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 post is a recent essay by Eric Levitz, which was published in New York Magazine in October. Here's a link to the original. He explores an issue that has been a major concern of mine in recent years, the role that higher education has had in exacerbating political divisions in the US and elsewhere in … Continue reading Eric Levitz — The Diploma Divide
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 … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
This post is a piece by Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovitz that was published recently in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. It's an astute analysis of the harmful effects of the pandemic on American schooling. They argue that only part of the damage was done by school closures. A lot of the harm … Continue reading Levinson and Markovitz — The Biggest Disruption in the History of American Education
This post is a piece from NPR summarizing the recent Tennessee study about the negative effect of preschool programs. Here's a link to the original. The study showed that the preschool program in Tennessee aimed at disadvantaged students was no only ineffective at improving the academic performance of these students but actually put them at … Continue reading Releasing Poor Kids from Preschool Prison
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. 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? These institutions obviously benefit their students and … Continue reading How NOT to Defend the Private Research University
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 … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
This essay by Steve Lagerfeld was published in the current issue of Hedgehog Review. Here's a link to the original. This is brief piece is a striking reflection on the evolving meaning of privilege over time. In the current period of meritocratic privilege, people acquire status by getting exclusive degrees. This gives them the right … Continue reading A Different Sense of Privilege
This post is a column by my favorite education writer, Jay Mathews from the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. I've posted two other pieces by him recently (here and here). In it he addresses an issue that creates so much craziness -- the way upper-middle class American families obsess about getting their … Continue reading Jay Mathews — Don’t Fret that Harvard Turned You Down. Top Public Universities Have a Lot More High-Scoring Students than the Most Selective Privates
This post is a review of Cristina Groeger's new book, The Education Trap, which is eventually going to appear in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. This is the best book about education that I have read in a long time. I urge you to read it. Limited to 800 words, … Continue reading Review of Cristina Groeger’s Education Trap
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 