Larry Cuban

You do it across grade levels.

Our regular listeners will know that I love to reference David Tyack and Larry Cuban's book, Tinkering Toward Utopia, and one of their big points of analysis in that book.

is that reforms that make a difference, reforms that transform how we do school, are hybridized, right? That's the tinkering in their title.

And if you take this premise and say that the reforms that actually transform what we're doing in schools are always being hybridized, that that's one of the key elements, the potential for hybridization that enables ideas to make a real difference in education, then an idea that itself is not hybridizable to invent a new word there, is itself the challenge, right? It isn't necessarily that people are going to come out against it, because I think if DI could have been hybridized, and I think we could have a conversation about the ways in which it has actually been hybridized, just small d, small i.

The story we'd be telling is how he was perhaps the most influential educational researcher who ever lived.

More influential in terms of what is actually done in classrooms than John Dewey, who I think a lot of people would name.

Everybody should go read Larry Cuban's book.

This is my second Larry Cuban reference, How Teachers Taught.

So one thing that I think is worth talking about, and I'm going to come back to this, is...

the idea of the grammar of schooling, which comes to us from David Hayek and Larry Cuban through their fabulous book, Tinkering Toward Utopia.

I think that that's embedded in this idea about something becoming lodged in the systems and structures and culture of schooling and becoming very difficult to dislodge.

And I just want to also add in Baumgartner and Jones's punctuated equilibrium theory, which is, you know, that doesn't really roll off the tongue very

I smiled so many times in the book, just great nuggets of, like, storytelling and wisdom and, you know, I was a student in the eighties and nineties, so just, like, even the storytelling, it was great.

My very favorite one was you bring in Larry Cuban.

Who was one of my favorite professors at Stanford.

And by the way, his book was Oversold and Underused Computers in the Classroom, and he wrote it [laughs] in 2001.

And I actually think while your book is about big tech and education and so on, I actually think that's what the book is about, which is what is education for or what is school for.

And I guess I'd love to just end the conversation with what do you think school is for?

So first of all, I really admire and love Larry Cuban, and I talked to him for my book.

And one of the things we talked about is, like, we've gone from his book, which was like oversold and underused, and we're now in an era where parents feel like tech in schools is oversold-

There's a...

Larry Cuban has a great book called Teachers and Machines with a photograph in it of a big like armoire size radio set.

And it says with radio, the underprivileged school becomes a privileged one.

And so the idea that like we're going to have the best experts in the world broadcast radio lectures, radio lessons into homes all across the country.