



































Joseph Mayer Rice


 

Joseph Mayer Rice: Educational Researcher and Reformer 

 
Mark Groen 

 California State University, San Bernardino 

 

Abstract 

Joseph Mayer Rice has been called the 

father of educational research.  His articles 

published in the magazine The Forum, in 1892-

1893, are seen by many scholars as the 

beginning of the Progressive movement in 

education. His work popularized notions of 

educational reform which helped to launch the 

progressive education movement, and 

transformed both curriculum and pedagogy in 

ways that are still evident today.  

 

Joseph Mayer Rice has been called the 

“father of research on teaching” and “empirical 

classroom-based research” (Ayers 1918; 

Englehart & Thomas 1966; Kliebard 1982; 

Gurung & Schwartz 2009). His articles 

published in the magazine The Forum, between 

October 1892 and June 1893, popularized 

notions of educational reform and are seen by 

many scholars as the beginning of the 

Progressive movement in education (Cremin 

1961; Graham 1966; Kliebard 1993).  

Rice first began publishing his ideas 

about education in the weekly periodical Epoch 

in 1891, but for most scholars, it is his articles 

published in The Forum, between October, 

1892, and June, 1893, for which he is 

remembered. He also published several books 

and continued writing articles for The Forum, 

for over a decade. Rice also served as editor of 

The Forum, which was owned by his brother, 

from 1897-1907. His collected Forum articles 

provided the basis for the book, The Public 

School System of the U.S. This book, like the 

articles, contained a withering critique of 

schools and teaching practices in a number of 

northern cities. In each case, Rice recounted in 

detail what he considered the most egregious 

example of poor pedagogy he witnessed in the 

schools of that locality. He also questioned why 

superintendents allowed such teaching to 

persist. Rice’s exposé of pedagogical practices 

in schools placed him among the early 

practitioners of a journalistic style that would 

become known as muckraking journalism.  

Rice was born in Philadelphia, 

Pennsylvania, in 1857 two years after his 

parents immigrated to America from Germany. 

He attended public schools in Philadelphia and 

New York City, where the family relocated in 

1870. He received a degree in medicine from 

the College of Physicians and Surgeons at 

Columbia University in 1881, and built a 

successful pediatrics practice in New York City. 

Rice closed his pediatric practice in 1888 to 

pursue the study of education and psychology. 

In 1888, Rice traveled to Germany where he 

remained until 1890. While there he studied 

experimental psychology at the University in 

Leipzig, and studied Herbartianism at the 

laboratory school at the University of Jena.  

Herbartianism is an educational philosophy 

developed by Johann Freidrich Herbart, who 

also did pioneering work in psychology. After 

initiating his famous study of American schools, 

Rice returned to the University of Jena briefly in 

the summer of 1893, before resuming his 

educational reform efforts. Rice married 

Deborah Levinson in October of 1900, they had 

two children. 



61 

 

The dawn of the progressive era was a 

period during which the urban social values of 

the expanding cities triumphed over the 

traditional social mores of the countryside. 

Charles Sellers observed that throughout the 

nineteenth century the spread of the market 

economy pitted an agrarian “old timer” oral 

culture and local subsistence farming economy 

against the wealth, culture, and market oriented 

economy of the rising cities (Sellers 1991). 

During the last third of the nineteenth century 

the mantle of civic virtue passed from the 

Jeffersonian yeoman farmer to the urban 

middle-class professional. The social position of 

the farmer changed from being the foundation 

of society to that of a backward “hayseed” as 

urban life assumed a larger role in the direction 

of social norms. Rural folk resisted these 

changes to be sure. During the 1890s Grangers, 

Greenbackers, and Silverites united in the 

Populist party in 1892, and then under William 

Jennings Bryan fused with the Democracy in the 

election of 1896.  This election arrayed the 

monied interests of the East against the agrarian 

interests of the South and West. Out of the 

political turmoil of the 1890s the progressives 

would emerge to carry the banner of reform. 

Cremin argues that much of the Progressive 

agenda was based upon “support that derived 

from a half-century of agrarian protest and 

innovation” by the Granger and Populist 

movements (Cremin 1961, 42).  In the end, 

however, the Progressives found the “scientific 

ballast” that the earlier Grangers and Populists 

lacked (Cremin 1961, 164). A number of 

prominent historians have argued that the 

Progressive movement began with the series of 

articles in the journal The Forum, by 

educational reform advocate John Mayer Rice 

(Curti 1951; Cremin 1961; Kliebard 1986). 

Indeed, Rice pioneered the use of empirical data 

in the study of schools helping to provide that 

scientific ballast.  

