This post is an essay by Michael Elliott recently published in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. In it he explores a topic dear to my heart, that college -- and intellectual life in general -- should be experienced as a form of play. It's not a chore that you need trudge through out a … Continue reading Michael Elliott — College Should Be Way More Fun
This post is an essay by my favorite Substack author, a philosophy professor at a regional state university in Pennsylvania, who has a wonderful pen name: Hilarius Bookbinder. Here's a link to the original. In this essay, he explores the way in which the rise of AI on college campuses has exposed the credentialing game … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — The End of Credentialing
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 an essay by Julia Fisher from the Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. It's about reading and writing. Here point is in the title. Here's how she puts it in her intro: In my high-school English classes, I often tell my students that they write their papers backwards: They devise a thesis and … Continue reading Julia Fisher — My Students Write Their Papers Backwards
This post is an essay I recently published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original. I also presented these ideas in a talk. Here's a link to the PowerPoint slides of that talk. The story is in the title. See what you think. Americans are overschooled By David F. Labaree | Mar 9, 2026 | Backtalk No … Continue reading Americans Are Overschooled
This post is a recent essay by Steven Mintz about how to teach students to write effectively. It appeared in his Substack, which I strongly recommend. Here's a link to the original. It's a natural follow-up to my last post. "The Five-Paragraph Fetish." He talks about the difference between teaching writing based on rules compared to … Continue reading Steven Mintz — Learning to Write Like AI, and Then Beyond It
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 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
