Schooling – David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing

Credentialing, Meritocracy, Schooling, Theory

Karl Marx — The Fetishism of Commodities

Posted on January 18, 2021January 15, 2021 by David Labaree

This post is a classic piece by Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” It’s the last section of the first chapter in Capital, volume 1.

This analysis had a big impact on me when I first read it in grad school, and it has shaped a lot of my own work. At the heart of it is the distinction between use value and exchange value. A product — whether it be flour or a hula hoop — has use value in that it is useful to us. Flour can be turned into bread and thus feed us. Hula hoops can provide a form of entertainment. But a product can also have exchange value, in that we can sell it in the market in exchange for money. In an advanced exchange economy, nearly all products are produced for sale on the market rather than for consumption by the producer.

At one level, use value would seem to be the source of exchange value. People want to buy a product because it’s useful to them. But the size of the exchange value is not proportional to its utility but to its relative scarcity. Bread can be critically important for human survival, but it’s also readily available and thus low in price. Caviar is a nonessential form of food, but it’s very expensive because it’s scarce. Use value is a function of its usefulness; exchange value is a function of supply and demand in the market. As a result the two forms of value are potentially quite independent of each other.

Why would this distinction be important for someone like me, who studies education? Because education also exemplifies the two forms of value. It’s a use value, because what we learn in school can be very helpful to us in negotiating life in a complex society, where we need to be able read, write calculate, analyze, persuade, and understand how the world works. But it’s also an exchange value, because we can exchange educational diplomas for access to a good job and the chance to live a prosperous and healthy life.

As with other commodities, the exchange value of an educational credential is less a function of the learning acquired in school than of its scarcity in the credentials market. The more advanced the degree — and the more exclusive the institution that awards it — the fewer people have it and the more it’s worth. In a market economy in which educational credentials control access to jobs and status, the exchange value of education is king.

Under these circumstances, then, the focus of schooling becomes the acquisition of grades, credits, and degrees more than learning useful knowledge and skills. The latter may be helpful to you on the job, but the exchange value is what gets you the job in the first place. The result is that schooling can turn into an exercise in formalism, pursuing merit badges over learning, form over substance. Here’s how Marx puts it:

I love that last sentence, which continues to resonate with me. When a product like education becomes a commodity, then educational relations are no longer a matter of “the social relations between individuals” at school — teaching and learning in the classroom — “but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.”

Commodified schooling creates a situation in which there is a material relation between teacher and student and a social relationship between credentials and jobs. The teacher is there to provide you with credits toward a degree and the employer offers you a job based on your degree and not your person. Degrees thus become the central currency of the job market, and your value as a person becomes measured by the scarcity of your degree. Form and substance separate, and the educational process revolves increasingly around its form. Sounds a lot like the system of education we live with, doesn’t it?

Marx Commodities

SECTION 4

THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES

AND THE SECRET THEREOF

Karl Marx

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development.[27] And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? In what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.[29] The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.

The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,[30] let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.

Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.

For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilised races.[31] We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.

Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.

Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely,[32] value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.[33] These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.[34]

To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.

The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and not out of society?

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the commodity form. Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist.

“Value” – (i.e., exchange value) “is a property of things, riches” – (i.e., use value) “of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.”[35] “Riches” (use value) “are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable…” A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or a diamond.[36]

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, “To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”[37]

Educational goals, Inequality, Schooling, Social mobility

Guhin: How Covid Can Change What Schools Are For

Posted on September 3, 2020August 28, 2020 by David Labaree

This post is a short essay by Jeffrey Guhin published on August 27, 2020 in Hedgehog Review. In it he puts forth an argument about the purpose of schooling that resonates with some of my own work, including recent posts here such as this, this, and this. Here’s a link to the original.

How COVID Can Change What Schools Are For

What if the purpose of education has nothing to do with social mobility?

Jeffrey Guhin

As school years start up again, just about everyone agrees COVID is hurting education, except, perhaps, those with healthy financial stakes in online learning. Parents are exhausted, students are bored, and teachers and staff are overwhelmed, plus terrified of getting sick. Yet if COVID does nothing else for education, it might force all of us to spend a bit more time examining what all this educational effort is actually for.

Listen to most policymakers, and you’d probably guess the purpose of education is social mobility—lifting poor kids out of poverty and getting middle-class kids into Harvard, even if schools aren’t achieving that goal. Meanwhile, the more radical among us argue that schools are simply doing what they were always intended to do, not fix inequality but maintain it, all the while convincing both winners and losers that where they wind up is where they deserve to be.

But what if—and just go with me here for a second—the purpose of education has nothing to do with social mobility? What if we let schools off the hook for fixing social inequalities and just fixed those inequalities instead? What if we took money from the wealthy and took privileges from the entrenched and we gave these boons to those who needed them more? There are dozens of ways such changes could take shape: wealth taxes, reparations for black and indigenous Americans, stronger unions, and universal child care, to name just a few.

As things are, a focus on social mobility pits students, families, and schools against each other for ever-diminishing resources, making it easy to forget that education could just as easily be about community as it is about competition. Whether it’s school choice and vouchers or simply ensuring it’s your kids who gets the best teachers and COVID pods, schooling as the solution to social mobility helps to reinforce that education, and, well, life, are about each individual getting ahead. And that cynicism boils down to the experience of learning itself.

When we’re obsessed with schools as the primary solution to social inequality, the content of learning—everything from fractions to Franz Ferdinand—becomes a means to an end. Some of that content might be useful (like learning to read or touch-type). Students might even find some of it meaningful, like the elegance of a complex math solution or the thrill of a well-crafted experiment. Yet all too often that content is treated as a checkbox to complete, with each lesson bringing students one step closer to the degree, the credential they really need.

