Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition.  Here’s a link to the PDF. Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics being a positive in the world of public education. U.S. schools are …

Megan Daum — The Broken-In World

This post is a stunning essay by one of my favorite writers, Meghan Daum.  It's a beautifully crafted piece of prose reflecting on her life after divorce, when feeling broken evolved into feeling part of world that is broken-in.   The Broken-In World How could I have known that my most satisfying life was a …

Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege

This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials.  Here's a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education.   An overview of the argument: Modern systems of public schooling have transformed …

The Role of Queen

In light of Queen Elizabeth's death, I thought it might be worth revisiting this earlier post in which I reflected on the durability of monarchy over the years. ****** In episode 5 of The Crown‘s season 4, a desperate out-of-work painter named Michael Fagan breaks into Buckingham Palace, enters the queen’s bedroom, sits on the foot …

Futures of the Field of Education

This post is a piece of mine about the futures of the university field of education.  It focuses on the question:  What kind of roles do educational researchers play in school and society?  I wrote this essay as the summary chapter for a book edited by Geoff Whitty and John Furlong, Knowledge and the Study …

Nabokov on Student Exam Essays

This post is a piece by Vladimir Nabokov in response to answers that students wrote for the mid-term exam in his 1957 Cornell literature class.  It appeared in Times Literary Supplement last month with an introduction by Eric Naiman.  Here's a link to the original.   It's fun to imaging the great Russian writer grading undergraduate …

Teacher Persona

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 explore the …

Larry Cuban — Classrooms Around the World

This post is by Larry Cuban, which he posted on his blog last year.  Here's a link to the original. It's a lovely illustration -- literally -- of the homogeneity of classroom organization around the world.  If you could be dropped in any one of these rooms out of the blue, without understanding anything about …

Sermon on Educational Research

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.  Hope you like it. Sermon on Educational …