How Football Helped Make US Universities Great

This post is a piece I published in Quartz in 2017.  Here’s a link to the original.  It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that …

Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition.  Here’s a link to the PDF. Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics being a positive in the world of public education. U.S. schools are …

Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege

This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials.  Here's a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education.   An overview of the argument: Modern systems of public schooling have transformed …

Teacher Persona

This post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching — the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona.   In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail.  In the second part, I explore the …

Sermon on Educational Research

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 …

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 …

College — What Is It Good For?

This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2013 at the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society.  It was published the following year in the Society's journal, Education and Culture.  Here's a link to the published version.            The story I tell here is not a philosophical …

The Five-Paragraph Fetish

This is a piece I published in Aeon several years ago about the persistence of the five-paragraph essay, which has evolved into the five-chapter dissertation and the five-section journal article.  Formalism reins supreme.  Here’s the link to the original. The Five-Paragraph Essay Writing essays by a formula was meant to be a step on the way. …

What If Napoleon Had Won at Waterloo

What If Napoleon Had Won at Waterloo Today I want to explore an interesting case of counterfactual history.  What would have happened if Napoleon Bonaparte had won in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo?  What consequences might have followed for Europe in the next two centuries?  That he might have succeeded is not mere fantasy.  …

Do No Harm: Reflections on the Impact of Educational Research

This post is a short piece I wrote in 2011 for a special issue of the journal Teacher Education and Practice on “Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Scholarship.” My own take is that research in education is not necessarily well positioned to enhance education; on the contrary, it often does more harm than good.  See what …