Education becomes no longer about what students do but rather where students arrive, and so it’s no wonder young people feel alienated by all the time between beginning and end. And, because of our unwillingness to consider more dramatic solutions to inequality, these students and their families know they have no other choice. Families might believe the strangely radical idea that your value as a person is entirely separate from your achievement in school. But until we live in a society that sees inequality as a problem rather than a justification, that kind of commitment to human dignity is a pretty idea that can’t pay the bills.

Concerns about social mobility also dominate discussions about COVID and education. Marginalized students fall behind benchmarks while privileged students get further ahead, whether via pods, readily available parents, or simply the certainty they have the medical care and financial support to handle whatever COVID University sends their way. Fixing these inequalities is as necessary as ever, and they highlight the vital role schools play in the lives of our nation’s children. Schools, often quite literally, feed those who need to be fed.

Yet too often schools are tasked not simply with caring for their students but with repairing an entire social order. Schools can do so much we do not ask of them, like developing solidarity, fostering political responsibility, and ensuring a love of learning for its own sake. Yet the one thing we are most insistent they accomplish, the ensuring of “equal opportunity,” is something even the best school is simply not capable of achieving. We’re asking our schools to do the wrong things, and then blaming them, and their students, when they fail. And now we’re going to try it all again while remote learning.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The potential freedom new COVID syllabi and pedagogies provide us could give room for different ways to think about education, both while we’re in this mess and maybe even when we get back to our classrooms. In her vital work on the purpose of schools, bell hooks provides a model for such rethinking, echoing the landmark work of John Dewey, Anna J. Cooper, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

hooks helps us recognize that what we learn must be connected to how we live, centered within the relationships students forge with their teachers and with each other. Learning should always be meaningful—capable, at any moment, of bringing us to moral and political transformations. It is through this context of a safe and trusting community that students can learn about injustice and privilege, about problems they can see in their own stories or recognize as their own responsibilities. Ironically, educating for justice becomes much easier when education is no longer considered the only means of building a just society.

As we get ready for another COVID semester, the stress of combining full-time work and full-time de-facto homeschooling is matched by the sadness of smushing all the power and beauty of education into the meritocratic ideology it has come to represent. Our students, our children, are more than achieving automatons. Yet this is where our focus on schools as agents of social mobility has brought them, and us. Don’t let the crisis go to waste. Fix inequality in whatever ways we can. And then we can let education actually be about education, even if we’re still just doing it at home.

History of education, Public Good, Schooling, Welfare

Public Schooling as Social Welfare

Posted on August 24, 2020August 23, 2020 by David Labaree

This post is a follow-up to a piece I posted three weeks ago, which was Michael Katz’s 2020 essay, Public Education as Welfare. Below is my own take on this subject, which I wrote for a book that will be published in recognition of the hundredth anniversary of the Horace Mann League. The tentative title of the book is Public Education: The Cornerstone of American Democracy and the editors are David Berliner and Carl Hermanns. All of the contributions focus on the role that public schools play in American life. Here’s a link to a pdf of my piece.

Public Schooling as Social Welfare

David F. Labaree

In the mid nineteenth century, Horace Mann made a forceful case for a distinctly political vision of public schooling, as a mechanism for creating citizens for the American republic. In the twentieth century, policymakers put forth an alternative economic vision for this institution, as a mechanism for turning out productive workers to promote growth of the American economy. In this essay, I explore a third view of public schooling, which is less readily recognizable than the other two but no less important. This is a social vision, in which public schooling serves as a mechanism for promoting social welfare, by working to ameliorate the inequalities of American society.

All three of these visions construe public schooling as a public good. As a public good, its benefits flow to the entire community, including those who never attended school, by enriching the broad spectrum of political, economic, and social life. But public schooling is also a private good. As such, its benefits accrue only to its graduates, who use their diplomas to gain selective access to jobs at the expense of those who lack these credentials.

Consider the relative costs and benefits of these two types of goods. Investing in public goods is highly inclusive, in that every dollar invested goes to support the common weal. But at the same time this investment is also highly contingent, since individuals will gain the benefits even if they don’t contribute, getting a free ride on the contributions of others. The usual way around the free rider problem is to make such investment mandatory for everyone through the mechanism of taxation. By contrast, investment in private goods is self-sustaining, with no state action needed. Individuals have a strong incentive to invest because only they gain the benefit. In addition, as a private good its effects are highly exclusive, benefiting some people at the expense of others and thus tending to increase social inequality.

Like the political and economic visions of schooling, the welfare vision carries the traits of its condition as a public good. Its scope is inclusive, its impact is egalitarian, and its sustainability depends heavily on state mandate. But it lacks a key advantage shared by the other two, whose benefits clearly flow to the population as a whole. Everyone benefits by being part of a polity in which citizens are capable, law abiding, and informed. Everyone benefits by being part of an economy in which workers contribute productively to the general prosperity.

In contrast, however, it’s less obvious that everyone benefits from transferring public resources to disadvantaged citizens in order to improve their quality of life. The word welfare carries a foul odor in American politics, redolent of laziness, bad behavior, and criminality. It’s so bad that in 1980 the federal government changed the name of the Department Health, Education, and Welfare to Health and Human Services just to get rid of the stigmatized term.

So one reason that the welfare function doesn’t jump to mind when you think of schools is that we really don’t want to associate the two. Don’t besmirch schooling by calling it welfare. Michael Katz caught this feeling in the opening sentences of his 2010 essay, “Public Education as Welfare,” which serves as a reference point for my own essay: “Welfare is the most despised public institution in America. Public education is the most iconic. To associate them with each other will strike most Americans as bizarre, even offensive.” But let’s give it a try anyway.