Rice began his educational odyssey, “to 

discover the marked variation in the general 

degree of excellence of the schools of various 

localities” seeking to “permanently rais[e] the 

standard of schools … b[y] the eradication of 

the causes of their inferiority” (Rice 1893, 1-2). 

For six months in early 1892, he travelled 

through 36 cities observing schools and 

classrooms. He collected data and compared 

practices in different schools to determine why 

some schools were more successful than others. 

Determined to base his ideas “on a foundation 

of science rather than mere opinion,” Rice 

sought the answers to these problems through 

observations in schools (Kliebard 1993). 

Although others had collected educational data 

before him, His innovative use of the data made 

him “the acknowledged father of comparative 

methodology in educational research” (Kliebard 

1982).  

Rice clearly did not approve of teachers 

who taught “on a purely mechanical basis,” by 

which he meant schools in which teachers 

“conduct sing-song recitations in spelling and 

arithmetic, hear children recite lessons verbatim 

from a text-book, or conduct concert lessons in 

geography” (Rice 1893, 5-6). Rice favored 

schools “conducted on scientific principles,” 

observing that, “in the progressive schools” 

mechanical “methods are never tolerated for any 

length of time after they have been detected” 

(Rice 1893, 6). He indicated, in his early 

articles, that this was his primary criteria for 

judging schools. Later however, he developed a 

more refined and somewhat different criterion. 

Rice strongly advocated “the unification of 

studies,” and “that the sciences can and should 



62 

 

be taught in organic connection with the other 

branches of the curriculum” (Rice 1893, 212, 

215), what today we might call inter-

disciplinary or thematic teaching. Rice based his 

rankings of city schools on the prevalence of 

recitation versus thematic teaching he observed 

(Rice 1893, 229). He then proceeded to publish 

articles condemning what he perceived to be 

poor teaching practices in a school district.  

Rice opened a discussion of the schools 

of Philadelphia with the observation; “The 

public schools of Philadelphia offer a striking 

example of the difficulties involved in 

advancing the schools when those in authority 

use their offices for selfish motives …  instead 

of for the purpose of furthering the welfare of 

the children intrusted [sic] to their care” (Rice 

1893, 147). He commented that in Chicago; 

“some of the teaching was the most absurd I 

have ever witnessed” (Rice 1893, 170). In New 

York, he insisted that “the school has been 

converted into the most dehumanizing 

institution I have ever laid eyes upon” (Rice 

1893, 31). He found: “A hard, unsympathetic, 

mechanical-drudgery school, a school into 

which the light of science has not yet entered. 

Its characteristic feature lies in the severity of its 

discipline of enforced silence, immobility, and 

mental passivity” (Rice 1893, 39). He went on 

to note that; “The schools of Baltimore compare 

unfavorably even with those of New York” 

(Rice 1893, 55), and “until a material change is 

effected, those attending the schools of that city 

[Baltimore] will be doomed to a miserable 

childhood” (Rice 1893, 64).  He reserved his 

harshest condemnation for the schools of St. 

Louis, Missouri where he found; “The treatment 

of the children cannot be considered otherwise 

than barbarous” (Rice 1893, 98). Indeed, he 

concluded, “The schools of St Louis … in my 

opinion are the most barbarous schools in the 

country” (Rice 1893, 220-221). He found; “In 

some cities the schools have advanced so little 

that they may be regarded as representing a 

stage of civilization before the age of steam and 

electricity” (Rice 1893, 218). There were, 

however, schools that met his approbation and 

teachers who were doing good work in a 

humane and thoughtful manner. He found such 

classrooms in Indianapolis and La Porte, 

Indiana and in Minneapolis and St. Paul 

Minnesota.  

 The harsh rhetoric in Rice’s articles 

increased the circulation of the Forum and 

roused educational reformers, but it also raised 

the indignation of educational professionals.  

Perhaps finding the harsh tone of his Forum 

articles hindered his research, Rice retreated 

somewhat in the summary of his book 

compiling those articles. He wrote:  

 

My general impression of our 

elementary schools is not so 

unfavorable as might be inferred from 

some of the earlier chapters. That I 

may have conveyed a more pessimistic 

view of the situation than I actually 

possess is owing entirely to force of 

circumstances, and not to any desire 

on my part to do so. It was because I 

deemed it necessary to direct the 

attention of the public primarily to 

those children who are most 

grievously wronged, and consequently 

to the schools most urgently in need of 

reform, that I was led to devote so 

much space to the discussion of such 

schools as are a disgrace to an 

enlightened nation (Rice 1893, 229-

230).   



