Let’s Measure What No One Teaches: PISA, NCLB, and the Shrinking Aims of Education

This post is a piece I published in Teachers College Record in 2014.  Here's a link to the original.   It's an analysis of two major players in the world movement for educational accountability:  OECD's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the US No Child Left Behind law.  The core argument is this: Both PISA …

Caitlin Flanagan — The Fury of Prep-School Parents

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 …

Lauren Oyler — The Case for Semicolons

Ok, today let's talk about something really important:  punctuation.  I know, it's exciting but it really does matter.  If you want to be understood, you need to punctuate your writing in a way that fosters understanding. Today's post is a lovely essay by Lauren Oyler from the Times last week.  Here's a link to the original.  …

Online Gaming Is Teaching Us that We Live in a World Without Constraints

This post is a piece by Francis Fukuyama published February 8 in American Purpose.  Here's a link to the original. What I particularly like about this brief analysis is the way he uses his own experience trying to work with an engineering design and manufacturing software to throw light on the recent invasion of the …

Work with What You’ve Got: Advice for Teachers from Ken Teitelbaum

This post is a review I wrote of a new book by Ken Teitelbaum, which will eventually appear in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy.  At its heart, this is a book of advice for teachers, and its messages really resonate with me.  You can't change the world, but you can do something important where …

Accountability Could Kill US Higher Ed

This is a new 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 will be published this summer by Rowman and Littlefield.  Two weeks ago, I posted the foreword I wrote for …

Consuming the Public School

This essay is a piece I published in Educational Theory in 2011.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original. In this essay I examine the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve …

Harold Wechsler — An Academic Gresham’s Law

This post is a favorite piece by an old friend and terrific scholar, Harold Wechsler, who sadly died several years ago.  Here's a link to the original, which appeared in Teachers College Record in 1981. In this paper, Wechsler explores a longstanding issue in American higher education.  How do students and colleges respond when the …