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This book examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research that explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of that work at the state and local level, and the voices of southerners, including those in rural black communities, the book demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South and challenges us to re-evaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Foundation leaders were self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education, efforts they believed critical in the South, and black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education that would bring isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schooling served as an important site for expanding state and local governance capacity. It provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and affect black agency in the process. Because foundations could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in local black communities, collaboration between foundation agents and local citizens was necessary to education reform and had the potential to open political opportunity structures in rural areas. Unfortunately, that potential was difficult to realize because foundations were less effective at implementing programs consistently in local areas.

Why do white students have better test scores than black students in American schools? In this engaging book, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer this vexing question with novel historical evidence, and show that we must understand its origins to make further progress in closing the racial achievement gap. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind, the pernicious idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior, they show how philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume helped construct it, how it shaped American schooling, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass and Anna Julia Cooper debunked the Color of Mind, and worked to undo its adverse impact on black educational achievement and attainment. Rejecting the view that white and black student differences in achievement are a product of the Color of Mind, Darby and Rury argue that the racial achievement gap has been socially constructed. Because the Color of Mind is reinforced in tracking, discipline, and special education practices, school leaders must work to correct this. While we cannot expect them to solve social problems of poverty, inequality, and segregation, which also affect student achievement, a just society demands that they address the systemic school practices that reinforce contemporary manifestations of racist ideas. This is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, and afford all kids the dignity they deserve.

This book tells the story of the sweeping makeover of the 200-year old campus of the University of North Carolina. Six million square feet of new buildings were constructed and a million square feet of historic buildings were renovated during one vibrant ten-year period. To make this massive growth work required bold thinking. A new Master Plan created a vision for combining historic preservation, green building, and long-range development. A statewide bond issue for higher education capital facilities, supplemented with outside support, generated $1.5 billion in capital funding. Previous town-gown tensions were swept aside as university officials and elected leaders collaborated on critical planning and zoning innovations. Award-winning plans and designs inspired new student living and learning communities. University facilities and construction staff doubled and a design review board formed to handle the increased load of new projects. Detailed design guidelines ensured that new development would be compatible with the traditional campus landscape as well as sensitive to environmental conservation. Written by authors who held major planning roles and supplemented with key player interviews, the book describes the politics, planning, and design that shaped the Dynamic Decade. Illustrated with color photographs and maps, this comprehensive account offers lessons to all concerned with sustainable university growth.

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? What, exactly, is higher education good for? This book challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—the book engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, the book illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. The book demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

Hong Kong's Chinese History Curriculum from 1945: Politics and Identity investigates the ways in which Chinese history has evolved as a subject in Hong Kong secondary schools since 1945, and the various social, political and economic factors that have shaped the curriculum, through an examination of a wide range of primary and secondary source materials and interviews. This book examines how the aims, content, teaching, learning and assessment of the Chinese history curriculum have evolved since 1945. It describes how Chinese history became an independent subject in secondary schools in Hong Kong despite the political sensitivity of the subject, how it consolidated its status during the colonial period, and how it has faced threats to its independence since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. An important element of the book is its in-depth analysis of the major socio-political and socio-economic forces that have been involved in the development of Chinese history. This book will be of interest to all who are interested in history education and curriculum development, and readers who are concerned with history education.

The Importance of Being Urban offers several new perspectives on Progressive Era school reform by arguing that educational progressivism manifested itself differently at the local level than at the national level. This distinction can best be seen by examining how local district leaders—termed “district progressives”—embraced a variety of educational reforms considered novel and innovative. District progressives adopted curricula and instructional practices associated with Deweyan notions of pedagogy while they simultaneously implemented intelligence tests and other reforms that epitomized social efficiency and scientific management. During a period of vigorous urban planning, sweeping municipal reorganization, hastened immigration, and a shifting economic and industrial base, urban school districts began to play an increasingly prominent role in urban society, embedding themselves more and more into American urban life and taking responsibility for a much larger slice of the American childhood than ever before. Standard historical narratives tend to divide progressive educators into separate streams of thought, usually distinguishing between pedagogical and administrative progressives, but these divisions mask a more comprehensive understanding of district progressivism and obscure the ways in which districts combined reforms heretofore seen as incongruous and incompatible. By looking across multiple urban school systems, this study demonstrates that district progressivism was a common pattern, not simply representative of an isolated case or two. Moreover, the way local school leaders interpreted democratic education and assessed the potential of non-Anglo children from different national, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds reveals much about the types of schools they ultimately constructed.

