num_pages: 304
description: 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.
language: English
title: Someone Has to Fail: the Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling
publisher: Harvard University Press