This post is a paper I published in Journal of Teacher Education in 2010. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original. It is republished as a chapter in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. This is a summary of the argument: Teach For America is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college … Continue reading Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads You Win, Tails We Lose| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a tribute to a wonderful essay by the great British historian of working-class history, E. P. Thompson. His classic work is The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1966. The paper I’m touting here provides a lovely window into the heart of his craft, which is an unlikely combination of … Continue reading E.P. Thompson: Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
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 … Continue reading Perils of the Professionalized Historian| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is an essay by Joel Stein that appeared recently in the New York Times. Here’s a link to the original. It’s purportedly about the issue of how much authors are going to get paid for all the material that artificial intelligence systems are hoovering up from the world’s literature. The answer to this, of … Continue reading Joel Stein: What Should I Get Paid When a Chatbot Eats My Books| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
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 …| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
5 posts published by David Labaree during September 2025| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is an essay by Joel Stein published two days ago in the New York Times. Here’s a link to the original. It’s on a theme that will resonate with most writers, especially academic writers. What are your books worth in the publishing market place? Not much. Even AI understands this, as Stein found out. … Continue reading Joel Stein — What Should I Get Paid When a Chatbot Eats My Books?| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a talk I gave earlier this week — Boys Are Falling Behind: Overschooling Is the Reason. Here’s a LINK to the slides. Below is a brief overview of the argument, but I recommend looking at the slides to get the full story. Males are increasingly falling behind in our educational system Compared to … Continue reading Boys Are Falling Behind — Overschooling Is the Reason| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a lovely essay by Rose Horowitch, recently published in Atlantic. Here’s a link to the original. The average GPA of the graduating class at Harvard is a resounding 3.8. Really? Grade inflation is as disease with multiple causes — the popularity contest of teacher evaluations, the urge to keep the customer happy, … Continue reading Rose Horowitch — The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a commentary on historian Walter Scheidel’s book, Escape from Rome, which is a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? This post is republished in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. Scheidel examines … Continue reading How the Fall of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and Parallels with the Rise of US Higher Ed| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is an essay by historian Steven Mintz from his Substack. Here’s a link to the original. In it, he explores the need to balance structure and agency in the way we write history. A…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a paper I presented as part of a panel on the politics of teacher education at the annual meeting of the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) in 2005. It was…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
8 posts published by David Labaree during July 2025| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
This post is a very recent piece by Larry Cuban, which he posted on his blog two days ago. I just love it. He asks, What’s the problem with being an average student? How did average scho…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing
In this paper, I explore the issue of relevance in educational research. I argue that the chronic efforts by researchers to pursue relevance is counterproductive. Paradoxically, trying to make rese…| David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing