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 …

Perils of the Professionalized Historian

This is a short piece about the problems that professionalism poses for the academic historian.  History is a different kind of subject, and too often academic rigor gets in the way of telling the kinds of historical accounts that we need. An earlier version was published in 2017 in the International Journal of the Historiography of Education. Perils …

Response to Student Comments on My “Academic Technicians and Justice Warriors” Essay

This post is my response to student comments about a piece I wrote called "We're Producing Academic Technicians and Justice Warriors: A Sermon on Educational Research, part 2." Both were published in the Swiss journal Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. The "We're Producing" paper was in turn a follow-up to another piece I …

Rethinking the Movement to Professionalize Teaching: A Story of Status and Control

This post is a chapter from my book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.  It's a revised version of a paper that was previously published in 1992 as “Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Teaching: A Genealogy of Teacher Professionalization” in Harvard Educational Review. Here's a link to that version. The HER version of …

Why Do We Need a Graduate School of Education?

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 …

Targeting Teachers

In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse — the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains.  If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers.  This targeting of teachers employs a new form of …

David Cohen — Teaching Practice: Plus Ca Change

This post is a classic essay by David Cohen.  The version I'm reproducing here comes from a conference paper he prepared for the Benton Center at University of Chicago.  Here's a link to the original.  An earlier and shorter version was published as a chapter in 1988 in a book edited by Philip Jackson, Contributing  …

Jonathan Rauch — The War on Professionalism

This post is an wonderful essay by Jonathan Rauch, The War on Professionalism.  It was published in the current issue of National Affairs.  Here's a link to the original. This essay is a celebration of professionalism, in a populist period when to call someone professional seems seems slanderous.  Here's how he sets the context for …

Larry Cuban — Rockets Are Complicated but Schools Are Complex; Thoughts about Educational Exceptionalism

In this post, I want to explore a vivid image developed by Larry Cuban to characterize the peculiar nature of teaching and learning in schools.  Scholars have frequently argued for a form of educational exceptionalism that sees schooling as a social structure that is distinctive from the normal patterns of bureaucratic organization that one sees …

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools

This post is a review I wrote of Steven Conn's book, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools, which will be coming out this summer in History of Education Quarterly.  Here's a link to the proofs. Steven Conn. Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools. Ithaca, NY: Cornell …