Middle grades education has been the object of efforts to remediate US education to address an array of social problems. Districts have sought out K-8 models to create smaller learning communities, require fewer school transitions, and allow sustained student connections. This paper offers a historical analysis of K-8 schools, drawing on statistical and spatial methods and a DisCrit intersectional lens to illustrate how creating K-8 schools produced enclaves of privilege in one urban school district. K-8 schools in our target district became whiter and wealthier than district averages. Students with disabilities attending K-8 schools tended to be placed in more inclusive classrooms, where they were more likely to be integrated alongside nondisabled peers than counterparts attending traditional middle schools. We consider how the configuration of K-8 schools, which could be considered an administrative decision to better serve students, has obscured interworkings of power and privilege.

America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which created the nation's system of publicly supported land-grant colleges. And during Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau, operating under the auspices of the War Department, aided former slaves in creating thousands of schools to help protect their hard-fought freedoms. Not only do “wars make states,” as sociologist Charles Tilly claimed, but wars have also shaped the politics of knowledge in the modern university in powerful and lasting ways.

This article analyzes the role of the Julius Rosenwald Fund in shaping the career of W. Allison Davis, a distinguished anthropologist who became the first African American appointed to the faculty of a mostly white university. From 1928 to 1948, the Rosenwald Fund ran an expansive fellowship program for African American intellectuals, which, despite its significance, remains largely unexamined in the scholarly literature. Davis tied his academic aspirations to Rosenwald Fund support, including for his early research and the terms of his faculty appointment. His experiences illustrate the dynamics inclusion and exclusion of African Americans in the academy; paternalistic promotion and strategic denial functioned as two sides of the same coin. Spotlighting Davis's negotiations, this article establishes how presumptions of racial inferiority guided Rosenwald patronage and demonstrates the extent to which the principles of meritocracy and expertise remained secondary concerns for those interested in cultivating African American intellectuals.

In Carl Kaestle's 1992 essay “Standards of Evidence,” generalization is how we know when we know. Kaestle sketches a model of increasing certainty in historical claims as they are developed and refined at increasing scales of research, from local to international. A historical claim might originate in the study of a particular place or case, but to know that the claims were true, the historian needed to move from the microlevel view to a more macro one, perhaps at the national rather than local level. Once tested and refined through comparison with other cases, possibly smoothing some of the rougher edges in the process, the claim could then be transferred beyond national borders. When a historical claim is polished enough to fit other contexts, we know it is true. Kaestle illustrates this increasing certainty through increasing scale with reference to the history of literacy and, more specifically, to scholarship on how Western European and US industrialization shaped literacy rates. Bringing studies from various locales into connection, and then comparing these cases with the national context, Kaestle summarizes that it was the commercial processes of urbanization, rather than industrialization itself, that helped produce rising literacy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Generalization at greater scale becomes not only the means through which to claim the value of historical work, but the basis for constructing historical knowledge in the first place.

Historically, education has often varied by curriculum, access, and stature based on location, race, gender, economic status, religion, and time period. In addition, many educational institutions and much scholarly research have been significantly impacted by private foundation support. This essay discusses the politics of knowledge as it relates to gender and race as well as the impact of philanthropy on the production of knowledge with these groups. While many aspects of these themes have changed in the past sixty years, many of them remain highly contested.

As scholars of higher education regularly point out, American universities face a fundamental tension between access and exclusion. On the one hand, as publicly supported institutions operating in a democracy, they are charged with promoting social mobility and sharing knowledge that can improve society. On the other, they are tasked with identifying and supporting elites—those talented, ambitious, and hardworking individuals who deserve the most money and accolades. In his 1993 History of Education Society presidential address, “Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post-World War II Era,” historian James Anderson describes one way in which northern white colleges and universities coped with this tension after World War II. During this time, Fred Wale, director of education for the Julius Rosenwald Fund, compiled a list of 150 outstanding black scholars with degrees from schools like the University of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Michigan; extensive teaching experience at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs); and highly regarded publication records. Wale sent his list to hundreds of university presidents, encouraging them to consider these qualified candidates for faculty appointments. His efforts made minimal impact: between 1945 and 1947, only twenty-three of the scholars on Wale's list were offered permanent faculty positions at northern white universities.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in scholarship on Latino educational history and a new nonbinary umbrella term, Latinx, that a younger generation prefers. Many of historian Victoria-María MacDonald's astute observations in 2001 presaged the growth of the field. Focus has increased on Spanish-surnamed teachers and discussions have grown about the Latino experience in higher education, especially around student activism on campus. Great strides are being made in studying the history of Spanish-speaking regions with long ties to the United States, either as colonies or as sites of large-scale immigration, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Historical inquiry into the place of Latinos in the US educational system has also developed in ways that MacDonald did not anticipate. The growth of the comparative race and ethnicity field in and of itself has encouraged cross-ethnic and cross-racial studies, which often also tie together larger themes of colonialism, language instruction, legal cases, and civil rights or activism.

The importance of education for Asian Americans looking to fight race-based discrimination, create a sense of community, and reclaim and establish an identity is well documented. In 1884, Mary and Joseph Tape, Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, sued the San Francisco Board of Education and the principal of the Spring Valley Primary School—Jennie Hurley--after Hurley denied their daughter, Mamie, admission because she was “Chinese” (though born in the United States). The Superior Court ruled in favor of the Tapes, but in 1885, the School Board appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of California where justices upheld the lower court's decision. Though Mamie would not be able to attend Spring Valley after the School Board successfully pushed for state-wide school segregation legislation, many “white-only” institutions began to admit Chinese American children after the Tape case.

There is a “world of difference,” anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa argued, “between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” The distinction between both perspectives, he explained, is exemplified in the two names used for the region: Pacific Islands and Oceania. The former represents a colonial vision produced by white “continental men” emphasizing the smallness and remoteness of “dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from centers of power.” This understanding has produced and sustained an “economistic and geographic deterministic view” emphasizing Pacific Island nations as “too small, too poor, and too isolated” to take care of themselves. The latter, in contrast, denotes a grand space inhabited by brave and resourceful people whose myths, legends, oral traditions, and cosmologies reveal how they did not conceive of themselves in such “microscopic proportions.” Rather, Oceanic peoples have for over two millennia viewed the sea as a “large world” where peoples, goods, and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by fixed national boundaries.