Work to understand how schools have been social institutions.
Note: this first appeared as a column in the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) January 8, 2026. When the Arizona Board of Education voted December 8 to remove anything smacking of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from our Structured English Immersion curriculum and the Arizona Professional Teaching Standards, they were succumbing to this year’s witchhunt for words. […]
Inevitability is a common rhetorical ploy in education. To Thomas Edison, film would inevitably replace textbooks. In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner said that teaching machines were inevitably going to replace teachers. In 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were inevitably going to take over higher education. Pick your initiative, and you can almost always find someone […]
On November 26, Arizona State University featured in a Wall Street Journal article written by Elizabeth Collins, one of their national political reporters based in Phoenix, and Douglas Belkin, a Journal higher ed reporter. This was not the first time my university employer has been prominently mentioned in a Journal article in 2025: On June 20, President Michael Crow’s op-ed argued for […]
On one of the social media platforms I visit, there was a set of threads recently on the science of reading and three-cuing, a now-disdained prompt for early readers having difficulty with a word. As I understand it, three-cuing is a set of three prompts to guess the word. I’m not a fan of encouraging […]
In my social media feeds recently, I’ve seen debate over the decision by the American Federation of Teachers to partner with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to open a National Academy for AI Instruction. The July 8 press release describes the goal as “a national model for AI-integrated curriculum and teaching that puts educators in the driver’s seat.” […]
I write this from Seoul, at the end of a week-long stay that began for me with the International Conference on Education Research and is ending with reading the news that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted yet another emergency order to relieve the Trump administration of the obligations under the law, in this case removing a […]
When I last wrote a blog entry, it was at the end of 2023. Six weeks before, while I was in Miami for a meeting, my daughter had found my wife unresponsive one morning and called 911. Elizabeth had extremely low blood sugar and came home after half a day in the ER, alive thanks […]
A little more than five years ago, I traveled with my then-student Wooyeong Kim to the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library. The archive there has thousands of feet of shelved material on the American history of broadcasting, much of it on public broadcasting, and we spent the entire week in the papers of the Children’s […]
I was in sixth grade when I first argued with a teacher about a math test. It was a multiple-choice test, made by the teacher and returned to us with her corrections and our grades, after comparing our work to her answer key. During a few minutes reserved for seatwork, I walked to the front […]
In his presidential address to the (U.S.) History of Education Society, Ben Justice pitched his argument that schooling has historically been a white good. Further, he wrote, the extent to which schooling has served the public interest has been the result of explicit efforts to counter white supremacy, led by non-white activism. ((Justice’s address is […]