This post is about an issue I’ve wrestled with for years, namely why reforming schools in the U.S. is so difficult. I eventually wrote a book on the subject, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, which was published in 2010. But you may not need to read it if you look at this … Continue reading The Chronic Failure of Curriculum Reform
This post is a piece I published in Kappan in November, 2018. It's about the declining American commitment to schooling for the public good. Here’s a link to the original. PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR PRIVATE GAIN: THE DECLINING AMERICAN COMMITMENT TO SERVING THE PUBLIC GOOD When schooling comes to be viewed mainly as a source of … Continue reading Public Schools for Private Gain
This post is an essay I wrote for a festschrift volume in honor of my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Tröhler, who is a professor at University of Vienna. The book is National Literacies in Education: Historical Reflections on the Nexus of Nations, National Identity, and Education, edited by Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser. It was … Continue reading Reflections on States, Schools, and National Literacies
This post is the statement issued on October 11 by the president and provost of Stanford. To me, it's the best such statement by university leaders that I've seen in response to the Hamas attack on Israel and the ongoing battle in Gaza. What I like is that they stay focused on the issues on … Continue reading Stanford Statement on Israel and Palestine
This post is an op-ed I published on my birthday (May 17) 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 … Continue reading The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
This post is the text of a lecture I delivered in 2019 in Japan at Kyoto University and Keio University. It draws on the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail (which has been translated into Japanese), and at the end I try to bring the analysis up to the present. The advantage … Continue reading From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the U.S.
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 a reflection on some of the insights I culled from Irena Smith's new book, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. The book is a memoir a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, who got a PhD in comp lit, taught college, became an admissions reader at Stanford and then … Continue reading Irena Smith — The Golden Ticket
This post is a piece I wrote for the 1989 book, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Don Warren. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. A slightly different version appeared as a chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. I agreed to write the chapter a … Continue reading Career Ladders and the Early School Teacher: A Story of Inequality and Opportunity
This essay is a piece I published in Educational Theory in 2011. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. In this essay I examine the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, … Continue reading Consuming the Public School
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 