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
[This essay is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling.] Professionals, by definition, are more skilled than amateurs in any given field, but they both experience failure. And to an average observer, they appear to fail in similar ways. The practitioner is moving along nicely in carrying out his or her … Continue reading Failing Like a Professional: Professionals Choke, Amateurs Panic
This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it. It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools. It now appears as a chapter in my newish book, Being a Scholar, published in 2023. The core insight is that research trajectories are … Continue reading Adventures in Scholarship
This post is a piece I that came out in 2021 as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School. The book was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part a series edited by Bill Reese and John Rury 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 is a piece I published in 2021 in Kappan. Here’s a link to the original. It is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. In this essay, I explore an issue about the “grammar of schooling” that bothered me over the years as I was teaching about this subject. … Continue reading The Dynamic Tension at the Core of the Grammar of Schooling
This post is an op-ed that Deborah Malizia and I just published in the San Jose Mercury News. Here's a link to the original. It follows up on an earlier op-ed we did on the subject. Schools’ shift from community to competition harms our youth U.S. education system created in the 19th century to serve the … Continue reading School’s Shift from Community to Competition Can Harm Our Youth
With this post, I am announcing the publication of my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my last book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. One result is that the book appeared for sale one hour after … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
This post is a piece I published five years ago in Aeon. Here’s the link to the original. I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy. It was nearly impossible to get students to consider … Continue reading Luck and Pluck — Alternative Stories of Life in the Meritocracy
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. Here’s a link to the original. It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years. How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities? These institutions … Continue reading How Not to Defend the Research University
This piece was published in Inside Higher Ed in June, 2020. Here’s a link to the original. It speaks for itself. The argument here seems particularly pertinent in light of the current conflicts on campuses across the country over free speech and the war between Israel and Hamas. DOCTORAL DYSFUNCTION Many doctoral students today are tending to fall into … Continue reading Doctoral Dysfunction
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 