This post is a classic piece by Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” It’s the last section of the first chapter in Capital, volume 1. This analysis had a big impact on me when I first read it in grad school, and it has shaped a lot of my own work. At … Continue reading Karl Marx — The Fetishism of Commodities
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 a piece I published in Kappan in 2000. Here’s a link to the PDF. It’s an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards. Of course my timing wasn’t great. Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a system of standard mandates. Oops. This … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
This post is a discussion of Karl Weick’s classic essay, “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems,” which was published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1976. Here’s a link to the original. The essay begins with this wonderful thought experiment: Imagine that you’re either the referee, coach, player or spectator at an unconventional soccer match: the field for the game … Continue reading Educational Organizations as Loosely-Coupled Systems
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 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
This post is a piece from the The Economist about the cost of attending American universities. It pushes back against the conventional wisdom about the excessive cost burden that these institutions impose on students. The spin is one I like, which is that universities have an incentive to appear more expensive than they really are. … Continue reading Sticker Shocker: US Universities Aren’t as Expensive as They Look
This post is a piece I published last year in Kappan. Here’s a link to the original. It’s a response to an essay by Jal Mehta proposing a new US grammar of schooling, and it refers to a piece I wrote for Kappan with my take on understanding the roots of this grammar. In my response I explore … Continue reading The Attractions of Doing School
This post is an op-ed by Harvard undergrad Aden Barton, which was published recently in the Harvard Crimson. Here's a link to the original. To see the graphs he refers to, click on the link. The essay explores the reasons for the recent surge in careerism among Harvard undergraduate as a way to understand the … Continue reading Aden Barton — How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom
This essay is a piece I published in Educational Theory in 2011. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. In this essay I examine the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, … Continue reading Consuming the Public School
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 