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…

Conflict over the curriculum is nothing new in American public education, which has never been insulated from the culture wars. In the past few years, conflict over the teaching of race has torn through history and social studies classrooms, inciting the most serious fight over America's past since the last "history war" in the 1990s. At…

As the author of this article read through the fascinating ruminations of Drs. Albisetti, Finkelstein, Thelin, and Urban, it seemed to him that two basic points emerge, one conceptual and one methodological. Conceptually, Albisetti, Finkelstein, and Urban are asking historians of education to move away from national frames of reference to either a…

This essay argues that Amherst County citizens and policy makers treated Monacan children differently than white, black, and even other Indian students in Virginia and were determined to keep this particular group of children out of "their" schools and out of "their" community. Even despite federal mandates to do otherwise,…

Recounts the rocky development of a dominant common school system in London, Ontario between 1852 and 1860. Details the support and opposition to the move among the various social, economic, and ethnic groups in the provincial city. Even after the system implementation, school attendance indicated social differentiation. (MJP)