This post is an essay by my favorite Substack author, a philosophy professor at a regional state university in Pennsylvania, who has a wonderful pen name: Hilarius Bookbinder. Here's a link to the original. In this essay, he explores the way in which the rise of AI on college campuses has exposed the credentialing game … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — The End of Credentialing
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 standards mandates. … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
This post is an opinion piece that Deborah Malizia and I just published in Hechinger Report. Here's a link to the original. It builds on two earlier op-eds (here and here) we did about the negative impact of schooling on American students. OPINION: The standards-driven pressure cooker of public education is the real crisis we must address … Continue reading Labaree and Malizia –The Standards-Driven Pressure Cooker of Public Education Is the Real Crisis We Must Address
This post is a piece I wrote a couple years ago. I tried unsuccessfully to publish in five different venues and gave up, so I'm posting it here. It is also republished in my book, Being a Scholar. I focus on an issue that I've been thinking about for quite a while: How to understand … Continue reading Universities Give Away Knowledge and Sell Degrees
This post is an essay by Carl Hendrick -- The Blind Regulator: Ashby's Law and the Unavoidable Logic of Instructional Design. It appeared in his Substack, The Learning Dispatch, which I highly recommend. Here's a link to the original. In it he addresses a central problem facing systems of instruction. Here's the short version: "If learners … Continue reading Carl Hendrick — The Blind Regulator: Ashby’s Law and the Unavoidable Logic of Instructional Design
This post is a piece I published in Teachers College Record in 2014. Here’s a link to the original. It’s an analysis of two major players in the world movement for educational accountability: OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the US No Child Left Behind law. The core argument is this: Both PISA and NCLB, I argue, … Continue reading Let’s Measure What No One Teaches
This post is about an issue I wrestled with for years, namely why reforming schools in the U.S. is so difficult. I eventually wrote a book on the subject, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, which was published in 2010. But you may not need to read it if you look at … Continue reading The Chronic Failure of Curriculum Reform
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
This post draws on a discussion I participated in that was published in Comparative Education Review in 2009. It brought together a variety of scholars to comment on a new film about schooling produced by Bob Compton called 2 Million Minutes. The film draws its title from the number of minutes that students around the … Continue reading Schools Should Focus on Producing More Hustlers than Scholars
This post is an essay by River Page about how we don't need more Tiger Moms, which appeared recently in The Free Press. Here's a link to the original. The point is that it's very unhealthy to promote a social and educational system that stresses high academic achievement over other competing values. Education is important but … Continue reading River Page — We Don’t Need More Tiger Moms
