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Phi Delta Kappa at the Threshold THE IDEA of an association is in the word itself: associate, to connect or join together. Since its fraternal origins a century ago, Phi Delta Kappa International has been foremost a society of individuals joined together in professional collegiality and dedicated to tenets of leadership, service, and research in education. As PDK crosses the threshold into its second century, that early spirit of association lit in 1906, like the lamp of Truth on the organization’s crest, still burns as brightly as ever. Today, across the United States and abroad, Kappans are striving to make PDK a beacon for networking, professional development, school improvement, and advocacy on behalf of high-quality, universally available education. In this centennial year it seems fitting to cast a glance over our collective shoulder to see whence we have come as an organization and then to face forward, toward the future, and to consider where we are headed -- and why. The Forces of Modernity It may be helpful in looking back to set the 1906 founding of PDK in the context of its era. Fin-de-siècle America, the period roughly from 1890 until the U.S. entry into the First World War in 1917, bore witness to the emergence of "modernity," as marked by two phenomena germane to the founding of PDK: an awakening of social conscience and a quickening of scientific knowledge. Both of these affected the progress of education, which was then struggling to find its place as a profession. And both sprang from the increased urbanization of America brought about by the Industrial Revolution that began in the 1700s. By the end of the 1800s, Edison’s light bulb was illuminating cities -- and factories -- and urban assembly lines were attracting impoverished farm workers and immigrants. As historian Lawrence Cremin put it, "In the cities of the 1890s a new generation of Americans was coming into abrasive contact with the ills of industrial civilization."1 Those who swarmed into New York, Chicago, and other urban centers too soon found their hopes of a better life through industry dashed. But modernity and industrialization also gave rise to the professions, among them education -- or so those early educators hoped. And education offered a way out of the urban/industrial mire for both students and their teachers. The education of prospective teachers (who would be the first Kappans) had reached a critical point at the turn of the century. In the United States, training specifically for teaching had initially been aimed at women. Men who became teachers in the early 1800s usually were trained in subject matter, rather than pedagogy. Because women were not permitted to enter men’s academies, they were offered teacher training in secondary schools, beginning in the late 1820s. By 1829 Samuel Hall had founded the first private "normal" school for teacher training, and by 1839 the first public normal school had been founded in Massachusetts. Normal schools, which started by offering a two-year course of teacher training, proliferated over the next 60 years and were supplemented by teachers’ institutes and other schools. They also became co-ed over time. By the end of the 19th century, most normal schools had "matured" into four-year colleges, and graduate-level programs in education were being developed. The first graduate program in education was begun at New York University in 1887. Teachers College, Columbia University, was founded the next year. Complementing this emergence of education as a field of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels was the founding, in the decades immediately before and after 1900, of a number of societies dedicated to the cause of social progress. Inherent in their mission was the provision of education to the downtrodden and disenfranchised. The social settlement movement, which reached its zenith in this period, is a prime example of this impulse to help the less fortunate. The movement originated in the 1880s in response to the conditions of industrialization and came to symbolize "a vast variety" of institutional forms of awakening social conscience, including "civic commissions, charity associations, church leagues, and reform societies galore."2 The most famous of the American settlements was Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1891. As social scientists considered social theory and looked at how people lived, their counterparts in the emerging science of psychology examined how people thought. Indeed, "virtually every field of knowledge quickened under the influence of science in general and Darwinism in particular."3 All of this affected pedagogy, the term for what we now call simply, and more generally, education. For example, this scientific revolution gave support to Charles William Eliot (president of Harvard University, 1869-1909) and his campaign for "new education" based on the sciences, mathematics, and modern languages. It influenced G. Stanley Hall’s work in child development and his belief, articulated through Pedagogical Seminary magazine, which he founded in 1891, that urbanization had fundamentally changed the nature of childhood experience. In Hall’s view, the school curriculum should be determined from scientific data on child development. Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike, who would take issue with the conservative Darwinism of G. Stanley Hall, began his animal studies during this period, culminating with the publication of his classic, three-volume Educational Psychology in 1913-14. Thorndike himself would later be considered conservative in comparison to John Dewey, who was laying the groundwork for progressive education, having been brought to the University of Chicago in 1894 to head the departments of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy. Dewey, like Hall, believed that industrialization had radically changed social life, and so education, to be effective, also would have to be completely transformed. These are but a few of the ideas that provided fertile ground for the seeds of Phi Delta Kappa during the first decade of the 20th century. But they are sufficient to show a period of heightened intellectual stimulation that could give rise to societies in which individuals who were engaged in pedagogical transformation might exchange views and band together in the hope of creating change. The Birth of PDK Phi Delta Kappa has roots in three organizations, tracing its beginning to the formation of the first, the Society of Pi Kappa Mu, at Indiana University on 24 January 1906. The eight male college students who organized this first society were by no means unusual in taking this step to respond to the intellectual crosscurrents of the era; they were simply the first to do so in the PDK saga. In his 1931 history of PDK, Paul Cook, the fraternity’s first and longest-serving executive secretary, recalls an "almost spontaneous recognition" of the need for a professional fraternity in education.4 This "spontaneous recognition" also gave rise to the all-male associations in New York and Missouri that within a few years would join with Pi Kappa Mu to form PDK. The fraternal character of Pi Kappa Mu and the other organizations should not be seen as merely an artifact of a time when fraternities and sororities were being established right and left in colleges and universities across the nation. Rather, it should be understood that the men then preparing to work in the emerging education profession believed that increasing their ranks was essential if the status of a true profession was to be achieved. At the turn of the 20th century, it was well understood that an occupation largely dependent on female workers could not be viewed as a "profession." After all, women did not have the vote yet and would not achieve that milestone for more than a decade. Many schools employed female teachers, most of them single women. Women teachers who married were often forced to give up their career. Men more often entered teaching as a steppingstone to school administration or university teaching, and female school administrators were rare. Thus for credibility as a profession, education needed men, and many male education students believed that the best way to accomplish this end was to form societies devoted to collegiality ("fellowship") and, following the lead of other learned societies, to the "scientific study" of their field (à la G. Stanley Hall). The founding of all-male societies in education during the decade was carried out with what Cook termed "true missionary zeal." "At Indiana University, at Columbia University, and at the University of Missouri, each quite independent of the other," wrote Cook, "there developed organizations for the purpose of providing fellowship and professional stimulation among men then interested in Education as a profession." The earliest of these, Pi Kappa Mu, called its premier chapter the Bergstrom Chapter, in honor of John Bergstrom, "whose professional vision and zeal were the mainspring of the whole movement and who was the guiding spirit of the chapter in its early years." Pi Kappa Mu later acquired two more chapters, at Stanford University in California and at the State University of Iowa, both established in 1909. At Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, the Alpha Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa was founded on 13 May 1908. The next year saw the formation of a Gamma Chapter at the University of Chicago. Phi Delta Kappa acquired a third chapter, the Beta Chapter, in 1910 at the University of Minnesota. Although the new science of psychology had close ties to pedagogy, it should be noted that these early educators also formed professional societies because they believed it was necessary to assert the independence of education as its own profession and not merely a subtopic of psychology. Walter Jessup, an early member and officer of the Alpha Chapter at Columbia, answered a colleague’s question this way, according to Cook’s history: "With reference to your query touching the inclusion of departments of psychology, I will say that strictly speaking we do not propose to include them; we have no objection to the inclusion of men who are in educational psychology, but men confining their attention to pure psychology can not satisfy our constitutional requirements." During the 1908-09 academic year, the movement for an education fraternity at the University of Missouri reached its peak, and Nu Rho Beta was established there on 23 February 1909. By the end of the year the new organization had 11 active members, encouraging one another to pursue individual research along professional lines and promoting the scientific study of education. Nu Rho Beta was the first of the three fraternities to inaugurate the practice of publishing a newsletter; the group’s News Letter figured prominently in the first section