Public Education

Purpose: To remedy the city’s overcrowded, antiquated system of primary and secondary public school education

Principal Investigator: Dr. Leonard P. Ayres, a former school superintendent who now worked for the Russell Sage Foundation as director of education and statistics. Ayres subsequently accepted an offer to become vice president for business forecasting at Cleveland Trust and served on the board of the Cleveland Foundation.

Finished Product: 25 reports, published between the fall of 1915 and January 1917

Recommendations and Outcomes: A new superintendent, Frank E. Spaulding, who formerly headed the Minneapolis public schools, was recruited with Ayres’s assistance in 1917. Spaulding ultimately implemented three-quarters of the survey’s recommendations. As the Cleveland Foundation determined in a follow-up investigation conducted in 1923, compulsory attendance to age 16 had been instituted, vocational training had been expanded and special programs for the gifted introduced, teachers’ salaries had been raised and their professional development opportunities enhanced, nine of 11 board seats up for election had been filled by candidates pledged to noninterference in administrative matters, and five school bond issues providing $29 million in revenues had been passed. Although problems with truancy, high dropout rates and the underperformance of students from poor and working-class families persisted, for several decades after the survey’s completion the Cleveland public schools were widely considered an exemplary system. The survey itself was long esteemed as a national model.

Recreation

Purpose: To analyze the leisure-time needs of adults and children and investigate the ability of existing public, private and profit-oriented recreational outlets to meet those needs

Principal Investigator: Cleveland Foundation survey director Allen T. Burns, with technical assistance provided by Rowland Hayes, New York City’s recreation secretary

Finished Product: The political controversy over the study’s claim that Cleveland’s mayor turned a blind eye toward prostitution and gambling prompted Burns’s resignation with only three of the contemplated six reports having been published. Begun in late 1916, work on the recreation survey was halted for the duration of World War I. The survey was completed in late 1919 by the foundation’s first full-time director, Raymond Moley.

Recommendations and Outcomes: The survey called upon the Cleveland Board of Education to increase expenditures for recreational programming and accept responsibility for operating the city’s playgrounds. Both recommendations were followed for a time. Other findings resulted in the creation of city-sponsored sports leagues, a separate tax to support the Cleveland Public Library, and the establishment of a Cleveland Recreational Council. Operating under the auspices of the Welfare Federation of Cleveland, the council immediately began pushing for passage of a special tax levy to allow the Metropolitan Park Board to purchase land ringing the city. With 50 influential citizens on the campaign team, whom the council had taken on a guided tour of Bear Mountain Park in New York, the levy passed, and the park board set about assembling what was to become the Cleveland Metroparks.

Criminal Justice

Purpose: To address the failure of the criminal court system in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County to function swiftly, impartially and without deviation from the public interest, and to determine whether the city’s high incidence of crime was related to this breakdown

Principal Investigators: Roscoe Pound, dean of the Harvard University Law School, and his colleague, Felix Frankfurter, professor of administrative law and former assistant U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, supervised the work of a team of researchers.

This team included Reginald Heber Smith, a Boston attorney and future president of the American Bar Association, and Raymond B. Fosdick, the author of respected books on American and European law enforcement and the future president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Felix Frankfurter went on to serve as a distinguished associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962.

Finished Product: Reports on the survey’s seven areas of inquiry—law enforcement, prosecution, court organization and administration, penal and correctional treatment, psychiatry, legal education, and press coverage—were issued in the fall of 1921, and a 729-page summary volume was published the following year.

Recommendations and Outcomes: Calling the survey “broadly and courageously planned,” The New Republic magazine led a chorus of praise that greeted the published findings of what was America’s first “scientific” examination of the administration of justice. Requests for information about the survey came from around the country and indeed the world, particularly from continental Europe and the United Kingdom.

Received much less positively by the study subjects in Cleveland, the criminal justice survey nonetheless led to new leadership at the city prosecutor’s offices and at the city workhouse, both of which had been singled out for laxity; the creation of the administrative position of chief justice of the county common pleas court; the elimination of a mandatory preindictment court appearance by police that prolonged the scheduling of trials; and the passage of a twice-defeated bond issue that permitted the completion of a new police station and jail on East 21st Street in 1926. Four years later, a modern criminal courts building was erected next door.