Prelude to Professional Identity and Organization: American Public School Curriculum Workers and Their Annual Meetings, 1927-1929 O. L. Davis, Jr. In February, 1927, a larger than usual number of school curriculum workers met informally at the Dallas meeting of the Department of Superintendence. As had done at their previous two meetings, they talked about curriculum projects in their school systems. The small group also took an unusual action. It requested the Research Division of the National Education Association to survey curriculum work being undertaken by city schools across the United States Additionally, it asked the Research Division to serve as a clearing house for curriculum research studies completed in school systems enrolled in the Department's Cooperative Plan of Curriculum Revision.! Their short meeting completed, the curriculum workers agreed to meet at the following year's convention of the Department of Superintendence. The 1928 meeting would be in Boston. A. K. Loomis2, Denver's Director of Curriculum, continued to serve as the group's convener. The informal sessions of curriculum workers at the 1927 meeting occurred within the fulsome context of continuing emphasis accorded to local school curriculum revision by the nation's school superintendents. During the three previous years, for example, successive yearbooks of the Department of Superintendence focused attention on public school curriculum improvement.) Furthermore, at this convention, the National Society for the Study of Education formally presented its 26th yearbook, The Foundation and Techniques of Curriculum Construction. 4 More than 1, 000 school administrators attended the meeting at which this landmark two-volume yearbook was presented. Two nights later, an audience of approximately 6, 000 attended a forum on the junior high school curriculum. s The curriculum revision "movement," a "grass roots," ical enterprise, was underway and the NSSE yearbook appeared only to contribute to its attractiveness rather than to offer any order to the emerging curriculum field. still, the entire Dallas meeting could only have heightened school administrators' sense of the vital of local school curriculum revision. Within this environment, increased 29 enthusiasm for their special work was an easy yield for the small, informal band of public school curriculum administrators. These school curriculum workers had begun to meet regularly in 1925, only two years before the Dallas meeting. L. Thomas Hopkins, then the de facto administrator of Denver' s curriculum revision program as well as a faculty member at the University of Colorado, arranged that initial meeting and recalled that the group was small enough to sit around a single large table with room to spare. 6 These few curriculum workers, with Hopkins the single exception, were school administrators charged with system-wide curriculum revision responsibilities. Also, they were all men. Informality characterized these meetings of school curriculum workers. The group never organized formally and also never had an "official" name. It never assessed dues. Membership was casual in the extreme. In fact, "membership" may have been asserted by attendance at the short yearly meeting. Not included as regular meeting participants were prominent university professors like Franklin Bobbitt and W. W. Charters7 who were popularizing curriculum reform through their graduate courses in their school consultations. An advance agenda for the first meetings was not set. This structural informality may have been important to those early sessions. Never a separatist schism from other superintendents and their administrative assistants, this informality permitted easy association of those who began to know themselves mainly as curriculum workers. Importantly, the informal meetings nourished the development of their professional understandings. In this process, school curriculum work developed a ional identity and an specialty independent of e superintendency. Organizational , however, could not sustain the needs of the growing curriculum field. In fact, this informal group continued for five more years, until 1932, when it with another, and formally structured form the for Nevertheless, the meetings of this informal group, even for a few years, served as prelude to the emerging American professional specialty of curriculum practice. Plans for the 1928 Meeting: Questions Back of Routine Curriculum Problems A. K. Loomis began to plan the 1928 Boston meeting of public school curriculum workers in November, 1927. In a letter to Jesse H. Newlon,9 his former superintendent in Denver, Loomis inquired about the appropriateness of inviting a small number of people active in city schools' curriculum work to participate in the meeting. 