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 … Continue reading Let’s Measure What No One Teaches: PISA, NCLB, and the Shrinking Aims of Education
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 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
This post is about an issue I've 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 … Continue reading The Chronic Failure of Curriculum Reform
