Often overshadowed by the GI Bill, the National Youth Administration (NYA) supervised the first federal need-based financial aid program in the United States. Tracing the origin of federal aid back to the era of the NYA reveals that the rationale for need-based assistance rests closer to the core of the American policymaking tradition. This article contributes to previous histories of the NYA by demonstrating how its decentralized implementation empowered local college officials who jeopardized the program’s needs-based intent. Meanwhile, this localized administration also facilitated the NYA’s unusual and relatively successful support for Black college students.

For more than two decades, Virginia’s high school history teachers were required to teach Virginia’s Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession alongside every American history textbook. This article argues that Mary Munford and other white, predominantly women educator-activists in Virginia fashioned a project of racial instruction around Virginia’s Attitude meant to entrench white supremacy and justify Jim Crow segregation. The textbook, and Lost Cause lessons wrapped in it, was just one part of a larger state system of racial control through history curricula. From the surface, it appears that curricular change and textbook adoption occurred through efforts by men who operated that system—superintendents, Board of Education members who approved textbooks, and leaders of curriculum reviewing committees. While these men often made the decisions that approved curricular guidelines, investigation into the background of curriculum construction reveals that the ideas for new ways to teach history came largely from white women.

After the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, student counseling services at the University of Texas (UT) were redesigned around a framework of psychopathology that attempted to prevent future violence through speculative assessments of dangerousness, or the capacity to harm oneself or others. This article explores how UT’s leadership and Texas politicians marshaled the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology to restore a sense of safety on campus despite their inability to accurately assess threats of violence. As a result, updates to the counseling center led to an escalation of campus surveillance, increased pressures on students and faculty to conform to UT’s values, and a proliferation of guns in the hands of campus police. The cost of attempting to eliminate danger by expanding mental health care at UT was an environment of heightened security and control that had questionable impact on campus safety and student mental health.

The historiography of African American education has stressed the work of education professionals, tensions over curricula, and the desegregation of schools. Informal learning settings, while recognized as important educative spaces, have remained tangential to the broader narrative of the struggle for education. Thus, the influence of Black civic voluntary organizations is largely underexplored. In this essay I posit that instead of being on the margins, Black associations supplemented, guided, supported, and funded the education of African Americans through overlapping organizational networks that comprised autonomous counterpublic spaces. In these spaces, a wide variety of voluntary groups worked collaboratively to improve local public schools, to develop curricula centered on Black culture, and to provide educational opportunities for youth and adults. Recognizing that the history of African American education cannot be fully told without investigating informal spaces, this essay offers a roadmap for the investigation of Black civic voluntary organizations.

Although many historians have explored the theoretical relationship between progressive education and the teaching of Black students in segregated schools during the interwar years, far less is known about what pedagogical progressivism looked like in Black schools, why Black teachers chose to adopt and implement these new methods, and how their methods and goals evolved over time. In this article, the authors trace the origins and development of pedagogically progressive experiments by Black educational leaders and classroom teachers. We argue that Black educators introduced progressive methods that fused academic and practical content not only to better engage their students with a relevant curriculum, but, more importantly, to protect the academic content from White educators’ pressure to focus the curriculum exclusively on manual training. This approach later expanded to include the development of democratic dispositions toward the fight for racial advancement.

This article examines the role of playing Indian in the development of progressive education in the U.S at the turn of the twentieth century. Experiential education provided an important incubator for a particular type of playing Indian, what I dub pedagogical playing Indian. The site of this analysis is the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, overseen by John Dewey from 1896 to 1904. Here Indian play aligned linear historicism and genetic psychology with Dewey’s emerging experimental method. The central role of Indian play was epitomized by the school’s history curriculum, where instructors encouraged students to imagine themselves as an Indian tribe through use of a sand table. In an ironic historical twist, Estelle Reel, superintendent of Indian Schools, then introduced the sand table and other Deweyan insights into federal Indian schools. This entanglement, effaced by the innocence of play, complicates the legacy of Dewey’s educational innovations with the dispossessive logic of Indian schooling.

This article explores the evolution of school dress code policies in the United States as a critical lens into the workings of public education, authority, and exclusion. Focusing on metropolitan Seattle as a case study, the research traces the shift from informal appearance norms to formalized and punitive dress code enforcement from the 1950s to the present. Rather than functioning as neutral guidelines, dress codes have historically reinforced gendered, racialized, and class-based hierarchies under the guise of order and safety. By situating dress policies within broader political and social transformations—including student rights movements, the rise of zero-tolerance policies, and recent federal investigations—this article demonstrates how dress codes have become tools of gatekeeping that shape access to learning and belonging in public schools. In highlighting moments of resistance and change, this study interrogates the role of schools in regulating identity and offers a historical foundation to understand contemporary inequities in educational discipline and policy.

