmetz himself had optimistically declared in his 1869 report to the Central Board that “an inspection of the Public School-buildings erected under the direction of your Board” would “establish the fact that they are, for the purpose intended, equal, if not superior, to any in existence.”Footnote ⁹⁸ But such claims would be disputed by a citywide sanitary examination in 1875 of the city’s 178 public buildings and the more than 424 schools held within them, conducted by a committee of physicians, educators, and architects appointed by Steinmetz’s successor, M. Hall Stanton.

The visiting physicians argued that to maintain a healthy environment, overcrowding should be avoided, adequate heating and ventilation systems should be installed, and each student should have between 200 and 300 cubic feet of air space.Footnote ⁹⁹ The range was not random: school hygiene had quickly developed since Ward and Shippen proposed their specifications in the late 1850s and early 1860s; by the 1870s 18 square feet of floor surface (figure 2) and 248 cubic feet of air space (figure 1) were considered the average standard. These higher thresholds, combined with the establishment of permanent boards of health to monitor and control school hazards, allowed authorities in other states to tackle overcrowding and ventilation effectively. By the late 1870s, in school systems such as those in New Orleans and Massachusetts, “no serious [sanitary] defects existed,” and in other states, these defects were being addressed head-on.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Conversely, Philadelphia’s public schools had seemingly not kept pace with these advancements, as the special committee’s report, published in 1875, revealed significant deficiencies in ventilation, heating, and overall building conditions.Footnote ¹⁰¹ E. Thomson, the committee’s chemist, reported alarming levels of “carbonic acid” (carbon dioxide) in many schools, reaching levels that could potentially harm human health.Footnote ¹⁰² Ventilation was particularly inadequate, with half of the schools providing less than 130 cubic feet of air space per student and a staggering majority lacking proper air inlets and outlets. More than 40 percent of the buildings had no ventilation system whatsoever besides their windows and doors, and a third had been built before the publication of Pennsylvania School Architecture. An independent, detailed analysis based on thirty-one buildings erected by 1875, as shown in figures 4 and 5, confirms the report’s conclusions, as a meager 10 percent complied with ventilation and 22 percent with classroom space standards.

As instructors themselves reported and as summarized in table 1, the sanitary condition of the schools was dire. Teachers from the Third District’s Union Primary complained that the working conditions were “totally unfit for a school,” while another teacher from Shackamaxon Secondary described the privies as “abominably and indescribably filthy,” attributing the headaches people were suffering to the damp atmosphere and the toxic gas that escaped from “defective flues” and “worn-out heaters.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Between 50 and 60 percent of interviewed teachers reported headaches, dizziness, or nosebleeds due to the nauseating, stuffy classroom atmosphere, while three-quarters of the schools had persistent “foul” air problems, necessitating that windows remain open for ventilation. However, this was not an effective solution, as it could prevent the removal of stale air, introduce pollutants from outside, freeze ventilation and heating flues, or—during Philadelphia’s harsh winter season—create drafts and enfeeble instructors and pupils.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Table 1. Material and infrastructural variables of the public schools of the city of Philadelphia, 1875. Source: Author’s calculations, based on data contained in L. Wagner, D. Steinmetz and A. Nebinger, Report of the Committee

The 1875 report ended on an outraged note and called for an improvement of the city’s school architecture. State Superintendent James Wickersham seized upon the momentum, writing in his 1875 annual report that the laws of hygiene were “palpably violated” in a vast number of the schools throughout the state. Once again, he would blame local school officers for sowing “the seeds of sickness and death” among children and call for school construction reform.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

School authorities in neighboring states praised the work of the committee and repeatedly brought it up in nationwide debates on school hygiene, especially Boston’s John Dudley Philbrick.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This new emphasis coincided with the standardization of minimal sanitary criteria at both the national and state level: as these standards began to be systematically implemented, school hygiene and overall classroom conditions markedly improved in several states.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As sanitary surveys became a genre in themselves, boards of education from across the country began comparing school buildings on the basis of their functional dimensions. This inadvertently brought further nationwide attention to Philadelphia, as the city—then the second most populated in the US—invariably ranked at the bottom of the tables and figures. In fact, a nationwide survey by the Brooklyn Board of Education in 1883-84 showed that among twenty-three cities from thirteen states, Philadelphia was the only city lacking clear regulations on school buildings and had the third-lowest air space allotments per pupil, behind only New York and Newark.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

