This post is a dialogue I had last winter with Sara Goldrick-Rab, which covered a wide range of topics surrounding higher education policy in the US. It was just published online by History of Education Quarterly. Here's a link to the original. It's part of a series of such dialogues that the journal has been … Continue reading Policy Dialogue with Sara Goldrick-Rab
This post is a piece by my favorite education writer, Jay Mathews at the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. It's his discussion of a new book by Tom Loveless at the Brookings Institution, Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core. The book is an examination of why … Continue reading Jay Mathews — Why Plans to Raise Educational Standards Will Never Work
This post is a paper I published Educational Theory in 2008. Here's a link to the original. In this essay, I examine the paradox of educationalization in the American context. I argue that, like most modern Western societies, the United States has displayed a strong tendency over the years for educationalizing social problems, even though … Continue reading The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the US
This post is a short piece I wrote in 2011 for a special issue of the journal Teacher Education and Practice on "Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Scholarship." My one take is that research in education is not necessarily well positioned to enhance education; on the contrary, it often does more harm than good. See … Continue reading Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research
Every now and then in these difficult times, it's nice to consider some of the institutions that are working pretty well. One of these is the US system of higher education. Yes, it's fraught with some problems right now: Covid cutbacks and Zoom fatigue, high student debt loads, the increasing size of the contingent faculty, … Continue reading Kroger — In Praise of American Higher Education
In this post I reprint a piece by Ricardo Hausmann (an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School), which was published in Project Syndicate in 2015. Here's a link to the original. If you can't get past the paywall, here's a link to a PDF. What I like about this piece is the way Hausmann challenges a central … Continue reading Hausmann: The Education Myth
This post is my reflection on a classic piece by my former advisor, Michael Katz. It's a chapter in Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools called "Alternative Proposals for American Education: The Nineteenth Century." Here's a link to a PDF of the chapter. The core argument is this. In American politics of education in the 19th century, … Continue reading Michael Katz — Alternative Forms of School Governance
This post contains all of the material for the doctoral proseminar -- Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education -- that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last four years. The aim of this class is to give first-year doctoral students in education a grounding in some of … Continue reading Doctoral Proseminar: An Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education
This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne. It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. Here is the link to the first published version. It's about a longstanding … Continue reading What Schools Can’t Do: Understanding the Chronic Failure of American School Reform
This post is aabout a 1975 paper by James G. March, which was published in, of all places, the Texas Tech Journal of Education. Given that provenance, it's something you likely have never encountered before unless someone actually handed it to you. I used it in a number of my classes and wanted to share … Continue reading James March: Education and the Pursuit of Optimism
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 