James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.

The book provides a comprehensive assessment of current African-American education policy and its politics.

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

Focuses on the politics surrounding the pursuit of equality of education in America for African Americans. Examines desegregation from its original intent of quality schooling for African Americans to its current incarnation of striving for racial balance in schools. Discusses the growing movement among African American families and communities to obtain quality schooling for their children in safe, anti-racist, culturally affirming, but segregated environments. This well-researched, in-depth look at the quality of schooling for African American students presents the views of two dozen scholars. They share their remarkable experiences and their interpretations of how desegregation has changed the content of education for the majority of African Americans.

Education as Freedom is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, a dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. Education as Freedom is a long awaited text that historicizes the current racial achievement gap as well as illuminates the myriad of African American voices and actions to define the purpose of education and to push the limits of the democratic experiment in the United States.

In the years immediately following the Civil War--the formative years for an emerging society of freed African Americans in Mississippi--there was much debate over the general purpose of black schools and who would control them. From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse is the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi's politics and policies of postwar racial education. The primary debate centered on whether schools for African Americans (mostly freedpeople) should seek to develop blacks as citizens, train them to be free but subordinate laborers, or produce some other outcome. African Americans envisioned schools established by and for themselves as a primary means of achieving independence, equality, political empowerment, and some degree of social and economic mobility--in essence, full citizenship. Most northerners assisting freedpeople regarded such expectations as unrealistic and expected African Americans to labor under contract for those who had previously enslaved them and their families. Meanwhile, many white Mississippians objected to any educational opportunities for the former slaves. Christopher Span finds that newly freed slaves made heroic efforts to participate in their own education, but too often the schooling was used to control and redirect the aspirations of the newly freed.

The Encyclopedia of African American Education covers educational institutions at every level, from preschool through graduate and professional training, with special attention to historically black and predominantly black colleges and universities. Other entries cover individuals, organizations, associations, and publications that have had a significant impact on African American education. The Encyclopedia also presents information on public policy affecting the education of African Americans, including both court decisions and legislation. It includes a discussion of curriculum, concepts, theories, and alternative models of education, and addresses the topics of gender and sexual orientation, religion, and the media. The Encyclopedia also includes a Reader's Guide, provided to help readers find entries on related topics. It classifies entries in sixteen categories: " Alternative Educational Models " Associations and Organizations " Biographies " Collegiate Education " Curriculum " Economics " Gender " Graduate and Professional Education " Historically Black Colleges and Universities " Legal Cases " Pre-Collegiate Education " Psychology and Human Development " Public Policy " Publications " Religious Institutions " Segregation/Desegregation. Some entries appear in more than one category. This two-volume reference work will be an invaluable resource not only for educators and students but for all readers who seek an understanding of African American education both historically and in the 21st century.