In this year's Presidential Address, historian Derrick P. Alridge discusses his current research project, Teachers in the Movement: Pedagogy, Activism, and Freedom. The project builds on recent literature about teachers as activists between 1950 and 1980 and explores how and what secondary and postsecondary teachers taught. Focusing on teachers in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the project investigates teachers’ roles as agents of social change through teaching the ideals of freedom during the most significant social movement in the United States in the twentieth century. Drawing on oral history and archival research, the project plans to produce five hundred videotaped interviews that will generate extensive firsthand knowledge and fresh perspectives about teachers in the civil rights movement. By examining teachers’ pedagogical activism during this period of rapid social change, Alridge hopes to inspire and inform educators teaching in the midst of today's freedom and social justice movements.

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and producing knowledge about China for the United States during the Cold War. It analyzes how Tsou navigated a complex political terrain in which his Chinese identity was both a professional asset and a liability. Examining Tsou's personal and professional decisions as well as his response to the politicization of his Chinese identity reveals the (geo)politicization of higher education more broadly.

This article explores the passage and failure of the 1973 Illinois Resource Equalizer formula which was designed to reduce disparities in school finance by breaking the connection between local wealth and school revenue. It argues that two sets of goals drove passage of the new law—equity and local property tax relief—and they came into conflict during implementation, with the latter winning out over the former. It argues that to understand both the passage and failure of the law requires looking deeply at the politics, policies, and practices of taxation, especially the methods of assessing property and levying taxes, where officials made decisions about how to apportion burden and benefits. The Illinois Resource Equalizer story highlights the political and policy choices that structure inequality through school finance at a moment when it was quietly defended and deepened.

Nineteenth-century educators worried that blind children were particularly susceptible to moral apathy, religious decay, and atheism because they could not see the beauty of nature. These educators used instruction in biology, zoology, and natural history to teach blind children about the beauty of the natural world and the breadth of God's creation. Instruction techniques included innovative but expensive apparatuses and tactile models. Despite cost challenges, educators of the blind devoted time and ingenuity to expand the science curriculum, particularly nature study programs, to help their students become successful, productive, and pious citizens equal to their sighted peers. Teaching blind students about nature ensured the blind would not become burdens on society but could be brought into the proper, civilized, religious sphere of the sighted.

After World War II, the colonial rule imposed by the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan was symbiotically connected with its project of nation building. This project of “national colonialism” initially spurred the KMT to build an extensive public education system and to marginalize private schools. Financial concerns after 1954, however, forced the KMT to allow more private schools to open. As the role of private schools expanded, the state limited their resources and required that they follow state curricula, leading many private schools to come under the control of agents tied to the regime. Thus, schools that the colonizers initially sought to subdue ended up spreading ideologies that served the KMT. The case of Taiwan provides a perspective on colonialism and private schooling that suggests that private schooling under national colonialism differed from that under nonnational forms of colonial rule.

In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes, especially for Black children. This essay explores the history of Greene County from 1954 to the recent past, with a particular focus on Warrior Academy, a segregated private school (“segregation academy”) founded by Whites in 1965. As a case study of “school choice” in the context of the “long civil rights movement,” it complicates scholarly definitions of “massive resistance.” Furthermore, it demonstrates the ways in which an emerging “color-blind” conservatism premised on White concerns about “educational quality” thwarted Black efforts to achieve educational equality, even in places where African Americans achieved significant political victories.

As colleges and universities respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, many in the media call it unprecedented. This is not the first time that institutions of higher education have had to respond to an epidemic, however. A historical review of college and university reactions to illnesses such as yellow fever and the 1918 influenza pandemic provides prior examples of institutional responses to epidemic diseases.

Federal agents, church officials, and education reformers have long used schooling as a weapon to eliminate Indigenous people; at the same time, Indigenous individuals and communities have long repurposed schooling to protect tribal sovereignty, reconstitute their communities, and shape Indigenous futures. Joining scholarship that speaks to Indigenous perspectives on schooling, this paper offers seven touchpoints from Native nations since the 1830s in which Indigenous educators repurposed “schooling” as a technology to advance Indigenous interests. Together, these stories illustrate the broad diversity of Native educators’ multifaceted engagements with schooling and challenge settler colonialism's exclusive claim on schools. Though the outcomes of their efforts varied, these experiments with schooling represent Indigenous educators’ underappreciated innovations in the history of education in the United States.

Many rights struggles have promoted education and learning as proof of citizenship and capacity, and disability rights movements are no exception. Blanche Van Leuven Browne, one early twentieth-century polio survivor, reimagined the possibilities of education for “crippled children” by approaching schooling as not only preparation for vocational work but as a sign of disabled children's social worthiness. This article explores the role of education in Browne's life and work, from her childhood in the 1880s to the Detroit hospital-school for physically disabled children she operated from 1907 to 1918. Browne's educational approach emphasized writing and citizenship to (re)define the identity of the “crippled child,” envisioning each as an intelligent future citizen. This approach contrasted with predominant contemporary medical, philanthropic, and educational approaches, which emphasized medical care and vocational training for children with orthopedic disabilities. It also distanced physically disabled children from intellectually disabled children, who were key cultural targets of eugenic fears.

