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Christopher Saldaña: Hi everyone. I'm Chris Saldaña and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. In this month's podcast, we spoke with David Labaree, professor emeritus at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. His work is focused on how American schools often function as credentialing machines rather than learning institutions.

In this month's podcast, professor Labaree helps us make sense of recent events and trends in American education through the lens of sociology and history. So almost 30 years ago now, you wrote a piece called Public Goods Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals. Your framework - you provided three competing goals: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility.

And your framework seems especially relevant today as various stakeholders advocate for different priorities in curriculum and workforce preparation. When these goals clash in education policy or in politics, how does the system typically resolve the tension?

David Labaree: Good question. It's one of the things that I realized in working on that paper.

I was teaching a course on school and society. Every teacher ed program has a school and society class. I was at Michigan State and trying to think about how do you get prospective teachers to think about this incredibly complex environment they're about to go into in a school system. It's a fiendishly complex system, radically decentralized and loosely coupled.

It's got all these characteristics that make it sort of an oddball organization. And one of the things I realized that was particularly important was to get them to understand that it's not a single unitary focused organization with a single goal. It makes a corporation look easy. Our job is to make a profit.

Everything else is secondary. In schools not the case. And so one of the reasons, the things I was realizing, and I was trying to get the students to realize, was that it's a very complex system that arose to develop a lot of different purposes that it accumulated along the way, and that as a result, it's often working against itself.

There are lots of tensions internally, and the issue I realized was that, these are not tensions you can resolve. They're built in. And for teachers, I thought it was particularly useful for them to think about this because these are tendencies that they can draw on. If they're things they don't like that are going on, they could draw on one of these goals to say, Hey, wait a minute.

We shouldn't be doing this. We, and there’s momentum behind it, it's gonna resonate because that's out there in the atmosphere. And so the idea, when you look at how school systems first developed, they basically are the institution that helped create the nation state.

They arose 200 years ago, 300 years ago, in the process of trying to turn subjects of the king into citizens of a state. Which means they have to have some things in common. They have to have a shared set of values. They have to have some sense of being part of a community. When you think about a nation as a very odd community, people don't know each other, but they all feel part of it.

It's a kind of fake community in many ways, and the school was the institution for doing that. So its original goal was very much a political one, and I call that one democratic equality, thinking about liberal democracies. But it works also in more authoritarian settings. It's a place of creating a sense of citizenship, a sense of civic responsibility, sense of shared membership.

And so that's where it came from. And then it started picking up things along the way. It was a long time coming. It was really toward the end of the 19th century that it finally became clear that schooling was also good for preparing people for work. One of the odd things about schooling, the history of schooling is that if you look at the US in the 19th century, schooling was increasing rapidly from the 1830s to the end of the century.

By the end of the century, suddenly the average school age kid had already gone through eight years of school, so the lower grades had filled up, they started pouring into high school and what he started saying was that finally, at that point, there was a rationale for education because the new corporate bureaucracies, the new state agencies needed white collar workers with verbal and mathematical and argumentative and cognitive skills, not just strong arms.

And so schooling suddenly became relevant for the workplace. Before then it wasn't. If you look at the 19th century, the school levels were going up and the skill level of the occupation force was going down. We were industrializing, and so skilled laborers were turning into manual workers on the assembly line.

Schooling was more or less irrelevant to work until the end of the century, and then that starts developing two components of the additional components. One is, this is a way people started in educational policy, thinking of schooling as a way of investing in the future economic growth of the country.

That language of investment is one that education policy people love to use. And we're not spending money on schools, we're investing in our future growth. And that's an important kind of rationale for why it is we're willing to spend all this money on schooling. We spend an enormous amount, and if it's not anymore just for political purposes, the state's already well established. We don't need schools to make that happen anymore, but we do need a well-educated workforce for the new modern economy. And at the same time individuals started realizing another goal, which is that it's good for the state to have schooling and to develop to produce human capital, but it's also very important for individuals as a way to get ahead and to get ahead, you get an education. That's been the sort of slogan that used to appear on buses and everywhere all the time. You want to get a job, get a good education. And so for the individual, this is the way to make it. It's zone of opportunity. And that's a very powerful motivating force within schools.

So you've got these three elements here. You've got one focused on a political goal of creating a citizenship. Another goal creating productive workers. And a third one is helping people get ahead. And one of the things I started realizing when I was looking at that was that two of those are our public goods and one of them is a private good vision.

