Page 526 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Telev s on n Schools | 0

by schools, displacing some of the focus on and debate around classroom uses
of television, but not all.
The 1950s saw the first major wave of implementation of television usage in
schools, paralleled by the licensing of the first educational channels at the begin-
ning of the decade. Some of these channels were directed at in-school audiences
and others were meant to provide alternatives to the mainly entertainment-
related commercial stations. In 1952, against the opposition of commercial
broadcasters, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set aside a por-
tion of the airwave bandwidth for educational use. A major force that under-
wrote lobbying for this move was the Ford Foundation, which had emerged
as the leading proponent of educational television (ETV) in the United States.
The foundation promoted ETV through two of its largest programs: the Fund
for Adult Education (FAE), which was directed at public education outside of
schools, and the Fund for the Advancement of Education (TFAE), which was
focused on school and college education. While the FAE became the leading
force behind educational education, the TFAE funded an array of influential
experimental programs designed to be models for demonstrating the efficacy
of teaching by television. These programs encompassed large schools and some
entire districts and continued into the mid-1960s.
Notable examples were carried out in New York City’s Chelsea school district,
and Hagerstown, a suburb of Washington, DC. In 1957, the fund published a
report by Alexander Stoddard titled Schools for Tomorrow, which stressed the
teaching of very large classes to alleviate classroom crowding and limit numbers
of teaching positions needed. He also argued that broadcast lessons would bring
a wider range of subject matter and a higher caliber of teaching to remote and
rural schools. The report was presented to superintendents of districts through-
out the country in order to solicit their cooperation in pilot teaching projects as
part of the Ford Foundation’s National Program. Based on this effort, the foun-
dation funded modestly sized experiments with the introduction of ETV in over
800 hundred primary and secondary schools in municipalities throughout the
United States, along with several more comprehensive studies. Approximately
200,000 students were involved in these projects. Along the lines suggested in
Schools for Tomorrow, almost all of these projects employed television to reach
exceptionally large classes: up to 175 in elementary classes, and from 200–500
in junior and senior high schools. And the foundation also supported a much-
publicized large-scale ETV experiment in American Samoa, an island under
American control in the South Pacific that was carried out by its affiliate, the
National Association of Educational Broadcasters, using closed circuit television
(see “Early Experiments in ETV” sidebar).
It is worth noting that the promotion of television in schools was linked to
an important shift that was taking place with regard to the role of the federal
government in U.S. educational policy. From the nation’s founding until the
1950s, educational policy had been the largely unchallenged domain of state
governments. Attempts to shift some control over education to the federal gov-
ernment were framed by what was perceived as a crisis in education that began
in the years immediately following the Second World War. The goal of remaining