1.1. California

California embraced centralized schooling in its original 1848 constitution. It provided for a school fund from the income derived from the sale and rental of public lands. It also included a provision for a superintendent of public instruction, followed by legislation that established a State Board of Education, funding for a state school journal, and teacher institutes that led to the creation of the California Educational Society, a teacher organization that promoted minimum terms and professional standards.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Clemen’s terms, these early institutes represented a distinct organizational innovation that facilitated the political participation of ordinary teachers and other educators, including women. The efforts to use land for the creation of a school fund, however, required the state to transform dispossessed Indigenous and Mexican lands in a process that was time consuming, politically difficult, and sometimes unsuccessful.Footnote ⁴⁶ Revenues were insufficient to building a public system that met the needs of a vast state with diverse regions and population.

The state teachers’ institutes were an important venue for addressing and publicizing these early fiscal policy concerns. The 1871 institute registered 463 educators and advocated education to hundreds of citizens who attended public talks over 4 days.Footnote ⁴⁷ The result was the enactment of a state school tax that demonstrated the potential of nascent educator organization. The State Teachers Association formed in 1876 and fiscal policy reform remained a central concern.

The second state Constitution in 1879 introduced new fiscal policies in education that reflected the populist political context. It eliminated the State Board of Education and specified that the entirety of the state’s central school fund be directed exclusively to the support of common schools, not high schools. This provision represented a populist critique of traditions of school funding dating back to the Revolutionary Era, when the proceeds of central state funds were directed to “higher” schools such as colleges, academies, and high schools serving a very small proportion of the population (approximately 2 percent of the relevant age cohort) and selected localities, rather than to “common” or elementary schools serving as mass institutions for the population and state as a whole.Footnote ⁴⁸

The fiscal policies introduced by the 1879 Constitution reflected a populist critique of that tradition but created new problems. Subsequent legislation shifted responsibility for high school funding from the state to the local level, which highlighted ineffective county-level administrative systems and insufficient funding. The State Board of Education was no longer a legal state institution but continued to meet, coordinating with the State Teachers Association and education activists to address new fiscal policy constraints and establish the first constitutionally supported state Board of Education, comprised of leaders of secondary teacher training institutions.Footnote ⁴⁹

The group promoted legislation that would provide state support for high schools. This included an 1883 act to create a “grammar school course” with several years of advanced instruction that escaped the Constitutional prohibition. The Union District Bill enacted in 1891 allowed towns of 1500 or more, or small districts uniting to reach that number, to establish a high school, and the County District Bill in the same year allowed county residents to vote a high school tax.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1903, a State High School Teachers Association formed and the state successfully passed an act that provided for free high schools.Footnote ⁵¹ However, this concerted and protracted action on behalf of fiscal policy reform was difficult to sustain because the leaders of the new State Board of Education were simultaneously managing teacher training institutions.Footnote ⁵² The state teachers’ organization would fill the void.

The State Teachers Association had been effective in advocating for high schools. It had created an “Advisory Council” in 1891 that held annual meetings in small towns across the state for teachers and citizens to create “common sentiment” around public schooling.Footnote ⁵³ It spoke as an authority on education issues, propagandized on the state’s educational responsibilities, and investigated a range of topics, like textbook selection, teacher certification, rural school supervision, and curricular offerings.Footnote ⁵⁴ Its powerful networks promoted activism on behalf of public education through the dissemination of what Clemens refers to as “organizational repertoires” in support of schooling.Footnote ⁵⁵

The work institutionalized and empowered state teacher organizing and further developed the social underpinnings of the state’s education culture, efforts that were central to the associational action that defined early twentieth-century fiscal policy reform. It was broadly inclusive, including participation from state agencies and affiliated organizations like university faculties, women’s groups, school boards, principals, welfare agencies, and powerful state and national education leaders who could draw on extensive experience and foster connections to teacher organizations outside of the state.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Advisory Council became an “ambitiously extensive, all-inclusive state educational association, utilizing the varied intellectual and professional resources for large ends.”Footnote ⁵⁷ When the State Teachers Association reorganized in 1905, the new California Teachers Association (CTA) created an organizational structure that fostered teacher activism that would support fiscal policy reform through direct democracy initiatives.Footnote ⁵⁸

The CTA developed a central organization, the California Council on Education (CCE), which replaced the Advisory Council and oversaw six regional associations led by executive committees that included a representative for every 300 paid memberships and had the autonomy and authority to address local concerns.Footnote ⁵⁹ The CCE continued to provide oversight and a strong synergy with state and national education and political leaders.

The CTA helped to obviate urban/rural and gender distinctions in a way that proved significant for subsequent legislative initiatives and diverged with the pattern of educator organization in Washington State. What proved important was its representational structure, which created coherence across regions and organizational interests, and created opportunities at the state and local level for educators to exercise agency, particularly women who served as teachers and superintendents. Members within their respective regions elected representatives to a central decision-making council rather than voting as individuals on major matters of policy and strategy. The structure had the effect of reconciling different interests under a rationalized central authority that could claim to act on behalf of the whole, even as it subordinated some perspectives to others. The association was led by the state superintendent, which conferred important advantages for education policy initiatives by providing entre into local teacher associations and schools.Footnote ⁶⁰ There were 10,000 teachers in the state in 1909 and two-thirds were members of the CTA, which became their primary bargaining unit.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the group became a powerful force in state politics because of its focus on fiscal policy concerns.

The growing reliance on local property taxes as a primary source for school funding exacerbated fiscal problems by the early twentieth century. The general property tax was not uniformly applied throughout districts until after 1890, and state funds were insufficient to support the schools.Footnote ⁶² California increasingly relied on local property taxation for education costs, which excluded intangible wealth like securities, and local property was typically underassessed to limit local taxation.Footnote ⁶³ While the 1879 Constitution had included a novel clause that provided for corporate taxation, the Southern Pacific Railroad used the Fourteenth Amendment to withhold payment of the assessment.Footnote ⁶⁴ The state failed to develop equalization policies between communities, state and local government, and corporations.

A 1906 state tax commission criticized the state for systemic inequalities that handicapped state growth, for taxing real estate instead of personal property, and because it “penalized honesty and paid a high premium for dishonesty.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The commission recommended that the state separate state and local taxation, which was enacted as Amendment 1 to the state constitution in 1910. Local revenues would include taxes on real estate and state revenues would include a $2 poll tax earmarked for schooling, an inheritance tax, and a set of constitutionally defined business taxes that could only be modified with a two-thirds vote of the legislature.Footnote ⁶⁶

The plan was lauded by fiscal policy reformers within and outside the state as a progressive and innovative policy that would more accurately reflect cost centers. It established corporate taxation as a source of state revenue, advanced the theory that statewide activities should be taxed at the state level and local activities at the local level, and challenged the premise that a uniform and equal taxation of all property accurately captured the varying taxpaying abilities of different individuals and property interests.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, in practice, the plan proved far less “progressive” and more problematic in its effects than initially portrayed, resulting in decreased shares of revenue from corporate taxes and increased funding disparities among school districts. How far such consequences were anticipated and/or intended by the amendment’s chief author, Carl Plehn, and the plan’s proponents, is an open question and a matter of continuing historiographical debate.Footnote ⁶⁸ Clemens recognizes the use of special “commissions” as one of the organizational innovations used to promote social innovation.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, in this case the final recommendations changed materially the tax structure without sufficiently affecting outcomes, given Plehn’s central role and the benefits that redounded to business interests. What is clear is that the new fiscal policies inspired new rounds of political activism on the part of both business interests and organized educators.

