College Teaching Is Better than You’d Expect

This is an essay that is published in my new book, Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. For years, I'd been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching  and I finally put it down on paper a couple years ago. Everyone complains about the quality of teaching colleges, …

George Packer: The Moral Case Against Equity Language

This post is an essay by George Packer from the April issue of Atlantic.  Here's a link to the original. I find a thoughtful rumination on the problems posed by shifting to equity language in an effort to reduce discrimination and disparagement.  The problem, he says, is that the effort tends to lead to euphemisms, which …

My New Book Is Out: Being a Scholar

This post is a preview of my new book, which I just published with Kindle.  It's available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback.  The title is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life.   Below is the book's introduction, which provides the rationale for the book and summarizes …

Walter Mimms — How “Please” Stopped Being Polite

This blog post is an essay from Atlantic by Walter Mimms about the peculiar evolution of the word "please" in English usage.  Somehow it evolved from the super-polite "if it please you" to the slightly less formal "if you please" to the polite but simple "please" to the peremptory "would you please move" to the …

Career Ladders and the Early School Teacher: A Story of Inequality and Opportunity

This post is a piece I wrote for the 1989 book, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Don Warren.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original.  A slightly different version appeared as a chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.  I agreed to write the chapter a …

Walter Parker — Democracy Dies without Trust or Truth: Shore Up Civics in Schools

This post is a lovely op-ed by Walter Parker, which appeared recently in the Seattle Times.  Here's a link to the original.  Walter is an emeritus professor of civic education at University of Washington.  This essay draws on his forthcoming book, Education for Liberal Democracy.   The topic could not be more timely. Democracy dies without …

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 and promote public aims, …

Nathan Greenfield and Val Bur– The Influence of Institutional Prestige in Faculty Hiring

This post is a piece by Nathan Greenfield, reporting on a major study about the influence of institutional prestige on faculty hiring in the US. His article was first published in University World News.  Here's a link to the original. He focuses on a new research analysis recently published in Nature. The study, conducted by a …

The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers

This is a paper I published Educational Theory back in 2011 about the factors shaping the rise of quantification in education research.  It still seems relevant to a lot of issues in the field educational policy.  Here's an overview of the argument: In this paper I explore the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers …