Month: March 2020

Posted in Power, Sociology, Students, Teaching

Willard Waller on the Power Struggle between Teachers and Students

Posted on by David Labaree

In 1932, Willard Waller published his classic book, The Sociology of Teaching.  For years I used a chapter from it (“The Teacher-Pupil Relationship“) as a way to get students to think about the problem that most frightens rookie teachers and that continues to haunt even the most experienced practitioners:  how to gain and maintain control of the classroom.

The core problems facing you as a teacher in the classroom are these:  students radically outnumber you; they don’t want to be there; and your power to get them to do what you want is sharply limited.  Otherwise, teaching is a piece of cake.

They outnumber you:  Teaching is one of the few professions that are practiced in isolation from other professionals.  Most classrooms are self-contained structures with one teacher and 25 or 30 students, so teachers have to ply their craft behind closed doors without the support of their peers.  You can commiserate with colleagues about you class in the bar after work, but during the school day you are on your own, left to figure out a way to maintain control that works for you.

They’re conscripts:   Most professionals have voluntary clients, who come to them seeking help with a problem: write my will, fix my knee, do my taxes.  Students are not like that.  They’re in the classroom under compulsion.  The law mandates school attendance and so does the job market, since the only way to get a good job is to acquire the right educational credentials.  As a result, as a teacher you have to figure out how to motivate this group of conscripts to follow your lead and learn what you teach.  This poses a huge challenge, to face a room full of students who may be thinking, “Teach me, I dare you.”

Your powers are limited:   You have some implied authority as an adult and some institutional authority as the agent of the school, but the consequences students face for resisting you are relatively weak:  a low grade, a timeout in the back of the room, a referral to the principal, or a call to the parent.  In the long run, resisting school can ruin your future by consigning you to a bad job, low pay, and a shorter life.  And teachers try to use this angle:  Listen up, you’re going to need this some day.  But the long run is not very meaningful to kids, for whom adulthood is a distant fantasy but the reality of life in the classroom is here and now.  As a result, teachers rely on a kind of confidence game, pretending they have more power than they do and trying to keep students from realizing the truth.  You can only issue a few threats before students begin to realize how hollow they are.

One example of the limits of teacher power is something I remember teachers saying when I was in elementary school:  “Don’t let me you see you do that again!”  At the time this just meant “Don’t do it,” but now I’ve come to interpret the admonition more literally:  “Don’t let me you see you do that again!”  If I see you, I’ll have to call you on it in order to put down your challenge to my authority; but if you do it behind my back, I don’t have to respond and can save my ammunition for a direct threat.

Here’s how Waller sees the problem:

The weightiest social relationship of the teacher is his relationship to his students; it is this relationship which is teaching.  It is around this relationship that the teacher’s personality tends to be organized, and it is in adaptation to the needs of this relationship that the qualities of character which mark the teacher are produced. The teacher-pupil relationship is a special form of dominance and subordination, a very unstable relationship and in quivering equilibrium, not much supported by sanction and the strong arm of authority, but depending largely upon purely personal ascendancy.  Every  teacher is  a  taskmaster and  every  taskmaster is a hard man….

Ouch.  He goes on to describe the root of the conflict between teachers and students in the classroom:

The teacher-pupil relationship is a form of institutionalized dominance and subordination. Teacher and pupil confront each other in the school with an original conflict of desires, and however much that conflict may be reduced in amount, or however much it may be hidden, it still remains. The teacher represents the adult group, ever the enemy of the spontaneous life of groups of children. The teacher represents the formal curriculum, and his interest is in imposing that curriculum upon the children in the form of tasks; pupils are much more interested in life in their own world than in the desiccated bits of adult life which teachers have to offer. The teacher represents the established social order in the school, and his interest is in maintaining that order, whereas pupils have only a negative interest in that feudal superstructure.

I’ve always resonated with this depiction of the school curriculum:  “desiccated bits of adult life.”  Why indeed would students develop an appetite for the processed meat that emerges from textbooks?  Why would they be eager to learn the dry as toast knowledge that constitutes the formal curriculum, disconnected from context and bereft of meaning?

Waller Book Cover

An additional insight I gain from Waller is this:  that teaching has a great impact on teachers than on students.

Conflict is in the role, for the wishes of the teacher and the student are necessarily divergent, and more conflict because the teacher must protect himself from the possible destruction of his authority that might arise from this divergence of motives. Subordination is possible only because the subordinated one is a subordinate with a mere fragment of his personality, while the dominant one participates completely. The subject is a subject only part of the time and with a part of himself, but the king is all king.

What a great insight.  Students can phone it in.  They can pretend to be listening while lost in their own fantasies.  But teachers don’t enjoy this luxury.  They need to be totally immersed in the teacher role, making it a component of self and not a cloak lightly worn.  “The subject is a subject only part of the time and with a part of himself, but the king is all king.”

Here he talks about the resources that teachers and students bring to the struggle for power in the classroom:

Whatever the rules that the teacher lays down, the tendency of the pupils is to empty them of meaning. By mechanization of conformity, by “laughing off” the teacher or hating him out of all existence as a person, by taking refuge in self-initiated activities that are always just beyond the teacher’s reach, students attempt to neutralize teacher control. The teacher, however, is striving to read meaning into the rules and regulations, to make standards really standards, to force students really to conform. This is a battle which is not unequal. The power of the teacher to pass rules is not limited, but his power to enforce rules is, and so is his power to control attitudes toward rules.

