Toke Richstein — Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?

This post is an essay by Toke Reichstein from his Substack. Here's a link to the original. The key issue is the title: "Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?"  In the course of this essay, he deploys economics at its best in trying to sort out this problem.   He shows that simplistic approaches to setting social priorities bring a ton of unintended consequences. 

davidlabaree.com

Opinion | How We Speak Has Gotten Extravagant. Literally. (Gift Article)

We don’t speak just to say something. We speak to be heard.

nytimes.com

The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism

This post is a set of slides for a talk I gave recently, "The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism." It's an effort to put the challenge that artificial intelligence poses for American education in historical perspective.  Today, students can have AI do course readings for them and then write the required papers for them as well.  Soon, students will be able to hire an AI agent to sign into their account in the college course management system (Canvas, Blackboard, etc.), do all the readings, watch all the lectures, and submit all the papers -- without the student ever having to get out of bed. 

davidlabaree.com

Katy Purviance — Schools Don’t Just Fail the Kids Who Struggle. They Are Run by the Kids Who Didn’t.

This post is an essay by Katy Purviance from her Substack "the joy of learning." Here's a link to the original.   She's exploring an issue that has became increasingly interesting to me: the damage that schooling can do to many students, especially boys (see here and here).  The problem is the unnatural process that schooling inflicts on students -- forcing them to sit quietly at their desks for 6 hours a day, 180 days a year, over 12 years. 

davidlabaree.com

Essay | Is It Time to ‘Liquidate’ the Study of Sociology?

Sociology has long been tasked with investigating society’s most pressing challenges. But these days, sociologists’ greatest obstacle may be themselves.

wsj.com

Know It Before You Mess With It

This post is the text of a keynote address I gave on July 14 (Bastille Day!) at the Building Blackboard Together 2026 conference in Dallas. This is an annual event hosted by Blackboard -- the learning management systems (LMS) company -- which brings together the Blackboard staff and the system's users at colleges and universities to talk about new developments in the company's LMS. 

davidlabaree.com

Schools Don't Just Fail the Kids Who Struggle. They Are Run by the Kids Who Didn't.

An open letter to every educator who loved school, written on behalf of those who didn't

open.substack.com

The Odyssey Is Not a Story About PTSD

It Is a Story About Life After the End of a World

open.substack.com

David Cohen — Teaching Practice: Plus Ca Change

This post is a classic essay by David Cohen.  The version I'm reproducing here comes from a conference paper he prepared for the Benton Center at University of Chicago.  Here's a link to the original.  An earlier and shorter version was published as a chapter in 1988 in a book edited by Philip Jackson, Contributing  to  Educational  Change: Perspectives on Research and Practice…

davidlabaree.com

How Football Helped Make US Universities Great

This post is a piece I published in Quartz in 2017.  Here’s a link to the original.  It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is their ability to reach beyond the narrow constituency for its elevated intellectual accomplishments. 

davidlabaree.com

Harold Wechsler — Group Repulsion in the History of US Higher Ed

This post is a favorite piece by an old friend and terrific scholar, Harold Wechsler, who sadly died a few years ago.  Here’s a link to the original, which appeared in Teachers College Record in 1981. In this paper, Wechsler explores a longstanding issue in American higher education.  How do students and colleges respond when the initial core group of college students — wealthy white males — face newcomers that don’t look like them? 

davidlabaree.com

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 educational policy:  We ask schools to pursue goals that are beyond their capabilities. 

davidlabaree.com

5 Bewildering Dispatches From Academic Publishing (opinion)

The journals are fine. Everything is fine.

insidehighered.com

Gordon Wood: What Explains the Genius of the American Founders?

This post is an essay by Gordon Wood that was published a while ago as in op-ed in the Washington Post.  Here's a link to the original.  I thought it was worth remembering what an insightful historian he was, after the news of his recent death. His focus is on why the American colonies produced such a remarkable set of republican thinkers and leaders. 

davidlabaree.com

Indigenous Bullshit

History Doesn't Care Who Got Here First

open.substack.com

Campbell's Law: Something Every Educator Should Know

As soon as I learned Campbell's Law, how I conceived my teaching changed.

open.substack.com