David F. Labaree

Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals

This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have been at the root of educational conflicts over the years: democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions). These goals represent, respectively, the educational perspective of the citizen, the taxpayer, and the consumer. Whereas the first two look on education as a public good, the third sees it as a private good. Historical conflict over these competing visions of education has resulted in a contradictory structure for the educational system that has sharply impaired its effectiveness. More important still has been the growing domination of the social mobility goal, which has reshaped education into a commodity for the purposes of status attainment and has elevated the pursuit of credentials over the acquisition of knowledge.

The Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers

In this article, some difficulties are examined involving turning educational practitioners into educational researchers at American education schools. Teachers bring many traits that are ideal for this new role. At the same time, students and professors in researcher training programs often encounter a cultural clash between the world-views of the teacher and researcher. Students may feel they are being asked to transform their cultural orientation from normative to analytical, from personal to intellectual, from particular to universal, and from experiential to theoretical. They often resist. Differences in worldview between teachers and researchers cannot be eliminated easily because they arise from irreducible differences in the nature of the work that teachers and researchers do.

On the Nature of Teaching and Teacher Education Difficult Practices that Look Easy

The effort over the past 150 years to create an effective and respected system for preparing teachers in the United States has not been easy. A large body of research on the history of teacher-education reform is a tale of persistent mediocrity and resistance to change. The author’s aim in this article is not to revisit this sad story, but to examine an old and enduring problem that has long blocked the path to a truly professional education for teachers, that teaching is an enormously difficult job that looks easy. The author explores the roots of the gap between the reality and the perception of learning to teach by first spelling out some of the characteristics of teaching that make it such a difficult form of professional practice. He then examines key elements in the nature of teaching that make the process of becoming a teacher seem so uncomplicated.

Educational Researchers: Living With a Lesser Form of Knowledge:

In this article, I argue that key characteristics of educational knowledge both constrain and enable the work of educational researchers, as producers of this knowledge, in distinctive ways. Educational knowledge is soft (vs. hard), applied (vs. Pure), and provides use value (vs. exchange value). As a result, knowledge production in education is organized in a manner that is structurally egalitarian and substantively divergent. Some consequences of this are negative. For example, educational researchers find themselves unable to speak authoritatively about their field and feel pressure to imitate unproductive forms of intellectual practice. Other consequences are positive: For example, they have the potential for speaking to a wide lay audience and for participating in a relatively open and unregulated mode of scholarly production.

Teach for America and Teacher Ed: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose.

Teach for America (TFA) is a marvel at marketing, offering elite college students a win-win option: by becoming corps members, they can do good and do well at the same time. Teacher education (TE) programs are in a hopeless position in trying to compete with TFA for prospective students. They cannot provide students with the opportunity to do well, because they can offer none of the exclusiveness and cachet that comes from being accepted as a TFA corps member. TE has always offered students the chance to do good, but this prospect is less entrancing when they realize that TFA’s escape clause allows graduates to do good without major personal sacrifice. More than that, it promises to be a great career booster that will pay off handsomely in future income and prestige. In short, the competition between TFA and TE is a case of “heads they win, tails we lose.”

