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…

The "Castañeda" Standard was handed down in 1981. We use this Standard along with Latino Critical Race Theory (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) and Ruiz's Language Orientations (1984) to conduct a historical analysis of bilingual education in Colorado from 1976 to 2019 to examine the availability of bilingual/dual language education for…

Next generation accountability systems can empower states, districts, communities, and schools with timely, relevant information and provide the capacity to analyze and continuously improve instruction and learning. After 21 years of the current accountability framework in federal and state policy in the United States, there is growing recognition…

Mexican American educational history has become a vibrant field of study since the late 1980s. In the last seven years, however, it is notable that this research has inspired community-based efforts to preserve and publicly commemorate challenges to unequal education. In this commentary, we discuss the archival recovery of the "Francisco…

Hispanic-serving Institutions (HSIs) are not typically mission-bound to serve Latinx students. In addition to examining structural changes that embrace an HSI designation, we argue that curriculum is critical in truly serving a diverse student body. Using the case of a small, rural HSI, we describe the process and product of making meaningful…

In "The Other American Dilemma," Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson examine the experiences of Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, and Hispanos/as in their schools and communities between 1912 and 1953. Drawing from the Mexican Archives located in Mexico City and by venturing outside of the Southwest, their examinations of specific…

In 1947 T. Carol Agee resurrected the Fort Collins High School Orchestra (FCHS) program after his return from WWII, and became the first music teacher to be hired as the full-time orchestra director at the school. He quickly created a "storied" program in the state of Colorado culminating, for him, in a 1955 Colorado Music Educators…

Charter schools began in the 1990s as an experimental alternative to public schools. Today they are a multi-billion dollar sector composed of both nonprofit and for-profit corporations that embrace the philosophy of the marketplace. Supporters of charters see school failure as a natural feature of the model. They argue that schools do not fail at…

Mexican Americans have a long history in the struggle to end school segregation and achieve educational equality. Rubén Donato and Jarrod Hanson trace that history through a series of court cases that show how their fight for desegregation both intersects with and differs from the more well-known struggle of Black Americans. In some cases, Mexican…

The authors in this article argue that the "Francisco Maestas et al. vs. George H. Shone et al." (1914) case is one of the earliest Mexican American challenges to school segregation in the United States. Unidentified for over a century, the lawsuit took place in southern Colorado, a region of the nation where Mexican Americans have deep…

This article examines schooling in the western American state of Colorado during the early twentieth century. Conditions of youth and education are examined at the Walsen coal-mining camp near the town of Walsenburg in the southern region of the state. The experiences of children in the camp are compared to with those living in the town, with a…

Claiming that free speech is dying on American campuses, a conservative think tank has led an effort to push states to adopt a model bill that, in the name of defending campus free speech, risks undermining it. This report seeks to understand the context and content of the "campus free-speech" movement, to track its influence within…

Improving public education has long been a cornerstone of the Democratic platform. Because progressives understand that access to a quality education is the gateway to a better life, their decades-long struggle to promote equal rights and opportunity for all Americans has been deeply tied to their struggle to create an effective public school…

In recent decades, bilingual education policies, programs, pedagogies, and practices have been constrained by neoliberal agendas which have undermined the radical vision of bilingual education as a means toward self-determination that the Chicana/o Movement youth articulated more than 50 years ago. This narrowing of educational possibilities has…

The economic and environmental significance of school land policy in the United States has yet to be imagined, let alone systematically studied, by scholars. Although the fact that Congress allocated shares of public lands to the support of schools beginning in the 1780s is well known, historians have not adequately assessed the impacts of that…