In this essay David Labaree examines the tension between two competing visions of the purposes of education that have shaped American public schools. From one perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to preserve and promote public aims, such as keeping the faith, shoring up the republic, or promoting economic growth. From the other perspective, we have seen schooling as a way to advance the interests of individual educational consumers in the pursuit of social access and social advantage. In (...) the first half of the essay Labaree shows the evolution of the public vision over time, from an emphasis on religious aims to political ones to economic ones and, finally, to an embrace of individual opportunity. In the second half, he shows how the consumerist vision of schooling has not only come to dominate in the rhetoric of school reform but also in shaping the structure of the school system. (shrink)

American higher education rose to fame and fortune during the Cold War, when both student enrollments and funded research shot upward. Prior to World War II, the federal government showed little interest in universities and provided little support. The war spurred a large investment in defence-based scientific research in universities, and the emergence of the Cold War expanded federal investment exponentially. Unlike a hot war, the Cold War offered an extended period of federally funded research public subsidy for expanding student (...) enrollments. The result was the golden age of the American university. The good times continued for about 30 years and then began to go bad. The decline was triggered by the combination of a decline in the perceived Soviet threat and a taxpayer revolt against high public spending; both trends culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With no money and no enemy, the Cold War university fell as quickly as it arose. Instead of seeing the Cold War university as the norm, we need to think of it as the exception. What we are experiencing now in American higher education is a regression to the mean, in which, over the long haul, Americans have understood higher education to be a distinctly private good. (shrink)

Delivered as the 55th Annual John Dewey Lecture, sponsored by the John Dewey Society, at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, April 27, 2013. I want to say up front that I’m here under false pretenses. I’m not a Dewey scholar or a philosopher; I’m a sociologist doing history in the field of education. And the title of my lecture is a bit deceptive. I’m not really going to talk about what college is good (...) for. Instead, I’m going to talk about how the institution we know as the modern American university came into being. As a sociologist, I’m more interested in the structure of the institution than in its philosophical aims. It’s not that I’m opposed to these aims. .. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this essay David Labaree explores the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers dependent on statistics. He shows that educational research as a domain, with its focus on a radically soft and thoroughly applied form of knowledge and with its low academic standing, fits the pattern in which weak professions have been most likely to adopt quantification. One problem with educational researchers' seduction by the quantitative turn is that it deflects attention away from many of the most (...) important issues in the field, which are not easily reduced to standardized quanta. Another is that by adopting this rationalized, quantified, abstracted, statist, and reductionist vision of education, educational policymakers risk imposing reforms that will destroy the local practical knowledge that makes the ecology of the classroom function effectively. Quantification, Labaree suggests, may be useful for the professional interests of educational researchers, but it can be devastating for school and society. (shrink)