The work of the 1946-1948 President's Commission on Higher Education was unquestionably influenced by the immediate aftermath of World War II. In this article, we examine the backgrounds and ideas of 10 commissioners to argue that their efforts were also deeply influenced by their experience of a different world war. The 1914-1918 "Great…

Regional Comprehensive Universities (RCUs) are public institutions established to facilitate access, student-centeredness, and regional wellbeing, which has led scholars to call them the "people's universities." This study examined the histories of RCUs between 1970 and 2000, using qualitative inquiry and narrative analysis of data from…

This dissertation project used an interpretivist qualitative research design to study how the right-to-read claim made by seven teenagers attending Detroit public schools in 2016 reflects, addresses, or describes contemporary discussions about educational access. Using situational analysis (SA) as a theory/method, the entirety of the claim…

Over the past 50 years, China's initial teacher education (ITE) system has undergone significant changes and improvements. To review and reflect on these experiences, we construct a multi-level, context-specific conceptualisation of ITE professionalisation. Guided by this framework, we segment the history of ITE professionalisation into three…

This article traces the development of four narratives of financial assistance for Australian university students - to encourage excellence; to meet public need; to build the stock of human capital; and as universal provision - and their effect on the development of a fifth narrative, centred on the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS).…

Promise programs are discussed as a policy movement that began with the 2005 launch of the Kalamazoo Promise. Since then, programs bearing the Promise label or sharing similar features have spread across the higher educational landscape, appearing in most states and across postsecondary sectors. Simultaneously, scholarly literature discussing…

Brian Simon (1915-2002), an influential Marxist historian and educationist in Britain, had been campaigning for comprehensive education from the late 1940s to the 1960s. In the early 1970s, followed by a rapid expansion of comprehensive schools since the issue of Circular 10/65, comprehensive education was under attack by the Conservative…

This essay considers the usefulness of history of education, first, through the history of Australian university-based teacher education and then through the history of how, in the postwar period of schooling expansion, the provision of public schooling was transformed discursively from a policy solution into a policy problem--with opposing…

Since the beginning of higher education, universities have remained largely closed off spaces for disabled students. This paper examines how, and why, it has largely been in the last fifty years that these students have slowly been able to enter universities as the sector has made incremental improvements to enable the entry of students from…

Open education has existed for more than 6 decades. In its beginnings, it consisted of removing various controls that made it difficult for students to enter and remain in the educational system. Today, it involves characteristics such as accessibility, flexibility, and adaptability, in environments beyond academics. The student-centered teaching…

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…

This article highlights the stipulation of the provision of formal schooling in a regional constitution drafted in West Africa in 1871, almost 150 years ago. The constitution under discussion originated in Fanteland, a coastal region of the Gold Coast (modern-day southern Ghana), and was the main achievement of a historical movement which sought…

Research has demonstrated the wide-ranging and positive benefits from high-quality publicly-funded prekindergarten education. Yet, access for families with young children remains uneven, with significant gaps across geography, income, race, and ethnicity. Over the last few decades, many states have worked to broaden access to prekindergarten…

The history of the people, problems, and politics surrounding the establishment of federal special education policy is rich with useful illustrations for advocates and educators. As the 50th anniversary of IDEA approaches, we use a historical perspective to consider how the promise of the law -- to ensure access to a free appropriate public…

This article expands the scope of comparative social stratification research in education to rapidly developing, largely low-income sub-Saharan Africa. First, we investigate trends in the association between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and children's chances to attend and complete primary education, exploring whether and where educational…