This post is a piece by Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovitz that was published recently in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. It's an astute analysis of the harmful effects of the pandemic on American schooling. They argue that only part of the damage was done by school closures. A lot of the harm … Continue reading Levinson and Markovitz — The Biggest Disruption in the History of American Education
This post is a piece from NPR summarizing the recent Tennessee study about the negative effect of preschool programs. Here's a link to the original. The study showed that the preschool program in Tennessee aimed at disadvantaged students was no only ineffective at improving the academic performance of these students but actually put them at … Continue reading Releasing Poor Kids from Preschool Prison
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
This post is a column by my favorite education writer, Jay Mathews from the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. I've posted two other pieces by him recently (here and here). In it he addresses an issue that creates so much craziness -- the way upper-middle class American families obsess about getting their … Continue reading Jay Mathews — Don’t Fret that Harvard Turned You Down. Top Public Universities Have a Lot More High-Scoring Students than the Most Selective Privates
This post is a review of Cristina Groeger's new book, The Education Trap, which is eventually going to appear in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. This is the best book about education that I have read in a long time. I urge you to read it. Limited to 800 words, … Continue reading Review of Cristina Groeger’s Education Trap
This post is a recent piece by Matthew Yglesias from his Substack site Slow Boring. Here's a link to the original. It's part of an ongoing series of posts here about the problems of meritocracy (for example, this, this, this, and this.) As Yglesias notes, most critiques of meritocracy are focused on the failures of … Continue reading Matthew Yglesias — Meritocracy Is Bad
This post is a favorite piece by an old friend and terrific scholar, Harold Wechsler, who sadly died several years ago. Here's a link to the original, which appeared in Teachers College Record in 1981. In this paper, Wechsler explores a longstanding issue in American higher education. How do students and colleges respond when the … Continue reading Harold Wechsler — An Academic Gresham’s Law
This post is a lovely essay by Michael Lind, which was recently published in Tablet magazine. Here's a link to the original. In this piece, Lind provides a rich analysis of the history of the American elite. The key to this story is that the elite used to be plural -- a set of local … Continue reading Michael Lind — The New American Elite
This post is a piece by Agnes Callard, A More Perfect Meritocracy, which was published in Boston Review on December 21, 2020. Here's a link to the original. As you know, if you've been following this blog, I've long been wrestling with the idea of meritocracy. In particular, I've been focusing on its dysfunctions and … Continue reading Agnes Callard — A More Perfect Meritocracy
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 