Governor-elect Hiram Johnson, leader of the Progressive Party, was initially optimistic about Amendment 1 because it would potentially strengthen the state’s fiscal structure and make local communities responsible for ensuring that private property assessments met local needs, particularly in schooling. It would provide sufficient revenues for a progressive reform agenda that he believed could be funded primarily at the level of the state and obviate a requirement for the state to increase local property taxes. The Amendment was also initially supported by both business interests and the CTA.

Johnson, in his optimism, ignored the Amendment’s limitations. State tax revenues were based on economic conditions that affected business income and provided no guarantee of stable budgets.Footnote ⁷⁰ The business community perceived correctly that it was relatively good for business because a single-state assessment would be less in total than that imposed by fifty-seven local assessors and would address inequitable taxation across counties in which businesses operated. Further, a two-thirds vote of the legislature was required to modify business tax rates, a high bar that provided greater power to corporations. Individual tax assessments were determined by local property assessors with rates fixed by a simple local majority. Citizens would pay an additional ad valorem tax in the case of a state shortfall, while corporations would not be required to assist with local deficits.

There were also significant changes to the state’s public school system in the decade after Amendment 1 was enacted. The state’s school-age population doubled between 1911 and 1922 and average daily attendance increased more than 60 percent with associated costs for longer school terms, schoolhouse construction, and related debt.Footnote ⁷¹ State educators promoted innovations such as kindergarten, Americanization, vocational schools, junior high schools, and a higher education system that included junior colleges. The system included diverse urban areas with explosive growth and demand for modern methods, and a vast rural system of small, costly schools. Economic diversity across communities led to resource inequality and demands for equalization. By the early 1910s, school cost was increasing faster than attendance. By the 1920s, a third of the state budget went to education and the state ranked second in the nation in per pupil spending.Footnote ⁷²

The Amendment effectively distributed increased costs and related tax burdens to local government. The state was responsible for 28.9 percent of public-school costs in 1910 and 22 percent in 1915; the county was responsible for 24.3 percent in 1910 and 19.1 percent in 1915; and, the decrease in state and county tax burdens was assumed at the local level where the share of costs increased from 45 percent in 1910 to 56.1 percent in 1915.Footnote ⁷³ State contributions per elementary school student decreased from $29.34 per pupil in 1890 to $14.31 per pupil by 1920 and property-owning voters were faced with much higher tax increases than corporations.Footnote ⁷⁴ The shift in responsibility from state to district was exacerbated by the difficulty of raising sufficient state income through corporate taxation. While overall state tax revenue from corporations grew, it was not at a pace that matched population growth and the expansion of public education.

The new tax policies inspired lobbying and a weakened party structure facilitated it. The Republican Party had dominated California politics beginning in the 1890s, though its governing capacity was shaped by the considerable power of the Southern Pacific Railroad. In the early twentieth century, party factions developed, including the Lincoln–Roosevelt League in 1907 that led to the formation of the Progressive Party and the election of Governor Hiram Johnson.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Progressive Party pursued social reform, worked to destroy the power of the Southern Pacific, and weakened party control over state politics. However, while the two-party system had integrated the goals of the major parties into a manageable range of action, the creation of the state’s Progressive Party in 1913, a weak Democratic Party, and a cross-filing system that allowed candidates to file with more than one party weakened party control over state politics.

The dynamic of non-partisanship in state and local elections resulted in a majority of the California legislature affiliated with at least two political parties.Footnote ⁷⁶ Chester Rowell, editor and publisher of the Fresno Republican, claimed that “non-partisanship in the government of California is not a thing that is proposed as a novelty. It is a thing that is and long has been.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Before his election as governor in 1927, Clement Calhoun Young had been elected for five consecutive terms to the California Assembly beginning in 1909 as a candidate of the Progressive, Republican, and Democratic parties.Footnote ⁷⁸ Many Republicans in the progressive camp remained loyal to Johnson and surrendered the party organization to him in 1914.Footnote ⁷⁹ Those who remained became anti-Progressive and more reactionary.

Johnson had campaigned to limit the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad and return government “to the People.”Footnote ⁸⁰ He strengthened the executive power of the Governor through a “Board of Control” that provided central oversight. However, he also supported a more horizontal government that included direct democracy legislation that enhanced voter power and held public servants accountable, home rule charters that authorized cities to exercise authority over municipal affairs bounded only by constitutional limits, and autonomy for certain state agencies, particularly the schools.Footnote ⁸¹ The state’s administrative reforms intersected with the larger political context so that monopoly control by one special interest, the Southern Pacific Railroad, was replaced by the competitive power of many special interests that provided a counterbalance to the railroad's elite influence and created a more highly competitive policy context for organized educators in the state’s policy domain.Footnote ⁸² Interest groups defined alternatives through lobbying and public relations and then utilized direct democracy to implement reforms across public domains, including labor, business, and public utilities. Johnson’s policies and a weakened political party structure privileged even further the relationship of the CTA to the state government bureaucracy.Footnote ⁸³

The separation of taxes through Amendment 1 shaped CTA goals for the next decade. While the amendment resulted from state fiscal policy processes that had begun decades earlier, its enactment reshaped the political environment and inspired interest group efforts to manage its implementation.Footnote ⁸⁴ The CTA was able to provide leadership and mobilize educators across the state through its Advisory Council led by state superintendent Will Woods and its journal, The Sierra Educational News. The group focused primarily on fiscal policy after 1910 and became a powerful force in local politics.Footnote ⁸⁵ Its strength in electoral politics was beneficial to direct democracy initiatives that expanded and protected state and local revenues for public education.

At the same time, the ongoing threat of business tax increases given periodic economic downturns and Progressive Party initiatives inspired corporate lobbying and limited efforts to address fiscal policy concerns at the state level. For example, California voters in 1914 abolished the Poll Tax, an important component of the state education budget, resulting in a 5 percent loss to the total state budget and a 10 percent loss for the 1915 education allocation.Footnote ⁸⁶ The CTA called on the state to augment the public-school budget, but public utility corporations lobbied the legislature to vote against possible tax rate increases. The result was a compromise business tax increase that covered 75 percent of the education budget loss and created significant pressures on local school budgets to raise the remainder, a dynamic that undermined the intent of Amendment 1.Footnote ⁸⁷ The new tax rates were unsatisfactory to both the CTA and business interests.

