How To Succeed In School Without Really Learning

How to Succeed in Schoolhouse Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education

Past David F. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1999).

When a volume finds permanent lodging in your head, it's often considering the author introduces you to new ways of understanding the earth in all its contradictions. At least that's the case for me, and David Labaree is just such an author. He contemplates circuitous bug we accept for granted as part of everyday life and then writes cogent analyses that illuminate the constituent parts of the problem.

While he has done this repeatedly, his 1999 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, stands out for me in its analytical heft. Despite the snarky title, the key thesis of the book is not so much about an individual's learning (or lack thereof) as it is near schooling's inherent contradictions. The central chapter points to the pathologies of a system that tries to adjust both collective and private purposes for schools. Simply rather than making just another simplistic "public-adept, private-bad" (or "private-good, public-bad") argument, Labaree offers a much more nuanced and intelligent view, showing, for instance, that private purposes for teaching are themselves contradictory. That is, the imperative for a school system that efficiently sorts students to match employment demands conflicts with the mobility goal where individuals (or their families) seek additional opportunities and advantages for themselves. And these collide with the equality impulse for everyone to accept a off-white milk shake regardless of their parents' or futurity employers' ambitions and needs. Every bit an case, when flush parents push for their child to be admitted to a competitive arts program created for underrepresented children, they may be looking out for their own child'southward best interests, only, in doing so, may also oversupply out more deserving kids, or atomic number 82 to an over-supply of such graduates, funded past the taxpayers.

These mutually contradictory goals, which Labaree calls social efficiency, social mobility, and democratic equality, represent conflicting constituencies with different aims for schools. Merely rather than cheer for 1 aim and denigrate others, Labaree focuses our attention on the validity of each and shows us how trying to achieve them all will ever mean schools are "declining" some stakeholders.

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CHRISTOPHER LUBIENSKI (clubiens@iu.edu; @Club_edu) is a professor of pedagogy leadership at Indiana University, Bloomington, and was previously on the board of a faith-based school in Chicago. He is a co-editor of The Rise of External Actors in Education (Policy Press, 2022).