This post is an essay by Max Roser from the website Our World in Data. Here's a link to the original. Roser is the founder of that website, which I have found an invaluable source for valid data on all manner of subjects relevant in today's world. I check it out every day to check out … Continue reading Max Roser — The Limits of Personal Experience and the Value of Statistics
This post is about 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 a piece I wrote about the harm that educational research has inflicted over the years. Given a track record of making things worse for school and society, educational researchers would do well to heed the wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath. If our work often fails to make things better, we should at least … Continue reading Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research
This is a piece I published in 2012 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. It draws on my experience over the years working with doctoral students in education. The advice, basically, is to approach your apprenticeship in educational research doing the opposite of what everyone else tells you to do. Hope you like it. SERMON ON EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH … Continue reading Sermon on Educational Research
This is a piece I wrote a few years ago, which had been rattling around in my head for a long time. 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 … Continue reading Why We Need Histories of Education
In this paper, I explore the issue of relevance in educational research. I argue that the chronic efforts by researchers to pursue relevance is counterproductive. Paradoxically, trying to make research more relevant actually makes it less so. Drawing on an analysis by Mie Augier and Jim March, I show that this is the result of … Continue reading The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance in Educational Research
on Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in ScholarThis post is an overview of my life as a scholar. I presented an oral version in my job talk at Stanford in 2002. The idea was to make sense of the path I’d taken in my scholarly writing up to that point. What were the … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
This is a paper I published Educational Theory back in 2011 about the factors shaping the rise of quantification in education research. It still seems relevant to a lot of issues in the field educational policy. Here's an overview of the argument: In this paper I explore the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers … Continue reading The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers
This post is a paper I published in Educational Researcher in 1998. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. This is an overview of the story I'm telling: In this article, I argue that key characteristics of educational knowledge both constrain and enable the work of educational researchers, as producers of this knowledge, … Continue reading Educational Researchers: Living with a Lesser Form of Knowledge
This is a piece I wrote about the harm that educational research has inflicted over the years. Given a track record of making things worse for school and society, educational researchers would do well to heed the wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath. If our work often fails to make things better, we should at least … Continue reading Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 