With this post, I am announcing the publication of my new book, The Ironies of Schooling.
It’s available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my last book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. One result is that the book appeared for sale one hour after I submitted the manuscript — rather than the usual two-year delay I was used to in working with university presses. Another result is that it’s available dirt cheep: $5 for the e-book and $15 for the 300-page paperback. Tell your friends and your students.
The book is made up of 21 chapters, which are all pieces I published elsewhere over the last 30 years that never found there way into one of earlier books.
Here’s an overview of what’s in the contents, drawn from the book’s introduction.
Introduction
This book gathers together pieces I have written over the last 40 years that revolved around a central theme in my work – the ironies of schooling. I used to tell students that in order to understand the complex social role played by the institution of education, you need to develop a taste for irony. Systems of schooling are nothing if not complex, and much of the complexity comes from their embrace of contradiction. They are adept at incorporating social goals and educational practices that are totally at odds with each other.
Schools provide opportunities for people in the lower levels of society to get ahead and for others in the upper levels to stay ahead. They have a homogenizing effect on the social differences among students, by bringing together a diverse array of actors into a single social setting and subjecting them to a common educational experience; and they also have a differentiating effect on students, by ordering them into a hierarchy of academic achievement and attainment. They promote both individual autonomy (do your own work, create your own future, collaboration is cheating) and social conformity (stand in line, follow orders, keep out of trouble with authority). They create both independent citizens and docile workers. Going to school is both a great gift and a prison sentence. As we saw doing Covid, denying students access to school was devastating to them, but still there is nothing more treasured than a snow day.
The essays here were written at different times, for different purposes, and published in widely different venues – as journal articles, book chapters, magazine articles, speeches, op-eds, and blog posts. So I have not tried to weave them together in a single story running through this book but instead simply clustered them in rough categories and left them in their original form. As a result, you’ll find a fair amount of repetition, as central themes keep popping up in different chapters. For example, you’ll hear a lot about the competing goals for schools. So it is less a book to be read from cover to cover than a collection of essays to be explored as you see fit.. Feel free to skip around and look for things you are interested in rather than plowing through from beginning to end. I’m hoping some of these essays will useful for teachers to use in class, for students to draw on in their studies, and for others to consider as they ruminate about the universal experience of schooling.
For better and for worse, we have all found ourselves immersed in this institution for many years of our lives. It’s good to spend a little time trying to make sense of that experience. On my part, I spent 25 years of my life as a student and another 40 years as a teacher, with a number of those years spent occupying both roles. In the end, school is not just an experience from the past but a set of norms, values, and practices that we continue to inhabit for the rest of our lives.
Educational Policy
1. Let’s Measure What No One Teaches:
PISA, NCLB, and the Shrinking Aims of Education
PISA has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to measure student achievement across national school systems with different curricula. Instead of measuring how well students learn what they are taught in each system, it measures a set of purportedly economically useful skills that no one teaches. The aim of this essay is to figure out how this odd situation came about in the current global policy context. I explore PISA as one type of educational accountability system, based on how well students demonstrate mastery of particular cognitive skills, and compare it with the state-level accountability systems in the U.S. (No Child Left Behind), which are based on how well students demonstrate mastery of the formal curriculum. Both PISA and NCLB, I argue, are cases of how we are shrinking the aims of education. One approach focuses on mastery of skills that are relevant but not taught and the other on mastery of content that is taught but not relevant. Neither seems a sensible basis for understanding the quality of schooling or for making educational policy.
2. The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness:
The Cases of Healthcare, Industry, and Education
The covid-19 pandemic showed a lot of things that were wrong in American society, including terrible leadership, a frail social safety net, and a lack of investment in public goods. But one that has particularly struck me is the way our social institutions have been become dominated by the logic of efficiency over the logic of effectiveness. In the name of efficiency, we have increasingly disabled the ability of healthcare, industry, and education to carry out their missions effectively. An effective system of public education needs be more loosely coupled than the efficiency model imposed by the educational standards movement. The link between teaching and learning is tight if you’re teaching to the test but it’s necessarily much looser when you’re trying to induce students to engage with the issues and skills and knowledge domains that they will need to be productive workers and civic minded citizens.
