This article explores the All-Day Neighborhood Schools (ADNS) program, operated as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and local philanthropists from 1936 to 1971. Designed to expand the resources available to children and parents, the program included after-school activities, additional teachers, professional development,…

The United States occupations of Cuba and Puerto Rico following the War of 1898 instituted immediate reforms to the educational systems of the islands. The imposition of public school systems modeled on those of the United States and a concurrent wave of Protestant schools established by American missionaries are well-known features of the…

This article summarizes and assesses federal K-12 compensatory education policies during the past six decades. It focuses on the centerpiece of that effort, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Related programs such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds Act are discussed. It…

Historical policy stories that situate teachers as the root cause of problems in public schools have long accompanied educational reforms, including No Child Left Behind. This article portrays the history of teacher blame as a defining component of the grammar of American educational reform. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers identified…

In the mid to late nineteenth century, many missionary women from Western countries arrived in Japan to engage in educational work. They made a significant impact not only on the establishment of Christian kindergartens and kindergarten teacher training schools but also on the dissemination of Friedrich Froebel's theory of kindergarten education…

Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan's educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had…

The "Quincy Method" is widely considered a successful nineteenth-century school reform. Pioneered by Francis Parker in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1875, it fostered broad pedagogic change in an ordinary school system, transforming Quincy into a renowned hub of child-centered instruction. This article revisits the reform and explores its…

The rise of online learning over the past few decades has raised fundamental questions about the kinds of "spaces" and "places" this mode of education creates. Do they support meaningful exchanges? Can they advance educational equity, access, and community-building? Are they comparable to in-person classroom experiences? The…

This History of Education Society Presidential Address comes at the society's sixtieth anniversary and provides a new conceptual framework that foregrounds recognizing a "racist-blind," and not a color-blind, ideology in the intentional and unequal design our educational past and present. It highlights systemic racism brought on by the…

As colleges and universities respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, many in the media call it "unprecedented." This is not the first time that institutions of higher education have had to respond to an epidemic, however. A historical review of college and university reactions to illnesses such as yellow fever and the 1918 influenza pandemic…

Federal agents, church officials, and education reformers have long used schooling as a weapon to eliminate Indigenous people; at the same time, Indigenous individuals and communities have long repurposed schooling to protect tribal sovereignty, reconstitute their communities, and shape Indigenous futures. Joining scholarship that speaks to…

This article considers issues of race and ethnic identity experienced by immigrants and students who came to the United States from Asia. For Asian Americans, the meaning of race and ethnicity underwent significant transformations from the nineteenth through the twentieth century as perceptions of their cultural values and traits shifted in the…

Chicago's magnet schools were one of the nation's earliest experiments in choice-driven school desegregation, originating among civil rights advocates and academic education experts in the 1960s and appearing at specific sites in Chicago's urban landscape during the 1970s. The specific concerns that motivated the creation of magnet schools during…

The essay reinterprets the 1845-1847 pamphlet war between Emma Willard and Marcius Willson, authors of popular history schoolbooks. Willson publicly attacked the accuracy and literary quality of history schoolbooks by eight leading authors, with particular attention to Willard's, just as he was publishing his first school history. Willard and…

Progressive education swept across Canada in the early to mid-twentieth century, restructuring schools, introducing new courses, and urging teachers to reorient the classroom to the interests and needs of the learner. The women religious who taught in Vancouver's Catholic schools negotiated the revised public school curriculum, determined to…