Education (In)Equality from the 1870’s to 1954 – A Brief History

In Pennsylvania, the 1870’s was a time of important legislative movement. In 1870, the Republicans in the state legislature of Pennsylvania introduced legislation to end discrimination of African Americans in schools and in 1874 an antidiscrimination bill passed the state senate.[1] By 1881, a county court ruled on a case brought by an African American father, Elias H. Allen, who wanted his children to attend a White public school in Meadville, Pennsylvania and determined that “the Pennsylvania segregation law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” and required that African American children be admitted to public schools that were closest to their homes.[2] Vincent Franklin reports that the Philadelphia school system in 1908 consisted of nine Black public schools yet a majority of African American children attended mixed schools. A complicating factor during this time period was that African American teachers were not allowed to teach White children in the Philadelphia public school system. Several research studies by individuals such as Byron Phillips and Howard Odum focused on intelligence and compared White and African American school aged children. The “results” showed that African American children were “retarded” more than White children were which further fueled the argument that African American and White children were to be schooled under different curriculums and that African American school children were to be segregated from White children.[3] Public education in the South was especially challenging for African Americans during this time period. The Southern education movement from 1901 to 1915 saw a resistance in educational reform for African Americans.[4] African Americans experienced both racist attitudes and laws in all aspects of their lives including their education. During this time period, Whites in South Carolina opposed public education for African Americans and Whites in North Carolina were strongly against taxation for African American schools while Georgia allowed school boards to exempt African American children from the compulsory school attendance law that was passed in 1916.[5]

A challenge for public school systems in Northern cities, including in Philadelphia, were the large numbers of African American families that migrated from the South primarily from 1915 to 1930. Vincent Franklin reports that by 1920, the number of African Americans in Philadelphia grew 58.9% to 134,000 people in ten years and by 1930 the number of African Americans had grown by 63.5% to over 200,000 people.[6] Major cities in the Midwest also saw significant increases in the growth of the African American population during the first few decades of the twentieth century or what many called the “Migrant Crisis.” Between 1910 and 1920, the city of Chicago saw a sharp increase in its African American population by 148% or 124,000 people, Detroit’s African American population grew by 35,000 or 611% and the African American population in Cleveland grew 308% or 26,000 people.[7] The migration of large numbers of African Americans to northern cities also had an impact in Southern states and the public funding of schools for African Americans in the South. Many White landowners in the South were concerned with the loss of cash tenants, share-croppers, and laborers who were migrating north and returned public tax funds in order to build rural schools in the hope that many African Americans would consider staying in the South.[8] James Anderson reports that nearly half of the African American’s in Georgia left the state during the 1920’s.[9] To be sure, the considerable demographic shifts witnessed in the urban cities of the North and in the Southern states from the early 1900’s to the 1930’s had a significant impact on the schooling of African Americans during this time period.

The decade preceding the Brown v. Board decision continued to be a time of difficulty for African Americans in the United States. Civil rights abuses were part of the every day life of African Americans. This post-World War II time period for African Americans, despite all of the discriminatory practices they encountered, was also one of hope. In 1947, President Harry Truman was keen on passing civil rights legislation and he commissioned the Congressional Committee on Civil Rights to provide the United States with a public agenda for change.[10] The Committee report outlined the discrimination that African Americans experienced all across the United States. The Committee reported that the legal school segregation found in seventeen states and the District of Columbia was inappropriate and unfair and stated “whatever test is used-expenditure per pupil, teachers’ salaries, the number of pupils per teacher, transportation of students, adequacy of school buildings and educational equipment, length of school term, extent of curriculum-Negro students are invariably at a disadvantage.”[11] Of the 48 states that made up the United States at the time of the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, seventeen states and the District of Columbia required school segregation, four states permitted school segregation to a certain degree, sixteen states prohibited school segregation and eleven states had no specific laws on school segregation.[12] The history of African American struggles for educational equality dating back to the Roberts v. The City of Boston case in 1849 to the various school segregation laws of the 48 states of the Union in 1954 laid the groundwork for Oliver Brown et al.[13] to have their case heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. The time period leading up to the Brown v. Board decision and the years immediately following the case were challenging times in American education. While desegregation efforts were important for African American school children and their families this effort was part of a much larger issue in American society, that being the Civil Rights Movement.

