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 … Continue reading College: What Is It Good For?
This post is a reflection on some of the insights I culled from Irena Smith's new book, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. The book is a memoir a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, who got a PhD in comp lit, taught college, became an admissions reader at Stanford and then … Continue reading Irena Smith — The Golden Ticket
This post is a piece I wrote for the 1989 book, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Don Warren. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. A slightly different version appeared as a chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. I agreed to write the chapter a … Continue reading Career Ladders and the Early School Teacher: A Story of Inequality and Opportunity
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, … Continue reading Consuming the Public School
This post is an op-ed I published on my birthday (May 17) in 2018 on the online international opinion site, Project Syndicate. The original is hidden behind a paywall; here are PDFs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It’s a brief essay on what is distinctive about the American system of higher education, drawn from my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy … Continue reading Exceptionalism in US Higher Education
This post is a piece I published in Kappan in November, 2018. Here’s a link to the original. Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good When schooling comes to be viewed mainly as a source of private benefit, both schools and society pay the consequences. By David F. Labaree … Continue reading Public Schools for Private Gain
This post is a piece by Larry Cuban, which he recently published on his blog. Here's a link to the original. It's all about how some things never change in schools. Despite the enormous disruption of Covid shutdown and Zoom classrooms, American classrooms remain in the age-old format of teacher-centered instruction. SKIP TO C Timeless … Continue reading Larry Cuban — Timelessness of Teacher-Centered Instruction
This post is a chilling analysis by Keven Carey about the collapsing demography of US higher ed, which was recently published in Vox. Here's a link to the original. An overview of his argument: In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, … Continue reading Kevin Carey — The Incredible Shrinking Future of College
This post is a new essay of mine that was just published in Kappan. Here's a link to the original. And here's a link to the pdf. The essay focuses on an issue I've been thinking about for years, the tight interrelationship between states and schools. Here's an overview of the argument: The nation state and … Continue reading The Fraught Connection between State and School
This post is an essay of mine that laid the foundation for my 2017 book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. Getting there was a long and winding road. Let me count the curves along the way. This version was published in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education in … Continue reading A System Without a Plan
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 