My own essay arises from the time when I’m writing it – the summer of 2020 during the early phases of Covid-19 pandemic. Like everyone else in the US, I watched in amazement this spring when schools suddenly shut down across the country and students started a new regime of online learning from home. It started me thinking about what schools mean to us, what they do for us.

Often it’s only when an institution goes missing that we come to recognize its value. After the Covid shutdown, parents, children, officials, and citizens discovered just what they lost when the kids came home to stay. You could hear voices around the country and around the globe pleading, “When are schools going to open again?”

I didn’t hear people talking much about the other two public goods views of schooling. There wasn’t a groundswell of opinion complaining about the absence of citizenship formation or the falloff of human capital production. Instead, there was a growing awareness of the various social welfare functions of schooling that were now suddenly gone. Here are a few, in no particular order.

Schools are the main source of child care for working parents. When schools close, someone needs to stay home to take care of the younger children. For parents with the kind of white collar jobs that allow them to work from home, this causes a major inconvenience as they try to juggle work and child care and online schooling. But for parents who can’t phone in their work, having to stay home with the kids is a huge financial sacrifice, and it’s even bigger for single parents in this category.

Schools are a key place for children to get healthy meals. In the U.S., about 30 million students receive free or discounted lunch (and often breakfast) at school every day. It’s so common that researchers use the proportion of “students on free or reduced lunch” as a measure of the poverty rate in individual schools. When schools close, these children go hungry. In response to this problem, a number of closed school systems have continued to prepare these meals for parents to pick up and take home with them.

Schools are crucial for the health of children. In the absence of universal health care in the U.S., schools have served as a frail substitute. They require all students to have vaccinations. They provide health education. And they have school nurses who can check for student ailments and make referrals.

Schools are especially important for dealing with the mental health of young people. Teachers and school psychologists can identify mental illness and serve as prompts for getting students treatment. Special education programs identify developmental disabilities in students and devise individualized plans for treating them.

Schools serve as oases for children who are abused at home. Educators are required by law to look out for signs of mental or physical abuse and to report these cases to authorities. When schools close, these children are trapped in abusive settings at home, which gives the lie to the idea of sheltering in place. For many students, the true shelter is the school itself. In the absence of teacher referrals, agencies reported a sharp drop-off in the reports of child abuse.

Schools are domains for relative safety for students who live in dangerous neighborhoods. For many kids, who live in settings with gangs and drugs and crime, getting to and from school is the most treacherous part of the day. Once inside the walls of the school, they are relatively free of physical threats. Closing school doors to students puts them at risk.

Schools are environments that are often healthier than their own homes. Students in wealthy neighborhoods may look on schools in poor neighborhoods as relatively shabby and depressing, but for many children the buildings have a degree of heat, light, cleanliness, and safety that they can’t find at home. These schools may not have swimming pools and tennis courts, but they also don’t have rats and refuse.

Schools may be the only institutional setting for many kids in which the professional norm is to serve the best interests of the child. We know that students can be harmed by schools. All it takes is a bully or a disparaging judgment. The core of the educator’s job is to foster growth, spur interest, increase knowledge, enhance skill, and promote development. Being cut off from such an environment for a long period of time is a major loss for any student, rich or poor.

Schools are one of the few places in American life where young people undergo a shared experience. This is especially true at the elementary level, where most children in a neighborhood attend the same school and undergo a relatively homogeneous curriculum. It’s less true in high school, where the tracked curriculum provides more divergent experiences. A key component of the shared experience is that it places you face-to-face with students who may be different from you. As we have found, when you turn schooling into online learning, you tend to exacerbate social differences, because students are isolated in disparate family contexts where there is a sharp divide in internet access.

Schools are where children socialize with each other. A key reason kids want to go to school is because that’s where their friends are. It’s where they make friends they otherwise would have never meet, learn to maintain these friendships, and learn how to manage conflicts. Humans are thoroughly social animals, who need interaction with others in order to grow and thrive. So being cooped up at home leaves everyone, but especially children, without a central component of human existence.

Schools are the primary public institution for overseeing the development of young children into healthy and capable adults. Families are the core private institution engaged in this process, but schools serve as the critical intermediary between family and the larger society. They’re the way our children learn now to live and engage with other people’s children, and they’re a key way that society seeks to ameliorate social differences that might impede children’s development, serving as what Mann called the “a great equalizer of the conditions of men – the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

These are some aspects of schooling that we take for granted but don’t think about very much. For policymakers, these they may be considered side effects of the school’s academic mission, but for many (maybe most) families they are a main effect. And the various social support roles that schools play are particularly critical in a country like the United States, where the absence of a robust social welfare system means that schools stand as the primary alternative. School’s absence made the heart grow fonder for it. We all become aware of just how much schools do for us.

Systems of universal public schooling did not arise in order to promote social welfare. During the last 200 years, in countries around the world, the impetus came from the kind of political rationale that Horace Mann so eloquently put forward. Public schools emerged as part of the process of creating nation states. Their function was to turn subjects of the crown into citizens of the nation, or, as Eugen Weber put it in the title of his wonderful book, to turn Peasants into Frenchmen. Schools took localized populations with regional dialects and traditional authority relations and helped affiliate these populations with an imagined community called France or the United States. They created a common language (in case of France, it was Parisian French), a shared sense of national membership, and a shared educational experience.

