David F. Labaree – författare

Read the news about America’s colleges and universities—rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators—and it’s clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it’s always been that way. And that’s exactly why it has become the most successful and sought-after source of learning in the world. Detailing American higher education’s unusual struggle for survival in a free market that never guaranteed its place in society—a fact that seemed to doom it in its early days in the nineteenth century—he tells a lively story of the entrepreneurial spirit that drove American higher education to become the best.            And the best it is: today America’s universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world. But this was not an inevitability. Weakly funded by the state, American schools in their early years had to rely on student tuition and alumni donations in order to survive. This gave them tremendous autonomy to seek out sources of financial support and pursue unconventional opportunities to ensure their success. As Labaree shows, by striving as much as possible to meet social needs and fulfill individual ambitions, they developed a broad base of political and financial support that, grounded by large undergraduate programs, allowed for the most cutting-edge research and advanced graduate study ever conducted. As a result, American higher education eventually managed to combine a unique mix of the populist, the practical, and the elite in a single complex system.            The answers to today’s problems in higher education are not easy, but as this book shows, they shouldn’t be: no single person or institution can determine higher education’s future. It is something that faculty, administrators, and students—adapting to society’s needs—will determine together, just as they have always done.

How have the educational goals of American public high schools changed over time?  What can the experiences of one secondary school tell us about the problems they all face today?  This book provides an analytical history of the origins and development of Central High School, the first high school in Philadelphia and a model for many subsequent institutions.  Using Central as a case study, David F. Labaree argues that the American public high school can be viewed as the product of both democratic politics and capitalist markets: although it was originally intended to produce informed citizens for the new republic, the high school, with its meritocratic emphasis, instead became a vehicle for conferring status on the select group that was educated there.  The struggle between these two goals—one leading to political equality and the other reinforcing economic inequality—has characterized its history ever since, says Labaree. According to Labaree, Central was founded as a selective middle-class school with broad moral and political aims.  However, the school’s success in providing advantages for its graduates led, during the 1880s, to growing public demand for secondary education.  The resulting rapid expansion of Centrals’ enrollment and the establishment of other public high schools eventually undermined the selectivity that had made its credentials so valuable and enabled it to flourish.  This in turn spurred the school to protect its credentials by introducing tracking, with a new dual curriculum for college-bound and non college-bound students.   Labaree contends that this compromise between access and exclusivity does not work: it fails to serve the public interest because of the attenuation of the school’s democratic goals, and it fails to serve private interests because of the declining value of the credentials it bestows.  In order to achieve its original democratic goals, he argues, the public high school must abandon its longstanding links to the market.

David F. Labaree has spent the last twenty years researching, thinking and writing about some of the key and enduring issues in the history of education and education policy and politics. Here, he brings together twelve of his key writings in one place. Starting with a specially written introduction, 'Getting It Wrong', which gives an ironic overview of how the ideas in his work have evolved over time and throws light on the process of scholarly production, the chapters cover such topics as:the structure of the educational system conflicting purposes of educationthe core problems of practice in teaching and teacher education barriers to curriculum reform. An ideal resource for anyone wanting to know more about the development of schools and schooling and David Labaree's contribution to these important fields.

David F. Labaree has spent the last twenty years researching, thinking and writing about some of the key and enduring issues in the history of education and education policy and politics. Here, he brings together twelve of his key writings in one place. Starting with a specially written introduction, 'Getting It Wrong', which gives an ironic overview of how the ideas in his work have evolved over time and throws light on the process of scholarly production, the chapters cover such topics as:the structure of the educational system conflicting purposes of educationthe core problems of practice in teaching and teacher education barriers to curriculum reform. An ideal resource for anyone wanting to know more about the development of schools and schooling and David Labaree's contribution to these important fields.

This book is a comparative history that explores the social, cultural, and political formation of the modern nation through the construction of public schooling. It asks how modern school systems arose in a variety of different republics and non-republics across four continents during the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The authors begin with the republican preoccupation with civic virtue – the need to overcome self-interest in order to take up the common interest – which requires a form of education that can produce individuals who are capable of self-guided rational action for the public good. They then ask how these educational preoccupations led to the emergence of modern school systems in a disparate array of national contexts, even those that were not republican. By examining historical changes in republicanism across time and space, the authors explore central epistemologies that connect the modern individual to community and citizenship through the medium of schooling. Ideas of the individual were reformulated in the nineteenth century in reaction to new ideas about justice, social order, and progress, and the organization and pedagogy of the school turned these changes into a way to transform the self into the citizen.

What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way “this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.” Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult. At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own.Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.