Abstract The recent surge of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has prompted urgent questions about the past, present, and future of such initiatives. In this HEQ policy dialogue, Kevin Kumashiro and Michael Olneck take up those questions directly, tracing how contemporary assaults—beginning with criticisms of the 1619 Project, critical race theory, and gender studies—have broadened into a campaign aimed at reshaping curriculum, institutions, and civic understanding. They probe the power of narrative and counter-narrative, asking what stories about democracy, citizenship, and education are being advanced and whether progressive educators and advocates have offered compelling alternatives. Drawing on historical examples and political theory, their conversation situates today’s moment within longer struggles over who belongs in the American civic imaginary—from early twentieth-century immigrant restrictionism to competing visions of liberty voiced in nineteenth-century abolitionist and Reconstruction debates. Kumashiro and Olneck consider how new social imaginaries are articulated and disseminated, and what educators might do to cultivate aspirations about the kind of society and schools we aim to build. Michael Olneck is Professor Emeritus in the departments of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Culture Wars in American Education: Past and Present Struggles Over the Symbolic Order , along with numerous articles and book chapters on multiculturalism in American education. Kevin Kumashiro is former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco and cofounder of the national network Education Deans for Justice and Equity; he is the author or editor of ten books on education and justice. HEQ policy dialogues are, by design, intended to promote an informal, free exchange of ideas between scholars. The transcript of this dialogue has been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.
This article critically assesses the popular nineteenth-century universal history textbook Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern, by Alexander Fraser Tytler. Educators on both sides of the Atlantic found the text to be a useful and authoritative source of universal history appropriate for secondary and tertiary students for decades, indicating a shared vision for human history centering Europe as the apotheosis of human civilization. Over time, publishers and educators creatively adapted the work by inserting new research, enhancing coverage of national history, and adding religious content. American educators retrofitted the work to provide an origin story for the United States in which America was the heir to European civilization. The sustained success of Tytler's narrative in the United States demonstrates that Eurocentric world histories have been deeply entwined with American education since the emergence of history as a school subject, providing a civilizational framing that complemented the ideology of American exceptionalism.
This article explores the evolution of school dress code policies in the United States as a critical lens into the workings of public education, authority, and exclusion. Focusing on metropolitan Seattle as a case study, the research traces the shift from informal appearance norms to formalized and punitive dress code enforcement from the 1950s to the present. Rather than functioning as neutral guidelines, dress codes have historically reinforced gendered, racialized, and class-based hierarchies under the guise of order and safety. By situating dress policies within broader political and social transformations-including student rights movements, the rise of zero-tolerance policies, and recent federal investigations-this article demonstrates how dress codes have become tools of gatekeeping that shape access to learning and belonging in public schools. In highlighting moments of resistance and change, this study interrogates the role of schools in regulating identity and offers a historical foundation to understand contemporary inequities in educational discipline and policy.
This paper examines the politics of leveling-down policy in education through the case study of the Israeli reforms in the 1960s, which sought to reduce gaps not only by strengthening disadvantaged students but also by deliberately limiting the avenues available for socially and economically advantaged students to ensure their superiority. This analysis locates the theoretical concept of leveling down within the broader historical context of postwar welfare state construction in Israel and Europe, specifically the expansion of the universal right to education. In so doing, it demonstrates how historical analysis can enrich the theoretical understanding of important political concepts, in this case elaborating on existing discourse previously largely confined to the fields of philosophy, law and sociology. Thus, the article seeks to contribute to the study of the history of education and to contemporary discussions on issues of equality and gaps in the education system.
Public schools in Dearborn, Michigan, experienced increased enrollment of students of Arab descent during the 1980s and 1990s. While social, political, and personal contestation accompanied this demographic shift, the experiences of Arab American students in Dearborn revealed a spectrum of acceptance and rejection of American values among communities of Arab descent. As the presence of Arab-descendant youth increased, public schools shifted from emphasizing assimilation to becoming more accepting of cultural pluralism. This shift developed through a reciprocal process in which Arab-descendant students and their adult allies demanded respect for their multifaceted linguistic, religious, and ethnic identities even as they refashioned conceptions of who they were through acculturation. By illuminating Arab and Muslim students' school experiences amid heightened geopolitical tensions, this article complicates prevailing narratives about Arab American identity formation. Additionally, its examination of youth identity formation in relation to geopolitics, religion, nationality, race, and gender broadens understandings of schooling and identity formation within the United States.
For more than two decades, Virginia's high school history teachers were required to teach Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession alongside every American history textbook. This article argues that Mary Munford and other white, predominantly women educator-activists in Virginia fashioned a project of racial instruction around Virginia's Attitude meant to entrench white supremacy and justify Jim Crow segregation. The textbook, and Lost Cause lessons wrapped in it, was just one part of a larger state system of racial control through history curricula. From the surface, it appears that curricular change and textbook adoption occurred through efforts by men who operated that system-superintendents, Board of Education members who approved textbooks, and leaders of curriculum reviewing committees. While these men often made the decisions that approved curricular guidelines, investigation into the background of curriculum construction reveals that the ideas for new ways to teach history came largely from white women.
After the 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin, student counseling services at the University of Texas (UT) were redesigned around a framework of psychopathology that attempted to prevent future violence through speculative assessments of dangerousness, or the capacity to harm oneself or others. This article explores how UT's leadership and Texas politicians marshaled the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology to restore a sense of safety on campus despite their inability to accurately assess threats of violence. As a result, updates to the counseling center led to an escalation of campus surveillance, increased pressures on students and faculty to conform to UT's values, and a proliferation of guns in the hands of campus police. The cost of attempting to eliminate danger by expanding mental health care at UT was an environment of heightened security and control that had questionable impact on campus safety and student mental health.
This article examines the role of playing Indian in the development of progressive education in the U.S at the turn of the twentieth century. Experiential education provided an important incubator for a particular type of playing Indian, what I dub pedagogical playing Indian. The site of this analysis is the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, overseen by John Dewey from 1896 to 1904. Here Indian play aligned linear historicism and genetic psychology with Dewey's emerging experimental method. The central role of Indian play was epitomized by the school's history curriculum, where instructors encouraged students to imagine themselves as an Indian tribe through use of a sand table. In an ironic historical twist, Estelle Reel, superintendent of Indian Schools, then introduced the sand table and other Deweyan insights into federal Indian schools. This entanglement, effaced by the innocence of play, complicates the legacy of Dewey's educational innovations with the dispossessive logic of Indian schooling.
