While a number of recent studies highlight John Stuart Mill’s role as a “teacher of the people,” his reflections upon the political significance of higher education have received relatively little attention. I argue that Mill’s 1867 St. Andrews Address was both a defense of liberal education against influential arguments for religion- and science-based models of higher education, and a call for elites educated in reformed universities to shape a public vision for the construction of a polity committed to liberal principles. I conclude that Mill’s St. Andrews Address can contribute to debates about the role of the university in contemporary liberal societies.

This article analyzes class formation of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA). In 2011, Wisconsin curtailed public-sector union collective bargaining, causing Wisconsin unions’ membership and political power to plummet. This article puts the 2011 collapse into historical perspective, by considering the development of Milwaukee teachers’ labor organizing over the course of the twentieth century. In part I, I chronicle the formation of the MTEA, including its early contest with the Milwaukee Teachers Union (MTU) and the gendered fault lines of the teachers’ collective vision. In part II, I discuss the consequences of teachers’ rhetorical contradictions, especially their lack of collaboration with the civil rights movement in Milwaukee. This article challenges the notion that class movements are preordained with unified interests and aims, and instead shows that unions themselves build and assemble people’s political ideas, either to expand solidarity or to narrow it.

The educational mission of most western schools today includes the nurturing of children’s sexual upbringing, which many scholars see as a way of controlling their sexuality and forming them into “sexual citizens.” This article examines how official Swedish school guidelines and textbooks have mediated sexuality norms through education on masturbation. The professional discourse on masturbation started to change during the first half of the twentieth century, when masturbation shifted from being perceived as something harmful to something accepted as natural and harmless. This article focuses on a period following that shift in opinion: circa 1945-2000. The analysis shows that boys’ sexuality during this time received more attention than girls’, and a strong new norm about sex contributed to masturbation taking on less importance than heterosexual intercourse within a relationship. This article shows how state-controlled curricula have created norms about gender and sexuality, thus contributing to the development of a sexual citizenship.

The educational attainment literature has brought back interest in early American primary schools, and much current research views those schools as superior to their European peers in the education offered to youth. Its emphasis, though, on using school enrollment as the prime indicator of attainment conflicts with the revisionist view of a previous generation of historians who argued that education in the heavily rural and agricultural society of the time should be considered as a process of social reproduction delivered by households, with schools being peripheral for most youth. This article, relying on evidence from statutes, indentures, and a 1798 New York State school survey, finds increased resort to primary schooling over the eighteenth century, attributable not to American exceptionalism but to a transatlantic movement away from scribal-dominated literacy and numeracy toward common use of a standardized written vernacular and “arithmetic by pen.” However, the dependence of households on child labor meant that the Three Rs did not get distributed in either an egalitarian or compact fashion. Small doses spread over a number of years—educational sprawl—best describes the system, and it lasted through much of the nineteenth century.

Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has “the public good” been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a white good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to place, the knowledge that schools impart, and the hobbling of brown and Black children. Insofar as schooling has approached being a public good, that tendency has emerged as the result of counter-majoritarian, explicitly racial activism led by non-white people. The struggle for racial justice has been the struggle of moving schooling from a white good to a public good.

This article uses oral history, archival material, and published primary sources to examine the competing conceptions of “innovation” at work in the creation and operation of the West Philadelphia Community Free School (WPCFS) from 1969 to 1978. One of the longest-running initiatives in the School District of Philadelphia's experimental Office of Innovative Programs, the WPCFS stood at the crossroads of conflicting imperatives for “innovation.” These included: (1) institutional interests in advancing “humanizing” pedagogy; (2) Black activists’ interests in operating a community-controlled school for students of color in West Philadelphia; and (3) teachers’ interests in balancing their commitments to “humanizing” instruction and a surrounding community with different educational priorities. We highlight two instances where the frictions between these uses of “innovation” became pronounced in the WPCFS—debates over “free time” and the 1973 teachers’ strike. These incidents clarify how the burden of reconciling opposing innovations fell unevenly on the teachers and community members—often in ways that pitted the groups against one another—and exacerbated raced and classed inequalities in the school and district. While the account focuses on the 1960–1970s, we suggest that the WPCFS is relevant for us today, offering insights for the present into the longer discursive history of “innovation” as a lever for school reform, and into its impacts on educational equity.

This article provides a historiographical survey of significant African American historians researching, writing, and interpreting Black people's education history. At the heart of this article are the following questions: Who were the African American historians of education who produced this work? What has been the significant scholarship of African American education historians from the late nineteenth century to the present? Although much scholarship has been published on African American education, its history remains underrepresented in the study of educational history. Nonetheless, this historiography is burgeoning thanks to Black educational historians’ scholarship.

