Challenging the "Educationists": The Ford Foundation and the Ideological Roots of Post-War Teacher Education Reform

FAIN: FT-56370-08

Bethany Lynn Rogers
CUNY Research Foundation, College of Staten Island (Staten Island, NY 10314-6609)

This study examines the ideological roots of teacher education reform and innovation as developed by the Ford Foundation and its Fund for the Advancement of Education (FAE) in the 1950s and early 1960s. While the FAE's innovations did not replace the dominant form of teacher training at the time, the ideas behind them underwrote the next half century's worth of challenges to university-based teacher education. Though the FAE's ideas played out in different ways over time, a common aim was divesting authority from teacher educators and awarding greater power over teacher preparation to the public, academic scholars, and teachers themselves. Focusing on the FAE's ideas and efforts, this study will attend to the ways they were shaped by larger historical developments as well as the ways in which the FAE's innovations influenced educational opportunity, access, and equity in the post-war period.