Mary Metz: Real School

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 …

Doctoral Proseminar: An Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education

This post contains all of the material for the doctoral proseminar -- Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education -- that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last four years. The aim of this class is to give first-year doctoral students in education a grounding in some of …

Pluck vs. Luck

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 …

Academic Writing Issues #9: Metaphors — The Poetry of Everyday Life

Earlier I posted a piece about mangled metaphors (Academic Writing Issues # 6), which focused on the trouble that writers get into when they use a metaphor without taking into account the root comparison that is embedded within it.  Example:  talking about "the doctrine set forth in Roe v. Wade and its progeny” -- a …