David F. Labaree

1 month ago | nepc.colorado.edu | Beckie Supiano |YearBy Year |David F. Labaree

This post is a recent essay by Beckie Supiano from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Here’s a link to the original. There’s been a lot written lately about the effect that the pandemic had on student learning, and this piece picks up on some of that analysis. But what I find so compelling about this piece is how the author goes more deeply into the role that the educational standards has had in dumbing down the capabilities of students.

Aug 30, 2024 | nepc.colorado.edu | YearBy Year |David F. Labaree

This post is a piece I published in 2021 in Kappan. Here’s a link to the original. It is now a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. 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 a 1994 AERJ paper and then more fully developed in a 1995 book that Tyack coauthored with Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia.

Aug 29, 2024 | davidlabaree.com | David F. Labaree

This is a piece I wrote about the harm that educational research has inflicted over the years. Given a track record of making things worse for school and society, educational researchers would do well to heed the wisdom in the Hippocratic Oath. If our work often fails to make things better, we should at least strive to do no harm. The paper first appeared in Teacher Education and Practice in 2011. Here’s a link to the original. David F.

Aug 20, 2024 | nepc.colorado.edu | YearBy Year |David F. Labaree

This post is a piece I that came out in 2021 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 link to a pdf of the chapter. This essay is dedicated to my old friend and former colleague, David Cohen, who died in 2020. It now appears as a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling.

Jul 8, 2024 | davidlabaree.com | David F. Labaree

This post is an essay by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, which was published recently in The Nation.  Here’s a link to the original. It draws from their new book, which I highly recommend: Their core argument is that the pressure for school choice — “fund students not systems” — is at heart an effort to turn public education into a private good, whose benefits accrue only to the degree holder.