A 1915 state tax commission criticized Amendment 1 for its limitations and urged the state to develop a “fundamentally sound and permanent system of taxation.”Footnote ⁸⁸ A repeal of the amendment would likely have been impossible given the increase in interest group activism and a likely difficult public debate. It had been only 5 years since the Amendment passed, but it had already shaped a new policy environment, one that prioritized Progressive Party initiatives that cut across traditional party lines and limited partisanship. The CTA sought to transfer tax burdens to the state, while business interests sought to ensure that education was funded locally to limit corporate tax burdens. Fiscal policy reform was fostering deeply entrenched positions on private property rights, state formation, and equity that shaped the goals of interest groups.Footnote ⁸⁹

Business activism converged with post WWI anti-communism crusades. The Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913, created the federal income tax and, with it, a national policy threat to the wealthy. Isaac Martin describes anti-tax clubs that developed in response to the Sixteenth Amendment but does not include in his analysis California and the Better American Federation (BAF), which was the most prominent anti-tax group in the state.Footnote ⁹⁰ This superpatriot group represented business interests with a focus on private property rights as a basis for organization and membership.Footnote ⁹¹ At its 1917 inception, the organization’s mission sought to “urge upon businessmen the necessity of taking a more active part in legislative matters … through patriotic, educational, governmental, and cooperative methods.”Footnote ⁹² The group’s anti-communism campaigns equated patriotism with adherence to private property rights that yielded an $800,000 operating budget through subscriptions in its first year of operation.Footnote ⁹³ In 1918, the BAF distributed more than 300,000 pieces of literature throughout the state with recommendations on twenty-five amendments on a range of governance issues to demonstrate the group’s commitment to good governance, patriotism, and private property rights.Footnote ⁹⁴

The BAF also associated education elites like Will Wood with increased tax rates and directed political campaigns against him and the CTA to shape public attitudes about the role of schools and the cost of equity.Footnote ⁹⁵ These efforts were part of an anti-statist, anti-taxation zeitgeist that captured the state by 1920 and promoted efforts to use patriotic appeals to mobilize supporters and demobilize enemies. The BAF developed organizational repertoires that questioned the patriotism and professionalism of teachers and were intended to shape attitudes about schooling, the scope of the state, and policy around educational equity.Footnote ⁹⁶

William Stephens succeeded Johnson in 1917 and faced difficult state fiscal constraints from insufficient revenues and the economic uncertainty created by WWI. Individual taxpayers perceived that relative tax assessments favored corporations, with claims that costs per taxpayer had increased $95 per year, while costs per corporation had decreased $83 per year.Footnote ⁹⁷ With schooling the largest fixed cost in state and local budgets, Stephens signed into law Assembly Bill 1013 in 1917, the “tax limitation law,” which made it illegal for counties to increase tax revenues more than 5 percent of the previous year’s revenues.Footnote ⁹⁸

School officials considered the bill a threat to public education. Because local school costs were dependent upon municipal property tax revenues, the bill might “wreck the entire system of school financial support.”Footnote ⁹⁹ A committee chaired by Mark Keppel, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent, initiated a referendum to block the legislation. The CTA backed the legislation, voters repealed the tax-limitation law, and school officials celebrated that school revenues were “once again safe.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, business interests, including the California Taxpayer's Association, were incensed that the CTA had been effective in getting the law repealed and characterized the efforts as a “gross usurpation of power” by a powerful political machine.Footnote ¹⁰¹ On the one hand, it is unlikely that business interests cared much about whether local property taxes increased because higher local taxes would protect corporate interests. However, business taxes had increased with the loss of the poll tax so the referendum was also likely perceived as a tax threat. Business interests were also perhaps rightly concerned about the lack of attention to appropriate costs. Anti-tax groups sought governance structures that would protect business interests and were frustrated that the CTA had enough organizational strength and voter support to repeal Assembly Bill 2013. They were likely shocked by the CTA’s effectiveness, which inspired efforts to limit the group’s increasing power.

The referendum demonstrated to both groups that direct democracy could be a powerful tool for fiscal reform. Los Angeles county superintendent Keppel and state superintendent Will Wood developed Proposition 16 in 1920, a constitutional amendment designed to promote equalization and increase state educational allocations.Footnote ¹⁰² When Keppel presented the Amendment to the annual meeting of the California High School Teachers’ Association, he focused on the state’s role in promoting equity. He explained that the education burden had shifted to county and districts to the disadvantage of the schools. He argued that all property should be taxed but “the revenue from such taxation should be distributed where the children are, and fairly and equitably to the end that equality of educational opportunity shall by guaranteed to each and every child.”Footnote ¹⁰³ State superintendent Wood argued that the Proposition would restore “the old principle that the state and the county should be equal partners in supporting elementary schools,” especially because hundreds of districts were too poor to do so.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Amendment asked more of corporations, but its scope highlighted the expansion in public schooling and the strength of the education bureaucracy and the CTA. The organization’s extensive networks included by 1920 labor, progressive organizations, local political interest groups, political activists, and national education leaders that included the NEA. When Proposition 16 passed in 1920, it solidified the electoral power of the CTA and education leaders, who were perceived by many as “masterful tacticians.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The amendment had an immediate fiscal impact. The Board of Control projected a $14 million deficit in the state’s 1921 biennial budget after the Amendment passed, a significant increase over the initial deficit projection of $1 million.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The projected deficit increased the state's share of education costs, which had been 22 percent of the state budget in 1920–21 to 40 percent in the following year.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Friend Richardson, in his 1922 California gubernatorial campaign, characterized it as “the most vicious, iniquitous measure ever written into the statutes.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The Amendment inspired an attack on the “school machine.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Business interests sought to undermine public education leaders both ideologically and strategically. They also promoted public schooling as a venue that could serve private property rights by shaping the public's conception of the state through education. The BAF argued that the “kind of instruction the children receive, both in precept and example, will determine the kind of government and society this country will have in 15 or 20 years hence” and their literature demanded a curriculum and teacher that could be trusted to promote anti-tax interests.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Their claims inspired accusations that more liberal minded teachers were unpatriotic, socialist in their support of unions, and disloyal to the constitutional right to private property. Many conservative groups, particularly the anti-tax interests, believed their success depended upon taking control of the public schools.

The same ballot in 1920 that included Proposition 16 also included an unsuccessful bill supported by anti-tax interest groups to undermine direct democracy by limiting the use of the initiative for purposes of changing tax policies that was, ironically, put on the ballot through the initiative.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 1921, Assembly member Carlton Greene, with support from the BAF, promoted new legislation to weaken the initiative and roll back progressive social reforms, and another bill to revoke certification of any teacher who disparaged to a pupil or the school any provision of the U.S. Constitution, or suggested any change to the Constitution. While the bill failed, 26 to 42, many of its supporters had been involved with the emerging anti-tax movement in the state, and six were members of an anti-tax organization.Footnote ¹¹² Pro-business interests explicitly linked direct democracy to tax reform, including the CTA’s success in overturning Assembly Bill 2013 and passing Proposition 16. In 1921, the BAF invited LA businesspeople and legislators to meet with Harry Atwood, president of the Chicago-based Constitutional Educational Association, who warned that direct democracy initiatives had caused tax rates to be “twelve times higher” in California and too much democracy was the greatest menace to society.Footnote ¹¹³

The backlash against teachers was perhaps not surprising. While business interests, particularly the Southern Pacific Railroad in earlier years, had dominated California politics and used fiscal policy to their benefit throughout the period of this analysis, the CTA had effectively shaped fiscal policy reform between 1910 and 1920 to benefit public education. Many residents after 1910 perceived that Amendment 1 to separate taxes and increase corporate assessments, as well as Johnson’s campaign to end the power of the Southern Pacific, had successfully reigned in corporations. That perception did not quite meet the reality of the limitations of Amendment 1, the growth in corporate lobbying that supplanted the railroad’s power, and the close relationship between fiscal policy experts like Carl Plehn and business interests in the state. The railroad menace had fostered earlier voter antipathy for business interests but was perceived to have been eliminated, which made it easier for anti-tax groups to present the CTA, which fostered state expansion, as a new menace.

