The nineteenth-century debate about the role of the US Bureau of Education was marked by negotiations between the civic republican language of antebellum common school advocacy and a social scientific language of educational professionalism. To advance this argument, this essay traces how members of Congress defined, criticized, and delimited the…

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…

This paper considers how the practice of culturally relevant pedagogy may have predated the theory's coinage. Using scholarly accounts of Black women teachers in de jure segregated Black schools in the Jim Crow South, the authors suggest that these educators engaged a critical, politically and culturally informed pedagogy; their praxis built on…

Antiblackness has a long and storied history in higher education in the United States, and unfortunately, antiblack attitudes and practices continue in the 21st century. With implications for countering antiblackness in higher education and institutionalizing support for cultural health and wellness, we documented experiences of antiblackness in…

In this article, I connect the ways that learning is fundamental to life, for human and nonhuman beings. I write this article at a time of crystalline xenophobic backlash, the rise of several totalitarian regimes across the planet, as well as the formation and action from many social movements. I argue that in this moment, it is even more…

Two conditions are needed to effect large-scale reforms in academia: a hierarchical, top-down system of governance that can enact sweeping changes, and for that system to be controlled or heavily influenced by those outside the system. Strong board governance provides both of those conditions. Most university boards, especially the public ones,…

The dividing line between high school and college has never been entirely clear, explains a historian of American education. In fact, for most of the 19th century, it was difficult to distinguish between high schools and colleges. It wasn't until the early 1900s that high school and university officials drew firm boundaries between the two…

The educability of personal qualities has garnered attention for its potential to raise student achievement. This investigation asks how one such quality--grit--has become a commonsensical way to think about differences among students. As a history of the present, grit is approached as a cultural thesis that links individualism to narratives of…

This dissertation examines the surviving archival evidence from several 19th century prominent West Feliciana families found in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) at the LSU libraries in an effort to understand how Louisianans' value and support education. The antebellum period was chosen for study because it was…

Curriculum within the US was birthed in a context of antiblackness and continues to operate as anti-Black through imagining Black youth as less than and uneducable. However, despite the ways educational space has historically worked to image Black children and communities through deficit lenses, the creation of non-traditional Black curricular…

This article analyses findings from a research project examining the Pear Tree Community School in Oakland, California, USA -- a small, social justice-focused school primarily serving Black, Indigenous and other students of colour in grades from kindergarten to Grade 5. Through this multi-year case study, which included observations, interviews…

Continuing racial inequities and marginalization have led some communities to reject reliance on public schooling by forming their own programmes and/or schools, claiming sovereignty over the education of their children. We highlight Freedom Schools as one such ongoing but under-studied movement that precedes and contributes to recent,…

This study considers the role of apprenticeships in the education of Louisiana's gens de couleur libres during the early nineteenth century. Although Louisiana was a slave society, demand for skilled labor in the taming of eighteenth-century Louisiana allowed Africans to be cast not merely as brute labor, but as an adept workforce. Such conditions…

Through an analysis of Black urban high school youth's critical engagements with literacy, the authors examine school suspensions--particularly disproportionality--as anti-Black symbolic violence. By historically mapping the terrain of discipline, from chattel slavery to "The New Jim Crow," the article unearths the connection between…

The conclusion of World War II created anxiety about how to accommodate the return of millions of veterans and spurred the passage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944--the GI Bill--that would ultimately send two million people to college. But in 1946, the second year of Truman's Presidency, there was an even larger political question. The…