“Max Rafferty (1917-82), Conservative Educator and California State School Superintendent During 1962-70.” By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
“Max Rafferty (1917-82), Conservative Educator and California State School Superintendent During 1962-70By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
Rafferty, Maxwell Lewis, Jr. (born May 17, 1917; died June 13, 1982), educator, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Maxwell Lewis Rafferty, an Irish Roman Catholic store owner and auto plant worker, and DeEtta Cox (mother).
In 1921 the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and then, in 1931, to Los Angeles, California. Young Max skipped several grades and graduated at age sixteen from Beverly Hills High School, California, where he was remembered for being studious, quick witted, and much younger than his classmates.
Entering the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he majored in history, managed the football and rugby teams, was president of Sigma Pi fraternity, joined the UCLA Americans (an anti-communist athletic group opposed to leftist students), and received a B.A. in 1938. He then enrolled in the UCLA School of Education to become a teacher and later claimed to have reluctantly studied John Dewey’s educational philosophy in order to become certified.
He taught English and history and coached football at Trona High School, in Trona, California, from 1940 to 1948, having been classified physically unfit for the World War II draft because of flat feet. He married a schoolmate in 1940, was divorced in 1943, and married Frances Louella Longman in 1944. They had three children. He earned an M.A. degree from UCLA in 1949 and an Ed.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 1955.
Asked later why he chose to be a teacher and school administrator for twenty-one years in isolated southern California desert towns, Rafferty replied that “they paid better salaries, and advancement was more rapid.” From Trona, California, where he had risen to be vice principal, he became principal of the high school in Big Bear, California, a resort town in the San Bernardino Mountains, from 1948 to 1951. He was then school superintend at Saticoy, (1951-1955), Needles (1955-1961), and La Canada, a prosperous northeast Los Angeles suburb (1961-1962), all in California.
Max Rafferty’s speeches to education groups and civic clubs as well as his articles (particularly in Phi Delta Kappan, the journal of the education honor society) and books written during these years expressed his contempt for progressive education and school approaches that stressed “life adjustment.”
He described leftist students of the 1950s and 1960s as “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs.” His impassioned speeches and writings soon won him admiration from the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups, many of which had growing memberships in California during these years.
His 1961 “Passing of the Patriot” speech to the La Canada school board excoriated educators for having been “so busy educating for ‘life adjustment’ that we forgot that the first duty of a nation’s schools is to preserve that nation.” That speech marked a turning point in his career. Wide press coverage made Rafferty a hero of not only political right wingers but also of those who yearned more generally for a return to simple and manly virtues.
In 1962, backed by a coalition of conservative forces, Rafferty won election as state superintendent of public instruction; he was reelected in 1966. He feuded with the liberal state board of education, especially over books that he wanted removed from school libraries and as textbooks in school subjects.
But his conservative philosophy of education had little real impact because of the checks and balances and local control built into the California school system. His critics claimed that California’s schools were never as progressive as Rafferty claimed.
Encouraged by conservative Republicans, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968, won the nomination over liberal-Republican California Senator Thomas H. Kushell, but lost to Democrat Alan M. Cranston in the general election.
He also lost his third reelection bid in 1970 as California’s superintendent of public instruction to Wilson Riles, a black educator whom he had appointed his deputy. Having been rejected in California, he left in 1971 to become dean of education at Troy State University, in Troy, Alabama. He died following an automobile accident.
Rafferty presaged the New Right’s ascendancy to political power through the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and particularly Ronald Reagan. Many observers believed that Rafferty preached a conservative gospel as a means of self-promotion, rather than out of personal conviction. Despite his talent for invective, opponents as well as allies found him likable and articulate.References
Rafferty’s best-known books:
Suffer, Little Children, 1962.
What They Are Doing To Your Children, 1964.
Max Rafferty on Education, 1968.
Classroom Countdown: Education at the Crossroads, 1970.
Rafferty Biographies:
Paul F. Cummins, Max Rafferty: A Study in Simplicity (1968) and
Franklin Parker, “School Critic Max Rafferty (1917-1982) and the New Right,” Review Journal of Philosophy & Social Science, 10, 2 (1985): 129-40.
Rafferty Obituaries:
New York Times, June 15, 1982.
San Diego Union (Calif.), June 14, 1982.
Oakland Tribune (Calif.), June 14 1982.
Los Angeles Times (Calif.), June 14 1982.
San Francisco Examiner (Calif.), June 15, 1982.
Birmingham News (Ala.) , June 16, 1982.
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