After George Floyd was murdered by police, teachers, alongside the leaders of their unions and professional associations, confronted urgent calls to address racism in their communities, schools, and classrooms, just as they were concluding an academic year rendered chaotic by COVID-19. This article leverages four waves of semistructured interviews…

This article reviews a collection of papers written by the American Educational Research Association's first 50 presidents that deal specifically with curricular issues. It characterizes the ways in which curricula were conceptualized, implemented, and assessed, with an eye toward the epistemological and methodological framings that the authors…

This essay considers the absence, presence, and shifting treatment of the topic of research on teaching and teacher education in AERA presidential addresses. To capture the arc of this topic, the essay is structured chronologically according to three time periods beginning with AERA's birth in 1916 and continuing to the current years. At a general…

Despite the long history of curriculum studies in the American Educational Research Association, few past presidents have used their presidential addresses to speak about the curriculum and its importance in education research and teaching. In this essay, I examined the presidential addresses (and paper) of three well-known curriculum…

The mission statement of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) articulates the following goals: "improving the educational process," "advancing knowledge about education," "[encouraging] scholarly inquiry related to education," and "[promoting] the use of research ... to serve the public…

American Educational Research Association presidents' presidential addresses have only intermittently considered relevance as a criterion of quality for education research. A few, though, argued that education research could only distinguish itself from research in the disciplines through attention to improving educational outcomes. David…

The eight presidential addresses included in this essay, delivered between 1923 and 2009, focus wholly or partly on education politics and policy. Although they reflect their different intellectual and social times, they share a dominant theme in documenting the shifting and uneasy relationship between research and education policy. Presidents…

Research on education and society is the focus in discussing four essays of AERA past presidents, Newton Edwards, Maxine Greene, Linda Darling-Hammond, and William F. Tate, IV. The title, "We May Well Become Accomplices... ," is taken from Greene's speech to foreground inherent moral obligations of scholars when racial and social justice…

For a century, AERA has had as its mission using research to improve K-12 and higher education practices. Born in a period of reform, the Association's mission--reformist both in spirit and the letter--has been articulated time and again by its elected presidents. As different reform movements have swept across U.S. schools, as demographics and…

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the quest for civil rights by African Americans and other groups of color reverberated throughout the United States and the world, including within educational professional and research organizations, such as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the National Council of…

Using five AERA presidential addresses over the past half century as landmarks, this essay traces the evolution of research on teaching and teacher education as well as some critical impacts the research has had on policy and practice related to teacher education and teacher evaluation in the United States. The discussion shows how these addresses…

This article investigates the persistent and change elements of educational testing and assessment from 1920 to the present day. I show by examining the addresses and texts of American Educational Research Association presidents a continuing focus on schools, from early experiments and development up through applications in accountability systems.…

This essay briefly describes some of the early AERA presidents who were empiricists, several of them directors of research, and how their work connects with some of the issues of design, measurement, analysis, and interpretation today. Beginning with the first president of AERA, a number of presidents through the late 1940s are highlighted, as…

Among the notable aspects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the diverse array of interest groups supporting them. These organizations must now apply the strategies they used so effectively in advancing the Common Core to stem mounting opposition to it. This article draws on theories of political and policy learning and interviews with…

This report is intended to provide information to facilitate revision of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) website. All AERA members were invited to participate in an electronic survey to respond to questions about their assessments of the current website and their use of technology to access it. This report presents findings…