The political and the human capital views are ones in which say, we wanna invest in education because that investment benefits everybody. It's a shared good, even if your kids don't go to school. Even if you don't go to school, you benefit from having other people go to school. That's a public good.

The third is very much a private good. It's a zero sum game. I get the job. You don't I wanna get more education than you have, because if I don't, then you're gonna get the job and I won't. And so that's another form of tension that builds in between “Is this all about me or is this all about us?”

Those are really not resolvable tensions really. It's there are things that are built into the system that you can't get out and you look at the tensions in the system, you can see require everybody to go. That's something you do because there's a public benefit involved.

You don't have mandatory attendance for things that are seen as not a great public interest. You have a kind of shared experience. You have the, everybody's in the same school. Everybody's in the same classroom. That's a very much coming out of the democratic equality model. But you also have things like tracking and ability groups because the workforce is highly differentiated.

And if you're thinking about schooling, that's not just making everybody a good citizen, in which case everybody gets exactly the same education. Equality is the measure, and you want a highly equalized educational system, which is what elementary education looks like for the most part. But that time you get to middle and particularly high school, you start, people start moving toward different trajectories and are they gonna be white collar or blue collar? Are they, what kind of white collar? We start having a system to start sorting people because this, the workforce is sorted and the individuals. And when you're trying to get ahead, the last thing you want to have is the same education that everybody else had.

You want a different education, I want special, a special form of education and I want the good teacher. I want the high track class. I wanna get into the best college I can because it'll get me the best job. That's a very different kind of struggle. All those elements are visible.

You can see the tensions there between the shared experience and that differentiated experience that it's all about us and it's all about me. They're all there, and the poor teacher is sitting there in the middle of the classroom time to juggle all those things and fought saying all those forces swooping into the classroom from different directions and trying to get through it. So the idea was to try to give the teachers a little bit of a sense and maybe a little bit of some methods, some forms of power that they can try to exercise to make their job more manageable.

Christopher Saldaña: You mentioned that, when you wrote the piece, your goal was really to try to help your students make sense of this very complex system. One of the aspects of the system that is so complex is the fact that we have these different levels of governance, right? We have a federal government, we have state governments, we have local school districts. I wonder what you make of some of the rhetoric around returning responsibilities to states that the current administration is using to justify some of the policy changes, given that you have established that there are constantly these three competing goals?

David Labaree: Yeah one of the complexities as you point out is that it's so widely dispersed geographically and radically decentralized. I mean there are all these school districts, I forget how many there are, something like 15,000 school districts out there. They're the ones that are really running the school. And then the states play a central role, the federal government has played a very small role over the years at K-12 education. Also, not very much in higher education. It's been very much of a local and then state enterprise. And so when the feds started getting into it, particularly through the standards movement, you started seeing more and more interventions there and through interventions to try to promote some degree of social equality and, deal with racial integration. The Feds got involved in all those ways and that's a lot of the tensions therefore are around how that's gonna play out in the long term. The Americans in general have a tendency of not liking government very much and the higher the level of the government, the more distant it seems and the more, more skeptical you tend to be about it.

So it, it fits a lot of ways into the American view of things to say it's a local thing, let's let our school board handle it, you know, maybe the state government, but keep the feds out. And I understand that. Now the problem is of course, some things you had to intervene. School segregation was an issue that we left it to the locals; it didn't turn out well. But then the question is, well, how far is that going? The idea of trying to set standards for curriculum across a whole United States turned out to be a very difficult thing and developed a lot of resistance, and I think a lot of that resistance was well justified.

Trying to homogenize a radically decentralized and compartmentalized system is probably not a healthy thing.

Christopher Saldaña: So I want to switch gears a little bit because you've long argued that credentialism lets students succeed in schools without really learning, and that someone has to fail for education to work as a sorting mechanism.

And so now we're in this world of AI that can perform academic tasks. There's great inflation across many schools and institutions of higher education, and yet we also have this phenomena of students feeling or reporting unprecedented stress. And so when you think about the ideas of credentialism and the sorting function of schools and institutions of higher education, how have you seen that evolve over time?