As the notoriety of the city’s haywire approach to school buildings increased, national authorities such as US commissioner of education John Eaton and Philbrick himself would single out the city’s system in their published works on school architecture. Philbrick had been the first principal of Boston’s Quincy School, the building to which American urban school buildings could “trace many of their internal elements,” and he was a recognized authority in school administration and architecture, second only in influence to Barnard and Mann.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In his 1885 short pamphlet City School Systems in the United States, he dedicated an entire page to excoriate the Quaker City’s school architecture, “of such preeminent badness in respect to the cardinal requirements—regard for health, convenience, and safety,” attributing the defects of the schools built after the 1875 report to systemic flaws in the system’s administration.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Pennsylvania’s state and county superintendents, along with the majority of the teaching workforce, shared Philbrick’s assessment: the root issue lay in the organization of the school system. They repeatedly argued that a cohesive, scientific approach to education was hindered by both local boards having unchecked authority over school construction and reluctant city councils who, “holding the purse strings,” refused necessary appropriations.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Central Board lacked the power to levy taxes or allocate funds for construction beyond what local directors demanded and the councils approved.Footnote ¹¹² In State Superintendent E. Higbee’s view, central authorities lacked “any remedy in the case beyond the unpleasant duty of vain complaint,” and their frustrations often took a toll on their health.Footnote ¹¹³

Philadelphia’s sectional school boards were unmoved, and neither the 1875 report nor other nationwide surveys were discussed by local newspapers or boards. Ironically, discussions on school hygiene at city and state levels kept increasing the recommended ranges of floor and air space per pupil, with average values reaching around 37.5 square feet and 331 cubic feet per pupil in the 1880s. However, local resistance to taxation for building purposes, plus the decentralized nature of the system, negated all efforts to address these issues, widening the gap between expected and actual compliance. This rendered the piecemeal improvements of the 1870s ineffective, resulting in an all-time low of about 95 percent of buildings erected by 1886 falling below minimal crowding and ventilation thresholds.

Starting in the 1870s, central authorities frequently clashed with local directors, as superintendents and progressive educators attempted to cajole ward boards into sharing their school construction authority. The former consistently highlighted that school boards, typically comprising farmers, mechanics, businessmen, and clerks, were more inclined to update, improve, and adorn barns than schoolhouses, pointing out that even the directors who presented themselves as intelligent and qualified business managers lacked expertise in architecture, engineering, or even carpentry.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Mastering the art of building and furnishing a schoolhouse conducive to student learning and health “requires years of study,” claimed Superintendent Wickersham in 1881: to the superintendents and progressive educators, school architecture had become a profession in itself, a “specialty” in which “little help can be had from other vocations or the appliances of other pursuits.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Progressives and reformers in the 1870s and early 1880s were, however, wary of ossifying the school system into a “cumbersome” and “unwieldy” bureaucracy, and initially aimed to combine bureaucratic efficiency with local authority, defining themselves as counselors who wanted “not the power to compel” but “the authority to prescribe” minimal sanitary standards. They thus sought to persuade ward boards to consult with superintendents, architects, the Central Board, and teachers.Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, school directors as a rule avoided educational administrators and modified building plans in a manner akin to “moving in the dark,” without understanding proper ventilation and lighting, leading to wasteful spending and inefficient structures.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Any narrative that categorizes progressives as enlightened and local directors as ignorant is simplistic. Every schoolhouse reform movement sought to build up educational bureaucracy and naturalize cultural practices.Footnote ¹¹⁸ However, it is not any less true that progressives often struggled to convince Philadelphia’s local directors about basic, even fundamental facts on sanitation. Sectional wards tended to dismiss school hygiene as a passing fad or “mania for physiology,” labeling efforts to improve ventilation as frivolous expenses—the product of a “ventilation fever” or a “hobby” that wasted thousands of dollars by merely “punch[ing] school house walls full of holes,” as a local director stated in 1881. Physicians were incensed by these claims and responded that not one school building in a hundred in the city had adequate ventilation, asserting that such conditions were “killing the bodies of our children.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

As articles highlighting the harmful effects of congested and stifling classrooms filled Pennsylvania’s scientific journals, the State Board of Health warned teachers and local boards about the health risks associated with unsanitary school environments, including headaches and nervous diseases.Footnote ¹²⁰ Still, directors remained unfazed. Most did not feel the need to explicitly counter these claims, instead opting for what William Issel has described as an “apathetic” and “passive” but still very effective type of resistance.Footnote ¹²¹ Directors discussed school hygiene only occasionally at their annual conventions, and when they did, they argued that their “folks” were “hard to kill” by schoolhouses, as J. N. Richards did in 1891. Richards pointed out that they had observed forty or fifty children crowded into small buildings “and yet all [were] enjoying good health.” Therefore, he reasoned, “we perhaps would not deserve very severe censure if we lost some of our faith in the absolute necessity of pure air.”Footnote ¹²²

As all these issues ultimately boiled down to laws and ordinances. Those interested in school building reform took the struggle to the legislative realm during the 1880s, relentlessly advocating for new legislation that democratized school construction authority by extending it from local directors to superintendents, architects, physicians, and even teachers.Footnote ¹²³ Organized around the newly established Public Education Association of Philadelphia, local reformers argued that the city had “long since outgrown” the “swaddling clothes” of the 1818 act, which was seen as outmoded, restrictive, and counterproductive in light of the city’s continuous growth.Footnote ¹²⁴ Reformers first lobbied the legislature to sanction the publication of an updated work on school architecture. Declaring Burrowes’s 1854 book outdated and citing cases where legislative acts were establishing new reference works on school architecture, such as in New York and Brooklyn, the authorities in Pennsylvania pushed for the publication of a new guide or reference work from which local boards of directors would be compelled to draw standardized designs.Footnote ¹²⁵