Since World War II, the American discourse around children and science has been held in the form of a postmortem: a series of diagnoses pointing to a commitment gap that never seems to be fixed. The formation “Children don’t love science like they used to” points to an imagined past, full of the joy of experimentation and discovery. Although some now argue that we no longer actually face a scientific “manpower shortage,” the popular belief that we do is deeply ingrained, coming, as it does, from this vision of a lost time of utopian explorations. This book, a twentieth-century cultural history of the “science kid,” asks what the stakes of this belief might be. It argues that the nostalgic vision of “a time when American kids loved science” tends to represent these “science kids” as male. If we’re stuck associating the qualities of a potential young scientist—curiosity, mischievousness, a certain free way of thinking that sometimes borders on the antisocial—with masculinity, what effect might this persistent set of associations have on the attempt to recruit women into STEM fields?

This book argues that Clark Kerr, Gaylord P. Harnwell, and other post-World War II academic leaders set the American research university on a new course by creating the instrumental university. With its emphasis on procedural rationality, organized research, and project-based funding by external patrons, the instrumental university would provide technical and managerial knowledge to shape the social order. Its leaders hoped that by solving the nation’s pressing social problems, the research university would become the essential institution of postwar America. On this view, the university’s leading purposes included promoting economic development and coordinating research from many fields in order to attack social problems. Reorienting institutions to prioritize these activities had numerous consequences. One was to inject more capitalistic and managerial tendencies into universities. Today, those who decry universities’ corporatizing and market-driven tendencies often trace them to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. This book suggests that a fuller explanation of these tendencies must highlight their deeper roots in the technocratic progressive tradition that originated in the 1910s, particularly the organizational changes within universities that this tradition spawned from the 1940s onward as part of the instrumental university.

As a result of tremendous social, legal, and political movements after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the South led the nation in school desegregation from the late 1960s through the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, following a series of court cases in the past two decades—including a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that raised potentially strong barriers for districts wishing to pursue integration—public schools in the South and across the nation are now resegregating faster than ever. In this comprehensive volume, a roster of leading scholars in educational policy and related fields offer eighteen essays seeking to illuminate new ways for American public education to counter persistent racial and socioeconomic inequality in American society. Drawing on extensive research, the contributors reinforce the key benefits of racially integrated schools, examine remaining options to pursue multiracial integration, and discuss case examples that suggest how to build support for those efforts. Framed by the editors' introduction and a conclusion by Gary Orfield, these essays engage the heated debates over school reform and advance new arguments about the dangers of resegregation while offering practical, research-grounded solutions to one of the most pressing issues in American education.

From World War II through the late 1960s in Nashville, Tennessee, policy choices linking segregation in housing, labor markets, and schooling created educational inequality and privileged white students over their black counterparts. Beginning in 1971, Nashville achieved significant desegregation in its schools via court-ordered busing across the consolidated metropolitan school district. But old pressures for inequality, operating in the new context of metropolitan desegregation and economic growth agendas, remade inequality through the later decades of the twentieth century. Schooling the Metropolis locates the causal roots of educational inequality in the interactions between schools, and the basic political and economic structures of the city and the metropolis. These forces shaped three modes of making and remaking educational inequality: the spatial organization of schooling (where students attended school, and which communities had schools), the curricular organization of schooling (which students enjoyed what academic opportunities in school), and the popular and legal narratives through which people explained inequality. Schooling the Metropolis departs from previous views in key ways: it situates schooling as a force in the making of the city and metropolis rather than as a passive recipient of urban and metropolitan dynamics; and it redirects attention from popular white resistance to policy choices that gave desegregation its specific form and meaning. By examining one of the more sweeping and statistically successful desegregation plans, it recognizes obstacles to educational inequality operating even within metropolitan city-county jurisdictions, and it appreciates the multiple and contradictory ways in which local, state, and federal power constructing and challenged educational inequality.