of that fraternity’s bylaws. With the formation of Nu Rho Beta, the three organizations that would amalgamate into one and take the name Phi Delta Kappa were in place. All three engaged in correspondence to encourage amalgamation into a single national fraternity. Indeed, an early attempt had been made to persuade Nu Rho Beta to join either Phi Delta Kappa or Pi Kappa Mu. But the leaders of Nu Rho Beta held out, seeking to use their influence to push for a general conference, for which they issued a formal call on 15 December 1909. On 8 January 1910, James Wilkinson, president of the Bergstrom Chapter of Pi Kappa Mu, called together a meeting of chapter members in his home to consider the report of a resolutions committee "relative to the unification of the various movements toward a National Educational Society among the students in Education." Out of this meeting came the chapter’s resolution to "join with Phi Delta Kappa and Nu Rho Beta in issuing a call for a conference of the several Education Societies of the various Schools of Education and Teachers Colleges -- not a conference of either organization but one to consider ways and means of organizing a single great National Education Society of whatever nature the conference may decide." In the meantime, however, other leaders of Phi Delta Kappa and Pi Kappa Mu, sensing an unhealthy rivalry developing between the two larger organizations, had also begun direct negotiations toward the amalgamation of their two societies. Consequently, when the leaders of Pi Kappa Mu and Phi Delta Kappa had agreed on a plan for a "National Joint Conference of Pi Kappa Mu and Phi Delta Kappa," it was they who then invited the participation of Nu Rho Beta. At the conference, which was held on 1 March 1910 in Indianapolis, Nu Rho Beta was represented by its secretary, Noble Lee Garrison. He was granted a seat on the council "with the same rights and privileges held by delegates of the other organizations," according to Cook. When the amalgamation was achieved, joining all three organizations under the name Phi Delta Kappa, Garrison was named the first national treasurer of the amalgamated organization. Walter Jessup, whose statement urging a demarcation between education and psychology was quoted above, became the first national secretary. A Unified Vision It should be remembered that these fraternal societies were formed by a mere handful of upperclassmen and graduate students at the various institutions. The founding purposes of the three fraternities -- the original seven chapters -- differed from one another in minor ways. But all of the societies held to notions of "good fellowship," "education as a profession," "research through cooperation," and "promotion of social efficiency." These characteristics are prominent in the earliest documents, including a brief 1912 history of PDK written for a directory published that year by Julian Butterworth, who was then national secretary. A more comprehensive authority on the early years is J. David Houser, who worked with Butterworth and then served as the fraternity’s first national historian from 1915 to 1924. Houser prepared an 84-page history that appeared in Volume VI, Number 5 (April-June 1924), of the Phi Delta Kappan. Incidentally, the journal was so named by the Seventh Council, held in New York in 1916, following informal newsletter and magazine endeavors that showed the usefulness of a national publication. The following paragraph from Houser’s 1924 history aptly captures the vision that the early leaders of PDK held for their fledgling organization:
By the time of Houser’s history the national fraternity comprised 33 chapters. The first three represented the founding groups: Alpha Chapter (Indiana, the Bergstrom Chapter of Pi Kappa Mu), Beta Chapter (Columbia University, the original Alpha Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa), and Gamma Chapter (Missouri, originally Nu Rho Beta). Other chapters had been formed at Cornell, Harvard, Peabody, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and North Dakota. Only 14 years after the amalgamation, the national organization was growing across the country, a fitting demonstration of the power of idealism and dedication. The accomplishment of 33 chapters in 1924 is particularly noteworthy when we realize that World War I intervened during those formative years. The United States entered the First World War by declaring war on Germany on 6 April 1917, and the effect on the male college-age population was dramatic. The history of the Alpha Chapter at Indiana University, which is part of Houser’s longer 1924 history, notes, "The war entirely depleted the ranks of the active members of the Alpha Chapter. In 1917-18 there were but two men enrolled in our School of Education. In October, 1918, there was not a single active member in attendance at Indiana University and the Chapter had to be revived by two faculty members and the secretary of the University Y.M.C.A., all of whom were associate members." (In the early years only students were active members of the fraternity; faculty members were regarded as associate members.) That the fraternity survived during the course of the war is significant; that it revived and thrived afterward is remarkable -- and clearly a tribute to the driving principles so dearly held by the early leaders. Notable Moments A comprehensive history is impossible in the space of this brief essay, but there are notable moments over