This article examines cases of governors who established a foundation for school choice between 1980 and 1996. Education was a strategic issue around which they sought to alleviate economic concerns and anxieties about desegregation to realize their vision of building, yet again, a New South. As part of this process, southern governors extolled the values of the free market in deracialized ways and networked to pass comprehensive education reform grounded in neoliberal ideologies including individualism and competition.

This study analyzes 191 popular cultural artifacts referencing New Math and shows that broader cultural themes of the postwar era, including the urgent need and potential of technological progress, align with widespread beliefs about New Math. The analysis reveals that the public knew little about New Math and regarded it as a mysterious, powerful new technology that would empower the next generation. The study suggests that the public’s perceptions of New Math, and likely other educational reforms, were shaped in a social dialogue among producers and consumers of culture as much as by the content of those reforms.

Public schools in Dearborn, Michigan, experienced increased enrollment of students of Arab descent during the 1980s and 1990s. While social, political, and personal contestation accompanied this demographic shift, the experiences of Arab American students in Dearborn revealed a spectrum of acceptance and rejection of American values among communities of Arab descent. As the presence of Arab-descendant youth increased, public schools shifted from emphasizing assimilation to becoming more accepting of cultural pluralism. This shift developed through a reciprocal process in which Arab-descendant students and their adult allies demanded respect for their multifaceted linguistic, religious, and ethnic identities even as they refashioned conceptions of who they were through acculturation. By illuminating Arab and Muslim students’ school experiences amid heightened geopolitical tensions, this article complicates prevailing narratives about Arab American identity formation. Additionally, its examination of youth identity formation in relation to geopolitics, religion, nationality, race, and gender broadens understandings of schooling and identity formation within the United States.

This article traces the unique set of factors that allowed mid-nineteenth-century coeducation at a medical college traditionally reserved for men. I argue that in the period 1850-1856, a window of opportunity offered a small group of women the chance to pursue medical education at the traditionally all-male regular Cleveland Medical College, at a time when medical training was inaccessible to women. A unique confluence of factors inspired this development, including a temporary fluidity of standards in medical training and practice, rising prospects for women’s access to higher education, the rapidly changing Cleveland urban environment and its progressive women’s network, and the College’s internal dynamics. The female graduates of the Cleveland Medical College joined a pioneer generation of women physicians in the mid-nineteenth-century US who chipped away at long-standing barriers limiting the role of women in medicine.

Drawing on a sample of seven students (three Black, four White) from schools in the North before the Civil War, this article examines how schooltime writing—compositions, letters, and diaries—helped young women navigate social expectations and assert intellectual agency. While Black and White students’ expressions reflected different positionalities, both critiqued confining ideals of domesticity. White students challenged assumptions that their futures lay only in the home as wives and mothers, while Black students reimagined their place in intellectual and civic life, articulating visions of liberation and belonging that confronted racism and sexism. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s framework of everyday negotiations of power and William Reddy’s concept of emotives, the article shows how affective writing worked as a subtle mode of social critique. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on women’s education and the history of emotions.

The recent surge of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has prompted urgent questions about the past, present, and future of such initiatives. In this HEQ policy dialogue, Kevin Kumashiro and Michael Olneck take up those questions directly, tracing how contemporary assaults—beginning with criticisms of the 1619 Project, critical race theory, and gender studies—have broadened into a campaign aimed at reshaping curriculum, institutions, and civic understanding. They probe the power of narrative and counter-narrative, asking what stories about democracy, citizenship, and education are being advanced and whether progressive educators and advocates have offered compelling alternatives.

Drawing on historical examples and political theory, their conversation situates today’s moment within longer struggles over who belongs in the American civic imaginary—from early twentieth-century immigrant restrictionism to competing visions of liberty voiced in nineteenth-century abolitionist and Reconstruction debates. Kumashiro and Olneck consider how new social imaginaries are articulated and disseminated, and what educators might do to cultivate aspirations about the kind of society and schools we aim to build.

Michael Olneck is Professor Emeritus in the departments of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Culture Wars in American Education: Past and Present Struggles Over the Symbolic Order, along with numerous articles and book chapters on multiculturalism in American education. Kevin Kumashiro is former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco and cofounder of the national network Education Deans for Justice and Equity; he is the author or editor of ten books on education and justice.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. The transcript of this dialogue has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.