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 piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years. How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities? These institutions obviously benefit their students and … Continue reading How NOT to Defend the Private Research University
This post is a review of Cristina Groeger's new book, The Education Trap, which is eventually going to appear in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. This is the best book about education that I have read in a long time. I urge you to read it. Limited to 800 words, … Continue reading Review of Cristina Groeger’s Education Trap
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 … Continue reading Consuming the Public School
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 … Continue reading Harold Wechsler — An Academic Gresham’s Law
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. … Continue reading Karl Marx — The Fetishism of Commodities
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 … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
This blog post is a still salient 2013 article from the New York Times about credential inflation in the American job market. Turns out that if you want to be a file clerk or runner at a law firm these days, you're going to need a four-year college degree. Here's a link to the original. … Continue reading Rampell — It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk
Today I am posting a piece I wrote in 1995. It was the foreword to a book by David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism. I have long been interested in credentialing theory, but this is the only place where I ever tried to spell out in detail … Continue reading How Credentialing Theory Explains the Extraordinary Growth in US Higher Ed in the 19th Century
This blog post is a tribute to the classic paper by Mary Metz, "Real School." In it she shows how schools follow a cultural script that demonstrates all of the characteristics we want to see in a school. The argument, in line with neo-institutional theory (see this example by Meyer and Rowan), is that schools … Continue reading Mary Metz: Real School
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 