This post is an essay by Perry Bacon that was published recently in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. The title tells the story. Crisis is an overused word in the politics of American education, and his analysis shows that it doesn't fit the data. See what you think. We don’t have an … Continue reading Perry Bacon — We Don’t Have an Education Crisis in America
In this paper, I explore the issue of relevance in educational research. I argue that the chronic efforts by researchers to pursue relevance is counterproductive. Paradoxically, trying to make research more relevant actually makes it less so. Drawing on an analysis by Mie Augier and Jim March, I show that this is the result of … Continue reading The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance in Educational Research
This post is a reflection on the peculiar history and social structure of imperial Venice, drawing on a 2013 book by Garry Wills, Venice: Lion City -- The Religion of Empire. On the surface of it, Venice was the unlikely hub of an empire. It was a city-state with a small population and no sizeable … Continue reading Garry Wills on the History of the Venetian Empire
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. This essay is included in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here’s a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. An overview … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy
This post is an essay by David Brooks published recently in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. It's about the fierce competition that students face in the academic rat race. First they fight to get into a highly selective college that only admits 5% of the people who apply. Then when they … Continue reading David Brooks — We Are the Most Rejected Generation
This post is a lecture I gave at University of Luxembourg in 2011, which was published in a book, edited by Daniel Tröhler and Ragnhild Barbu, Education Systems in Historical, Cultural, and Sociological Perspectives. It draws on material from my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. This essay is one of 21 pieces included in my … Continue reading When Is School the Answer to What Social Problems?
This post is a recent op-ed by Ezra Klein from the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. It draws on his terrific new book, Abundance, coauthored with Derek Thompson. It's about a core problem facing the country and the Democratic Party, which is that we have made it near impossible to build major … Continue reading Ezra Klein — You Try to Build Anything, and You’re Stepping into Quicksand
This post is a commentary on a classic essay by Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” which appeared in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In. Here’s a PDF of the original chapter. Given the state of the second Trump administration, there has never been a better to time revisit this analysis. … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This post is a recent essay by Peter Gray published in his Substack. Here's a link to the original. It's the best critique I've seen about the damage done by the Common Core. Here's how he summarizes his argument: Why has Common Core failed even to increase scores in the subject areas of its primary focus? … Continue reading Peter Gray — The Total Failure of the Common Core
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 