Central authorities in Pennsylvania also advocated legislation requiring school designs and building plans to undergo sanitary inspection and approval by the State Department of Education before construction.Footnote ¹²⁶ These measures were supported verbally by Governor James A. Beaver in 1889 and six years later by Philadelphia mayor Charles Franklin Warwick, but they never materialized.Footnote ¹²⁷ Because they also sought legislative authority to define sanitary standards for school construction, including specific per-pupil square and cubic footage of floor and air space, reformers bitterly contrasted Pennsylvania’s decentralized approach with cities like Boston and Cincinnati, which had centralized school construction efforts or were in the process of creating them.Footnote ¹²⁸ Local reformers also aimed at laws mandating annual medical inspections of schools and withholding state school funding until condemned buildings were renovated or demolished.Footnote ¹²⁹ Finally, they also argued for direct appropriation of school funds to the Board of Education, similar to the funding structure in Chicago, for more effective allocation based on educational needs.Footnote ¹³⁰

In the calls for reform, most demands that the authority to approve plans and construct buildings be transferred to centralized administrative entities were never drafted into bills, and when they were, those bills were consistently rejected by the legislature, owing to the pressure successful applied by local boards.Footnote ¹³¹ As explained by David Nasaw, “home rule” and neighborhood coalitions were stronger and more coordinated than the reformers who waged “war against the wards.” Moreover, and as I analyze below, Philadelphia’s “traditionalists,” to borrow William H. Issel’s term, were honestly satisfied with their “reasonably successful means of schooling,” and thus saw no reason to let go of their executive powers in regard to drafting, planning, financing, and erecting schools.Footnote ¹³²

One of the net results of the legislative clashes of the 1880s and the pressure from state authorities was that they put school directors on the offensive, as seen in their opposition to James Mac Alister, the first city superintendent of public schools appointed in 1883, whom ward boards viewed as an unnecessary expense. As one of his first official actions, in 1883 Mac Alister conducted a citywide examination of primary pupils, which revealed that teachers were not promoting some pupils because of a lack of accommodations in the higher grades’ overcrowded classrooms. The superintendent promptly criticized the “wholly inadequate” buildings for upper grades and requested larger appropriations to repair and erect new buildings. The Pennsylvania School Journal, edited by State Superintendent Higbee, amplified Mac Alister’s findings, claiming that teachers were suffering due to the “the Board of Education and the City Councils, who have failed to provide adequate school facilities for the city’s children [emphasis added].”Footnote ¹³³ These claims, which at the time could be construed as typical progressive vitriol, were quickly confirmed to be based in reality by independent observers like Joseph Rice, who visited the schools soon thereafter.Footnote ¹³⁴

As part of his periodic visits to the schools, during the mid-1880s Mac Alister produced “elaborate report[s]” on the school plant, showing that 121 additional school rooms were needed to accommodate the city’s schoolchildren. By 1889 he was still describing the school plant as “wretchedly inadequate” because of its inability to keep pace with annual student population growth, which a statistical analysis reveals was occurring at a yearly average of 2.1 percent. Despite his repeated pleas, only nineteen new schools were built between 1888 and 1890 (see figure 3). Five older buildings were lost or sold. The few new buildings were fully occupied within a few weeks after opening, and divisions became “overcrowded to an extent that is injurious to the health of the children.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Mac Alister grew noticeably frustrated and blamed local boards for delaying appropriations and blocking construction; state leaders added to his objections by noting violations of the 1818 act, as teachers were often assigned more than the maximum of fifty pupils. Although in line with national recommendations and criteria, these demands had little impact on the ground.Footnote ¹³⁶

With the 1866 “boom” long over and local boards unwilling to construct new schools, the only option left was to renovate and expand existing buildings. In his first annual report as architect and supervisor of public school buildings for the city’s Central Board in 1884, Joseph Austin called for “better heating, ventilation and sanitary appliances” and emphasized the slow progress in addressing hygiene issues due to limited funding and the challenges posed by old building designs.Footnote ¹³⁷ Retrofitting old structures to accommodate modern heating and ventilation systems was challenging, as they were not originally designed for such installations. Adding new floors or enlarging classrooms often compromised lighting or the buildings’ overall integrity.