3. Targeting Teachers
Teachers have increasingly become the target of school reformers. If achievement is lagging, then teachers must be the reason. So we have started measuring teacher effectiveness by their ability to raise individual student test scores and then rewarding or punishing these teachers proportionately. The problem with this approach, I argue, is that it ignores central characteristics of teaching as a profession. Teaching is hard, since it depends on being able to motivate student conscripts to learn the curriculum under conditions of high uncertainty. Teaching looks easy to the public, which can’t see all the skill and planning and flexible decision-making that is needed to do the job well. And teachers make an all-too-easy target, standing there alone at the front of the room with no one else to take the blame.
4.Educational Consumerism
We hear a lot these days about how we could save American schools if we would just make them more responsive to the educational consumer. Supporters of school vouchers, choice, and charters tell us that we should destroy the government monopoly that has protected school bureaucracies from having to meet the demands of their own customers. But the sad fact is that schooling at all levels is already catering to the customer in ways that are harmful to both education and society. For years now the trend in public schools has been toward educational consumerism. That is, increasingly we have been putting schools in the position of trying to sell educational products to student customers, where the primary selling point is the prospect of getting a good job rather than a good education. This consumerism is turning public education into a private good and turning the pursuit of learning into a chase for credentials.
5. Politics and Markets:
The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling
In this essay, I explore how the tension between politics and markets, which David Cohen uncovered for me in the draft of my first book, helps us understand the central dynamics of the American system of schooling over its 200-year history. The primary insight is that the system, as with the high school I examined in that book, is at odds with itself. It’s a system without a plan. No one constructed a coherent design for the system or assigned it a clear and consistent mission. Instead, the system evolved through the dynamic interplay of competing actors seeking to accomplish contradictory social goals through a single organizational machinery. And at the core of this conflict was a struggle between democratic politics, which pushed for an egalitarian system, and market economics, which worked toward a highly stratified system. We’ve been living with the consequences of this conflict for the last two centuries. Along the way, the essay shows how this theme ran through three other books of mine: How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning (1997); Someone Has to Fail (2010); and A Perfect Mess (2017).
6. Public Schools for Private Gain:
The Declining American Commitment to Serving the Public Good
Over the last several decades, as schooling has come to be viewed mainly as a source of private benefit rather than as a public good, the consequences have been dramatic for both schools and society. Increasingly prized as a resource by affluent families, traditional public schooling has become a mechanism by which to reinforce their advantages. And as a result, is has become harder and harder to distinguish what is truly public about our public schools. At a deeper level, as we have privatized our vision of public schooling, we have shown a willingness to back away from the social commitment to the public good that motivated the formation of the American republic and the common school system. We have grown all too comfortable in allowing the fate of other people’s children be determined by the unequal competition among consumers for social advantage through schooling.
7.From Citizens to Consumers:
Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the US
The American system of education is highly accessible, radically unequal, organizationally fragmented, and instructionally mediocre. In combination, these characteristics have provided a strong and continuing incentive for school reformers to try to change the system, by launching reform movements that would seek to broaden access, reduce inequality, transform governance, and improve learning. But at the same time that these traits have spurred reform efforts, they have also kept reformers from accomplishing their aims. We reform schools in an effort to solve pressing social problems. And we have to keep coming up with new reform movements because schools keep failing to fix the problems we ask them to fix. The issue is that we keep asking schools to do things they are incapable of doing. This chapter is a lecture I gave in Japan in 2019, which draws heavily from my 2012 book, Someone Has to Fail, and also brings some of its findings up to the present.
Purposes of Schooling
8. The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy:
Educationalizing Social Problems in the US
In this essay, I examine the paradox of educationalization in the American context. I argue that, like most modern Western societies, the United States has displayed a strong tendency over the years for educationalizing social problems, even though schools have repeatedly proven that they are an ineffective mechanism for solving these problems. I start by examining the ways in which the process of educationalizing social problems is deeply grounded in American beliefs, social processes, political and organizational tensions, and structural possibilities. These include utility, individualism, optimism, professional interest, political interest, political opportunity, structural limits, and formalism. Then I explore the roots of education’s failure in the role of social reform agent; and I close with an analysis of why we continue to pursue educationalization in the face of its ineffectiveness.
