After teaching shifted from men's to women's work in the second half of the nineteenth century, women pushed into newly created realms of educational leadership. They earned appointments to principalships and, buoyed by the growing woman's suffrage movement, they began winning elected superintendencies and school board positions. However, fearing that women might overtake men in running the schools, a multifaceted backlash movement emerged to rein in women's advancements. A tightly organized national network of influential male educators sought to centralize power, standardize and mechanize practices, and otherwise push women out of leadership positions while simultaneously making teaching an increasingly servile profession. Ella Flagg Young, Chicago's superintendent of schools who had long advocated for expanding women's public service, staunchly resisted this disempowerment of teachers. Instead, through her leadership, she vividly illustrated how schools might work if freedom, individuality, and community were truly honored.

The nineteenth-century debate about the role of the US Bureau of Education was marked by negotiations between the civic republican language of antebellum common school advocacy and a social scientific language of educational professionalism. To advance this argument, this essay traces how members of Congress defined, criticized, and delimited the Bureau's institutional role between 1865 and 1872. First, avoiding calls for direct federal intervention, the Bureau's initial congressional advocates defined the Bureau as a vehicle for indirect influence on the states through the use of data and statistics. Second, after the Bureau's founding, its legislative critics used rhetoric to chastise and question both the Bureau's comprehensive vision and power. Finally, beginning with Commissioner John Eaton's tenure in 1870, the Bureau's functions were narrowed. Due to Eaton's reimagining of the Commissioner role, further congressional critique, and failed efforts to expand Bureau authority, the Bureau eventually became a government-sanctioned purveyor of social scientific expertise—one with little direct authority to intervene in education.

This paper examines Australia's history of uniformed schooling as mediated by its leading mass-market magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly. This magazine was a significant cultural agent that served as an authority on everything from fashion to schooling, capitalizing on the matter of school dress by running advertisements for school uniforms, printing articles and letters on school wear, and featuring attractive images of uniformed schoolchildren. This paper argues that the Weekly used this content to provide textual and visual reinforcement for a powerful cultural trope of the proper, desirable, happy, and modern Australian schoolchild as uniformed. In doing so, it represented the normative school mother as working behind the scenes to produce or procure the school uniform as well as to arrange and manage the uniformed child. We contend that the magazine portrayed this work as part of a project to draw the mother into a respectable and ostensibly “Australian” community.

This essay explores the experiences and debates surrounding preparatory schools for Chinese students in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. These institutions attempted to expand educational opportunities for poorer Chinese students who might otherwise not have had a chance to go to school; however, most of these children also had families in the United States, who supported their children's education but also needed their help to sustain their families. American laws banned most forms of Chinese immigration, and families had to carefully maneuver through federal policies to enter the country as students, often turning to European Americans-who were invested in expanding U.S. involvement in China-for support. Because of anti-Chinese sentiments, consular and immigration authorities questioned these programs, making them difficult to sustain. Ultimately, the interactions between immigration and consular officials, education boosters, and Chinese students were integral to the development of preparatory schools for other international students in the twentieth century.