Educational broadcasting history project update

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 […]

Assessment has a learn and hungry look

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 […]

American education is a tilted ecology

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 […]

Applying to doctoral programs

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 […]

Barbara J. Shircliffe, 1968-2023

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 […]