This post is a brief talk I gave in 2013 for the occasion celebrating the renaming of the ed school at Stanford, complete with a new logo and branded swag. It had long been called the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE for short) and at that point it changed to the Stanford Graduate School … Continue reading Why Do We Need a Graduate School of Education?
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: Be Wrong Be … Continue reading Sermon on Educational Research
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 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
This 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 issues I was looking at and why? How did … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
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 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
One of the most prominent and dysfunctional traits of academic writing is its heavy reliance on what Helen Sword, in the piece below, calls "zombie nouns." These are cases when the writer takes an agile verb or adjective or noun and transforms it into a more imposing noun with lead feet. Just add the proper … Continue reading Academic Writing Issues #2: Zombie Nouns
In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse -- the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains. If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers. This targeting of teachers employs a new form of … Continue reading Targeting Teachers
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
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 