[1] Franklin, V.P. The Education of Black Philadelphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 34.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, p. 41-48.
[4] Anderson, J.D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 101.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, p. 60-61.
[7] Dougherty, J. More than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 52.
[8] Anderson, 159.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ravitch, D. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983), 21.
[11] Cited in Ravitch, p. 22 from To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947).
[12] Data obtained from analysis of a map showing the status of school segregation law prior to the Brown v. Board case that is presented in Dougherty, 37.
[13] Other legal case included with the Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case included: Briggs v. Elliott (South Carolina), Bolling v. Sharpe (Washington, D.C.), Belton v. Gebhart (Delaware), and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia).

New practice resources on NAFSA Teaching, Learning and Scholarship, Research/Scholarship network

The new practice resources include links to:

1) Internet Resources for Higher Education Outcomes Assessment, NC State University
2) Information on the Forum on Education Abroad publication "The Guide to Outcomes Assessment in Education Abroad" edited by Mell Bolen
3) The Research Center of CIEE: The Council on International Educational Exchange
4) Research on Education Abroad Database (READ) of the Forum on Education Abroad
5) New journals added to the "Research-based Publications on International Education" practice resource

I hope you find some of these new resources to be of interest and helpful to your work and research. You can access the NAFSA TLS RS network here <www.nafsa.org/RSnetwork>

Postmodern Discourse

This is the seventh and final post where I will briefly review the works of comparative education scholars and place them along an epistemological spectrum. For this post, I’m looking at postmodern discourse.

Rust, V.D. 1991. “Postmodernism and its Comparative Education Implications,” Comparative Education Review 35, no. 2: 610-626.

Postmodern discourse is another “fringe epistemology” on Epstein’s epistemological spectrum. During his presidential address to the Comparative and International Education Society, Rust argued that “postmodernism should be a central concept in our comparative education discourse.”[1] Rust confesses that his “own orientation is a tempered acceptance of the notion of an era shift. Of course, the world is so pluralistic that a variety of conditions and orientations will always exist simultaneously; however, the pervasive ideology of modernism and modernity has been ruptured and is undergoing radical reconstruction.”[2] There are two passages by Rust that stand out in his argument for a postmodern discourse theoretical position. First, he states that “the postmodern world is decentered, constantly changing, without the chains and conventions of modern society. Its proponents believe the story of pluralistic contemporary society is being written by a number of narratives and reject philosophical systems of thought that provide some universal standard.” [3] In relation to Vandra Masemann’s call “for the legitimacy of varied ways of knowing”, Rust argues that “postmodernists would support that claim and reject any claim that one way of knowing is the only legitimate way. Rather, they would say our task is to determine which approach to knowing is appropriate to specific interests and needs rather than argue some universal application and validity, which ends up totalizing and confining in its ultimate effect.”[4] Rust’s extreme relativistic/ideographic approach to comparative education in his work finds a home in postmodern discourse with other comparative education scholars such as Rolland Paulston, Martin Liebman, Peter Ninnes and Gregory Burnett.

In conclusion to these series of posts, comparative education scholars approach their scholarship from a wide variety of epistemological viewpoints. This, in my opinion, is necessary in all academic scholarship and something that is very important in all fields of academia. An interesting question that surfaces from time to time in the field is the impact that comparative education research has on policy. An interesting perspective to this question was put forward by Keith Watson when he wrote that “the widely held criticisms that comparative education is too fragmented and irrelevant for policy makers is harder to refute…there are many reasons for this: personality clashes, arguments over terminology, too much emphasis on methodology and not enough on substance.”[5] My posts do not attempt to answer the question of comparative education’s impact on educational policy. I present Watson’s position only to provide an interesting perspective on the different epistemological positions that comparativists bring to the table.

