Ansley T. Erickson
· Associate Professor of History and Education PolicyVerifiedColumbia University · Curriculum & Teaching
Active 2010–2023
About
Ansley T. Erickson is an Assistant Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who received the Bancroft Dissertation Award from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for her outstanding dissertation in American History. Her dissertation, titled “Schooling the Metropolis: Educational Inequality Made and Remade, Nashville, TN, 1945-1985,” explores how the pursuit of economic growth fostered educational inequality in Nashville, even as the district achieved relative success at desegregation. Erickson's research links desegregation efforts to changes in the city's economy and geography, providing new insights into the accomplishments and limitations of desegregation. She examines how schools contributed to shifts in metropolitan space during the post-World War II decades, including the redistribution of students during court-ordered desegregation, which often favored suburban, white, middle-class students over urban, black, poorer residents. Her work also investigates how economic growth influenced curriculum development and tracking patterns that separated students by race and class within desegregating schools. Prior to her appointment at Teachers College, Erickson taught at Syracuse University, and her research has been published in the Journal of Urban History.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Humanities
- Sociology
- History
- Public administration
- Economic growth
- Mathematics
- Positive economics
- Economics
- Cartography
- Psychology
- Epistemology
- Geography
- Art
- Philosophy
- Archaeology
- Law
Selected publications
History of Education Quarterly · 2023-11-01
article1st authorCorrespondingAn abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Desegregation and Its Discontents
Vanderbilt University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- Public administration
History of Education Quarterly · 2020 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Positive economics
In Carl Kaestle's 1992 essay “Standards of Evidence,” generalization is how we know when we know. Kaestle sketches a model of increasing certainty in historical claims as they are developed and refined at increasing scales of research, from local to international. A historical claim might originate in the study of a particular place or case, but to know that the claims were true, the historian needed to move from the microlevel view to a more macro one, perhaps at the national rather than local level. Once tested and refined through comparison with other cases, possibly smoothing some of the rougher edges in the process, the claim could then be transferred beyond national borders. When a historical claim is polished enough to fit other contexts, we know it is true. Kaestle illustrates this increasing certainty through increasing scale with reference to the history of literacy and, more specifically, to scholarship on how Western European and US industrialization shaped literacy rates. Bringing studies from various locales into connection, and then comparing these cases with the national context, Kaestle summarizes that it was the commercial processes of urbanization, rather than industrialization itself, that helped produce rising literacy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Generalization at greater scale becomes not only the means through which to claim the value of historical work, but the basis for constructing historical knowledge in the first place.
2020
- Humanities
- Psychology
- Humanities
Chapter Two: Desegregation from Tokenism to Moderation
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorrespondingChapter Three: The Curricular Organization of Segregated Schooling
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorrespondingChapter Six: Busing Resisted and Transformed
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorrespondingChapter One: Metropolitan Visions of Segregation and Growth
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorrespondingColumbia University Press eBooks · 2019-12-05
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingOral History and Interview Participants
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Ernest Morrell
- 3 shared
Andrew R. Highsmith
University of California, Irvine
- 1 shared
Christopher Saldaña
Education
Ph.D., History
Columbia University
B.A., Educational Studies and Political Science
Brown University
Awards & honors
- Bancroft Dissertation Prize (Columbia University)
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