the course of the past century that give indications of the association’s ideals and endeavors. A national magazine. Abel McAllister was a student at the University of Kansas in the fall of 1913 and had been a Kappan for about a year when he broached the idea of a national magazine to his fellow Kappa Chapter members. The chapter provided moral support, and McAllister took the idea to the national executive committee in December 1913. The committee was slow to move, but eventually, on action by the Sixth Annual Council in 1915, the Phi Delta Kappa Inter-Chapter News Letter, subsequently rechristened as the National News Letter of Phi Delta Kappa, was launched with Volume I, Number 1, in November 1915, published at Effingham, Kansas. The publication continued for one year under that title until it was renamed the Phi Delta Kappan, beginning with Volume II, Number 1, in November 1916. Unfortunately, the second year and its first under the current banner also was the magazine’s last year for a while. Publication temporarily ceased with the June 1917 issue because of America’s entry into World War I. Although the armistice came in 1918, it was not until November 1920 that publication resumed with Volume III, Number 1. Abel McAllister continued as editor until 1924, when Clayton Wise, who held the position for two years, succeeded him. Paul Cook succeeded Wise in 1926, and Cook maintained the position even after he was chosen as the fraternity’s first executive secretary in 1928. He would hold the post of executive secretary for 28 years, until his retirement in 1956. Paul Cook edited the Kappan for most of his tenure as executive secretary, but it is Stanley Elam, editor from 1956 to 1981, who deserves the credit for transforming the fraternity magazine into a professional journal of note. Elam initiated the fraternity newsletter, News, Notes, and Quotes (now PDK Connection), to provide association news to members while raising the Kappan to a scholarly, professional level in order to focus on the dissemination of educational research and informed commentary for practicing and prospective educators. Elam was on the job at the right moment to include in the Kappan the results of a new poll that would eventually become the well-known Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Initially, the poll was not connected to PDK. It was conceived by Edward Brainard, who served on the board of CFK Ltd. with George Gallup, Sr., the founder of scientific polling. Charles Kettering II, son of the inventor, automaker, and onetime schoolteacher who created the Kettering Foundation, had set up CFK Ltd. to develop education-related projects. The first poll report was published in the IDEA/Reporter in 1969. The Institute for Development of Education Activities was a project of the Kettering Foundation, directed by Florida educator B. Frank Brown. Elam summarized this first poll report for the November 1969 issue of the Kappan, and Brainard, who saw that brief summary, asked whether Phi Delta Kappa would be interested in publishing the entire text of the next poll report. Elam jumped at the chance to share information on public attitudes with PDK members and educators at large, and the poll has been a standing feature of the Kappan ever since. George Gallup took a strong interest in conducting the poll each year and wrote the annual reports of the poll’s findings until his death in 1984. Since then, his son Alec has been an author or a co-author of every poll report. When Elam retired as Kappan editor in 1981, he became a contributing editor and also assumed direction of Phi Delta Kappa’s polling program. In 1988 he began to share the writing of the poll report with Alec Gallup. In 1991, Lowell Rose, executive director emeritus of Phi Delta Kappa, added his name to the poll’s byline and took over the direction of PDK’s polling efforts in in 1998. Issues of sex and race. Phi Delta Kappa began life as a "fraternity," a term that in its strict sense denotes a brotherhood. Although the original association’s all-male nature might have been taken for granted, in fact it was not formalized until the Sixth National Council in 1915. That council revised the constitution accordingly, but the delegates also tackled a number of other issues. The Sixth National Council was a watershed event in several ways. The delegates 1) abolished the practice of sending proxies to council meetings, requiring delegates thereafter to be active members of chapters; 2) formally limited active membership to student members, barring faculty and "field members," such as teachers and principals; 3) decided that national officers would be elected at large; 4) authorized the publication of a national magazine; and 5) limited membership to "white males." This agenda was pursued in the name of "nationalization," that is, moving the fraternity toward a truly national scope. However, many delegates, according to Cook’s 1931 history, were troubled by two of these moves, the limiting of active membership to students and the restriction of membership to "white" males. Both issues would be resolved eventually, and over time the association’s all-male composition would also be challenged. Because the six-year-old fraternity was conceived by and for male students, it initially seemed that student status was a natural requirement for membership. However, students do not remain students forever, and many who had been active members desired to remain active once they