63 

 

Rice continued to write for the Forum, but his 

days as a so-called muckraking journalist were 

over by 1894. His subsequent work focused not 

on exposés, but on reforming curriculum, 

pedagogy and school governance. 

 In his first tour of schools in 1892, Rice 

examined “the spirit of schools,” in 1895 he set 

out again, this time to “study the results of 

instruction” (Rice 1913, 147). Rice collected 

samples of student work in a variety of subject 

areas from thousands of students. He also used 

the first comparative survey administered to 

students to obtain information on demographics. 

Rice noted that most educators assumed 

educational outcomes “are largely influenced by 

the heredity, nationality and home environment 

of the pupils,” but in fact, he found that these 

“were found to exert an exceedingly small 

amount of influence” (Rice 1913, 228).  He 

concluded that teaching methods mattered far 

more than ethnicity in obtaining high student 

outcomes. In the same study, Rice found that in 

spelling after fifteen minutes of study students 

experienced rapidly diminishing returns from 

additional study time. In arithmetic, however, 

this did not occur. He concluded that teachers 

were wasting time on long spelling exercises 

that might be better spent on the study or other 

subjects.  

Rice’s second book, The Rational 

Spelling Book appeared in 1898, based on an 

article in an 1897 edition of The Forum titled 

“The Futility of the Spelling Grind.” Rice 

asserted that “not more than fifteen minutes 

daily be devoted to spelling, including both 

study and recitation.” He insisted that 

“additional time given to the subject is not 

rewarded by additional return” (Rice 1898, 6). 

Basing his work on spelling tests administered 

to over 33,000 pupils, he created a spelling text 

that utilized only the most commonly used 

words as a way of increasing the efficiency of 

spelling instruction. His primary focus was not 

on the difficulty of the material to be learned but 

rather on minimizing the amount of study time 

expended to learn the material. Rice’s Rational 

Spelling Book began with the fourth grade and 

contained all of the lessons through the eighth 

grade, thus students could work from the same 

book year after year. This proved to be 

extremely popular in an era when parents still 

had to purchase the school textbooks their 

children used. 

Rice utilized a business vocabulary to 

criticize the educational system of the time. He 

sought to understand the management of schools 

and to suggest ways to make them more 

efficient and less prone to political interference 

from elected school boards and committees 

which often had day-to-day management 

responsibilities for municipal schools. In 1913, 

he released Scientific Management. In this book 

he addressed school governance and pedagogy, 

particularly elementary arithmetic. Rice 

concluded that the “differences in the results” 

among schools “were due to differences in the 

quality of the teaching” and he looked at how 

school governance and pedagogy could be 

altered to enhance the quality of schooling (Rice 

1913, ix). Rice observed that even if educators 

had the knowledge and knew the best teaching 

methods results were not guaranteed. He wrote: 

“The attainment of the best possible results in 

the class-room … cannot be depended upon … 

unless the proper thing is done by the 

educational workers after they have been given 

their pedagogical freedom” (Rice 1913, xii). 

The solution Rice eventually endorsed was 

“scientific management,” a system of insuring 

that schools produced the greatest educational 



64 

 

gains in the least possible time, thus operating 

“efficiently.” Rice embraced the social 

efficiency movement sweeping the business 

world at the dawn of the twentieth century. He 

introduced a spelling primer which he believed 

could significantly reduce the time spent in 

memorization and recitation. Indeed, his work in 

spelling was still being cited a century later to 

refute supposed “truisms” masked as research 

(Gage 1993).  

Rice condemned the influence of ward 

politicians in cities such as New York and 

Chicago. Reformers soon wrested control of the 

schools in both cities with varying results 

(Tyack 1974). He advocated changes in both the 

measurement and testing of student learning. By 

the close of the first decade of the twentieth 

century he noted that, “The current standard” 

called for measuring success based on “what the 

teacher does.” He suggested replacing that 

standard with a “judgment by what she 

accomplishes” (Rice 1913, 233). He proposed to 

accomplish this by replacing tests of “low 

order” thinking skills or “knowledge as a matter 

of memory,” with tests of “the ability to apply 

their knowledge of processes and principles,” 

what he called a “test of the power to reason” 

(Rice 1913, 234, 240). 

During the late nineteenth century the 

locally oriented Jeffersonian ideals of agrarian 

social virtues gave way to new urban oriented 

social standards. As new notions of social norms 

emerged, agrarian populists contested and 

resisted these changes. In some of the cities 

Rice visited the older agrarian norms still held 

sway. Rice represented the new urban reformer 

contesting the control of social norms. This was 

a period when local community institutions, 

including schools, still held sway with little 

interference from the wider society, even in the 

large cities. Reformers, like Rice, promoted the 

emerging set of “standards evident in… the new 

corporations, professions… and government 

bureaucracies” (Fackler & Lin 1995, 373). From 

the perspective of reformers searching for order 

in mass society, the substitution of society-

oriented, universal standards for community-

oriented and particularistic standards, was both 

rational and necessary (Fackler & Lin 1995, 

374). That did not make it any less divisive, 

however.  

