Abstract
The provision of school-based social services in the United States began in the Progressive Era, and the efforts of visiting teachers seem to be distinguishable from other services because it raises a question that focuses on the difficulties of institutionalizing such social services into a manageable school system. This paper is an attempt to analyze the origin and the institutionalization process of visiting teachers in New York City so that some implications become available for those concerned with the consequences of the recent Japanese government's policy to subsidize school social workers in Japanese schools. This paper greatly emphasizes the role of the Public Education Association of the City of New York (PEA), a progressive women's reform group especially interested in education. Before the appearance of visiting teachers, the truant officers were exclusively in charge of truant or non-attendance problems, but they became severely criticized for their anti-progressive-ness by the reformers. Visiting teachers were expected to be a substitution for the truant officers has and provide "social scientific" diagnoses for problem children. The earliest visiting teachers, however, were not well-trained professionals but like community activists who took roles as liaisons between school and home. Subsequently, the NY board of education found the role of visiting teachers invaluable and it became necessary to provide financial support instead relying on a private civic group like PEA. The employment of visiting teachers by the board of education eventually came to fruition in September 1913, placing them in the department for ungraded classroom teaching. It means that visiting teachers had to be involved with the special education of the students who were falling behind in public schools, including the mentally handicapped, foreigners, and habitual truants. While their labor condition improved, in terms of the new position of visiting teachers, they could not avoid committing to the new model of efficiency-oriented school administration. Furthermore, the regulation of the scope of work and qualifications of visiting teachers deprived them of the independence that would enable them to criticize the school.
