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 …

How Much of a Problem Is College Teaching? Less than You’d Expect

For years, I've been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching now finally got it down on paper.  Everyone complains about the quality of teaching colleges, and there's a lot of truth in the critiques.  But what has struck me over the years is how college teaching is better than it should be in …

Caitlin Flanagan — The Fury of Prep-School Parents

This post is a scorching essay by Caitlin Flanagan, "The Fury of the Prep-School Parents," which appeared two years ago in Atlantic.  Here's a link to the original. I'm posting it here for two reasons.  One is that it's a great case in point about the pathologies that arise from the new American meritocracy based …

Accountability Could Kill US Higher Ed

This is a new piece I wrote as the foreword to a book by J. M. Beach -- The Myths of Measurement and Meritocracy: Why Accountability Metrics in Higher Education are Unfair and Increase Inequality -- which will be published this summer by Rowman and Littlefield.  Two weeks ago, I posted the foreword I wrote for …

Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege

This a new piece I recently wrote, based on a paper I presented last fall at the ISCHE conference in Berlin.  It's part of a larger project that focuses on the construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy of credentials. Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, …