Centralized administrative authorities increasingly viewed the architectural decisions made in Philadelphia during the 1850s and 1860s as poor investments, with critics like Wickersham likening them to “throwing away” of “millions of dollars” because the buildings had not been designed by professionals.Footnote ¹³⁸ They might not have been certain or precise, but Wickersham and his colleagues were not wrong: a careful statistical analysis of Philadelphia’s school expenditures reveals that for every dollar spent on new schools between 1855 and 1875, an additional $0.58 was required for repairs and expansion, rising to $0.75 between 1876 and 1885. And even when opting for cheaper options like plastering old buildings, allocated funds were insufficient for anything beyond urgent repairs, leading to temporary fixes. As Mac Alister stressed in 1888, permanent relief could only come from replacing most old schoolhouses in a relatively short period of time.Footnote ¹³⁹

Even the “new” schools built in Philadelphia during the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s were not necessarily better. Though structurally they contained improved heating and ventilation systems, their functional sanitary performance was substandard and worsened each passing year. Schools constructed in the 1870s had already fallen below ventilation standards by 1882 and below overcrowding standards by 1891, and as late as 1901, they still had not met these standards. Those built in the 1880s never complied with the recommended standards, even from the beginning, despite several undergoing repeated enlargements throughout the 1890s. As shown in figures 4 and 5, between 1881 and 1896, about 90 percent of the buildings did not meet seating standards, and 92 percent were below the recommended air space allotment per pupil. These new schools were frequently described as “ill-adapted to their purpose” by state and national authorities, and more sensationally as “the very refinement of cruelty” by physicians. Furthermore, their condition deteriorated as the local boards, pressed by the fact that more than twenty thousand children in the city were denied seats due to insufficient accommodations, often allowed these new buildings to exceed their intended capacities.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Ultimately, the suitability of any structure was a function of its real use over a period of time, and a system of heating and ventilation suitable for forty pupils was rendered useless for sixty.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As Mac Alister repeatedly acknowledged, unsanitary schools were kept open only because of the overwhelming demand for seats.Footnote ¹⁴² Frustrated by the lack of support from the Central Board and the opposition of local directors, he resigned in early 1890 and was replaced by Edward Brooks.

Escalation: Centralization, Corruption, and the Moral Effects of the School Environment in the 1890s

As Philadelphia began planning “bottom-up” clinical initiatives in the late 1890s, the city’s schoolhouses were rapidly deteriorating, along with the professional relations between city, state, and local administrations. As executive conflicts hindered school construction activities and widened the gap between Philadelphia and the rest of the country, all parties involved adopted a more aggressive stance. School officers now emphasized the moral implications and fatal consequences of unsanitary school environments for pupils and teachers, while local wards brushed off such complaints as unwarranted annoyances. References to children who became dwarfed, maimed, or even died as a result of unsanitary conditions, rare thus far, now became common. As State Superintendent Nathan C. Schaeffer put it, “When parents carry their dear ones to the cemetery, it matters very little to them whether disease and death came through the carelessness of the janitor, or the defects of the ventilating system.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Chester County superintendent Joseph Walton was more blunt, claiming that healthy children were dulled and their muscles and bodies loosened and enfeebled by rooms “reeking with foul and poisonous gases.” In his address to the 1896 Pennsylvania Association of School Directors meeting, he blamed cheap contractors for leading children “to a maximum of destructiveness.” To Walton, schools built by those ignoring proper architecture would merely boost “the patronage for the local physician” and make “generous contributions to the nearest burying ground.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

These statements were clearly aimed at moving the population and other reformers to action, but as historians like Duffy and Meckel have pointed out, they were not necessarily false or even exaggerated and should be understood contextually.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As school architecture blossomed into a professional specialty, school systems like those in New York City in 1890-1891, St. Louis in 1897, and Minnesota in 1899 started centralizing school architecture decisions and adopting standardized plans drafted by educated architects employed by the boards of education.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This was often supplemented by the adoption of mandatory, comprehensive sanitary codes for school buildings, first in Massachusetts (1888) and then in Connecticut (1893), Vermont (1896), and Columbia (1897), which notably helped in improving classroom atmosphere.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Minimal standards in floor surface and air space per pupil had to be carefully observed, as it was now “generally admitted,” as James Penniman declared in 1895, that a teacher could not successfully instruct more than thirty-five to forty pupils sitting in the same classroom.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Pennsylvania’s authorities mirrored these initiatives, emphasizing limits of forty-five to fifty pupils per teacher.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Following the recommendations of Wisconsin’s State Board of Health, school hygienists, physicians, and Pennsylvania’s own state board recommended that classrooms have a per-pupil average of 21 square feet of floor space and 300 cubic feet of air space.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Still, in Philadelphia the gap between aims and means remained very wide, with nine out of every ten schools falling below both standards by 1896. In fact, when analyzing groups of schools according to decade of construction and comparing them to that decade’s standards, the schools built in the 1880s now exhibited the lowest functional performance, surpassed even by those erected in the 1820s and 1850s. Thus, the assertion that the “pressing wants of the [school system] had been fairly supplied” by the buildings from the 1870s onwards is wildly inaccurate, and Cutler’s claim that after 1889 each pupil had “more than fifteen square feet apiece” does not apply to more than half the buildings examined for this article.Footnote ¹⁵¹

