Category: Course Syllabus

Labaree, David F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34:1 (Spring), 39-81.

Course Description

In the first week we look at the backstory of schooling in the U.S. We explore its historical roots, the nature of its original mission, and how that mission evolved over time. And we also examine the conflicting mix of goals that we have imposed on schools and the various social functions they have accumulated over time.

In week two, we turn to the core practices of teaching and learning in classrooms. Included as issues such as: the distinctive characteristics of teaching as a professional practice; the socialization of teachers and the incentives that shape the way teachers play their roles; and the grammar of schooling that both defines it and makes it resistant to change.

In week three, we look at the teacher-student relationship in the classroom and how this relationship is experienced by both parties. We also examine some of the ways that schools create winners and losers, how they both promote and ameliorate social differences.

In week four, we look as school organization from several perspectives: alternative ways of school organization and their implications for school outcomes; the loose coupling of the nested components of American schooling (classroom, school, school district, and state system) that make it different from other organizations; and the reasons that structural reforms often have little impact on teaching practice.

In week five, we look at the social and cultural pressures that shape school. This includes examining how the shared expectations of teachers, students, and parents reinforce our conception of what a “real school” is; the rampant formalism that runs through schooling, favoring process over content; and the organizational features of schooling that allow it to carry social functions that the organization of families does not allow.

In week six, we look at the role that race, class, and culture have in schooling. Among other things, this means examining the class and race factors that shape the kind of cultural knowledge and skill (cultural capital) schools value and try to teach; and the problem of attempting to teach this culture without at the same time demeaning or repressing other cultures.

In week seven, we look at the issue of cultural capital compared to other forms of capital. And then we consider two different theoretical perspectives on the social role of the school curriculum – the functionalist view that schools teach the knowledge and values that all adults need in order to function in a modern society; and the social reproduction view that schools teach different knowledge and values to students from different backgrounds, thus preparing them for stratified futures.

In week eight, we read a classic book by the political economist Albert Hirschman – Exit, Voice, and Loyalty – which explores the mechanisms by which different kinds of organizations correct for dysfunctional outcomes. He shows how market organizations are primarily responsive to exit, in which customers signal their dissatisfaction with a product by buying another one instead. On the other hand, political organizations are primarily responsive to voice, in which clients signal their dissatisfaction by directly voicing their complaint. From this view, low functioning schools can be seen as unhappy hybrids – political organizations that respond to voice but provoke dissatisfied customers to exit.

In week nine, we read another classic book by the political scientist and anthropologist James Scott – Seeing Like a State. Here he addresses the problems inherent in state-initiated efforts at social engineering. The issue is that such schemes too often involve an attempt by planners in the capital to impose a highly rationalized and universalistic model of social order on remote ecologies that are organic and particularistic. Which sounds a lot like what happens in school reform.

In week ten, we look at the role that educational researchers play in shaping educational policy, the nature of educational research as a practice, and the trajectory of academic careers in a stratified system of higher education.

Readings

All of the readings for this class are available as PDFs on the web. This includes the full text of the two books assigned for the course, Hirschman and Scott.

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 the slides for that week’s class.

1) Introduction: The Historical Roots and Competing Goals of the U.S. School System

Tips for week 1 readings

Labaree, David F. (2010). Founding the American school system. In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling (pp. 42-79). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class slides for week 1

2) The Problems of Teaching as a Practice

Tips for week 2 readings

Cohen, David K. (1988), Teaching practice: Plus que ça change. In Phillip W. Jackson (ed.), Contributing to Educational change (pp. 27-84). Berkeley: McCutchan.

Lortie, Dan C. (1969). The balance of control and autonomy in elementary teaching. In Amatai Etzioni (Ed.), The semi-professions and their organization. Teachers, nurses, social workers. New York, 1-53.

Tyack, David & Tobin, William. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal 31: 3 (Autumn), 453-479.

Class slides for week 2

3) The Classroom, the Teacher-Student Relationship, and Tracking

Tips for week 3 readings

Jackson, Philip. (1990). The daily grind. Life in classrooms (pp. 33-50). New York: Teachers College Press.

Waller, Willard. (1932/1965). The teacher-pupil relationship. In The sociology of teaching (pp. 189-211). New York: Wiley.

Oakes, Jeannie. (1986). Keeping track, part 1: The policy and practice of curriculum inequality. Phi Delta Kappan, 68, 12-17.

Fine, Michelle. (1986). Why urban adolescents drop into and out of public high school. The Teachers College Record, 87(3), 393-409.

Class slides for week 3

4) The Organization of the School

Tips for week 4 readings

Katz, Michael. (1971). Alternative proposals for American education: The nineteenth century. In Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (pp. 3-55). New York: Praeger.

Weick, Karl. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely-coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, 1-19.

Cuban, Larry. (2013). Why so many structural changes in schools and so little reform in teaching practice? Inside the black box of classroom practice: Change without reform in American education (pp. 155-187). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Class slides for week 4

5) Expectations and the Roots of the Stability of the School as an Organization

Tips for week 5 readings

Metz, Mary H. (1990). Real school: A universal drama amid disparate experience. In Douglas E. Mitchell & Margaret E. Goertz (Eds.), Education Politics for the New Century (pp. 75-91). New York: Falmer.

Meyer, John W. & Rowan, Brian. (1983). The structure of educational organizations. In Organizational environments: Ritual and rationality (pp. 71-97), edited by John W. Meyer and William R. Scott. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Parsons, Talcott. (1959). The school as a social system: Some of its functions in American society. In Social structure and personality (pp. 129-154). New York: Free Press.

Labaree, David F. (2014). Schooling in the United States: Historical analyses. In D.C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational theory and philosophy (pp. 740-43). Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA.

Class slides for week 5

6) Class, Race, and Culture in the School

Tips for week 6 readings

Bernstein, Basil. (1977). Social class, language and socialization. In Jerome Karabel & A. H. Halsey (eds.), Power and ideology in education (pp. 473-486). New York: Oxford University Press.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), 7-24.

Delpit, Lisa. (1995). The silenced dialogue. In Other people’s children (pp. 21-47). New York: New Press.

Recommended: The Problem We All Live With, Parts 1 and 2. (2015). This American Life Podcast. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with.

Class slides for week 6

7) Cultural Difference and the School Curriculum

Tips for week 7 readings

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986). The forms of capital. In John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). New York: Greenwood.

McWhorter, John. (2018). There’s nothing wrong with Black English. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/who-gets-to-use-black-english/566867/?utm_source=twb.

Dreeben, Robert. (1968). The contribution of schooling to the learning of norms: Independence, achievement, universalism, and specificity. In On what is learned in school (pp. 63-90). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Anyon, Jean. (1981). Social class and school knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 11, 3-42.

Class slides for week 7

8) Schools as Political and Market Entities

Tips for week 8 readings

Hirschman, Albert O. (2006). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Chubb, John E. & Moe, Terry M. (1988). Politics, markets, and the organization of schools. American Political Science Review, 82:4 (December), 1065-1087.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903). The souls of black folk. New York: Knopf. http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/203/the-souls-of-black-folk/4457/chapter-13-of-the-coming-of-john/

Class slides for week 8

9) The Problem of School Reform – Imposing a Rationalized Vision on the Ecology of the Classroom; Schooling and the Meritocracy

Tips for week 9 readings

Scott, James. (1999). Seeing like a state. New Haven: Yale University Press. Introduction, chapters 1-2 and 9-10.

McClay, William M. (2016). A distant elite: How meritocracy went wrong. The Hedgehog Review 18:2 (Summer). http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Summer_McClay.php

Class slides for week 9

10) The Role of Researchers in Educational Policy and the Prospects for New Researchers in the University

Tips for week 10 readings

Cohen, David K. & Garet, Michael S. (1975). Reforming educational policy with applied social research. Harvard Educational Review, 45, 17-43.

Weber, Max. (1919/1958). Science as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (pp. 129-156). New York: Oxford University Press.

March, James G. (1975). Education and the pursuit of optimism. Texas Tech Journal of Education, 2:1, 5-17.

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Class slides 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:

What’s the point? This is the analysis issue: what is the author’s angle?
Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
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 longer papers, but most of the same concerns apply to short papers as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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., (Kliebard, 1986, 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.

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.

Course Syllabus, Higher Education, History of education, History of Higher Education Class

Class on History of Higher Education in the US

Posted on November 12, 2020November 11, 2020 by David Labaree

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of Higher Education in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are a college teacher, feel free to use any of it in whole or part. If you are a student or a group of students, you can work your way through the class on your own at your own pace. Any benefits that accrue are purely intrinsic, since no one will get college credits. But that also means you’re free to pursue the parts of the class that you want and you don’t have any requirements or papers. How great is that.

