This study has three primary, interrelated themes. First, this thesis will show that creating native Christian leadership was a fundamental goal of the Presbyterians who ran the Tucson Indian Training School (1888-1960). Second it will be shown that this pursuit by the Presbyterians, when combined with the motivations and goals of the students and their families, often times expressed itself in Escuela students who were adept at cooperation and cultural brokering. Finally this thesis will address the fundamental difference between federal Indian schools and mission schools to show that a goal of creating Christian leaders was more easily achieved in the mission school environment after the turn of the 20th century. Primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews with Tucson Indian School alumni are used to place this particular Indian boarding school in historical, cultural and personal perspective.

<p>Effective teacher training and preparation is widely recognized as key in raising student achievement. This historical study examined the influence of the normal school movement, one of the first concrete approaches to the preparation and training of public school teachers in the nineteenth century in the United States. Specifically, this study investigated the influence of the vision of teaching and learning of Nicholas Tillinghast, the first principal of Bridgewater State Normal School between 1840 and 1853, and of the &ldquo;sons of Bridgewater,&rdquo; the students of Tillinghast who became normal school principals across the United States. Primary source and archived documents such as personal correspondence, diaries, conference records, and newsletters, and photographs were used to conduct this study. As a result of this study, normal schools, which were regionally impacted as they were established across the United States, emerged as an unrecognized, yet significant factor in the evolution of teacher training programs. The work of Nicholas Tillinghast and the sons of Bridgewater during the nineteenth century made a significant impact on the spread and evolution of the normal school movement and played an important role in the professionalization of teaching. </p>

<p> Understanding the role of the public school teacher and how that role has changed over recent history is critical to comprehending the nature of teaching and teachers in American schools. This 2-phase, hypothesis-generating study was undertaken to develop a deeper understanding of the role of the teacher and, in particular, the ways that role has remained stable or changed across the historical process. It explored how the role of the teacher is construed by current, experienced teachers through personal construct systems and through their shared enactments of a social construct system proposed as an extension to personal construct theory. Departing from the traditional disciplinary approaches that have characterized much of the previous research on this topic and which have been limited in scope and method by their associated paradigms, this study adopted an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach that integrated the perspectives of several disciplines and professional fields. It employed the repertory grid technique (RGT) from personal construct theory to elicit personal constructs from 16 experienced teachers in intensive RGT interviews to identify shared constructs. Those shared constructs were then employed as an inferred social construct system in an anonymous online survey of experienced practicing teachers (<i>n</i> = 258) to identify the ways in which that social construct system is enacted in construing the role of the teacher across the historical process, envisioning the future role of the teacher, and perceiving the ideal role. Latent class analysis indicated heterogeneity in teachers' views regarding the role and substantial perceived change across recent history, suggesting a lack of role consensus. The study also compared the participants' views of the ideal role of the teacher with their expectations for the future. The findings have implications for future research and for educational theory, policy, and practice.</p><p> <i>Keywords:</i> education history, repertory grid technique, teacher role</p>

"Contrasting Portraits" is the history of Rodriguez, the Texas school finance case from 1968 to 1973. The thesis places the case within three contexts: Texas education, Mexican-American rights, and equal protection. Rodriguez concluded one stream of Supreme Court equal protection analysis and launched another interpretation, reflective of societal change. An analysis of the Rodriguez briefs and court opinions revealed two conflicting ideals: equality and liberty. School finance cases pit constituencies representing these ideals against each other: advocates of equal educational opportunity and advocates of local control, each searching to provide the best education for America's children. The study, which includes a chronology chart of Rodriguez from 1968 to 1995, suggests that school finance reformers should continue to search for new, simple, moderate standards that will both foster equality and liberty and still strengthen all schools.

<p> In 1947, the National Panhellenic Conference invited Jewish sororities to join its ranks, constituting the first time in the organization's history that non-Jewish sororities officially recognized their Jewish counterparts. The period of 1947-1964, I argue, became an era based on a new understanding between the Jewish and non-Jewish sororities, a "Gentlewoman's Agreement." This unspoken arrangement offered Jewish sororities unprecedented status in Greek affairs and a more visible presence within student life on college campuses across the country. However, membership came at a cost; the Jewish women had to ensure that their individual organizations' spoken beliefs conformed to those articulated by the larger, socially conservative non-Jewish groups. This significantly impacted the ways in which they responded to civil rights and the anticommunist hysteria that enveloped American society in these years. In addition to offering an appraisal of the ways in which gender shaped Jewish encounters with American higher education, the postwar Jewish sorority experience serves as a previously unexplored entry point into an examination of the limits of Jewish liberalism and provides a reevaluation of Jewish-Christian relationships during the period scholars have deemed the "Golden Age" of American Jewry </p>

