Consuming the Public School

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, …

Larry Cuban’s Confessions of a School Reformer

This post is a brief promo I wrote for Larry Cuban's wonderful book, Confessions of a School Reformer, which was just published in Kappan.  Here's a link to the original.  They ask Kappan authors to recommend a book in every issue and this was my contribution.  You'll love this book! David Labaree recommends Confessions of a …

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 …

Insights from James Scott about the Conflicting Worldviews of Reformers and Teachers

This post is a reflection on the conflicting worldviews that reformers and teachers use in trying to understand teaching and learning in classrooms.  It draws on the insights from one of my favorite books, James Scott's Seeing Like a State.  The text itself comes from chapter 5 of my book, Someone Has to Fail.  The …

History of School Reform Class Syllabus with Links to Readings and Slides

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of School Reform in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for 15 years.  In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested.  If you are a college …

The Chronic Failure of Curriculum Reform

This post is about an issue I’ve wrestled with for years, namely why reforming schools in the U.S. is so difficult.  I eventually wrote a book on the subject, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, which was published in 2010.  But you may not need to read it if you look at this …

What Schools Can’t Do

This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne.  It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail.  Here is the link to the first published version. It’s about a longstanding problem in American …

The Attractions of Doing School

This post is a new piece I just published in Kappan.  Here's a link to the original.  It's a response to an essay by Jal Mehta proposing a new US grammar of schooling, and it refers to a piece I wrote for Kappan with my take on understanding the roots of this grammar.  In it …

Citizens and Consumers — Evolving Rhetorics of US School Reform

This post is a paper I presented at a conference in Zurich in 2007 and then published as a chapter in the 2011 book, Schooling and the Making of Citizens in the Long Nineteenth Century: Comparative Visions, edited by Daniel Trohler, Thomas Popkewitz, and David Labaree.  Here's is a link to the corrected proofs of …

Limits on the Impact of Educational Reform

I first presented this paper at the conference on “The Century of the School: Continuity and Innovation During the First Half of the 20th Century,” Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, September, 2007.  A revised version was published in a book edited by Claudia Crotti and Fritz Osterwalder, Das Jahrhundert der Schulreformen: Internationale und Nationale Perspektiven, 1900-1950, …