This is a piece I wrote as the foreword to a book by J. M. Beach -- The Myths of Measurement and Meritocracy: Why Accountability Metrics in Higher Education are Unfair and Increase Inequality -- which was published in 2021. Last week, I posted the foreword I wrote for the first volume in this series, which … Continue reading Accountability Could Kill US Higher Ed
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
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
This post is a scorching essay by Caitlin Flanagan, "The Fury of the Prep-School Parents," which appeared two years ago in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. I'm posting it here for two reasons. One is that it's a great case in point about the pathologies that arise from the new American meritocracy based … Continue reading Caitlin Flanagan — The Fury of Prep-School Parents
This a new piece I recently wrote, based on a paper I presented last fall at the ISCHE conference in Berlin. It's part of a larger project that focuses on the construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy of credentials. Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 