This dissertation contains three chapters, each investigating a question in American economic history. The first chapter is co-authored with Ran Abramitzky, Santiago Perez, and Joseph Price. In this work, we conduct a large-scale digitization of historical college registers, encompassing 2.7 million students at 65 elite US universities. We use…

The present article is a result of historical investigation into the cultural aspects of English language education in secondary schools of Ukraine in the 1930s-1980s, when Ukraine was one of the republics of the former Soviet Union. The course books, the school curricula and the articles published in scientific journals during this period built…

Preparing students for postsecondary life is among the most important roles that a high school plays. And yet, how schools approach this work, what schools should be preparing students for, and who should be responsible for this work have long been contested. Jeremy Greenfield draws on an emerging body of psychological literature exploring purpose…

In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the United States launched dozens of new pre-college programmes for low-income and predominantly African American high school students. Many of these initiatives were inspired by the civil rights movement. Moved by the sit-ins, marches and boycotts that had riveted the nation, a range of educators…

This article investigates policy and provision of music in initial teacher education (ITE) in Ireland and Northern Ireland through a novel approach to comparative music education in ITE. Employing literature reviews and a survey of music ITE policy and provision in the two jurisdictions, it draws on a range of primary and secondary sources and…

It has been almost twenty years since Namasagali College, a co-educational secondary school in Eastern Uganda, staged its last performance, yet the memory of these musical theater productions are recalled with the nostalgia of a lost renaissance. These transdisciplinary productions that utilized modern dance, acting and mimed songs transformed the…

This study examines the art pedagogies at Southern African American high schools during the civil rights era (1955-1969). I examine three segregated high schools located in South Carolina as a lens to highlight art pedagogies that were practiced; I expose counterstories by three former students, a student teacher, and the wife of an art teacher; I…

Using the case study of Anglesey and its pioneering comprehensive scheme, this paper aims to re-examine education reforms and interventions by central government c.1918-1950. This is undertaken in a bid to reveal the significance of such reforms for the way in which comprehensive secondary education was able to evolve at the local level.…

The canon forming the backbone of most conceptions of Western music has been a feature of musical culture for decades, exerting an influence upon musical study in educational settings. In English school contexts, the once perceived superiority of classical music in educational terms has been substantially revised and reconsidered, opening up…

The relationship between students' entry to higher education and the history or status of the secondary school which they attended is examined using school leavers' surveys in Scotland stretching from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. The surveys are unique in the length of this period, their details of the higher-education institutions and…

We propose a new framework for understanding post-conflict history education based on ethnographic fieldwork in the same South African school two decades apart. We explore how and why teachers engage with the legacies of conflict in 1998 and 2019 by investigating how they draw boundaries around 1) time, what the conflict period is and how stark…

College transition programs offer early access to the collegiate experience, aid in the adjustment of students transitioning to college, and facilitate positive adjustments for Black women in their early college years. Less is known about whether Black women identify these programs as having a lasting influence on their college degree programs and…

This dissertation was a comparative study of computer science in secondary schools in both Ireland and the United States. Computer science was a new subject compared to more established subjects in both Ireland and the United States. This dissertation looked at how this subject could be accessed by students in both countries. I used a document…

Although the United States Supreme Court declared segregation in education under law unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the public high schools in Jackson, Mississippi, would remain segregated until 1970. The present study examines the effects of this social climate on the high school band programs in…

The purpose of this article is to present the findings of a qualitative content analysis of historical documents related to the teaching of literature. Through a social semiotics framework, we analyzed 10 national standards documents in the field of secondary English. Our analysis details the evolution of the standards paradigm for teaching…