New York City's Failed Teacher Selection Project: Political Reality Trumps Educational Research, 1947–1953

Abstract

This article describes the history of the failed New York City Teacher Selection Project (TSP; 1947–1953), a collaborative effort to replace the city's teacher licensing tests, which emphasized subject matter knowledge with personality tests. The TSP was a partnership between the Board of Examiners and the Citizens Committee for Children, and its members included pioneers from the field of child psychiatry. The author draws on primary documents to detail the TSP's research and shows how the tests that the group designed reflected individual members’ commitment to progressive education and the ethos of mental hygiene. In addition, the article shows how the TSP embraced an experimental scale created to measure applicants’ authoritarian tendencies. The author concludes that the TSP's efforts to influence teacher licensing failed largely because members chose to work with like-minded colleagues in isolation from the political realities of New York City and the public school system.