This post is a piece I just wrote, which will end up as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School. It will be published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of Bill Reese and John Rury series on Historical Studies in Education. Here is a link … Continue reading Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling
Every now and then in these difficult times, it's nice to consider some of the institutions that are working pretty well. One of these is the US system of higher education. Yes, it's fraught with some problems right now: Covid cutbacks and Zoom fatigue, high student debt loads, the increasing size of the contingent faculty, … Continue reading Kroger — In Praise of American Higher Education
This blog post is a tribute to the classic paper by Mary Metz, "Real School." In it she shows how schools follow a cultural script that demonstrates all of the characteristics we want to see in a school. The argument, in line with neo-institutional theory (see this example by Meyer and Rowan), is that schools … Continue reading Mary Metz: Real School
This post is a piece I recently published 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 that … Continue reading Pluck vs. Luck
This post is the text of a lecture I delivered last week 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 subject … 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 (University of Chicago Press). From the perspective of 19th-century visitors to the United States, the country’s system of higher education was a … Continue reading An Unlikely Triumph: How US Higher Education Went from Rags in the 19th Century to Riches in the 20th
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 