The History of Education Quarterly is celebrating its sixtieth year of publication in 2020. During that time, it has published over 1,500 articles and extended reviews. An examination of these articles reveals several enduring themes that have shaped the field and that will likely continue as HEQ moves into its seventh decade. Given this, the editors have asked scholars to envision how this might happen. Using a few select articles from the past as starting points, the next few issues will feature pieces by historians of education considering future avenues of research related to a specific theme.

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs follow written syntax? Or should it have its own coherence, that is, possibly a different syntax and order of enunciation? Starting with these questions, distinct teaching legacies developed, specifying which kinds of signs to use in which context and what role signs were to fulfill. This article focuses on French deaf and hearing teachers whose positions were influential throughout Europe and the United States, moving from Abbé de l'Epée's 1784 method to Rémi Valade's 1854 publication of the first sign language grammar.

In 1976, after being imprisoned and forced into exile from his home country, Uruguay, Eduardo Galeano defiantly wrote “Defensa De La Palabra” (In Defense of the Word). In it, he argued that denying people access to their histories obstructs their vision of themselves as a people connected across time, and therefore restricts their ability to envision change for their future. He believed contributions to the revelation of the past depended on “the intensity level of the writer's responsiveness to his or her people—their roots, their vicissitudes, their destiny.” Forty-four years later, Galeano's reflections remain timely and methodologically instructive for those working at the nexus of history and education:

The History of Education Quarterly is celebrating its sixtieth year of publication in 2020. During that time, it has published over 1,500 articles and extended reviews. An examination of these articles reveals several enduring themes that have shaped the field and that will likely continue to do so as HEQ moves into its seventh decade. Given this, the editors have asked scholars to envision that future. Using select articles from the past as starting points, Volume 60 features a series of forums in which historians of education consider future avenues of research related to designated themes.

Ideas and norms about disability shaped the experiences and careers of every teacher and prospective teacher in the Los Angeles public schools between 1930 and 1970. Medical doctors created and conducted the extensive medical examinations that teaching candidates and practicing teachers needed to pass to enter or remain in the classroom. The Los Angeles City Board of Education capitalized on existing disability-related retirement policies, targeting educators with age-related disabilities and enacting a compulsory retirement age for all teachers. Teachers accused of disability-related incompetence could only retain their positions if they could disprove their diagnoses. By adding this discussion of teachers’ bodies and disability to the historiography of teachers, we can better understand teachers’ experiences and the ways in which school leaders attempted to define and enforce standards of normality.

As someone whose training is in political science and who writes about the history of my own discipline, I admit to some hesitation in recommending future avenues of research for historians of education. For that reason, the following thoughts are directed toward disciplinary history broadly and social science history specifically. Moreover, the three articles that contributors to this forum were asked to use as inspiration suggest that any future I would recommend has been under way in one form or another for a while. For those reasons, I want to reframe my contribution as a reflection on a particular mode of analysis all three authors employed and how it may be particularly useful for exploring the questions of power, exclusion, and race- and gender-making in the academy that are present in all three articles and that explicitly animate two of them.

In the two decades following World War II, a loose network of home economists at colleges and universities across the United States turned their attention to homemaking methods for women with physical disabilities. Often in consultation with physically disabled homemakers, these home economists researched and designed assistive devices, adaptive equipment, and work simplification techniques for use in the home. Their efforts signaled a new field of study, “homemaker rehabilitation,” which helped to enlarge the broader vocational rehabilitation system beyond its historic focus on male veterans and wage earners while also expanding the boundaries of home economics itself. Home economists’ work with disabled homemakers both bolstered and challenged postwar domesticity, middle-class gender roles, and able-bodied normalcy. Calling attention to these contradictions reveals much about how home economists engaged with and understood disability and how their work intersected with burgeoning movements for disability rights.

Roberts v. City of Boston is a well-known legal case in the history of US education. In 1847, the Boston School Committee denied Sarah C. Roberts, a five-year-old African American girl, admission to the public primary school closest to her home. She was instead ordered to attend the all-black Abiel Smith School, about a half-mile walk from her home. In March 1848, Sarah's father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston for denying Sarah the right to attend the public school closest to her home. The case wound its way through the courts, eventually reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 1850, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled in favor of the city of Boston, affirming that the Boston School Committee had “not violated any principle of equality, inasmuch as they have provided a school with competent instructors for the colored children, where they enjoy equal advantages of instruction with those enjoyed by the white children.” And thus, the doctrine of separate but equal was born in Massachusetts.

Pivoting around two sit-ins at the University of Georgia, this article examines student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US South. The first sit-in, at the conclusion of the spring 1968 March for Coed Equality, was part of the effort to overcome parietal rules that significantly restricted women's rights but left men relatively untouched. The second occurred in 1972 when the university responded to salacious allegations of immorality in women's residence halls by replacing progressive residential education programming with the policing of student behavior. This article centers student efforts for women's rights, demonstrates how students and administrators shifted tactics in reaction to external stimuli, and explores the repercussions of challenging the entrenched patriarchal power structure. In so doing, it joins the growing literature complicating understandings of student activism in the era by focusing attention away from the most famous and extreme cases.