I’m posting the full syllabus below. But it would be more useful to get it as a Word document through this link. Feel free to share it with anyone you like.

All of the course materials except three required books are embedded in the syllabus through hyperlinks to a Google drive. For each week, the syllabus includes a link to tips for approaching the readings, links to the PDFs of the readings, and a link to the slides for that week’s class. Slides also include links to additional sources. So the syllabus is all that is needed to gain access to the full class.

I hope you find this useful.

History of Higher Education in the U.S.

David Labaree

Twitter: @Dlabaree

Perkin, Harold. (1997). History of universities. In Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Eds.), ASHE reader on the history of higher education, 2^nd ed. (pp. 3-32). Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing.

Course Description

This course provides an introductory overview of the history of higher education in the United States. We will start with Perkin’s account of the world history of the university, and two chapters from my book about the role of the market in shaping the history of American higher education and the pressure from consumers to have college provide both social access and social advantage. In week two, we examine an overview of the history of American college and university in the 18^th and 19^th centuries from John Thelin, and my chapter on the emerging nature of the college system. In week three, we focus on the rise of the university in the latter part of the 19^th century using two more chapters from Thelin, and my own chapter on the subject. In week four, we read a series of papers around the issue of access to higher education, showing how colleges for many years sought to repel or redirect the college aspirations of women, blacks, and Jews. In week five, we examine the history of professional education, with special attention to schools of business, education, and medicine. In week six, we read several chapters from Donald Levine’s book about the rise of mass higher education after World War I, my piece about the rise of community colleges, and more from Thelin. In week seven, we look at the surge of higher ed enrollments after World War II, drawing on pieces by Rebecca Lowen, Roger Geiger, Thelin, and Labaree. In week eight, we look at the broadly accessible full-service regional state university, drawing on Alden Dunham, Thelin, Lohmann, and my chapter on the relationship between the public and private sector. In week nine, we read a selection of chapters from Jerome Karabel’s book about the struggle by elite universities to stay on top of a dynamic and expanding system of higher education. And in week 10, we step back and try to get a fix on the evolved nature of the American system of higher education, drawing on work by Mitchell Stevens and the concluding chapters of my book.

Like every course, this one is not a neutral survey of all possible perspectives on the domain identified by the course title; like every course, this one has a point of view. This point of view comes through in my book manuscript that we’ll be reading in the course. Let me give you an idea of the kind of approach I will be taking.

The American system of higher education is an anomaly. In the twentieth century it surged past its European forebears to become the dominant system in the world – with more money, talent, scholarly esteem, and institutional influence than any of the systems that served as its models. By all rights, this never should have happened. Its origins were remarkably humble: a loose assortment of parochial nineteenth-century liberal-arts colleges, which emerged in the pursuit of sectarian expansion and civic boosterism more than scholarly distinction. These colleges had no academic credibility, no reliable source of students, and no steady funding. Yet these weaknesses of the American system in the nineteenth century turned out to be strengths in the twentieth. In the absence of strong funding and central control, individual colleges had to learn how to survive and thrive in a highly competitive market, in which they needed to rely on student tuition and alumni donations and had to develop a mode of governance that would position them to pursue any opportunity and cultivate any source of patronage. As a result, American colleges developed into an emergent system of higher education that was lean, adaptable, autonomous, consumer-sensitive, self-supporting, and radically decentralized. This put the system in a strong position to expand and prosper when, before the turn of the twentieth century, it finally got what it was most grievously lacking: a surge of academic credibility (when it assumed the mantle of scientific research) and a surge of student enrollments (when it became the pipeline to the middle class). This course is an effort to understand how a system that started out so badly turned out so well – and how its apparently unworkable structure is precisely what makes the system work.

That’s an overview of the kind of argument I will be making about the history of higher education. But you should feel free to construct your own, rejecting mine in part or in whole. The point of this class, like any class, is to encourage you to try on a variety of perspectives as part of the process of developing your own working conceptual framework for understanding the world. I hope you will enjoy the ride.

Readings

Books: We will be reading the following books:

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Labaree, David F. (2017). A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Karabel, Jerome. (2005). The chosen: The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Supplementary Resources: There is a terrific online archive of primary and secondary readings on higher education, which is a supplement to The History of Higher Education, 3^rd ed., published by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE): http://www.pearsoncustom.com/mi/msu_ashe/.

Course Outline

Below are the topics we will cover, week by week, with the readings for each week.

Week 1

Introduction to course

Tips for week 1 readings

Labaree, David F. (2015). A system without a plan: Elements of the American model of higher education. Chapter 1 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Labaree, David F. (2015). Balancing access and advantage. Chapter 5 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Class slides for week 1

Week 2

Overview of the Early History of Higher Education in the U.S.

Tips for week 2 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (introductory essay and chapters 1-3).

Labaree, David F. (2015). Unpromising roots: The ragtag college system in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 2

Week 3

Roots of the Growth of the University in the Late 19^th and Early 20^th Century

Thursday 4/19

Tips for week 3 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapters 4-5).

Labaree, David F. (2015). Adding the pinnacle and keeping the base: The graduate school crowns the system, 1880-1910. Chapter 3 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Labaree, David F. (1995). Foreword (to book by Brown, David K. (1995). Degrees of control: A sociology of educational expansion and occupational credentialism. New York: Teachers College Press).

Class slides for week 3

Week 4

Educating and Not Educating the Other: Blacks, Women, and Jews

Tips for week 4 readings

Wechsler, Harold S. (1997). An academic Gresham’s law: Group repulsion as a theme in American higher education. In Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Eds.), ASHE reader on the history of higher education, 2^nd ed. (pp. 416-431). Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing.

Anderson, James D. (1997). Training the apostles of liberal culture: Black higher education, 1900-1935. In Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Eds.), ASHE reader on the history of higher education, 2^nd ed. (pp. 432-458). Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing.

Gordon, Lynn D. (1997). From seminary to university: An overview of women’s higher education, 1870-1920. In Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Eds.), ASHE reader on the history of higher education, 2^nd ed. (pp. 473-498). Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing.

Class slides for week 4

Week 5

History of Professional Education

Tips for week 5 readings

Brubacher, John S. and Rudy, Willis. (1997). Professional education. In Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Eds.), ASHE reader on the history of higher education, 2^nd ed. (pp. 379-393). Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing.

Bledstein, Burton J. (1976). The culture of professionalism. In The culture of professionalism: The middle class and the development of higher education in America (pp. 80-128). New York: W. W. Norton.

Labaree, David F. (2015). Mutual subversion: The liberal and the professional. Chapter 4 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Starr, Paul. (1984). Transformation of the medical school. In Social transformation of American medicine (pp. 112-127). New York: Basic.

Class slides for week 5

Week 6

Emergence of Mass Higher Education

Tips for week 6 readings

Levine, Donald O. (1986). The American college and the culture of aspiration, 1915-1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Read introduction and chapters 3, 4, and 8.

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapter 6).

Labaree, David F. (1997). The rise of the community college: Markets and the limits of educational opportunity. In How to succeed in school without really learning: The credentials race in American education (chapter 8, pp. 190-222). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Class slides for week 6

Week 7

The Huge Surge of Higher Education Expansion after World War II

Tips for week 7 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapter 7).

Geiger, Roger. (2004). University advancement from the postwar era to the 1960s. In Research and relevant knowledge: American research universities since World War II (chapter 5, pp. 117-156). Read the first half of the chapter, which focuses on the rise of Stanford.

Lowen, Rebecca S. (1997). Creating the cold war university: The transformation of Stanford. Berkeley: University of California Press. Introduction and Chapters 5 and 6.

Labaree, David F. (2015). Learning to love the bomb: America’s brief cold-war fling with the university as a public good. Chapter 7 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 7

Week 8

Populist, Practical, and Elite: The Diversity and Evolved Institutional Character of the Full-Service American University

Tips for week 8 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapter 8).

Dunham, Edgar Alden. (1969). Colleges of the forgotten Americans: A profile of state colleges and universities. New York: McGraw Hill (introduction, chapters 1-2).

Lohmann, Suzanne. (2006). The public research university as a complex adaptive system. Unpublished paper, University of California, Los Angeles.

Labaree, David F. (2015). Private advantage, public impact. Chapter 6 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 8

Week 9

The Struggle by Elite Universities to Stay on Top

Tips for week 9 readings

Karabel, Jerome. (2005). The chosen: The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Read introduction and chapters 2, 4, 9, 12, 13, 17, and 18.

