Ansley Erickson
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ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Ansley Erickson
@ansleyerickson.bsky.social
4.3K followers 840 following 1.3K posts
US cities & schools, historically.
Books: Making the Unequal Metropolis; Educating Harlem.
Thoughts here represent me, not my employer.
www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/ate11
nyccivilrightshistory.org
Also 🌱 🪴 and 🏊‍♀️ 🏊‍♀️ and I♥️NYC.
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ansleyerickson.bsky.social
The orchid is preparing to make blooms. Growth, regeneration, beauty still lay ahead.
New shoot emerging from an orchid plant - Small green next to big green leaves
November 11, 2025 at 1:17 AM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Good morning from Providence!
Small pleasures fuel the fight.
Blue mug holding a latte with a leaf pattern on the foam. Red and white patterned cloth on the table behind.
November 8, 2025 at 1:43 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
My city on its best day of the year #nycmarathon
(Sound on!)
November 2, 2025 at 10:30 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Totally my favorite marathon sign/family support station
Marathon supporter’s sign, next to a Colombian flag. The black letters on a white poster read “La meta tiene snacks”
November 2, 2025 at 10:25 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Best day in the best city, period.
November 2, 2025 at 5:53 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
New Yorkers, join us! #mayoralcontrol

(and think about mayoral control when you #vote before this panel!)
Flyer for Looking Back to Move Forward: A History of NYC School Governance, on Black, green, red, yellow and blue background. Subtitle is “Learn about school governance before mayoral control from the perspective of those who served under it. Panelists Senator Robert Jackson, educational historians Ansley Erickson and Heather Lewis, and former school board member Margaret Kelly, with moderator Zaakiyah Shaakir Ansari. Nov 10, virtual, 6:30 pm. Register at Bit.ly/nycschoolgov. Logos for Alliance for Quality Education and Education Council Consortium.
October 31, 2025 at 12:15 AM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
I ❤️ NYC.
October 29, 2025 at 1:52 AM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
For some CEO/VC ish Ed Tech event at Columbia my clever and rightly skeptical colleagues made an exhibit of Dead Tech. Learning machines, laptop for every child, School of the Air, and Smartboard mania. Brilliant and necessary rebuttal.
Large graphic printed on a fake wood floor. Words say Hype Cycle and show repeated rises and falls. Altered version of an Archie comic, altered to show the exhibit title, Dead Tech, and then a classroom full of old Ed technology
October 23, 2025 at 12:50 AM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Join this community forum to help NPS and ASALH design a plan for National Historic Landmark designation for Black public secondary schools.

Black Public High Schools 1870-1970 Project, led by Principal Investigator Amber N. Wiley, PhD.
Graphic for Black public hS listening session. October 9 on Zoom, 6 pm CDT Community stakeholders in various parts of the country have expressed interest in National Historic Landmark designation for Black public secondary schools. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) is working with National Park Service (NPS), scholars of the history of Black secondary education, and community advocates for extant schools to develop a strategy for evaluating eligibility for this designation. This listening session, which will be recorded for research purposes only, is one of the three community engagement activities of the Black Public High Schools 1870-1970 Project, led by Principal Investigator Amber N. Wiley, PhD.
October 3, 2025 at 1:48 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
All work and no plays makes me a dull boy.
Playbill for The Other Americans at the Public Theater.
October 2, 2025 at 11:25 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
I found Klein's dismissal of historical perspective especially infuriating because Coates, in insisting on recognizing basic humanity, is calling up the long Black tradition of working from exactly that point. Rather than tolerating otherwise.

Eg, WEB DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 1934
Photo of book page from Black Reconstruction: "It would be only fair to the reader to say frankly in advance that the attitude of any person toward this story will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given envrironment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced. If, however, he regards the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization and whose emancipation and enfranchisement were gestures against nature, then he will need something more than the sort of facts I have set down. But this latter person, I am not trying to convince. I am simply pointing out these two points of view, so obvious to Americans, and then without further ado, I am assuming the truth of the first. In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.
September 29, 2025 at 12:29 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Woke up with the Sanskrit phrase Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu (May all Beings Everywhere be Happy and Free) running through my head.

