About

I am Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. I was a high school social studies teacher (14 years), district superintendent (7 years) and university professor (20 years). I have published op-ed pieces, scholarly articles and books on classroom teaching, history of school reform, how policy gets translated into practice, and teacher and student use of technologies in K-12 and college classrooms.

Confessions of a School Reformer appeared in December 2021. In this book, I track my life and career as a student, high school history teacher, district superintendent, and professor as that life and career unfolded during three major school reform movements in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I entered elementary school and graduated high school during the later years of the Progressive reform movement, taught history and social studies in urban high schools while the struggle for civil rights swept across America, and led a school district as the nation’s schools got caught up in the business-inspired standards, testing and accountability reform movement that began in the 1980s and continues into the 21st century.

In Confessions, I analyze each of these 20th century school reform movements in separate chapters. Following each of those analytic chapters are chapters where I entwine my boyhood and teenage life growing up in Pittsburgh (PA), years I taught high school history and social studies in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C., served as a district superintendent in Arlington (VA), and then as a professor at Stanford University researching teaching, classroom technologies and the history of school reform in the U.S.

Over the past two decades, I have completed  research projects that have been published. For example, I described and analyzed public school curriculum and teaching comparing both to how university medical schools prepared and taught students to become doctors. That study became Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice (Harvard Education Press, 2013). I also looked at how I taught history over 60 years ago in two urban high schools in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. and then returned to those two high schools in the early 2000s to examine how teachers were teaching history in those very same high schools. That study became Teaching History Then and Now (Harvard Education Press, 2016). Another study was of Silicon Valley exemplary teachers who integrated technology into their daily lessons. That project was published as the The Path of a Butterfly or a Bullet: Integrating Technology in Classrooms (Harvard Education Press, 2018). In 2023, The University of Chicago Press published The Enduring Classroom: Teaching Then and Now. The book draws together my ideas about and reflections on classroom teaching, schooling, and efforts to reform public schools over the past century.

Finally, since 2009 I have written twice-weekly posts for my blog that draws not only from all of my work but also gives me a chance to try out new ideas and pursue different lines of reasoning about teaching and schooling.