Class slides for week 9

Week 10

Conclusions about the American System of Higher Education

Tips for week 10 readings

Stevens, Mitchell L., Armstrong, Elizabeth A., & Arum, Richard. (2008). Sieve, incubator, temple, hub: Empirical and theoretical advances in the sociology of higher education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34 (127-151).

Labaree, David F. (2015). Upstairs, downstairs: Relations between the tiers of the system. Chapter 8 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Labaree, David F. (2015). A perfect mess. Chapter 9 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 10

Guidelines for Critical Reading

Whenever you set out to do a critical reading of a particular text (a book, article, speech, proposal, conference paper), you need to use the following questions as a framework to guide you as you read:

What’s the point? This is the analysis/interpretation issue: what is the author’s angle?
What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
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?

Guidelines for Analytical Writing

In writing papers for this (or any) course, keep in mind the following points. They apply in particular to the longer papers, but most of the same concerns apply to critical reaction papers as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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., (Kliebard, 1986, 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.

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.

POSTED I

Course Syllabus, History, History of School Reform Class, School reform

Class on History of School Reform in the U.S.

Posted on October 29, 2020October 28, 2020 by David Labaree

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of School Reform in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are a college teacher, feel free to use any of it in whole or part. If you are a student or a group of students, you can work your way through the class on your own at your own pace. Any benefits that accrue are purely intrinsic, since no one will get college credits. But that also means you’re free to pursue the parts of the class that you want and you don’t have any requirements or papers. How great is that.

I’m posting the full syllabus below. But it would be more useful to download it as a Word document through this link. Feel free to share this with anyone you like.

All of the course materials are embedded in the syllabus through hyperlinks to a Google drive. For each week, this includes a link to tips for approaching the readings, links to the PDFs of the readings, and a link to the slides for that week’s class. Slides also include links to additional sources. So the syllabus is all that is needed to gain access to the full class.

What are the central themes of this class?

One is that reform of schooling is all about trying to improve it. But whether a particular reform constitutes an improvement or a detriment to school and society rests in the eye of the beholder. It all depends on what goals you want schools to accomplish, but the fact is that we don’t fully agree on what those goals are. So reform is not a linear process leading inevitably toward a better future but a cyclical process resulting from efforts to accomplish alternative goals that are in tension with each other. This produces a series on long-term pendulum swings between alternative visions of education.

A second theme is that examining the history of reform efforts can provide us with rich insight into the nature of the educational system. Think of reforms as a series of experiments in school improvement. How the system reacts to each of these experimental interventions tells us something important about how the system operates.

One conclusion I have drawn from examining this process is that reformers have been overconfident about their understanding of what the problems with schooling are and therefore what solutions are required. The fact is that a lot of reform efforts make schools worse. By failing to understand the complexity of the system and the way it has evolved over time, reformers have frequently been throwing a monkey wrench into the works. They try to solve one problem and in the process create another. (This is one reason by Dick Elmore and Milbrey McLaughlin call school reform “steady work.”)

So one message the course sends to students is to show a little humility in your efforts to improve schools. Learn more about how the system works before tinkering with it. And consider the possibility that you might make things worse.

I hope you find this useful.

History of School Reform in the US

A Ten-Week Class

David Labaree

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

Twitter: @Dlabaree

Elmore, Richard F., & McLaughlin, Milbrey W. (1988). Steady work. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

Course Description

In this course, we will explore the history of school reform in the United States. In only 10 weeks we will not be able to pursue a systematic study of this history from beginning to end, so instead we will explore a few of the major issues in this history and examine some pertinent cases of school reform to consider their consequences. School reform is the intended change of schooling toward accomplishment of a valued goal. One problem with reform, therefore, is intent. Education is an extraordinarily complex social institution – involving a vast array of people, structures, and organizations – which means that reforming education in ways that make it produce the intended results is quite difficult. Frequently reforms unintentionally generate new problems, which then require a new wave of reform to deal with them. (This is why Elmore and McLaughlin call school reform “steady work.”) A second problem with reform is that reasonable people can disagree over the goals of schooling, which means that what is a positive reform for some people may be a negative change for others. The result is that your reaction to the success or failure of a reform effort depends on where you stand on its value, since the failure of a bad reform is a good thing.

Major Issues in the History of School Reform: Framing our look at the history of reform will be two core books: Tinkering Toward Utopia, which David Tyack and Larry Cuban wrote in response to what they learned from teaching this class at Stanford for a number of years; and Someone Has to Fail, the book I wrote after teaching the same course for a decade. We’ll read their book at the start of the class and read mine in pieces across the quarter. A key theme in Tyack and Cuban is the paradox of school reform, in which it seems that schools are constantly being bounced around by a stream of reform efforts while at the same time they never seem to change. They unravel this paradox by separating the history of reform into two interacting elements: the noisy and often contradictory rounds of reform rhetoric that intrude upon schools at irregular intervals, and the slower and steadier process of evolutionary change in the structure of schooling that takes place largely outside of public view. We will look at both aspects of reform, with special attention to assessing the outcomes of reform in the realm of the structure and practice of schooling itself. My own book takes a more jaundiced view of reform, examining why the common school movement was such a success and later reforms were such failures. In the early part of the book, the focus is on how the loosely coupled organization of schooling and the peculiar characteristics of teaching as a practice have put severe limits on the possibilities of reform. In the latter part, I explore why the failure of reform is largely good news, protecting the system from damaging experiments based on misguided visions of what schools can do to solve social problems. I argue that schools are a terrible way to solve most of the social problems that they are asked to address. I also suggest that schools are doing what educational consumers want from them – providing us with social access and social advantage – even if they don’t do what reformers ask of them.

The class starts with the work of David Cohen, Richard Elmore, and Milbrey McLaughlin, who consider the organizational and pedagogical reasons it has been so difficult to change the basic grammar of schooling through deliberate reform efforts. Next we read Tyack and Cuban to get an overview of the subject. Then we look at my representation of the two most important reform movements in the history of American schools, one promoting the common school and the other pushing for progressive education. Next we look at the rhetorics of school reform by examining a series of reform documents from the last 200 years. We will then look in detail at the nature and variety of school reform rhetoric, through a close study of a few key reform texts over the years, including pedagogical progressivism, administrative progressivism, desegregation, the standards movement, and school choice. In succeeding weeks, we explore the core factors that make the school system so resistant to reform and consider some of the kinds of reform practices that are more likely to bring about results. Then we examine the system’s core social role, showing how the system continually adapts to pressure for greater social access by stratifying instruction in a way the preserves social advantage. In week 8 we look at issues surrounding race and American schooling. In week 9, we put the issue of school reform in the larger context of state-driven social change efforts, by focusing on James Scott’s framework, which examines why it has been so hard over the years for governments to impose order on complex social institutions such as schooling. For the last class, we read the final chapters in my book, talk about what schools can do, and what they can’t do.

What This Class Is and Is Not About: This class is intended to encourage you to think hard about the things that make educational reform so complex, contradictory, difficult, and often dysfunctional. Its focus is on analyzing what happens to reform efforts between initial proposals and eventual outcomes. This means that its aim is not to provide you with a how-to manual that will enable you to be a successful reformer. I don’t think such a manual exists, and the dream of finding the one right way to fix things has done a lot of damage to schools over the years. Instead, think of this class as an exercise in realism, a set of cautionary tales that I hope will help you locate your own efforts to improve schools within a useful historical framework. The idea is to encourage students to develop a rich understanding of the American system of schooling – even a grudging respect for it – before trying to institute reforms, and to instill a little humility into people’s plans for saving the world with better schools.

Audience

This class was originally designed for master’s and doctoral students in education, but it has also works for graduate or undergraduate students in any field who are interested in learning about the nature of the American system of education.

Readings

Books: The following books are used in the course; both are in print. Also, pirated digital versions of both books can be found online.

Tyack, David & Cuban, Larry. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: Reflections on a century of public school reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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

Assigned Articles and Other Readings: All other readings are available in PDF on the course Google Drive.

Course Outline

Below are the topics we will cover, week by week, with the readings for each week. For each week, I provide: a link to tips for how to approach each week’s readings; links for access to the PDFs of these readings; a link to the class slides for that week.

Week 1

Introduction to course

Tips for week 1 readings

Cohen, David K. (1988), Teaching practice: Plus que ça change. In Phillip W. Jackson (ed.), Contributing to Educational change (pp. 27-84). Berkeley: McCutchan.