Joseph Mayer Rice, a physician by 

training, abandoned medicine to pursue 

educational reform. His studies proved 

profoundly influential, however Rice never held 

an academic appointment and the educational 

and academic establishment never fully 

accepted him. His work was occasionally cited 

but he remained an outsider in the educational 

reform movement he helped to create. The 

Progressive movement, “once under way… 

manifested itself in a remarkable diversity of 

pedagogical protest and innovation; from the 

very beginning it was pluralistic, often self-

contradictory and always related to broader 

currents of social and political progressivism”  

(Cremin 1961, 22).  This proved true of Rice’s 

writing as well. He started out as a pedagogical 

progressive, seeking to replace recitation style 

teaching with thematic instruction, in the early 

1890s, but by the time his final book was 

published in 1913, he had become a proponent 

of testing and the social efficiency movement. 

He retired in 1915, and died in Philadelphia in 

June 1934. 

  Schools in the 1890s faced many of the 

same challenges that confronted them a century 

later (Lagemann 1997). Educators’ encountered 

rapid demographic and economic changes, as 

well as a perception that schools were failing to 



65 

 

reach many students as successfully as they 

might. Rice’s findings have endured the test of 

time and both his methodology and his proposed 

remedies have returned to inform contemporary 

debates about the nature of the curriculum, the 

efficacy of schools, and the most effective 

pedagogical methods for imparting knowledge. 

The work of Joseph Mayer Rice has enduring 

relevance both for his groundbreaking 

innovations in educational research and for his 

proposed solutions to pedagogical problems. 

The educational reforms he advocated at the 

dawn of the 20
th

 century have again gained 

currency at the dawn of the 21
st
 century. The 

emphasis on research-based educational 

practices in the No Child Left Behind Act 

harkens back to Rice’s early insistence on 

classroom observation. The emphasis on testing 

and educational efficiency emerging from the 

accountability provisions of NCLB also mirror 

the educational reforms Rice advocated later in 

his career. Even the push for academic standards 

harkens back to recommendations he promoted. 

Rice wrote, “A scientific system of pedagogical 

management would demand fundamentally the 

measurement of results in the light of fixed 

standards” (Rice 1913, xv). 

Rice created a furor with his articles and 

books. He even prompted some changes in the 

governance in some school systems. Rice 

believed that there should be standards for 

educators, and that superintendents and 

principals should be responsible for seeing that 

teachers met those standards. A century later, a 

variation of Rice’s vision came to pass. Schools 

now have rigorous academic standards and 

students are required to pass tests to 

demonstrate proficiency in those skills. 

Curiously, the testing that measures attainment 

of the standards reinvigorated the very type of 

drill and recitation teaching Joseph Mayer Rice 

first found so objectionable.     

 

References 

 

Ayers, Leonard P. 1918. “History and Present 

Status of Educational Measurements” 

Seventeenth Yearbook of the National 

Society for the Study of Education, Part II: 

11-12. 

Cremin, Lawrence A. 1961. The Transformation 

of the School. New York: Knopf. 

Curti, Merle E. 1951. The Growth of American 

Thought 2
nd

 ed.  New York: Harper.    

Englehart, Max D. and Macklin Thomas. 1966. 

Rice as the Inventor of the Comparative 

Test. Journal of Educational Measurement 

Vol. 3, No. 2:141-145. 

Fackler, Tim and Tse-min Lin. 1995. “Political 

Corruption and Presidential Elections, 1929-

1992” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 57, No. 

4:971-993. 

Gage, N. L. 1991. The Obviousness of 

Educational Research Results. Educational 

Researcher Vol. 20, No. 1:10-16. 

Graham, Patricia A. 1966. Joseph Mayor Rice 

as a Founder of the Progressive Education 

Movement. Journal of Educational 

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Gurung, Regan A. R. and Beth M. Schwartz. 

2009. Optimizing Teaching and Learning 

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Curriculum Change. Educational 

Researcher Vol. 11, No. 1:16-24. 

Kliebard, Herbert M. 1986. The Struggle for the 

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York: Routledge. 



66 

 

Kliebard, Herbert M. 1993. What Is a 

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Rice, Joseph M. 1893. The Public School 

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