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 rags-to-riches story, in which the US system of higher education went from pitiful in the 19th century to powerful in the … Continue reading Rags to Riches: How US Higher Ed Went from Pitiful to Powerful
This post is an essay of mine that is now the opening chapter of my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. The path toward its latest iteration was long and winding. Let me count the curves along the way. This version was published in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education … Continue reading A System Without a Plan
Here are the syllabi for classes I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Each syllabus includes links to nearly all course readings, tips for doing the reading, and class slides. As a result you can take the course, either individually and in groups. Feel free to share the syllabi with anyone you want. … Continue reading All of My Course Syllabi, Including Links to Readings, Reading Tips, and Slides
This post is an op-ed I published in 2018 on the online international opinion site, Project Syndicate. The original is hidden behind a paywall; here are PDFs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It's a brief essay about what is distinctive about the American system of higher education, drawn from my book, A Perfect Mess: The … Continue reading The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
This is a piece I wrote a few years ago, which had been rattling around in my head for a long time. The issue is to figure out what role histories of education should play in the formation of educational policy. My short answer is that we should produce the histories we need rather than … Continue reading Why We Need Histories of Education
This post is an essay by David Brooks published recently in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. It's about the fierce competition that students face in the academic rat race. First they fight to get into a highly selective college that only admits 5% of the people who apply. Then when they … Continue reading David Brooks — We Are the Most Rejected Generation
This post is a lecture I gave at University of Luxembourg in 2011, which was published in a book, edited by Daniel Tröhler and Ragnhild Barbu, Education Systems in Historical, Cultural, and Sociological Perspectives. It draws on material from my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. This essay is one of 21 pieces included in my … Continue reading When Is School the Answer to What Social Problems?
This post is an essay about the formation of the US common school system, which was responsible for forming the American republic during a period in the early 19th century when its survival was in doubt. The essay is an extended excerpt from the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail. I'm posting … Continue reading Formation of the US Common School System
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 is a piece I wrote as the foreword to a book by J. M. Beach -- The Myths of Measurement and Meritocracy: Why Accountability Metrics in Higher Education are Unfair and Increase Inequality -- which was published in 2021. Last week, I posted the foreword I wrote for the first volume in this series, which … Continue reading Accountability Could Kill US Higher Ed