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

Class slides for week 1: slides 1a, slides 1b, slides 1c

Week 2

The History of Educational Reform: An Overview

Tips for week 2 readings

Tyack, David & Cuban, Larry. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: Reflections on a century of public school reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class slides for week 2

Week 3

The Two Major Reform Movements – Common School and Progressivism; Schooling and the Meritocracy

Tips for week 3 readings

Labaree. Someone has to fail. Chapters 1, 2, and 3.

McClay, William M. (2016). A distant elite: How meritocracy went wrong. The Hedgehog Review 18:2 (Summer).

Class slides for week 3

Week 4

Factors That Make Reform Difficult

Tips for week 4 readings

Labaree. Someone has to fail. Chapters 4 and 5

Cuban, Larry. (2013). Why so many structural changes in schools and so little reform in teaching practice? In Inside the black box of classroom practice: Change without reform in American education (pp. 155-187). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Check out Larry Cuban’s blog on school reform and classroom practice, always a good read: http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/.

Class slides for week 4

Week 5

The Rhetorics of Reform: Cases in Point

Read any four of these closely; lightly skim the rest.

Tips for week 5 readings

Common School Movement

Mann, Horace. (1848). Twelfth Annual Report to the State Board of Education of Massachusetts. Selections.

Committee of 10

Committee of 10. (1893). Report to the National Council of Education. Selections.

Pedagogical Progressivism

Dewey, John. (1902/1990). The child and the curriculum. In Philip W. Jackson (ed.), The school and society and the child and the curriculum (pp. 181-209). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Administrative Progressivism

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918). Cardinal principles of secondary education. Washington, DC: National Education Association.

Desegregation

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

Standards Movement 1.0

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

School Choice

Walberg, Herbert J. & Best, Joseph L. (2003). Failure of the public school monopoly. In Education and capitalism: How overcoming our fear of markets and economics can improve America’s schools (pp. 3-32). Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.

Standards Movement 2.0

No Child Left Behind Act. (2002). Public Law 107-110. Title I.

School Choice 2.0

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-d5LuTZ5YYkLbsL0S268vtaRLFoEqJ_b

Class slides for week 5

Week 6

Making Educational Change

Tips for week 6 readings

Fullan, Michael G. (2001). The new meaning of educational change (3^rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Chapter 2.

Fullan, Michael G. (2001). The new meaning of educational change (3^rd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Chapter 5.

Wolf, Shelby A., Borko, Hilda, Elliott, Rebekah L., & McIver, Monette C. (2000). “That dog won’t hunt!:” Exemplary school change efforts within the Kentucky reform. American Educational Research Journal, 37:2, 349-393.

Delpit, Lisa. (1995). The silenced dialogue. In Other people’s children (pp. 21-47). New York: New Press.

Class slides for week 6

Week 7

Balancing Social Access and Social Advantage

Tips for week 7 readings

Labaree, David F. (2013). Balancing access and advantage in the history of American schooling. In Rolf Becker, Patrick Bühler, & Thomas Bühler (Eds.), Bildungsungleichheit und Gerechtigkeit: Wissenschaftliche und Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen (pp. 101-114). Bern: Haupt Verlag.

Cohen, David. K., & Neufeld, Barbara. (1981). The failure of high schools and the progress of education. Daedelus, 110 (Summer), 69-89.

Labaree, David F. (1997). The middle class and the high school. In How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education (pp. 92-109). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 34:3, pp. 159-165.

Class slides for week 7

Week 8

Race and American Schooling

Tips for week 8 readings

Nieto, Sonia (1994). Affirmation, solidarity, and critique: Moving beyond tolerance in multicultural education. Multicultural Education, 1:4, pp. 9-12, 35-38.

Fine, Michelle. (1986). Why urban adolescents drop into and out of public high school. The Teachers College Record, 87(3), 393-409.

McWhorter, John. (2018). There’s nothing wrong with Black English. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/who-gets-to-use-black-english/566867/?utm_source=twb.

Recommended: The Problem We All Live With. (2015). This American Life Podcast (July 31). Available in audio (below) and in transcript. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with.

Class slides for week 8

Week 9

Problems in Making Systematic Reform of Education

Tips for week 9 readings

Scott, James. (1999). Seeing like a state. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pay close attention to Introduction, chapters 1-2 and 9-10. Skim through the rest looking for examples.

Class slides for week 9

Week 10

Conclusions

Tips for week 10 readings

Labaree. Someone has to fail. Chapters 6, 7, and 8.

Cohen, David K. (1990). A revolution in one classroom: The case of Mrs. Oublier,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 12:3, pp. 311-329.

March, James G. (1975). Education and the pursuit of optimism. Texas Tech Journal of Education, 2:1, 5-17.

Class slides 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:

What’s the point? This is the analysis issue: what is the author’s angle?
Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
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 any course, keep in mind the following points.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cite your sources: You need to identify for the reader where particular ideas or examples come from. 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.
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.

Academic writing, Course Syllabus, Writing Class

Class on Academic Writing

Posted on October 5, 2020September 29, 2020 by David Labaree

This is the syllabus for a class on academic writing for clarity and grace, which I originally posted more than a year ago. It is designed as a 10-week class, with weekly readings, slides, and texts for editing. It’s aimed at doctoral students who are preparing to become researchers who seek to publish their scholarship. Ideally you can take the class with a group of peers, where you give each other feedback on your own writing projects in progress. But you can also take the class by yourself.

Below is the syllabus, which includes links to all readings, class slides, and texts for editing. Here’s a link to the Word document with all of the links, which is easier to work with.

I’ve also constructed a 6-week version of the class, which is aimed at graduate and undergraduate students who want to work on their writing for whatever purpose they choose. Here’s a link to that syllabus as a Word document.

“The effort the writer does not put into writing, the reader has to put into reading.”

Stephen Toulmin

Academic Writing for Clarity and Grace

A Ten-Week Class

David Labaree

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

Twitter: @Dlabaree

*Williams, Joseph M. & Bizup, Joseph. (2016). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (12^th ed.). New York: Longman.

Course Description

The title sounds like a joke, since academics (especially in the social sciences) do not have a reputation for writing with either clarity or grace much less both. But I hope in this class to draw students into my own and every other academic’s lifelong quest to become a better writer. The course will bring in a wide range of reference works that I have found useful over the years in working on my own writing and in helping students with theirs. The idea is not that a 10-week class will make students good writers; many of us have been working at this for 40 years or more and we’re just getting started. Instead, the plan is to provide students with some helpful strategies, habits, and critical faculties; increase their sense of writing as an extended process of revision; and leave them with a set of books that will support them in their own lifelong pursuit of good writing.

This online course is based on one I used to teach at Stanford for graduate students in education who wanted to work on their writing. It was offered in the ten-week format of the university’s quarter system, and I’m keeping that format. But you can use it in any way that works for you.

Some may want to treat it as a weekly class, doing the readings for each week, reviewing the PowerPoint slides for that week, and working through some of the exercises. If you’re treating it this way, it would work best if you can do it with a writing group made up of other students with similar interests. That way you can take advantage of the workshop component of the class, in which members of the group exchange sections of a paper they working on, giving and receiving feedback.

Others may use it as a general source of information about writing, diving into particular readings or slide decks as needed.

Classes include some instruction on particular skills and particular aspects of the writing process: developing an analytical angle on a subject; writing a good sentence; getting started in the writing process; working out the logic of the argument; developing the forms of validation for the argument; learning what your point is from the process of writing rather than as a precursor to writing; and revising, revising, revising. We spend another part of the class working as a group doing exercises in spotting and fixing problems. For these purposes we will use some helpful examples from the Williams book and elsewhere that focus on particular skills, but you can use the work produced within your own writing group.

Work in your writing group: Everyone needs to develop a recognition of the value of getting critical feedback from others on their work in progress, so you should be exchanging papers and work at editing each other’s work. Student work outside of class will include reading required texts, editing other student’s work around particular areas of concern, and working on revising your own paper or papers. Every week you will be submitting a piece of written work to your writing group, which will involve repeated efforts to edit a particular text of your own; and every week you will provide feedback to others in your group about their own texts.

