In 1923, Los Angeles teachers protested the state's biennial budget, a controversial document from newly elected governor Friend Richardson that significantly cut funding to government agencies. The budget was the culmination of more than a decade of fiscal policy reform that reflected a significant shift in anti-tax sentiment. The expansion of…

The size and cost of US public higher education, funded largely by government, grew continuously for nearly twenty-five years after World War II. In the late 1960s, as the nation's economic growth slowed, the question of who should pay for higher education came under fresh political scrutiny. Decades-old no-tuition policies at the University of…

Over the last few decades, scholars have called on the field of educational history to more fully account for the perspectives of women and People of Color, and to connect history to contemporary educational research and policy. While a number of scholars answered these calls with important contributions, few have offered a methodological roadmap…

This article explores how education reformers in California pioneered forms of centralized educational governance between 1850 and 1879. Challenging previous scholarship that has attributed the success of this early educational state to reformer John Swett and New England migrants, this article situates the creation of common schools in California…

To introduce their examination of the social production of segregated space and power relations in Oxnard, California from 1934 to 1954, the authors utilize portions of a letter written by Alice Shaffer, April 21, 1938, to the Oxnard School Board of Trustees. Shaffer outlines the seemingly shared concerns of her neighbors about a disruption of the…

"Newsweek" ran an article on "The Homosexual Teacher" in December 1978. At the end of a tumultuous two-year period framed by Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in South Florida and John Briggs' proposition to bar gay and lesbian educators from working in California public schools, reporters concluded, "Most homosexual…

They sat in the Cubberley Education Lecture Hall to hear visiting experts. More often they could be found meeting in reduced-size classes, or working on small-group activities. They usually took notes; sometimes they took field trips. They memorized lists and sat for exams, but they also watched films and acted out scenarios. Rather than take…

This article discusses the role of education within communities and underscores the changing nature of minority groups in the United States. It specifically examines the struggle between African Americans and Latinos over education, employment, and empowerment in Compton, California. The story of Compton and its school district exposes…

Today, scholars, social commentators, and practitioners alike tend to credit the bureaucratization of school discipline to court decisions from the 1960s and 1970s granting students certain civil rights in school. They argue that as the legal recognition of students' rights grew, educators lost the authority to act "in loco parentis,"…

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This essay focuses on an analysis of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens. Starting from…

By December 1968, the Anaheim Family Life and Sex Education (FLSE) program, celebrated since its formal introduction in 1965 as one of the most progressive in the nation, was being smeared as communistic and perverse. Local activists in this Orange County city had been congregating in hotel rooms and homes, screening cautionary films for the…

The introduction of a loyalty oath for professors at the University of California was part of the nationwide search for political subversives in all key institutions in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the early 1950s, the panic over political subversives that led to the imposition of a loyalty oath at the University of California had spilled…

In this article, the author discusses the experiences of Marian Sauer as one of the teachers during World War II. Marian Sauer, began teaching at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Richmond, California, in 1942. During World War II, Richmond's population skyrocketed, as a direct result of homefront mobilization and school enrollments grew six…