Do business schools actually make good on their promises of “innovative,” “outside-the-box” thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? This book asserts that they do not and they never have. In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of business schools, the book examines the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions at the heart of these enterprises and details the way business schools have failed to resolve them. Beginning with founding of the Wharton School in 1881, the book measures these schools' aspirations against their actual accomplishments and tells the full and disappointing history of missed opportunities, unmet aspirations, and educational mistakes. It then poses a set of crucial questions about the role and function of American business schools. The results are not pretty. Posing a set of crucial questions about the function of American business schools, the book is pugnacious and controversial. It argues that the impressive façades of business school buildings resemble nothing so much as collegiate versions of Oz. It pulls back the curtain to reveal a story of failure to meet the expectations of the public, their missions, their graduates, and their own lofty aspirations of producing moral and ethical business leaders.

A Progressive Education? argues that concepts of both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh primary and secondary modern schools between 1918 and 1979, and that, by putting childhood at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. A ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ education began to emerge theoretically in the United States and Western Europe from the late nineteenth century, claiming to rewrite curriculums to suit children and young people’s needs, wants and abilities. Existing work suggests that progressivism both rose and retreated in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, when a right-wing backlash against permissive teaching and the deschooling movement led to the imposition of central state control over education. However, the child-centred pedagogies that became mainstream in English and Welsh schools after 1945 rested on a fundamentally different vision of childhood. Unlike utopian deschoolers, post-war child-centred educationalists assumed that the achievements of mass democracy and the welfare state must be carefully preserved. Children needed to be socialised by adult educators to ensure that they acquired the necessary physical, intellectual, social and emotional maturity to become full citizens. Teachers, far from enthusiastically advocating child-centred methods, perceived them as a profound challenge to their authority in the classroom, and implemented them partially and reluctantly. Child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, thus promoted a much more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood and youth as it came to dominate mainstream schooling after the Second World War.

Reparation and Reconciliation is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Formed in 1846 by Protestant abolitionists, the American Missionary Association united a network of colleges open to all, designed especially to educate African American and white students together, both male and female. The AMA and its affiliates envisioned integrated campuses as a training ground to produce a new leadership class for a racially integrated democracy. Case studies at three colleges--Berea College, Oberlin College, and Howard University--reveal the strategies administrators used and the challenges they faced as higher education quickly developed as a competitive social field.

In the early twentieth century, a curriculum known as nature study flourished in major city school systems, streetcar suburbs, small towns, and even rural one-room schools. This object-based approach to learning about the natural world marked the first systematic attempt to introduce science into elementary education, and it came at a time when institutions such as zoos, botanical gardens, natural history museums, and national parks were promoting the idea that direct knowledge of nature would benefit an increasingly urban and industrial nation. This book emphasizes the scientific, pedagogical, and social incentives that encouraged (primarily women) teachers to explore nature in and beyond their classrooms. It brings to life the instructors and reformers who advanced nature study through on-campus schools, summer programs, textbooks, and public speaking. Within a generation, this highly successful hands-on approach migrated beyond public schools into summer camps, afterschool activities, and the scouting movement. Although the rich diversity of nature study classes eventually lost ground to increasingly standardized curricula, the book locates its legacy in the living plants and animals in classrooms and environmental field trips that remain central parts of science education today.

