This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

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…

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was one of the most significant legislative accomplishments in twentieth-century American politics. To date, legislative histories have usually argued that the ESEA's passage was the result of either auspicious political circumstances or the political skill of the Johnson White House.…

In the 1890s, the Board of Trustees of the not-yet-built University of Chicago had just elected Rainey Harper to be its first president, and later, he would formally accept the position. Harper left a secure position at Yale University to accept the presidency of a university that was nothing more than an idea, a board of trustees, and the…

Nicholas Murray Butler, G. Stanley Hall, Charles W. Eliot, the respective subjects of three biographies reviewed here, were university presidents whose personal dominance has too often impeded the biographer in his task of objective historical inquiry. (JH)

A survey of how early university presidents viewed the colleges. (Author)