Three Books

by David Labaree, posted in Academic Life, Academic writing, Ed schools, Educational goals, Educational policy, Featured, Higher Education, Schooling, Systems of Schooling
This post is a reminder about my most recent books.  As a retired guy with time on his hands, I decided — what the hell — to self-publish three books in the last three years.  Kindle Direct Publishing makes this possible.  I thought it might be useful to put together collections of my papers and blog posts that have not been published in one of my books and that I could organize around three themes.  The first focuses on what it means to be a scholar, the second on the many ironies of the American school system, and the third on the peculiarities of the American higher education system.  Below is a brief overview and table of contents for each of these volumes.
I’m glad I published these books and I plan to do one more in the next few months.  But I wouldn’t recommend doing this kind of publication if you have material you really want to get into the hands of the reading public.  It’s easy to put out a book this way:  One hour after submission, the e-book is available on Amazon and one day later the paper edition is available on print to order.  Not bad.  But almost no one buys or reads these books.  There is no publisher marketing and no availability in libraries and bookstores.  Since the first volume came out in 2023, I’ve sold a grand total of about 400 books.  Better than nothing, but still — whoop-dee-doo. 
This book is a collection of essays I have written over the years about the scholarly writing, doctoral study, and the academic life. Most were published in a variety of venues including my blog, but I thought it would be useful to put them all together in one volume. Most of them I wrote for the benefit of my doctoral students and early-career professors, in order to give them insight into the nature of the world they were entering and provide them with advice about how to negotiate this world.

Contents

Introduction

Doctoral Study

  1. Advice for New PhD Students
  2. Sermon on Educational Research
  3. Doctoral Dysfunction: The Growing Prominence of Academic Technicians and Justice Warriors

Scholarly Writing

  1. The Esthetic Pleasures of Scholarly Writing
  2. Academic Writing as an Exercise in Arrogance and Humility
  3. The Five-Paragraph Fetish
  4. Adventures in Scholarship

Academic Life

  1. Universities Give Away Knowledge and Sell Degrees
  2. College Teaching Is Better than You’d Expect
  3. Academic Publishing as the Lust for Glory
  4. Luck and Pluck: Competing Accounts of Life in the Meritocracy

 

 

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.

Contents

Introduction

Educational Policy

  1. Let’s Measure What No One Teaches: PISA, NCLB, and the Shrinking Aims of Education
  2. The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness: The Cases of Healthcare, Industry, and Education
  3. Targeting Teachers
  4. Educational Consumerism
  5. Politics and Markets: The Enduring Dynamics of the US System of Schooling
  6. Public Schools for Private Gain: The Declining American Commitment to Serving the Public Good
  7. From Citizens to Consumers: Evolution of Reform Rhetoric and Consumer Practice in the US

Purposes of Schooling

  1. The Winning Ways of a Losing Strategy: Educationalizing Social Problems in the US
  2. What Schools Can’t Do: Understanding the Chronic Failure of American School Reform
  3. School Syndrome: Understanding the USA’s Magical Belief that Schooling Can Somehow Improve Society, Promote Access, and Preserve Advantage
  4. Public Schooling as Social Welfare
  5. No Exit: Public Education as an Inescapably Public Good
  6. When Is School the Answer to What Social Problems?
  7. How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement,and Naturalize Privilege

Structure of Schooling

  1. The Fraught Connection between Nation States and Public Schools
  2. School Gave Me the Creeps
  3. The Dynamic Tension at the Heart of the Grammar of Schooling
  4. Resisting Educational Standards
  5. Failing Like a Professional: Amateurs Panic, Professionals Choke
  6. How Dewey Lost: The Victory of David Snedden and Social Efficiency in the Reform of American Education
  7. Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

 

This book is a collection of pieces I wrote about the emergence of the peculiar American system of higher education and what makes this system so remarkable. The heart of the story is that this is a system without a plan. America never had a figure like Wilhelm von Humboldt to map out a coherent vision for a structure of higher education. Indeed, only a madman would have planned a system as radically decentralized, chaotically organized, and stunningly inefficient as the system that eventually came into being. And yet it turned out that these same organizational inefficiencies have helped establish the system’s effectiveness as an educational institution, making it the envy the world. Its strength came from the fact that it emerged from the bottom up instead of being imposed from the top down. In the 2024 Shanghai rankings of world universities, American institutions account for 26 of the top 50, 16 of the top 20, and 8 of the top 10. Not bad for the heirs of a rag-tag collection of small, scattered, and undistinguished nineteenth century colleges that were rightly considered a joke by European visitors.

Contents

Introduction

The System of Higher Education

  1. A System Without a Plan
  2. From Rags to Riches: How the American College Went from Pitiful in the Nineteenth Century to Powerful in the Twentieth
  3. College – What Is It Good For?
  4. How Education Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Normalize Privilege
  5. How Not to Defend Private Research Universities
  6. An Affair to Remember: America’s Brief Fling with Higher Education as a Public Good
  7. Reflections on Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” and the Role of the Professor
  8. How the Fall of the Roman Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity – and What This Suggests about the Rise of US Higher Education
  9. Teacher Persona
  10. You Don’t Have to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies

Scholarship

  1. The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance
  2. Do No Harm
  3. Perils of the Professionalized Historian
  4. Why? Different Ways that People Give Reasons – and Lessons for Scholars
  5. A Brutal Review of My First Book
  6. Why We Need Histories of Education
  7. Doctoral Study as a Transformative Experience
  8. Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision

Schools of Education

  1. Life on the Margins
  2. Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education
  3. Teach For America vs. Teacher Ed: Heads They Win, Tails We Lose
  4. The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers
  5. Reflections on The Trouble with Ed Schools for the Chinese Edition of the Book

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