He goes on to wrap up this point, repeating it in different forms in order to bring it home.

Teaching makes the teacher. Teaching is a boomerang that never fails to come back to the hand that threw it. Of teaching, too, it is true, perhaps, that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it also has more effect. Between good teaching and bad there is a great difference where students are concerned, but none in this, that its most pronounced effect is upon the teacher. Teaching does something to those who teach.

I love this stuff, and students who have been teachers often appreciate the way he gives visibility to the visceral struggle for control that they experienced in the classroom.  But for a lot of students, teachers or not, he’s a hard sell.  One complaint is that he’s sexist.  Of course he is.  The teacher is always “he” and the milieu he’s describing has a masculine feel, focused more on power over students than on engagement with them.  But so what?  The power issue in the classroom is as real for female as male teachers.

A related complaint is that the situation he describes is dated; things are different in classrooms now than they were in the 1930s.  The teacher-student relationship today is warmer, more informal, more focused on drawing students into the process of learning than on driving them toward it.  In this context, teachers who exercise power in the classroom can just be seen as bad teachers.  Good teachers take a progressive approach, creating an atmosphere of positive feeling in which students and teachers like each other and interact through exchange rather than dictation.

Much of this is true, I think.  Classrooms are indeed warmer and more informal places than they used to be, as Larry Cuban has pointed out in his work.  But that doesn’t mean that the power struggle has disappeared.  Progressive teachers are engaged in the eternal pedagogical practice of getting students to do what teachers want.  This is an exercise in power, but contemporary teachers are just sneakier about it.  They find ways of motivating student compliance with their wishes through inducement, personal engagement, humor, and fostering affectionate connections with their students.

The most effective use of power is the one that is least visible.  Better to have students feel that what they’re doing in the classroom is the result of their own choice rather than the dictate of the teacher.  But this is still a case of a teacher imposing her will on students, and it’s still true that without imposing her will she won’t be able to teach effectively.  Waller just scrapes off the rose-tinted film of progressive posturing from the window into teaching, so you can see for yourself what’s really at stake in the pedagogical exchange.

It helps to realized that The Sociology of Teaching was used as a textbook for students who were preparing to become teachers.  In it, his voice is that of a grizzled homicide detective lecturing bright-eyed students at the police academy, revealing the true nature of the job they’re embarking on.  David Cohen caught Waller’s vision perfectly in a lovely essay, “Willard Waller, On Hating School and Loving Education,” which I highly recommend.  From his perspective, Waller was a jaded progressive, who pined for schools that were true to the progressive spirit but wanted to warn future teachers about the grim reality what was actually awaiting them.

Waller’s book has been out of print for years, but you can find a scanned version here.  Enjoy.

Posted in Inequality, School organization, Schooling, Sociology

Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

Posted on by David Labaree

This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition.  Here’s a link to the PDF.

Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics being a positive 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 egalitarianism. In recent years, I argue, schools have tilted toward the liberal side, enabling privileged families to game the system 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.

 

Cover page from Two Cheers Magazine version-page-0.

 

Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

By David F. Labaree

To call an organization “bureaucratic” has long been taken to mean that it is inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and strongly favors a literal rather than substantive interpretation of rules. In the popular imagination, bureaucracies make it difficult to accomplish whatever you want to do, forcing you to wade through a relentless proliferation of red tape.

School bureaucracy is no exception to this rule. Teachers, students, administrators, parents, citizens, reformers, and policymakers have long railed against it as a barrier that stands between them and the kind of schools they want and need. My aim here is to provide a little pushback against this received wisdom by proposing a modest defense of school bureaucracy. My core assertion is this: Bureaucracy may make it hard to change schools for the better, but at the same time it helps keep schools from turning for the worse.

Critiques of bureaucracy

Criticisms of school bureaucracy have taken different forms over the years. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, the critique came from the left. From that perspective, the bureaucracy was a top-down system in which those at the top (policy makers, administrators) impose their will on the actors at the bottom (teachers, students, parents, and communities). Because the bureaucracy was built within a system that perpetuated inequalities of class, race, and gender, it tended to operate in a way that made sure that White males from the upper classes maintained their position, and that stifled grassroots efforts to bring about change from below. Central critical texts at the time were Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools, published in 1971 by Michael Katz (who was my doctoral advisor at the University of Pennsylvania) and Schooling in Capitalist America, published in 1976 by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis.

By the 1990s, however, attacks on school bureaucracy started to come from the right. Building on the Reagan-era view of government as the problem rather than the solution, critics in the emergent school choice movement began to develop a critique of bureaucracy as a barrier to school effectiveness. The central text then was Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools by John Chubb and Terry Moe (1990), who argued that organizational autonomy was the key factor that made private and religious schools more effective than public schools. Because they didn’t have to follow the rigid rules laid down by the school-district bureaucracy, they were free to adapt to families’ demands for the kind of school that met their children’s needs. To Chubb and Moe, state control of schools inevitably stifles the imagination and will of local educators. According to their analysis, democratic control of schools fosters a bureaucratic structure to make sure all schools adhere to political admonitions from above. They proposed abandoning state control, releasing schools from the tyranny of bureaucracy and politics so they could respond to market pressures from educational consumers.

