Ellwood Cubberley

Ellwood Cubberley (born June 6, 1868, Andrews, Indiana, U.S.—died September 14, 1941, Santa Clara, California) was an American educator and administrator who—as head (1898–1933) of Stanford University’s department of education and, later, its School of Education—helped establish education as a university-level subject.

Cubberley studied physics at Indiana University. While there, he served as an assistant to the school’s president, David Starr Jordan, who would prove highly influential to his career. After graduating in 1891, Cubberley joined the faculty at Vincennes University—on the recommendation of Jordan—serving as a professor of science before becoming the school’s president in 1893. He left three years later to serve as superintendent of the San Diego, California, public schools, again recommended by Jordan. In that post, he sought to make school governance more efficient and to centralize decision making in his office. He also stressed the importance of choosing candidates based on capability rather than political connections.

In 1898 Jordan, who was then president of Stanford University, hired Cubberley as an assistant professor and as head of the school’s education department. At the time, many universities were unconvinced that education was a subject worthy of collegiate-level study, and he was given three years to make the department academically respectable; otherwise, it would be dismantled. Over the next several years, Cubberley was able to win colleagues’ support for the department, and he began developing research programs to establish education as a legitimate field of study. To further his work, he attended Teachers College, Columbia University (M.A., 1902; Ph.D., 1905). In 1917 Cubberley oversaw the transformation of Stanford’s education department into a full-fledged School of Education, and he served as its first dean until his retirement in 1933. He helped produce the first generation of university-trained school administrators and personally advised and mentored hundreds of educators.

On a national level, Cubberley was one of the earliest experts in school administration, and his prolific scholarship helped to shape the field. He wrote on such topics as school finance, state governance, rural schooling, and county administration, among other things, and he developed some of the earliest and most-influential textbooks in school administration. In addition, Cubberley created one of the country’s first textbook series on education, Riverside Textbooks in Education, and used it to promote new scholarship in the field.

Cubberley also had an important impact on the history of education. He viewed history as a way to infuse educators with a sense of mission and wrote historical accounts that celebrated and legitimated the education-reform movements of his day by linking them to a story of unfolding progress and democracy. His popular 1919 book, Public Education in the United States, best reflects that inspirational narrative and was influential in shaping historical scholarship well into the 1960s. Afterward, however, that interpretation came under attack by historians who argued that Cubberley’s overarching framework was insufficiently critical and ignored failures, conflicts, and inegalitarian aspects of schooling in an effort to proselytize to educators and the public.