1O He also suggested that the meeting feature discussions of two questions earlier raised by Newlon.!! Both questions arose from the 26th NSSE yearbook published the previous year. They lay "back of the problems" routinely considered by most curriculum directors. "Should the curriculum be made in advance?", although Newlon opined that it "may not be a question of great importance for a city school system at this time," clearly warranted fundamental consideration. William Heard Kilpatrick had answered the question with a strong negative response in his yearbook chapter12 and Newlon, then only three months into his new post at Lincoln School and Teachers College, recognized the merits of Kilpatrick's position, at least in experimental schools. Newlon also urged consideration of a second question, "Are you satisfied with the subject matter divisions that obtain in the elementary grades?" This question was stimulated by Harold Rugg's contention that current subject divisions should be jettisoned and substituted with a "resynthesis of knowledge" .13 Newlon obviously hoped that curriculum workers would begin to rethink conceptions and functions of "content" and "subject matter" which framed their curriculum decisions. Loomis initially proposed that one of the Boston sessions include both these questions with five minute responses by three or four individuals. Newlon courteously replied that consideration of each question would require at least the participation of several (2-4) persons each of whom would speak for a 30-40 minute period. 14 In order that the expected discussions be accommodated, he also suggested that Loomis increase the number of sessions at the 30 curriculum workers' meeting. Loomis responded with a detailed program outline for two 2-hour sessions on Saturday, February 25. IS Newlon would open the morning session with an address, "Should the curriculum be made in advance?" Respondent "discussions" of 5-minutes would be offered by four school curriculum workers: John Coulbourn of Baltimore, Ethel Salisbury of Los Angeles, Walter D. Cocking, formerly of St. Louis, and Thomas D. Gosling of Madison, Wisconsin. The second half of the morning would feature an address by the University of Chicago's William S. Gray on the topic, "What is subject matter and what is its function?" Then, George Wheeler of Philadelphia, John W. Studebaker of Des Moines, Richard E. Rutledge of Oakland, and Velda C. Bamesberger, formerly of Oklahoma City, would present short discussions of the question. The afternoon session, likewise, would be packed with consideration of two major questions. Ernest Horn of the State University of Iowa would present a 3D-minute address on the question, "Should the subject matter divisions in the elementary grades be changed?" Proposed discussants included Michael J. Downey of Boston, L. L. Nolin of San Francisco, Charles A. Brown of Baltimore, and Arthur Dondineau of Detroit. Concluding the intensive day would be L. Thomas Hopkins' principal remarks on "What can the elementary schools do in character education?" followed by commentary by T. V. Goodrich of Lincoln, Nebraska, Julius E. Warren of Springfield, Massachusetts, Emil Lange of Long Beach, and Florence B. Stratemeyer of Teachers College, Columbia University. Newlon may have been replaced on the program, a final copy of which has not survived. He requested that Loomis not use him because he thought "it would be better for you and for the movement" for him to remain in the background. 16 Newlon, only recently removed from public school leadership, understood that the group of school curriculum workers or "the movement" was fueled by school interests and composed mainly of school curriculum administrators. He clearly sensed the looming tension between the practical and the theoretic or between "public school men" and professors. Loomis also must have understood the political sensitivity of this Nevertheless, he positioned professors (Newlon, Gray, Horn, and Hopkins) to make the only major presentations at the meeting. Too, he included as discussants, in addition to Stratemeyer, both cocking and Bamesberger, then in residence at Teachers College, Columbia University, but identified as "formerly of" their previous school systems. Newlon's continuing influence with Loomis, moreover, certainly influenced the nature if not the structure of plans for the 1928 Boston meeting of school curriculum workers. Newlon was less persuasive on Loomis' decisions about individuals to be invited to the meeting. In his first letter to Newlon about the meeting, Loomis suggested names of eighteen school administrators then involved in curriculum research and seven others, mainly university professors, who might be invited to join the Boston meeting. Newlon' s specific advice on membership was to include only individuals active .. in directing curriculum revision work the same as you do in Denver" and .. not load up your conference with a lot of people who have only a nominal interest in the work." No direct evidence is available as to whom Loomis extended invitations. On the other hand, Loomis' final program failed to include from his first list only three of the school administrators (M. A. Dalman of Indianapolis, A. L. Hartman of Montclair, N. J., and Worcester Warren of Bridgeport, Connecticut) and two of the others (Herbert B. Bruner of Teachers College, Columbia University, and Margaret M. Alltucker of the NEA Research Division). These twenty-five individuals plus Loomis may well have constituted the substantial part of the attendance at the Boston meeting. This group consisted mainly of school curriculum workers. The four university professors included were ones actively involved in school curriculum revision efforts. Exclusion of the growing number of university professors interested but not involved full time in school curriculum reform activities must be recognized, in retrospect, as a major contribution to the forthcoming gle for the field's ional identity. The program for the 1928 Boston meeting of school curriculum workers was densely crowded with presentations and discussions. It did not include time for the curriculum workers to share results of their individual schools' curriculum 31 research and revision efforts. This trade-off may well have been palatable by the availability of the report to them requested of the NEA Research Division at their previous year's meeting. This report of curriculum research and revision practices clearly reflected the period's favorable sentiments about scientific inquiry. 