Biography

Current Research:

I am currently working on two books.  One is about the historically evolved nature of American higher education. A central aim of this study is to explore how the peculiar structure of the U.S. system of higher education helps explain its relatively recent rise to the top of world rankings. This system is extraordinarily complex, bringing together contradictory educational goals, a broad array political constituencies, diverse sources of funds, and multiple forms of authority into a single institutional arena characterized by creative tension and local autonomy. One tension is between the influence of the market and the influence of the state. Another arises from the conflict among three social-political visions of higher education – as undergraduate college (populist), graduate school (elitist), and land grant college (practical). A third arises from the way the system combines three alternative modes of authority – traditional, rational, and charismatic. In combination, these elements promote organizational complexity, radical stratification, broad political and financial support, partial autonomy, and adaptive entrepreneurial behavior.

The other book project is about the history of school reform in the United States.  The core of the argument is this:  School reform in the U.S. is better at reforming the language of education than at reforming its structure, and better at reforming its structure than at reforming its substance – teaching and learning in classrooms.  That is only natural, since schools themselves are better at expressing a goal than in operationalizing that goal in a manner that might actually realize it.  Schools are ways for society to express its concern about a social problem and demonstrate a desire to solve it without really doing anything serious about solving it directly.  Instead we assign the problem to schools, which is a way of showing we’re not serious about it while still maintaining a strong impression that we’re on the case.  Thus it follows that school reform parallels this process, focusing on discourse rather than outcomes, on form rather than substance.

Professional Experience:

Associate Dean for Student Affairs, School of Education, Stanford University, 2005 to present

Professor, School of Education, Stanford University, 2003 to present

Assistant Professor to Professor, Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University (1985-2003)

Coordinator of MSU Ph.D. program in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy (1996-2001)

Recent Roles in Professional Organizations

President, History of Education Society (2004-2005)

Vice president of Division F (History of Education), American Educational Research Association (2003-2006)

Member, executive board, AERA (2004-2005)

Selected Recent Publications:

"An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University," in Cochran-Smith et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, 3rd ed. (Association of Teacher Educators, forthcoming 2008)

Education, Markets, and the Public good: Selected Works of David F. Labaree (Routledge, 2007);

"Mutual subversion: A short history of the liberal and the professional in American higher education." History of Education Quarterly (2006)

The Trouble with Ed Schools (Yale University Press, 2004)

"The Ed School’s Romance with Progressivism," in Ravitch, Brookings Papers on Education Policy (2004)

"The Peculiar Problems of Preparing and Becoming Educational Researchers," Educational Researcher (2003)

"On the Nature of Teaching and Teacher Education: Difficult Practices that Look Easy," in Journal of Teacher Education (2000)

"No Exit: Public Education as an Inescapably Public Good," in Cuban & Shipps, Reconstructing the Common Good in Education (2000)

" Educational Researchers: Living with a Lesser Form of Knowledge," in Educational Researcher (1998)

How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning:  The Credentials Race in American Education (Yale University Press, 1997)