This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. This essay is included in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here’s a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. An overview … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy
This post is a short piece I published a while ago in Insider Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision Don’t be limited by what’s straight ahead, David Labaree writes The problem with scholarly focus is that it leads where you intend to go. And this is a … Continue reading Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision
This post is an overview of the book I published two years ago. It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. The title is The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my earlier book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
This post is a set of slides for a talk I gave recently, "The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism." It's an effort to put the challenge that artificial intelligence poses for American education in historical perspective. Today, students can have AI do course readings for them and then write the required … Continue reading The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism
This post is the text of a keynote address I gave on July 14 (Bastille Day!) at the Building Blackboard Together 2026 conference in Dallas. This is an annual event hosted by Blackboard -- the learning management systems (LMS) company -- which brings together the Blackboard staff and the system's users at colleges and universities … Continue reading Know It Before You Mess With It
This post is a piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here’s a link to the original. It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that … Continue reading How Football Helped Make US Universities Great
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 is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition. Here’s a link to the PDF. It was also reprinted in my recent book, The Ironies of Schooling. Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
This post is a reminder about my most recent books. As a retired guy with time on his hands, I decided -- what the hell -- to self-publish three books in the last three years. Kindle Direct Publishing makes this possible. I thought it might be useful to put together collections of my papers and … Continue reading Three Books
This post is an opinion piece that Deborah Malizia and I just published in Hechinger Report. Here's a link to the original. It builds on two earlier op-eds (here and here) we did about the negative impact of schooling on American students. OPINION: The standards-driven pressure cooker of public education is the real crisis we must address … Continue reading Labaree and Malizia –The Standards-Driven Pressure Cooker of Public Education Is the Real Crisis We Must Address