graduated. Thus limiting active membership to students fell by the wayside early on with the establishment of alumni and field chapters composed of student members who had received their degrees and moved into work in the education profession. It was no great leap from including alumni to inducting working educators who had not been Kappans during their student days. The nominal distinction of university-based and field-based was maintained for many years, but even that was finally abandoned in 1974. In recodifying the PDK constitution and bylaws, the Sixth Annual Council also set into the governance documents the infamous "white clause," which restricted membership to "white" males. Houser, serving his first year as national historian, wrote "Sixth Annual Council -- A Critique" for the first issue of the National News Letter, in which he explained the action this way:
From the vantage point of 90 years later, these justifications appear questionable. Seen in the context of a time when American society and schools were deeply segregated, however, they may be understandable. Public education in 1915 was carried out under the segregationist doctrine of "separate but equal" enunciated by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. That doctrine would not be overturned for 58 years. Even so, the "white clause" was immediately called into question by some Kappans. Roy Warren, then national secretary, noted in his column in the National News Letter of June 1916 a number of items to be taken up by the very next national council, among them "The race question -- the question of the admission of those other than whites."7 In spite of repeated attempts to eliminate the "white clause," nonwhite males continued to be excluded from the fraternity until 1942, when the matter was put to an unprecedented all-member referendum. While it may be lamented that the restriction was ever made and once set in place remained for 27 years, it should be noted that PDK’s move toward racial inclusion predated much of the subsequent desegregation of American society. President Truman did not issue the executive order ending segregation in the U.S. Army until 1948. And Brown v. Board of Education did not overturn Plessy’s "separate but equal" segregation of the public schools until 1954. The fact that one of the founding purposes of the fraternity was to provide professional collegiality for males (then and still today a minority in education) made the issue of admitting women a particularly difficult one. Women gained the right to vote in 1920, but the women’s rights movement did not achieve full steam until the 1960s. In 1961 President Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and appointed former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to chair it. President Lyndon Johnson’s affirmative action orders were expanded in 1967 to include anti-discrimination language regarding women’s place in the work force. Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 (although the legislation died in 1982 after failing to achieve ratification in the needed 38 states). And in 1973 the Supreme Court rendered its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, regarding women’s right to abortion. All of these social changes set the mood, after the issue had been debated by several previous councils (now meeting every other year rather than on an annual basis), for the 34th Biennial Council in 1974 to end the restriction against women. Former Kappan editor Bob Cole described the event:
Even so, PDK lost a few chapters over this then-controversial move, and some of the remaining chapters discouraged the initiation of women members for a number of years. Finally, in 1999 Phi Delta Kappa International formally discontinued the use of fraternity in favor of association to describe the nature of the organization. A permanent home. The first of the fraternities that would amalgamate into Phi Delta Kappa was formed at Indiana University in Bloomington in 1906. The National Joint Conference in 1910 that resulted in the amalgamation of the three original societies was held in Indianapolis. And the Articles of Association of Phi Delta Kappa, signed on 25 February 1911, specified in Article V that "the principal place of business of this association shall be at Bloomington, Indiana." But it was not until PDK reached its half-century anniversary that Bloomington, or indeed Indiana, became the fraternity’s permanent home. For its first 50 years, PDK’s "home" was wherever its principal leader resided. For much of that period, the organization was based in or near Chicago. For example, when Cook’s history was published in 1931, the PDK office was located in Suite 410 at 1180 East 63rd Street in Chicago. By the 1940s it had moved to Homewood, Illinois, and by the 22nd National Council in 1950, according to Cole, "Phi Delta Kappa was in possession of an already seriously overcrowded national headquarters building, a five-year lease at $250 per month, little action being contemplated by the headquarters staff, the board of directors, or the council delegates, and a 50th anniversary that was looming ever closer." It was time to move. The leadership looked at some 20 possible sites in the Midwest, a region preferred for its central location and favorable cost of living. The executive board was attracted to the idea of relocating to the fraternity’s first home, Bloomington, Indiana. Herman B Wells, then president of Indiana University, was