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, …

The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the US

This post is a paper I published Educational Theory in 2008.  Here’s a link to the original. In this essay, I examine the paradox of educationalization in the American context. I argue that, like most modern Western societies, the United States has displayed a strong tendency over the years for educationalizing social problems, even though schools have repeatedly proven …

Course Syllabus — School, What Is It Good For?

This post is the syllabus for a class I taught for several years at Stanford Graduate School of Education: “School — What Is It Good For?” The course's aim is to provide a guided exploration of alternative theories of the social functions that schools serve, especially in American society.  Along the way it tries to …

School Syndrome: Understanding the USA’s Magical Belief that Schooling Can Somehow Improve Society, Promote Access, and Preserve Advantage

This post is a 2012 piece I published Journal of Curriculum Studies, which draws on my book Someone Has to Fail.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. An overview of the story I’m telling: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium …

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 …

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 …

The Dynamic Tension at the Core of the Grammar of Schooling

This post is a new piece I published last year in Kappan.  Here’s a link to the original. In this essay, I explore an issue about the “grammar of schooling” that bothered me over the years as I was teaching about this subject.  The concept was originally introduced by David Tyack and William Tobin in …

Doctoral Proseminar — Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education

This post contains all of the material for the doctoral proseminar — Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education — that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last four years of my time there. The aim of this class is to give first-year doctoral students in education a …

Resisting Educational Standards

This post is a piece I published in Kappan in 2000.  Here’s a link to the PDF. It’s an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards.  Of course my timing wasn’t great.  Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a system of standard mandates.  Oops. This …

The American High School Has Failed Its Missions

This article was originally published in 1989 in the MSU Alumni Magazine.  Here's a link to the original. It came out right after publication of my first book, The Making of an American High School, and introduces the scheme of three conflicting goals for US education -- democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility -- …