Alongside Walt Disney's animated movies, television programming, and theme parks, scholars have examined The Walt Disney Studios’ True-Life Adventures series of live-action nature documentary films for their impact on popular culture. Historians, however, have mostly overlooked the significance of the True-Life Adventures for student learning about the natural world. Amending this historiographical shortcoming, this essay examines Disney's innovative approach to wildlife filmmaking, describes viewers’ reactions to the True-Life Adventures’ educational qualities, and investigates the Studios’ efforts to use the films to enter the education market. The study breaks new ground by analyzing seldom accessed documents preserved in the Walt Disney Archives both to reveal how students, teachers, and college and university faculty responded to the films and to examine the extension of the nature documentaries through related media.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the San Antonio v. Rodriguez case, viewed by some as the worst decision in the US Supreme Court’s modern history. As legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky observed, the court essentially declared that “discrimination against the poor does not violate the Constitution and that education is not a fundamental right.”1 Five decades later, how does this case from the past continue to exert its influence on the present? And how might the present have looked different if the court had reached a different conclusion?

For this policy dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Bruce Baker and David Hinojosa to discuss the Rodriguez decision and its legacy, focusing particularly on how the case has shaped and constrained equity efforts in K-12 education. Bruce Baker is professor and chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami. A leading scholar on the financing of public elementary and secondary education systems, he is the author of Educational Inequality and School Finance (Harvard Education Press, 2018) and School Finance and Education Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2021). David Hinojosa is the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where he spearheads the organization’s systemic racial justice work in guaranteeing that historically marginalized students of color receive equal and equitable educational opportunities in public schools and institutions of higher education. He is a leading litigator and advocate in civil rights, specializing in educational impact litigation and policy.

HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.

This article explores the All-Day Neighborhood Schools (ADNS) program, operated as a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and local philanthropists from 1936 to 1971. Designed to expand the resources available to children and parents, the program included after-school activities, additional teachers, professional development, social workers, and parent engagement at fourteen public elementary schools across the city. Through a study of two program sites, I examine how this public-private partnership functioned, and trace changes in the motivations of its leadership, from a focus on recreation and democracy during World War II, to juvenile delinquency prevention, to compensatory education. I argue that ADNS's ability to transform public schooling in New York City was limited by its separation from the rest of the school system, which came about through its dependance on outside philanthropy and its consistent formulation as a supplemental program rather than as a fundamental part of children's education.

This article analyzes class formation of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA). In 2011, Wisconsin curtailed public-sector union collective bargaining, causing Wisconsin unions’ membership and political power to plummet. This article puts the 2011 collapse into historical perspective, by considering the development of Milwaukee teachers’ labor organizing over the course of the twentieth century. In part I, I chronicle the formation of the MTEA, including its early contest with the Milwaukee Teachers Union (MTU) and the gendered fault lines of the teachers’ collective vision. In part II, I discuss the consequences of teachers’ rhetorical contradictions, especially their lack of collaboration with the civil rights movement in Milwaukee. This article challenges the notion that class movements are preordained with unified interests and aims, and instead shows that unions themselves build and assemble people’s political ideas, either to expand solidarity or to narrow it.

This article traces the rise of anxiety among American high school and college students since the late 1950s, with particular focus on the decades before 2000. Evidence for rates of change comes from anxiety tests administered during the period, as well as a variety of psychological studies. The article also takes up the issue of causation, highlighting the extension of counseling services and psychological vocabulary that affected evaluations of nervousness; the impact of negative developments like crime rates and growing family instability; and the results both of changes in educational patterns—such as more frequent examinations—and significant shifts in student goals and expectations. Finally, the article touches on efforts to mitigate anxiety, such as expanding student services, and also their limited impact.

America's schools are more segregated today than they were three decades ago. After initial progress in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education—further bolstered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as by several other rulings by the court—the nation's schools began a process of resegregation in the early 1990s. White resistance, reversals by the court, and growing residential segregation have ensured that many young people attend school with classmates from similar racial and class backgrounds. As a recent report from the UCLA's Civil Rights Project found, the average White student attends a school in which 69 percent of students are White, the average Latinx student attends a school in which 55 percent of students are Latinx, and the average Black student attends a school in which 47 percent of students are Black. Segregation is a fact of life in both the North and the South, in urban and rural communities, in red states and in blue states.

For this Policy Dialogue, HEQ's editors asked Cara McClellan and Matthew Delmont to discuss the segregation of K-12 schools by race. How, we wanted to know, has the past shaped the present and constrained the future? How are present-day efforts responding to that past and challenging the structures and cultures that reinforce racial segregation? What might the future hold? Cara McClellan is director of the Advocacy for Racial and Civil Justice Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania's Carey Law School, where she is also an associate professor of practice. Prior to this role, she served as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she represented students and families in cases such as Sheff v. O'Neill. Matthew Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His work focuses on African American history and the history of civil rights, and he is the author of several books including Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation and, most recently, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.

HEQ Policy Dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. At the end of the exchange, we offer a list of references for readers who wish to follow up on sources relevant to the discussion.