This post is a reflection on the conflicting worldviews that reformers and teachers use in trying to understand teaching and learning in classrooms. It draws on the insights from one of my favorite books, James Scott's Seeing Like a State. The text itself comes from chapter 5 of my book, Someone Has to Fail. The … Continue reading Insights from James Scott about the Conflicting Worldviews of Reformers and Teachers
I'm posting this as a public service. Read it and you won't need to read -- much less buy -- my 2004 book with the same title. It provides an overview of the book's argument, which was originally published in Educational Foundations in 1996. Here's a link to the original. This is an overview: Everyone … Continue reading The Trouble with Ed Schools
This post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching -- the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona. In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail. In the second part, I … Continue reading Teacher Persona
This post is a chapter from my book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. It's a revised version of a paper that was previously published in 1992 as “Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Teaching: A Genealogy of Teacher Professionalization” in Harvard Educational Review. Here's a link to that version. The HER version of … Continue reading Rethinking the Movement to Professionalize Teaching: A Story of Status and Control
I first presented this paper at the conference on “The Century of the School: Continuity and Innovation During the First Half of the 20th Century,” Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, September, 2007. A revised version was published in a book edited by Claudia Crotti and Fritz Osterwalder, Das Jahrhundert der Schulreformen: Internationale und Nationale Perspektiven, 1900-1950, … Continue reading Limits on the Impact of Educational Reform
In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse — the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains. If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers. This targeting of teachers employs a new form of … Continue reading Targeting Teachers
This post is a new piece I just published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original, which appears in the October edition of the magazine. In this essay, I explore an issue about the "grammar of schooling" that bothered me over the years as I was teaching about this subject. The concept was originally … Continue reading The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling
This post is a piece I published two years ago 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 … Continue reading Pluck and Luck
This post is a recent piece by the Washington Post education columnist, Jay Mathews. Here's a link to the original. What I love about this column is the succinct way in which Mathews skewers the entire school standards movement. The targets we use for student learning, he says, are not things that students will ever … Continue reading Jay Mathews — We must dump marginal learning standards and other annoyances in return to classrooms
For years, I've been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching now finally got it down on paper. Everyone complains about the quality of teaching colleges, and there's a lot of truth in the critiques. But what has struck me over the years is how college teaching is better than it should be in … Continue reading How Much of a Problem Is College Teaching? Less than You’d Expect
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 