This post is a lovely essay by Michael Lind, which was 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 elites … Continue reading Michael Lind — The New American Elite
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 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 post is a review essay by Becca Rothfeld published recently in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. The review focuses on the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game, by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. The latter is a connoisseur of games, who appreciate how the rule-bound metrics of … Continue reading Becca Rothfeld — A Philosopher’s Case for Living Playfully Without Keeping Score
This post is an essay by Beverly Gage published recently in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. In it, she draws on Richard Hofstadter's 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, to show how this is not the first time that American universities found themselves the target of political attacks. Let's not forget the … Continue reading Beverly Gage: The American University Is in Crisis. Not for the First Time.
This post is a lovely essay by Rose Horowitch, recently published in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. The average GPA of the graduating class at Harvard is a resounding 3.8. Really? Grade inflation is as disease with multiple causes -- the popularity contest of teacher evaluations, the urge to keep the customer happy, … Continue reading Rose Horowitch — The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. Here's a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. It is republished in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege
This post is an essay by Julien Berman that was published recently in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. How higher education failed America’s poor For decades, policymakers claimed to expand college access. In reality, they steered poor students into the least valuable degrees. Julien Berman The best investment you can make … Continue reading Julien Berman — How Higher Education Failed America’s Poor
This post is a classic piece by Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” It’s the last section of the first chapter in Capital, volume 1. This analysis had a big impact on me when I first read it in grad school, and it has shaped a lot of my own work. At … Continue reading Marx’s “The Fetishism of Commodities” and Its Implications for Education
This post is a very recent piece by Larry Cuban, which he posted on his blog two days ago. I just love it. He asks, What's the problem with being an average student? How did average school achievement become redefined as mediocre? This piece picks up on a theme I've been working on in … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Success, Failure, and “Mediocrity” in U.S Schools
