Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling

This post is a piece I that came out last November as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School.  The book was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part a series edited by Bill Reese and John Rury on Historical Studies in Education.  Here is a …

What Schools Can’t Do

This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne.  It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail.  Here is the link to the first published version. It’s about a longstanding problem in American …

Are Students Consumers?

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 …

Public Goods, Private Goods — The American Struggle over Educational Goals

This post is a paper I published in 1997 in American Journal of Educational Research.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original.  It became the framing chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed In School Without Really Learning. Here's the abstract: This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have …

Elliot Eisner — What Does It Mean to Say a School Is Doing Well?

This post is an essay by Elliot Eisner that was published in 2001 in Kappan.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original.  Elliot, my friend and colleague, died in 2014.  Here's a link to his obituary.  Elliot was one of the great academic champions for a richly humanistic view of education, the perfect …

The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling

This post is a new piece I just published in Kappan.  Here's a link to the original, which appears in the October edition of the magazine. 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 …

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 …

Larry Cuban — Reforming Again, Again, and Again

This blog post is a classic essay by Larry Cuban that explores the perennial problem of why efforts to reform schools in the US are steady work.  Why do we keep trying to make the same reforms, over and over again, with only minimal success?  The essay was published in Educational Researcher in 1990.  Here's …

Why We Obsess about the Goals of Schooling even though Schools Continually Fail to Meet These Goals

This post is a paper I presented in 2008 at the annual meeting of the research group on the Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education, Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium.  The theme of the papers for this meeting was "Proofs, Arguments, and Other Reasonings: The Language of Education."  The paper was published in a …

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 …