By the time the Pennsylvania compulsory attendance act was passed in 1895, school attendance in Philadelphia was increasing at a pace of 1.8 percent per year, and the city’s buildings had become prematurely old. Paraphrasing Amy Weisser, Philadelphia’s orderly facades and the broadly replicated exterior design of its school buildings actually obscure the fact that their air quality were violently disrupted by “complex programmatic demands.”Footnote ¹⁵² As a result, the city’s school architecture remained under siege by national authorities, who criticized the city’s design and its ubiquitous glass partitions that separated giant halls into smaller classrooms as “an extremely cheap mode of providing shelter for scholars” and continued to call for organizational reform.Footnote ¹⁵³

With regard to the city’s school laws, the central authorities found themselves powerless to rectify the situation. During the 1880s and 1890s, the list of suggested repairs for the schoolhouses, written by the Central Board’s supervising architect, frequently ran several dozen pages long—a fact which administrators took as an indication that they had not gotten what they had paid for and that they “ha[d] been cheated” by the designers, contractors, and builders.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In 1894, Austin again acknowledged the city’s failure in addressing the “herculean task” of renovating its outdated and inadequately adapted school buildings.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Ironically, Austin would not have to worry for long, as a series of interconnected scandals brought the issue of the schools’ mismanagement to the forefront of public debate in the 1890s and early 1900s. In 1894, City of Lancaster superintendent Robert Buehrle concluded that the legislature, having consistently rejected support for a new work on school architecture like Burrowes’s, was “not likely to do anything in this line in the near future,” which stirred up discontent and visible frustration among the city’s administrators.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Two years later, several authorities, Austin among them, were charged and tried for bribery and extortion related to the construction of new school buildings, after which the architect was removed from the board and the office left vacant until 1897.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Finally, also in 1896, another independent committee found that the Central Board had been “ill-served” (this is, overcharged) in the matter of its coal supplies, leading to the discharge of several weighers and the replacement of a coal contractor.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

In the public’s view, the scandals were evidence of gross mismanagement. Central Board president Simon Gratz resigned after a year in office, and his successor, Samuel Huey, admitted the city’s school buildings had been affected by “improper influences” and “dishonest practices.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The public fallout significantly damaged the reputation of school construction contracts, and local newspapers amplified the scandal. As the Philadelphia Times claimed in December 1896, “there must be a flood tide of corruption running through every department of our city authority.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The suspicions were reignited shortly thereafter when a group of muckrakers, in multiple independent investigations, exposed a system of “safe grafts” in Philadelphia’s public works involving the awarding of contracts for new buildings and franchises to companies favored by political bosses since the late 1890s.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Practices typical of Philadelphia included fake bids, high bids with unrealistic deadlines, and the construction of substandard public buildings. Schools were hit hard, as reports surfaced of plaster hanging dangerously over primary school children and poor hygienic conditions that burdened principals and teachers.Footnote ¹⁶² Public outrage grew over public plundering, extortion, and even schools involved in illegal lottery schemes, with judges warning that the city’s public school system was “in danger of being corrupted at its source.”Footnote ¹⁶³

The exposure school directors faced for their embezzlement, extortion, and other illegal activities prompted central authorities and reformers to scrutinize the composition of local boards in relation to the school building crisis. By the early 1900s, reformer Clinton Rogers Woodruff claimed that over half of Philadelphia’s school directors were linked to the liquor trade and gambling and that their board membership stemmed from political affiliation rather than professional experience in education. Only 19 percent came from learned professions, and even the professionals lacked expertise in education, architecture, or engineering. This critique now also extended to the Central Board, which superintendents and reformers saw as an inefficient entity—an oversized ward board tethered by the influence of local districts and their bosses. Although reformers admitted that a “minority” of “liberal-minded and progressive” directors existed, they were outnumbered and outmaneuvered by untrained officers.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Local trustees often replied to these charges by defending their choices and arguing they had “good common sense,” to which reformers usually argued that they had missed the point, as their occupations didn’t suggest a choice based on educational fitness. Even those superintendents and reformers who avoided underestimating local directors and admitted most were actually “honest men” added that local trustees “would do their duty” regarding school construction “if they knew it [emphasis added].” And, at least to superintendent of instruction of Cleveland Public Schools Andrew Sloan Draper, there was no reason “why they should [know],” as “no one knows until he has been educated upon the subject.” But as Potter County superintendent Anna Bodler argued, local directors tended to “rely upon their own judgement” when building schools in ways that ran counter to current developments in school hygiene and ventilation. Although they could be taught about the topic to a degree, Walton argued it was “impossible” for reformers to keep all school directors, contractors, and builders “informed on the latest and most desirable in school-house construction,” even if they were disposed to be.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

