Article 6: “For the Best Interests of the Community”: Riverside’s 14th Street School Debate

The placement of schoolhouses provided a forum for animated and often colorful local debate during the late 19 th century. The great political debates over national school systems and the racial politics of Reconstruction, while influencing state educational policies, elicited little interest at the local level in Southern California. Local racial animosities, however, permeated the debate. Local newspaper editors occasionally interspersed references culled from national educational debates within their columns, indicating that their readers were well aware of the issues and the rhetoric of national politics surrounding public schools. The increasing importance of the school building in the community, and the changing architecture of schools communicated both a new institutional structure and changing social beliefs about schools and schooling. These emerging social beliefs are illustrated in the debates in the communities of San Bernardino and Riverside, California, during the late 1880s.