Much of class time will focus on working on particular texts around a key issue of the day – like framing, wordiness, clarity, sentence rhythm. These texts will be examples from the readings and also papers by students, on which they would like to get feedback from the class as a whole. Topics will include things like:

Framing an argument, writing the introduction to a paper
Elements of rhetoric
Sentence rhythm and music
Emphasis – putting the key element at the end of sentence and paragraph; delivering the punch line
Concision – eliminating wordiness
Clarity – avoiding nominalizations; opting for Anglo-Saxon words; clearing up murky syntax
Focusing on action and actors
Metaphor and imagery
Correct usage: punctuation, common grammatical errors, word use
Avoiding the most common academic tics: jargon, isms, Latinate constructions, nominalizations, abstraction, hiding from view behind passive voice and third person
The basics of making an argument
Using quotes – integrating them into your argument, and commenting on them instead of assuming they make the point on their own.
Using data – how to integrate data into a text and explain its meaning and significance
The relation of writing and thought
Revision – of writing and thinking
The relation of grammar and mechanics to rhetorical effect
Sentence style
The relation of style to audience
Disciplinary conventions for style, organization, modes of argument, evidence
Authority and voice

Writing is a very personal process and the things we write are expressions of who we are, so it is important for everyone in the class to keep focused on being constructive in their comments and being tolerant of criticism from others. Criticism from others is very important for writers, but no one likes it. I have a ritual every time I get feedback on a paper or manuscript – whether blind reviews from journals or publishers or personal comments from colleagues. I let the review sit for a while until I’m in the right mood. Then I open it and skim it quickly to get the overall impression of how positive or negative it is. At that point I set it aside, cursing the editors for sending the paper to such an incompetent reviewer or reconsidering my formerly high opinion of the particular colleague-critic, then finally coming back a few days later (after a vodka or two) to read the thing carefully and assess the damage. Neurotic I know, but most writers are neurotic about their craft. It’s hard not to take criticism personally. Beyond all reason, I always expect the reviewers to say, “Don’t change a word; publish it immediately!” But somehow they never do. So I’m asking all members of the class both to recognize the vulnerability of their fellow writers and to open themselves up to the criticism of these colleagues in the craft.

Course Texts

Books listed with an * are ones where older editions are available; it’s ok to use one of these editions instead of the most recent version.

*Becker, Howard S. (2007). Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book, or article (2^nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

*Graff, Gerald, & Birkenstein, Cathy. (2014). “They say, I say:” The moves that matter in academic writing (3^rd ed.). New York: Norton.

Sword, Helen. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

*Garner, Bryan A. (2016). Garner’s modern English usage (4^th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. (Any earlier edition is fine to use.)

Other required readings are available in PDF on a Google drive.

Course Outline

Week 1: Introduction to Course; Writing Rituals; Writing Well, or at Least Less Badly

Zinnser, William. (2010). Writing English as a second language. Point of Departure (Winter). Americanscholar.org.

Munger, Michael C. (2010). 10 tips for how to write less badly. Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 6). Chronicle.com.

Lepore, Jill. (2009). How to write a paper for this class. History Department, Harvard University.

Lamott, Anne. (2005). Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life. In English 111 Reader. Miami University Department of English.

Zuckerman, Ezra W. (2008). Tips to article writers. http://web.mit.edu/ewzucker/www/Tips%20to%20article%20writers.pdf.

Slides for week 1 class

Week 2: Clarity

Williams, Joseph M. & Bizup, Joseph. (2016). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (12^th ed.). New York: Longman. Lessons One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six. It’s ok to use any earlier edition of this book.

Slides for week 2 class

Week 3: Structuring the Argument in a Paper

Graff, Gerald, & Birkenstein, Cathy. (2014). “They say, I say:” The moves that matter in academic writing (3^rd ed.). New York: Norton. You can use any earlier edition of this book.

Wroe, Ann. (2011). In the beginning was the sound. Intelligent Life Magazine, Spring. http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/arts/ann-wroe/beginning-was-sound.

Slides for week 3 class

Week 4: Grace

Williams, Joseph M. & Bizup, Joseph. (2016). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (12^th ed.). New York: Longman. Lessons Seven, Eight, and Nine.

Orwell, George. (1946). Politics and the English Language. Horizon.

Lipton, Peter. (2007). Writing Philosophy.

Slides for week 4 class

Week 5: Stylish Academic Writing

Sword, Helen. (2012). Stylish academic writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Check out Helen Sword’s website, Writer’s Diet, which allows you to paste in a text of your own and get back an analysis of how flabby or fit it is: http://www.writersdiet.com/WT.php.

Haslett, Adam. (2011). The art of good writing. Financial Times (Jan. 22). Ft.com.

Slides for week 5 class

Week 6: Writing in the Social Sciences

Becker, Howard S. (2007). Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book, or article (2^nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. It’s fine to use any earlier edition of this book.

Slides for week 6 class

Week 7: Usage

Garner, Bryan A. (2016). Garner’s modern English usage (4^th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Selections. Any earlier edition of this book is fine to use.

Wallace, David Foster. (2001). Tense present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage. Harpers (April), 39-58.

Slides for week 7 class

Week 8: Writing with Clarity and Grace

Limerick, Patricia. (1993). Dancing with professors: The trouble with academic prose.

Scott Brauer. (2014). Writing instructor, skeptical of automated grading, pits machine vs. machine. Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28.

Pinker, Steven. (2014). Why academics stink at writing. Chronicle of Education, Sept. 26.

Labaree, David F. (2018). The Five-Paragraph Fetish. Aeon.

Slides for week 8 class

Week 9: Clarity of Form

Williams, Joseph M. & Bizup, Joseph. (2016). Style: Lessons in clarity and grace (12^th ed.). New York: Longman. Lessons Ten, Eleven, and Twelve.

Yagoda, Ben. (2011). The elements of clunk. Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 2). Chronicle.com.

Slides for week 9 class

Week 10: Writing with Clarity and Grace

March, James G. (1975). Education and the pursuit of optimism. Texas Tech Journal of Education, 2:1, 5-17.

Gladwell, Malcolm. (2000). The art of failure: Why some people choke and others panic. New Yorker (Aug. 21 and 28). Gladwell.com

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Slides for week 10 class

Academic writing, Course Syllabus, Writing

Links to All of My Publications and Course Materials

Posted on July 9, 2020July 1, 2020 by David Labaree

For anyone who’s interested, today I’m posting below a list of all my publications and courses, including links to these works and to full course materials. Here’s a link to a Word document with this hyperlinked material, and here’s a link to my full CV including the former.

David F. Labaree

Links to Courses, Papers, Chapters, Magazine Articles, and Books

July 1, 2020

Lee L. Jacks Professor, Emeritus

Graduate School of Education E-mail: dlabaree@stanford.edu

485 Lasuen Mall Web: https://dlabaree.people.stanford.edu/

Stanford University Twitter: @Dlabaree

Stanford, CA 94305 Blog: https://davidlabaree.com/

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT: with links to full course materials

Doctoral Proseminar in Education

Academic Writing for Clarity and Grace

History of Higher Education

History of School Reform in the U.S.

School: What Is It Good For?

BOOKS:

Labaree, David F. (2017). A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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

Labaree, David F. (2007). Education, markets, and the public good: Selected works of David F. Labaree (in series: Routledge World Library of Educationalists). London: Routledge.

Labaree, David F. (2004). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Labaree, David F. (1997). How to succeed in school without really learning: The credentials race in American education. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Labaree, David F. (1988). The making of an American high school: The credentials market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press.

EDITED BOOK:

Tröhler, Daniel, Popkewitz, Thomas, & Labaree, David F. (Eds.). (2011). Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century: Comparative visions. New York: Routledge.

MEDIA ARTICLES:

Labaree, David F. (2020). Doctoral dysfunction: Many doctoral students today are tending to fall into one of two disturbing categories: academic technician or justice warrior. Inside Higher Ed (June 18).

Labaree, David F. (2020). Two cheers for school bureaucracy. Phi Delta Kappan, 101:6 (March), 53-56.

Labaree, David F. (2020). Book review: Steven Conn. Nothing succeeds like failure: The sad history of American business schools. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. History of Education Quarterly,

Labaree, David F. (2020). Two cheers for school bureaucracy. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10:1, 123-26

Labaree, David F. (2020). Try spreading your wings. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10:1, 100-103. Response to comments on “We’re producing academic technicians and justice warriors.”

Labaree, David F. (2019). Pluck vs. luck: Meritocracy emphasises the power of the individual to overcome obstacles, but the real story is quite a different one. Aeon (December 4). https://aeon.co/essays/pluck-and-hard-work-or-luck-of-birth-two-stories-one-man

Labaree, David F. (2019). Book review: Research universities and the public good: Discovery for an uncertain future. By Jason Owen-Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. American Journal of Sociology, 125:2, 310-12.

Labaree, David F. (2019). Luck and pluck: Competing accounts of a life in the meritocracy. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 9:2, 295-302.

Labaree, David F. (2019). We’re producing academic technicians and justice warriors: A sermon on educational research, part 2. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 9:1, 123-26.

