Public Goods, Private Goods — The American Struggle over Educational Goals

This post is a paper I published in 1997 in American Journal of Educational Research.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original.  It became the framing chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed In School Without Really Learning. Here's the abstract: This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have …

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire — Parents Don’t Have the Right to Shape their Kids’ School Curriculum

This post is an op-ed by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire recently published in the Washington Post.  Here's a link to the original. They're responding to the efforts by parents and by Republican legislators to give parents veto power over what they're children are taught in public schools.  Schneider and Berkshire argue that American law …

Why Do We Need a Graduate School of Education?

This post is a brief talk I gave in 2013 for the occasion celebrating the renaming of the ed school at Stanford, complete with a new logo and branded swag.  It had long been called the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE for short) and at that point it changed to the Stanford Graduate School …

Elliot Eisner — What Does It Mean to Say a School Is Doing Well?

This post is an essay by Elliot Eisner that was published in 2001 in Kappan.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original.  Elliot, my friend and colleague, died in 2014.  Here's a link to his obituary.  Elliot was one of the great academic champions for a richly humanistic view of education, the perfect …

Preface to the Chinese Edition of A Perfect Mess

This post is the text of the preface I just wrote for the Chinese translation of my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of the American System of Higher Education.  The translators are Professor Sun Bi and research assistant Liu Zitai from the School of Education at South China Normal University.  It will be …

Ethan Hutt — The Sickness in Our Schools

This post is a piece by Ethan Hutt (an education professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), which was originally published in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education.  Here's a link to the PDF. In this essay, he explores the way in which the Covid experience has revealed an ailment that has long …

Targeting Teachers

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 …

A Different Sense of Privilege

This essay by Steve Lagerfeld was published in the current issue of Hedgehog Review.  Here's a link to the original. This is brief piece is a striking reflection on the evolving meaning of privilege over time.  In the current period of meritocratic privilege, people acquire status by getting exclusive degrees.  This gives them the right …