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
This post is a piece by Nathan Greenfield, reporting on a major study about the influence of institutional prestige on faculty hiring in the US. His article was first published in University World News. Here's a link to the original. He focuses on a new research analysis recently published in Nature. The study, conducted by a … Continue reading Nathan Greenfield and Val Bur– The Influence of Institutional Prestige in Faculty Hiring
This post is an article by Nathan Greenfield about how institutional prestige shapes faculty hiring. It was published recently in University World News. Here's a link to the original. He's reporting on a remarkable study by Daniel Larremore and Hunter Wapman, which involved "300,000 faculty members in 10,612 departments in 368 PhD-granting American universities." What … Continue reading Nathan Greenfield — How Institutional Prestige Shapes Faculty Hiring
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 … Continue reading Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. Here's a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. An overview of the argument: Modern systems of public schooling have transformed … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege
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
