Edwin G. Cooley

Edwin Gilbert Cooley (March 12, 1857 – September 28, 1923) was an American schoolteacher who later served as superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools district from 1900 until February 1909. Early life and education Cooley was born in Strawberry Point, Iowa. He started college at Iowa State University in 1872, but had to leave to work as a wagon maker's apprentice. In 1895 he graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.B.

Career Cooley became principal of a school in Strawberry Point in 1882, then in 1885 superintendent of schools in Cresco, Iowa. In 1901 he backed a reform bill proposed by a commission headed by William Rainey Harper that would have required a college degree to teach in the school system. This would have greatly disadvantaged women teachers, most of whom in Chicago at the time were Irish Catholics. There was regular hostility between his office and the Chicago Teachers Federation. He resigned on February 12, 1909. Cooley made several attempts to require members of high school football teams to maintain passing grades in order to participate in their sport. In late 1902, he managed to pressure the Board of Control overseeing high school football competition in Chicago to instate such a requirement. Later career Cooley was subsequently president of the publisher D. C. Heath and Company, then from 1910 to 1915, educational commissioner of the Commercial Club of Chicago. In this position he traveled widely studying industrial schools in the US, Europe, A bill named for him was unsuccessfully proposed in the Illinois state legislature that would have created a separate system of vocational schools modeled on the German system. From 1918 until his death, he was head of the Chicago continuation schools. Personal life and death He married Lydia K. Stanley on January 1, 1878; they had six children and lived in La Grange, Illinois. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1922, he died at a sanitarium in Winnetka on September 28, 1923, aged 67. Publications Some Continuation Schools in Europe (1912) The Need of Vocational Schools in the United States (1912) Vocational Education in Europe, 2 vols. (1912, 1915) Honors Honorary degree, University of Illinois Austrian Order of Franz Joseph Edwin G. Cooley Vocational High School and Upper Grade Center, Chicago