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
This is an updated and abbreviated version of the lecture I posted on December 2. It makes for an easier read, plus I've added a piece at the end trying to answer the question: Why do we keep trying to reform schools? Here's the new conclusion about the endless efforts to reform schools: This … Continue reading From Citizens to Consumers — Abbreviated Version with New Conclusion about Why We Keep Trying to Reform Schools
This post is the text of a lecture I delivered last week in Japan at Kyoto University and Keio University. It draws on the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail (which has been translated into Japanese), and at the end I try to bring the analysis up to the present. The subject … Continue reading From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the U.S.
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