This book is a history of the University of Chicago, from its first founding in 1857 through its re-founding in 1890 till today. It presents the story of the emergence and growth of a complex academic community, particularly the College, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the University to sustain itself. It focuses on two issues particular to undergraduate liberal arts colleges set within larger research universities. First, while the University’s relationship to the undergraduate College has been unpredictable, that relationship has had enormous influence over the identity and fiscal health of the larger institution. Second, Chicago’s history reveals a unique chronological flow within the story of American higher education, in that its “Golden Age” of fiscal bounty and rising ambitions came before 1945. Yet its successes proved fragile precisely because Chicago found itself on a different demographic trajectory than its peers, characterized by a collapse of undergraduate enrolment in the 1950s that profoundly disadvantaged the welfare of the University in the next forty years. These two themes run through an unusually complicated and controversial history, which has been shrouded at many points by layers of myth and hearsay. It is the contention of this book that one can most accurately uncover such a university history by addressing questions to sources that can be authenticated and compared with other sources.

How we provide equal educational opportunity to an increasingly diverse, highly urbanized student population is one of the central concerns facing our nation. We are currently allowing a labyrinthine system of school district boundaries to cleave students—and opportunities—along racial and economic lines. Rather than confronting these realities, though, most contemporary educational policies focus on improving schools by raising academic standards, holding teachers and students accountable through test performance, and promoting private-sector competition. WHEN THE FENCES COME DOWN takes us into the heart of the metropolitan South to explore what happens when communities instead focus squarely on overcoming the educational divide between city and suburb. Based on widely differing and highly illustrative experiences with regional school desegregation in Richmond, Virginia; Louisville, Kentucky; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; and Chattanooga, Tennessee between 1990 and 2010, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley uses quantitative methods and innovative mapping tools to both underscore the damages wrought by school district boundary lines and raise awareness about communities that have sought to counteract them. She shows that city-suburban school desegregation policy is related to clear-cut progress on both school and housing desegregation. WHEN THE FENCES COME DOWN revisits educational policies that in many cases were abruptly halted—or never begun—to spur an open conversation about the creation of the healthy, integrated schools and communities critical to our multiracial future.

From headlines to documentaries, urban schools are at the center of current education debates. But from these accounts, one would never know that 56 million Americans live in rural communities and depend on their rural public schools to meet their educational and, often, their economic and social needs. This book shares the untold narratives of rural education. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research in two rural Southern towns, the book exposes the complicated ways in which schools shape the racial dynamics of their towns and nurture the communities that surround them. It argues that current education policies, both limiting the roles these schools play and threatening to close them, also endanger rural communities. The book issues a warning: the state's growing powers—and the current narrowing of a school's purpose to academic achievement alone—endanger rural America and undermine the potential of a school, whether rural or urban, to sustain a community. Demonstrating the effects of narrow definitions of public education in an era of economic turmoil and widening social inequality, the book calls for a more contextual approach to education policymaking, involving both state and community.

The academy may claim to seek and value diversity in its professoriate, but reports from faculty of color around the country make clear that departments and administrators discriminate in ways that range from unintentional to malignant. Stories abound of scholars--despite impressive records of publication, excellent teaching evaluations, and exemplary service to their universities--struggling on the tenure track. These stories, however, are rarely shared for public consumption. Written/Unwritten reveals that faculty of color often face two sets of rules when applying for reappointment, tenure, and promotion: those made explicit in handbooks and faculty orientations or determined by union contracts and those that operate beneath the surface. It is this second, unwritten set of rules that disproportionally affects faculty who are hired to "diversify" academic departments and then expected to meet ever-shifting requirements set by tenured colleagues and administrators. Patricia A. Matthew and her contributors reveal how these implicit processes undermine the quality of research and teaching in American colleges and universities. They also show what is possible when universities persist in their efforts to create a diverse and more equitable professorate. These narratives hold the academy accountable while providing a pragmatic view about how it might improve itself and how that improvement can extend to academic culture at large.