Education History 101

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Welcome to the blog!

Early into my research around the identities of all members of the New York State Board of Regents since 1904, I came across a salary table in a New York State Education Commissioner’s field report from the 1860s detailing teachers’ summer salaries. I felt my brain hiccup as it was my understanding schools in NYS were closed in the summer so young people could work on the farm.

One read through of School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools by Kenneth Mark Gold (2002) and I understood how wrong my understanding was. While sharing my new learning with my husband I said something to the effect of “This is Education History 101 stuff! How come I didn’t know this?” And the podcast was born. (We get into summer vacation in this episode.)

I created the EdHistory101 Twitter account where I share tweets and stories related to American education history and carried the name over to Reddit, where I’m a moderator on Ask Historians. The blog includes my pieces on education history in New York State, summaries of the Wikipedia articles I’ve edited or created, essays where I fact check education history in popular education books, and my thinking and wondering on various education topics such as assessment and standards.

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Latest Posts

Recommended books on feedback and language

Getting good at feedback is mostly about practice. Lots and lots of practice. And being very clear on the type of feedback the person is looking for and making sure the feedback attends to that. There are, though, some texts I've found to be useful for crafting...

Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York

My first historical research project was sparked by gaps I saw on this page when I first visited a few years ago, looking for the name of the first woman Regent. The page originally ended with the 1904 appointments and I began looking around for sources that would...

What I’m Currently Reading

Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America by Kabria Baumgartner. It's wonderful and incredibly accessible while providing the reader a detailed history of the women's lives.

Schools designed for factory workers?

‘The modern education system was designed to produce complacent factory workers’ is an oft repeated idea. How true or false is this?

“Most Likely to Succeed” by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith

Below is the text of an email I wrote (and re-wrote, and edited, and re-wrote and changed a bunch) to Tony Wagner about some passages in his book. We had an exchange on Twitter that was mostly about math education but I slid in my strongly held opinions about the...