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 … Continue reading The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers
This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it. It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools, and it first appeared in print as the introduction to a 2005 book called Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David … Continue reading Adventures in Scholarship
This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it. It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools, and it first appeared in print as the introduction to a 2005 book called Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David … Continue reading Adventures in Scholarship
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 … Continue reading Futures of the Field of Education
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 … Continue reading Sermon on Educational Research
This is a piece I wrote a year ago, which had been rattling around in my head for years. The issue is to figure out what role histories of education should play in the formation of educational policy. My short answer is that we should produce the histories we need rather than the histories we … Continue reading Why We Need Histories 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 … Continue reading Doctoral Proseminar — Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education
This is a class on academic writing for clarity and grace. It is designed as a 10-week class, with weekly readings, slides, and texts for editing. It’s aimed at doctoral students who are preparing to become researchers who seek to publish their scholarship. Ideally you can take the class with a group of peers, where you … Continue reading Writing Class Syllabus, Including Readings, Slides, and Texts
on Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in ScholarThis post is an overview of my life as a scholar. I presented an oral version in my job talk at Stanford in 2002. The idea was to make sense of the path I’d taken in my scholarly writing up to that point. What were the … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
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 … Continue reading Why Do We Need a Graduate School of Education?
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 