We must not lose sight of the fact that local muckrakers themselves had their own agenda—one that often blended well with the paternalism, elitism, and condescension demonstrated by reformers and progressives.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ However, the corruption they described and attacked seems to have been based on factual grounds, especially in regard to the grasp of the city’s Republican “machine” over local boards.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Be that as it may, the reformers and muckrakers, with their hard data and hard-hitting, sensational exposés, did manage to stir the public imagination and persuade school officials and even some local directors. Administrators sardonically pointed out that, when disregarding expert recommendations on school architecture, the average trustee “thinks he knows more about it [school construction] than Horace Mann if he had lived until now.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As a rule, superintendents and lay reformers lambasted school directors, labeling them as “conservatives,” “demagogues,” and “worshippers of gold.” Lucerne County superintendent Torrence Harrison disparaged directors who favored “what-was-good-enough-for-me-is-good-enough-for-them” buildings, implying that in toeing the party line they were neglecting the needs of their own children.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Reformers in the 1890s also shifted from democratic solutions to advocating for school building standardization, a more hierarchical system of supervision, and centralized control. Superintendents were now touted as the directors’ superiors whose task was to “mold” the boards’ deliberations and “guide” their decisions, supported by laws allowing judges to condemn unfit school buildings based on state and city reports.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Walton and Buehrle supported requiring boards to submit schoolhouse plans to the “intelligent, responsible criticism of an educational expert” for approval, without which the project should be discarded.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Civic societies and medical associations also pushed for mandatory sanitary inspections, leveraging the Austin scandal to advocate for a bill allowing a reformed Central Board to levy taxes for school construction and maintenance.Footnote ¹⁷²

In cities like New York and Boston, the publicity given to the dismal condition of some school buildings in the 1870s and 1880s was crucial in advancing the reformers’ battle for centralization.Footnote ¹⁷³ Conversely, Philadelphia’s ward boards successfully retained their authority regarding the decentralization of school construction, effectively resisting legislative reform efforts until the early 1910s. The Pennsylvania School Directors’ Association was established in 1896 and served as a platform to voice the concerns of the local powers. In 1897 its president, H. H. Quimby, argued that in the face of uncertainty about the division of responsibilities between school boards and laws, it was preferable to “err on the side of individual freedom” rather than advocate for “more paternal laws.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Indeed, local boards sometimes gave credence to Harrison’s harsh criticism as quoted above by repeatedly glorifying “the charms of the old-fashioned country school” with a single teacher, no course of study, and no limitations of subject.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Even after acknowledging that the “strain” on teachers in country schools “was immense,” local boards still idealized these schools as part of the “good old times.” Directors rejected standardized buildings, which they deemed “palaces,” echoing Lancaster himself, and fondly recalled their own experiences “sitting on the soft side of a slab” in old, rustic one-room schools before arguing that the existing school facilities available to the children were “adequate for their needs.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶

The standards and ideal schools that local trustees envisioned differed fundamentally from those envisioned by reformers and educational administrators: what was a “model” school for directors made physicians and inspectors gag when visiting and conducting inspections.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ When superintendents claimed that their expertise should be respected and that directors relied too heavily on their own uninformed judgment, the latter argued that any honest person with “good common sense” and good intentions made suitable material for a director. To the average ward trustee, no “unusual scientific knowledge” on architecture, engineering, or hygiene was required to construct a model schoolroom.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ To local boards, the claim to the contrary made by superintendents and reformers was a byproduct of their excessive ambition and academic arrogance. As an anonymous note in the Pennsylvania School Journal put it, these new administrators represented the “educator,” that “being whose shadow has since darkened all the land” with its graded schools, to whom systematic thinking and efficiency were “a precious thing.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

To local directors, any legislation centralizing school construction was interpreted as a direct attack on their system of beliefs and an entire tradition—one steeped in rural, antebellum, and Lancasterian Pennsylvania, where agrarian culture and semi-colonial administration blended into what Michael Katz has described as “democratic localism” in school organization and administration. Indeed, Philadelphia’s ward boards shared the model’s anti-professionalism, its hostility and suspicion toward the professional educator, its belief in the “innate common-sense and intelligence” of the people, and its subordination of efficiency and rationality to “responsiveness, close public control, and local involvement.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ However, local boards also gravitated away from the democratic model toward an autocratic form of organization by rejecting not only the “university clique” and central bureaucrats but also school directors who advocated for change, and even former teachers who managed to become ward trustees.

