This article reconstructs the story behind Freeman v. Pitts (1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of whether school officials in an Atlanta suburb were responsible for the racial segregation that had developed in the area alongside the rapid settlement of African Americans there in the late twentieth century. Thus, along with shedding new light on how the South transitioned from an era focused on desegregation to one enabling resegregation, the article makes contributions to two areas of increasing scholarly interest: the history of African American suburbanization and the history of suburban school districts. Finally, the article underscores disconcerting patterns in how the Supreme Court utilized history in Freeman.

Using a collection of settler family letters to the Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in British Columbia, the first provincial government–supported “schooling by mail” arrangement of its kind in Canada, I highlight the efforts of rural families to secure an education for their children in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The settler families who took advantage of correspondence schooling did so without the benefit of a professional teacher or a dedicated schoolhouse. This arrangement proved onerous for many settler families. In their letters to the ECS, adults and young people articulated the belief that the provincial government needed to do more to provide educational services for them. Families were acutely aware of their contributions to the prosperity of the province and, in return, they demanded schools for their children. Given the unique perspectives reflected through this collection of letters, my examination is situated in the interstices between rural schooling and correspondence schooling.

Modern American scientific identity has its roots in the colleges of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the botanical sciences as an example, this essay examines the conflicts between those who viewed scientists as cosmopolitan (or international) and those who viewed scientists as citizens (or servants) of the national state. Whereas today many American scientists claim a cosmopolitan identity, even as they decry steady declines in state aid, two centuries ago, they did just the opposite: to win public support, they quietly subsumed the ideals of cosmopolitanism within a commitment to national service, even as they deftly cultivated a new professional image rooted in a rhetoric of scientific internationalism. The construction of this new self-image was, I argue, a necessary precondition for the creation of the modern American research university—particularly the public research university—which sought to reconcile the competing ideals of scientific cosmopolitanism and citizenship.

This article explores citizenship's multiple meanings in Los Angeles by describing five different types of Americanization, or immigrant education, in the city of angels from 1910 to 1940. The federal racialization of access to citizenship influenced these alternative approaches to Americanization at a local level. In the context of Supreme Court rulings and federal laws that made it difficult for immigrants of color to naturalize in the United States during the Progressive Era, Anglo officials in the school district and settlement houses developed an English-only curriculum that benefited only European immigrants. In response to such restrictions, Mexican and Japanese educators in turn developed programs that showed how learning Spanish and Japanese made their children loyal Americans worthy of citizenship. In the decades before internment and the Zoot Suit Riots, language instruction was one of the few vehicles that allowed Mexican and Japanese Angelinos the opportunity to take control of their Americanization experiences despite the racialized constraints they faced.

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’ associations as well as in education journals. While emphasizing saving money and time, their arguments for spelling reform also infused social justice into social efficiency, and efficiency into child-centered pedagogy. Although leaders saw schoolteachers as the torchbearers for simplified spelling, teachers’ subtle resistance undermined the movement. Teachers and the few administrators who opposed spelling reform occasionally voiced objections to efficiency itself, but their concerns about public scrutiny most influenced their opposition and thus the movement's ultimate demise. This examination of the public education sector's relationship to the simplified spelling movement illustrates the complexity of education leaders’ relationship with efficiency as well as their vulnerability to teacher resistance and public censure.

Students in the early republic commonly stitched, drew, and painted maps of their states, nation, and world as part of their educations. Map drawing and geography were regarded as particularly appropriate subjects for girls, both as a pathway to literacy and as a means of demonstrating accomplishment. Many young girls exposed to map work in their own educations went on to become teachers themselves and carried these practices with them into an ever-growing national network of female academies and seminaries. These school maps and related penmanship journals also reveal a network and set of teaching practices around graphic literacy that has drawn little attention from historians. By drawing their country, students were making the nation manifest, inscribing its abstract boundaries and administrative units, and visualizing territory that most would never see firsthand. Map drawing was part of an intensely graphic education that significantly influenced reformers such as Emma Willard, though it also drew criticism from subsequent educators.

