How to Succeed in School without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education

How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education, by David Labaree. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 328 PP. $35.00 David Labaree adds to a very large body of literature that criticizes American schooling. In How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning he describes the relationship and contradictions between social mobility (private good), social efficiency, and democratic equality (public good). His thesis is that the pursuit of credentials (grades, degrees, etc.), as private good, has come to dominate and actually hinder students from acquiring knowledge and learning skills that would make them better citizens and better contributers to the capitalist economy. Labaree follows the earlier credential theorists, Boudon (1974) Collins (1979) and Brown (1995), adding information from his historical case study of an American high school. His arguments are clear and cogent, but for readers who anticipate new solutions to education's "crisis" there may be disappointment. In the final chapter, Labaree simply states: "Social mobility, I conclude, needs to be balanced by democratic equality and social efficiency, or else we wi ll continue to reproduce an educational system that is mired in consumerism and credentialism." The formula by which such a balance is to be achieved is not provided by Labaree. To be sure, credentialist theory has much to offer in describing the state of professionalism in American schooling today, and Labaree lays out its major themes clearly and concisely in his first chapter. In his next three chapters he focuses upon "the sorting and selecting of students within schools" by examining the historical roots, consequences, and implications of that process. This is followed by an analysis of education stratification from a market perspective. "From this perspective, the processes of selection and stratification that characterize education are the result not simply of societal needs but of individual demands, as individual consumers pursue symbolic advantages that will enhance their competitive position. The logic that governs these processes is that of the market." Labaree states that "arguments most often found in the literature [ldots] draw on either human capital theory or social reproduction theory," a practice he finds to be inadequate. But this is an unnecessary simplification of a large body of literature that has much to offer as well as to reject. Though he is rightly concerned about the slight of individual agency, Labaree's market individualism takes the other extreme, which is equally insufficient as an approach aimed at describing the "root causes" of education's woes. Consistent with liberalism, Labaree accepts the contradiction between corporate and democratic values as necessary and wants to promote both. That corporate capitalism undermines both political and educational democracy is well documented (e.g., Barrow, 1990; Callahan, 1962; Hollinger, 1996; Lustig, 1982; Ophuls, 1997; Weinstein, 1968). Rather than attempting to balance the conflicting goals by putting social needs above personal desires, a better solution is to make the two identical (Benedict, 1992). But Labaree gives no credence to the possibility of a democratic economic system that meets, as Bowles and Gintis (1992) phrase it, "the demanding criteria of fostering fundamental fairness, the dignity of the human person, and enhanced social participation" (p. 3). A major contention of Labaree is "that the central problems with education in the United States are not pedagogical or organizational or social or cultural in nature but are fundamentally political." Labaree claims a tie to Weber, but does not seem to appreciate that "class, status, and party" have to be grasped as phenomena of the distribution of power (Giddens, 1982). Thus, completely absent is any discussion of the influence of corporate power on schooling in particular and society as a whole (e. …