The unions’ own records
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in their own words: annual proceedings, journals, bulletins, committee reports and press releases. The NEA holds 24 series, 1869–1963, among them every annual volume from 1890 to 1940 except 1931. The AFT and other teachers’ unions hold 5 series, 1903–1963, including 198 issues of the AFT’s magazine, The American Teacher. The Chicago Teachers’ Federation helped found the AFT in 1916 as its Local 1.
Online now
National Education Association
24 series, 800 items, 126,267 scanned pages, 1869–1963.
Proceedings, yearbooks and indexes
Journals, bulletins and news
Commissions, committees and research
NEA annual proceedings: 50 of the 51 years, 1890–1940, about 27.0 million words of text. 1906: the Fiftieth Anniversary Volume, 1857–1906 (vol. 44A); no meeting was held that year, and this volume serves as the 1906 volume.
Not yet online
NEA proceedings for 1931 and after 1940
1931: no open scan exists. We treat the volume as public domain, and we will add it as soon as we can obtain a scan. Later volumes will join the same series as open copies are found and their rights are reviewed.
Online now
American Federation of Teachers and other teachers’ unions
5 series, 208 items, 7,139 scanned pages, 1903–1963.
American Federation of Teachers
Online now
1 series, 1 item, 184 scanned pages, 1916.
Government records
What government wrote down and enacted while the public school system took shape. The annual reports of the U.S. Commissioner of Education run from Henry Barnard’s first report of 1867–68 to fiscal year 1968, with school statistics for every state. The Blaine collection holds the 1875–76 Congressional votes on the Blaine amendment, the state conventions that wrote its language into state constitutions, the state laws that first made attendance compulsory, Oregon’s 1922 public-school law and the Supreme Court cases that followed.
Online now
Government records
2 series, 152 reports and 103 documents, plus 5 alternate copies, 175,355 scanned pages, 1852–1969.
U.S. Commissioner of Education
Blaine amendments and compulsory schooling
Topics & features
Guided readings that pull documents from across the archive on a single subject. Every entry is checked against an image of the printed page, cited to its printed page number and linked to the scan, so a reader can check each claim against the source. The first, on the NEA, the AFT and eugenics from 1901 to 1938, has a timeline, people, critical voices and stated limits.
Topic page
NEA and AFT records on eugenics, 1901–1938: papers, the NEA Committee on Racial Well-Being, and critical voices, each cited to the printed page.
Topic guide
25 passages on eugenics in the Commissioner of Education’s reports and the NEA’s annual proceedings, 1909–1950. Each one opens the scan at the printed page, so the record speaks for itself.
Topic guide
A reading guide to the federal and state records of the Blaine amendments and compulsory schooling: the 1875–76 votes in Congress, the state conventions, the first compulsory attendance laws and Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
All topic guides
Why we built this archive
American public schooling was built in law and argued for in print, and the record of how it happened is scattered. Between 1852 and 1918, the states passed the laws that first made school attendance compulsory. In 1875 President Ulysses S. Grant asked Congress for an amendment on schools and religious sects. The House passed the Blaine amendment 180 to 7 in 1876. In the Senate the vote was 28 to 16, short of the two-thirds an amendment needs. State constitutional conventions then wrote its language into state constitutions. In 1922 Oregon voters passed a law requiring every child to attend a public school. The Supreme Court struck it down three years later. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” the Court wrote in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).
Through the same decades, the teachers’ organizations made the case for the system in their own meetings and journals. The NEA’s committees set out what high schools should teach, from the Committee of Ten report of 1893 to the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. The AFT was formed in Chicago in 1916. Year by year, the U.S. Commissioner of Education counted the schools and reported on them.
Scholars cite these volumes, but few readers see them whole. Copies sit in different libraries and digital collections, under shifting titles, with gaps and mislabeled years. The Educational Freedom Institute gathered them into one place, with one page per volume, so anyone can read what was said and enacted and check what others say was said.
EFI advocates for education freedom. Families still live inside the system these documents built, and anyone who wants to change it should be able to read how it was made. The archive is open to anyone, of any view. The volumes themselves are the record.
