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How has school attainment varied across countries in the last 50 years?
Now that Valerie Strauss has called my field the unsexy academic arena of education history, albeit while trying to calm down those affected by "Ravitch Rage," I should evidently switch fields, maybe to something sexier like economics of education or even Fuller brush sales. But before I quit not only the field of the history […]
Civic protest and inversion rituals
A picture of gay-rights protests in Turkey distributed to Twitter in the last week is one of these "wow" moments of modern life, like the picture of the protester in Tahrir Square expressing solidarity with public workers in Wisconsin. Civic protest is something that is both wondrous when you see it halfway across the world and worrisome […]
Dropout prevention theater… or at least concerts
Apparently John Legend is going to be singing for Proctor & Gamble's "anti-dropout promotion" campaign. This PR effort is deja vu all over again, from this historian's perspective. There have been anti-dropout PR campaigns since World War I, sometimes government sponsored (as in WW1), sometimes public-private combinations (as in a summer 1963 campaign partly funded by a […]
Pathology narratives and parenting
These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. Paul Bohn, paraphrased in How to Land Your Kid in Therapy by Lori Gottlieb. He soon became a specialist, specializing in diseases of the […]
Disruptiness in K-12: historical perspectives
In his blog recently, Jay Greene summarized the general disruption/creative-destruction argument for privatization and quasi-privatization efforts: you can't easily turn low-performing schools around, but you can replace them with new schools, so that's what we should do in large school districts that Greene labels as obviously failing. There are pieces in his brief post that tie into […]