The document discusses national school reform during the early Cold War era in the United States. It describes the political and economic context of the postwar period including the fear of communist expansion. Key figures like James Conant advocated for meritocratic education policies to identify and educate talented students to serve in positions of leadership and authority. This led to the rise of standardized testing and tracking students into academic or vocational programs. The National Defense Education Act provided funding to improve math and science education after the Soviet launch of Sputnik raised concerns about U.S. competitiveness. Overall the document analyzes how Cold War fears and ideologies shaped education policies in this era.

1. National School Reform: The Early Cold War EraEDU 550 by Dr. Paul A. Rodríguez

2. Analytic Framework The Early Cold War Era

4. U.S. mobilization for World War II ended the great depression.

5. The war forced the application of Keynesian principles of deficit spending that Roosevelt’s New Deal had never fully employed.

7. They believed that Soviet insurgents would create a political climate antithetical to economic growth and that this would threaten American well-being.

8. American government officials devised two key policies to slow the Soviet juggernaut.

10. U. S. support for French aid to the South Vietnamese in their civil war with North Vietnam set in motion a series of events that intimately led to the U. S. war in Vietnam.

11. In the Doctrine of First Use, the U. S. declared its prerogative to initiate nuclear bombing whenever enemy forces, whether nuclear or conventional, threatened American military installations.

12. The U. S. stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons at great cost to the taxpayers.

13. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society all accused government agencies of harboring communists.

14. Hearings were held and blacklists were complied to rid the U. S. of “reds” and “pinkos.”

15. Although fears of communist infiltration lessened considerably after the mid-1050s, for the next two decades American foreign policy continued to be based on the ideological split between the two superpowers and the premise that the Soviets were intent on spreading communism around the globe.

17. The Supreme Court declared segregated schools inherently unequal in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.

20. The provisional freedom as increasingly tied to nationalism.

21. Modern liberals posited a strong central government as the only real route to freedom, for only “big government” was strong enough to regulate monopolies, big banking, labor organizers, poverty and other internal threats to the freedom of the common person.

22. Freedom became increasingly identified with “our” way of life, while “theirs” was unfree.

23. Socialism was increasingly characterized as a “foreign” system of thought, totalitarian and anti-American.

26. T “Conant settled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

27. Educational Testing Service (ETS) emerged.

29. The GI Bill of Rights indicated America’s unwillingness to accept the selective principle of education, that Conant regarded as essential in a free and fluid society.

31. The Educational Policy Commission's Education for All American Youth

32. A sociological study, Who Shall Be Educated?

34. National Defense Education Act, of 1958.

35. This allocated millions of dollars for upgrading the teaching of science and math and improving procedures for identifying and educating gifted students.