So the only thing the left and the right agree on is that school bureaucracy is a problem, one that arises from the very nature of bureaucracy itself — an organizational system defined as rule by offices (bureaus) rather than by people. The central function of any bureaucracy is to be a neutral structure that carries the aims of its designers at the top down to the ground level where the action takes place. Each actor in the system plays a role that is defined by their particular job description and aligned with the organization’s overall purpose, and the nature of this role is independent of the individual who fills it. Actors are interchangeable, but the roles remain. The problem arises if you want something from the bureaucracy that it is not programmed to provide. In that case, the organization does indeed come to seem inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and rigidly committed to following the rules.

The bureaucracy of schools

Embedded within the structure of the school bureaucracy are the contradictory values of liberal democracy. Liberalism brings a strong commitment to individual liberty, preservation of private property, and a tolerance of the kinds of social inequalities that arise if you leave people to pursue their own interests without state interference. It sees education as a private good (Labaree, 2018). These are the characteristics of school bureaucracy — private interests promoting outcomes that may be unequal — that upset the left. Democracy, on the other hand, brings a strong commitment to political and social equality, in which the citizenry establishes schooling for its collective betterment, and the structure of schooling seeks to provide equal benefits to all students. It sees education as a public good. These are the characteristics — collectivist and egalitarian — that upset the right.

Over the years, I have argued — in books such as How to Succeed in School without Really Learning (1997) and Someone Has to Fail (2012) — that the balance between the liberal and democratic in U.S. schools has tilted sharply toward the liberal. Increasingly, we treat schooling as a private good, whose benefits accrue primarily to the educational consumer who receives the degree. It has become the primary way for people to get ahead in society and a primary way for people who are already ahead to stay that way. It both promotes access and preserves advantage. Families that enjoy a social advantage have become increasingly effective at manipulating the educational system to ensure that their children will enjoy this same advantage. In a liberal democracy, where we are reluctant to constrain individual liberty, privileged parents have been able to game the structure of schooling to provide advantages for their children at the expense of other people’s children. They threaten to turn education into a zero-sum game whose winners get the best jobs.

Gaming the system

So how do upper-middle-class families boost their children’s chances for success in this competition? The first and most obvious step is to buy a house in a district with good schools. Real estate agents know that they’re selling a school system along with a house — I recall an agent once telling me not to consider a house on the other side of the street because it was in the wrong district — and the demand in areas with the best schools drives up housing prices. If you can’t move to such a district, you enter the lottery to gain access to the best schools of choice in town. Failing that, you send your children to private schools. Then, once you’ve placed them in a good school, you work to give your children an edge within that school. You already have a big advantage if you are highly educated and thus able to pass on to your children the cultural capital that constitutes the core of what schools teach and value. If students come to school already adept at the verbal and cognitive and behavioral skills that schools seek to instill, then they have a leg up over students who must rely on the school alone to teach them these skills.

In addition, privileged parents have a wealth of experience at doing school at the highest levels, and they use this social capital to game the system in favor of their kids: You work to get your children into the class of the best available teacher, then push to get them into the top reading group and the gifted and talented program. When they get to high school, you steer them into the top academic track and the most advanced placement classes, while also rounding out their college admissions portfolios with an impressive array of extracurricular activities and volunteer work. Then comes the race to get into the best college (meaning the one with the most selective admissions), using an array of techniques including the college tour, private admissions counselors, test prep tutoring, legacies, social networks, and strategic donations. Ideally, you save hundreds of thousands of dollars by securing this elite education within the public system. But whether you send your kids to public or private school, you seek out every conceivable way to mark them as smarter and more accomplished and more college-admissible than their classmates.

At first glance, these frantic efforts by upper-middle class parents to work the system for the benefit of their children can seem comically overwrought. Children from economically successful and highly educated families do better in school and in life than other children precisely because of the economic, cultural, and social advantages they have from birth. So why all fuss about getting kids into the best college instead of one of the best colleges? The fix is in, and it’s in their favor, so relax.

The anxiety about college admissions among these families is not irrational (see, for example, Doepke & Zilibotti, 2019). It arises from two characteristics of the system. First, in modern societies social position is largely determined by educational attainment rather than birth. Your parents may be doctors, but they can’t pass the family business on to their children. Instead, you must trace the same kind of stellar path through the educational system that your parents did. This leads to the second problem. If you’re born at the top of the system, the only mobility available to you is downward. And because jobs are allocated according to educational attainment, there are always a number of smart and motivated poor kids who may win the academic contest instead of you, who may not be as smart or motivated. There’s a real chance that you will end up at a lower social position than your parents, so your parents feel pressure to leave no stone unturned in the effort to give you an educational edge.

The bureaucracy barrier

Here is where bureaucracy enters the scene, as it can create barriers to the most affluent parents’ efforts to guarantee the success of their children. The school system, as a bureaucracy established in part with the egalitarian values of its democratic control structure, just doesn’t think your children are all that special. This is precisely the problem Chubb and Moe and other choice supporters have identified.

When we’re talking about a bureaucracy, roles are roles and rules are rules. The role of the teacher is to serve all students in the class and not just yours. School rules apply to everyone, so you can’t always be the exception. Get over it. At one level, your children are just part of the crowd of students in their school, subject to the same policies and procedures and educational experiences as all of the others. By and large, privileged parents don’t want to hear that.

