Schools and Societies: Third Edition 9781503601031

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schools and societies

schools and societies Third Edition

steven brint

stanford social sciences An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. First edition published by Pine Forge Press, © 1998. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brint, Steven, author. Title: Schools and societies / Steven Brint. Description: Third edition. | Stanford, California : Stanford Social Sciences, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016042259 (print) | LCCN 2016042637 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804782470 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503601031 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Educational sociology—United States. | Schools—United States—Sociological aspects. | Educational sociology—Cross-cultural studies. | Schools—Sociological aspects— Cross-cultural studies. | Comparative education. Classification: LCC LC191.4 .B75 2017 (print) | LCC LC191.4 (ebook) | DDC 306.43—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042259 Cover photographs: iStock Typeset by Newgen in 10/13.5 Minion

contents



Preface Acknowledgments

vii xi

Chapter 1

Schools as Social Institutions

Chapter 2

Schooling in the Industrialized World

32

Chapter 3

Schooling in the Developing World

71

Chapter 4

Schools and Cultural Transmission

106

Chapter 5

Schools and Socialization

150

Chapter 6

Schools and Social Selection: Opportunity

186

Chapter 7

Schools and Social Selection: Inequality

227

Chapter 8

Teaching and Learning in Comparative Perspective

270

Chapter 9

School Reform

309

Coda

The Possibilities of Schooling

344



Notes References Index

353 363 417

1

preface

The daily papers in the United States are full of stories about testing for accountability, the common core curriculum, bilingual education, vouchers, values teaching, the virtues and vices of new ways of teaching math and science, teacher qualifications, and a host of other school-related issues. The intensity of the debate about these issues suggests that Americans are preoccupied with their schools. Hovering over these debates is an abiding concern about whether children are learning the things they will need to know to succeed in an information-rich, global economy—and, more to the point, whether one’s own children will get the education they need to succeed in life. What many people do not appreciate is how often school issues are at the center of public passions in other countries as well. A government in Canada decides to lower teacher qualifications to bring more teachers into the schools and a full-fledged national crisis ensues. A political party in France calls for stricter controls on subsidies to Catholic schools and dormant, but centuries-old divisions in French society spring to life again. A report on bullying in Japanese primary schools becomes a national cause célèbre. Affirmative action in Indian universities sparks periodic outbreaks of violence. Other social institutions may be as important as schools, but often it is schooling that people around the world seem to care about. The power of schooling to excite public passions is not as surprising as it first seems. Most days of the year, hundreds of millions of parents turn over temporary custody of their children to these public houses of instruction. Parents naturally hope this will be time well spent. In particular, the hopes parents entertain for their children’s later life success are caught up in the power of schools to equip children with skills and attitudes that will help them. Collectively, too, citizens hold high expectations of schooling. Other than the legal system, perhaps no other social institution is as thoroughly implicated in collective concerns about national identity, intergroup relations, and future progress. This book is based on a new approach to understanding schools as social institutions. It moves away from the tired debates between functionalists and power theorists over whether schools serve the whole of society or primarily the interest of elites. We have today



