For this first History of Education Quarterly Policy Forum, we invited participants in the special Plenary Session at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the History of Education Society (HES) in St Louis to publish their remarks on the historical significance of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) at fifty. Organized and introduced by HES vice-president and program chair Adam R. Nelson, the session consisted of presentations by three expert panelists from the fields of History and African American Studies, American Law and Politics, and Political Science and Public Policy: Crystal Sanders of Penn State University, Doug Reed of Georgetown University, and Susan Moffitt of Brawn University, respectively. What follows are the texts of Adam Nelson's introductory remarks—including his introduction of the three panelists—followed by the panelists' remarks.

Even though the black community of antebellum New York City lived in a society that marginalized them socially and economically, they were intent on pursuing the basic privileges of American citizenship. One tactic African Americans employed to this end was the tenacious pursuit of education, which leaders believed would act both as an aid in economic advancement and as a counterargument against the widely assumed social inferiority of their race. The weekly newspaper, Freedom's Journal, the first African American owned and operated newspaper in the United States, was an avid supporter of this strategy of social elevation through education. From 1827 to 1829, the paper's editors, John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, used their platform to advertise for a range of schools, editorialize on the importance of learning, and draw connections between the enlightenment of the individual and the progress of the race.

This article focuses on a seminar-conference held in Hawaii in 1936 on the “educability” of native peoples. The seminar-conference was convened by New Zealand anthropologist Felix Keesing and Yale education professor Charles Loram and supported by the Carnegie Corporation, among other organizations. Conference delegates-who came from across the Pacific, including the U.S. mainland, Australia, and New Zealand, and from as far as South Africa-joined to discuss the future of colonial education. The residential conference, which lasted several weeks, resulted in published proceedings and the establishment of extensive transpacific networks. One in a series of international congresses on education that took place during the interwar years, the 1936 Hawaii conference offers unique insight into the transnational dialogue among academics, education practitioners, colonial administrators, and, in some cases, Indigenous spokespeople, concerning the modernization of colonialism and new forms of citizenship in the era of progressive education and cultural internationalism.

History of Education Quarterly editorial team is planning to integrate a new feature, “History of Education in the News,” into periodic issues of the journal. Our idea is to highlight relevant historical scholarship on a topic that has contemporary public resonance. Our first piece in this new vein engages the current uptick of interest in the links between slavery and higher education. Recent scholarship and popular press accounts have documented how many eastern colleges and universities benefited from enslaved African-American labor.

We asked Professors James D. Anderson and Christopher M. Span of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to take up this issue and reflect on how a deep knowledge of history informs recent activism on college and university campuses, particularly activism focused on forcing institutions to reckon with their histories and become antiracist spaces.

I am honored to participate on this plenary and I want to extend my thanks to the conference planning committee for the invitation. I come to this gathering as a civil rights scholar who has an interest in black education in the South. I do not consider it hyperbole on this the fiftieth anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to say that the legislation was the most important federal government action on black education since the second Morrill Act of 1890. Surely, some in this room would disagree with my assessment and make a strong case for the 1954 Brown decision. Indeed, the Supreme Court declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional was significant. The ruling, however, had a lot of bark but very little bite, and the recalcitrant South needed bite. We know the states of the former Confederacy needed a get-tough “if-then approach”—as in, if you don't do X, then you won't get Y.

When the History of Education Quarterly editors invited us to contribute to this forum, they asked us to reflect on how we taught histoiy with case studies. To jump-start our exchange, they suggested four possible purposes for teaching history in this way, which I have paraphrased below:

• • To reflect on the antecedents of the so-called “new” educational policy topics (what is the long histoiy of standardized testing?).

• • To disrupt conventional beliefs with counterexamples (why did nineteenth-century science and math classrooms include so many female students?).

• • To compare and contrast educational change in particular places or regions (how did the development of schooling differ in New England, the New South, or New Mexico?).

