This blog post is a classic essay by Larry Cuban that explores the perennial problem of why efforts to reform schools in the US are steady work. Why do we keep trying to make the same reforms, over and over again, with only minimal success? The essay was published in Educational Researcher in 1990. Here's … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Reforming Again, Again, and Again
This post is a paper I presented in 2008 at the annual meeting of the research group on the Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education, Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium. The theme of the papers for this meeting was "Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings: The Language of Education." The paper was published in a … Continue reading Why We Obsess about the Goals of Schooling even though Schools Continually Fail to Meet These Goals
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 review I wrote of a new book by Ken Teitelbaum, which will eventually appear in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. At its heart, this is a book of advice for teachers, and its messages really resonate with me. You can't change the world, but you can do something important where … Continue reading Work with What You’ve Got: Advice for Teachers from Ken Teitelbaum
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 … Continue reading Consuming the Public School
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 … Continue reading Resisting Educational Standards
This post is a piece I just wrote, which will end up as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School. It will be published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of Bill Reese and John Rury series on Historical Studies in Education. Here is a link … Continue reading Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling
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: An Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education
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 short essay by Jeffrey Guhin published on August 27, 2020 in Hedgehog Review. In it he puts forth an argument about the purpose of schooling that resonates with some of my own work, including recent posts here such as this, this, and this. Here's a link to the original. How COVID Can … Continue reading Guhin: How Covid Can Change What Schools Are For
