This post is a new piece I just wrote as the preface to the Chinese translation of my book, The Trouble with Ed Schools. For me, this was a nice opportunity to accomplish two things in looking back on this work, which was published in 2004. One is to show how the book came about through my own experience as an outsider immersing myself in an education school, a participant observer going native. The other is to explain, for a non-American audience what’s peculiar about the American education school.
I hope you find it interesting.
Preface to the Chinese Translation
I’m honored to have my book, The Trouble with Ed Schools, now translated into Chinese. For the new Chinese audience, I thought it might be useful to provide some background about where this book came from. First, I want to show how the book arose from my own experience early in my career as an education professor. And then I’d like to show how the institution it examines emerged from a peculiarly American context, which is likely quite different from the conditions within which education schools operate in China.
Unlike most education professors in the US, I was never a teacher in the public schools. All of my teaching experience has been at the university level. So my knowledge about the preparation of teachers and the practice of teaching comes from my own research, from my engagement with the literature in the field, from my work as a teacher educator, and from my interaction over the years with graduate students coming from extensive careers as classroom teachers. Therefore this book is not an empirical study or a how-to manual but instead an essay in which I try to synthesize what I have learned from all these sources in order to capture the nature of the American education school as a social institution. My doctorate is in sociology and my approach to understanding the education school is filtered through the conceptual framework of historical sociology. The idea was to sort out how the American education school evolved within the peculiar context of American educational history and from the emerging social role that schooling has played both for individual educational consumers and for the larger society.
As I finished my PhD from University of Pennsylvania, I took on a series of one-year faculty positions in sociology departments at three different universities – Penn, Georgetown, and Widener. Then in 1985 I plunged head-first into the world of education schools by becoming an assistant professor in the Teacher Education Department at the Michigan State University College of Education, where I remained for the next 18 years. For me, it was a stunning immersion into a strange new world. In retrospect, I realized I was like an anthropologist embedding himself in a tribal culture far removed from his original context. So I became a participant-observer in Education World, where I had to learn the language, norms, traditions, hierarchies, and professional practices. The Trouble with Ed Schools was the end result of this process, which I published in 2004 as I was leaving Michigan State for a new position in the education school at Stanford. It’s no accident that I dedicated the book to my colleagues and students at MSU, because they taught me all I know about the book’s subject.
It turns out the MSU was the perfect place to be for someone who wanted to learn about ed schools, because when I arrived it was leading a movement among deans of education schools at research universities to reform the very institution I was entering. The MSU dean, Judith Lanier, was the president of this reform collaboration, known as the Holmes Group, and the group’s first reform report was being written there by my new colleagues. Published in 1986 as Tomorrow’s Teachers, it entered an intense arena of educational reform documents in the US, including the 1983 report from the US Department of Education, A Nation at Risk, and the 1986 report from the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. Holmes quickly published two more reports while I was at MSU, Tomorrow’s Schools (1990) and Tomorrow’s Schools of Education (1995). My immersion in education at this point taught me an important lesson: If you want to understand an institution, watch what happens when people seek to reform it. The flurry of reform reports provided me with a rich set of diagnoses about what was ailing the US profession of teaching and the US education school along with prescriptions for how to cure these ailments. Lucky me: all of this material dropped into my lap just as I was entering this new world and gave me a wonderful array of insights into the institution’s functions and dysfunctions. This book is the result.
Now let me turn from the origins of the book to the nature of the institution that it examines. The American education school is a peculiar place, which arose under conditions that are in several ways quite different from how education schools developed in other countries. One distinctive feature is that the profession for which the US education schools prepares students is not highly respected in this country. Teaching in the US is the prototypical middle class occupation, but it doesn’t have the status of a profession in the same way as law or medicine. It’s at best considered a semi-profession. For working-class families, having a child become a teacher is a major step up into the white-collar work force. But for middle-class families, the expectation is that students who attend college should aspire to a higher position than classroom teacher.
One problem with teaching is that it’s a mass occupation, so it lacks the aura of exclusivity carried by the high professions and upper management positions. Especially in upper-middle-class families, having a child become a teacher is a bit of a disappointment, a sign that the child has set his or her sights too low. Another factor that undermines the status of the teachers in the US is that they are public servants, a problem in a country that values the private sector over the public sector. Government work is considered less demanding, less engaging, and less rewarding than work in the private economy. There’s an expression – “good enough for government work” – which captures the view that this work carries a lower expectation for achievement. And yet another strike against teaching in the US is that teachers are seen as intellectuals in a country that honors practical accomplishment over intellectual accomplishment. Our heroes are entrepreneurs and inventors, like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Even the highest levels of intellectuals, such as literary figures and university professors, are more acknowledged than honored by the larger public. And teachers – as street-level intellectuals, who are so commonplace that everyone has interacted closely with them – garner little respect.
Another problem with education schools is that they have long occupied a subordinate status in the hierarchy of higher education. The first institutions for preparing teachers – normal schools – emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the US in order to fill the classrooms of the newly established system of public education. Given the sudden increase in demand for teachers, normal schools were under pressure to produce a large number of teachers at high speed and low cost, with an emphasis on quantity over quality. They operated more like high schools than colleges and universities, staffed by faculty who were generally not college-educated themselves, and they focused on preparing students to become teachers at elementary schools. The small number of high school teachers that were needed came from colleges. Early on these normal schools became popular with students who didn’t necessarily want to become teachers but who sought an inexpensive and highly accessible form of advanced education. The strong demand for advanced education drove the upward mobility of the education school within American higher education. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, normal schools started turning into teachers colleges, which granted college degrees and had a declining share of students going into teaching. By the 1920s they dropped the term “teacher” from their titles and turned into full-service state colleges, and by the 1960s they were rechristened as regional state universities. The good news was that education students and faculty – 100 years after the establishment of the first normal schools – were now officially affiliated with a university, but the bad news was that they were both seen as parvenues in the rarefied air of higher education. Education schools had made it to the big leagues, but they bore the stigma of their lowly origins. Compared with the other realms of the university, they were stuck with the reputation for being the home of weak students, low academic standards, and undistinguished faculty and for their association with a lesser profession.
So American education school have had a longstanding status problem. They don’t get much respect. I thought that might be different when I moved from a large public university to the rarefied air of an elite private university in 2003, but, alas, such was not the case. On my first day of classes I saw a sign printed in chalk on the pavement in front of the education building that read “Edukashun Skool.” Disrespect is the norm for this institution, and my book seeks to explore the roots and consequences of this problem.
David F. Labaree
Palo Alto, California
June, 2023
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 