Chapter 15: Texas Standard: Spreading the Word to the Teachers’ State Association of Texas

Throughout the history of the United States, individuals engaged in common occupations joined together to form professional associations. Artisans in colonial Georgia founded the Mechanics Society of Augusta (Gillespie 2000, 39), physicians formed the American Medical Association, and attorneys, the American Bar Association. Through these organizations individuals were able to disseminate ideas and research and, collectively, to exert influence on legislative matters and public opinion.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, teachers organized into national and state associations. Stinnett noted the earliest teachers’ association, the Edinburgh Society of Teachers, was founded in Scotland in 1737. In the United States, the first recorded association was the Society of Associated Teachers, organized in New York City in 1794. This was followed by the formation of other educational organizations, mainly along the east coast. (Stinnett 1956). Notable Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard were among the early members of these organizations. Granrud noted that by 1907 every state had a teachers’ association, although the total membership of these groups amounted to less than 15% of the teacher population. However, by 1923 these figures had more than quadrupled, with over 61% of American teachers belonging to an association (Granrud 1926, 1).