This dissertation considers the significance of the relationship between the federal government and U.S. higher education during World War II and the immediate postwar years, using four Texas universities (the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor University, and the Rice Institute) as case studies. World War II and Cold War contexts of emergency and moral purpose were manifest in America's institutions of higher learning, which channeled their resources to assist a national agenda. Reciprocally, the federal government provided support to universities on unprecedented scales. This partnership was especially relevant to universities in the South, which had historically lagged behind their non-southern peers in research capability, had been more wary of outside influence, and had tended to stress regionalism over---if not at the expense of---nationalism. Yet despite the changes depicted in this study, a preexisting role of the southern university as serving one or more constituencies made the cooperation with the federal government less of a shift in the uses of the university than might otherwise be apparent. Among the topics that this study looks at in some depth are wartime financing of university research, curricular change, campus trainee programs, postwar veteran enrollments, the southern university as a trainer in so-called American values, and the impetus to assert these values. Of special note is the rise of defense-oriented research agendas and securing the revenues to sustain them. The partnership between the university and the federal government institutionalized a new a way of conducting university business that became so normative in just a few years after World War II as to seem irreversible. This dissertation shows the importance of this partnership at a group of universities outside the few high-profile institutions typically invoked as iconic or indicative of war-era federal cooperation. With its regional perspective that considers the southern university's role in advancing defense research, commerce, and technology, such investigation also highlights another basis on which to recognize World War II and the immediate postwar era as transformative in the history of the U.S. South.

As host to the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, Tennessee has an obvious history of conflict over religion and education. By examining white Tennessee Baptists and Methodists in the half-century leading up to the showdown in Dayton, this dissertation argues that Tennessee's 1925 anti-evolution law and the resulting Scopes trial were less about the truth or falsehood of evolution and more about the important question of the place of parents, churches, and religious belief in New South public education. Furthermore, this investigation of religious attitudes about public schools---the laboratories in which many different forces hoped to shape the future of society---reveals a systematic southern evangelical interest in earthly social relations rarely recognized by previous scholars. From an early opposition to state funded public education as necessarily "godless," Tennessee evangelicals gradually acquiesced, assuming that the schools would reflect the values of their predominantly Protestant local communities. Further, they believed that the home, Sunday school, and denominational college would provide any additional moral leavening necessary for their vision of a religious New South. But as Progressive era school reforms increasingly removed control of education from the hands of parents, local school boards, and church communities---all of whom would presumably guarantee a role for religion---evangelicals feared they would lose the schools and the rising generation. Further trepidation over the supposed secularization of higher education---symbolized most poignantly for Tennessee evangelicals in the separation of Vanderbilt University from the southern Methodist church---led many evangelical leaders to advocate a more explicit respect for Christianity in the public schools. The logical extension of this changed attitude appears most clearly in the first decades of the twentieth century with the 1915 enactment of a state-wide law requiring the Bible to be read every morning in the schools and the more infamous Butler law of 1925 that criminalized the teaching of evolution. Symbolic conceptions of the South as a distinctively religious society led many Tennessee evangelicals to break taboos about mixing religion and politics and support the Butler anti-evolution bill.

