This post is a recent essay by Peter Gray published on his Substack, Play Makes Us Human. Here's a link to the original. He is a research professor of psychology at Boston College, who has written a number of books about the importance of free play for children. Like me, Gray is concerned that we over … Continue reading Peter Gray: The Toxic Consequences of Attending a High-Achieving School
This week's post is a piece I presented at a conference in Switzerland and then published in an obscure book in 2010. Here's the original version. And now it's a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's a story about the contest for dominance in US education in the early 20th century … Continue reading How Dewey Lost
This post is a recent essay by David Deming, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy Center and Education School, about the use of SAT and ACT scores in college admission. It appeared in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. He says data show that using these scores benefit some disadvantaged students, who have a chance … Continue reading David Deming: The Worst Way to Do College Admissions
This post is an essay by Peter Greene in which he discusses a fascination argument made by a free-market economist on why free-market approaches such as vouchers will not work with public education. The economist, Douglas Harris, shows how no fewer than six conditions that are necessary for the functioning of an efficient free-market economy … Continue reading Free Market Approaches Don’t Work for Public Education
This post is a paper I presented as part of a panel on the politics of teacher education at the annual meeting of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2005. It was published that same year in the Journal of Teacher Education. Here’s a link to the original. The paper draws in part … Continue reading Life on the Margins: Why Teacher Ed Has So Little Impact on Ed Policy
This post is an essay by Larry Cuban about how educational policy is a mix of policy from above and the pedagogical orientations of individual teachers and the choices they make in the classroom. Here's a link to the original. Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers Larry Cuban Watching a policy travel from the White House, a … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Kindergarten Teachers as Policymakers
This is a piece I wrote a year ago, which had been rattling around in my head for years. The issue is to figure out what role histories of education should play in the formation of educational policy. My short answer is that we should produce the histories we need rather than the histories we … Continue reading Why We Need Histories of Education
This post is a chapter from my book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. It's a revised version of a paper that was previously published in 1992 as “Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Teaching: A Genealogy of Teacher Professionalization” in Harvard Educational Review. Here's a link to that version. The HER version of … Continue reading Rethinking the Movement to Professionalize Teaching: A Story of Status and Control
This post is an op-ed by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire recently published in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. They're responding to the efforts by parents and by Republican legislators to give parents veto power over what they're children are taught in public schools. Schneider and Berkshire argue that American law … Continue reading Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire — Parents Don’t Have the Right to Shape their Kids’ School Curriculum
This post is an essay by Elliot Eisner that was published in 2001 in Kappan. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. Elliot, my friend and colleague, died in 2014. Here's a link to his obituary. Elliot was one of the great academic champions for a richly humanistic view of education, the perfect … Continue reading Elliot Eisner — What Does It Mean to Say a School Is Doing Well?
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 