So school bureaucracy sometimes succeeds in rolling back a few of the structures that privilege upper-middle class students.  They seek to eliminate ability grouping in favor of cooperative learning, abandon gifted programs for the few in favor of using the pedagogies of these programs for the many, and reduce high school tracking by creating heterogenous classrooms.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the bureaucracy always or even usually wins out in the competition with parents seeking special treatment for their children.  Parents often succeed in fighting off efforts to eliminating ability groups, tracks, gifted programs, and other threats.  Private interests are relentless in trying to obtain private schooling at public expense, but every impediment to getting their way is infuriating to parents lobbying for privilege.

For these parents, the school bureaucracy becomes the enemy, which you need to bypass, suborn, or overrule in your effort to turn school to the benefit of your children. At the same time, this same bureaucracy becomes the friend and protector of the democratic side of liberal democratic schooling. Without it, empowered families would proceed unimpeded in their quest to make schooling a purely private good. So two cheers for bureaucracy.

References

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America New York, NY: Basic Books.

Chubb, J. & Moe, T. (1990). Politics, markets, and America’s schools. Washington, DC: Brookings.

Doepke, M. & Zilibotti, F. (2019). The economic roots of helicopter parenting. Phi Delta Kappan, 100 (7), 22-27.

Katz, M. (1971). Class, bureaucracy, and schools. New York, NY: Praeger.

 Labaree, D.L. (1997) How to succeed in school without really learning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Labaree, D.L. (2018). Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good. Phi Delta Kappan, 100 (3), 8-13

Labaree, D.L. (2010). Someone has to fail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 AUTHORID

DAVID F. LABAREE (dlabaree@stanford.edu; @DLabaree) is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, emeritus, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in Palo Alto, CA. He is the author, most recently, of A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

 

ABSTRACT

Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But David Labaree makes a case for these characteristics being a positive 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 egalitarianism. In recent years, Labaree argues, schools have tilted toward the liberal side, enabling privileged families to game the system 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.

 

 

 

Posted in Education policy, History of education, School organization, School reform

Michael Katz — Alternative Forms of School Governance

Posted on by David Labaree

This post is my reflection on a classic piece by my former advisor, Michael Katz.  It’s a chapter in Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools called “Alternative Proposals for American Education: The Nineteenth Century.”  Here’s a link to a PDF of the chapter.

Katz CBS

The core argument is this.  In American politics of education in the 19th century, there were four competing models of how schools could be organized and governed.  Katz calls them paternalistic voluntarism, democratic localism, corporate voluntarism, and incipient bureaucracy.  By the end of the century, the bureaucratic model won out and ever since it has constituted the way public school systems operate.  But at the time, this outcome was by no means obvious to the participants in the debate.

At one level, this analysis provides an important lesson in the role of contingency in the process of institutional development.  Historical outcomes are never predetermined.  Instead they’re the result of complex social interactions in which contingency plays a major role.  That is, a particular outcome depends on the interplay of multiple contingent factors.

At another level, his analysis unpacks the particular social values and educational visions that are embedded within each of these organizational forms for schooling.

In addition, the models Katz shows here never really went away.  Bureaucracy became the norm for school organization, but the other forms persisted, in public school systems, in other forms of modern schooling, and in educational policies.

This is a piece I often used in class, and I’m drawing on class slides in the discussion that follows.

First, consider the characteristics of each model:

  • Paternalistic voluntarism
    • Pauper school associations as the model (which preceded public schools)
    • This is a top-down organization: we educate you
    • Elite amateurs ran the organization
  • Democratic localism
    • The small- town district school as the model
    • Purely public in control and funding, governed by an elected board of lay people: we educate ourselves
    • Anti-professional, anti-intellectual, reflecting local values
  • Corporate voluntarism
    • Private colleges and academies as the model
    • Independent, local, adaptable; on the border between public and private
    • Funded by student tuition and donations
    • Flexible, anti-democratic
    • Owned and operated by an elite board of directors
  • Incipient bureaucracy
    • An interesting composite of the others
    • As with PV, it’s a top down model with elite administration
    • As with CV, it provides some autonomy from democratic control
    • But as with DL, it answers to an elected board, which exerts formal control

Questions to consider:

    • How have paternalistic voluntarism, corporate voluntarism, and democratic localism persisted in modern schooling?
    • What difference does this make in how we think about schools?

Consider how all of these forms have persisted in the present day:

  • Paternalistic voluntarism
    • Means tests for educational benefits (Chapter I)
    • School reformer’s emphasis on the education of Other People’s Children (e.g., no excuses charter schools)
    • Teach For America
  • Corporate voluntarism
    • Private colleges and private schools continue this model
  • Democratic localism
    • Decentralized control of schools at the district level — 15,000 schools districts that hire teachers, build schools, and operate the system
    • Elected local school boards
  • Incipient bureaucracy
    • Still the most visible element of the current structure of schooling

Katz sees democratic localism as the good guy, bureaucracy as the bad guy

  • Is this true?  Consider the downsides of democratic localism
    • Parochialism, racism, restricted opportunity, weak academics
    • Desegregation of schools relied on federal power to override the preferences of local school boards
  • Katz is critical of ed bureaucracy from the left, a reflection of when he published the book (1971)
  • But the right has more recently developed a critique of ed bureaucracy, which is behind the choice movement: free schools from the government school monopoly;

Question: What is your take on the role that the educational bureaucracy plays in schooling?