This is the origin story of public schooling. But once schools became institutionalized and the state’s existence grew relatively secure, they began to accumulate other functions, both private (gaining an edge in the competition for social position) and public (promoting economic growth and supporting social welfare). In different countries these functions took different forms, and the load the state placed on schooling varied considerably. The American case, as is so often true, was extreme.

The U.S. bet the farm on the public school. It was relatively early in establishing a system of publicly funded and governed schools across the country in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But it was way ahead of European countries in its rapid upward expansion of the system. Universal enrollment moved quickly from primary school to grammar school to high school. By 1900, the average American teenager had completed eight years of schooling. This led to a massive surge in high school enrollments, which doubled every decade between 1890 and 1940. By 1951, 75 percent of 16-year olds were enrolled in high school compared to only 14 percent in the United Kingdom. In the three decades after the Second World War, the surge spilled over into colleges, with the rate of enrollment between 1950 and 1980 rising from 9 to 40 percent of the eligible population.

The US system had an indirect connection to welfare even before it started acting as a kind of social service agency. The short version of the story is this. In the second part of the nineteenth century, European countries like Disraeli’s United Kingdom and Bismarck’s Germany set up the framework for a welfare state, with pensions and other elements of a safety net for the working class. The U.S. chose not to take this route, which it largely deferred until the 1930s. Instead it put its money on schooling. The vision was to provide individuals with educational opportunities to get ahead on their own rather than to give them direct aid to improve their current quality of life. The idea was to focus on developing a promising future rather than on meeting current needs. People were supposed to educate their way out of poverty, climbing up the ladder with the help of state schooling. The fear was that provide direct relief for food, clothing, and shelter – the dreaded dole – would only stifle their incentive to get ahead. Better to stimulate the pursuit of future betterment rather to run the risk that people might get used to subsisting comfortably in the present.

By nature, schooling is a forward-looking enterprise. Its focus is on preparing students for their future roles as citizens, workers, and members of society rather than on helping them deal with their current living conditions. By setting up an educational state rather than a welfare state, the U.S. in effect chose to write off the parents, seen as a lost cause, and concentrate instead on providing opportunities to the children, seen as still salvageable.

In the twentieth century, spurred by the New Deal’s response to the Great Depression, the U.S. developed the rudiments of a welfare state, with pensions and then health care for the elderly, temporary cash support and health care for the poor, and unemployment insurance for the worker. At the same time, schools began to deal with the problems arising from poverty that students brought with them to the classroom. This was propelled by a growing understanding that hungry, sick, and abused children are not going to able to take advantage of educational opportunities in order to attain a better life in the future. Schooling alone couldn’t provide the chance for schooling to succeed. Thus the introduction of free meals, the school nurse, de facto day care, and other social-work activities in the school.

The tale of the rise of the social welfare function of the American public school, therefore, is anything but a success story. Rather, it’s a story of one failure on top of another. First is the failure to deal directly with social inequality in American life, when instead we chose to defer the intervention to the future by focusing on educating children while ignoring their parents. Second, when poverty kept interfering with the schooling process, we introduced rudimentary welfare programs into the school in order give students a better chance, while still leaving poor parents to their own devices.

As with the American welfare system in general, school welfare is not much but it’s better than nothing. Carrying on the pattern set in the nineteenth century, we are still shirking responsibility for dealing directly with poverty through the political system by opposing universal health care and a strong safety net. Instead, we continue to put our money on schooling as the answer when the real solution lies elsewhere. Until we decide to implement that solution, however, schooling is all we’ve got.

In the meantime, schools serve as the wobbly but indispensable balance wheel of American social life. Too bad it took a global pandemic to get us to realize what we lose when schools close down.

History, Schooling, Welfare

Michael Katz — Public Education as Welfare

Posted on August 3, 2020July 28, 2020 by David Labaree

In this post, I reproduce a seminal essay by Michael Katz called “Public Education as Welfare.” It was originally published in Dissent in 2010 (link to the original) and it draws on his book, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State.

I encountered this essay when I was working on a piece of my own about the role that US public schools play as social welfare agencies. My interest emerged from an op-ed about what is lost when schools close that I published a couple weeks ago and then posted here. Michael was my dissertation advisor back at Penn, and I remembered he had written about the connection between schooling and welfare. As you’ll see when I publish my essay here in a week or so, my focus is on the welfare function of schooling in companion with its other functions: building political community, promoting economic growth, and providing advantage in the competition for social position.

Katz takes a much broader approach, seeking to locate schools as a central component of the peculiar form of the American welfare state. He does a brilliant job of locating schooling in relation to the complex array of other public and private programs that constitute this rickety and fiendishly complex structure. Enjoy.

Katz Cover

Public Education as Welfare

Michael B. Katz

Welfare is the most despised public institution in America. Public education is the most iconic. To associate them with each other will strike most Americans as bizarre, even offensive. Thelin would be less surprising to nineteenth century reformers for whom crime, poverty, and ignorance formed an unholy trinity against which they struggled. Nor would it raise British eyebrows. Ignorance was one of the “five giants” to be slain by the new welfare state proposed in the famous Beveridge Report. National health insurance, the cornerstone of the British welfare state, and the 1944 Education Act, which introduced the first national system of secondary education to Britain, were passed by Parliament only two years apart. Yet, in the United States, only a few students of welfare and education have even suggested that the two might stand together.

Why this mutual neglect? And how does public education fit into the architecture of the welfare state? It is important to answer these questions. Both the welfare state and the public school system are enormous and in one way or another touch every single American. Insight into the links between the two will illuminate the mechanisms through which American governments try to accomplish their goals; and it will show how institutions whose public purpose is egalitarian in fact reproduce inequality.

