Malcolm Gladwell on Panicking and Choking: The Different Ways that Amateurs and Professionals Fail

Professionals, by definition, are more skilled than amateurs in any given field, but they both experience failure.  And to an average observer, they appear to fail in similar ways.   The practitioner is moving along nicely in carrying out his or her craft -- and then suddenly it all falls apart.  The golf ball flies off …

The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness — in Both Public Health and Public Schooling

I published this op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News two years ago, in the early stages of the pandemic.  Here’s a link to the original. If anything, its relevance is even more apparent now than it was in 2020.  Consider the enormous shipping and trucking backlogs that clogged up our economic system at the tail end …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

School Gave Me the Creeps

This post is a piece I wrote recently, something I’ve been meaning to write for years.  An alternative title is: “School — Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It.”  Here’s a link to the Word document. See what you think. School Gave Me the Creeps David Labaree             Did you like school?  I didn’t.    …

Schools Are at the Root of the Youth Mental Health Crisis

This post is an op-ed written by Deborah Malizia and me that was published on December 2 in the Mercury News.  Here's a link to the original.  It's about how the pressure for rigor and high academic achievement in American schools has been damaging the mental health of students.  Another example of schooling's role in …

How Not to Defend the Private Research University

This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review.  Here's a link to the original.  It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years.  How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities?  …

Luck and Pluck — Alternative Stories of Life in the Meritocracy

This post is a piece I published three years ago in Aeon.  Here’s the link to the original.  I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy.  It was nearly impossible to get students to consider …