17 Practically and symbolically I the report undoubtedly offered support to their work. Also, with the report available for reading, the public school curriculum workers could spend their Boston meeting time on matters other than "shop talk." Creative Activities for Meeting: A Program Agenda for a New Organization Curriculum Field the 1929 and Plans for the Following the intellectually packed meetings in Boston, the small group of school curriculum workers edged a bit further away from its informal organizational policies. It established an executive committee of unknown membership although A. K. Loomis continued as its program organizer and convener. Unknown to these school curriculum workers, a few university curriculum specialists began to plan for what could only become a competing organization. Both groups pointed for the 1929 meetings in Cleveland. As he had done the previous year, Loomis wrote to his friend Newlon about plans for the public school group's next meeting. He noted that the executive committee desired that "Creative Activities" be the focus of the next year's sessions. Further, the committee identified fifteen individuals who might discuss dimensions of this topic. At least half of them, people like Newlon, Cocking, Dondineau, Gosling I Alltucker, Lange, and Loomis, had been active in the group for one or more years. Several others, mostly women and newcomers to the group, included Prudence Cutright of Minneapolis; Elma A. Neal of San Antonio; Rose Wickey of , Missouri; Ethel I. Los ; Charles C. of Kalamazoo; and Mildred of Raleigh. Significantly, these women were central office administrators, assistant superintendents or curriculum directors. Newlon, in his reply to Loomis, approved the plans for the Cleveland meeting .19 Following his consistent position over several years, he urged Loomis to restrict the size of the group to thirty or fewer persons, ones "actively concerned with curriculum construction and giving practically all their time to such work." Newlon also nominated three individuals to JOkn the forthcoming meeting. He thought that John R. Clark, principal of Lincoln School's high school division "clearly belongs in the group." He also suggested "a Miss McGregor of Rochester," the editor of that school system's curriculum revision work. Newlon's third nominee was Paul R. Hanna, "a young research associate who has come into the Lincoln School." The February, 1929, sessions in Cleveland for the school curriculum workers apparently occurred as planned although no record of them is known to exist. This silence partially may be explained by a concurrent development, a proposal to establish a solid national organization for the curriculum field. This new society began to take shape, in fact, during the months that Loomis planned the 1929 meeting for his small group of school curriculum workers. Henry Harap led the efforts to found the new organization. Then an associate professor of education at western Reserve University in Cleveland, Harapw shared his perception of the need for such a national organization of curriculum workers with W. W. Charters and Harold O. Rugg, two university professors prominent in the promotion of school curriculum revision efforts. Both men encouraged Harap and suggested that he canvas prospective members. In early December, 1928, he wrote to a number of individuals to inquire of their possible interest in the proposed organization.~ His justification of a new organization was sharply rendered. "If the curriculum making movement is to be more than a fad, it needs to be organized for permanent action," Harap wrote. Implicitly recognizing the contributions to the curriculum field by yearbooks of the Department of Superintendence and the National Society for the Study of Education, he noted that both associations were then other concerns. He or was unaware of the annual, meetings of school curriculum workers. Harap further claimed that, beginning in 1918, the number of curriculum 32 investigations rose until output peaked in 1926 after which they declined. This phenomenon should "serve as a warning to those of us who are deeply concerned over the work that still remains to be done." Harap's ready answer to the problem was a national organization of curriculum workers. His "Initial List of Curriculum Workers" contained names of 44 individuals. Only twelve were identified with school systems; of the others, 31 were college or university faculty members and one, Margaret Alltucker, was an NEA staff member. Moreover, just five of the school administrators (Cocking, Lange, Loomis, Rutledge, and Wickey) and six of the others (Alltucker, Bruner, Hopkins, Horn, Newlon, and Stratemeyer) are known to have been involved