This article examines children's literature written by African American teachers during the first part of the twentieth century. Drawing on theories of racialization, I analyze children's books written by two African American teachers: Helen Adele Whiting (1885-1959) and Jane Dabney Shackelford (1895-1979). I argue that their books represented more than an effort toward greater Black representation in schools; they also served as a contribution to a larger discourse on Blackness and identity that emerged during the “New Negro” movement. In this view, African American teachers were not mere passive recipients of an outside Black culture, but rather intellectual actors involved in the production of racial identity during the interwar period.

This article explores the All-Day Neighborhood Schools (ADNS) program, operated as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and local philanthropists from 1936 to 1971. Designed to expand the resources available to children and parents, the program included after-school activities, additional teachers, professional development, social workers, and parent engagement at fourteen public elementary schools across the city. Through a study of two program sites, I examine how this public-private partnership functioned, and trace changes in the motivations of its leadership, from a focus on recreation and democracy during World War II, to juvenile delinquency prevention, to compensatory education. I argue that ADNS's ability to transform public schooling in New York City was limited by its separation from the rest of the school system, which came about through its dependance on outside philanthropy and its consistent formulation as a supplemental program rather than as a fundamental part of children's education.

America's schools are more segregated today than they were three decades ago. After initial progress in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education—further bolstered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as by several other rulings by the court—the nation's schools began a process of resegregation in the early 1990s. White resistance, reversals by the court, and growing residential segregation have ensured that many young people attend school with classmates from similar racial and class backgrounds. As a recent report from the UCLA's Civil Rights Project found, the average White student attends a school in which 69 percent of students are White, the average Latinx student attends a school in which 55 percent of students are Latinx, and the average Black student attends a school in which 47 percent of students are Black. Segregation is a fact of life in both the North and the South, in urban and rural communities, in red states and in blue states.

For this Policy Dialogue, HEQ's editors asked Cara McClellan and Matthew Delmont to discuss the segregation of K-12 schools by race. How, we wanted to know, has the past shaped the present and constrained the future? How are present-day efforts responding to that past and challenging the structures and cultures that reinforce racial segregation? What might the future hold? Cara McClellan is director of the Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania's Carey Law School, where she is also an associate professor of practice. Prior to this role, she served as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she represented students and families in cases such as Sheff v. O'Neill. Matthew Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His work focuses on African American history and the history of civil rights, and he is the author of several books including Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation and, most recently, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

While US and Dominican officials have traditionally received credit for the expansion of the public school system during the US military occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, this article offers an alternative account by focusing on the role of guardians, or caretakers, in supporting and creating schools in this period. Drawing from sources from the Department of Public Instruction in the Dominican Republic and analyzing them “against the archival grain,” I argue that Dominican guardians were pivotal to the expansion of the Dominican school system and key actors in shaping the educational landscape during this period. Not only did guardians construct and maintain most of the schools opened during the US occupation, but they also shaped school policy. Most significantly, through their grassroots efforts, guardians and other volunteers ensured that schools in the Dominican Republic continued to operate during the financial crisis of 1921 that bankrupted the school system.

This article examines the complex drivers of change in language education that have resulted in Australia having the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. An analysis of academic and non-academic literature, policy documents, and quantitative data helps trace the trajectory of the Italian language in the Australian education system, from the 1960s to the 1990s, illustrating the interaction of different variables that facilitated the shift in Italian's status from a largely immigrant language to one of the most widely studied languages in Australia. This research documents the factors behind the successful mainstreaming of Italian into schools, which, in addition to the active support it received from the Italian community and the Italian government, also included, notably, the ability of different Australian governments to address societal transformation and to respond to the emerging practical challenges in scaling up new language education initiatives in a detailed and comprehensive manner.

Through the lens of the school board, this essay examines school governance dynamics as a southern, historically white public school district struggled to implement school desegregation. In 1976, the city of Waco simultaneously elected its school district's first trustees of Color, Dr. Emma Louise Harrison and Rev. Robert Lewis Gilbert. Harrison and Gilbert used distinctly different political strategies to navigate the racially hostile school board environment, but ultimately, as this article demonstrates, neither strategy enabled them to overcome white supremacy in Waco. This seemingly obvious point reveals a notable yet underemphasized drawback of school desegregation: that it failed to upend structural racial injustice. The case of Harrison and Gilbert illustrates that this limitation was reflected in the token number of Black trustees on the boards of desegregated schools and the concerted white resistance they met in working to spur meaningful racial change.

The long history of Montessori education in India dates to 1915, and it was expanded through Maria and Mario Montessori's work in India between 1939 to 1946 and 1947 to 1949. The article characterizes a century of Montessori education in India as a series of adapted, competing, and contested framings with key disputes over Montessori education's intended purpose, audience, and how much it could be adapted. First, from 1915 to 1939, Montessori education was connected to the Indian independence movement as nation-building education, but it was eclipsed by a parallel rise of elite, private Montessori schools, a framing reinforced by Maria Montessori's insistence on fidelity to her method. Starting in the 1950s, other Indian educators adapted Montessori for poor children, an emphasis that continues today with government and foundation-funded schools. Finally, in the last thirty years, India's new middle class has driven demand for early childhood education, leading to branded Montessori franchises, some bearing little resemblance to Montessori's original pedagogy.

