James Edward Allen was born on April 25, 1911 in Elkins, West Virginia, United States. He was the first child of James Edward Allen, the president of Davis and Elkins College, and Susan Hackney Garrott, the college librarian. Early in his life, Allen absorbed the dedication to hard work, sympathy for the underprivileged, and sense of moral responsibility characteristic of his strongly religious parents.
Allen graduated from Davis and Elkins in 1932. Later he pursued graduate study at Harvard University. He enrolled in Harvard in 1941, earning a master's of education in 1942 and received a Doctor of Education degree in 1945.
In 1933 Allen was hired by the West Virginia State Department of Education, where he compiled statistical data on school finance. Later he and his wife left for Princeton, New Jersey, where he became research associate with the Princeton (University) Surveys, studying educational finance in New Jersey and Massachusetts. The move to Princeton would be the first of many between 1939 and 1947. As a result of his work, Allen came to know Alfred Simpson, a professor at Harvard University's School of Education, who encouraged him to continue his studies there. While at Harvard, he became acquainted with James Conant, Francis Keppel, and John Gardner, men who served as models of the educational statesmanship Allen himself would later epitomize.
After a brief stint as a civilian operations analyst for the Air Force in Tampa during the period 1944-1945, Allen accepted an appointment as assistant professor of education at Syracuse University. While on the Syracuse faculty he spent several months in Washington, D. C. , as a staffer for President Truman's Commission on Higher Education, which was to make recommendations on the role the federal government would play in meeting the country's postwar higher education needs.
Shortly after Allen returned to Syracuse in 1947, Francis Spaulding, New York State Commissioner of Education and former dean of the Harvard School of Education, offered Allen the position of executive assistant to the commissioner. The gypsy phase of Allen's career was over. When Spaulding died in 1950, the New York State Board of Regents appointed Allen deputy commissioner. In 1955 he assumed the commissionership upon the retirement of Lewis Wilson.
At age forty-four he held what was arguably the most important education job in the nation. Allen's fourteen-year tenure as Commissioner of Education in New York, from September 1, 1955, to May 1, 1969, was marked by immense growth of the state's education system and, in the later years, considerable turmoil over school desegregation. He favored local control of schools, and endorsed a decentralization of New York City's school system. The debate over control of the schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School District touched off a series of disturbances there, which in turn resulted in a citywide teachers' strike.
One of Allen's clearest goals as New York's Education Commissioner was equal educational opportunity. Because he used the powers of his office to champion racial equality and civil rights throughout the 1960s, Allen placed himself at the center of a heated fight over racial imbalance in the schools. A number of school districts brought suits against Allen's integration orders. In a decision on one of these suits, with significant implications for educational policy across New York State and beyond, a New York appellate court upheld "the judgment of the Commissioner that correction of racial imbalance is an educational aid to a minority group in attaining the skills and level of education which others have had for generations and that compulsory education should be designed for the greatest good of all. "
By 1969 the era of education growth in New York was drawing to a close. The previous year, Allen had been approached by the Nixon administration about the post of United States Commissioner of Education. He took the job in 1969 in part because Robert Finch, the newly nominated Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and a liberal on education matters, assured him that education would have high priority in the Nixon White House. Accepting Nixon's overture proved to be the largest mistake Allen made in his professional life.
On May 1, 1969, Allen became assistant secretary for education and United States Commissioner of Education. He had been a champion of the preeminence of the states in education. He had welcomed the federal government into education financing when many states sought to block federal involvement. The post of chief education officer for the federal government seemed a natural capstone to a career that had increasingly been concerned with charting a vigorous national education policy. But President Nixon had been elected in part as a reaction against the "Great Society" view of government as a benevolent social force. Consequently, Allen found that he was not consulted on major decisions affecting education. His choices for top positions in the Office of Education were rejected by the White House, and the Office's budget was cut by $370 million. Allen continued to advocate racial integration in the schools and student rights, and to propose new research and social action ventures such as the National Institute of Education and the Right to Read program, at a time when the Nixon administration was playing to the conservatism of "the silent majority" and devoting considerable resources to the war in Vietnam.
On June 10, 1970, after barely more than a year in office, Robert Finch asked for Allen's resignation. Shortly thereafter Allen returned to Princeton to accept a visiting lectureship at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a position he held when Allen and his wife were flying on a small charter plane from Las Vegas, Nevada, to the Grand Canyon in Arizona on October 16, 1971. The plane flew into a severe storm and crashed in a heavily wooded area called Pine Mountain, sixty miles east of the Arizona-Nevada border. Six other passengers and the two crewmen were killed in addition to the Allens.
During Allen's term as Commissioner of Education in New York, the number of public school students rose from 2, 300, 000 to 3, 400, 000 and annual educational expenditures climbed from $1 billion to $4. 1 billion. At the same time, Allen succeeded in reducing the number of school districts by more than half, thus strengthening the remaining consolidated districts. This simultaneous expansion and contraction called upon all of Allen's well-developed skills as an educational planner, manager, and politician. As U. S. Commissioner of Education, Allen helped found the Education Commission of the States to give them a collective national voice. He also helped launch the National Assessment of Educational Progress to provide comparative data on student learning outcomes nationwide.
Quotations: "Broadly generalized statements of goals will not satisfy the increasingly intense scrutiny of the public, of legislative bodies, hard-headed businessmen, and taxpayers. "
Allen was referred as an educational statesman and a practical visionary. His speeches on equal opportunity, environmental education, and multiculturalism leave no doubt that he had a vision of the future of American education and society. In pursuing this vision, for all his balance and diplomacy, he was resolute, tough-minded, and fearless.
On April 23, 1938, Allen married Florence Pell Miller, like him a West Virginian from a small town. In 1942 the Allens became parents of twins, a boy and a girl.
