This post is a commentary on a classic essay by Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” which appeared in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In. Here’s a PDF of the original chapter. Given the state of the second Trump administration, there has never been a better to time revisit this analysis. … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
Below is a piece I wrote for a book that was published by Teachers College Press in 2022 -- Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, edited by David Berliner and Carl Hermanns. Here’s a link to a pdf of my piece. I republished the essay in my 2024 book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here's … Continue reading Public Schooling as Social Welfare
This post is a short piece I just published 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 problem because … Continue reading Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision
This is my first ever Pollyanna post. I wrote it last year in order to cheer myself about the world we live in. I think it still stands up. We Live in the Best of Times We seem to be in a world … Continue reading We Live in the Best of Times — Really
This post is an op-ed written by Deborah Malizia and me that was published on December, 2022 in the Mercury News. Here's a link to the original. It's about how the pressure for rigor and high academic achievement in American schools has been damaging the mental health of students. Another example of schooling's role in … Continue reading Schools Are at the Root of the Youth Mental Health Crisis
This post is a reflection on Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” which he gave in 1919 at Munich University. “Science as a Vocation” is the other famous speech he gave at Munich in 1917, which I posted here a few years ago. Compared to the science lecture, it’s very long — 23,000 words — so … Continue reading Reflections on Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” and the Role of the Professor
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 latest 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 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
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 post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching — the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona. In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail. In the second part, I explore the … Continue reading Teacher Persona