My own take is this:

  • Bureaucracy is how we promote fairness in education
    • Setting universal procedures for everyone
  • Bureaucracy is how we promote democratic control over a complex educational institution
    • Setting a common set of standards transmitted by the elected board
  • Bureaucracy is how we protect schools from pure market pressures (see Philip Cusick’s book, The Educational System)
    • As consumers try to manipulate the system for private ends
    • It’s how we protect teachers from the unreasonable demands of parents
  • Thus bureaucracy serves as a bastardized bastion of the public good
  • Consider the modern school system – elected board and bureaucratic administration – as an expression of liberal democracy, with the democratic and liberal elements constraining each other
    • B expresses democratic will and enforces it, restricting individual choice
    • B provides due process for adjudicating individual choice, protecting it from tyranny of majority

Next week I will be publishing a new piece of my own, which picks up this last part of the analysis.  It’s called, “Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy.”  Stay tuned.

Posted in Family, Meritocracy, Modernity, Schooling, Sociology, Teaching

What Schools Can Do that Families Can’t: Robert Dreeben’s Analysis

Posted on by David Labaree

In this post, I explore a key issue in understanding the social role that schools play:  Why do we need schools anyway?  For thousands of years, children grew up learning the skills, knowledge, and values they would need in order to be fully functioning adults.  They didn’t need schools to accomplish this.  The family, the tribe, the apprenticeship, and the church were sufficient to provide them with this kind of acculturation.  Keep in mind that education is ancient but universal public schooling is a quite recent invention, which arose about 200 years ago as part of the creation of modernity.

Here I focus on a comparison between family and school as institutions for social learning.  In particular, I examine what social ends schools can accomplish that families can’t.  I’m drawing on a classic analysis by Robert Dreeben in his 1968 book, On What Is Learned in School.  Dreeben is a sociologist in the structural functionalist tradition who was a student of Talcott Parsons.  His book demonstrates the strengths of functionalism in helping us understand schooling as a critically important mechanism for societies to survive in competition with other societies in the modern era.  The section I’m focusing on here is chapter six, “The Contribution of Schooling to the Learning of Norms: Independence, Achievement, Universalism, and Specificity.”   I strongly recommend that you read the original, using the preceding link.  My discussion is merely a commentary on his text.

Dreeben Cover

I’m drawing on a set of slides I used when I taught this chapter in class.

This is structural functionalism at its best:

      • The structure of schooling teaches students values that modern societies require; the structure functions even if that outcome is unintended

He examines the social functions of the school compared with the family

      • Not the explicit learning that goes on in school – the subject matter, the curriculum (English, math, science, social studies)

      • Instead he looks as the social norms you learn in school

He’s not focusing on the explicit teaching that goes on in school – the formal curriculum

      • Instead he focuses on what the structure of the school setting teaches students – vs. what the structure of the family teaches children

      • The emphasis, therefore, is on the differences in social structure of the two settings

      • What can and can’t be learned in each setting?

Families and schools are parallel in several important ways

      • Socialization: they teach the young

        • Both provide the young with skills, knowledge, values, and norms

        • Both use explicit and implicit teaching

      • Selection: they set the young on a particular social trajectory in the social hierarchy

        • Both provide them with social means to attain a particular social position

        • School: via grades, credits and degrees

        • Families: via economic, social, and cultural capital

The difference between family and school boils down to preparing the young for two very different kinds of social relationships

      • Primary relationships, which families model as the relations between parent and child and between siblings

      • Secondary relationships, which schools model as the relations between teacher and student and between students

Each setting prepares children to take on a distinctive kind of relationship

Dreeben argues that schools teach students four norms that are central to the effective functioning of modern societies:  Independence, achievement, universalism, and specificity.  These are central to the kinds of roles we play in public life, which sociologists call secondary roles, roles that are institutionally structured in relation to other secondary roles, such as employee-employer, customer-clerk, bus rider-bus driver, teacher-student.  The norms that define proper behavior in secondary roles differ strikingly from the norms for another set of relationship defined as primary roles.  These are the intimate relationship we have with our closest friends and family members.  One difference is that we play a large number of secondary roles in order to function in complex modern societies but only a small number of primary roles.  Another is that secondary roles are strictly utilitarian, means to practical ends, whereas primary roles are ends in themselves.  A third is that secondary role relationships are narrowly defined; you don’t need or want to know much about the salesperson in the store in order to make your purchase.  Primary relationship are quite diffuse, requiring deeper involvement — friends vs. acquaintances.

As a result, each of the four norms that schools teach, which are essential for maintaining secondary role relationships, correspond to equal and opposite norms that are essential for maintaining primary role relationships.  Modern social life requires expertise at moving back and forth effortlessly between these different kinds of roles and the contrasting norms they require of us.  We have to be good at maintaining our work relations and our personal relations and knowing which norms apply to which setting.