The problem with Proposition 16 was that it did not effectively reform fiscal policy to address problems of inflation and population growth. Further, in spite of advertising campaigns to the contrary, it did little to address equity. It required minimum contributions to education at all levels of government, but no consideration of appropriate costs. The CTA’s singular focus on raising school revenues impeded its ability to think broadly about the political costs of such a strategy.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Proposition enshrined schooling in the Constitution as an exception to “scientific budgeting” efforts that included oversight by Johnson's Board of Control, which was exercised over other state institutions to manage costs and eliminate waste. The primary focus on revenues in Proposition 16 inspired the wrath and scrutiny of anti-tax activists and created an easy opening to criticize educators for profligate spending.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The state’s increased responsibilities for the cost of schooling under Proposition 16 led to state budget deficits without a clear path forward for effectively managing revenues or costs. The King Tax Bill, proposed in 1921 to require a reassessment of corporate taxation, highlighted a powerful ideological divide. Corporate efforts to avoid taxation at all costs and CTA efforts to expand schooling and promote equity manifested in divisive ideological debates about how to define the scope of the state and its responsibilities to citizens and allocate relative fiscal responsibility.

Public debates on the bill provided corporations with a soapbox for speaking to common taxpayer concerns, including high local tax rates, an implied attack on public schooling. The BAF was particularly vocal. While the King Tax Bill benefitted individual taxpayers by taxing corporations in order to prevent an additional ad valorem tax on property, a well-organized and effective campaign by business interests in the state’s major newspapers claimed the bill would ultimately cost individual taxpayers. The director of the Taxpayers’ Association, with BAF backing, issued a statewide advertisement that claimed the bill would cost taxpayers $7 million and would lead to additional taxes on citizens.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The group sent to each of the seventy-nine members of the Assembly a personal telegram urging defeat and organized additional telegrams sent from all parts of the state.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Taxpayers’ Association reiterated claims that the problem was not state revenues, but state costs. While the bill was about equalization it inspired a movement for economy and small government, which became a focus of weekly BAF newsletters subtitled, “Less Government in Business; More Business in Government.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Supporters of the King Tax Bill, including the CTA, were similarly vocal about the bill's merits. They accused the business special interests of inappropriate efforts “to capture political control of the state.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ One senator’s scathing critique of the BAF in the Senate chamber demonstrates the divisive legal fight.

The bill, which required a two-thirds majority because it would change corporate tax rates, narrowly passed by one vote after failing in the first attempt.Footnote ¹²¹

The legislative difficulty highlighted how education fiscal policy reform had shaped voter interests. Governor Stephens appealed to voters:

The San Francisco Chronicle described debates about the King Tax Bill as an effort by corporate interests to “evade just taxation.… Their purpose is to restore crooked big business and the corporate interests in power … they will whenever they can shift burdens of taxation to the backs of the people.”Footnote ¹²³ When the bill passed, the railroads challenged it in court and won a tax rate reduction.Footnote ¹²⁴

The debates solidified the deep ideological divides between interest groups about the scope of government that had been shaped by a decade of fiscal policy reform. The idea of “economy in government as a way out of the taxation problem,” inspired Richardson’s campaign and a critique of state education leaders.Footnote ¹²⁵ Education had become a focal point of the pro-business lobby, which resented the political success of the CTA and the ability of teachers’ groups to insulate themselves from political oversight in state government that resulted in part because of the extent to which a significant portion of education costs were fixed. The state board of education was relatively weak, but its leaders operated through the CTA’s political and regional networks.

Friend Richardson won the gubernatorial election in 1922 on the basis of campaign promises for fiscal economy. He introduced the first budget in the state’s history that did not increase appropriations. Instead, it cut $12 million, taken from offices and functions across the state government, to arrive at a total budget of almost $79 million, with a planned surplus of more than $1 million to prevent additional taxation, which he claimed represented a longer-term savings of approximately 70 million.Footnote ¹²⁶ The budget fulfilled the pledge to eliminate useless expenses, but Richardson focused his wrath on public schooling.

Richardson’s first biennial budget gutted state support for education and his rhetoric castigated public school leaders, a strategy that had been shaped by BAF activism. The cuts included the elimination of appropriations for the supervision of programs in vocational education, part-time education, and Americanization initiatives, as well as a reduction of Board of Education expenditures from $204,000 to $125,000 a biennium, salaries paid to state education commissioners, and funding to teachers’ colleges.Footnote ¹²⁷ The decisions were explicitly fiscal, but intellectual in the sense that the budget potentially reshaped conceptions of the scope of state government and public schooling. The budget cuts to the state Board of Education affected its ability to represent holistically educational interests and created the possibility that divergent forces in the state could capture public schooling and impact educational fiscal policy.Footnote ¹²⁸

State Superintendent Wood called the education budget “a gruesome jest at the sincerity of campaign pledges” and a deliberate effort to wreck the Department of Education and starve its institutions.Footnote ¹²⁹ Richardson denounced the professionalism of his detractors. He claimed children learned about many subjects but knew little of any, could not spell, write legibly, or do simple problems. He accused politicians who were “under the guise of educators” for failing to see that “reckless extravagance has characterized the management of the schools.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Richardson’s accusations drew on conservative sentiment that had been developing in the state during the progressive era, especially after the federal income tax amendment and the King Tax Bill.

Public budget discussions demonstrated the potential effect of anti-tax efforts on schooling. Nellie Pierce, Governor Richardson’s budget director, argued that the greater proportion of education work would be best carried out by localities. Susan Dorsey, Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, responded that the “first duty of education is to equalize opportunities for every child; and this cannot be done unless the State and the nation help to bear the burdens of education.”Footnote ¹³¹ The Los Angeles School Journal argued that the budget was merely a “camouflaged attempt” to limit corporate taxes.Footnote ¹³²

The League of Women Voters pointed out that many people voted for Richardson because they thought economy would lead to a tax reduction, an idea that was promoted by Plehn, Elwood Cubberley, and other education finance experts who refused to acknowledge the inequality that resulted from district funding.Footnote ¹³³ Instead, the League recognized that the shift from state to local funding that started with Amendment 1 and culminated in Richardson’s drastic cuts in state education funding meant higher taxes on private property, which potentially raised taxes on individuals and reduced corporate responsibility.Footnote ¹³⁴ Matthew Kelly describes how fiscal policy reform after 1910 helped to further entrench local financing, and increase inequalities across the state.Footnote ¹³⁵ Scholars have demonstrated that state centralization brings resource decisions into the public sphere and puts the state in a position to address equalization, but requires consensus about the role of the state in promoting educational equity.Footnote ¹³⁶ With the help of an efficacious organizational structure, educators in California achieved considerable success at promoting this important state responsibility through fiscal policy reform, but at the cost of galvanizing organized opposition that remained active in subsequent decades.