in the informal meetings of curriculum workers convened by Loomis during the previous two years. Only four of the school administrators who made Harap's list had responded to the national survey of curriculum work conducted by the NEA. The other eight school administrators were from Cuyahoga County (greater Cleveland), Ohio; Cleveland; Santa Monica; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Denver (Superintendent A. L. Threlkeld); Kansas City, Missouri; and Winnetka (Carlton W. Washburne). Furthermore, only three women (Alltucker, Wickey, and Stratemeyer) were included. Harap's vision of curriculum workers, quite obviously, differed markedly from that which guided Loomis and Newlon during the previous years. "If a new society of curriculum workers is formed," Newlon replied to Harap, "I want very much to be a member of it."22 Newlon's endorsement carried with it, however, his sensitive understanding of the implicit political "take over" of the curriculum revision "movement" by university professors. Newlon pointed out that the informal group of school curriculum workers ·with a few others" had met for several years and that Loomis, Denver's curriculum director, served as its chair. Newlon admitted that he saw no need for two ions and that Harap invite Loomis to his invitation to the sessions already scheduled for Cleveland. The resultant Of should embrace both the workers in schools and in the schools of education." Newlon also j that some individuals on list were "not concerned with curriculum work." Pointedly, he excluded Threlkeld, his former assistant superintendent in Denver, but called attention, in general, "to some of the college professors and others whose interests are not in the curriculum field, as are yours." Harap did not heed Newlon's advice. An overwhelming number of those contacted by Harap about a new national organization responded affirmatively. Subsequently, Harap invited those having expressed interest to nominate individuals to serve as a steering committee to establish the organization. The seven member steering committee met in Cleveland on February 25, 1929, and formed a permanent organization. Its first name may have been the National Society of Curriculum Workers; within a year, it was the Society of Curriculum Specialists. B The organizing committee selected the University of Chicago's W. W. Charters to chair the new group and Harap as its secretary. As a final act, it set the Society's first meeting for the 1930 annual meeting of the Department of Superintendence. Within the next year, 49 individuals became members of the Society;~ all were university professors. 25 Three years later, the Society was commonly known as "the college group". Organization of a New Professional Specialty for Curriculum Workers: Informality Overcome; Identity Asserted Effectively, the new Society quickly overshadowed the informal group of public school curriculum workers. It also may have appropriated, for a short time, their self-styled if informal designation of themselves, "curriculum workers," as a key element of the new organization's formal name. The public school curriculum workers, known by this time as the "Public School Division," met with the Society in 1930 and 1931. In 1932, the two groups publicly merged to become the Society for Curriculum Study. 26 The informal group of public school curriculum workers could not serve the interests of the emerging and enlarging curriculum field. Likely, it was too small; it certainly lacked a sense of permanence. Still, during its existence, it contributed to its members' sense of ional as school curriculum workers. At its annual 33 meetings, colleagues shared ideas and descriptions of work in progress. Especially, they provided one another professional support during years when practical school curriculum revision struggled for success and visibility. Its meetings helped sustain the notion that school curriculum work was viable, not simply administratively desirable. Especially, its participants understood themselves to be members of a larger undertaking, the creation of what Newlon called the curriculum "movement to. For them, their curriculum work was practical, not theoretical. These individuals, their work, and their informal meetings created an impressive prelude to the development of a new professional specialty. It was known, simply, as "curriculum work". This emerging professional specialty and its new organization continued to focus on curriculum revision, later termed curriculum development. 27 In the absence of centralized authority in American education, the new Society, like other professional associations, offered an expanded influential authority of peers and practice. The curriculum field had been asserted into existence. Still, it differed from what it might have been. One aspect was particularly obvious. The influence of university professors and scholars swiftly replaced their earlier near absence from the community of school curriculum workers. Such a development was not simply a deliberately planned exercise of power politics. To be sure, neither Charters nor Harap, the Society's first officers, had participated in the yearly discussions of the informal group of public school curriculum workers. They may have believed that they and other university curriculum specialists had been excluded from