Labaree, David F. (2018). Gold among the dross. Academic research in the US is unplanned, exploitative and driven by a lust for glory. The result is the envy of the world. Aeon (December 18). https://aeon.co/essays/higher-education-in-the-us-is-driven-by-a-lust-for-glory

Labaree, David F. (2018). Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good. Phi Delta Kappan, 100:3 (November), 9-13. https://www.kappanonline.org/labaree-public-schools-private-gain-decline-american-commitment-public-good/

Labaree, David F. (2018). The exceptionalism of American higher education. Project Syndicate (May 17). https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/american-higher-education-exceptionalism-by-david-f-labaree-2018-05?linkId=51848748

Labaree, David F. (2018). The five-paragraph fetish. Aeon (February 15). https://aeon.co/essays/writing-essays-by-formula-teaches-students-how-to-not-think

Labaree, David F. (2017). Rags to riches: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Aeon (October 11). https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-us-college-went-from-pitiful-to-powerful

Labaree, David F. (2017). Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe. Op-ed in Quartz (October 7). https://qz.com/1095906/nobel-prizes-are-great-but-college-football-is-why-american-universities-dominate-the-globe/.

Labaree, David F. (2013). Why GSE? Why now? Stanford Educator (spring), 4-5.

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Targeting teachers. Dissent (summer), 9-14.

Labaree, David F. (2000). Resisting educational standards. Phi Delta Kappan, 82:1 (September), 28-33.

Labaree, David F. (1999). The chronic failure of curriculum reform. Perspective article, Lessons of a Century series, Education Week 16:36 (May 19), pp. 42-44. Reprinted in Staff of Education Week (2000), Lessons of a century: A nation’s schools come of age (pp. 148-151). Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education.

Labaree, David F. (1999). Too easy a target: The trouble with ed schools and the implications for the university. Academe, 85:1 (January-February), 34-39.

Labaree, David F. (1998). Educational consumerism: Bad for schools. Op-ed column, Detroit News, February 26, p. 15A.

Labaree, David F. (1997). Are students “consumers”? The rise of public education as a private good. Commentary article in Education Week 17:3 (September 17), pp. 48, 38.

Labaree, David F. (1994). An unlovely legacy: The disabling impact of the market on American teacher education. Phi Delta Kappan, 75:8 (April), 591-595.

Labaree, David F. (1989). The American high school has failed its missions. MSU Alumni Bulletin, 7:1 (Fall), 14-17; reprinted in MASB Journal (Michigan Association of School Boards), 50 (November), 10-12.

Labaree, David F. (1983). Schools: Some caveats on promoting. Op-ed, Philadelphia Inquirer (May 17).

REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES:

Labaree, David F. (2020). How schools came to democratize merit, formalize achievement, and naturalize privilege: The case of the United States. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10:1, 29-41.

Labaree, David F. (2017). Perils of the professionalized historian. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 7:1, 95-6.

Labaree, David F. (2016). An affair to remember: America’s brief fling with the university as a public good. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 50: 1, 20-36.

Labaree, David F. (2014). College – What is it good for? Education and Culture, 30: 1, 3-15.

Labaree, David F. (2014). Let’s measure what no one teaches: PISA, NCLB, and the shrinking aims of education. Teachers College Record, 116: 090303, 14 pages.

Labaree, David F. (2013). A system without a plan: Emergence of an American system of higher education in the twentieth century. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 3:1, 46-59.

Labaree, David F. (2012). School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44:2, 143-163.

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Do no harm. Teacher Education and Practice, 24:4, 434-439.

Labaree, David F. (2011). The lure of statistics for educational researchers. Educational Theory, 61:6, 621-631.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Consuming the public school. Educational Theory,61: 4, 381-394.

Labaree, David F. (2010). Understanding the rise of American higher education: How complexity breeds autonomy (translated into Chinese). Peking University Education Review, 8:3, 24-39.

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

Labaree, David F. (2009). Teach For America and teacher ed: Heads they win, tails we lose. Journal of Teacher Education, 61:1-2, 48-55.

Labaree, David F. (2009). Participant in moderated discussion of the film 2 Million Minutes. Comparative Education Review, 53:1, 113-137.

Labaree, David F. (2008). The winning ways of a losing strategy: Educationalizing social problems in the U.S. Educational Theory, 58:4 (November), 447-460.

Labaree, David F. (2008). The dysfunctional pursuit of relevance in educational research. Educational Researcher, 37:7 (October), 421-23.

Labaree, David F. (2006). Mutual subversion: A short history of the liberal and the professional in American higher education. History of Education Quarterly, 46:1 (Spring), 1-15.

Labaree, David F. (2006). Innovation, nostalgia, and the politics of educational change. Educational Administration Quarterly, 42:1 (February), 157-164.

Labaree, David F. (2005). Life on the margins. Journal of Teacher Education, 56:3 (May/June), 186-191).

Labaree, David F. (2005). Progressivism, schools, and schools of education: An American romance. Paedagogica Historica, 41:1&2 (February), 275-288.

Labaree, David F. (2003). The peculiar problems of preparing and becoming educational researchers. Educational Researcher, 32:4 (May), 13-22.

Labaree, David F. (2000). On the nature of teaching and teacher education: Difficult practices that look easy. Journal of Teacher Education, 51:3 (May), 68-73.

Labaree, David F. (1998). Educational researchers: Living with a lesser form of knowledge. Educational Researcher, 27:8 (November), 4-12. Reprinted in Day, C. et al. (Eds.), The life and work of teachers: International perspectives in changing times (pp. 55-75). London: Falmer Press.

Labaree, David F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34:1 (Spring), 39-81.

Labaree, David F. (1996). The trouble with ed schools. Educational Foundations, 10:3 (Summer), 27-45.

Labaree, David F., & Pallas, A. M. (1996). Dire straits: The narrow vision of the Holmes Group. Rejoinder: The Holmes Group’s Mystifying Response. Educational Researcher, 25:5 (June/July), 25-28, 31-32, 47.

Labaree, David F. (1995). A disabling vision: Rhetoric and reality in Tomorrow’s Schools of Education. Teachers College Record, 97:2 (Winter), 166-205.

Labaree, David F. (1992). Power, knowledge, and the rationalization of teaching: A genealogy of the movement to professionalize teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 62:2 (Summer), 123-154.

Labaree, David F. (1992). Doing good, doing science: The Holmes Group reports and the rhetorics of educational reform. Teachers College Record, 93:4 (Summer), 628-640.

Labaree, David F. (1991). Does the subject matter? Dewey, democracy, and the history of curriculum. History of Education Quarterly, 31:4 (Winter), 513-521.

Labaree, David F. (1990). A kinder and gentler report: Turning Points and the Carnegie tradition. Journal of Education Policy 5:3, 249-264.

Labaree, David F. (1990). From comprehensive high school to community college: Politics, markets, and the evolution of educational opportunity. In Corwin, R. G. (Ed.), Research on Sociology of Education and Socialization, 9, 203-240. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.

Labaree, David F. (1987). Politics, markets and the compromised curriculum. Harvard Educational Review 57:4 (November), 483-494.

Labaree, David F. (1986). Parens patriae: The private roots of public policy toward children. History of Education Quarterly, 26:1 (Spring), 111-116.

Labaree, David F. (1986). Curriculum, credentials, and the middle class: A case study of a nineteenth century high school. Sociology of Education, 59:1 (January), 42-57.

Labaree, David F. (1984). Academic excellence in an early U.S. high school. Social Problems, 31:5 (June), 558-567.

Labaree, David F. (1984). Setting the standard: Alternative policies for student promotion. Harvard Educational Review, 54:1 (February), 67-87.

BOOK CHAPTERS:

Labaree, David F. (2017). Futures of the field of education. In Geoff Whitty & John Furlong (Eds.), Knowledge and the study of education: An international exploration (pp. 277-283). Oxford, UK: Symposium Books.

Labaree, David F. (2016). Learning to love the bomb: The Cold War brings the best of times to American higher education. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Discourses of change and changes in discourse (pp. 101-117). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2014). Schooling in the United States: Historical analyses. In D.C. Phillips (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational theory and philosophy (pp. 740-43). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Labaree, David F. (2013). Balancing access and advantage in the history of American schooling. In Rolf Becker, Patrick Bühler, & Thomas Bühler (Eds.), Bildungsungleichheit und Gerechtigkeit: Wissenschaftliche und Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen (pp. 101-114). Bern: Haupt Verlag.