1.2. Washington

The weak party politics that facilitated associative action and policy innovation in California and broadly in the West was particularly pronounced in Washington and other Upper West states, due in part to their later dates of statehood, and in part to their different patterns of economic and political development. In Washington, an explicitly anti-party politics of People's Conventions, non-partisan candidates, cross-party alliances, populist policy measures, and popular initiatives, took root during the territorial period, shaped the politics of statehood itself in 1889, and continued through the peak of populist politics nationally in the 1890s and into the progressive era. Notably for the analysis presented here, these aspects of weak party organization also facilitated the election of women to office in the policy domain of education, beginning in the territorial period and accelerating in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹³⁷

When Washington became a state in 1889, two major components of the state constitution fostered a centralizing dynamic between education organizations and fiscal policy similar to, and potentially even stronger than, that in California. First, the constitution granted authority to the state in the strongest possible terms to fund and regulate the public school system.Footnote ¹³⁸ Using distinctively strong language for the time, it made it “the paramount duty of the state” to “amply” provide for the education of “all” children inhabiting the state “without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Second, like California and other states established during the nineteenth century, the Constitution initiated the process for the State to claim the “school lands” that the federal government had set aside for school funding when Washington first became a formal U.S. territory in 1854.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As compared with states established earlier in the century, including California, Washington’s constitution specified particularly strong terms for managing those lands in order to realize their maximum possible value and preserve the yield as a common fund to support the state’s schools. As in other states, the precise terms upon which those central funds would be allocated were left to subsequent legislation.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In 1876, the first Washington Teachers Institute convened with the express purpose of proposing new common school legislation for the territory, a practice continued in subsequent years. After statehood in 1889, the Washington State Teachers Association (WSTA) made “securing wise legislation through its legislative committee” an explicit mission of its operation.Footnote ¹⁴² These initiatives promoted a statewide culture of collaboration among educators.

At the same time, however, another major fiscal policy component of the state’s constitution, borrowed directly from California, had the effect of reinforcing distinctions among different districts and educators that had developed during the State’s long territorial period. The Washington Constitution mandated that the state’s Common School Fund be exclusively applied to support common schools, as distinct from high schools, normal schools, technical schools, or other “special” schools and allowed that sometime later such “special” schools might be included in the public system.Footnote ¹⁴³ As with California’s 1879 Constitution, this provision of the Washington Constitution was shaped by populist politics, aiming to concentrate public resources in the support of mass education of the people rather than distributing them to the very small proportion of the population that sought “higher” schooling.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

In time, however, these provisions of the Washington Constitution paradoxically reinforced hierarchies of place and differences of interest in the State. The commitment of the entire proceeds of the state’s school fund to “common” schools meant that in order to establish high schools or technical schools, localities had to raise their own funds. This in turn effectively created urban/rural distinctions that shaped teacher interests and organization. Because high schools and technical schools were excluded from central state funding, the state legislature enacted laws allowing urban areas of certain sizes to raise special tax levies to support those schools. At the same time, the state exempted city districts of more than 10,000 inhabitants from county school taxes and apportionments. Eventually, legislation allowed urban areas special votes to double the 10 mill rate (1903) and classed districts by size (1907, 1909) in order to increase maximum taxation caps for larger districts.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Thus, state fiscal policies supported the state’s common schools but sustained distinct systems of municipal and county-based units of school funding and administration.

These early fiscal policies structured different policy interests among educators. As long as the central state tax and income from state permanent funds went only to common schools, common school teachers shared an interest in statewide policies directing the administration of those funds. Teachers and administrators of high school districts, meanwhile, shared an interest in special legislation that authorized urban districts to levy their own special taxes and manage the resulting revenue autonomously. Those differences shaped teacher organization.

As early as the 1890s grade school teachers and high school teachers organized separately in some urban districts. For example, “The Puget Sound Schoolmasters Club,” which convened in Seattle in 1890 and remained active for decades, accepted exclusively male membership from institutions excluded from common school fund provisions, including academies, high schools, independent vocational schools, normal schools, and the state university.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Other Seattle educators, meanwhile, organized a “Primary Teachers Association” and then the Grade School Teachers Club in 1912, composed entirely of women, who were active in local salary issues and state legislative matters. A distinct High School Teachers’ League in Seattle advocated for the interests of its much smaller membership.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

These examples suggest that early fiscal policy decisions inspired educators to organize along overlapping but not wholly congruent group lines defined by hierarchies of place (rural/urban), academic grade levels (grade school/high school), and sex (male/female).

Scholars have tended to focus on urban cases and to portray urban growth and development as the driver of politics and policy change during the progressive era. Tracy Steffes, by contrast, highlights the expansion of state administrative capacity in relation to rural school development and reform in states throughout the country from 1900 to 1930, while acknowledging variation in the “timing, form, and degree” of such expansion from state to state.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In Washington, the early, long (35 years), and influential development of certain rural regions before statehood in 1889 allowed distinctive rural patterns of school organization, funding, and administration to become well-established and remain every bit as important as urban change to interest group politics, state development, and fiscal policy through the progressive era.

Patterns of regional economic development contributed to the significance of rural constituencies in progressive politics and policy in Washington. In the 1870s, the Walla Walla region in the southeastern corner of Washington Territory became the locus of a settled agricultural region of large wheat farms in the Palouse hills and of expansive agricultural and grazing lands in the Columbian Plain, with a world market in grain that the region continues to supply to this day. As late as 1885 it seemed possible, even likely, that that region would achieve statehood as part of a different territory than Washington. After statehood in 1889, the rich Walla Walla region continued to exercise substantial political weight in the state, though with the arrival of the railroad, the eastern city of Spokane overtook the river city of Walla Walla in commercial significance. The western port cities of Tacoma and Seattle that focused on shipping and resource extraction also grew quickly after 1890 with the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, but that commercial significance was still very much tied to the globally significant agricultural production of wheat in the Palouse and Great Columbian Plain.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

For a time from the 1890s through the 1910s, those economic ties supported a variety of political alliances between laborers in the shipping and timber industries in the western part of the state and agricultural interests in the eastern part of the state. Animated by a sense of shared western grievance against discriminatory banking, railroad, labor, and tariff practices and policies that favored eastern economic interests, populist forces carried the state of Washington for William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Once the Populist moment faded, Grange organizations and organized labor forged a series of coalitions to various effects at local, state, and national levels. At local and county levels, those alliances found a wide variety of expressions, including as Democrats, non-partisans, socialists, a Triple Alliance wing of the Republican Party (Grange, AF of L, brotherhood of Railway workers), and briefly, a Farmer–Labor Party. At state and national levels, the alliances expressed themselves in formal politics primarily through different wings of the Republican Party and, also briefly, the Progressive Party.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the ongoing political significance of farmer–labor alliances and of the Walla Walla/Spokane region of eastern Washington became a focus of both state and national attention as part of what came to be called the country life movement, a social movement that aimed to improve rural life by infusing it with progressive ideals, technologies, and institutional structures, including progressive education, school reform, and agricultural extension services. The Country Life Commission, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 and chaired by Liberty Hyde Bailey, the nationally recognized authority in agricultural education and nature study, made rural education a central focus of its investigation and recommendations, with the Pacific Northwest figuring prominently in its vision of rural progress.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Accordingly, in 1910, the Country Life Commission held a convention in Spokane, and highlighted the Walla Walla and Spokane regions as models for policy ideas and reforms, including in the domain of education.Footnote ¹⁵²

At the same time, progressive alliances won several legislative achievements. In 1910, Washington State granted women full suffrage rights by state constitutional amendment. The next year, in one session in 1911, it enacted direct democracy, the 8-hour workday for women, workmen's compensation, and ratification of the federal income tax.Footnote ¹⁵³ Such policies were very much the product of what by then was a long history of anti-party politics and farmer–labor alliances within the State and their leverage within the Progressive Party and the progressive wing of the Republican Party. Also significant within and alongside those alliances, though less often called out in this context, were politically active women. In Seattle in these years, women were prominent in the leadership of the Socialist Party and the Central Labor Council, as labor organizers, and as experts providing economic data, analysis, and testimony in support of Washington State’s vanguard labor legislation.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The significance of Washington’s labor legislation, including provisions such as mother’s pensions and women and child labor laws, the influence of Washington’s Grange and women’s organizations, and its relatively early passage of full women’s suffrage, were among the factors that led Clemens to include Washington in her study of organizational innovation and progressive politics in the first decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Arguably, however, industrial labor law represented a very small slice of the issues that animated progressive politics and constituencies in Washington in the 1910s. The expansion of public education played a central role in embodying ideas of progress in this period, and in mobilizing broad grassroots constituencies around progressive ideas and politics.