David Labaree: Yeah, it's every teacher knows this. The classic question that pops up is, a hand goes up, it says, yes, is this gonna be on the test? If it's not on the test, I don't care about it. It doesn't count. And so that's been it's, that's been one of the teacher challenges over the years is to try to lure people into looking at stuff just 'cause it's interesting and it might be something you find yourself engaged in, even if it's not necessarily gonna pay off right away. And so credentialism has a sense of, it debases the educational experience in many ways by basically encouraging people to try to get their, if I'm not here to learn stuff, I'm here to get grades and credits and degrees, then my incentive is to get it the cheapest and easiest way I possibly can. And that means studying strategically about what kind of things is she gonna ask on the test, study the things in bold face type in the textbook, 'cause those are the ones that are gonna be important. And that kind of strategy is difficult to deal with because it's like buying a used car. You don't wanna, nobody pays a sticker price. I don't wanna pay the sticker price for my education. I wanna get it the easy way. And AI sure makes that easy.

Wow. It's like magic. I don't have to read the book. AI will summarize it for me. I don't have to write the paper. AI will write it for me. And so you, it's like the magic sauce that makes the whole thing work from a credentialing point of view and it from the point of view of the institution, it's this shocking thing.

It's like wait a minute, we're really, we're trying to get, give people an education and people are finding they can go through school without becoming educated. Schooling and education have always been only loosely connected. Credentialing is about schooling. And we've tried to structure it in a way that if you want the credential, you really have to learn some stuff so it'll work, it'll be a useful incentive.

But if they can do it without doing any work at all, without any learning, why would they not? Because everything has told them over the years, that's why you're here. You're here to get a good job. And if you don't get good grades, how do you get a good job? That puts pressure on schools.

It's true at colleges too, giving somebody a bad grade is a problem for them. It makes life hard on the teacher. No teacher has ever had a student complain about getting an A. And so it's a nice way to get people off your back. And now with AI, I don't know. I'm really glad I'm not teaching right now.

I'm trying to figure out is this essay really written by this person or does it have all the little cues that suggest it's like some AI monster out there that likes em dashes a lot.

Christopher Saldaña: Do you think there's a possibility? I'm sure there is. I guess the better question is under what conditions might AI and the advancement of technology lead us to a world where we move away from maybe the credentialism phenomena?

David Labaree: One of the things there, things teachers can do, there was a teacher I ran into from Stanford who runs an ethics and society program, and she was, I was like, how do you handle this AI thing? She says what I do is I give them a prompt for an essay, and then I put the prompt into chatGPT, I do a bunch of little follow ups, and then I send them out the essay that GPT did and said.

Your job is to write something better than this. This is a phone it in, journeyman, moderately competent thing. Your job is to beat it. And one of the things she's found that's useful is that students can actually, in small groups sit there and look at their own paper and look at the GPT paper and say what's missing there?

That was like, it checked the boxes. It's like the perfect credentialist response. It's what do you want? I'll give it to you. But what was missing? I don't know. There are possibilities there. But it's really hard because it really feeds into credentialing in such a direct way that it's like, it's perfect. I can get my brand new car dirt cheap, and why would I wanna spend more than that? Nobody ever complains. People aren't begging their teacher to teach them algebra. They just have to get through that in order to go on. And they may discover they really like it while they're in there.

And one of the things that a good teacher could do is to lure people into learning more than they need to, actually to like the subject and to start pursuing it on your own rather than saying I'll just do what I need to get a good grade. Teachers are really good at that. It is a seduction process in many ways.

You're trying to lure them against their best interest into actually spending some time here and looking around and expanding your mind instead of just checking off your checklist for getting into a good college.

Christopher Saldaña: When you think about the sorting function of schools, I wanna go back to some of the recent policy changes we've seen in terms of things like the expansion of school choice or attacks on, or claiming that affirmative action or finding that affirmative action is unconstitutional.

How do those policy changes, how can we make sense of them given the historical sorting mechanism of schools?

David Labaree: Yeah, that's a lot of different things there. School choice is a really interesting phenomenon because it in many ways feeds into the credentialist vision of schooling.

One sees it as very much a function of individual benefit, not broader social benefit. And we don't spend huge amounts of money on public education at great expense to the taxpayer in order to simply feed people's individual ambitions. There is a broader sense of things that we need and that we're lacking a sense of civic virtue, as they used to say back in the in the early 19th century that we're trying to broad. Wouldn't it be nice to have some more civic virtue right now? Wow. We could really use some.

Christopher Saldaña: What a novel idea.

David Labaree: And we could have a class in Congress about civic virtue if we get a really good teacher in there and might actually lure them into thinking that would be a good idea.

But that's school choice saying, it's up to me what my child learns, not some broader social phenomenon and it encourages schools to feed what the families want rather than what society needs or what a good policy needs in order to survive in a healthy way as a liberal democracy.