these annual meetings. Certainly, Newlon had cautioned against involvement of professors in the early meetings, as well as school administrators not directly involved in curriculum work. Nevertheless, the history of the Soc for Curriculum Study highlighted the productive association of both school and university curriculum workers. One ameliorative influence in the rapidly changing curriculum enterprise surely helped redraw uncertain boundaries of location of and involvement in curriculum work. Newlon, Cocking and a number of other prominent early school curriculum workers joined college and university faculties. They, university colleagues similarly disposed (e.g., Hopkins, Horn, Stratemeyer), and other university recruits to the curriculum field (e.g., Hollis L. Caswell, Ralph Tyler, Hilda Taba) continued to work cooperatively with associates in the schools on practical curriculum problems. The Society for Curriculum Study and its successor, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,U stressed their organizational openness to individuals regardless of their occupational roles in school curriculum work. 29 The resultant association, and only tenuous collaboration, of individuals in Newlon's typification of "curriculum workers in the schools and in the schools of education" contributed an impressive dimension to the emerging professional identity of the curriculum field. 34 NOTES 1 (NEA Research Division), "Coordination of Activities of Curriculum Directors in City School Systems," undated (19277), 32 pp. (mimeo.). Copy in the Jesse H. Newlon Papers, Special Collections, Penrose Library, University of Denver (hereafter cited, Newlon Papers). The cooperative Plan of Curriculum Revision, authorized in 1925, grew out of the work of the Department of Superintendence's Commission on the Curriculum which had begun work in 1924. About 300 school systems of different sizes were members of the Cooperative Plan. See, Department of Superintendence, The Nation at Work on the Public School Curriculum, Fourth Yearbook (Washington, D. C.: the Department, 1926), Chapter II, pp. 21-27. 2 Loomis joined Denver Superintendent Jesse H. Newlon's administrative staff in 1925 as Director of the Curriculum Department. His new full-time position legitimated both the success of the curriculum revision project and the importance of system-wide curriculum work. Loomis' position replaced the part-time appointments of L. Thomas Hopkins and his associates, W. D. Armentrout and Frederick L. Whitney, both professors at Colorado State Teachers College, Greeley. See Jesse H. Newlon, Review of Four-Year Period, August, 1923 to July, 1927. Twenty-fourth Annual Report of Super intendent of Schools, Section 1. (Denver: the Board of Education, 1927), p. 18. 3 These Department of Superintendence yearbooks included The Elementary School Curriculum (Washington, D. C.: the Department, 1924) i Research in Constructing the Elementary School Curriculum (Washington, D. C.: the Department, 1925); and The Nation at Work on the Public School Curriculum (Washington, D. C.: the Department, 1926). The next two yearbooks continued this emphasis: The Junior High School curriculum (Washington, D. C.: the Department, 1927) and Development of the High School Curriculum ( D. C.: the Department, 1928) . 4 Harold O. Rugg (Chairman), The Foundation and Techniques of Curriculum Construction, Parts I II of the Yearbook of National the Education ( , IL: School Publishing Co., 1926). 5 "Minutes of the Dallas Meeting of the Society, February 26, and March 1, 1927," in Lewis M. Terman (Chairman), Nature and Nurture, Part II of the Twenty-Seventh Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Co., 1928), 358-360. 6 Hopkins, a former Massachusetts superintendent of schools, began his role, carrying the title of Consul tant, with Denver' s then struggling curriculum revision program in September, 1923. See L. Thomas Hopkins oral history interview and his "My Curriculum Viewpoint," unpublished paper (mimeo.), August, 1978, p. 3, Hopkins Papers, Oral History in Education Collection, College of Education, The University of Texas at Austin. In 1929, Hopkins became Director of Research at Lincoln School and associate professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. 7 Hopkins acknowledged Charters' assistance in arranging the first meeting of curriculum workers. Charters is not listed as a participant in any of the meetings. See Hopkins, "My Curriculum Viewpoint," Hopkins Papers. 8 See J. Galen Saylor, "ASCD and Its Beginnings." In William Van Til, ASCD in Retrospect (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1986), 6-7. 9 Newlon became Denver's superintendent of schools in August, 1920, after having been superintendent of Lincoln, Nebraska, public schools. With substantial financial support of the Board of Education, he initiated Denver's program of extensive curriculum revision two years later. This program brought international attention to Newlon and the Denver schools. Newlon resigned his superintendency effective August 31, 1927, to become Professor of Education and Director, Lincoln School, Teachers College, Columbia University. See Gary L. Peltier, Jessie H. Newlon as Superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, 1920-1927. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Denver: University of Denver, 1965. 