The definition and boundaries of the welfare state remain contentious topics. I believe that the “term “welfare state” refers to a collection of programs designed to assure economic security to all citizens by guaranteeing the fundamental necessities of life: food, shelter, medical care, protection in childhood, and support in old age. In the United States, the term generally excludes private efforts to provide these goods. But the best way to understand a nation’s welfare state is not to apply a theoretically driven definition but, rather, to examine the mechanisms through which legislators, service providers, and employers, whether public, private, or a mix of the two, try to prevent or respond to poverty, illness, dependency, economic security, and old age.

Where does public education fit within this account? First, most concretely, for more than century schools have been used as agents of the welfare state to deliver social services, such as nutrition and health. Today, in poor neighborhoods, they often provide hot breakfasts among other services. More to the point, public school systems administer one of the nation’s largest programs of economic redistribution. Most accounts of the financing of public education stress the opposite point by highlighting inequities, “savage inequalities,” to borrow Jonathan Kool’s phrase, that shortchange city youngsters and racial minorities. These result mostly from the much higher per-pupil spending in affluent suburbs than in poor inner cities, where yields from property taxes are much lower. All this is undeniable as well as unacceptable.

But tilt the angle and look at the question from another perspective. Consider how much the average family with children pays in property taxes, the principal support for schools. Then focus on per-pupil expenditure, even in poor districts. You will find that families, including poor city families, receive benefits worth much more than they have contributed. Wealthier families, childless and empty-nest couples, and businesses subsidize families with children in school.

There is nothing new about this. The mid-nineteenth-century founders of public school systems, like Horace Mann, and their opponents understood the redistributive character of public education. To build school systems, early school promoters needed to persuade the wealthy and childless that universal, free education would their interests by reducing the incidence of crime, lowering the cost of poor relief, improving the skills and attitudes of workers, assimilating immigrants—and therefore saving them money in the long run. So successful were early school promoters that taxation for public education lost its controversial quality. With just a few exceptions, debates focused on the amount of taxes, not on their legitimacy. The exceptions occurred primarily around the founding of high schools that working-class and other voters correctly observed would serve only a small fraction of families at a time when most youngsters in their early teens were sent out to work or kept at home to help their families. For the most part, however, the redistributive quality of public education sank further from public consciousness. This is what early school promoters wanted and had worked to make happen. When they began their working the early nineteenth century, “public” usually referred to schools widely available and either free or cheap—in short, schools for the poor. School promoters worked tirelessly to break this link between public and pauper that inhibited the development of universal public education systems. So successful were they that today the linkage seems outrageous—though in cities where most of the remaining affluent families send their children to private schools, the association of public with pauper has reemerged with renewed ferocity.

As a concrete example, here is a back-of-the envelope illustration. In 2003–2004, public elementary and secondary education in the United States cost $403 billion or, on average, $8,310 per student (or, taking the median, $7,860). Most families paid nothing like the full cost of this education in taxes. Property taxes, which account for a huge share of spending on public schools, average $935 per person or, for family of four, something under $4,000, less than half the average per-pupil cost. As rough as these figures are, they do suggest that most families with school-age children receive much more from spending on public education than they contribute in taxes. (A similar point could be made about public higher education.)

Taxpayers provide this subsidy because they view public education as a crucial public good. It prevents poverty, lowers the crime rate, prepares young people for the work force, and fosters social mobility—or so the story goes. The reality, as historians of education have shown, is a good deal more complex. Public education is the mechanism through which the United States solves problems and attempts to reach goals achieved more directly or through different mechanisms in other countries. International comparisons usually brand the United States a welfare laggard because it spends less of its national income on welfare related benefits than do other advanced industrial democracies. But the comparisons leave out spending on public education, private social services, employer-provided health care and pensions, and benefits delivered through the tax code, a definitional weakness whose importance will become clearer when I describe the architecture of the welfare state.

***

Almost thirty-five years ago, in Social Control of the Welfare State, Morris Janowitz pointed out that “the most significant difference between the institutional bases of the welfare state in Great Britain and the United States was the emphasis placed on public education—especially for lower income groups—in the United States. Massive support for the expansion of public education . . . in the United States must be seen as a central component of the American notion of welfare . . .” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while other nations were introducing unemployment, old age, and health insurance, the United States was building high schools for a huge surge in enrollment. “One would have to return to the 1910s to find levels of secondary school enrollment in the United States that match those in 1950s Western Europe,” point out economists Claudia Golden and Lawrence F. Katz in The Race Between Education and Technology. European nations were about generation behind the United States in expanding secondary education; the United States was about a generation behind Europe in instituting its welfare state.

If we think of education as a component, wean see that the U.S. welfare state focuses on enhancing equality of opportunity in contrast to European welfare states, which have been more sympathetic to equality of condition. In the United States, equality always has primarily about a level playing field where individuals can compete unhindered by obstacles that crimp the full expression of their native talents; education has served as the main mechanism for leveling the field. European concepts of equality more often focus on group inequality and the collective mitigation of handicaps and risks that, in the United States, have been left for individuals to deal with on their own.

***

Public education is part of the American welfare state. But which one? Each part is rooted in a different place in American history. Think of the welfare state as a loosely constructed, largely unplanned structure erected by many different people over centuries. This rickety structure, which no sane person would have designed, consists of two main divisions, the public and private welfare states, with subdivisions within each. The divisions of the public welfare state are public assistance, social insurance, and taxation. Public assistance (called outdoor relief through most of its history) originated with the Elizabethan poor laws brought over by the colonists. It consists of means-tested benefits. Before 1996, the primary example was Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and since 1996, it has been Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)—the programs current-day Americans usually have in mind when they speak of “welfare.”