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 justify building their own high school and battled against both New Brunswick and the New Jersey Department of Education, which ostensibly supported integration and the creation of larger, consolidated school districts. Black and Latino city residents initially advocated integration but soon renounced integration and demanded “community control” over New Brunswick High. Ultimately, the New Jersey Department of Education permitted the schools in the city and the suburb to become separate, allowing segregation to prevail in the so-called “era of integration.”

During the mid-1960s, the War on Poverty ushered in a change in outlook on the poor and stimulated Neighborhood House (a social service agency that began as a settlement house) to focus on educative, community-building initiatives. Yet ironically, while staffers offered educational programs for residents, they were themselves becoming educated. The space Neighborhood House provided emerged as a powerful venue in which staffers developed their talents to become socially minded civic leaders. This study of the post–World War II transformation of settlement work in a city in the Pacific Northwest reveals commonalities with other places as well as distinctiveness to Seattle conditions. The article expands the extant scholarship on multi-ethnoracial communities, War on Poverty programs, and settlement house responses to societal changes. In doing so, it reveals the ways in which Neighborhood House provided an important educative space for those who worked there, a place that nurtured their growth as civically minded community builders.

In nineteenth-century America, students buried their mathematics books. This practice consistently celebrated the milestone of passing through collegiate mathematics, yet it changed due to national events. This article considers the case of Bowdoin College, where students buried their books differently before and after the Civil War. Antebellum, they observed a complex “Burial of Calculus” with songs, parades, and mock prayers. Postbellum, students personified their books as a woman, placing stones marked “Anna” on the textbooks’ graves. Using archival investigations of students' pamphlets and textbooks, this paper argues that these changes resulted from the war's effects on education as well as changing attitudes toward death. Both the antebellum and postbellum rituals communicated understandings of mathematics and academic achievement, as connected through a mock funeral ritual. Through investigating these connections, this paper asserts the importance of student practices for our understanding of Civil War era education.

Fannie Fern Andrews, a Boston educator and reformer, started the American School Peace League (ASPL) in 1908 in order to educate schoolchildren in the principles of what she called “world citizenship.” Through its curriculum, A Course in Citizenship, the ASPL taught students about cooperation, tolerance, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. At the same time, however, they were preparing white, native-born US children to lead the new world and to judge others’ capacity for membership in it—their fitness for world citizenship—according to “civilized,” white American standards. I argue that while Andrews and the ASPL professed a desire for internationalism, theirs was very much a US-dominated internationalism. A Course in Citizenship calibrated the standards of progress and civilization by which children were to measure not only themselves but others around the world. Education for peace was also education for the new American empire.

The college accreditation movement that arose at the turn of the twentieth century had an important antecedent in the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West. Founded in 1843, this nondenominational philanthropy aspired to direct the development of higher education by dispersing eastern funds to Protestant colleges that met its standards for instruction, administration, and piety. For all its ambitions, the Society did not always offer dependable or disinterested supervision. Its relationships with Knox College and Iowa College (now Grinnell) exposed its shortcomings. Coinciding with the rising sectional conflict over slavery, the activities of these institutions forced the regulatory association to engage in the very brand of ecclesiastical politics it had vowed to transcend. This article shows how institutional resistance and church rivalry helped delay the growth of accreditation until the turn of the twentieth century, when secular organizations took up the reins of regulation.

This article focuses on teachers in the discourses of early twentieth-century proponents of intelligence testing in America. Teachers were often a targeted enemy in the academic literature on intelligence testing—their methods belittled, their unreliability emphasized. Yet, in part because teachers were essential for intelligence tests to be given in schools, they were also often talked about in more ambiguous ways. In particular, this paper argues that psychologists’ ways of talking to, at, and about teachers presented a relationship characterized by an originary indebtedness of teachers toward psychology. Intelligence tests, it was implied, were a gift for teachers, and psychologists’ help a favor that teachers should repay by using the tests and showing rigor, obedience, and gratefulness in doing so. Arguably, the debt was framed in such ways as to render impossible its repayment and to make illegible the potential contributions and initiatives of teachers in the intelligence-testing movement.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was one of the most significant legislative accomplishments in twentieth-century American politics. To date, legislative histories have usually argued that the ESEA's passage was the result of either auspicious political circumstances or the political skill of the Johnson White House. Complicating these histories, I argue here that the ESEA was the result of skillful entrepreneurship on the part of policymakers in the White House and in Congress, and that while some auspicious political circumstances existed, these had less to do with the 1964 landslide election and more to do with subtler changes in congressional rules and commitment assignments that had taken place over the previous decade. I illustrate how ESEA supporters collectively overcame daunting legislative roadblocks, including a fractious House of Representatives and the “Three Rs.” I conclude by reflecting on the relevance of the 1965 debates for today's education policy environment.