interested in attracting to Bloomington "professional organizations that would interact with the university." Cole quotes him recalling, "We made them [Phi Delta Kappa] a price just as low as we could and get by with. At the time we also arranged to have certain campus privileges accorded to top staff members of the fraternity." PDK’s leaders accepted Wells’ offer, and in February 1954 the board voted unanimously to purchase the designat-ed site next to Indiana University on Bloomington’s east side for "no more than $7,500." Soon a two-story "headquarters" building was under construction. Kappans gathered on New Year’s Eve 1955 to dedicate the new building at Eighth and Union Streets. Finally PDK had a permanent home. Times of Change Paul Cook, who had led PDK as executive secretary for 28 years, decided to retire rather than make the move to Bloomington. His successor was Maynard Bemis, whose appointment became effective on 15 August 1956. Bemis had been elected to the PDK board of directors as comptroller at the 24th Council in December 1953 and had gained notice during the long search for a new headquarters site. He had received a doctorate in school administration from the University of Colorado in 1948. Early in his career he had been a junior and senior high school teacher, a principal, and a superintendent. By the start of the 1950s he was a professor at Stanford University. It seemed only fitting that the board would turn to Bemis to fill Cook’s shoes. They had seen his work firsthand and knew him to be hard-working, clear-headed, and a devoted Kappan. Bemis would preside over what some consider the halcyon days of the fraternity. Yet the educational landscape of the time was far from calm, as Cole wrote:
The pressures on PDK to stay relevant increased as the Great Society followed Camelot in the 1960s and brought more changes to U.S. education. Under Bemis the association met the challenges: membership continued to expand, field chapters were recognized on par with university chapters, Stanley Elam was hired to transform the Kappan into a major journal, the fraternity increased its presence abroad, educational research gained new emphasis, and, perhaps as significant as any of these, in 1966 the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation was established. The foundation was the dream of Ohio educator George Reavis, who approached Bemis early in 1966 with the idea of establishing a trust fund to realize his dream of publishing "as yet unwritten wisdom." Reavis believed that there were "schoolmen" who had led active lives and had gained information that they would be unable to share because they lacked the time and the resources. He thought that the foundation could make it possible for these educators to record their wisdom and that Phi Delta Kappa could then publish their writings. Reavis saw the foundation as a cooperative venture involving a major university, Ohio State, and PDK. The signing of the irrevocable trust agreement creating the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation came on 13 October 1966 in the Dean’s Conference Room in Arps Hall at Ohio State University. The initial funds amounted to about $500,000. Bemis was plagued throughout his tenure by repeated bouts of ill health, including several heart attacks, which eventually forced his retirement in 1970. He had served as executive secretary for 14 years. Following a brief interim, the next executive secretary arrived in the person of Lowell Rose, a 41-year-old educator who at the time was serving as executive director of the Indiana School Boards Association. Rose would shepherd the fraternity through its most vigorous period of growth, partly a result of the constitutional change in 1974 that admitted women to membership in the association. During Rose’s 24-year tenure as executive director (the title replaced executive secretary in 1988), the fraternity thrived as never before, reaching a membership peak exceeding 135,000, with Kappans spread out around the world in more than 650 chapters. The Kappan journal reached more readers and gained in influence, the book-publishing activity that was a goal of the Educational Foundation was invigorated, and PDK increasingly expanded its endeavors to assist educators by providing resources and professional development. For example, the Maynard R. Bemis Center for Evaluation, Development, and Research (or CEDR) -- founded by Bemis in 1966 and christened in his honor after his retirement -- initiated the enormously popular Hot Topics series, compilations of articles from professional journals that served to jump-start many doctoral students’ literature searches before the age of the Internet. A center created to disseminate innovative resource materials was later merged with a professional development center to become the Center for Professional Development and Services, which now oversees PDK’s annual international conference, the summer Gabbard Institutes, and many other professional development opportunities. Rose retired in 1995, but more than a decade later he remains active in the education profession and now directs the annual PDK/Gallup poll. A New Constitution for a New Century With the advent of the 1990s, PDK entered a period of transition. The organizational structure that had worked for nearly a century had become burdensome. PDK leaders began to recognize that governance needed to be streamlined if the organization was to thrive in the face of a new