Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose

This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. This is a summary of the argument:             Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college students a win-win option:  By becoming corps members, they can do good and do well at the same …

Too Easy a Target: The Trouble with Ed Schools and the Implications for the University

This post is a piece I published in Academe (the journal of AAUP) in 1999.  It provides an overview of the argument in my 2004 book, The Trouble with Ed Schools. I reproduce it here as a public service:  if you read this, you won’t need to read my book much less buy it.  You’re welcome.  Also, looking …

An Unlovely Legacy: The Disabling Impact of the Market on American Teacher Education

What with huge problems hanging in the balance right now, like the future of American democracy and the world order, this might be a good time to focus on a little problem, one mostly of academic interest.  The issue for today is — wait for it — the trouble with American ed schools.  Sounds a …

Response to Student Comments on My “Academic Technicians and Justice Warriors” Essay

This post is my response to student comments about a piece I wrote called "We're Producing Academic Technicians and Justice Warriors: A Sermon on Educational Research, part 2." Both were published in the Swiss journal Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. The "We're Producing" paper was in turn a follow-up to another piece I …

The Trouble with Ed Schools

I'm posting this as a public service.  Read it and you won't need to read -- much less buy -- my 2004 book with the same title.  It provides an overview of the book's argument, which was originally published in Educational Foundations in 1996.  Here's a link to the original.  This is an overview: Everyone …

Rethinking the Movement to Professionalize Teaching: A Story of Status and Control

This post is a chapter from my book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.  It's a revised version of a paper that was previously published in 1992 as “Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Teaching: A Genealogy of Teacher Professionalization” in Harvard Educational Review. Here's a link to that version. The HER version of …

Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers

This post is a chapter from my 2004 book, The Trouble with Ed Schools.  Here's a link to an earlier version that was published in 2003 in Educational Researcher.   I wrote this in response to my experience teaching doctoral students in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.  Nearly all of the students …

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 …

A Conversation about US Higher Education

This post is the transcript of a conversation I recently had with Ryan Maloney, who is a strength and conditioning coach at Fredonia University.  He has a very interesting blog, Cerebral Conversations, in which he discusses issues in higher education with a wide variety of people in the field.  This discussion was posted on his …

Educational Researchers: Living with a Lesser Form of Knowledge

This post is a paper I published in Educational Researcher in 1998.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original. This is an overview of the story I'm telling: In this article, I argue that key characteristics of educational knowl­edge both constrain and enable the work of educational researchers, as producers of this knowledge, …