David Labaree

Emeritus Stanford professor. History & sociology of US education. Latest book is The Emergent Genius of American Higher Ed. Blog at

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Reimagining the Public High School in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Part 1) https://t.co/7lHEPntIS7 via @CubanLarry

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

The Dirt That Refused To Die | Quanta Magazine. For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.

https://t.co/82s0mVshDM

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

A great reverse migration is shifting the balance of power in the U.S.
Transformations of American democracy are typically measured by constitutional amendments and federal legislation. But one of the most consequential occurred when Black Americans decided to vote with their feet. During the Great Migration between 1910 and 1970, 6 million of them left the South — where they effectively couldn’t vote for much of that time — for northern and Midwestern states, where they could. Since 1990, though, at least 2 million have returned, a reverse migration that’s reshaping the region’s politics and changing the calculus for the Democratic and Republican parties.

https://t.co/w2Egwo6QjN

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading. https://t.co/dBuUJUoSQj

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Life in England over the years

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

The hockey stick graph for the history of economic growth.

https://t.co/HdEY2BSZxF

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

https://t.co/VOoNt7baAf

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

My new blog post is an essay by Steven Mintz about the possibilities for doing art in the age of AI.
He starts with a tribute to the golden age of the Broadway musical, showing how it emerged from a particular immigrant culture with its own emotional register.
But sometime soon, AI is going to be able to write a musical in the style of Rogers and Hammerstein.  It will look and sound like the original but it won't have the cultural resonance, emotional context, and moral meaning of the original. Is that the end of musical theater?
No. Consider the case of photography, which stole the art of representation from artists -- who then turned toward impressionism and expressionism and myriad other forms. And photography itself developed its own art forms.
Don't you love this take? When technology can do what people do, then people are free to explore other areas of creative work.  They can be liberated from mechanical tasks (we don't need to calculate with pen and paper any more) and can instead focus on the things that algorithms can't do.  Tasks that require creativity, cultural grounding, moral purpose.
https://t.co/0xbH5pAfOg

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

My new blog post is an essay by Steven Mintz about the possibilities for doing art in the age of AI.
He starts with a tribute to the golden age of the Broadway musical, showing how it emerged from a particular immigrant culture with its own emotional register.
But sometime soon, AI is going to be able to write a musical in the style of Rogers and Hammerstein.  It will look and sound like the original but it won't have the cultural resonance, emotional context, and moral meaning of the original. Is that the end of musical theater?
No. Consider the case of photography, which stole the art of representation from artists -- who then turned toward impressionism and expressionism and myriad other forms. And photography itself developed its own art forms.
Don't you love this take? When technology can do what people do, then people are free to explore other areas of creative work.  They can be liberated from mechanical tasks (we don't need to calculate with pen and paper any more) and can instead focus on the things that algorithms can't do.  Tasks that require creativity, cultural grounding, moral purpose.
https://t.co/0xbH5pzHYI

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

This is the heartbreaking contradiction. The Israeli is fighting for the survival of a spirit and culture long exiled, which their ancestors suffered to preserve, even if it meant leaving land they loved to which it belonged; the Palestinian is fighting for the continuity of a presence long established, which their ancestors suffered to keep even if it meant sacrificing their native spirit and culture for the language and culture of their conqueror.
The settler-colonial lens cannot process this. It must choose a “Native,” and because the Palestinian model of presence more easily resembles quasi-Marxist conceptions of indigenous peoples overrun by Europe, the academic lens arbitrarily criminalizes the Jewish model of practice, culture, and return.

https://t.co/60oTK1tQ1U

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

But a true intellectual intervention requires us to put down the lens and look at the inhabitants. When we do, we do not find a colonial drama written in a Western faculty lounge, or the studio of a Middle Eastern activist, or the imagination of a diplomatic Arabist. We find a heartbreaking ethnographic reality: a century-long war driven by a tragic, irreconcilable collision between two profound concepts of indigeneity and two mutually exclusive visions of survival.

https://t.co/60oTK1tQ1U

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

How Teaching History Can Help Our Terrible Reading Scores https://t.co/wo7MJU3Ixi

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Without much attention, the number of women in medical school, law school, pharmacy school, optometry school, dental school and veterinary school has surpassed the number of men.
Women now earn 60 percent of master’s and  doctoral degrees, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
It’s a trend that begins with the steadily declining number of men who choose to go to college after graduating from high school. Among the reasons for this: Girls do better in grades K-12 than boys; traditionally female-oriented occupations such as teaching, nursing and social work require degrees; and boys are generally less likely to think they need college educations to get jobs.
https://t.co/6VUPIjim3y

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Smart tech is making war a dumber choice https://t.co/7uSiHBYoJQ

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Robert Davis, author of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, estimates that at least one million Europeans were enslaved by slave traders in North Africa over a period of more than 200 years. During colonial times, Americans enjoyed some degree of protection as a result of tributes paid by Britain to the Barbary states, but following America’s independence in 1776, privateers known as corsairs began preying on American ships and capturing their crews.

https://t.co/uR2LPTbbCh

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

Explore U.S. population growth by state from 1970–2025, highlighting the rise of the Sun Belt and migration trends. https://t.co/cFq0whvnjD via @visualcap

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

A Day on Earth Is Getting Longer as the Planet’s Rotation Slows. https://t.co/IxtTAAXmf2 https://t.co/lOfLT5n55i

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

https://t.co/PewQklMI50

[David Labaree @DLabaree]

In 712 Harvard course offerings last year, every enrolled undergraduate received an A.
In another 532, A’s were common enough that the class would have violated the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ newly approved grade cap — a policy that will soon limit top grades in most undergraduate courses to 20 percent of students, plus four more.
Together, those courses made up more than half of all undergraduate course offerings in a confidential grading dataset obtained by The Crimson, offering the clearest picture yet of how deeply Harvard’s grades have been compressed at the top — and how unevenly the faculty’s new cap will hit when it takes effect in fall 2027.
A Crimson analysis of more than 22,000 rows of course-level grading records found that A grades rose from roughly 44 percent of undergraduate grades in 2014-15 to about 63 percent in 2024-25.
But the rise was not spread evenly across the College.
In Arts and Humanities courses, roughly 78 percent of students received A’s last year. In Social Sciences, the figure was 62 percent. In the Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, A’s made up 57 percent and 56 percent, respectively.
https://t.co/lNKBk7n26L