on An Unlikely Triumph: How US Higher Education Went from Rags in the 19th Century to Riches in the 20th This is a piece I published in Aeon in October, 2017. It provides an overview of my book that came out that year, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. It's a highly improbable … Continue reading Rags to Riches: How US Higher Ed Went from Pitiful to Powerful
This piece was published in Inside Higher Ed in June, 2020. Here’s a link to the original. It speaks for itself. Doctoral Dysfunction Many doctoral students today are tending to fall into one of two disturbing categories: academic technician or justice warrior, writes David F. Labaree. David F. Labaree June 18, 2020 After nearly 40 years as a … Continue reading Doctoral Dysfunction — We’re Creating Too Many Academic Technicians and Justice Warriors
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 … Continue reading Teacher Persona
This post is a piece I just wrote, something I've been meaning to write for years. An alternative title is: "School -- Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It." Here's a link to the Word document. See what you think. School Gave Me the Creeps David Labaree Did you like school? I didn’t. … Continue reading School Gave Me the Creeps
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. 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 obviously benefit their students and … Continue reading How NOT to Defend the Private Research University
This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition. Here’s a link to the PDF. 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 being a positive in the world of public education. U.S. schools are … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
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 post is a new piece I just published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original, which appears in the October edition of the magazine. 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. The concept was originally … Continue reading The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling
This post is a piece I published two 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 Pluck and Luck
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
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 