[Yesp, 1000% cliché 2000s white lady who practiced yoga. And still,]

Thank you universe, this is what I need to hear right now.
New York City woods at sunrise.
September 29, 2025 at 11:20 AM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Phase 4. Clear the remaining pine-and-kudzu woods and some houses to built data centers and the massive power corridors that feed them, encouraged by tax credits that help businesses more than residents.
A data center under construction in the Atlanta area. Massive low grey building under construction on a bare red-clay lot.
September 28, 2025 at 3:15 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Phase 3: Strip value from these suburbs via subprime mortgage lending and foreclosure.
Map of Metro Atlanta counties by racial composition of residents and foreclosures rates in subprime crisis. Clayton County shows as historically black with high foreclosure rates.
September 28, 2025 at 3:15 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Phase 2: Convert ex-farmland to dollars through the making of segregated white suburb/exurbia, 1960s-1990s
Aerial view of suburban tract homes in curving lines against pine trees, with an interstate highway in view.
September 28, 2025 at 3:15 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
There is a Georgia highway I know well, having ridden its ribbons of asphalt as a child, a teen, and a home-for-a-visit adult for half a century.

It’s a history of racial capitalism.

Phase 1: Pull value from the soil through enslaved labor and unfree sharecropping labor, to the mid-20thC
Engraving of enslaved people carrying cotton to gin along a row of cabins. Not exactly sure if my highway ran through cotton fields or not, but the agricultural base and connection to enslavement is clear.
September 28, 2025 at 3:15 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Nick Juravich tonight at Teachers College, on his great new book on “how schools shaped not just individual students through instruction, but also the distribution of employment opportunities, paths for political participation, and the process of community formation in the city.”
#histed #union
Book cover of Para Power: How Professional Labor Changed Education. Black background with fist holding a pencil
September 18, 2025 at 6:43 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
I’ve swum almost 20 kilometers this month. 👏🏼💪🏻🕺🏻🏊‍♀️
Clear blue water in a lap pool with black center-line markers and lane red and blue lane lines.
September 18, 2025 at 5:39 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Found this little guy on the 17 yo’s sketch pad.
Simple watercolor of a bird with long legs. Looking a bit uncertain
September 11, 2025 at 3:08 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Despite [gestures at the whole world, local and global] it has been a glorious summer in this northeast garden.
Pink and fuschia flowers - cosmos, zinnias, asters, and one other spiky one - in a vase. Background is a white kitchen where they are being arranged.
August 31, 2025 at 12:22 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
August = zinnias
Orange, pink, yellow, and fuschia zinnia flowers against a red patterned tablecloth
August 24, 2025 at 7:31 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
A seagull hovered high over a Tesla in an East End parking lot and dropped a rock (or heavy oyster) square into its back glass, shattering it.
Even the seagulls can fight fascism.
Grey-blue flat ocean beneath blue sky with a mottled cloud layer
August 20, 2025 at 12:24 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Honored to have this work in the @aeraedresearch.bsky.social Handbook of Education Policy Research, edited by @janellescott.bsky.social Peter Youngs & Lora Cohen-Vogel.

HMU if you want a pdf. Whole book is a whopper!
History and the Education Policy Imagination Ansley T. Erickson and Leana Cabral Teachers College, Columbia University Esther Cyna University of Versailles, Paris-Saclay Michael Hines Stanford University Matthew Gardner Kelly University of Washington 1800 page softcover book from the side. Bookcover of Handbook of Education Policy Research, 2nd edition, blue with abstract designs.
August 13, 2025 at 1:53 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
Education policy people, this fight over what counts as the nation's history is not just about historians.

With great co-authors (Leana Cabral, @esthercyna.bsky.social, Michael Hines, @mgardnerkelly.bsky.social) I got to write and think about how ideas about the past shape ed policy.

Timely!
This chapter examines varying kinds of interaction between education policy and history to argue that U.S. education policy has long been influenced by false and distorting views of the past. This is true across many areas of education policymaking, but we argue that it is most visible— and perhaps has been most powerful—in policymaking about the education of Black students. U. S. education policy has often been built on ideas of African American lives and communities, and of the nation as a whole, that minimize Black educational striving and accomplishment and trade on pathologizing views of Black families in the past and present. These narratives often ignore the multiple policy mechanisms that help create, undergird, and sustain educational inequality that harms Black students and poor students and their families while allowing resource hoarding by White and wealthier families. It does not have to be this way. Education policy can turn to more factually sound interpretations of the past. We show that recent work in African American educational history and the history of racism in U.S. education can provide an accurate base for, and help inform and shape, current policymaking
August 13, 2025 at 1:53 PM
ansleyerickson.bsky.social
And also true today:
The forces that control the schools and seek to prevent their participation in attempts to solve vital current problems are partly outside pressure groups, partly elements of the school system, and partly subjective forces within the educators themselves.
August 9, 2025 at 8:10 PM