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 own 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 what … Continue reading Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research
This post is a piece from NPR summarizing the recent Tennessee study about the negative effect of preschool programs. Here's a link to the original. The study showed that the preschool program in Tennessee aimed at disadvantaged students was no only ineffective at improving the academic performance of these students but actually put them at … Continue reading Releasing Poor Kids from Preschool Prison
This post is a paper I presented at a conference in Zurich in 2007 and then published as a chapter in the 2011 book, Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Comparative Visions, edited by Daniel Trohler, Thomas Popkewitz, and David Labaree. Here's is a link to the corrected proofs of … Continue reading Citizens and Consumers — Evolving Rhetorics of US School Reform
on Course: School — What Is It Good For? This post is the syllabus of a course I taught for years at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. It’s called "School — What Is It Good For?" I’ve copied the syllabus below, to give you an idea of what it’s all about. The aim is … Continue reading Course Syllabus: School — What Is It Good For?
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