9. What Schools Can’t Do:
Understanding the Chronic Failure of American School Reform
In America, we set our school system up for failure by asking it to fix all of our most pressing social problems, which we are unwilling to address more directly through political action rather than educational gesture. Then we blame the system when it fails. Both as a society and as individuals, we vest our greatest hopes in an institution that is manifestly unsuited to realizing them. In part the system’s failure is the result of a tension between our shifting social aims for education and the system’s own organizational momentum. We created the system to solve a critical social problem in the early days of the American republic, and its success in dealing with this problem fooled us into thinking that we could redirect the system toward new problems as time passed. But the school system has a mind of its own, and trying to change its direction is like trying to do a U-turn with a battleship.
10. School Syndrome:
Understanding the USA’s Magical Belief that Schooling Can Somehow
Improve Society, Promote Access, and Preserve Advantage
The U.S. is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. We want schools to express our highest ideals as a society and our greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since we do not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. We ask schools to promote equality while preserving privilege, so we perpetuate a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. We focus on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage. As a result the system continues to lure us to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating our ability to meet these goals. And we cannot find a simple cure for this syndrome because we will not accept any remedy that would mean giving up one of our aims for education in favor of another.
11. Public Schooling as Social Welfare
In the mid nineteenth century, Horace Mann made a forceful case for a distinctly political vision of public schooling, as a mechanism for creating citizens for the American republic. In the early twentieth century, policymakers put forth an alternative economic vision for this institution, as a mechanism for turning out productive workers. In this essay, I explore a third view of public schooling, which emerged in the 1930s. This is a social vision, in which public schooling serves as a mechanism for promoting social welfare, by working to ameliorate the inequalities of American society. Schools now provide day care, free lunches, nurses, a safe harbor, and a supportive community. Life the American social safety net, the contribution of schools in promoting public welfare may be inadequate, but it’s better than nothing.
12. No Exit:
Public Education as an Inescapably Public Good
In this essay, I draw on Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to explore the implications of school choice for American society. Hirschman explores the differences between private and public goods. If you’re unhappy with your experience in an organization providing private goods, like a restaurant, you can solve the problem by exiting that restaurant and choosing another. If you’re unhappy with an organization providing public goods, however, you can’t exit, because it’s the nature of public goods that they affect you whether you contribute to them or not. You need to stay and exercise your voice to achieve satisfaction. The issue with schools is that they produce both private and public goods: they provide credentials that give individuals competitive advantage in the job market, but they also provide society with a politically capable and socially responsible citizenry. School choice allows people to use exit to solve their private goods problem (getting a better education for their children, but this comes at the expense of schooling as a public good, by undermining the education of other people’s children. And everyone needs this public good. So loyalty to the public schools is a rational response for citizens to adopt, even if they have chosen to send their own children to private school or to the public school across the city line. They can run from public education, but they can’t hide from its consequences.
13. When Is School the Answer to What Social Problems?
Schools are a weak mechanism for solving social problems, but the movement that established the American common school system was the exception that proved the rule. Its aim was nothing less than to create a new social order in response to the political, moral, and social crisis of the United States in the early 19th century. This school system expressed the whig vision of the need to construct a new citizen for the republic, a new soul for the church, and a new conscience for society. As realized in the new social order, this vision ensured that individuals would internalize political, religious, and moral controls, which would allow them to participate as self interested entrepreneurs and workers in the market economy while preserving the U.S. as a Protestant republican nation. The core institutions of the new order – penitentiary, hospital, asylum, and poorhouse – built upon the model of the common school.
14. How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement,
and Naturalize Privilege
Modern systems of public schooling have transformed the concept of merit. The premodern form of this quality was what Joseph Kett calls essential merit, which represented a person’s public accomplishments. The new kind of merit, which arose in the mid-nineteenth century, is institutional merit; it is earned through academic attainment. In this paper I examine three consequences of this shift from essential to institutional merit in the American setting. First, this change democratized merit by making it, at least theoretically, accessible to anyone and not just the gentry, who in the premodern period had prime access to this reputational good. Second, it formalized the idea of merit by turning it from a series of publicly visible and substantive accomplishments into the accumulation of the forms that schooling had to offer – grades, credits, and degrees. Third, following from one and two, it served the social function of naturalizing the privileges of birth by transposing them into academic accomplishments. The well born, through the medium of schooling, acquired a second nature that transformed ascribed status into achieved status. The result is a new aristocracy of merit.