10 Letter from A. K. Jesse H. Newlon, November Newlon Papers. Loomis to 5, 1927, 11 Letter from Jesse H. Newlon to A. K. Loomis, October 20, 1927, Newlon Papers. 35 12 William Heard Kilpatrick, "Statement of Position," Chapter X in Harold O. Rugg (Chairman), The Foundations of Curriculum-Making, Part II of the Twenty-Sixth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing Co., 1926), 119-146. 13 Harold O. Rugg, "Curriculum­ Making: Points of Emphasis," Chapter XI in Ibid., 147-162. 14 Letter from Jesse H. A. K. Loomis, November Newlon Papers. 15 Letter from A. K. Jesse H. Newlon, November Newlon Papers. Newlon to 12, 1927, Loomis to 25, 1927, 16 Letter from Jesse H. Newlon to A. K. Loomis, December 5, 1927, Newlon Papers. 17 See, for example, Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cul t of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), and Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) . 18 Letter from A. K. Jesse H. Newlon, November Newlon Papers. 19 Letter from Jesse H. A. K. Loomis, November Newlon Papers. Loomis to 17, 1928, Newlon to 21, 1928, 20 Harap gained early prominence for his 1920's work in consumer education. The organizer of the National Society of Curriculum Workers or Society of Curriculum Specialists, he was its first secretary and, later, its chairman. He edited its News Bulletin and, after the formation of the Society for Curriculum Study in 1932, its Curriculum Journal from 1932 to 1943 when the Society merged with the Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction and this journal was superseded by Educational Leadership. In 1937, he became Professor of Education and Associate Director, Division of Surveys and Field Services, George Peabody College for Teachers. See Harap Papers, Oral in Education Collection, The University of Texas at Austin. 21 Letter from Henry Harap to Jesse H. Newlon, December 6, 1928, Newlon Papers. Included with this letter was Harap's "Initial List of Curriculum Workers" . 22 Letter from Jesse H. Newlon to Henry Harap, December 18, 1928, Newlon Papers. No other replies to Harap's inquiry are known to exist. 23 Saylor's account uses the name, National Society of Curriculum Workers. See Saylor, Ibid., p. 7. However, no issues of the Soc iety , s News Bulletin (1930-32) identified the group by that name. Beginning with its February 19, 1931, issue (Vol. 2, no. 2, p. 1), the News Bulletin carried the name, Society of Curriculum Specialists, as its sponsoring organization until after the merger of the Society (the college group) with the group of public school curriculum workers to form the Society for Curriculum Study. See News Bulletin 3 (May 2, 1932), p. 2. 24 Saylor, Ibid., p. 7. 25 At least, Harap remembered the membership in this way. See Henry Harap, "The Background of ASCD," unpublished paper (mimeo.), November 10, 1958. 2 pp. Harap Papers. 26 Saylor, Ibid. Harap, the Society's chairman, negotiated the merger with the representative of the "public school division," L. Frazier Banks of the Birmingham, Alabama, schools. On only one key point of the merger agreement, acceptance of the Society's dues structure, did Banks believe he must consult with his group's executive committee. Quite possibly, the informal group of public school curriculum workers had never assessed dues. Harap, Ibid.; also, News Bulletin 3. 27 Only slowly did the concept of "curriculum development" arise. An early use of this term and its meanings appear in Hollis L. Caswell, "Curriculum Revision in Rural Schools," Virginia Journal of Education, 25, 1932, 301-303. After publication of the book by Caswell and Doak S. Campbell, Curriculum Development (New York: American Book Co., 1935), the term's popularity swelled. 28 In 1943, the Society merged with the NEA' s Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction to form the Department, later, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Saylor, Ibid., 10-13. See, also, O. L. Davis, Jr., "Symbol of a Shift from Status to Function: Formation of the Association for supervision and Curriculum of Educational 36 35 (May, 1978), 609-614. 29 This history notwithstanding, tension between the interests of both groups in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development has continued to the time. Embedded in this tension are contested perceptions of the legitimacy of different functions of curriculum work and of various roles of curriculum workers. University curriculum professors were very prominent in the organization until only very recently. Clearly, they are much less visible and active in the Association now. Recent explorations of elements of this tension in ASCD, the organizational descendant of both the informal group of public school curriculum workers and the group of university curriculum specialists include O. L. Davis, Jr., "ASCD and Curriculum Development: The Later Years." In William Van Til (Ed. ) Ibid., 83-93; his "Curriculum Professors' Curriculum Work, or Can We Expand Our Practice While We Teach?" Teaching Education 4 (Spring, 1992), 43-49; his "Before We Were Members. .Looking for ASCD's Future in Its Past," unpublished assembly address, ASCD Annual Conference, Washington, D. C., March 28, 1993; and ASCD Review Council, "ASCD and Higher Education: An Analysis and Reflections" (Washington, D.C., March, 1993), 12 p. (mimeo. )