In 1879, with aid from the Peabody fund, Texas's first tax-supported teacher training institution, Sam Houston State Normal Institute (SHNI), opened on the site of the old Austin College in Huntsville (Richmond 1941, 37). The need for qualified educators in Texas was growing as the state struggled to make up for decades of neglect of and antipathy…

A majority of American students have taken the journey through schools that progressed from first to twelfth grade. So by the 1913 Committee on the Economy of Time in Education, American education featured a twelve-grade system quickly evolving from the forces of consolidation and corporate efficiency. Such was not the reality in Texas schools.…

This article will focus on the efforts of the State of Illinois to desegregate Chicago Public Schools between 1971 and 1979. The article also examines the responsibility taken on by the State of Illinois to desegregate schools and the limits between establishing the mechanisms to desegregate and the ability to accomplish those goals in Chicago.…

The purpose of this article has been to set the record straight as to the extent to which education of the mind and hands was prevalent in the United States prior to the 1880s. This effort is necessary since the proponents of the manual training curriculum that surfaced in the United States in the 1880s created a misperception that no prior form…

One of the most remarkable developments in American education in the past half century has been the creation and rapid growth of the nation's community colleges. Built on the curricular pillars of vocational education, transfer programs, and community education, community colleges today are considered the "engines of statewide economic growth"…

This article will examine a little known but long-standing group, the Lisle Fellowship, that endeavored to open the world to college students and foster international understanding--or "world-mindedness," as the organization's founders called it--ultimately with the goal to contribute to the ideal of world peace. It will also, in particular,…

Recent scholarship has suggested that: "A Nation at Risk" had put education on the national agenda," that it "catapulted education near to the top of the national political agenda," and that it started "an ambitious and well-publicized elementary and secondary education reform ... that has already lasted for more than a quarter of a century." The…

The role of federal involvement in education has, in recent years, become more and more prevalent. Such an involvement was not part of the historical origins of education at virtually any level. Whether it was for economic reasons, defense of the nation, the accountability of American taxpayers, or the pursuit of better civic-minded individuals,…

In the current vernacular, co-education means the education of the sexes together within an institutional setting. Once a phenomenon, today, women enjoy nearly equal status on campuses that were at one time bastions of "maleness." Moreover, the counter-culture revolution of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, ushered in a new dimension of…

This paper seeks to specifically focus on the evolution of civil rights case law and legislation as it pertains to educating students with disabilities, specifically the often implemented but poorly understood Section 504 provisions. The purpose of this paper is to examine historical influences that precipitated the implementation of Section 504…

There are six oversized boxes in the New York Historical Society that contain the remains of the Public School Society (PSS), New York City's first experiment with publicly-funded education. They are filled with the detritus of the Society's nearly fifty years: recommendations for prospective teachers from their clergymen, student certificates of…

In recent years, there has been considerable and renewed interest in the effects of McCarthyism on academia. Ellen Schrecker's "No Ivory Tower" (1986), Lionel Lewis' "Cold War on Campus" (1988), David Holmes' "Stalking the Academic Communist" (1989), Charles McCormick's "This Nest of Vipers" (1989), Neil Hamilton's "Zealotry and Academic Freedom"…

This essay explores factors creating Missouri's minimum attendance laws for black students from the end of the Civil War to the enactment of compulsory education in the state in 1905. It argues that, although blacks made notable efforts at educational advancement, they were caught in a crossfire of opposing forces stemming from wartime…

Congressman George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts introduced a bill "to establish a system of national education" on February 25, 1870. This bill, and others that followed, opened an acrimonious political debate that lasted for twenty years. The opening salvos of that debate, and the regional issues of ethnicity and religion that framed the debate,…

Throughout the 20th Century, medicine and law set the professional standards by which all other professions came to be measured. Teaching fell short of the mark because teachers were not perceived as having much control over their professional lives. For example, the professions of medicine and law developed standards boards or associations to…