Secondary Roles                      Primary Roles

(Work, public, school)           (Family, friends)

Independence                          Group orientation

Achievement                            Ascription

Universalism                            Particularism

Specificity                                  Diffuseness

Here is what’s involved in each of these contrasting norms:

Independence                            Group orientation

      Self reliance                                Dependence on group

      Individualism                             Group membership

      Individual effort                        Collective effort

      Act on your own                         Need/owe group support

Achievement                               Ascription

      Status based on what you do  Status based on who you are

      Active                                             Passive

      Earned                                           Inherited

                         Meritocracy                                  Aristocracy

Universalism                              Particularism

      Equality within category —       Personal uniqueness — my child

           a 5th grade student

      General rules apply to all        Different rules for us vs. them

      Central to fairness, justice      Central to being special

Specificity                                   Diffuseness

       Narrow relations                       Broad relations

       Extrinsic relations                    Intrinsic relations

       Means to an end                        An end in itself

Think about how the structure of the school differs from the structure of the family and what the consequences of these differences are.

Family vs. School:

Structure of the school (vs. structure of the family)

      • Teacher and student are both achieved roles (ascribed roles)

      • Large number of kids per adult (few)

      • No particularistic ties between teacher and students (blood ties)

      • Teachers deal with the class as a group (families as individuals based on sex and birth order)

      • Teacher and student are universalistic roles, with individuals being interchangeable in these roles (family roles are unique to that family and not interchangeable)

      • Relationship is short term, especially as you move up the grades (relations are lifelong)

      • Teachers and students are subject to objective evaluation (familie use subjective, emotional criteria)

      • Teachers and students both see their roles as means to an end (family relations are supposed to be selfless, ends in themselves)

      • Students are all the same age (in family birth order is central)

  Consider the modes of differentiation and stratification in families vs. schools.

Children in families:

Race, class, ethnicity, and religion are all the same

Age and gender are different

Children in schools:

Age is the same

Race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender are different

This allows for meritocratic evaluation, fostering the learning of achievement and independence

Questions

Do you agree that characteristics of school as a social structure makes it effective at transmitting secondary social norms, preparing for secondary roles?

Do you agree that characteristics of family as a social structure makes it ineffective at transmitting secondary norms, preparing for secondary roles?

But consider this complication to the story

Are schools, workplaces, public interactions fully in tune with the secondary model?

Are families, friends fully in tune with the primary model?

How do these two intermingle?  Why?

      • Having friends at work and school, makes life nicer – and also makes you work more efficiently

      • Getting students to like you makes you a more effective teacher

      • But the norm for a professional or occupational relationship is secondary – that’s how you define a good teacher, lawyer, worker

      • The norm for primary relations is that they are ends in themselves not means to an end

      • Family members may use each other for personal gain, but that is not considered the right way to behave

Posted in Course Syllabus, Schooling, Theory

Course: School — What Is It Good For?

Posted on by David Labaree

This post is the syllabus of a course I taught for years at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.  It’s called School — What Is It Good For? I’ve copied the syllabus below, to give you an idea of what it’s all about.  The aim is to provide a guided exploration of alternative theories of the social functions that schools serve, especially in American society.  Along the way it tries to lay out a framework for thinking about school theories in general.

The best way to use the syllabus is to download the syllabus here in the form of a Word document.  This document includes embedded links to:

  • most of the readings for the class (including articles and out-of-print books)

  • tips for approaching each week’s assigned readings

  • my notes for shaping the discussion in each class

Please feel free to use this course any way you would like.  You can take it as a self-guided class, either by yourself or as part of a group.  You can draw on it to teach your own course.  Or you can just use it as a prompt to explore some interesting readings in theories of schooling.  Enjoy.

School – What Is It Good For?

 David Labaree

Web: http://www.stanford.edu/~dlabaree/

Twitter: @Dlabaree

Blog: https://davidlabaree.com/

Course Description

This course seeks to answer the question in its title:  School – What Is It Good For?  Unlike the song from the 70s that inspired the course’s title (“War – What Is It Good For?”), the answer to this question is not necessarily “absolutely nothing,” although that will remain a distinct possibility throughout the class.  In practice, the course will focus on a series of books and a few articles in which authors try to establish claims about the particular purposes, functions, impacts, and social roles of schooling – especially in relation to American society.  The class draws in part from the issues that frame my book, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling.

The course addresses two broad domains of interest to education students:

It explores the big questions that underlie Educational Policy.

It explores a wide range of approaches to Educational Theory.

Americans have a long history of pinning their hopes on education as the way to realize compelling social ideals and solve challenging social problems.  We want schools to promote civic virtue, economic productivity, and social mobility; to alleviate inequalities in race, class, and gender; to improve health, reduce crime, and protect the environment.  So we assign these social missions to schools, and educators gamely accept responsibility for carrying them out.  When the school system inevitably fall far short of these goals, we initiate a wave of school reform to realign the institution with its social goals and ramp up its effectiveness in attaining them.  In this class, we explore the social mixed aims and mixed outcomes of America’s puzzling, estimable, gargantuan, and ineffectual system of public education.

