This post is an essay by John Warner that was published in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. He takes a smart approach to the problem of how to teach writing to college students in the era of AI, where an algorithm can produce an adequate essay in response to the instructor's prompt … Continue reading John Warner — Teach Writing, Not Document Production
This post is about a 1975 paper by James G. March, which was published in, of all places, the Texas Tech Journal of Education. Given that provenance, it's something you likely have never encountered before unless someone actually handed it to you. I used it in a number of my classes and wanted to share … Continue reading James March: Education and the Pursuit of Optimism
This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. It is republished as a chapter in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. This is a summary of the argument: Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college … Continue reading Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose
This post is a talk I gave earlier this week -- Boys Are Falling Behind: Overschooling Is the Reason. Here's a LINK to the slides. Below is a brief overview of the argument, but I recommend looking at the slides to get the full story. Males are increasingly falling behind in our educational system Compared to … Continue reading Boys Are Falling Behind — Overschooling Is the Reason
This post is a recent essay by Peter Gray published in his Substack. Here's a link to the original. It's the best critique I've seen about the damage done by the Common Core. Here's how he summarizes his argument: Why has Common Core failed even to increase scores in the subject areas of its primary focus? … Continue reading Peter Gray — The Total Failure of the Common Core
This post is a piece by Boaz Barak that was recently published as a guest essay in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. In it he explores what I consider to be an important issue about how higher education has in some ways contributed to the declining faith that the public has … Continue reading Boaz Barak: How About We Don’t Bring Our Whole Selves to the Classroom
This is a piece I wrote as the foreword to a book by J. M. Beach -- Can We Measure What Matters Most? Why Educational Accountability Metrics Lower Student Learning and Demoralize Teachers -- which was published in 2021. For me, this was a chance to provide a brief summary of my thoughts about the problems … Continue reading The Problems that Accountability Metrics Pose for Schooling
This post is a recent piece by Larry Cuban that appeared on his blog. Here's a link to the original. The title tells the story. But they way he tells the story is delightful. Policymakers and Teachers Live in Different Worlds Larry Cuban Here’s a story about the different worlds that U.S policymakers and teachers live in … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Policymakers and Teachers Live in Different Worlds
This post is an essay by Justin Sider, which recently appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's a link to the original. The essay is a diatribe against the prolific work of the pedagogy gurus of contemporary academe — the self-styled learning experts whose hectoring books and advice columns have become a familiar feature … Continue reading Justin Sider — The Problem with Pedagogy Gurus
This post is a classic essay by Philip Jackson from his 1974 book, Life in Classrooms. Here's a link to the original. To me, it's the best piece that has ever been written about "the daily grind" that students experience in elementary classrooms, which I often used in my classes. It's all about the hidden … Continue reading Philip Jackson — The Daily Grind
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 