That's a dangerous route to go down too far. And there's, in a healthy school system, there should always be some tension between what parents and students want and what it's all about. It's not just about pleasing the consumer here. That's what a business does that's organized around individual interests.

But if you've got a public interest here there's gonna be a tension and it's a healthy tension. And if parents call the shots. I don't know. I wrote a piece once years ago called something Like Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy. And it was about some ways the school bureaucracy, which people hate in a lot of ways, is in some ways the only institutional mechanism that keeps parents from shredding the school into a mechanism that I use for helping my kid get ahead and to hell with yours. And it's the bureaucracy, it's the one that says, no, we have a standard rule here. All students need to do this; we can't make an exception for you. The choice movement is saying everybody's an exception. I find that scary.

Christopher Saldaña: It's really interesting to think about the two alternatives, the one you mentioned at the very beginning of the episode that the school started because there was some need to have an institution that would bring a nation together that would help create cohesion or some sort of sense of society within a nation state.

And there is potentially this move that you've described where we know we could move as far away from that as choice will lead us. And with that, I want to ask you about what recommendations you might have and in particular, you've been skeptical of reforms that ignore educational fundamental contradictions and market dynamics.

So given current policy debates and obviously everything you know about that's happened in American education, what would you recommend to policymakers and groups aiming to support students and expand educational opportunity in our current moment?

David Labaree: I wouldn't, over the years I've developed a sense that I wanted to avoid taking a complex analysis of how the system works and then turn it into a five point plan for changing everything. I used to teach a course for many years at Stanford that I just loved. David Tyack and Larry Cuban taught it before me. It was called The History of School Reform in the U.S. Their book Tinkering Toward Utopia came out of that.

And my book Someone Has To Fail, came out of my version of it, but the, what it's about, it was a bunch of master students. They were former teachers coming in. They've been teaching for years. They've seen all the problems. They wanna come in and say, great, this is a chance to learn.

How do you fix it? How do you fix it? And I was sort of showing that the school reforms over the years have been more likely to do harm than good. The good news is they're not that effective. The bad news is that especially with the standards movement and high stakes tests, they seem to be getting more effective at intruding into what's actually happening in the classroom. The loose coupling of the system has tended to protect the classroom pretty well. Reforms bounce off the classroom door traditionally, and in general, I think that's probably been a pretty good thing. The nice thing about a loosely coupled system as it allows each classroom and each school to adapt to circumstances and not try to homogenize the process.

It also keeps bad ideas from spreading. On the other hand, it also keeps good ideas from spreading. So for reformers, it drives them crazy. But for somebody who's skeptical about reform, that's okay. And so I've decided there was a pattern. People write a book about schooling and they have this wonderfully rich analysis of what's going on that's very complex. And then in the last chapter, they, it suddenly, all the complexity disappears and it turns out to be really easy again, just these five points, you can do it. And so I just felt like ripping out the last chapter, and so I just don't write the last chapter myself.

I feel like there’re people that want to change schools, I wanna understand it. And what I, you get students to recognize is that the problem with school reform is that people think they have an answer, but they don't know what they're dealing with. They don't appreciate this institution that's been around a long time, serves a lot of different purposes, has a lot of different constituencies that are invested in it.

Trying to solve one piece of the problem without understanding how that's going to ricochet through the rest of the system is crazy. Loosely coupled system is capable of dealing with that. But if you make it tightly coupled, then you start getting big problems. So my argument was, before you change it, understand it, and not just understand it, but appreciate it. 200 years ago there were no public school systems and they came out of nowhere. They started taking up huge amounts of people's time and money. They now are like a third of the state budget goes into it.

We spend--I calculated this--this is embarrassing, but I calculated this the other day. I've spent a total of 27 years of my life as a student. I'm 78. That's more than a third of my life. I was a student two years of preschool, 12 years K-12, five years of graduate of college. That's eight years of graduate school.

I'd look around at the graduate students in my class. I'd say that's like the most successful institution of the history of the world that can take, it's so central to our lives. Families organize their entire lives around the school schedule. People spend most of the huge parts of their lives and the huge amounts of money and time and it, and it's doing stuff we, you need to know what stuff it's doing and you'll likely make things worse if you just start throwing something in that stirs the pot and then you're out of office and it's somebody else's problem to fix it. It's so, don't make recommendations.

Christopher Saldaña: Thank you Professor Labaree for being on this month's podcast.

As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter@nepc.colorado.edu