This essay examines parental opinion on homework in the first half of the 20th Century, when opposition to homework was widespread, in order to provide perspective on emerging controversies regarding homework, and to shed new light on the history of schooling and the family. The essay also raises methodological difficulties in trying to assess parental opinion on any educational topic, past or present.

The views of George I. Sanchez are examined to determine what an earlier generation of Hispanic-American educators thought about bilingual education. Sanchez stressed integrating Spanish-speaking children into Anglo classrooms and downplayed the need for a new pedagogy, such as bilingual instruction.

This essay is a critical overview of the ideology, politics, and implications of recent federal initiatives in parent education.

This article focuses on the creation of the nation's premier reformatory, the New York House of Refuge, in 1825. That refuge officials looked equally to prisons and public schools as organizational models, or at least as reference points to help explain their objectives, is not surprising. For the institution owed much to two turn-of-the-century reform movements in education and penology which had reached critical stages about the same time that a separate facility for delinquents was seriously proposed.