As a domain of social policy, education brought together many of the same elements—including farm, labor, and women’s interests–that animated Clemens analysis of interest group politics in the West, but in a different configuration. In Washington in particular, education was a domain where women dominated not only the labor force and political organization, but certain categories of elected officials. This gendered politics intersected with place-based power. Rural interests were essential for promoting state support for public education in Washington during the progressive era. Moreover, rural schools in Washington were regarded as “progressive” by national standards, as represented by the Country Life Movement.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Rural school supervision already occurred under a sophisticated system of state standards and inspections by county superintendents. The relative success of that system contributed substantially to the state’s number 1 ranking in 1910 across a range of standard measures of school progress.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Women educators played significant roles in creating this success and exercised substantial political influence in Washington in the domain of education, the largest fiscal responsibility of the state, even before they won general state suffrage in 1910.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Suffrage then furthered that influence. By 1915, a near-majority (49 percent) of county superintendents, who were elected and paid, were women.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

This convergence between a rural place-based progressive politics and women’s political agency was embodied in the career of Josephine Corliss Preston, elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction from 1913 to 1928. Preston began her career teaching in Walla Walla County, became deputy county superintendent in 1904 and county superintendent in 1908. In 1911, acknowledging the significance of the Walla Walla region in the state’s economy and the increasing significance of women in state politics, Republican Governor Hay appointed her to the state school board. The next year, during the first state election in which women exercised full suffrage rights, she won election as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the first woman to hold state office in Washington.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Preston’s election reflected her considerable political skill and illuminates the broader significance of education as an arena of political agency for women in the West. To some extent, it seems, voters and political leaders acknowledged this significance by promoting women for office in the education domain.

Educator organizations were essential to realizing this political recognition and influence. State education leaders, including normal school principals, the state superintendent or her staff, and county or city superintendents, addressed the teacher labor force at annual teachers’ institutes on a range of issues, from educational philosophies and curricula, to issues of school governance, funding, and salaries. In addition, the state teachers’ organization met annually, rotating among different regions of the state. In 1904, the WSTA renamed itself the Washington Education Association (WEA), embracing the membership of city and county superintendents and normal school faculty as well as teachers.Footnote ¹⁶¹

The WEA, like the CTA and other state teachers’ organizations operated in a cooperative, but loose, relationship with the NEA. Many of the same educational leaders who addressed annual teachers’ institutes—especially normal school faculty and superintendents at various levels—participated in various subgroups of the national organization that had historically strategized across jurisdictions around a range of issues at both state and national levels, including federal bureau of education leadership, data collection, and policy. Rank and file teachers might rise to leadership in their local organizations and eventually find themselves nominated for positions in the NEA. Most ordinary teachers, however, were likely to engage the NEA only if it happened to hold its annual meeting in their state or in a city readily accessible to them by train. There they could network, hear addresses by national leaders, and vote on whatever issues happened to be before the body.

These relationships between local or state organizations and the NEA remained loose through the 1910s. During the 1910s, however, several factors led to efforts to tighten structural relationships among educator organizations. Chief among these were fiscal issues associated with the expansion of education over the previous 20 years. That expansion occurred along four main dimensions: growth in the size and proportion of the population that public schools served; increased persistence of school populations through higher grades; increased number and types of education programs offered for portions of the student population; and increased use of schools as sites for the delivery of other social services. Such expansion, for which the NEA, state organizations, and their allies, including women, farm, and labor groups, had often advocated, contributed to rising costs and demand for increased revenues, which organized educators further sought to promote and influence. At the same time, during the 1910s, the federal government provided the first support for K-12 education since Reconstruction in the form of categorical funding for certain programs, including Americanization beginning in 1914, agricultural education in 1914, and industrial and home economics education in 1917.Footnote ¹⁶² Monies for these programs were allocated to the states, which became responsible for structuring distribution, a process that organized educators also sought to influence. State and national leaders sought to strengthen the interorganizational capacity of educators to mobilize support for these specific legislative and administrative objectives.

California and Washington educators figured prominently in this effort at national organizational innovation and consolidation, with the CTA providing the organizational template and certain Washington educators playing key leadership roles. The basic plan for reorganization at the national level was advanced in 1913 by California educator, Henry Suzzallo, who would become president of the University of Washington in 1915.Footnote ¹⁶³ The proposal owed much to the CTA, with which Suzzallo was familiar from his years as an educator in San Francisco, where the CTA was headquartered. It organized teachers into a multitiered federated structure, with local associations at its base, state associations in the middle, and national organization at the top. Formal integration of these tiers would occur through a representative system by which local associations elected delegates to a state “representative council” and state associations likewise elected delegates to an equivalent national council. To support this multitiered organization and a more deliberate legislative and policy focus, Suzzallo further recommended that the national group maintain a central office in Washington D.C. with a paid executive secretary.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Reorganization of the NEA on Suzzallo’s model did not occur without controversy. The plan stimulated significant opposition that prefigured and intersected events in Washington State. At the national level, advocates made three attempts from 1915 to 1919 to win approval of organizational changes proposed by Suzzallo, only to be defeated all three times. Female educators, who constituted a majority of NEA membership, perceived that a structure that granted formal decision-making power only to a small number of individuals would radically reduce the influence of women. Under the leadership of Margaret Haley, founder and leader of the Chicago Teachers Federation, women teachers in 1915, 1918, and 1919 successfully mobilized to defeat the proposed reorganization.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Advocates of NEA reorganization did not give up, however, and their campaign gained momentum in the context of U.S. entry into WWI.

Two aspects of the war-time context proved particularly salient for education policy and politics in Washington State. First was the challenge that war-time federal education policy presented to the existing fiscal structure for education in Washington.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Under the State’s existing fiscal structure, which defined separate funding sources and administrative regimes for common schools and high schools, federal funding for vocational education strengthened the hand of (mostly male) high school educators in larger municipal districts. However, those high school educators and districts still had no formal structure through which their influence could be expressed at the state level and had no access to any dedicated sources of state funds. That challenge in turn created a demand both for major fiscal policy reform and for organizational innovations that could bridge divisions among educators.

A second aspect of the war-time context that proved particularly salient was war-time inflation. Inflation aggravated deteriorating salaries and working conditions for teachers, making the need and demand for effective teacher organization apparent. At the same time, federal funding for vocational education made visible the potential for both federal and state governments to support educational expansion. At the national level, leaders of the NEA sought to use teacher salary issues to push for NEA reorganization. In 1918, the NEA established a Commission on the Emergency in Education, ostensibly to coordinate educator response to war exigencies, but also to speak to teacher salary grievances and let teachers know that the NEA saw itself as representing those concerns.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Washington’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Josephine Preston, figured prominently in this salary campaign at both state and national levels.