[1] Rust, V.D. “Postmodernism and its Comparative Education Implications,” (Comparative Education Review 35, no. 2, 1991), 610.
[2] Ibid, 611-612.
[3] Ibid, 616.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Keith Watson, “Comparative Educational Research: The Need for Reconceptualisation and Fresh Insights,” Compare 29, no. 3, (1999): 237.

Building a Campus Network to Advise Undergraduate Fulbright Applicants

For the past eight years I have served as the Fulbright Program Adviser at the University of Chicago. For this post, I will focus on how we have built a network across campus to not only better promote the program but, more importantly, to advise undergraduates students on their applications and guide them through the process. Each spring quarter we hold two information sessions about the program specifically for third- and fourth-year undergraduate students. I promote these information sessions in a variety of ways. First, I take the traditional approach of posting flyers across campus. Second, I send a personal message to each and every faculty/academic staff member who serves as the undergraduate program chair of our 50+ majors and minors asking them to send information about the information sessions to their students. Third, I work with our undergraduate academic advising staff and ask them to inform all of their third- and fourth-year students. Fourth, I have access to a university database where I can target specific students and I e-mail every third- and fourth-year student in the College with a grade point average of 3.0 and above announcing the information sessions.

In addition to the spring information sessions we hold for the third- and fourth-year students we also hold general scholarship information sessions specifically tailored for second-year students. These information sessions are held during autumn and winter quarters and the goals of these sessions are to not only inform students of the various scholarship/fellowship opportunities that are available both during their undergraduate studies and post-graduation but also to educate them on what makes a competitive application, establishing relationships with faculty and planning for course and activities that will be an asset to future research and/or studies abroad. We discuss scholarships/fellowships such as the Fulbright, Rhodes, Marshall, Boren and Gilman as well as many other funding opportunities. We encourage students to take electives such as statistics, ethnographic research methods, or courses in area studies that will give them a strong foundation from which to build upon during their research abroad. We have found that there is very strong interest by our second-year students in these information meetings and we are now planning to hold meetings for our first-year students.

Finally, we have created a network of faculty and other academic staff members who have agreed to meet with prospective applicants to discuss their research interests and to go give advice and direction on how to put together the most competitive application. We have found this process to especially helpful for our students as they prepare their applications.

New Univ. of Maryland Diversity & Study Abroad Website

Institutions wanting to develop web resources to support and increase the diversity of their study abroad population may want to model their efforts after a new diversity and study abroad website at the University of Maryland. I find this to be a very comprehensive resource. You can view UM’s announcement of the new website here: http://www.umd.edu/fyi/index.cfm?id=18761

ResearchGATE Scientific Network

I recently became aware of this new and interesting website created to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing between researchers across the globe. ResearchGATE was started in May 2008 and is free of charge. You can access ResearchGATE here: https://www.researchgate.net/

Illinois Congressman Asks State Dept. to Screen 3 Palestinian Fulbright Recipients

Illinois Congressman Mark Kirk (member of the Lincoln Commission) has asked the United States Department of State to screen the 3 Fulbright recipients from Gaza. Representative Kirk is concerned about the student’s affiliation with the Islamic University in Gaza which several media outlets report is affiliated with or supported by Hamas. According to The New York Sun today, Representative Kirk wants these Fulbright recipients “to be vetted through the U.S. Agency for International Development's Terrorist Screening Center, a new vetting process created to keep development aid out of the hands of terrorists.”

In separate but related news, the Office of Inspector General of the United States Agency for International Development conducted an audit of USAID/West Bank and Gaza’s assistance to Al-Quds University, the Islamic University in Gaza, and American Near East Refugee Aid and released its report (Report No. 6-294-08-002-P) on December 10, 2007. The audit determined that USAID/West Bank and Gaza “did not always follow applicable Federal laws, regulations, or ISAID policies when providing assistance to Al-Quds University, the Islamic University in Gaza, and American Near East Refugee Aid.” You can access the Inspector General’s report here: www.usaid.gov/oig/public/fy08rpts/6-294-08-002-p.pdf.