Social insurance originated in Europe in the late nineteenth century and made its way slowly to the United States. The first form of U.S. social insurance was workers’ compensation, instituted by several state governments in the early twentieth century. Social insurance benefits accrue to individuals on account of fixed criteria such as age. They are called insurance because they are allegedly based on prior contributions. The major programs—Social Security for the elderly and unemployment insurance—emerged in 1935 when Congress passed the Social Security Act. Social insurance benefits are much higher than benefits provided through public assistance, and they carry no stigma.

The third track in the public welfare state is taxation. U.S. governments, both federal and state, administer important benefits through the tax code rather than through direct grants. Thesis the most modern feature of the welfare state. The major example of a benefit aimed at poor people is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which expanded greatly during the Clinton presidency.

Within the private welfare state are two divisions: charities and social services and employee benefits. Charities and social services have along and diverse history. In the 1960s, governments started to fund an increasing number of services through private agencies. (In America, governments primarily write checks; they do not usually operate programs.) More and more dependent on public funding, private agencies increasingly became, in effect, government providers, a transformation with profound implications for their work. Employee benefits constitute the other division in the private welfare state. These date primarily from the period after the Second World War. They expanded as a result of the growth of unions, legitimated by the 1935 Wagner Act and 1949 decisions of the National Labor Relations Board, which held that employers were required to bargain over, though not required to provide, employee benefits.

Some economists object to including these benefits within the welfare state, but they are mistaken. Employee benefits represent the mechanism through which the United States has chosen to meet the health care needs of majority of its population. About 60 percent of Americans receive their health insurance through their employer, and many receive pensions as well. If unions had bargained hard for a public rather than a private welfare state, the larger American welfare state would look very different. Moreover, the federal government encourages the delivery of healthcare and pensions through private employers by allowing them to deduct the cost from taxes, and it supervises them with massive regulations, notably the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974.

The first thing to stress about this welfare state is that its divisions are not distinct. They overlap and blend in complicated ways, giving the American welfare state a mixed economy not usefully described as either public or private. At the same time, federalism constrains its options, with some benefits provided by federal government and others offered through state and local governments. Throughout the twentieth century, one great problem facing would-be welfare state builders was designing benefits to pass constitutional muster.

How does public education fit into this odd, bifurcated structure? It shares characteristics with social insurance, public assistance, and social services. At first, it appears closest to social insurance. Its benefits are universal and not means tested, which makes them similar to Social Security (although Social Security benefits received by high income individuals are taxed). But education benefits are largely in kind, as are food stamps, housing, and Medicare. (In-kind benefits are “government provision of goods and services to those in need of them” rather than of “income sufficient to meet their needs via the market.”) Nor are the benefits earned by recipients through prior payroll contributions or employment. This separates them from Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. Public education is also an enormous source of employment, second only to health care in the public welfare state.

Even more important, public education is primarily local. Great variation exists among states and, within states, among municipalities. In this regard, it differs completely from Social Security and Medicare, whose nationally-set benefits are uniform across the nation. It is more like unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and TANF (and earlier AFDC), which vary by state, but not by municipality within states. The adequacy of educational benefits, by contrast, varies with municipal wealth. Education, in fact, is the only public benefit financed largely by property taxes. This confusing mix of administrative and financial patterns provides another example of how history shapes institutions and policy.

Because of its differences from both social insurance and public assistance, public education composes a separate division within the public welfare state. But it moves in the same directions as the rest. The forces redefining the American welfare state have buffeted public schools as well as public assistance, social insurance, and private welfare.

***

Since the 1980s, the pursuit of three objectives has driven change in the giant welfare state edifice. These objectives are, first, a war on dependence in all its forms—not only the dependence of young unmarried mothers on welfare but all forms of dependence on public and private support, including the dependence of workers on paternalistic employers for secure, long-term jobs and benefits. Second is the devolution of authority—the transfer of power from the federal government to the states, from states to localities, and from the public to the private sector. Last is the application of free market models to social policy. Everywhere the market triumphed as template for a reengineered welfare state. This is not a partisan story. Broad consensus on these objectives crossed party lines. Within the reconfigured welfare state, work in the regular labor market emerged as the gold standard, the mark of first-class citizenship, carrying with it entitlement to the most generous benefits. The corollary, of course, was that failure or inability to join the regular labor force meant relegation to second-class citizenship, where benefits were mean, punitive, or just unavailable.

The war on dependence, the devolution of authority, and the application of market models also run through the history of public education in these decades. The attack on “social promotion,” emphasis on high-stakes tests, implementation of tougher high school graduation requirements, and transmutation of “accountability” into the engine of school reform: all these developments are of a piece with the war on dependence. They call for students to stand on their own with rewards distributed strictly according to personal (testable) merit. Other developments point to the practice of devolution in public education. Prime example is the turn toward site-based management—that is, the decentralization of significant administrative authority from central offices to individual schools. The most extreme example is Chicago’s 1989 school reform, which put local school councils in charge of each school, even giving them authority to hire and fire principals.

At the same time, a countervailing trend, represented by the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind legislation and the imposition of standards, limited the autonomy of teachers and schools and imposed new forms of centralization. At least, that was the intent. In fact, left to develop their own standards, many states avoided penalties mandated in No Child Left Behind by lowering the bar and making it easier for students to pass the required tests. In 2010, the nation’s governors and state school superintendents convened a panel of experts to reverse this race to the bottom. The panel recommended combining a set of national standards—initially for English and math—with local autonomy in curriculum design and teaching methods. The Obama administration endorsed the recommendations and included them in its educational reform proposals.

