This post is a chapter from my 2004 book, The Trouble with Ed Schools. Here's a link to an earlier version that was published in 2003 in Educational Researcher. I wrote this in response to my experience teaching doctoral students in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Nearly all of the students … Continue reading Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers
This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. It is republished as a chapter in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. This is a summary of the argument: Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college … Continue reading Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose
This is a piece I wrote about the harm that educational research has inflicted over the years. Given a track record of making things worse for school and society, educational researchers would do well to heed the wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath. If our work often fails to make things better, we should at least … Continue reading Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research
In this post, I introduce my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education, which is now available on Amazon. Below is the book's introduction, which provides an overview of the issues it raises and gives summaries of the 23 chapters: Introduction This book is a collection of pieces I wrote about American … Continue reading My New Book: The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education
This post is a paper I presented as part of a panel on the politics of teacher education at the annual meeting of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2005. It was published that same year in the Journal of Teacher Education. Here’s a link to the original. It is going to … Continue reading Life on the Margins: Why Teacher Ed Has So Little Impact on Ed Policy
This post is the revised version of an invited lecture I gave in 2003 at the 25th annual meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was later published in Paedagogica Historica; here's a link to the PDF. It's the the of the love affair between … Continue reading Progressivism and Ed Schools — An American Romance
This is a paper I published Educational Theory back in 2011 about the factors shaping the rise of quantification in education research. It still seems relevant to a lot of issues in the field educational policy. Here's an overview of the argument: In this paper I explore the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers … Continue reading The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers
This post is a paper I published in Educational Researcher in 1998. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. This is an overview of the story I'm telling: In this article, I argue that key characteristics of educational knowledge both constrain and enable the work of educational researchers, as producers of this knowledge, … Continue reading Educational Researchers: Living with a Lesser Form of Knowledge
This week's post is a piece I presented at a conference in Switzerland and then published in an obscure book in 2010. Here's the original version. And now it's a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's a story about the contest for dominance in US education in the early 20th century … Continue reading How Dewey Lost
This post is a piece I published in Academe (the journal of AAUP) in 1999. It provides an overview of the argument in my 2004 book, The Trouble with Ed Schools. I reproduce it here as a public service: if you read this, you won’t need to read my book much less buy it. You’re welcome. Also, looking … Continue reading Too Easy a Target: The Trouble with Ed Schools and the Implications for the University
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 