The American Historical Association's (AHA's) Commission on the Social Studies was a compilation of prominent scholars who, from 1929 to 1934, investigated social studies education in American public schools in order to provide some cohesive recommendations for teachers. The AHA Commission had a controversial ending, with one of its members,…

In the 1960s, as part of the black freedom struggle in the United States, African-American educators increasingly achieved the position of school principal in the nation's big cities, helping to transform that office into a more dynamic force for school reform. This article presents the accomplishments and the struggles of one such principal,…

The purpose of this article is to argue for a social activist stance in educational leadership that fundamentally addresses social change and human emancipation. This call for social activism is framed within neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist discourses in the USA, which to social justice educators and leaders had devastating…

This paper attempts a comparative analysis of classification and framing relationships as they are exemplified in the four papers presented in this Special Issue. In particular, it interrogates Bernstein's assertion that education is simply a relay for power relations external to it and examines approaches to educational leadership and…

It is common in the literature to refer to British colonial education policy as if it were "a settled course adopted and purposefully carried into action", but in reality it was never like that. Contrary to popular belief, the size and diversity of the empire meant that no one really ruled it in any direct sense. Clearly some kind of authority had…

In the United Kingdom, television for schools is 50 years old in 2007. The anniversary provides a reason to undertake an exploratory history of school broadcasting, an area that has received very little attention from historians of British education. The first part of this article examines the origins of school radio broadcasting, focusing…

The journey that a practitioner takes into the realm of postgraduate research can be one that is sometimes filled with an unexpected cycle of security followed by doubt, and learning as a means of rediscovering a sense of security; there can be a continual sense of "coming back again" to familiar ground. This article is an autobiographical account…

During the last quarter of the century several universities including those in Michigan, Illinois, and Texas launched initiatives to ensure that high schools' academic standards prepared students for admission to the state university. This paper illuminates affiliation programs that foreshadowed the accreditation movement. Not only did affiliation…

The School Standards and Framework Act, 1998, required the Secretary of State to publish an order listing all the foundation and voluntary schools having a religious character and stating "the religion or religious denomination in accordance with whose tenets religious education is, or may be, required to be provided at the school..." Regulations…