challenge: declining membership. As the baby-boom generation of educators shuffled toward retirement and younger educators shied away from membership in professional societies and social service organizations, PDK was called upon to reenergize in ways not unlike those it had found necessary immediately following the First World War 70 years earlier. The call went out in 2002 for a constitutional convention, the first since the association’s founding era, 1906-10. In July 2002 representatives from across the association gathered at the international office in Bloomington to craft the outlines of a new governance document, which was written and ratified by the membership later that year. The system of governance was dramatically streamlined. Councils were done away with, replaced by a one-member/one-vote strategy, and the membership was expanded to include associates -- parents and community and government leaders concerned about education -- and institutional members -- schools, school districts, companies, and governmental units. The new constitution has enabled PDK to ready itself for the challenges of its second century. But some important things have stayed the same. The new Phi Delta Kappa International constitution reiterates the organization’s historical commitment: "to promote quality education, in particular publicly supported education, as essential to the development and maintenance of a democratic way of life. This purpose shall be accomplished through research, service, and leadership in education." The challenges facing the education profession in 2006, compared to 1906, are different in some ways and similar in others. As one challenge is met, another arises. Phi Delta Kappa International continues to work through its international office and its extensive network of members and chapters to seek ways to address ongoing and new needs. Electronic membership for international members is a recent example of the blending of long-held values and new technology. PDK has renewed its commitment to a multifold mission, including strong advocacy on behalf of education; significant professional publications, not least among them one of the most-cited journals in the field, the Phi Delta Kappan; diverse professional development opportunities, including since 2002 an annual international conference; significant outreach to educators outside North America through chapters abroad and international projects; and the nurturing of career interest in education among young people through the Future Educators Association (FEA). The international office continues after half a century to be located in Bloomington, Indiana. But the facility has been enlarged and renovated several times since the cornerstone was laid in 1956. PDK’s home now includes a third story; more office space for expanded services; shipping and printing areas; and a conference center, the Phi Delta Kappa International Rose Conference Center, named in honor of Lowell Rose. After his retirement in 1995, Rose was succeeded by a past international president, Ron Joekel, a University of Nebraska dean, who served as executive director from 1995 to 1999. George Kersey, Jr., a Tennessee educator and a former PDK international vice president, then held the office from 1999 until his retirement in 2004. The sixth and current executive director is William Bushaw, a former middle school teacher and high school principal. Bushaw directed the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA) program in Michigan, served as chief academic officer and deputy superintendent at the Michigan Department of Education, and was a director at Merit Network, Inc., before being tapped to guide PDK into its second century. Few would argue with the conclusion that the modern Phi Delta Kappa has far surpassed even the loftiest dreams of the eight young men who met to form the Society of Pi Kappa Mu on the wintry campus of Indiana University in January 1906. One hundred years later the association still draws its principal strength from the professional collegiality it fosters among its members. This month, as PDK crosses the threshold into its second century, the association stands ready to tackle the challenges and opportunities of the next hundred years. The future, as it was for those eight men in 1906, is bright with promise. 1. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 58. 2. Ibid., p. 59. 3. Ibid., p. 90. 4. Paul M. Cook, "The History of the Organization and Development of Phi Delta Kappa," Phi Delta Kappa Directory (Chicago: Phi Delta Kappa, 1931). Cook’s history is long out of print, though copies exist in PDK’s archive. Subsequent references will be made clear in context, but not footnoted. 5. J. David Houser, "National History of Phi Delta Kappa," Phi Delta Kappan, April/June 1924, p. 3. Subsequent references will be made clear in context, but not footnoted. 6. J. David Houser, "Sixth Annual Council -- A Critique," National News Letter of Phi Delta Kappa, November 1915, pp. 5-6. 7. Roy E. Warren, "From the National Secretary," National News Letter of Phi Delta Kappa, June 1916, p. 3. 8. Robert W. Cole, Jr., "Years of Trial, Years of Promise: The Modern Era of Phi Delta Kappa," unpublished manuscript, Bloomington, Ind., 1981, p. 82. Subsequent references will be made clear in context, but not footnoted. DONOVAN R. WALLING is the director of publications at Phi Delta Kappa International, Bloomington, Ind. |
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