This was clearly articulated by Quimby’s successor, Harvey H. Hubbert. In 1899 Hubbert publicly stated that the “most troublesome nuisance it has ever been my misfortune to meet” was the school director who made “long and frequent visits to the schools” and actually got involved in his ward’s school. Directors resented not only the encroachment of academics and reformers but any challenge to their authority, as “progressive” school directors were shunned or turned down by older, more conservative ward trustees.Footnote ¹⁸¹ And although superintendents and academics argued that school construction had to be democratized by including teachers in the discussion, many local trustees were wary of the possibility and continued to monopolize their executive powers.Footnote ¹⁸² When teachers attempted to enter the debate or appealed for better schoolhouses, directors suggested they focus on teaching “more arithmetic” instead.Footnote ¹⁸³

Local boards did not see formal education or professional training as a prerequisite for service. Hubbert claimed that his fellow directors were “superior in almost all respects” to their predecessors, especially in intelligence, morality, and honesty. Directors had “practical common sense and mechanical genius,” qualities that allowed them to design and construct schools more effectively than architects and superintendents. The latter, according to the directors, were too immersed in “college or university culture,” wasting their energies in “the theoretical and utopian realm” instead of demonstrating the necessary executive capacities. As Quimby himself replied to Walton’s 1896 plea for standardizing schoolhouses, they felt that, as directors, they had already “gone all through the subject of building plans, heating, and ventilation of schoolhouses” when constructing schools in their wards. As some local newspapers that ridiculed reformers claimed, these “old maids in the Civic Club” and “educational cranks” from the university clique had “no faith in the wisdom of the boilermakers, carpenters, and painters.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Understandably, then, local directors in Philadelphia consistently minimized the significance of school buildings. “Never mind the kind of school or the architecture of the building,” claimed A. M. Bennett in 1887. “It’s the result we are after. What kind of men and women are we to be through life?”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ This romantic sentiment grew prevalent in the 1890s, shifting focus from buildings to teachers as the primary forces of education. According to this perspective, competent teachers could deliver effective instruction anywhere, even outdoors, with basic tools like chalk and shingle.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Buildings were not crucial: teaching could not be measured “by the cubic yard,” and thus did not depend on the school building or “its material appliances.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ As Principal G. D. Eckels claimed in 1896: “You may burn the schoolhouse, but as long as children are gathered to learn and there is a teacher present, a school exists.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Traditionalists found an unlikely ally in Philadelphia superintendent Edward Brooks, who adopted a more diplomatic approach than Mac Alister’s, often bordering on the deceptive. Brooks repeatedly downplayed the importance of good schoolhouses, arguing that “fine buildings” did not affect a school’s success, then claiming in 1895 that the city’s structures were “unsurpassed” in adaptability, ventilation, convenience, and neatness.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In 1896, despite having lost his board’s supervising architect to a corruption scandal, with children “narrowly escaping” death from falling plaster in the Twelfth Section and national authorities in the Forum calling out the city’s school buildings “defective,” Brooks simply brushed off these allegations as “exaggerated.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰

As superintendents and grassroots reformers warred with local boards, teachers and pupils began succumbing to the consequences of a funereal school plant. By 1901, as depicted in figures 4 and 5, the forty buildings sampled for this article had consistently failed to meet the “typical” sanitary standards set by Pennsylvania or Philadelphia throughout the entire nineteenth century, except for brief periods in the early 1830s and mid-1850s. Encumbered by mounting demands and working in increasingly untenable conditions, instructors felt powerless in the face of their needs being ignored: they “can complain” about their schoolhouses, Higbee noted, “but their complaints may be unheeded.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ It was in this context that, starting in 1896, civil societies, academic centers, and the teaching workforce collaborated in establishing sanitary initiatives such as clinics, dispensaries, and child-study societies to address the complex educational landscape.

These “bottom-up” initiatives actually predated any significant changes in school administration in Philadelphia by more than a decade. Only in 1905 would the city reform its school system, establishing a smaller, unified, citywide Central Board, demoting sectional boards to “visiting” boards, and setting standards of 15 square feet of floor space and 200 cubic feet of air space per pupil, thus aligning with state and national recommendations put forth as early as the mid-1870s.Footnote ¹⁹² However, the law did not change the financing system, leaving city councils in control of the appropriations and limiting the Central Board’s ability to fund adequate school construction.Footnote ¹⁹³ Only with the Pennsylvania School Code of 1911 was Philadelphia’s Central Board given financial control, along with the authority to conduct mandatory quarterly inspections to enforce the 1905 standards and the power to condemn unsanitary buildings. But by then, inspectors found 40 percent of schoolhouses beyond repair and nearly 84 percent failing to meet basic air circulation requirements.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ This, coupled with the improved quality of buildings erected after 1911—only one of the buildings had to be condemned and 75 percent provided sufficient ventilation by 1919—suggests centralization improved school infrastructure in Philadelphia, though it arrived a few decades too late.

Concluding Remarks

In her study of US public school architecture, Amy Weisser significantly pointed out that school buildings give physical testimony to “the contradictions between intention and reality” that pervade public education and democratic culture.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ This is especially fitting for Philadelphia, where school buildings themselves were the products of compromise between sanitary expertise, decentralized executive control, administrative conflicts, and financial restrictions. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, as cities like Boston, Baltimore, and New York were selectively applying Lancaster’s ideas to their schools, Philadelphia made the unconditional adoption of the Lancasterian warehouse school design its founding act as an independent school district. Elevated renovation costs in the 1830s, negligence of the local boards’ supervisory duties in the 1840s, and the lack of uniformity among reference works in the 1850s forestalled the attempts to adopt new, improved school designs. As Boston and New York City progressively centralized their school systems, Philadelphia kept its 1818 diffuse administrative scheme, aptly dubbed “colonial” or “agrarian” by reformers and historians alike. And when the former experienced “booms” in school construction, their designs were curated jointly by architects and school administrators, while Philadelphia’s 1860s expansion was marred by local boards hiring the lowest bidders, contractors cutting costs, and a central architect possessing only advisory powers. As a result, by 1875 sanitary examinations found both old and new school buildings crammed and stale.

