Johnny Carson recently observed that he could tell that the new academic year was about to commence because the maternity boutiques on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills were having their “Back to School” sales. This comment nicely captured a profound, if still theoretical, transformation in the way Americans have responded to pregnant and wayward adolescents, for it was not until the late 1960s that they were permitted to attend school at all. Even then they were ordinarily segregated in isolated facilities to diminish their contaminating effect on other adolescents. An examination of the evolution of the education of “girls with special needs,” to employ a current euphemism, must consequently consider the organization of private-sector programs and voluntary agencies to provide rehabilitative services for a population most Americans considered to be too degraded or demoralized to enroll in regular classrooms.

The concept of “Ecology” has experienced some notable mutaions, since it was introduced by Ernest Haeckel, the German biologist, in 1869. This paper outlines its growth as a social concept and discusses ways in which an ecological approach can illuminate the study of urban education in the nineteenth century. The first section surveys the development of ecologial principles from their prototypical and still implicit use in the empirical social surveys of the nineteenth century, through their more formal attachment to a theory of urban society in the 1920s, as far as the 1970s when, despite all the vicissitudes faced over the previous half-century, they continued to be accepted as somewhat valid in the explanation of urban society.

From 1928 when he moved from the National Urban League to Fisk University until his untimely death in 1956, Charles S. Johnson was a major spokesman for black higher education in general and private, black southern colleges in particular. During that almost thirty year period he defended the uniqueness of their role in American higher education, while persistently urging them to elevate their academic quality to a level equal to that of mainstream colleges and universities.