In this slightly schizoid blend of local autonomy and central control, trends in public education paralleled developments in the administration of public assistance: the 1996 federal “welfare reform” legislation mandated asset of outcomes but left states autonomy in reaching them. In both education and public assistance, the mechanism of reform became the centralization of acceptable outcomes and the decentralization of the means for achieving them.

***

As for the market as a template for reform, it was everywhere in education as well as the rest of the welfare state. Markets invaded schools with compulsory viewing of the advertising on Chris Whittle’s Channel One “free” television news for schools, and with the kickbacks to schools from Coke, Pepsi, and other products sold in vending machines—money schools desperately needed as their budgets for sports, arts, and culture were cut. Some school districts turned over individual schools to for-profit corporations such as Edison Schools, while advocacy of vouchers and private charter schools reflected the belief that blending competition among providers with parental choice would expose poorly performing schools and teachers and motivate others to improve.

Unlike the situation in the rest of the welfare state, educational benefits cannot be tied to employment. But they are stratified nonetheless by location, wealth, and race. The forces eroding the fiscal capacities of cities and old suburbs—withdrawal of federal aid and shrinking tax base—have had a devastating impact on public education and on children and adolescents, relegating a great many youngsters living in poor or near-poor families to second class citizenship. In the educational division of the public welfare state test results play the role taken on elsewhere by employment. They are gatekeepers to the benefits of first-class citizenship. The danger is that high-stakes tests and stiffer graduation requirements will further stratify citizenship among the young, with kids failing tests joining stay-at-home mothers and out-of-work black men as the “undeserving poor.” In this way, public education complements the rest of the welfare state as a mechanism for reproducing, as well as mitigating, inequality in America.

***

Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His conception of the architecture of the American welfare state and the forces driving change within it are elaborated in his book The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, updated edition (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Inequality, Schooling, Social Programs

What Kids Miss When They Go Without School

Posted on July 20, 2020July 17, 2020 by David Labaree

This is an op-ed I published in the New York Daily News on Friday. It’s on the things we miss about schools when they close – a reminder about the nonacademic functions of school that are closer to our hearts than its academic functions.

What Kids Miss When They Go Without School

David F. Labaree

Often it’s only when an institution goes missing that we come to recognize its value. That seemed particularly this spring, when the Covid-19 pandemic closed schools around the world. Suddenly parents, children, officials, and citizens discovered just what they lost when the kids came home to stay. You could hear voices around the globe pleading, “When are schools going to open again?”

I’m not talking about the standard account of the value of schooling – the one that routinely appears in press, policy briefs, and the voluminous publications of the OECD. In this version, schooling is all about making sure that students learn the formal curriculum (math, science, language, and social studies) at a high level of achievement in order to turn them into productive contributors to economic growth. It’s a story of academic learning in service of human capital development.

This story is familiar, but it’s not what’s creating the demand by parents and students for schools to reopen as soon as possible. I haven’t heard people on the home front speak longingly about their desire to jump back into the academic production of human capital. So today I want to explore the other things that schools do for us. Here are a few, in no particular order.

Schools are a key place for children to get healthy meals. In the U.S., about 30 million students receive free or discounted lunch (and often breakfast) at school every day. It’s so common that researchers use the proportion of “students on free or reduced lunch” as a measure of the poverty rate in individual schools. When schools close, these children go hungry. In response to this problem, a number of closed school systems are continuing to prepare these meals for parents to pick up and take home with them.

Schools are environments that are often healthier than their own homes. Students in wealthy neighborhoods may look on schools in poor neighborhoods as relatively shabby and depressing, but for many children the buildings have a degree of heat, light, cleanliness, and safety that they can’t find at home. These schools may not have swimming pools and tennis courts, but they also don’t have rats and refuse.

These are some aspects of schooling that we take for granted but don’t think about very much. For policymakers, these are side effects of the school’s academic mission, but for most families they are the main effect. And the various social support roles that schools play are particularly critical in a country like the United States, where the absence of a robust social welfare system means that schools stand as the primary alternative. School’s absence has made the heart grow fonder for it. We’ve all become aware of just how much schools do for us.

Labaree is a retired professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education whose books include “Someone Has to Fail” and “A Perfect Mess.”

Inequality, School organization, Schooling, Sociology

Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

Posted on March 23, 2020March 6, 2020 by David Labaree

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

Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics being a positive in the world of public education. U.S. schools are built within a liberal democratic system, where the liberal pursuit of self-interest is often in tension with the democratic pursuit of egalitarianism. In recent years, I argue, schools have tilted toward the liberal side, enabling privileged families to game the system to help their children get ahead. In such a system, an impersonal bureaucracy stands as a check that ensures that the democratic side of schooling, in which all children are treated equally, remains in effect.

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Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy

By David F. Labaree

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

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

Critiques of bureaucracy

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

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

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

The bureaucracy of schools

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

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

Gaming the system

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

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

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

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

The bureaucracy barrier

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHORID

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

ABSTRACT

Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But David Labaree makes a case for these characteristics being a positive in the world of public education. U.S. schools are built within a liberal democratic system, where the liberal pursuit of self-interest is often in tension with the democratic pursuit of egalitarianism. In recent years, Labaree argues, schools have tilted toward the liberal side, enabling privileged families to game the system to help their children get ahead. In such a system, an impersonal bureaucracy stands as a check that ensures that the democratic side of schooling, in which all children are treated equally, remains in effect.

