This article uses oral history, archival material, and published primary sources to examine the competing conceptions of "innovation" at work in the creation and operation of the West Philadelphia Community Free School (WPCFS) from 1969 to 1978. One of the longest-running initiatives in the School District of Philadelphia's experimental…

In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs--one-day school boycotts-- to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black…

This article examines Black parents' efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the…

In this year's Presidential Address, historian Derrick P. Alridge discusses his current research project, Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom. The project builds on recent literature about teachers as activists between 1950 and 1980 and explores how and what secondary and postsecondary teachers taught. Focusing on teachers in…

Historical analyses of 1960s university campus activism have focused on activities related to the civil rights movement, Free Speech Movement, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This study supplements the historiography of civil disobedience and political activity on college campuses during that tumultuous era with an account of the initiation of…

In this article, the author focuses on the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and educational reform. The Klan's meteoric rise to national prominence in the 1920s has attracted a great deal of attention from historians, yet the group and its popularity during this time frame remain poorly understood. This is due in part to the fact that Klan symbols such…

Explores Dewey's concern about the potential threat to democratic community posed by dependence on experts as policymakers. Discusses Dewey's reservations and guarded support of professionalization. Contrasts his views with the democratic elitist position of Walter Lippmann. (MJP)

Each morning, 10 yellow school buses end their circuit through Montclair, New Jersey, to drop off 149 of Renaissance Middle School's 225 students. Community activists, almost forty years ago, had fought long and hard for school integration in this northern town. After court battles, parent meetings, community resistance, and ultimate victory, the…