One reason Up the Down Staircase, Bel Kaufman’s classic novel about a New York City schoolteacher, has aged so well is the particular moment in which its story is set:
Kaufman’s own teaching career coincided with a golden age in public education, and it was a golden age for some largely ignored reasons. Public schools were only expected to send a small fraction of students on to college. Congress’s restriction of immigration in 1924, not fully lifted until 1965, gave schools two generations to acculturate and assimilate newcomers. The horrific job market during the Great Depression, combined with commonplace sexism of the day, filled public-school faculties with overqualified educators, many of them women with no other career options apart from nursing.
(Hat tip to Education Realist.)
What’s astonishing about this article is that the author actually admits that the Immigration Pause of 1924-1965 had some good social effects. Considering that this was published in the New Yorker, that’s astonishing. That’s like Commentary publishing an article that expresses doubts about the full extent of the Holocaust, or NR giving props to Commies.