History

What we can learn from a half-century of federal special education reform (part 3)

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I described the five factors that shaped the past half-century of education reform focused on the rights and needs of individuals with disabilities: politics, deliberately designed policies and practices, history, emergent patterns of practices, and policy feedback. These factors can help explain some puzzles about this […]

What we can learn from a half-century of federal special education reform (part 2)

In part 1, I looked back at 50 years of education reform focused on students with disabilities and explained two of the five factors that shaped the last half-century of this history: political efforts to secure the educational rights of individuals with disabilities; and efforts to plan or design either education policy or educational techniques […]

What we can learn from a half-century of federal special education reform (part 1)

Two major historical anniversaries in American education passed by this summer without significant public comment: consent decrees that ended two federal lawsuits in May and August 1972, lawsuits intended to open up educational access for children with disabilities in Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. Before these lawsuits, it had been regularly practice since early in the […]

The evolving shape of a project (educational broadcasting history)

The evolving shape of a project (educational broadcasting history)

For the first time in my career, I’ve started receiving gifts that colleagues thought I’d enjoy related to a research project — i.e., they identify me with my current research into the post-1945 history of educational broadcasting in the United States, a project that is less than half a decade old. For an historian, that […]

Marginalized college radio: past, present, and future?

Not once but twice in the last century, major movements in radio policy marginalized a range of radio stations licensed to colleges and universities. In the 1920s, that marginalization was part of the disappearance of dozens of college radio stations. In the 1970s, college radio stations became divided into two broad segments: those who had […]