The African American Struggle For Secondary Schooling 1940 1980

This is the first comprehensive account of African American secondary education in the postwar era. Drawing on quantitative datasets, as well as oral history, this compelling narrative examines how African Americans narrowed the racial gap in high school completion. The authors explore regional variations in high school attendance across the United States and how intraracial factors affected attendance within racial groups. They also examine the larger social historical context, such as the national high school revolution, the civil rights movement, campaigns to expand schooling and urging youth to stay in school, and Black migration northward. Closing chapters focus on desegregation and the "urban crisis" of the 1960s and 1970s that accelerated “White flight” and funding problems for urban school systems. The conclusion summarizes these developments and briefly looks at the period since 1980, when secondary attainment levels stopped advancing for Blacks and Whites alike. Book Highlights: A comprehensive history, drawing on statistical analysis, archival research, and interviews with African Americans who attended school in the 1940s and 1950s.Lessons from the past, showing how parents and local communities played the most direct and dynamic role in the fight for access to education.Today’s major challenges, including the growth of inner-city poverty and changing family structures. John L. Rury is professor of education and (by courtesy) history at the University of Kansas. Shirley A. Hill is professor of sociology at the University of Kansas. “Based on prodigious research, The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling sets a new standard of excellence in social history and policy studies. The authors evocatively recreate the passions of the civil rights movement and centrality of public schools in the ongoing quest for justice, opportunity, and freedom.” —William J. Reese, Carl F. Kaestle WARF Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History, University of Wisconsin–Madison “This book is a rich and compelling addition to the literature on secondary education generally and on secondary education for African Americans specifically. It will set the standard for historical studies on American high schools for a long time to come.” —Jeffrey Mirel, David L. Angus Collegiate Chair of Education, Professor of History, University of Michigan “The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling fills a major gap in the history of African American educational history. This book will be on my shelf and will no doubt be on the shelves of scholars and students who study African American educational history.” —Thomas V. O'Brien, Professor and Chair, Department of Educational Studies and Research, University of Southern Mississippi “This is the only book-length account of the growth and impact of secondary education for African Americans post-1930. With a unique and original analysis, the authors frame key themes not only within the common historiographical tradition of an unfolding of 'growth and development' over time, but correctly understand that high school entailed opportunities for ‘attainment’ in a broader social sense as well.” —Michael Fultz, Professor, Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison

This book offers a history of African American education, while also serving as a companion text for teachers, students and researchers in cultural criticism, American and African American studies, postcolonialism, historiography, and psychoanalytics. Overall, it represents essential reading for scholars, critics, leaders of educational policy, and all others interested in ongoing discussions not only about the role of community, family, teachers and others in facilitating quality education for the citizenry, but also about ensuring the posterity of a society via equal access to, and attainment of, quality education by its constituents of color. Particularly, this volume fills a void in the annals of African American history and African American education, by addressing the vibrancy of an education ethos within Black America which has unequivocally served as cultural, historical, political, legal and theoretical references.

The American Educational History Journal is a peer?reviewed, national research journal devoted to the examination of educational topics using perspectives from a variety of disciplines. The editors of AEHJ encourage communication between scholars from numerous disciplines, nationalities, institutions, and backgrounds. Authors come from a variety of disciplines including political science, curriculum, history, philosophy, teacher education, and educational leadership. Acceptance for publication in AEHJ requires that each author present a well?articulated argument that deals substantively with questions of educational history.

Scholars have long explored school desegregation through various lenses, examining policy, the role of the courts and federal government, resistance and backlash, and the fight to preserve Black schools. However, few studies have examined the group experiences of students within desegregated schools. Crossing Segregated Boundaries centers the experiences of over sixty graduates of the class of 1988 in three desegregated Chicago high schools. Chicago’s housing segregation and declining white enrollments severely curtailed the city’s school desegregation plan, and as a result desegregation options were academically stratified, providing limited opportunities for a chosen few while leaving the majority of students in segregated, underperforming schools. Nevertheless, desegregation did provide a transformative opportunity for those students involved. While desegregation was the external impetus that brought students together, the students themselves made integration possible, and many students found that the few years that they spent in these schools had a profound impact on broadening their understanding of different racial and ethnic groups. In very real ways, desegregated schools reduced racial isolation for those who took part.

In 1978, V. P. Franklin and James D. Anderson co-edited New Perspectives on Black Educational History. For Franklin, Anderson, and their contributors, there were glaring gaps in the historiography of Black education that each of the essays began to fill with new information or fresh perspectives. There have been a number of important studies on the history of African American education in the more than three decades since Franklin and Anderson published their volume that has pushed the field forward. Scholars have redefined the views of Black southern schools as simply inferior, demonstrated the active role Blacks had in creating and sustaining their schools, sharpened our understanding of Black teachers’ and educational leaders’ role in educating Black students and themselves with professional development, provided a better understanding and recognition of the struggles in the North (particularly in urban and metropolitan areas), expanded our thinking about school desegregation and community control, and broadened our understanding of Black experiences and activism in higher education and private schools. Our volume will highlight and expand upon the changes to the field over the last three and a half decades. In the shadow of 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, contributors expand on the way African Americans viewed and experienced a variety of educational policies including segregation and desegregation, and the varied options they chose beyond desegregation. The volume covers both the North and South in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contributors explore how educators, administrators, students, and communities responded to educational policies in various settings including K-12 public and private schooling and higher education. A significant contribution of the book is showcasing the growing and concentrated work in the era immediately following the Brown decision. Finally, scholars consider the historian’s engagement with recent history, contemporary issues, future directions, methodology, and teaching.

American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind—the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior—they show how philosophers, such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts. Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

Creating the Suburban School Advantage explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. John L. Rury provides a national overview of the process, focusing on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post–World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. As Rury relates, at the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban-suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. School districts located wholly or partly within the municipal boundaries of Kansas City, Missouri, make for revealing cases that illuminate our understanding of these national patterns. As Rury demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, Rury cogently argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.

Focusing on the historical development of the teaching profession, this book explores how the relationship between education and the formation of modern nation states has influenced both the status of the profession as a whole and the differential status accorded to different kinds of teachers within it. Addressing different national and international contexts with seven distinct case studies, the book provides a comparative analysis of the long-term trajectories that illuminate the nature of teaching as a public profession, and demonstrates the variety of forms that labour markets have taken in different contexts. Offering new and up-to-date international analysis at a critical time for the field of teacher research, when recruitment into the profession and retention are major challenges, the volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers and doctoral students engaged in teacher research and comparative and international education more broadly. Those involved with education policy and politics will also benefit from reading this volume.