I appreciate the thoughtful comments that four invited scholars made to my article “Public schools for private gain.” Let me provide a few thoughts of my own in response to each.
Eric Hanushek makes an economic critique of my argument, asserting that schooling does more than provide credentials that get people jobs; it provides skills that are highly valued by employers because they make these employees more productive. He doesn’t deny that credentials may be the basis for the original hire, but he argues that over time employers keep and promote those with the best skills and then refine their future hiring in light of this process. I would agree up to a point. But this still leaves a powerful credentialing effect in place, since it’s the primary way to get hired in the first place. Employers rely on credentials for hiring decisions and hope they signal needed skills, which they don’t find out until workers have been on the job for a while. By this time, they’ve picked up the skills they need on the job that are not really taught in school anyway.
Another issue that he raises at the end is his concern about the possible policy interventions that might follow from my analysis. I share his concern, which is why I don’t recommend such policies. In an authoritarian state it is possible to restrict individual choice to keep families from pursuing their own interest through the educational choices they make on behalf of their children, but you can’t and shouldn’t do this in a liberal democracy. One thing you can do, however, is to keep from making things worse by encouraging more school choice. The public school bureaucracy is resented by upper-middle-class parents precisely because it limits their ability to pursue advantage for their own children at the expense of other people’s children.
The public school bureaucracy is resented by upper-middle-class parents precisely because it limits their ability to pursue advantage for their own children at the expense of other people’s children.
Johann Neem largely agrees with my paper. But he provides a valuable perspective by showing how important it was for the success of common schools that they were grounded in a rich informal institutional context in the mid-nineteenth century that nurtured their commonality. It’s a reminder to all of us that organizations like schools are not just organs of the state; they are public institutions whose success depends on a web of relationships and shared beliefs that are emergent qualities of community rather than policy constructs built according to government plan. (In the past two years in Washington, we have learned just how much the functioning of the federal government depends on institutional expectations, even more than law, for how officials should behave.)
James Shuls argues that Neem and I are pining for a communal basis for schools in the nineteenth century that never really existed even then. He makes a crucial point, which is that shared expectations and institutional stability are easiest to produce under conditions where the differences in the local population are minimal. One of the glories of American life in the twenty-first century — its enormous diversity or ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups — also makes it harder to develop the kind of consensus that institutions such as public schools require. Some of the early commonality arose because there was little need to compromise with people who were different. Today we don’t have that luxury. So, as this sense of cultural commonality has faded, the push coherence in public schooling becomes more dependent on legalistic rules instead. These rules are then gamed by self-interested consumers in an effort to turn schooling to their own individual benefit. Bye-bye public good.
Noliwe Rooks picks up this theme of difference and doubles down on the argument that schools never were common, arguing that race, gender, and class fractured the commonality of schools from day one. I would agree with her about race; it took 100 years after the common schools for government finally to compel racial integration. But public school classrooms from the very beginning contained both girls and boys, as David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot pointed out in their 1991 book, Learning Together. Given that this was occurring in Victorian America, where the sexes were radically segregated into separate spheres, this uncontested institutionalization of coeducation is particularly striking. They argue it emerged from the republican belief in the equality of White Americans in the civil sphere even if women couldn’t yet vote or hold office. As for class, I would argue that this was something the common school aimed at directly, trying to create a single school system for everyone in town. As they knew from history, republics can’t survive if class differences are too great, so they went to great pains to lure people of means into public schools. It was in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that class differences have come to overwhelm public schools, as we increasingly came to track students from different backgrounds toward different futures and created extended hierarchies of schooling that serve to reinforce class differences over time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David F. Labaree
David F. Labaree is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, emeritus, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in Palo Alto, Calif. He is the author, most recently, of A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education.