Labaree, David F. (2013). Targeting teachers. In Michael B. Katz & Mike Rose (Eds.), Public education under siege (pp. 30-39). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Labaree, David F. (2013). The power of the parochial in shaping the American system of higher education. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: The importance and effects of institutional spaces (pp. 31-46). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2011). When is school an answer to what social problems? Lessons from the early American republic. In Daniel Tröhler & Ragnhild Barbu (Eds.), Educational systems in historical, cultural and sociological perspectives (pp. 77-90). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Adventures in scholarship. In Wayne Urban (Ed.), Leaders in the historical study of American education (pp. 193-204). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Labaree, David F. (2011). Citizens and consumers: Changing visions of virtue and opportunity in U.S. education, 1841-1954. In Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Popkewitz, and David F. Labaree (Eds.), Schooling and the making of citizens in the long nineteenth century (pp. 168-183). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Labaree, David F. (2011). The lure of statistics for educational researchers. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Ethics and esthetics of statistics (pp. 13-25). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2010). How Dewey lost: The victory of David Snedden and social efficiency in the reform of American education. In Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Schlag, and Fritz Osterwalder (Eds.), Pragmatism and modernities (pp. 163-188). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Labaree, David F. (2009). Educational formalism and the language of goals in American education, educational reform, and educational history. In Paul Smeyers & Marc Depaepe (Eds.), Educational research: Proofs, arguments, and other reasonings (pp. 41-60). Dordrecht: Springer.

Labaree, David F. (2008). Limits on the impact of educational reform: The case of progressivism and U.S. schools, 1900-1950. In Claudia Crotti & Fritz Osterwalder (Eds.), Das Jahrhundert der Schulreformen: Internationale und nationale Perspektiven, 1900-1950 (pp. 105-133). Berne: Haupt.

Labaree, David F. (2008). An uneasy relationship: The history of teacher education in the university. In Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, Feiman Nemser, Sharon, & McIntyre, D. John (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education: Enduring issues in changing contexts, 3^rd ed. (pp. 290-306). Washington, DC: Association of Teacher Educators.

Labaree, David F. (2006). Progressisme, écoles, et education school: Une romance américaine. In Hofstetter, Rita & Schneuwly, Bernard (Eds.), Passion, fusion, tension: New education and educational sciences (pp. 305-324). Bern: Peter Lang. (Translation of 2005 paper in Paedagogica Historica.)

Labaree, David F. (2004). The ed school’s romance with progressivism. In Ravitch, Diane (Ed.), Brookings papers on education policy, 2004 (pp. 89-129). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Labaree, David F. (2000). No exit: Public education as an inescapably public good. In Cuban, L., & Shipps, D. (Eds.), Reconstructing the common good in education: Coping with intractable American dilemmas (pp. 110-129). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Translated into Japanese and published in Hidenori Fujita (Ed.), (2000), Education, Knowledge, Power (pp. 110-138). Translated into Italian and published in Punti Critici, 7 (November), 115-143.

Gitlin, A., & Labaree, David F. (1996). Historical notes on the barriers to the professionalization of American teachers: The influence of markets and patriarchy. In Hargreaves, A., & Goodson, I. (Eds.), Teachers’ Professional Lives (pp. 88-108).

Philadelphia: Falmer Press.

Labaree, David F. (1995). Why do schools cooperate with reformers? The case of the teacher professionalization movement. In Petrie, H. G. (Ed.), Professionalization, Partnership and Power: Building Professional Development Schools (pp. 93-109). Albany: SUNY Press.

Labaree, David F. (1995). The lowly status of teacher education in the U.S.: The impact of markets and the implications for reform. In Shimihara, N. K., & Holowinsky, I. Z. (Eds.), Teacher Education in Industrialized Nations: Issues in Changing Social Contexts (pp. 41-85). New York: Garland Publishing.

Labaree, David F. (1989). Career ladders and the early public high school teacher: A study of inequality and opportunity. In Warren, D. (Ed.), American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work (pp. 157-189). New York: Macmillan.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS:

Labaree, David F. (2003). The future of schools of education. The Navigator, 3:1 (fall), p. 7. Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.

Labaree, David F. (2003). Comment on paper by John Bishop. In Ravitch, Diane (Ed.), Brookings Papers on Education Policy, 2003 (pp. 204-208). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Labaree, David F. (1995). Foreword. In Brown, D. K., Degrees of control: A sociology of educational expansion and occupational credentialism (pp. ix-xvi). New York: Teachers College Press.

MONOGRAPHS:

Labaree, David F. (1983). Setting the Standard: The Characteristics and Consequences of Alternative Student Promotional Policies. Philadelphia: Citizens Committee on Public Education in Philadelphia.

Labaree, David F. (1983). The people’s college: A sociological analysis of Philadelphia’s Central High School, 1838-1939. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

Course Syllabus, Schooling, Theory

Course: School — What Is It Good For?

Posted on March 2, 2020February 24, 2020 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

Twitter: @Dlabaree

How to read efficiently: skimming

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 18^th century to the very center of American life in the 21^st, 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

*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:

What’s the point? This is the analysis issue: what is the author’s angle?
Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Course Syllabus, Education policy, Educational Research, Proseminar Class, Scholarship, Theory

Doctoral Proseminar: An Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education

Posted on January 20, 2020February 7, 2020 by David Labaree

This post contains all of the material for the doctoral proseminar — Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education — that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last four years.

The aim of this class is to give first-year doctoral students in education a grounding in some of the big issues surrounding the social role and social practice of schooling, with special emphasis on teaching and learning in classrooms and on school organization. Each of you will soon be specializing in a particular component of the educational domain, but it will be helpful to you to be able to locate your own special area to broader themes and literatures in the field. A lot of the readings in the class are nodal pieces in the network of educational citations; these are works you need to become familiar with. This class should help you answer crucial questions about your own work. What is your study a case of? What larger issues does it resonate with? What does it contribute to the larger discourse about school and society?

I’m posting the full syllabus below. But it would be more useful to get it as a Word document through this link. Feel free to share it with anyone you like.

All of the course materials are embedded in the syllabus through hyperlinks to a Google drive. For each week, the syllabus includes a link to tips for approaching the readings, links to the PDFs of the readings, and a link to the slides for that week’s class. Slides also include links to additional sources. So the syllabus is all that is needed to gain access to the full class.

I hope you find this useful.

Doctoral Proseminar

An Introduction to Big Issues in the Field of Education

David Labaree

Twitter: @Dlabaree

Labaree, David F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34:1 (Spring), 39-81.

Course Description

Readings

All of the readings for this class are available as PDFs on the web. This includes the full text of the two books assigned for the course, Hirschman and Scott.

Course Outline

1) Introduction: The Historical Roots and Competing Goals of the U.S. School System

Tips for week 1 readings

Labaree, David F. (2010). Founding the American school system. In Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling (pp. 42-79). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Class slides for week 1

2) The Problems of Teaching as a Practice

Tips for week 2 readings

Cohen, David K. (1988), Teaching practice: Plus que ça change. In Phillip W. Jackson (ed.), Contributing to Educational change (pp. 27-84). Berkeley: McCutchan.

Tyack, David & Tobin, William. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal 31: 3 (Autumn), 453-479.

Class slides for week 2

3) The Classroom, the Teacher-Student Relationship, and Tracking

Tips for week 3 readings

Jackson, Philip. (1990). The daily grind. Life in classrooms (pp. 33-50). New York: Teachers College Press.

Waller, Willard. (1932/1965). The teacher-pupil relationship. In The sociology of teaching (pp. 189-211). New York: Wiley.

Oakes, Jeannie. (1986). Keeping track, part 1: The policy and practice of curriculum inequality. Phi Delta Kappan, 68, 12-17.

Fine, Michelle. (1986). Why urban adolescents drop into and out of public high school. The Teachers College Record, 87(3), 393-409.

Class slides for week 3

4) The Organization of the School

Tips for week 4 readings

Katz, Michael. (1971). Alternative proposals for American education: The nineteenth century. In Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (pp. 3-55). New York: Praeger.

Weick, Karl. (1976). Educational organizations as loosely-coupled systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, 1-19.

Class slides for week 4

5) Expectations and the Roots of the Stability of the School as an Organization

Tips for week 5 readings

Parsons, Talcott. (1959). The school as a social system: Some of its functions in American society. In Social structure and personality (pp. 129-154). New York: Free Press.

Class slides for week 5

6) Class, Race, and Culture in the School

Tips for week 6 readings

Bernstein, Basil. (1977). Social class, language and socialization. In Jerome Karabel & A. H. Halsey (eds.), Power and ideology in education (pp. 473-486). New York: Oxford University Press.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International journal of qualitative studies in education, 11(1), 7-24.

