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education history



  • Students are the Victims of DeSantis's Education War in Florida

    Ron DeSantis's education policies are driven by what will rile up the most reactionary voters in the state and have little do do with rectifying the growing problems with student achievement and teacher retention that are actually putting the state's schools in crisis, argue two Floridian writers. 



  • The Book that Launched Black Studies Was a Challenge to Classroom Racism

    by Ibram X. Kendi

    Education historian Jarvis Givens discusses a 90th anniversary edition of Carter Woodson's pathbreaking "The Mis-Education of the Negro," noting that the book was banned in Oklahoma for being "antiklan" in its efforts to overturn the pervasive message of Black inferiority in the established school curriculum. 



  • Democrats' Embrace of Education "Reform" Paved Way for DeSantis

    by Nora De La Cour

    Decades of stressing metrics, measurement and job-readiness has created a vacuum where a robust public discussion of the role of public schools in nurturing shared humanity should be. Conservatives are now eagerly filling this vacuum with privatization and "classical education" curricula. 



  • Have Children Changed in Modern America?

    by Steven Mintz

    A recent argument for the general stability of children over the last century and a half misses the key point that "childhood" has been a fluid concept, and changes in how childhood is understood has necessarily affected the experiences of children. 



  • America's School Funding is Kleptocracy in Action

    by Esther Cyna

    The American system of funding schools largely through local property taxes contributes to inequalities both obvious and subtle that amount to legal dispossession of poor and minority students by denying them access to quality education. 



  • Who Gets to Be American?

    by Jonna Perrillo

    Johann Tschinkel, a Nazi scientist, was recruited by the United States after the war. His reflections on his educational experiences in Germany and those of his children in segregated American schools, offer a warning about the efforts to control the social studies curriculum today. 



  • Adults Support Empowering Youth – Until Youth Dissent

    by Dara Walker

    American youth are seldom credited for having a clear understanding of the policies that affect their lives. COVID safety walkouts are the latest example of student activism to be dismissed.



  • Reducing Child Poverty Is a No-Brainer even Without Brain Science

    by Mical Raz

    Reducing child poverty is a good in itself; justifying policies to reduce poverty in terms of improvements in measures of cognition or IQ scores makes such programs vulnerable to backlash and risks validating racist and eugenicist arguments about race and intelligence.



  • School Vandalism Is a Test We Need to Pass

    by Campbell F. Scribner

    Student vandalism in schools is nothing new. Effective responses must reject surveillance and punishment and put student growth above the simple protection of property.