Operation Paperclip, Public Education, and Citizenship

Dr. Jonna Perrillo has been an education historian and a professor of English Education at the University of Texas of El Paso since 2005. Her scholarship focuses on the history of schools and citizenship, both in the sense of how schools define and translate citizenship values and how they enfranchise or disenfranchise students and teachers. She is the author of two books: Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and the Battle for School Equity (winner of the New Scholar Book Award from the American Education Research Association) and Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands. She also writes opinion pieces advocating for school equity and reform issues, and has been published in the Boston Review, Washington Post, Education Week, El Paso Matters, the El Paso Times, and a number of national teachers’ publications. Her interviews with journalists on Educating the Enemy have appeared on the Texas Standard and Time magazine.