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maintained forms of schooling that align with the interests of social classes and status groups in intergenerational reproduction, and schools have been significantly advanced by the nation-building interests of state elites. However, as these forms developed they began to serve purposes that were legitimated, at least, in societal terms. These purposes include transmitting school knowledge, socializing the young, and selecting motivated and able people to move ahead in the educational structure and, ultimately, in the occupational fields connected to it. Instead of continuing debates between one-sided theories of schools as social institutions, what we need is a book that synthesizes the strong points of these theories into an overview that generalizes accurately, where possible, and is at the same time grounded in the relevant empirical studies. The book is intended to do more than summarize the existing sociological literature on schooling. It brings that literature into a more coherent focus than has been available so far. Indeed, my ambition from the beginning was to write something more than a textbook. Stanford University Press’s interest in publishing this revised and updated third edition suggests that the scholarly community has found something of value in the book, over and above its utility as an aid to classroom instruction. I hope Schools and Societies will continue to be read by scholars and students as a synthetic book about schooling that provides a framework that can be adapted for thinking about social institutions generally. I believe the third edition represents a significant step toward this goal. The book offers a new way of thinking about some key issues in the sociology of schooling. Here are just a few examples: It classifies the systems of schooling in the industrialized world in a way that reveals how different systems influence the life chances and outlooks of the students who participate in them. It provides the first broadly comparative treatment of schooling in the developing world. It offers a new way of thinking about the divisions of class, race and ethnicity, and gender as they influence educational outcomes. And it provides the first overview of how the school reform measures proposed over the last half century have worked out in practice. Although Schools and Societies is intended to be something more than a textbook, it is, of course, also a textbook. It has been used in many universities as a primary text in sociology of education and social foundations of education courses. It is designed to be used in upper-division undergraduate classes and introductory graduate-level classes. It can be used also as a supplementary text in courses on social institutions, socialization, and social stratification. Instructors who use the book as a primary text will find that they have ample room to supplement it with readings of their own choosing, either to enrich and highlight materials covered in the book or provide alternative interpretations of school processes and outcomes discussed in the book. We are living at a time when all state institutions are under unusual stress. Trends toward the privatization of schooling are all around us, including large increases in parental support for tutoring, private elementary and secondary schooling, homeschooling, and a variety of choice programs, including charter and magnet schools. It is a good time to assess how public schooling, one of the most important state institutions, has developed historically and comparatively.



preface

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We are also living at a time when the first signs of a global culture are emerging. If we can avoid disastrous global conflicts between ideological or political-economic systems, the next generation of adults will be in closer touch with people in many countries around the world. Studies of schooling have not, by and large, caught up to the emergence of a globalized society. If we choose to broaden our scope of vision, we will see that we have a rich canvas of schooling organizations from which to gain insight about our own and other societies. I have written this book partly in the hope that it will encourage the next generation of educators, social scientists, and engaged citizens to think about schooling from a perspective more appropriate to the world that is emerging. I hope that the book also conveys the intellectual excitement of using the tools of sociology to look at schools from this global comparative perspective.

acknowledgments

Two decades ago, Wendy Griswold persuaded me to write what became the first edition of Schools and Societies. When a book reaches its third edition, even the most skeptical author knows that it has proved useful to many readers. I therefore begin these acknowledgments with thanks to Wendy and to the original publisher of the book, Steve Rutter. I thank several colleagues who read and commented on chapters of this third edition: Elizabeth Armstrong, David Baker, David Brady, William Cummings, Scott Davies, David John Frank, Eric Grodsky, Emily Hannum, Jal Mehta, and Mitchell Stevens. Their comments significantly improved the quality of the book. I thank Michael Hout and ­Florencia Torche for sharing unpublished data with me. I also thank Kevin Curwin, Karin Johnson, and Sarah Yoshikawa, the graduate research assistants who helped, as well as my long-time collaborator on education-related projects, Robert Hanneman. This book, like all of my work, shows the imprint of the members of the Huron Group, with whom I first studied the sociology of education: Paul DiMaggio, Kevin Dougherty, Jerome Karabel, David Karen, Katherine McClelland, David Swartz, and Michael Useem. I thank Jenny Gavacs and Kate Wahl of Stanford University Press for their patient handling of my busy schedule and their firm insistence that I nevertheless meet a deadline. I would not have had time to complete this third edition if I could not have depended on the support of the Undergraduate Education team at the University of California–Riverside—notably, Madina Brammer, John Briggs, Rena Burton, Richard Cardullo, Gary Coyne, Gladis Herrera-Berkowitz, Bradley Hyman, JoAnn Javier, Joey Mavity, Debbie Pence, Tracey Scholtemeyer, Leonard Taylor, Victor Zordan, and especially the indefatigable Christine Victorino. My deepest feelings of gratitude go to my family: my brothers, Armand and Michael Brint, and sisters-in-law, Fran Resendez and Sue Brint; my mother, Shirl Grayson, and stepfather, Walter Grayson; my extraordinary children, Juliana and Ben; and especially my truest friend and loving wife, Michele Renee Salzman.

