This post is an essay by Toke Reichstein from his Substack. Here's a link to the original. The key issue is the title: "Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?" In the course of this essay, he deploys economics at its best in trying to sort out this problem. He shows that simplistic approaches to setting … Continue reading Toke Richstein — Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?
This post is a set of slides for a talk I gave recently, "The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism." It's an effort to put the challenge that artificial intelligence poses for American education in historical perspective. Today, students can have AI do course readings for them and then write the required … Continue reading The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism
This post is an essay by Katy Purviance from her Substack "the joy of learning." Here's a link to the original. She's exploring an issue that has became increasingly interesting to me: the damage that schooling can do to many students, especially boys (see here and here). The problem is the unnatural process that schooling inflicts … Continue reading Katy Purviance — Schools Don’t Just Fail the Kids Who Struggle. They Are Run by the Kids Who Didn’t.
This post is the text of a keynote address I gave on July 14 (Bastille Day!) at the Building Blackboard Together 2026 conference in Dallas. This is an annual event hosted by Blackboard -- the learning management systems (LMS) company -- which brings together the Blackboard staff and the system's users at colleges and universities … Continue reading Know It Before You Mess With It
This post is a classic essay by David Cohen. The version I'm reproducing here comes from a conference paper he prepared for the Benton Center at University of Chicago. Here's a link to the original. An earlier and shorter version was published as a chapter in 1988 in a book edited by Philip Jackson, Contributing … Continue reading David Cohen — Teaching Practice: Plus Ca Change
This post is a piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here’s a link to the original. It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that … Continue reading How Football Helped Make US Universities Great
This post is a favorite piece by an old friend and terrific scholar, Harold Wechsler, who sadly died a few years ago. Here’s a link to the original, which appeared in Teachers College Record in 1981. In this paper, Wechsler explores a longstanding issue in American higher education. How do students and colleges respond when the initial core … Continue reading Harold Wechsler — Group Repulsion in the History of US Higher Ed
This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne. It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. Here is the link to the first published version. It’s about a longstanding problem in American … Continue reading What Schools Can’t Do
This post is an essay by Gordon Wood that was published a while ago as in op-ed in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. I thought it was worth remembering what an insightful historian he was, after the news of his recent death. His focus is on why the American colonies produced … Continue reading Gordon Wood: What Explains the Genius of the American Founders?
This post draws on a discussion I participated in that was published in Comparative Education Review in 2009. It brought together a variety of scholars to comment on a new film about schooling produced by Bob Compton called 2 Million Minutes. The film draws its title from the number of minutes that students around the … Continue reading Schools Should Focus on Producing More Hustlers than Scholars
