This post is a favorite piece by an old friend and terrific scholar, Harold Wechsler, who sadly died several 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 group of … Continue reading Harold Wechsler — Group Repulsion in the History of US Higher Ed
This post is a persuasive essay by Jeremy Glazer from the latest issues of Kappan. Here's a link to the original. The core insight from this piece is that teachers cannot succeed based solely only on their own pedagogical skills. There's only so much that can be accomplished by better teacher training and professional development. Why? … Continue reading Jeremy Glazer — Teacher Expertise Isn’t Enough
This post is a piece I originally published in a 2000 book honoring David Tyack, Reconstructing the Good in Education: Coping with Intractable American Dilemmas. which was edited by Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps. Here's a link to a PDF of the chapter. Two years ago I did a short post about Albert Hirschman's book, … Continue reading No Exit: Public Education as an Inescapably Public Good
Many people have complained that academic writers are addicted to the passive voice, doing anything to avoid using the first person: "Data were gathered." I wonder who did that? But in some ways a bigger problem is that we refuse to use the kind of dynamic verbs that can energize our stories and drive the … Continue reading Academic Writing Issues #5: Failing to Use Dynamic Verbs
This post is the revised version of an invited lecture I gave in 2003 at the 25th annual meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was later published in Paedagogica Historica; here’s a link to the PDF. It’s all about the love affair between education schools and John … Continue reading Progressivism and Ed Schools: An American Romance
This post is a reflection on the social advantage that comes from attending an extremely exclusive private college. Typically this means one of the Ivy-Plus schools -- namely members of the Ivy League plus a few others such as Stanford and Chicago. Upper-middle class families are famously obsessed with getting their children into one of … Continue reading You Don’t Need the Ivies to Be Successful
This post is the text of a lecture I delivered in 2019 in Japan at Kyoto University and Keio University. It draws on the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail (which has been translated into Japanese), and at the end I try to bring the analysis up to the present. The advantage … Continue reading From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the U.S.
This post is an opinion essay that appeared in a recent Newsweek. Here's a link to the original. And here's a link and another and yet another for somewhat different spins on the subject. In the belief system of the American meritocracy, pursuing higher levels of formal education is the route to upward mobility and … Continue reading Diplomas May Be Killing the American Dream
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 