This article summarizes and assesses federal K-12 compensatory education policies during the past six decades. It focuses on the centerpiece of that effort, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Related programs such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds Act are discussed. It analyzes the increasing use of ambitious federal education goals since the 1990s as well as greater reliance on high-stakes testing. It also considers the role of presidents as well as governors in this process.

Andrew Monroe [pseud.] (b. 1894) was a Colorado street kid whose acts of truancy and theft landed him before the state's early juvenile courts, and his youth was marked by attempts at escape from reform school. His childhood and youth provide insights into the mechanics of how systems of juvenile corrections operated in the early twentieth century. To enforce new truancy laws, Progressive Era child-savers relied on report cards for the surveillance of probationers, categorizing children like Andrew as “stubborn,” “unyielding,” and “disobedient.” Ultimately, Andrew's refusal to comply with these new forms of institutional control serves as a case study for the challenges that children faced in escaping an apparatus that reduced them to the label of “delinquent.”

Since No Child Left Behind was signed into law, test-based accountability has become a core feature of the K-12 public education system in the United States. The approach, it would seem, is here to stay. Yet that is not to say that anything resembling a consensus has emerged. Over the past twenty years, critics have continued to raise questions about the theory of change underlying test-based accountability, and scholars have detailed a variety of unintended consequences associated with it.

If test-based accountability is both likely to persist and imperfect in its design, then it is critical to consider how its shortcomings might be addressed. In service of that aim, and in keeping with the mission of this feature, this Policy Dialogue explores future possibilities by starting, first, with a look at the past. In this particular case, participants were asked to address one simple question: “What have we learned from two decades of high-stakes testing?”

As regular readers of HEQ are aware, these dialogues usually feature a historian in conversation with a scholar or practitioner from the world of policy. In this case, the choice of Diane Ravitch was a natural one, particularly given the fact that she is a member of HEQ's editorial board. A research professor at New York University, she is also a former assistant US secretary of education and the author of several books about measurement and accountability.

Rather than select a single interlocutor, however, the editors chose to pair her with three leaders who represent the broad range of viewpoints in the field: Denise Forte, Princess Moss, and Paul Reville. Denise Forte is the interim CEO of The Education Trust. She brings to our conversation twenty years of experience in congressional staff roles, including as the staff director for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Princess Moss is vice president of the National Education Association and cochair of the NEA's task force on measurement and accountability. In prior work with the NEA's Executive Committee, she helped develop the group's position on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—from NCLB to the Every Student Succeeds Act. Paul Reville is the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and former secretary of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Nearly a decade before the passage of NCLB, he played a key role in the development of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which instituted standards-based accountability across the state.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

Alongside Walt Disney's animated movies, television programming, and theme parks, scholars have examined The Walt Disney Studios’ True-Life Adventures series of live-action nature documentary films for their impact on popular culture. Historians, however, have mostly overlooked the significance of the True-Life Adventures for student learning about the natural world. Amending this historiographical shortcoming, this essay examines Disney's innovative approach to wildlife filmmaking, describes viewers’ reactions to the True-Life Adventures’ educational qualities, and investigates the Studios’ efforts to use the films to enter the education market. The study breaks new ground by analyzing seldom accessed documents preserved in the Walt Disney Archives both to reveal how students, teachers, and college and university faculty responded to the films and to examine the extension of the nature documentaries through related media.

Although chiefly framed in the context of domestic education policy, debates about the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) echoed international education policy debates and the workings of global education governance. As this article demonstrates, both domestic and international efforts were shaped by three key features: tension between centralized goals and historically localized practices and authorities; links between education policy goals and a set of rhetorical arguments centered on human capital; and competitive comparisons among education systems that mixed market rhetoric with prestige dynamics. These common features can be attributed to the development of a “soft governance” layer, in which multilateral surveillance plays a major part. In the US, such development began before NCLB, accelerated during the NCLB era, and remained after NCLB was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015.

Scholars have demonstrated that a range of institutions, organizations, and “social movement schools” aimed to advance the civil rights movement through education. What remains unclear is how those institutions balanced conversation, direct instruction, role-play, and other pedagogical methods. This article focuses on the Highlander Folk School, a radical, racially integrated institution located in the hills of Tennessee. Drawing upon audio tapes of civil rights workshops at Highlander, I argue that the folk school's workshops blended a variety of pedagogical styles in a way that previous scholarship has failed to acknowledge, and that close attention to Highlander's varied pedagogies can help us rethink the relationship between education and the civil rights movement.