education history 
-
SOURCE: New York Magazine
5/30/2023
The Other Mothers Fighting the School Wars
Although Moms For Liberty was the early entrant into the current battles over curriculum, race and LGBTQ policies in schools, other groups have mobilized their identities as mothers to fight the right's efforts. Historians Adam Laats and Stacie Taranto note that school politics have often hinged on who could leverage motherhood as a political force.
-
SOURCE: TIME
5/9/2023
There's Never Been a Right Way to Read
by Adrian Johns
The intellectual work and play of reading has always competed with other demands on attention; only recently have science and commerce converged to sell remedies for distraction and proprietary methods for reading.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
4/26/2023
How the Reagan Administration Used "A Nation at Risk" to Push for School Privatization
by Valerie Strauss and James Harvey
One of the educators who served on the commission that developed an influential report on the state of American education argues that the report was built to serve an anti-public school ideology, and that its conclusions were a foundation for the culture war battles over schooling today.
-
SOURCE: Scientific American
4/7/2023
Attacks on Education Echo Fascism
by Eden McLean
"Florida’s legislation represents only the latest in a long history of attempts to deplore knowledge, deride academic inquiry for its own sake, and discourage intellectual curiosity in our children and the American public."
-
4/9/2023
SCOTUS Arguments in Debt Relief Cases Show the Fracturing of the Bipartisan "Education Myth"
by Jon Shelton
Two Justice's preoccupation with the fairness of relieving student debt proclaimed a concern that the government not pick economic winners and losers. But the student debt crisis reflects a decades-long bipartisan sales pitch, backed by policy, that college is the individual's path to prosperity. That pitch is now wearing thin.
-
SOURCE: The Nation
2/28/2023
Students are the Victims of DeSantis's Education War in Florida
Ron DeSantis's education policies are driven by what will rile up the most reactionary voters in the state and have little do do with rectifying the growing problems with student achievement and teacher retention that are actually putting the state's schools in crisis, argue two Floridian writers.
-
SOURCE: Texas Monthly
2/16/2023
Those "Local" School Battles in Texas are Part of a Decades-Long Statewide Plan to Undermine Public Schools
Advocates of privatizing public schools have bankrolled and organized parents' groups around a range of values issues with the goal of undermining confidence in local schools. In Texas, it seems to be working to break down the longstanding opposition of rural families to voucher programs.
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/14/2023
The Book that Launched Black Studies Was a Challenge to Classroom Racism
by Ibram X. Kendi
Education historian Jarvis Givens discusses a 90th anniversary edition of Carter Woodson's pathbreaking "The Mis-Education of the Negro," noting that the book was banned in Oklahoma for being "antiklan" in its efforts to overturn the pervasive message of Black inferiority in the established school curriculum.
-
SOURCE: Jacobin
2/15/2023
Democrats' Embrace of Education "Reform" Paved Way for DeSantis
by Nora De La Cour
Decades of stressing metrics, measurement and job-readiness has created a vacuum where a robust public discussion of the role of public schools in nurturing shared humanity should be. Conservatives are now eagerly filling this vacuum with privatization and "classical education" curricula.
-
SOURCE: Kappan
2/4/2023
Did DeSantis Claim More Credit than he Deserves for the College Board's Retreat?
by Adam Laats
The College Board faced immense public criticism for its revised standards for the AP US History exam in 2014, and caved to the demands of conservative Southerners. If Florida's governor deserves credit (or blame) it's for predicting they'd cave again.
-
SOURCE: Public Books
12/1/2022
The Activist Roots of Student-Centered Teaching (Review)
by Danica Savonick
A new book by Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis examines the history of teaching efforts to involve students not simply in discussions but in "co-creating a syllabus."
-
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
7/26/2022
Have Children Changed in Modern America?
by Steven Mintz
A recent argument for the general stability of children over the last century and a half misses the key point that "childhood" has been a fluid concept, and changes in how childhood is understood has necessarily affected the experiences of children.
-
SOURCE: The Forum
7/22/2022
"They Want Your Children!": Right-Wing School Panics Seek to Repeal Modernity
by Rick Perlstein
"Reactionary panics about what children learn in school are about as old as time. And they won’t ever go away."
-
7/8/2022
The Story of the School that Defied Nazi Ideological Control
by Deborah Cadbury
Amid the intense politicization of education today, what can we learn from one remarkable story of a teacher's defiance of official ideological control?
-
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
6/27/2022
The Classic Model of Education and Democracy Can't Address Today's School Politics
by Steven Mintz
The idea of education serving democracy by producing informed citizens is tested by the lack of agreement about what that goal means. Can the competing claims on the education system be reconciled?
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/24/2022
The CRT and "Don't Say Gay" Panics Aren't About Controlling Public Schools, but Destroying Them
by Adam Laats
In the 1920s, the KKK sought to strengthen and control the public schools as vehicles to teach their version of "100% Americanism"; today's culture warriors hope to undermine trust in schools as a way to defund and privatize them.
-
SOURCE: Politico
5/17/2022
The Undiscussed Backlash to Brown v. Board: The Sidelining of Black Educators
by Leslie T. Fenwick
Brown v. Board was meant to ensure that children of different racial groups would share classrooms. But resistance to allowing Black teachers and principals to oversee white students' education led an estimated 100,000 Black educators to leave their profession.
-
SOURCE: Phenomenal World
5/12/2022
America's School Funding is Kleptocracy in Action
by Esther Cyna
The American system of funding schools largely through local property taxes contributes to inequalities both obvious and subtle that amount to legal dispossession of poor and minority students by denying them access to quality education.
-
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
4/12/2022
John Thelin, Approaching Retirement, Shares Insight on the Past and Future of Higher Education
A college campus can be a spectacular stage set, but it's ultimately people – professors, students, and administrators – who make the campus a dramatic space reflecting and influencing the wider society.
-
SOURCE: Boston Review
3/21/2022
Who Gets to Be American?
by Jonna Perrillo
Johann Tschinkel, a Nazi scientist, was recruited by the United States after the war. His reflections on his educational experiences in Germany and those of his children in segregated American schools, offer a warning about the efforts to control the social studies curriculum today.
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of