Stop Making Sense

Rarely do we have an opportunity to read the real truth about education. In Stop Making Sense, Dr. Watson Scott Swail provides his take on a variety of policy and practical issues in education writ large, especially on issues involved educational equity, the cost of going to college, and the returns on a college educated for our nation and our graduates. Stop Making Sense provides essays taken from The Swail Letter on Education between 2011 and 2014. As a policy analyst and former teacher and President of the Educational Policy Institute, Swail provides a perspective that is at times raw but always interesting.


As Dr. Roseann O’Reilly Runte of the Canada Foundation for Innovation writes, Swail’s Stop Making Sense actually makes a great deal of sense.” George Washington University’s President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg writes, “This is a welcome text for those who care about the future of schools, schooling, colleges, universities, teaching, learning, research and scholarship. It’s fresh and refreshing but also sound all at once.”


Chapter titles include “The Financial Woes of Higher Education,” “Robert Reich and College Affordability,” and “The ROI on Higher Education.” Swail also takes on the NCAA in “The NCAA: Missing the Point of a Higher Education” and rails against the idea of free tuition in “College for Free? Not Really…”


Dr. Swail is a prolific writer, as noted by this collection of blogs from his The Swail Letter on Education on education, politics, and other stuff (www.swailletter.com). He edited the 2012 Teachers College Press book, Finding Superman: Debating the Future of American Public Education, and was the lead writer in the Jossey-Bass publication, Retaining Minority Students in Higher Education.