Horace Mann Bond was an early twentieth century scholar and a college administrator who focused on higher education for African Americans. His Negro Education in Alabama won Brown University’s Susan Colver Rosenberger Book Prize in 1937 and was praised as a landmark by W. E. B. Dubois in American Historical Review and by scholars in journals such as Journal of Negro Education and the Journal of Southern History. A seminal and wide-ranging work that encompasses not only education per se but a keen analysis of the African American experience of Reconstruction and the following decades, Negro Education in Alabama illuminates the social and educational conditions of its period. Observers of contemporary education can quickly perceive in Bond’s account the roots of many of today’s educational challenges.
The 2020 edition of the Alabama Standards for Early Learning and Development (ASELD) has been developed to support all professionals who interact with young children, birth to age 5. The Standards have been aligned with both national and state program standards and program requirements so that adults who work directly with children in infant-toddler or preschool classrooms, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, child care facilities, home visiting programs, or special education settings will be able to use the document to guide their interactions and instructional practices. Instructors in higher education, high school and career and technical programs are encouraged to introduce pre-service students to the standards through their coursework. Professional development specialists and technical assistance specialists who reference the standards within their training and coaching empower professionals' understanding and use of the ASELDs to cultivate high quality early learning programs. Professionals who write special education plans can use them to specify children's goals. In short, the ASELDs offer one single set of expectations for Alabama's young children that extend across all program types.The ASELDs follow a unique format that includes learning progressions or indicators for children's learning, birth to age 5. Each double page provides a sequence of development for specific strands within the ASELDs' domains.The ASLEDs are organized into 4 sections with 8 domains of learning for children and a 9th domain that describes the ways in which professionals and families work together to support children's learning. The eight children's domains portray a comprehensive view of children's learning and are further supplemented through the additional domain of Family and Community Engagement.Each of the eight learning domain segments in the ASELDs has 4 key parts: 1) a domain introductory page; 2) the learning progressions, birth to 5 years or 60 months; 3) recommendations for adaptations and accommodations to support children with unique needs; and 4) foundational practices for professionals. These pages work together to guide all professionals, regardless of the early learning setting, in the design and use of age, culturally, and linguistically appropriate learning standards for all young children, birth to age 5.
The Grammar of School Discipline examines how seemingly discrete school discipline policies and practices constitute a particular grammar: Removal, Resistance and Reform. Weaving numeric data with portraits of students and school practitioners, the authors detail a nuanced landscape of school discipline in Alabama and its anti-Black foundations. The removal of Black students can be traced to the antebellum construction of Blackness as criminal, deviant, and deserving of punishment. A focus on resistance centers the agency that students and practitioners exercise despite anti-Black removal. An exploration of specific reform efforts emphasizes that even the most well-intentioned and well-organized reforms are limited when the removal of students remains an option for practitioners. The authors end with an appeal to educational stakeholders to repair the harms that these anti-Black policies and practices inflict on students and communities, and thus move towards repairing the damage that white supremacy inflicts on everyone’s humanity.
After examining origins, Flynt (Southern history, Auburn U.) studies farmers, textile workers, coal miners, and timber workers in depth and discusses family structure, folk culture, the politics of poor whites, and their attempts to resolve problems through labor unions and political movements. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In Schooling in the Antebellum South, Sarah L. Hyde analyzes educational development in the Gulf South before the Civil War, not only revealing a thriving private and public education system, but also offering insight into the worldview and aspirations of the people inhabiting the region. While historians have tended to emphasize that much of the antebellum South had no public school system and offered education only to elites in private institutions, Hyde’s work suggests a different pattern of development in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where citizens actually worked to extend schooling across the region. As a result, students learned in a variety of settings—in their own homes with a family member or hired tutor, at private or parochial schools, and in public free schools. Regardless of the venue, Hyde shows that the ubiquity of learning in the region proves how highly southerners valued education. As early as the 1820s and 1830s, legislators in these states sought to increase access to education for less wealthy residents through financial assistance to private schools. Urban governments in the region were the first to acquiesce to voters’ demands, establishing public schools in New Orleans, Natchez, and Mobile. The success of these schools led residents in rural areas to lobby their local legislatures for similar opportunities. Despite an economic downturn in the late 1830s that limited legislative appropriations for education, the economic recovery of the 1840s ushered in a new era of educational progress. The return of prosperity, Hyde suggests, coincided with the maturation of Jacksonian democracy—a political philosophy that led southerners to demand access to privileges formerly reserved for the elite, including schooling. Hyde explains that while Jacksonian ideology inspired voters to lobby for schools, the value southerners placed on learning was rooted in republicanism: they believed a representative democracy needed an educated populace to survive. Consequently, by 1860 all three states had established statewide public school systems. Schooling in the Antebellum South successfully challenges the conventional wisdom that an elitist educational system prevailed in the South and adds historical depth to an understanding of the value placed on public schooling in the region.