As immigration and urbanization stretched the limits of nearly every city school plant from New Orleans and St. Louis to Cincinnati and Massachusetts in the 1870s and 1880s, their central authorities were legally empowered and administratively enabled to channel funds and professional expertise toward addressing these issues. In Philadelphia, however, as pointed out by William Issel, there was “no central administration to strengthen” until 1882, and even afterward, city superintendents were either ignored by local boards or repeatedly downplayed the school building crisis. Historians have claimed that by 1900 Philadelphia was “slowly eliminating the overcrowded and poorly constructed schools,” but the forty buildings tackled in this article suggest that, taken as a whole, the city’s school plant failed to meet even the most elementary sanitary criteria put forth by either national or local authorities up to the 1910s.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The city’s “bottom-up” clinical initiatives, which blossomed between 1896 and 1898, preceded the centralization of the city’s school system and the enforcement of sanitary measures by about fifteen years, and they should be understood as attempts to address these long-standing health concerns.

John Duffy has noted that progress in Pennsylvania’s school building standards was more slow and sporadic than in other states, making it difficult to explain “why the schoolhouses should have been so bad.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In light of historical evidence, I would argue that decentralization—both as an organizational dynamic and a system of values and beliefs—and the resulting tension between central and local bodies were the most significant obstacles to improving the functional conditions of Philadelphia’s schools throughout the nineteenth century. As Peter Lindert has claimed, the effects of local control of school administration in a given community constitute an open, empirically testable hypothesis, as it “could either accelerate or prevent the rise of schooling.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ A contextual, material history of schooling in the Quaker City suggests that the gap between the city and the rest of the country’s urbanized areas, as well as between standards and actual performance, dramatically widened due to a century-long dispersion of executive powers. This allowed plenipotentiary ward boards to downplay the importance of school buildings for pupil instruction, minimize the sanitary concerns central to reformers’ rhetoric, and adopt executive measures that ultimately impaired the performance of schoolhouses.Footnote ¹⁹⁹

Still, the conflict should not be construed as pitting “literate progressives” against “backward citizens.” Rather, it stemmed from fundamentally different standards and worldviews. Both factions held radically divergent frames of reference: progressives unfavorably compared Philadelphia to other US cities and advocated for medical science, administrative efficiency, and centralized control, while traditionalists trusted in common sense, positively compared Philadelphia to its early nineteenth-century self, and preferred more familiar, even intimate forms of control rooted in quid pro quo arrangements.Footnote ²⁰⁰ My analysis suggests that, to the traditionalists who comprised most of the local directors, discussions about the impact of school hygiene and sanitary standards on cubic feet of air space per pupil, which had become typical ever since the 1840s, were peripheral, alien topics. Indeed, the early nineteenth-century school building glorified by local wards never really existed, and, as shown in this paper, the real Lancasterian school of the 1820s was a noisy, overcrowded warehouse. These findings reveal that the conflict was not just about measurable facts but mainly about incompatible values and beliefs.

This interpretation could also explain the extent to which local boards deviated from typical nineteenth-century democratic localism in school organization by rejecting any kind of reformist attitude in school building, whether from academics, other school directors, or even teachers. To paraphrase a point made by Michael Katz, Philadelphia’s localists subordinated the existence of free, commodious, and healthy public schools to having the system adapt to the wishes and wants of the people, letting the chips fall where they may.Footnote ²⁰¹ And by magnifying their anti-professionalism, they effectively allowed school buildings to drift unrestricted by any functional standards. Rebecca Noel has rightly pointed out that reformers “hid behind the needs of the child’s body” to further their own agenda, but in Philadelphia, desolate school conditions made it easy for them to advocate for a bureaucratic system.Footnote ²⁰² In fact, my analysis suggests that the city’s centralization of school construction during the 1910s had a positive impact on school hygiene and sanitation.

Ultimately, what appeared as resilience to local directors was perceived as inertia by the reformers. What reformers considered to be coordinated public graft, local directors excused as “human nature.”Footnote ²⁰³ And what local and national reformers considered imperative changes to improve hygienic conditions, local boards saw as paternalistic and mostly ineffectual intellectualism—“prissy complaints,” in Noel’s terms.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Director J. N. Richards aptly put it in 1891: if the directors had not died by attending overcrowded houses, why would their “folks” be the first to do so? The material history of school construction in Philadelphia reveals that, as a rule, local schools embodied that belief well into the twentieth century, for better or for worse.