At its heart, this is a story grounded in paradox.  Schooling is perhaps the greatest institutional success in American history.  It grew from a modest and marginal position in the 18th century to the very center of American life in the 21st, where it consumes an enormous share of the time and treasure of both government and citizenry.  Key to its institutional success has been its ability to embrace and embody the social goals that have been imposed upon it.  Yet, in spite of continually recurring efforts, schooling in the U.S. has been remarkably unsuccessful at realizing these goals in the social outcomes of education.  In spite of everything, however, we keep pushing new tasks onto our schools, less as a rational investment in achieving social results than as a matter of faith.  The readings in this course explore the kinds of goals, ideals, problem-solving roles, and visions of the good society that we have imposed on schooling over the years.  They also explore the extent to which schools have been able to realize these aims, and if not, what kinds of effects they have exerted on American life.

Consider the following Policy Visions of what schools should do and Educational Theories about what they can and can’t do, with course readings that will explore each of these issues:

Produce citizens for a democracy:  Gutmann

Create human capital and promote economic growth:  Goldin & Katz, Kristof

Teach core values in American society:  Dreeben

Reproduce an unequal social structure:  Bowles & Gintis

Serve the interests of educational consumers:  Collins

Promote social mobility and social equality:  Boudon, Hertz, Goldin & Katz, Kristof

Promote disciplinary power:  Foucault

Teach core values within a religious community: Peshkin

Promote a mix of social access and social advantage:  Labaree

Readings

            Assigned Books:  We will read the following eight books.  Bowles & Gintis, Collins, and Dreeben are not in print and are through links to a Google drive (marked with an *).

Gutmann, Amy.  (1987).  Democratic education.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Goldin, Claudia & Katz, Lawrence F. (2008). The race between education and technology. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

*Dreeben, Robert. (1968). On what is learned in school. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.  Part 1, part 2, part 3.

*Bowles, Samuel & Gintis, Herbert. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Chapters 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-9, 10-11.

*Collins, Randall. (1979). The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification. New York: Academic Press.  Chapters 1-2, 3-5, 6, 7.

Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (trans. by Alan Sheridan). New York: Pantheon.

Peshkin, Alan.  (1986).  God’s choice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

* = not in print; available through link to a Google drive

            Assigned Articles:  We will also read a small number of articles and book chapters, which will be available to students through links to a Google drive.

Course Outline

             Below are the topics we will cover, week by week, with the readings for each week.  Just click on the assigned reading to link to the document on Google drive.  For every week you can click on a link to get tips for doing that week’s readings.  In addition, you can link to my notes for that week’s class.

Week 1:  Introduction to Course

Tips for week 1 readings

How to read efficiently: skimming

*Labaree, David F. (2010). What schools can’t do. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie, 16:1, 12-18.

*Kristof, Nicholas.  (2009).  Democrats and Schools. New York Times, October 15.

Class notes for week 1

Week 2:  Schools Promote Citizenship

Tips for week 2 readings

Gutmann, Amy.  (1987).  Democratic education.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 2 – Founding the American school system.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class notes for week 2

Week 3:  Schools Promote Human Capital Production

Tips for week 3 readings

Goldin, Claudia & Katz, Lawrence F. (2008). The race between education and technology. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 7 – The limits of school learning.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class notes for week 3

Week 4:  Schools Teach Core Values of Society

Tips for week 4 readings

*Dreeben, Robert. (1968). On what is learned in school. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.  Part 1, part 2, part 3.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 1 – From citizens to consumers: A history of reform goals.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

*Labaree, David F. (2013). Schooling in the United States: Historical analysis. In Denis C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. New York: Sage Publications.

Class notes for week 4

Week 5:  Schools Promote the Reproduction of an Unequal Social Structure

Tips for week 5 readings

*Bowles, Samuel & Gintis, Herbert. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books.  Chapters 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-9, 10-11.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 3 – The progressive effort to reshape the school system.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class notes for week 5

Week 6:  Schools Promote the Positional Interests of Educational Consumers

Tips for week 6 readings

*Collins, Randall. (1979). The credential society: An historical sociology of education and stratification. New York: Academic Press.  Chapters 1-2, 3-5, 6, 7.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 8 – Living with the school syndrome.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class notes for week 6

Week 7:  Schools Promote Social Mobility and Social Equality

Tips for week 7 readings

*Boudon, Raymond. (1986). Education, mobility, and sociological theory. In John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 261-274). New York: Greenwood.

*Hertz, Tom. (2006). Understanding mobility in America. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 6 – Failing to solve social problems.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class notes for week 7

Week 8:  Schools Promote Disciplinary Power

Tips for week 8 readings

Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (trans. by Alan Sheridan). New York: Pantheon.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Chapter 5 – Classroom resistance to school reform.  In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class notes for week 8

Week 9:  Schools Teach Core Values of a Religious Community

Tips for week 9 readings

Peshkin, Alan.  (1986).  God’s choice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Class notes for week 9

Week 10:  Schools Promote Both Social Access and Social Advantage

Tips for week 10 readings

Labaree, David F. (2010).  Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, remaining chapters.

Class notes for week 10

Guidelines for Critical Reading

As a critical reader of a particular text (a book, article, speech, proposal), you need to use the following questions as a framework to guide you as you read:

  1. What’s the point? This is the analysis issue: what is the author’s angle?
  2. Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
  3. What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
  4. Who cares? This is the significance issue, the most important issue of all, the one that subsumes all the others: Is this work worth doing?  Is the text worth reading?  Does it contribute something important?

If this is the way critical readers are going to approach a text, then as an analytical writer you need to guide readers toward the desired answers to each of these questions.

