Power, Protests, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City by Melissa F. Weiner

Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education: A Historiographical Review, 1880–1957

“…For example, Zimmerman (2002) demonstrated how many immigrant groups supported a traditional, patriotic, assimilationist brand of US history, so long as it included their own ethnic heroes, and Mirel's (2010) study of foreign language newspapers and educational materials found that immigrants balanced their desire to retain the cultural attributes of their native country with a desire to assimilate, an outlook Mirel dubbed patriotic pluralism. Weiner (2010) demonstrated how the Jewish community in New York City successfully deflected the segregationist curriculum of Gary, Indiana, that would have displaced the academic curriculum with a more vocationally oriented one. Thus, certain immigrant groups rejected some of the pedagogically progressive ideas that were designed to assimilate them, whereas others actively balanced desires for cultural assimilation with anti-racism (see Olneck, 2008).…”