Structure of Schooling
15. Fraught Connection between Nation States and Public Schools
The nation state and public schools grew up together, with each enabling the development of the other and with each as the precondition for the other. No nation, no school. No school, no nation. However, once the nation state became fully established, it was no longer so dependent on schools for its continued existence. States became the indispensable machinery for defending the populace against outside threats and providing for the health, wealth, and welfare of its citizens. And once established, schools came to acquire new missions, in particular by providing the skills needed to supply the economy with productive workers and by providing the credentials that qualified individuals to get ahead and stay ahead within the social structure. So where does this leave us today in understanding the interrelation of school and state? Schools in the current setting are critically important in providing the justification for the contemporary meritocratic structure of social hierarchy, without which the state would lack social legitimacy. And the state is increasingly essential to support the massive superstructure of schooling that has now expanded from a modest system of elementary schooling to a gargantuan system of elementary, secondary, college, and graduate education draw in students across much of their lifetimes.
16. School Gave Me the Creeps
Did you like school? I didn’t. In way that’s strange, since I did well at school and in the long run it did well for me. It got me into college and graduate school and eventually provided the subject matter for my career as an education professor. Nonetheless, school gave me the creeps, and it still does. That’s one of the reasons I chose to study the history of education, so I wouldn’t have to step inside a school. The creepy feeling was especially strong at the elementary level. By high school it got better, as I was able to enjoy the camaraderie of a group of friends even while constantly worrying about being too nerdy and uncool. It was only in college I came into my own, for the first time able to embrace intellectual pursuits in a peer setting where that was not considered weird and stigmatizing. I know I’m not alone in remembering that going to school had a deeply unpleasant side. It’s healthy for educators, who are so dedicated to the goodness of schooling, to keep this in mind.
17. The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling
The American system of schooling has been remarkably resistant to change, with most changes coming in the form of tinkering around the edges. Large-scale reform that alters what David Tyack and Larry Cuban referred to as the “grammar of schooling” has tended to fizzle out. In this essay, I suggest that the practices that are most likely to become part of this persistent grammar of schooling, such as the age-graded classroom, are those that align with schools’ social mission and that also meet schools’ organizational needs. Those two elements of the grammar of schooling must remain in balance if reform is to succeed. Get them out of balance, and reform is headed for failure.
18. Resisting Educational Standards
Over the years, we have increasingly come to view that education is a private good, which should serve the individual interests of educational consumers, rather than a public good, which should serve the broader public interest in producing competent citizens and productive workers. And from this perspective, the last thing we think we need is a standards effort that equalizes educational achievement. If the aim is to help some people get ahead of other in the race for the best jobs and the most comfortable life, then we want an educational system that stratifies students rather than equalizing them.
19. Failing Like a Professional:
Amateurs Panic, Professionals Choke
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published a remarkably insightful piece in the New Yorker that makes a critical distinction between the two kinds of failure. His thesis is this: Amateurs panic but professionals choke. I have found his analysis very helpful in trying to understand the nature of professionalism, in everything from golfing to teaching. It shows that the process of learning a profession is radically different from the process of practicing a profession. What works for the learner is a disaster for the accomplished practitioner.
20. How Dewey Lost:
The Victory of David Snedden and Social Efficiency
in the Reform of American Education
This essay is about how social efficiency competed so successfully with John Dewey’s progressive vision for the heart of American education. I approach this analysis as a sociologically oriented historian rather than as a philosopher. I argue that reform ideas win or lose according to the way they resonate with a particular social context, attract or repel particular constituencies, and respond to the social problems that are seen as most salient at the time. Ironically, the most successful reform ideas, as they become part of the natural landscape of schooling, tend to lose their connection to the original author and to disappear from view. In contrast, losing ideas tend to remain identified with their creator and preserve their visibility, precisely because they are still outside the walls of the school trying to find a way in. This analysis tries to sort out why Dewey, America’s most enduringly visible educational thinker, has had so little impact on the way schools work.
21. Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But in this essay I make a case that these characteristics are a positive factor in the world of public education. U.S. schools are built within a liberal democratic system, where the liberal pursuit of self-interest is often in tension with the democratic pursuit of equality. In recent years, schools have tilted toward the liberal side, enabling privileged families to game the system in order to help their children get ahead. In such a system, an impersonal bureaucracy stands as a check that ensures that the democratic side of schooling, in which all children are treated equally, remains in effect.
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 