Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling

This post is a piece I that came out last November as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School.  The book was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part a series edited by Bill Reese and John Rury on Historical Studies in Education.  Here is a …

Public Goods, Private Goods — The American Struggle over Educational Goals

This post is a paper I published in 1997 in American Journal of Educational Research.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original.  It became the framing chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed In School Without Really Learning. Here's the abstract: This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have …

Pluck and Luck

This post is a piece I published two years ago in Aeon.  Here’s the link to the original.  I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy.  It was nearly impossible to get students to consider …

Balancing Access and Advantage — The Tension at the Heart of US Education

This post is a paper I presented in Berne at the 2012 meeting of the Swiss Society for Research on Education in Berne, which was then published in a book -- Bildungsungleichheit und Gerechtigkeit: Wissenschaftliche und Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen (by far the coolest title in my entire CV).  It later appeared as a chapter in my …

School Syndrome: Understanding the USA’s Magical Belief that Schooling Can Somehow Improve Society, Promote Access, and Preserve Advantage

This post is a 2012 piece I published Journal of Curriculum Studies, which draws on my book Someone Has to Fail.  Here's a link to a PDF of the original. An overview of the story I'm telling: The USA is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways …

Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling

This post is a piece I just wrote, which will end up as a chapter in a book edited by Kyle Steele, New Perspectives on the Twentieth Century American High School.  It will be published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of Bill Reese and John Rury series on Historical Studies in Education.  Here is a link …

Kroger — In Praise of American Higher Education

Every now and then in these difficult times, it's nice to consider some of the institutions that are working pretty well.  One of these is the US system of higher education.  Yes, it's fraught with some problems right now: Covid cutbacks and Zoom fatigue, high student debt loads, the increasing size of the contingent faculty, …

Mary Metz: Real School

This blog post is a tribute to the classic paper by Mary Metz, "Real School."  In it she shows how schools follow a cultural script that demonstrates all of the characteristics we want to see in a school.  The argument, in line with neo-institutional theory (see this example by Meyer and Rowan), is that schools …

Pluck vs. Luck

This post is a piece I recently published in Aeon.  Here's the link to the original.  I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy.  It was nearly impossible to get students to consider that …

From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the U.S.

This post is the text of a lecture I delivered last week in Japan at Kyoto University and Keio University.  It draws on the second chapter of my book, Someone Has to Fail (which has been translated into Japanese), and at the end I try to bring the analysis up to the present.  The subject …