With this post, I am announcing the publication of my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my last book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. One result is that the book appeared for sale one hour after … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
This post is a piece I published in Kappan in 2000. Here’s a link to the PDF. It’s an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards. Of course my timing wasn’t great. Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a system of standard mandates. Oops. This … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
This post is the text of a lecture I delivered in 2019 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 advantage … Continue reading From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the U.S.
This essay is a piece I published in Educational Theory in 2011. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. In this essay I examine the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, … Continue reading Consuming the Public School
This post is the syllabus for a class I taught for several years at Stanford Graduate School of Education: “School — What Is It Good For?” The course's aim is to provide a guided exploration of alternative theories of the social functions that schools serve, especially in American society. Along the way it tries to … Continue reading Course Syllabus — School, What Is It Good For?
This post is a 2012 piece I published Journal of Curriculum Studies, which draws on my book Someone Has to Fail. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. An overview of the story I’m telling: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium … Continue reading School Syndrome: Understanding the USA’s Magical Belief that Schooling Can Somehow Improve Society, Promote Access, and Preserve Advantage
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 of mine about the futures of the university field of education. It focuses on the question: What kind of roles do educational researchers play in school and society? I wrote this essay as the summary chapter for a book edited by Geoff Whitty and John Furlong, Knowledge and the Study … Continue reading Futures of the Field of Education
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 of my time there. The aim of this class is to give first-year doctoral students in education a … Continue reading Doctoral Proseminar — Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education
This post is a piece I published in Kappan in 2000. Here’s a link to the PDF. It’s an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards. Of course my timing wasn’t great. Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a system of standard mandates. Oops. This … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 