<p> Collegiate secret societies, as distinguished from Greek-letter fraternal organizations, enjoyed prominence within many American campus communities from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century (Baird, 1879; Hitchcock, 1863; Slosson, 1910; Veysey, 1965). The establishment of these elite groups preceded the maturation of university administrative structures responsible for managing students&rsquo; extracurricular life, as well as the mass democratization of American higher education which occurred after World War II (Rudolph, 1990; Cohen, 2010). The presence of prestigious secret societies is documented and celebrated in college yearbooks and newspapers, reflecting a period in higher education's past when the hegemony of the white, male prevailed in student culture and fostered the composite ideal of the &ldquo;Big Man on Campus&rdquo; (&ldquo;B.M.O.C.&rdquo;) &ndash; the handsome varsity athlete, fraternity man, and club president destined for success in American public life.</p><p> Although collegiate secret societies &ldquo;disappeared&rdquo; on many campuses in the Civil Rights Era amidst accusations of elitism and reactions against established white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms, their legacy lingers into the twenty-first century, along with many unanswered questions about their historical role as a source of student power on campus. Their roots can be traced to the prestigious all-male boarding schools of the Northeastern United States in the late nineteenth century where patterns of upper-class masculine socialization developed. Due to a dearth of historical research on this topic, however, institutional leaders are challenged to understand the origins, purpose, and legacy of this type of student association that still holds meaning for students and other stakeholders in some campus communities. </p><p> This study utilized critical social theory from Bourdieu and Gramsci and the emerging scholarship of whiteness studies to provide an historical analysis of the rise and fall of the Order of Red Friars senior class secret society that was active at Duke University (Trinity College prior to 1924) between 1913 and 1971. Student leaders who manifested the &ldquo;B.M.O.C.&rdquo; ideal were tapped for membership in this group and collaborated with presidents, trustees, administrators, and select faculty on an agenda for student life (Durden, 1993). Utilizing archival research methods and oral history interviews, I was able to explore the involvement of the Order of Red Friars in the administration of student affairs at Duke University for sixty years during the twentieth century. This study provided basic knowledge about the phenomenon of the collegiate secret society and a deeper understanding of the cultural hegemony from which they emerged that continues to influence campus cultures today.</p><p> The history of American higher education literature documents how faculty discarded their <i>in loco parentis</i> responsibilities for managing student behavior as their field professionalized in the late nineteenth century (Rudolph, 1990; Thelin, 2011; Veysey, 1965) and how specialization of the student affairs profession coalesced four decades later in the 1930s (ACE, 1937; Biddix &amp; Schwartz, 2012; Lloyd-Jones, 1934; Schwartz, 2003). Yet, the historical role of students in the campus power structure of the early twentieth century, and particularly their role in sustaining their extracurricular affairs during this period, has been largely unexamined. This study addresses the gap that exists in the history of higher education literature about collegiate culture in the early twentieth century in the South, as well as the phenomenon of the collegiate secret society as a source of power on campus. (Thelin, 1982; Veysey, 1965).</p>

<p> The Emergency Immigrant Education Act of 1984 (EIEA) was passed by the 98th U.S. Congress to provide funds to states to "meet the costs of providing immigrant children supplementary educational services" (Emergency Immigrant Education Act of 1984, Title VI, Sec. 607). This study analyzes the culture, values, and political context in which the Emergency Immigrant Education Act of 1984 was developed, passed, and amended through its most recent reauthorization. EIEA is the only federal legislation that specifically targets new immigrant students. However, EIEA has been largely overlooked by education policy analysts, because new immigrant students are rarely considered as different from limited English proficient (LEP) students. The study employs historical document and content analysis, applying Kingdon's (2011) theoretical framework of agenda-setting and Manna's (2006) concept of borrowing strength to explain EIEA's path to the agenda. In addition, it applies McDonnell and Elmore's (1987) policy framework to EIEA to understand how policymakers sought to realize EIEA's goals, as well as that of Wirt, Mitchell, and Marshall (1988) to identify the cultural and political values revealed in the rhetoric of the legislation. In tracing EIEA's 30-year route, I describe how the nature of the legislation changed from a primarily capacity-building policy to more of an inducement. In addition, the study revealed a change in an egalitarian culture to one that emphasizes quality.</p>

<p> Whether in slavery or in freedom, African Americans understood the important role education played in their quest towards citizenship. As enslaved people, they risked their lives to learn to read and write so they would be prepared when freedom came their way. As free people, they continued to strive for an education that would move them beyond their prescribed station in life. Throughout the history of African Americans, they actively pursued their educational aspirations instead of patiently waiting for them to be granted. </p><p> The research associated with educational agency before and after the Civil War provides some insight into the ways African Americans worked towards liberation. From paying for their own teachers to building their own schools, African Americans are primary players in the narrative of educational advancements in the South. These stories of agency are in direct contrast to the stories of Northern philanthropists being responsible for African American education in the Southern states. Many of these narratives of African American agency are relatively new to the field and don't take into account border states such as Missouri. </p><p> This dissertation looks at African American educational agency in St. Louis, Missouri, a city in a state that was North enough to be in the Union, but South enough to permit slavery. Because of this dichotomy of ideology, Missouri is usually left out of discussions on issues of race and education because it did not neatly fit into a geographical region. Instead of asking how and why Missouri fit into the national narrative of African American education, such questions were merely a footnote, if they were mentioned at all. </p><p> Instead of viewing the duality of Missouri's state identity as something to be ignored, this dissertation views it as a challenge to propel the story of African American educational agency in St. Louis to center stage. Starting with the creation of an African American school board in the 1860s through the construction of Vashon High School in 1927, the story of African American agency is told through the lens of the citizens' councils that were organized to advocate for educational advancement. The men who comprised the citizens' councils worked tirelessly to insure that the educational dreams of former enslaved people were realized generation after generation.</p>