schools and societies

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schools as social institutions

The words “education” and “schooling” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Education, learning about the particular ways of a group, occurs willy-nilly throughout life at home, in peer play, at religious ceremonies, at work. These informal processes of learning occur in every distinct social group. Young Ponapean Islanders in the South Pacific, for example, learn from parents or neighbors that the quietness of a man is like the fierceness of a barracuda, and they also learn how to shape bark to make a watertight canoe. American children also learn most of the things that equip them to survive in their society—from how to act if approached by a stranger to how to operate kitchen appliances—from the people around them in the course of daily life. The same is true of important parts of education in every group and every society: much of what individuals find necessary to learn for survival and acceptance is taught outside schools. As the title Schools and Societies suggests, this book is not about education. Instead, it is about schooling, which is the more organized form of education that takes place in schools, and about the consequences of this organized form of education for individuals and for societies. Although schooling is in some ways more limited than education, it has great influence on the members of society. We are on strong ground to limit our scope to the study of schooling, because so much organized social effort goes into the formal education found in schools. It is also much easier to compare what happens in schools in different countries than it is to discuss the truly inexhaustible subject of what happens in educational processes generally. A related distinction is the one between two academic disciplines: the philosophy of education and the sociology of schooling. The philosophy of education concerns itself primarily with how education ought to be organized and the ends that it ought to serve. Sociology concerns itself with what schools are actually like, with why schools are the way they are, and with the consequences of what happens in schools. In making this distinction, I do not intend to imply a criticism of philosophy. Asking good questions about what schooling ought ideally to be can make existing forms of social life more visible and clear. For example, the philosopher’s idea that liberal education



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ought to provide a way of experiencing universal themes, such as the qualities of mature judgment, provides a good vantage point for sociological investigations about how changing national interests and cultural traditions shape humanities curricula. Both modes of thought have a legitimate place in the universe of academic study, but sociology is primarily concerned with what actually exists and how it came to be.

Mark Twain’s Education on the Mississippi In Life on the Mississippi, the American writer Mark Twain provides a memorable reminiscence of his apprenticeship to a veteran Mississippi riverboat captain, a Mr. Bixby. Twain’s portrait reminds us of the difficulty of learning hard subjects and of what is gained and lost in the educational process. It also raises good sociological questions: Why are so few teachers as effective as Mr. Bixby? And why have schools displaced on-the-job apprenticeships in so many fields? Like many adventurous boys in the 1830s, young Sam Clemens (Twain’s given name) longed to pilot one of the magnificent steamboats that carried the vast assembly of humanity, from roustabouts to fine ladies, and their cargo up and down the great Mississippi. Clemens apprenticed himself to Mr. Bixby in return for $500, to be paid out of his first wages as a pilot. Twain recalls the easy confidence with which he began his ordeal of learning the river. “I supposed that all a pilot had to do was keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide” (Twain [1896] 1972: 31). This easy confidence did not last the morning. Bixby began his lessons by pointing out some landmarks on the river where the water changed depth. Presently he turned on me and said: “What’s the name of the first point above New Orleans?” I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know. “Don’t know? Well, you’re a smart one!” said Mr. Bixby. “What’s the name of the next point?” Once more I didn’t know. “Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of any point or place I told you.” I studied for a while and decided that I couldn’t. . . . “You—you— don’t know?” mimicking my drawling manner of speech. “What do you know?” “I—I—nothing, for certain.” “By the great Caesar’s ghost, I believe you! You’re the stupidest dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you being a pilot— you! Why, you don’t know enough to pilot a cow down the lane.” (Twain [1896] 1972: 48 – 49)

Thus begins the education of the young Mark Twain on the Mississippi River. Soon Clemens’s notebook “fairly bristles” with the names of towns, points, bars, islands, bends, and reaches on the river, for the only way to get to be a pilot is to “get . . . [the] entire river by heart” (Twain [1896] 1972: 48).