During the 1910s, Preston had risen to the top of the NEA’s elected leadership.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As President-elect and President of the NEA in 1919 and 1920, she served on the Executive Committee and as a member of the NEA’s Commission on the Emergency in Education. In March 1920, Preston also staged a successful surprise lobbying effort for increased state funding for teacher salaries during a special session of the Washington Legislature.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Having proved her political efficacy on behalf of teachers at the state level, she used that political capital and her position as a rare woman superintendent among the NEA leadership to suppress objections to the NEA reorganization plan and facilitate its final passage at the 1920 NEA annual meeting.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Together, these intersections between general wartime contexts and specific Washington conditions recommended the State as a site for fiscal policy experimentation in 1920. During the special legislative session in March, educators had cooperated in lobbying the legislature for state salary relief, but that legislation did not address the underlying structural issues such as the lack of state-level funding and infrastructure to support high schools or vocational education, and the consequent reliance of high school districts on high levels of local taxation and special legislation. To address those larger structural issues would require a massive overhaul of school legislation and a major mobilization of political forces, especially educator organizations.

In 1920, a self-appointed subset of Washington educators took the lead in trying to address those issues. They did so first by developing a base of support among interested educators outside the main state education organization, through a separate association called the Washington State Teachers’ League (WSTL). Consisting almost entirely of schoolmen–normal school principals and faculty, mid-size city superintendents, high school teachers, and some male county superintendents, the WSTL did not represent a majority, or even a significant minority of teachers in the State, but it was well-networked with peers on the West Coast and in the NEA.

Drawing on those connections, the WSTL deployed many of the same strategies and tactics as their counterparts at the national level and in California. Following California’s example of establishing a special “tax commission” of experts to mastermind the major tax overhaul that had become Amendment 1 a decade earlier, the WSTL network convinced the Governor and Washington legislature in March 1920 to establish what came to be known as the “[School] Code Commission” to develop a plan for overhauling the system for funding the State’s public schools. The Commission began meeting in June 1920 with the aim of promoting the introduction of legislation in the next legislative session in January 1921.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Clemens has highlighted the practice of naming special commissions as characteristic of the kind of tactics that promoted social legislation by voluntary organizations. Such commissions, in her analysis, proved an effective means of tying the electoral power of voluntary organizations to specific state agencies and legislation.Footnote ¹⁷² That dynamic is readily observable in the Washington Code Commission’s development of Senate Bill #10, even as the case also reveals some of the limitations and pitfalls of such tactics, and of the process of policy and tactical diffusion from state to state described by Clemens.

Having succeeded in launching the Code Commission, the WSTL turned to the organizational problem of how to mobilize a solid constituency behind their reform agenda when they in fact represented a minority of the state’s educator population. Again looking to California, the WSTL network determined to put pressure on the larger WEA to reorganize on the CTA model. In effect, WSTL leaders pursued their agenda by acting as though the new structure they envisioned already existed and they were its leaders, essentially constituting themselves as the equivalent of the CTA leadership group known as the CCE. They then acted as if they had been commissioned by educators statewide to restructure the WEA and “pursue a legislative agenda” that would seriously overhaul the funding and administration of education in Washington State.Footnote ¹⁷³ Mimicking the CTA, the WSTL secured a full-time executive secretary, H. L. Hopkins, former superintendent for a small city in the Puget Sound region, to prosecute their organizational campaign. That work also converged with the larger effort to restructure the NEA, which required that state organizations develop a system for electing state representatives to the NEA.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Hopkins described differences between the WSTL and the WEA as essentially functional. The State League, in his account, was the political and policy arm of the state’s education profession, while the WEA tended more to the business of actual teaching, or “technical discussions and inspirational addresses.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ That description captured some partial truths. However, it also obscured fundamental differences of membership and representation between the two groups. Those differences were grounded in the state’s different fiscal policies for supporting primary and secondary education, and female and male teachers, and rural and urban school systems. Thus, in September 1920, the differences between the two organizations were both functional and representational. Those differences had significant consequences.

From September through December of 1920, Hopkins and the WSTL network pursued an intense campaign to simultaneously restructure educator organization in the state and mobilize educator support for fiscal policy reform. As revealed by extensive surviving correspondence to and from Hopkins in this period, the campaign proceeded in three stages, with no one stage complete before the next began. During the first phase, from August through September of 1920, Hopkins and his networks focused on expanding membership in the WSTL, both individually, and through formal affiliation with local county or municipal organizations. Hopkins did this through correspondence itself and through an extensive schedule of speeches and meetings at city and county teachers’ institutes around the state. In the second stage, Hopkins and his network performed an organizational pivot, somewhat breathless in its speed, of proposing a joint meeting of the WEA and WSTL in October, with the goal of achieving a formal “merger” of the two organizations under a new constitution that he and a committee of allies would be charged with drafting. This new structure would also include provisions for selecting future Washington State representatives to, and thus formal affiliation with, the NEA.

The third and final phase of the effort that did not really get underway until December was the campaign to mobilize educators behind the reforms embodied in Senate Bill #10. Given the complexity of the Bill and the plan to introduce it in the new legislative session beginning in January, the December campaign represented a very compressed timeline for mobilizing political support. That compression appears to have been the product of deliberate strategy, however.

Throughout the autumn of 1920, Hopkins and WSTL insiders worked in continuous backstage communication with the Code Commission. They also tried to prepare local leaders and associations to support the anticipated legislation, even as the content of the Commission's recommendations remained unknown to most educators and the public at large. They did so by outlining likely legislative provisions in the most general terms—that is, “fixing the state's revenue system and administration,” never mentioning the legislation’s most controversial provisions even when they knew what those provisions were and expressed concern privately about their controversial nature. This culture of secrecy on the part of both of Commission itself and the WSTL and its leaders was deliberate. By emphasizing general goals of increased school funding and improved teacher welfare, they tried to prevent early open opposition to the work. This strategy backfired, however, when it compromised the capacity of those most disposed to favor the legislation from effectively lobbying local constituencies and legislators. Hopkins received multiple letters from correspondents pleading with him to send more precise information about the proposed legislation's provisions.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In addition, the lack of public disclosure left the power to provide such information to groups inclined to oppose it, a power they incisively seized.

Ultimately, the failure of Senate Bill #10 suggests some of the hazards and pitfalls of the diffusion of innovation across states as analyzed by Clemens.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ More precisely, the short career of Senate Bill #10 shows how the shared wisdom of voluntary organizations about how to get “progressive” legislation “done” may at times have induced an unwarranted cockiness on the part of its practitioners. This overconfidence showed up in several ways in the Washington case. First, it was in the composition of the Code Commission itself. Though at first the Governor declared that the Commission would be composed entirely of businessmen, the selection process soon led to appointment of key members from the WSTL network.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Of course, packing a Commission with reformers was the rule, rather than the exception, when deploying such a strategy. But in this case the network constituted a very partial representation of organized educators that would eventually need to be mobilized in support of reform. Hopkins and his allies also had to fight a perception among educators that the work represented an attempt to “put something over” WEA membership and seize control of the organization.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The opposition was not wrong about this, as Hopkins’ own correspondence documents.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

A second dimension of overreach, and a direct contrast with the simultaneous fiscal policy reform effort in California, was the extent to which Washington’s Code Commission worked around, rather than with, the State's chief education agency—the State Office of Public Instruction. Clemens highlights the “disruptive” aspects of the extra-party politics of voluntary organizations.Footnote ¹⁸¹ From that perspective, disrupting existing patterns of state operation could be seen as the point of Commission work. But in this case, many of the beneficiaries and agents of the state office of public instruction saw it as already representing progressive politics and policy, making the intention of disrupting its operations politically problematic. Moreover, those same agents and constituencies that supported the work of the state office formed the major part of the electoral power that advocates of reform would eventually need to mobilize to secure the passage of reform legislation.