Delpit, Lisa. (1995). The silenced dialogue. In Other people’s children (pp. 21-47). New York: New Press.

Recommended: The Problem We All Live With, Parts 1 and 2. (2015). This American Life Podcast. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with.

Class slides for week 6

7) Cultural Difference and the School Curriculum

Tips for week 7 readings

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986). The forms of capital. In John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). New York: Greenwood.

McWhorter, John. (2018). There’s nothing wrong with Black English. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/who-gets-to-use-black-english/566867/?utm_source=twb.

Anyon, Jean. (1981). Social class and school knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 11, 3-42.

Class slides for week 7

8) Schools as Political and Market Entities

Tips for week 8 readings

Hirschman, Albert O. (2006). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Chubb, John E. & Moe, Terry M. (1988). Politics, markets, and the organization of schools. American Political Science Review, 82:4 (December), 1065-1087.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903). The souls of black folk. New York: Knopf. http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/203/the-souls-of-black-folk/4457/chapter-13-of-the-coming-of-john/

Class slides for week 8

9) The Problem of School Reform – Imposing a Rationalized Vision on the Ecology of the Classroom; Schooling and the Meritocracy

Tips for week 9 readings

Scott, James. (1999). Seeing like a state. New Haven: Yale University Press. Introduction, chapters 1-2 and 9-10.

McClay, William M. (2016). A distant elite: How meritocracy went wrong. The Hedgehog Review 18:2 (Summer). http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Summer_McClay.php

Class slides for week 9

10) The Role of Researchers in Educational Policy and the Prospects for New Researchers in the University

Tips for week 10 readings

Cohen, David K. & Garet, Michael S. (1975). Reforming educational policy with applied social research. Harvard Educational Review, 45, 17-43.

Weber, Max. (1919/1958). Science as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (pp. 129-156). New York: Oxford University Press.

March, James G. (1975). Education and the pursuit of optimism. Texas Tech Journal of Education, 2:1, 5-17.

Labaree, David F. (2012). Sermon on educational research. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 2:1, 78-87.

Class slides 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:

What’s the point? This is the analysis issue: what is the author’s angle?
Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
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 longer papers, but most of the same concerns apply to short papers as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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., (Kliebard, 1986, 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.

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.

Course Syllabus, Higher Education, History of education, History of Higher Education Class

Course on the History of Higher Education in the U.S.

Posted on October 14, 2019February 7, 2020 by David Labaree

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of Higher Education in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are a college teacher, feel free to use any of it in whole or part. If you are a student or a group of students, you can work your way through the class on your own at your own pace. Any benefits that accrue are purely intrinsic, since no one will get college credits. But that also means you’re free to pursue the parts of the class that you want and you don’t have any requirements or papers. How great is that.

I’m posting the full syllabus below. But it would be more useful to get it as a Word document through this link. Feel free to share it with anyone you like.

All of the course materials except three required books are embedded in the syllabus through hyperlinks to a Google drive. For each week, the syllabus includes a link to tips for approaching the readings, links to the PDFs of the readings, and a link to the slides for that week’s class. Slides also include links to additional sources. So the syllabus is all that is needed to gain access to the full class.

I hope you find this useful.

History of Higher Education in the U.S.

A 10-Week Class

David Labaree

Twitter: @Dlabaree

Starr, Paul. (1984). Transformation of the medical school. In Social transformation of American medicine (pp. 112-127). New York: Basic.

Course Description

Readings

Books: We will be reading the following books:

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Labaree, David F. (2017). A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Karabel, Jerome. (2005). The chosen: The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Supplementary Resources: There is a terrific online archive of primary and secondary readings on higher education, which is a supplement to The History of Higher Education, 3^rd ed., published by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE): http://www.pearsoncustom.com/mi/msu_ashe/.

Course Outline

Below are the topics we will cover, week by week, with the readings for each week.

Week 1

Introduction to course

Tips for week 1 readings

Labaree, David F. (2015). A system without a plan: Elements of the American model of higher education. Chapter 1 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Labaree, David F. (2015). Balancing access and advantage. Chapter 5 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Class slides for week 1

Week 2

Overview of the Early History of Higher Education in the U.S.

Tips for week 2 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (introductory essay and chapters 1-3).

Labaree, David F. (2015). Unpromising roots: The ragtag college system in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 2

Week 3

Roots of the Growth of the University in the Late 19^th and Early 20^th Century

Thursday 4/19

Tips for week 3 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapters 4-5).

Labaree, David F. (1995). Foreword (to book by Brown, David K. (1995). Degrees of control: A sociology of educational expansion and occupational credentialism. New York: Teachers College Press).

Class slides for week 3

Week 4

Educating and Not Educating the Other: Blacks, Women, and Jews

Tips for week 4 readings

Class slides for week 4

Week 5

History of Professional Education

Tips for week 5 readings

Labaree, David F. (2015). Mutual subversion: The liberal and the professional. Chapter 4 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Class slides for week 5

Week 6

Emergence of Mass Higher Education

Tips for week 6 readings

Levine, Donald O. (1986). The American college and the culture of aspiration, 1915-1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Read introduction and chapters 3, 4, and 8.

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapter 6).

Class slides for week 6

Week 7

The Huge Surge of Higher Education Expansion after World War II

Tips for week 7 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapter 7).

Lowen, Rebecca S. (1997). Creating the cold war university: The transformation of Stanford. Berkeley: University of California Press. Introduction and Chapters 5 and 6.

Class slides for week 7

Week 8

Populist, Practical, and Elite: The Diversity and Evolved Institutional Character of the Full-Service American University

Tips for week 8 readings

Thelin, John R. (2011). A history of American higher education, 2^nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (chapter 8).

Dunham, Edgar Alden. (1969). Colleges of the forgotten Americans: A profile of state colleges and universities. New York: McGraw Hill (introduction, chapters 1-2).

Lohmann, Suzanne. (2006). The public research university as a complex adaptive system. Unpublished paper, University of California, Los Angeles.

Labaree, David F. (2015). Private advantage, public impact. Chapter 6 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 8

Week 9

The Struggle by Elite Universities to Stay on Top

Tips for week 9 readings

Class slides for week 9

Week 10

Conclusions about the American System of Higher Education

Tips for week 10 readings

Labaree, David F. (2015). Upstairs, downstairs: Relations between the tiers of the system. Chapter 8 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education,

Labaree, David F. (2015). A perfect mess. Chapter 9 in A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education.

Class slides for week 10

Guidelines for Critical Reading

What’s the point? This is the analysis/interpretation issue: what is the author’s angle?
What’s new? This is the value-added issue: What does the author contribute that we don’t already know?
Who says? This is the validity issue: On what (data, literature) are the claims based?
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?

Guidelines for Analytical Writing

In writing papers for this (or any) course, keep in mind the following points. They apply in particular to the longer papers, but most of the same concerns apply to critical reaction papers as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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., (Kliebard, 1986, 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.

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.

Course Syllabus, Writing, Writing Class

Academic Writing Class — Complete Course Materials in One Document

Posted on July 1, 2019February 7, 2020 by David Labaree

Earlier I posted course materials for my academic writing class (both 6-week and 10-week versions via a link to a Google drive that contained the syllabus and class slides.

Here I’m posting a more compact and convenient version of each class. The syllabus for each class contains embedded links to both the readings for the class each week and the slides for that week. So all you need is the syllabus. This also makes it easier to share with other people: send the syllabus and they’ll have everything they need.

Feel free to forward to anyone you like.

Syllabus for 6 week class

Syllabus for 10 week class

Course Syllabus, History of School Reform Class

Course on History of School Reform in the U.S.

Posted on June 24, 2019February 7, 2020 by David Labaree

This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of School Reform in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are a college teacher, feel free to use any of it in whole or part. If you are a student or a group of students, you can work your way through the class on your own at your own pace. Any benefits that accrue are purely intrinsic, since no one will get college credits. But that also means you’re free to pursue the parts of the class that you want and you don’t have any requirements or papers. How great is that.

I’m posting the full syllabus below. But it would be more useful to download it as a Word document through this link. Feel free to share this with anyone you like.

All of the course materials are embedded in the syllabus through hyperlinks to a Google drive. For each week, this includes a link to tips for approaching the readings, links to the PDFs of the readings, and a link to the slides for that week’s class. Slides also include links to additional sources. So the syllabus is all that is needed to gain access to the full class.

I hope you find this useful.

History of School Reform in the US

A Ten-Week Class

David Labaree

Twitter: @Dlabaree