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When he has finally completes his apprenticeship on the river, Twain reflects on what he has gained and lost in the effort: Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. . . . All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! . . . A day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river’s face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. . . . All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. (49)

the societal importance of schooling Schooling is very highly valued by governments and their citizens. One indicator is that schooling takes up a large amount of young people’s time. If we assume that the average young person spends 6 hours in school 5 days a week and 9 months a year for at least 12 years, the total number of hours in school between the ages of 6 and 18 is almost 13,000. For the increasing number of people who complete a college degree, that figure climbs to over 17,000 hours of schooling. People who graduate from college will have spent, on average, 1 out of 6 of their waking hours in school from their 6th through their 21st year—and that does not count homework! As Figure 1.1 shows, children spend more time in school than they do watching television and playing with friends during the course of an average week. Moreover, schools are more important as socializing agents for most children, given the amount of attention school requires and the highly involving competitions and group interactions that occur there. Judging simply in terms of the amount of time they take up, schools are also substantially more important than other community socializing institutions, such as churches and recreational activities (see Figure 1.1). Even those who attend two hours of religious services every week, for example, spend only approximately one-seventh the time in their churches, synagogues, or mosques between the ages of 6 and 18 that they do in their schools. Another indicator of the importance that modern societies place on schooling is the amount of money they are willing to spend on it. Indeed, the most fundamental thing to be said about schooling in the contemporary world is that it involves substantial expenditure. Citizens devote relatively large amounts of their hard-earned money to build schools, maintain school grounds, purchase equipment and materials, and pay the salaries of teachers and staffs. In the United States, expenditures on schooling from kindergarten to college account for approximately 7 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). More than $1 trillion is spent on education each year in the United States (OECD 2014: 222). This amount is not



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16,000 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0

School and homework

Recreation and socializing

TV and other entertainment

Meals

Religious activities

Figure 1.1 Approximate total number of hours spent on various activities for an average American child from age 6 to 18 n o t e : School and homework calculated as 6 hours of school and 1 hour of homework per school day. Recreation and socializing calculated as 2.5 hours per day during the school year and 6.5 hours per day during summer vacation. Internet, television, and other entertainment calculated as 2.5 hours per day. Meals calculated as 1.5 hours per day. Religious activities calculated as 2 hours per week (churchgoers only).

nearly as high as health care’s contribution to GDP, but it is about twice as much as the construction industry’s share of the GDP and more than five times the share of either the food-products or auto industry (U.S. Department of Commerce 2016). Another good measure of a society’s commitment to schooling is the number of people working in schools. School teaching is by far the largest occupation classified as professional by the U.S. Census Bureau, numbering more than 4 million in 2014. College instructors and professors accounted for another 1.5 million, pushing the total number of teachers in the United States well past 5 million. Another 440,000 people worked in educational administration. The United States now has nearly three schoolteachers for every engineer, more than six teachers for every physician, and approximately seven teachers for every lawyer (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015b). Expenditures on schooling are similarly high throughout the developed world. As Table 1.1 indicates, in the richer industrial societies spending on education at all levels typically accounts for between 4 and 8 percent of the GDP. The United States is on the high side (along with South Korea, New Zealand, Israel, Canada, and several Scandinavian countries); Japan, Germany, Italy, and several Eastern European countries are on the low side (OECD 2014: 222). People in developing countries may place even more faith in schooling as a road to economic and social progress, but they have fewer resources to devote to it. In developing countries, expenditures on schooling typically average between 2 and 3 percent of GDP. But they sometimes reach up to one-fifth or more of the government’s total budget (Kurian 2001; World Bank 2016a). Why does virtually every country on the planet want to invest such large amounts of money in schooling? The answer is complex. Schooling was at one time limited to an





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Ta b l e 1 . 1 Educational expenditures as a percentage of GDP, selected countries, 2011 Country Denmark South Korea United States Canada a United Kingdom Sweden Mexico France Australia Spain Japan Germany Czech Republic Italy Hungaryb Turkeyb

Educational spending as a percentage of GDP 7.9 7.6 6.9 6.8 6.4 6.3 6.2 6.1 5.8 5.5 5.1 5.1 5.0 4.6 4.4 4.2

s o u r c e : OECD 2014: 230. a  Year of reference is 2010. b  Public expenditure only.

