A little more than five years ago, I traveled with my then-student Wooyeong Kim to the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library. The archive there has thousands of feet of shelved material on the American history of broadcasting, much of it on public broadcasting, and we spent the entire week in the papers of the Children’s Television Workshop. Now Sesame Workshop, it’s the nonprofit that created Sesame Street, The Electronic Company, and 3-2-1 Contact.1  My projects aren’t usually inspired by a new student, but this was. Wooyeong had enrolled in our educational policy and ..read more

I was in sixth grade when I first argued with a teacher about a math test. It was a multiple-choice test, made by the teacher and returned to us with her corrections and our grades, after comparing our work to her answer key. During a few minutes reserved for seatwork, I walked to the front of the room. I was explaining why my choice on a specific question was reasonable when she replied, “Well, it may be a possible answer, but it’s not the best answer.” Like many students, I fumed a bit as I returned to my seat, indignant at the capricious nature of school authority. But I also realized somet ..read more

In his presidential address to the (U.S.) History of Education Society, Ben Justice pitched his argument that schooling has historically been a white good. Further, he wrote, the extent to which schooling has served the public interest has been the result of explicit efforts to counter white supremacy, led by non-white activism.1 In part, Justice’s address was an effort to reconcile the potential of education with its frequent historical failings. Whether or not you agree with part or all of his address, it is a serious effort to frame the historical flaws in formal schooling in the U.S. I wan ..read more

37 years ago, I was writing applications for history doctoral programs. I was a senior in college, had one of my professors give me the “tenured jobs in history are shrinking, regardless of what others are saying” talk (he was right), and had no clue what doctoral admissions committees look for. I applied to a dozen programs, was admitted to a few, and given a promise of full support at one, at the University of Pennsylvania. And that’s where I attended. I vaguely remember that the departments generally had different essay questions — I think Yale’s program asked applicants to write about a hi ..read more

Over the summer my friend, fellow historian of education, and former colleague Barbara Shircliffe died while biking in Asheville, North Carolina. I last saw Barbara at the 2019 conference of the History of Education Society, where she was presenting with Deanna Michael and a graduate student. We met while moving into our offices as new assistant professors at the University of South Florida in August 1996, fellow historians of education.1 I was one of dozens of colleagues who benefited from her support in so many ways, from being a friendly ear to a shrewd and quiet observer of human quirks, e ..read more

In April, I wrote about finding peer reviewers in a journal context. This blog post is about a task that seems similar but isn’t: finding external reviewers of scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes. In most American colleges and universities with any research expectations for tenure, part of the process includes asking tenured faculty to write an external review letter assessing the scholarship of the candidate for promotion and/or tenure. Ideally, letter-writers are scholars who can provide an independent judgment (i.e., with no conflicts of interest), and who have both sufficient exp ..read more

Yesterday, I presented a poster on this blog series at the Association for Education Finance and Policy, in Denver, and I had a challenge: how does one present a broad-brush historical argument in this format? So I hacked the idea of a poster, which is to present a limited amount of information as an entree to a discussion with people who decide they’re interested in the topic… and created a chart thematically tied to this series, rescaled to show proportionate changes (with the bottom of the chart representing the greatest proportionate loss 2020-2023 from the 2019 baseline), but without labe ..read more

In early March 2020, my fellow historian of education Jonathan Zimmerman wrote a piece encouraging colleges and universities to enthusiastically see emergency remote instruction as an opportunity: Coronavirus and the Great Online-Learning Experiment (ungated version). Zimmerman’s piece amused me a little, because by using “experiment” in the title, he did not mean a rigorously-designed plan with data collection and analysis, but rather something like serendipitous discovery of what happened in the pandemic. I will leave it to the reader to assess whether our collective experience of emergency ..read more

In March 2020, all of the educators I know suddenly began working extraordinarily hard in a context they had never lived through. Several million educators did, at every level from those who work with infants to doctoral education. Three years later, it is possible to see both the effort and the gaps. The argument building in the past few blog entries is about the larger patterns of institutional erosion, default repertoires, and the pandemic dramaturgy, and the way that schools can be both highly connected with the rest of society and also miss important aspects of coordination. That missing ..read more

In the prior entry of this series, I described three large patterns in pandemic-era education in the U.S. since early 2020: institutional erosion, the quick development of a default repertoire of system-level responses, and the wrapping of education politics inside the COVID dramaturgy. What in the history of American education can provide context for these patterns? Institutional erosion and the educational dimension of pandemic dramaturgy are clearly about connections between schools and the rest of society, and one could argue that there has been a growing intertwining of schooling and the ..read more