This History of American Education Web Project was originally undertaken as a class assignment by members of an undergraduate Foundations of Education class. Most members of this class took it as juniors or seniors to fulfill a requirement for teacher certification. History of American Education was only one component of the course and most class members had no previous exposure to it.

During two weeks in the Summer of 1996, the class members each chose two topics in American Educational History, researched those topics, and e-mailed brief reports on them to their class instructor, Robert N. Barger. The instructor, whose Ph.D. is in History of Education, edited the student reports, created and formatted these Web pages, and linked the reports to them. Pictures to accompany the reports were compressed into jpeg files by John David Morris, a student in the class, and were also linked to these web pages. Students in subsequent sessions of this class have continued to contribute material to the project.

It should be noted that, during editing, the instructor did not change the content of the reports. Many of the sources which the students used contained a rather triumphalist view of American Educational History and the students' reports tended to reflect that view. The instructor would have liked to add some balance to these triumphalist views, but for a number of reasons he did not.