Finally, the most consequential overreach on the part of Senate Bill #10’s advocates appeared in the content of its provisions. The Bill was a highly complex piece of omnibus legislation. As formally introduced in January 1921, it included a constitutional amendment, tax law changes, and governance reforms. Considered alone, the tax law changes were fairly straightforward, reflecting an effort to shift more of the funding burden to the state level, raising the amount of state apportionment from $20 to $30 per child, with an additional $10 per child apportioned at the county level. Local districts would retain the capacity to assess local school taxes of up to 15 mils without special voter approval. Hence, the finance part of the proposal came to be known as the 30-10-15 plan. Overall, this plan would have increased the total amount of funding in the system and would have made the state responsible for a greater share of the total, thus promoting greater equalization of school funds. The shift would still have been limited, however, increasing the state’s share only up to an average of about 50 percent.Footnote ¹⁸²

However, the legislation also contained measures pertaining to school governance that were, by comparison, a radical structural departure from existing practice. Most “elective” school offices in the state would be replaced with appointed officials, including the state superintendent and all county superintendents. The county would become the fundamental administrative unit, with local school boards eliminated and replaced by countywide boards of appointed officials.Footnote ¹⁸³ The Commission also recommended that the county become the chief taxing unit rather than existing local districts.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ These equalization measures were undercut, however, by recommendations to increase allowable local tax rates from 10 to 15 mills and exclude the largest urban districts from county administration.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

This “county unit plan,” was the pet idea of Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of the School of Education at Stanford University and an important intellectual influence on fiscal policy reform in both California and Washington. In Washington, however, reformers sought to impose a full-scale version of Cubberley’s idea in a single sweeping bill, whereas in California elements of county-level school support and administration had been adopted more piecemeal. The prospect of losing local school decision-making power predictably triggered extensive resistance.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Moreover, the negative consequences of consolidation, and its impact on citizens’ sense of political representation, would be experienced primarily by rural districts and populations.

The impact would also be pronounced for women. To take aim at elective school offices in Washington in 1920 was to take aim at women’s political agency and leadership in education generally, and at Josephine Preston’s leadership specifically. That this was the deliberate intent of certain key players in Washington is clear. For individuals such as Governor Hart, who had been cornered politically by Preston on teacher salary issues earlier in 1920, and Albert S. Barrows, a member of the Commission appointed by Hart, who had sought the office of State Superintendent back in 1912 when Preston first won election, the immediate elimination of Preston and all county superintendents from public office (over 50 percent women in 1920) was a feature of the county unit plan.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ As stated by Noah Showalter, president of Cheney Normal School and a close behind-the scenes collaborator on the Commission’s recommendations,

In this comment, Showalter echoed similar statements made by Cubberley, who had referred in his own textbooks on school administration to the qualities required of the “men” who should serve as school administrators, while simultaneously referring to the presumed incapacity of teachers, consistently gendered as female, for making data-based assessments and decisions.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Senate Bill #10’s governance provisions were an expression of gender backlash against women's dominance in the policy domain of education, but the Bill also engendered a backlash of its own. Besides representing a strong reassertion of patriarchal power in the domain of education, the Code Commission’s recommendations proved to be politically and strategically naïve. Whether out of arrogance or ignorance, the members vastly underestimated both the breadth and the depth of opposition among rural constituencies to its proposed recommendations. Even more importantly, they underestimated Preston’s skill at mobilizing that opposition.

Preston utilized her political skills and well-organized professional and political network to take aim at each of the chief recommendations and justifications.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ In her annual Superintendent’s Report in the fall of 1920, she devoted a whole section to naming and refuting each recommendation, point by point, emphasizing its disruption to existing schools, districts, and school governance and highlighting the violation of democratic principles that would be effected by removing chief school officers from accountability to the electorate. She devoted another section of the Report to “The Program of Rural Education,” including extensive reporting from each county, exhibiting various kinds of “success” achieved in rural schools under the existing system.Footnote ¹⁹¹ She then published sections of her Report as a separate pamphlet, had 7,000 copies printed and distributed throughout the state, convening a statewide meeting of educators to discuss the recommendations a full month before the Report was finalized.Footnote ¹⁹² By the time legislation was formally introduced in January 2021, organized opposition had solidified. The resulting legislation, though repeatedly amended, lost by one vote on February 25, 1921.Footnote ¹⁹³

In Washington, where all but two of the forty-two members of the state Senate in 1921 identified as Republican, mainstream party politics cannot illuminate the vote on Senate Bill #10. Nor does any other category of analysis yield a clear-cut way of distinguishing Ayes from Nays. The final tally does provide some evidence of division along urban/rural lines, however. Senators from cities on the west side of the state generally voted in favor of the Bill, though some also opposed it. Three of the four Senators from the city of Tacoma voted for the Bill, for example, but the other opposed it. Five Senators from Seattle voted for the Bill, while three others did not. Senators from the eastern city of Spokane also favored the Bill 2 to 1, with a fourth Spokane Senator absent or not voting. Notably, though, the two Spokane Senators who voted in favor identified themselves as “lawyers,” while the one who voted against the Bill identified as a farmer. (The abstention was a banker.) Of all the nine Senators who identified as farmers, three voted for the Bill (though one of those was a former President of one of the state’s normal schools), while the other six farmer-senators voted against it. Representatives from the towns where other state normal schools were located (Bellingham and Ellensberg) joined their colleague in voting for the Bill. Both Senators from the eastern farming center of Walla Walla voted “no.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴

In published statements, reasons for opposition centered on the loss of local governance that some districts would suffer under the proposed changes. Called upon to explain his “no” vote after the tally had been recorded, Senator Hutchinson, the farmer from Spokane, stated:

Interestingly, the Senator called upon to represent those who had voted in favor of the measure raised similar issues. Senator Karshner from Puyallup, a somewhat rural area in the West of the State, began by saying that he favored the Bill’s fiscal provisions: “I believe this school code is correct in theory but premature in installation. I concur in its main provisions. I believe in a blanket county tax and in an enlarged uniform state tax which make an equal distribution of schools funds.” However, he suggested a more equivocal view of the Bill's administrative provisions.

These statements suggest how the decision of the Commission and its legislative partners to advance a “radical” attack on direct democracy in rural schooling ran counter to the strong tradition of “progressive” direct democracy in Washington that is highlighted in Clemens.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The Bill cut into the important coalition of farmer, labor, and women's groups that had often been important to the passage of progressive legislation. Senate Bill #10 effectively betrayed the recognition of women in politics by eliminating virtually their only viable path to elective office.

In this way, divisions among professional educators were key to the defeat of fiscal policy reform in Washington in 1920–21. Those differences of interest derived from fiscal policies that can be traced first to the delay in central state funding during Washington’s long territorial period, then through the fiscal provisions of the State constitution that excluded high schools and other “special” schools from benefits of the central common school fund, and finally through many pieces of legislation aimed at circumventing that exclusion by giving cities special taxing powers. These school funding structures both created and reinforced divergences of interests along three overlapping but not entirely congruent hierarchies of place (rural/urban), academic grade (common school/high school), and sex (female/male). Those divergences in turn had significant consequences for subsequent fiscal policy and state administrative capacity.