Conflict over the curriculum is nothing new in American public education, which has never been insulated from the culture wars. In the past few years, conflict over the teaching of race has torn through history and social studies classrooms, inciting the most serious fight over America's past since the last "history war" in the 1990s. At…

Public education, at least as it has been known for the past several generations in the US, is under threat. Conservative state legislatures from Arizona to Florida have enacted sweeping voucher legislation, channeling taxpayer dollars to private schools. At the same time, a vicious culture war has engulfed the public education system in…

Nearly 70 percent of American students enroll in postsecondary education immediately after graduating high school. Yet college and university completion rates remain highly disparate across social and economic groups. White students in the US are 20 percent more likely than Black and Latino students to graduate, and students from high-income…

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified…

After World War II, the colonial rule imposed by the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan was symbiotically connected with its project of nation building. This project of "national colonialism" initially spurred the KMT to build an extensive public education system and to marginalize private schools. Financial concerns after 1954, however, forced…

Progressive Era advocates of spelling reform argued that adopting "simplified" word forms would increase the efficiency of American schools. National education leaders and administrators sustained the movement as they discussed simplified spelling extensively in meetings of the National Education Association and state teachers'…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

As the author of this article read through the fascinating ruminations of Drs. Albisetti, Finkelstein, Thelin, and Urban, it seemed to him that two basic points emerge, one conceptual and one methodological. Conceptually, Albisetti, Finkelstein, and Urban are asking historians of education to move away from national frames of reference to either a…

During and after the American Civil War, individual state governments, faced with numerous economic demands, struggled to meet the needs of soldiers and their families. Among other pressing questions, they had to decide what to do with the massive number of dependent children orphaned by the war. In order to protect children, it became more…

One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called "the end of classical…

Between the 1840s and 1880s--a heyday of public bilingual schooling--the American Midwest emerged as a modern Babel because of its linguistic diversity and strong tradition of local control. In such a favorable environment, a variety of patterns and aims of foreign-language instruction developed. In this article, the author examines the contexts…

Thomas Woody, a reputable and well-published historian of education during the early twentieth century, made a thrashing call to historians in the field nearly sixty years ago in his article titled "Fields That Are White," where he depicted the history of education as a barren landscape awaiting the arrival of scholars who would alter…

The struggle to provide primary education for the Catholic poor in England and Wales dominated the agenda of English Catholic leaders in the last half of the nineteenth century. This effort occurred within the larger framework of a national educational revolution that slowly pushed the government into providing public education for the first time.…

Examines how the residents of Baltimore, Maryland, reacted to the idea of public schooling in the second quarter of the 19th century. Public education received considerable support. However, it was not embraced uniformly and simultaneously as a solution to alleviate middle- and upper-class anxieties over social change and disorder. (RM)

World War II stands as a defining moment for American higher education. During the crisis of international relations that existed by the late 1930s, American thinkers of various stripes felt compelled to mobilize the country's intellectual and educational resources in defense of democracy, thus creating "a great ideological revival of democracy…