Progressivism, schools and schools of education: An American romance

This paper tells a story about progressivism, schools and schools of education in twentieth‐century America. Depending on ones position in the politics of education, this story can assume the form of a tragedy or a romance, or perhaps even a comedy. The heart of the tale is the struggle for control of American education in the early twentieth century between two factions of the movement for progressive education. The administrative progressives won this struggle, and they reconstructed the organization and curriculum of American schools in a form that has lasted to the present day. Meanwhile the other group, the pedagogical progressives, who failed miserably in shaping what we do in schools, did at least succeed in shaping how we talk about schools. Professors in schools of education were caught in the middle of this dispute, and they ended up in an awkwardly compromised position. Their hands were busy—preparing teachers to work within the confines of the educational system established by the administrative progressives, and carrying out research to make this system work more efficiently. But their hearts were with the pedagogues. So they became the high priests of pedagogical progressivism, keeping this faith alive within the halls of the education school, and teaching the words of its credo to new generations of educators. Why is it that American education professors have such a longstanding, deeply rooted and widely shared rhetorical commitment to the progressive vision? The answer can be found in the convergence between the history of the education school and the history of the child‐centered strand of progressivism during the early twentieth century. Historical circumstances drew them together so strongly that they became inseparable. As a result, progressivism became the ideology of the education professor. Education schools have their own legend about how this happened, which is a stirring tale about a marriage made in heaven, between an ideal that would save education and a stalwart champion that would fight the forces of traditionalism to make this ideal a reality. As is the case with most legends, there is some truth in this account. But here a different story is told. In this story, the union between pedagogical progressivism and the education school is not the result of mutual attraction but of something more enduring: mutual need. It was not a marriage of the strong but a wedding of the weak. Both were losers in their respective arenas: child‐centered progressivism lost out in the struggle for control of American schools, and the education school lost out in the struggle for respect in American higher education. They needed each other, with one looking for a safe haven and the other looking for a righteous mission. As a result, education schools came to have a rhetorical commitment to progressivism that is so wide that, within these institutions, it is largely beyond challenge. At the same time, however, this progressive vision never came to dominate the practice of teaching and learning in schools—or even to reach deeply into the practice of teacher educators and researchers within education schools themselves.

THE LURE OF STATISTICS FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHERS

During the course of the 20th century, educational research yielded to the lure of Galileo’s vision of a universe that could be measured in numbers. This was especially true in the United States, where quantification had long enjoyed a prominent place in public policy and professional discourse. But the process of reframing reality in countable terms began eight centuries earlier in Western Europe, where it transformed everything from navigation to painting, then arrived fully formed on the shores of the New World, where it shaped the late-blooming field of scholarship in education. Like converts everywhere, the new American quantifiers in education became more Catholic than the pope, quickly developing a zeal for measurement that outdid the astronomers and mathematicians that preceded them. The consequences for both education and educational research have been deep and devastating.

Comments on Bulterman-Bos: The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance in Education Research

Responding to Bulterman-Bos (2008), the author argues that the effort to make education research more relevant is counterproductive. Teachers and researchers have different orientations toward education that arise from different institutional settings, occupational constraints, daily work demands, and professional incentives. These are not dysfunctional differences to be resolved by creating the proposed composite role of the clinical researcher but useful alternative perspectives, with each providing what the other is lacking. Relevance is a tricky quality to define because it is easier to recognize in retrospect than in prospect, and efforts to make research more relevant can make it useless or misleading. Scholarly work that neither arises from a quest for relevance nor demonstrates any particular utility at the time it is carried out may turn out to be highly useful at a later time and in a different place.

School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage

1 The US is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. Society wants schools to express the highest ideals as a society and the greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since one does not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. Schools are asked to promote equality while preserving privilege, so perpetuating a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. The focus is 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 one to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating one’s ability to meet these goals. Also, a simple cure cannot be found for this syndrome because no remedy will be accepted that would mean giving up one of the aims for education in favour of another.

Curriculum, Credentials, and the Middle Class: A Case Study of a Nineteenth-Century High School.

This historical case study of a prominent nineteenth-century high school analyzes one example of the development of the hegemonic curriculum. This developmental process hinged on the complex relationship between the high school and its middle-class constituency, a relationship that was mediated by the market in educational credentials. Shaped by bourgeois ideological principles (merit, self-discipline, and utility), the curriculum of the mid-1800s provided the schools middle-class constituents with a valuable form of symbolic wealth: i.e. educational credentials. However, by the 1880s the market in educational credentials changed. Alternative suppliers appeared on the scene, and the middle class began looking beyond a high school diploma to the acquisition of professional credentials. This market pressure forced the high school to revamp its course of study. What emerged was a version of the modern hegemonic curriculum, in which knowledge is stratified, academic, and appropriated through individual competition.