Guidelines for Analytical Writing

             In writing papers for this (or any) course, keep in mind the following points.  They apply in particular to the final paper or take-home exam for this class.   Many of the same concerns apply to critical reaction papers as well, but these short papers can be more informal than the final paper.

  1. Pick an important issue: Make sure that your analysis meets the “so what” test.  Why should anyone care about this topic, anyway?  Pick an issue or issues that matters and that you really care about.
  2. Keep focused: Don’t lose track of the point you are trying to make and make sure the reader knows where you are heading and why.
  3. Aim for clarity: Don’t assume that the reader knows what you’re talking about; it’s your job to make your points clearly.  In part this means keeping focused and avoiding distracting clutter.  But in part it means that you need to make more than elliptical references to concepts and sources or to professional experience.  When referring to readings (from the course or elsewhere), explain who said what and why this point is pertinent to the issue at hand.  When drawing on your own experiences or observations, set the context so the reader can understand what you mean.  Proceed as though you were writing for an educated person who is neither a member of this class nor a professional colleague, someone who has not read the material you are referring to.
  4. Provide analysis: A good paper is more than a catalogue of facts, concepts, experiences, or references; it is more than a description of the content of a set of readings; it is more than an expression of your educational values or an announcement of your prescription for what ails education.  A good paper is a logical and coherent analysis of the issues raised within your chosen area of focus.  This means that your paper should aim to explain rather than describe.  If you give examples, be sure to tell the reader what they mean in the context of your analysis.  Make sure the reader understands the connection between the various points in your paper.
  5. Provide depth, insight, and connections: The best papers are ones that go beyond making obvious points, superficial comparisons, and simplistic assertions.  They dig below the surface of the issue at hand, demonstrating a deeper level of understanding and an ability to make interesting connections.
  6. Support your analysis with evidence: You need to do more than simply state your ideas, however informed and useful these may be.  You also need to provide evidence that reassures the reader that you know what you are talking about, thus providing a foundation for your argument.  Evidence comes in part from the academic literature, whether encountered in this course or elsewhere.  Evidence can also come from your own experience.  Remember that you are trying to accomplish two things with the use of evidence.  First, you are saying that it is not just you making this assertion but that authoritative sources and solid evidence back you up.  Second, you are supplying a degree of specificity and detail, which helps to flesh out an otherwise skeletal argument.
  7. Draw on course materials (this applies primarily to reaction papers, not the final paper). Your paper should give evidence that you are taking this course.  You do not need to agree with any of the readings or presentations, but your paper should show you have considered the course materials thoughtfully.
  8. Recognize complexity and acknowledge multiple viewpoints. The issues in the history of American education are not simple, and your paper should not propose simple solutions to complex problems. It should not reduce issues to either/or, black/white, good/bad.  Your paper should give evidence that you understand and appreciate more than one perspective on an issue.  This does not mean you should be wishy-washy.  Instead, you should aim to make a clear point by showing that you have considered alternate views.
  9. Challenge assumptions. The paper should show that you have learned something by doing this paper. There should be evidence that you have been open to changing your mind.
  10. Do not overuse quotation: In a short paper, long quotations (more than a sentence or two in length) are generally not appropriate.  Even in longer papers, quotations should be used sparingly unless they constitute a primary form of data for your analysis.  In general, your paper is more effective if written primarily in your own words, using ideas from the literature but framing them in your own way in order to serve your own analytical purposes.  However, selective use of quotations can be very useful as a way of capturing the author’s tone or conveying a particularly aptly phrased point.
  11. Cite your sources: You need to identify for the reader where particular ideas or examples come from.  This can be done through in-text citation:  Give the author’s last name, publication year, and (in the case of quotations) page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence or paragraph where the idea is presented — e.g., (Ravitch, 2000, p. 22); provide the full citations in a list of references at the end of the paper.  You can also identify sources with footnotes or endnotes:  Give the full citation for the first reference to a text and a short citation for subsequent citations to the same text.  (For critical reaction papers, you only need to give the short cite for items from the course reading; other sources require full citations.)  Note that citing a source is not sufficient to fulfill the requirement to provide evidence for your argument.  As spelled out in #6 above, you need to transmit to the reader some of the substance of what appears in the source cited, so the reader can understand the connection with the point you are making and can have some meat to chew on.  The best analytical writing provides a real feel for the material and not just a list of assertions and citations.  Depth, insight, and connections count for more than a superficial collection of glancing references.  In other words, don’t just mention an array of sources without drawing substantive points and examples from these sources; and don’t draw on ideas from such sources without identifying the ones you used.
  12. Take care in the quality of your prose: A paper that is written in a clear and effective style makes a more convincing argument than one written in a murky manner, even when both writers start with the same basic understanding of the issues.  However, writing that is confusing usually signals confusion in a person’s thinking.  After all, one key purpose of writing is to put down your ideas in a way that permits you and others to reflect on them critically, to see if they stand up to analysis.  So you should take the time to reflect on your own ideas on paper and revise them as needed.  You may want to take advantage of the opportunity in this course to submit a draft of the final paper, revise it in light of comments, and then resubmit the revised version.  This, after all, is the way writers normally proceed.  Outside of the artificial world of the classroom, writers never turn in their first draft as their final statement on a subject.