Exit, Voice, and Loyalty – a book you can't get out of your head – was written Albert Hirschman, a political economist and total mensch (read his obituary). I find his framework is immensely useful in thinking about schools. The core argument is that political and economic organizations are responsive to different kinds of customer … Continue reading The Problem of Public Schools in a Liberal Democracy: Insights from Albert Hirschman’s “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty”
This post is an essay I wrote about the history of the uneasy relationship between American teacher education and the university. It was published in 2008 in the 3rd edition of the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and John McIntyre). This is a PDF of the original. Here's … Continue reading An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University
This post is a lovely essay by Adam Haslett about the art of good writing, which is framed as a review of Stanley Fish's book, How to Write a Sentence -- and How to Read One. It was published in 2011 in Financial Times. Here's a link to the original. I used to assign both … Continue reading Adam Haslett — The Art of Good Writing
This post is a piece by David Frum that was published in 2017 by Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. There has been a lot of talk lately about the threats to democracy, brought on by the disaster of the Trump administration and other shifts toward populist autocracy around the world. In this essay, … Continue reading David Frum: Democracies Fail in the Absence of Strong Conservative Parties
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 commentary on a classic essay by Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," which appeared in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In. Here's a PDF of the original chapter. His essay is a riff on an aphorism he developed earlier: the state make war and war … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This post is a stunning essay by Paul Fussell published in The New Republic in 1981. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. On August 2, we observed the 76th anniversary of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In light of that, it seems like a good time to revisit the debate about … Continue reading Paul Fussell — “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”
This post is a dialogue I had last winter with Sara Goldrick-Rab, which covered a wide range of topics surrounding higher education policy in the US. It was just published online by History of Education Quarterly. Here's a link to the original. It's part of a series of such dialogues that the journal has been … Continue reading Policy Dialogue with Sara Goldrick-Rab
This is a piece I published in 2012 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. It draws on my experience over the years working with doctoral students in education. The advice, basically, is to approach your apprenticeship in educational research doing the opposite of what everyone else tells you to do: Be Wrong Be … Continue reading Sermon on Educational Research
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 