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 brief talk I gave in 2013 for the occasion celebrating the renaming of the ed school at Stanford, complete with a new logo and branded swag. It had long been called the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE for short) and at that point it changed to the Stanford Graduate School … Continue reading Why Do We Need a Graduate School of Education?
This post is the transcript of a conversation I recently had with Ryan Maloney, who is a strength and conditioning coach at Fredonia University. He has a very interesting blog, Cerebral Conversations, in which he discusses issues in higher education with a wide variety of people in the field. This discussion was posted on his … Continue reading A Conversation about US Higher Education
This post is an essay I wrote about the history of the uneasy relationship between American teacher education and the university. It was published in 2008 in the 3rd edition of the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and John McIntyre). This is a PDF of the original. Here's … Continue reading An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University
This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. Here's a summary of the argument: Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college students a win-win option: By becoming corps members, they can do good and do … Continue reading Teach For America and Teacher Ed: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose
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. The paper draws … Continue reading Life on the Margins — Why Teacher Ed Has So Little Impact on Ed Policy
What with huge problems hanging in the balance right now, like the future of American democracy and the world order, this might be a good time to focus on a little problem, one mostly of academic interest. The issue for today is -- wait for it -- the trouble with American ed schools. Sounds a … Continue reading An Unlovely Legacy: The Disabling Impact of the Market on American Teacher Education
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 … Continue reading Too Easy a Target: The Trouble with Ed Schools and the Implications for the University
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 