• • To call attention to the intersection of human agency and institutional structures (how did teachers, parents, and political leaders conflict or collaborate in struggles over school reform?).

The year 2015 is as far away in chronological time from 1965 as 1965 was from World War I. In other words, Lyndon Baines Johnson and ESEA are as remote and distant to our students as Archduke Ferdinand was to us in our school days. What seems to some of us like yesterday, or the start of a recent era, is in fact now a distant and remote time, seemingly unconnected from our present educational predicaments—at least in the eyes of our students. Or, to put it another way, ESEA is now fit for historical study.

A graduate school of education contains a wide range of disciplinary models for the training of scholars and practitioners. I encounter these models as they come up in conversation with colleagues and students, or I confront them more directly as I pass a clinical psychology laboratory space each morning on the way to my office. I often see small groups of doctoral students at work, huddled around a computer monitor or deep in discussion. As my psychology colleagues are more likely to research and write in teams rather than individually, I read this scene as a sign of collaboration built into graduate training. It also contrasts with my experience of collaboration, or the lack thereof, in my own graduate training in history. In my own education, the most collaborative spaces—in which people come together around a common text and problem—existed in the earliest phases of graduate school. A few students and a professor gathered around a seminar table to analyze a book or article. But later, as students developed their own research agendas and proceeded into the archives, they researched and wrote largely in isolation. Writing groups and other venues for sharing work were sustaining, but the content of research remained an individual affair. (There were hints, though, of new spaces for collaboration—as in the History of Education Society's research mentoring sessions begun in 2009—and likely others existed, but were unknown to me as a graduate student.) Once in a faculty position, reflecting on my graduate training and juxtaposed with what I perceived at the psychology laboratory led me to ask where collaboration fits and how it might matter in graduate training in the history of education.

Title I has a mixed legacy that poses a paradox. Part of that legacy has yielded tremendous accomplishments. Title I asserted a federal priority to help disadvantaged students and broke with long resistance to a significant federal role in elementary and secondary schooling. It has deepened and expanded government responsibility and management of schooling at all levels—federal, state, and local. Over time, it has helped sweep schools, regardless of their student population's poverty levels, into the broader national standards-accountability movement, most recently expressed in the Common Core. While resistance to some aspects of federal authority remains, and may have intensified, Title I has developed durable constituencies and appetites for federal funds. Improving the education of children who live in poverty remains politically salient. These are remarkable accomplishments. And these accomplishments are intimately intertwined with other policies, including the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which facilitated the passage of other legislation, such as Head Start and Title I. Title I's legacy is intertwined in other ways, beyond its connections with contemporaneous policies; and these dependencies will be the focus of my remarks today.

For the past ten years, I have taught the Roots of Urban Education, a graduate-level course for preservice art teachers and librarians, and have used the course as a pedagogical case study to help improve my teaching. Given that this is the only history course students in the teacher education program are required to take, the course emphasizes depth over breadth through a place-based study of schooling during key reform eras in twentieth-century New York City. I documented, analyzed, and revised my teaching, with special focus on my expectation that students would develop historical habits of mind and that such competencies would be relevant for future teachers.

In Mexicans in the Making of America, historian Neil Foley reconceptualizes Manifest Destiny, not as the glorious westward push of European Americans, but as their arrival on the doorstep of Mexican America. He argues that the United States came to Mexico, and we must reimagine this moment as an entry into an established New World where negotiation, conquest, and possession were already in play among various peoples and nations. The diversity of this nineteenth-century world is often absent in the ways that we have been trained to teach students in our first-year courses, and this absence, in turn, extends into our twentieth-century and contemporary discussions of race and race relations where binary comparisons dominate. Using educational and legal case studies from a variety of communities has allowed me to expand analyses in the U.S. history survey and to broaden students' conceptualizations from a singular white or binary black/white experience into a unified multilingual, multicultural, and transnational America. More importantly, this shift creates space for diverse groups of students to reconsider their own historical significance in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the relevance of local historical narratives in the scope of American history.