on Are Students Consumers? This post is a piece I published in Education Week way back in 1997. It’s a much shorter and more accessible version of the most cited paper I ever published, “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals.” Drawing on the latter, it lays out a case for three competing educational … Continue reading Are Students Consumers?
This post is a piece from NPR summarizing the recent Tennessee study about the negative effect of preschool programs. Here's a link to the original. The study showed that the preschool program in Tennessee aimed at disadvantaged students was no only ineffective at improving the academic performance of these students but actually put them at … Continue reading Releasing Poor Kids from Preschool Prison
This post is a paper I presented at a conference in Zurich in 2007 and then published as a chapter in the 2011 book, Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Comparative Visions, edited by Daniel Trohler, Thomas Popkewitz, and David Labaree. Here's is a link to the corrected proofs of … Continue reading Citizens and Consumers — Evolving Rhetorics of US School Reform
This post is an essay by Michael Lind that was published in Tablet in early January. Here's a link to the original. Lind is an astute scholar of the growing divisions in American cultural and political life, and in this essay he unpacks the nature of this divide in a manner I find both original … Continue reading Michael Lind — America’s Asymmetric Civil War
Below is a piece I wrote for a book that was just published by Teachers College Press -- Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, edited by David Berliner and Carl Hermanns. Here’s a link to a pdf of my piece. Here's the book's table of contents, to give you an idea of its scope … Continue reading Public Schooling as Social Welfare
This post is about how to frame an academic argument, which draws on a book by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. I used this book in my class Academic Writing with Clarity and Grace. Here you can get the syllabus for the class along with … Continue reading Academic Writing — Framing an Argument as They Say, I Say
This post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching -- the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona. In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail. In the second part, I … Continue reading Teacher Persona
This post is a tribute to one of the great books of the last century and for me the greatest book about war, Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Published in 1961 it became an instant bestseller. Two weeks ago I highlighted another bestseller and first novel from the same period, Mrs. Bridge by Evans Connell, which was … Continue reading Catch-22
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 