Family, Meritocracy, Modernity, Schooling, Sociology, Teaching

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

Posted on March 9, 2020February 26, 2020 by David Labaree

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

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

Dreeben Cover

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

This is structural functionalism at its best:

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

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

- - Not the explicit learning that goes on in school – the subject matter, the curriculum (English, math, science, social studies)
  - Instead he looks as the social norms you learn in school

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

- - Instead he focuses on what the structure of the school setting teaches students – vs. what the structure of the family teaches children
  - The emphasis, therefore, is on the differences in social structure of the two settings
  - What can and can’t be learned in each setting?

Families and schools are parallel in several important ways

- - Socialization: they teach the young
    - Both provide the young with skills, knowledge, values, and norms
    - Both use explicit and implicit teaching
  - Selection: they set the young on a particular social trajectory in the social hierarchy
    - Both provide them with social means to attain a particular social position
    - School: via grades, credits and degrees
    - Families: via economic, social, and cultural capital

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

- - Primary relationships, which families model as the relations between parent and child and between siblings
  - Secondary relationships, which schools model as the relations between teacher and student and between students

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

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

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

Secondary Roles Primary Roles

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

Independence Group orientation

Achievement Ascription

Universalism Particularism

Specificity Diffuseness

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

Independence Group orientation

Self reliance Dependence on group

Individualism Group membership

Individual effort Collective effort

Act on your own Need/owe group support

Achievement Ascription

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

Active Passive

Earned Inherited

Meritocracy Aristocracy

Universalism Particularism

Equality within category — Personal uniqueness — my child

a 5th grade student

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

Central to fairness, justice Central to being special

Specificity Diffuseness

Narrow relations Broad relations

Extrinsic relations Intrinsic relations

Means to an end An end in itself

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

Family vs. School:

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

- - Teacher and student are both achieved roles (ascribed roles)
  - Large number of kids per adult (few)
  - No particularistic ties between teacher and students (blood ties)
  - Teachers deal with the class as a group (families as individuals based on sex and birth order)
  - Teacher and student are universalistic roles, with individuals being interchangeable in these roles (family roles are unique to that family and not interchangeable)
  - Relationship is short term, especially as you move up the grades (relations are lifelong)
  - Teachers and students are subject to objective evaluation (familie use subjective, emotional criteria)
  - Teachers and students both see their roles as means to an end (family relations are supposed to be selfless, ends in themselves)
  - Students are all the same age (in family birth order is central)

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

Children in families:

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

Age and gender are different

Children in schools:

Age is the same

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

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

Questions

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

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

But consider this complication to the story

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

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

How do these two intermingle? Why?

- - Having friends at work and school, makes life nicer – and also makes you work more efficiently
  - Getting students to like you makes you a more effective teacher
  - But the norm for a professional or occupational relationship is secondary – that’s how you define a good teacher, lawyer, worker
  - The norm for primary relations is that they are ends in themselves not means to an end
  - Family members may use each other for personal gain, but that is not considered the right way to behave

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

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

Twitter: @Dlabaree

Blog: https://davidlabaree.com/

Course Description

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

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

It explores the big questions that underlie Educational Policy.

It explores a wide range of approaches to Educational Theory.

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

At its heart, this is a story grounded in paradox. Schooling is perhaps the greatest institutional success in American history. It grew from a modest and marginal position in the 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

How to read efficiently: skimming

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

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

Class notes for week 1

Week 2: Schools Promote Citizenship

Tips for week 2 readings

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

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

Class notes for week 2

Week 3: Schools Promote Human Capital Production

Tips for week 3 readings

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

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

Class notes for week 3

Week 4: Schools Teach Core Values of Society

Tips for week 4 readings

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

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

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

Class notes for week 4

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

Tips for week 5 readings

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

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

Class notes for week 5

Week 6: Schools Promote the Positional Interests of Educational Consumers

Tips for week 6 readings

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

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

Class notes for week 6

Week 7: Schools Promote Social Mobility and Social Equality

Tips for week 7 readings

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

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

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

Class notes for week 7

Week 8: Schools Promote Disciplinary Power

Tips for week 8 readings

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

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

Class notes for week 8

Week 9: Schools Teach Core Values of a Religious Community

Tips for week 9 readings

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

Class notes for week 9

Week 10: Schools Promote Both Social Access and Social Advantage

Tips for week 10 readings

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

Class notes for week 10

Guidelines for Critical Reading

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

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.

THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES

AND THE SECRET THEREOF

Karl Marx

How COVID Can Change What Schools Are For

What if the purpose of education has nothing to do with social mobility?

Jeffrey Guhin

Public Schooling as Social Welfare

David F. Labaree

Public Education as Welfare

Michael B. Katz

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

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

This is structural functionalism at its best:

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

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

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

Instead he looks as the social norms you learn in school

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

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

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

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

Families and schools are parallel in several important ways

Socialization: they teach the young

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

Both use explicit and implicit teaching

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

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

School: via grades, credits and degrees

Families: via economic, social, and cultural capital

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

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

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

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

Secondary Roles Primary Roles

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

Independence Group orientation

Achievement Ascription

Universalism Particularism

Specificity Diffuseness

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

Independence Group orientation

Self reliance Dependence on group

Individualism Group membership

Individual effort Collective effort

Act on your own Need/owe group support

Achievement Ascription

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

Active Passive

Earned Inherited

Meritocracy Aristocracy

Universalism Particularism

Equality within category — Personal uniqueness — my child

a 5th grade student

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

Central to fairness, justice Central to being special

Specificity Diffuseness

Narrow relations Broad relations

Extrinsic relations Intrinsic relations

Means to an end An end in itself

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

Family vs. School:

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

Teacher and student are both achieved roles (ascribed roles)

Large number of kids per adult (few)

No particularistic ties between teacher and students (blood ties)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children in families:

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

Age and gender are different

Children in schools:

Age is the same

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

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