The following article documents the expansion of high school exchange programs during the Cold War. It also examines the potential conflicts underlying that expansion, which relied on preexisting networks of government agencies and private philanthropies and sometimes conflated the rhetoric of world peace with a narrower pursuit of American interests. Ultimately, the article contends, experiences abroad prompted teenagers to criticize American foreign policy and to reform their sponsoring organizations along increasingly multilateral, anti-colonial, and socially conscious lines.

In his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Lewis Terman presented the first version of the Stanford-Binet scale and his testing results for groups of California children. Singling out a few children whose scores fell in the range he categorized as “feeble-minded,” Terman commented:

Sidney Hook set the terms of debate on Communism, higher education, and academic freedom in the postwar United States. His view that Communists lacked the independence necessary for teaching and research—a view forged in the heated debates of New York City's radical left in the 1930s—provided the rationale for firing Communist professors across the country in the late 1940s and 1950s. Relying on close readings of underutilized archival sources, this article explores the development of Hook's thinking, charts his impact on key players in the period's higher education establishment (such as philosopher John Dewey and the American Association of University Professors), and outlines the way his writings helped lead to faculty dismissals at the University of Washington and New York University. The article also highlights the work of students and professors who challenged Hook's anti-Communist position, revealing a rich and often neglected mid-century discourse on academic freedom.

The Coleman Report

For this History of Education Quarterly Policy Forum, we look at the historical significance of the 1966 Coleman Report from several different perspectives. The four main essays published here originated as presentations for a session on “Legacies of the Coleman Report in US Thought and Culture” at the History of Education Society annual meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in November 2016. Presenters for that session— Zoë Burkholder, Victoria Cain, Leah Gordon, and Ethan Hutt—went on to participate in an HES-sponsored session entitled “Currents in Egalitarian Thought in the 1960s and 1970s: The Coleman Report in American Politics, Media, and Social Science” at the Organization of American Historians meeting in New Orleans in April 2017. Thinking that their reflections on the reception and influence of the Coleman Report in different contexts would be of broad interest to HEQ readers, we asked members of the panel to comment on each other's papers and revise them for this Forum. We then invited Harvey Kantor of the University of Utah and Robert Lowe of Marquette University to write an introduction summarizing the origins and findings of the Coleman Report, along with their own assessment of what the presenters’ essays teach us about its long-term significance. What follows are Kantor and Lowe's Introduction, “What Difference Did the Coleman Report Make?,” together with substantive essays by Zoë Burkholder of Montclair State University, Victoria Cain of Northeastern University, Leah Gordon of Amherst College, and Ethan Hutt of the University of Maryland.

John Hale's book about the Freedom Schools during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and Crystal Sanders's work on the largest Head Start program run by the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) from 1965 to 1968 sit at the end of a long line of histories of the black freedom struggle's mass movement years in Mississippi. Mississippi civil rights histories form well-trodden ground, from trailblazers John Dittmer and Charles Payne and nearly twenty-five years of subsequent scholarship and research supported by the building of new archives, to oral histories collected around the recent movement milestone anniversaries and reunions. There is always room for more accounts and fresh vantage points, given the nature of mass movements simultaneously orchestrated on multiple levels and in multiple locales, each with its own nuance and host of characters. Each book illustrates the cacophony of stories, voices, opinions, conflicts, political scuffles, and sacrifices that constitute a mass of movements with many routes to vaguely defined (and not always agreed upon) goals. As I have said elsewhere, full stories are messy and complicated, reflecting the reality of life. Recognizing these activist pasts becomes more relevant with the new phase of mass protest in the persistent struggle for black freedom, particularly around the global and domestic Black Lives Matter movement.