elite, no more than the top 2 or 3 percent of the population, and it was run by private academies or by church officials. In Europe, the shift to schooling for the masses began in the late 1700s, led by kings who wanted to build a stronger loyalty to the state among poorer populations, particularly those living in the hinterlands (Bendix 1968: 243–48). In the United States, the shift to mass schooling began a short time later, in the early 1800s, and was linked to both the republican virtue tradition of some of the country’s earliest political leaders and the evangelical enthusiasm for building a strong moral and cultural base for a new democracy. Of course, teaching basic literacy and numeracy were principal goals, but it would be a serious mistake to downplay the role of schools as agents of morality. In the 19th century, schools became linked to the effort of the Protestant mainstream to Americanize new immigrants. In a heterogeneous society, composed of many ethnic and religious groups, schools were the closest approximation to an American established church. They taught Protestant-entrepreneurial values—such as temperance and industriousness—that were generalized into a creed as “the American way of life” (Berthoft 1971: 438). Today, schooling is often thought to be an all-purpose panacea. More and better education is seen as the best solution to the common problems that ail most societies. Does a society have too many poor people? Does it have an epidemic of drug use? Does it have too many children who suffer at the hands of abusive parents? The first solution that many people think of is to try to change attitudes and behaviors through more and better education in public schools (see, for example, Graham 1993). Most important, schooling has become strongly associated with interests of the nationstate in the development of a productive workforce and well-disciplined citizenry. Most



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people believe that education is the route to a better life, and they have good reason to believe it. Those who obtain baccalaureate degrees earn considerably more on average than those who finish only secondary school; in the United States on average the difference amounts to more than a million dollars over the course of a lifetime (Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah 2011). The net gains remain substantial even after subtracting forgone earnings while in college and the costs of obtaining a college education. Economists who study human capital (that is, the productive skills and experience of human beings) argue that improved education contributes to not only the economic value of individuals but also a country’s overall prosperity. Some have attempted to quantify the economic value of education, arguing that an increase of one year in the average education of a population is associated with an increase of between 3 and 6 percent of total economic output (OECD 2006: 152). These kinds of calculations do not account for the technological, legal, and other institutional factors that are associated with a country’s level of economic prosperity. For this reason, the public benefit of education is more often calculated now solely in relation to state finances—that is, in relation to the higher taxes educated people pay and the lesser likelihood that they will require social services provided by the state, such as unemployment insurance. A recent report on countries in the developed world calculates that the public benefits for a man with higher education are on average 4 times as high as the public costs of education, and for a woman with higher education, 2.5 times as high (OECD 2014: 155). Schooling seems to have other benefits as well. More highly educated people are healthier. They exercise more and are more attentive to diet. They read more books and newspapers than other people and are more likely to be informed about current events. They participate more actively in the political and civic life of their communities, are more cosmopolitan and tolerant in their social attitudes, and express higher levels of trust and happiness. What is more, educated people show these attributes, even when social backgrounds and current incomes are statistically controlled to isolate the effects of education alone (James Davis 1982; Hyman and Wright 1979; Kingston et al. 2003). Cognitive ability and preexisting dispositions may lie behind some of these education effects, but it is doubtful that they explain them all (Conti, Heckman, and Urzua 2010; Heckman et al. 2014; cf. Kingston 2015). Elementary and secondary schooling is primarily an activity of the state. In the West, the state wrested control of education from churches in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is supported by taxes and provided free of charge to children. Some number of years of attendance is usually compulsory. This amount may vary from as few as 5 or 6 years in some developing countries to 10 or 11 years in most of the industrialized world. Indeed, although they were confronted by religious and ethnic opposition, nation-building states were able in the end to control the provision of primary and secondary schooling in every country but the Netherlands, where religious divisions prevailed. Today, primary and secondary schooling is primarily a publicly controlled activity in every country but the Netherlands (where financing, however, is public). The private sector is comparatively large in countries like South Korea and Japan, because of private supplemental schools that children attend after regular school.





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Ta b l e 1 . 2 Relative proportion of public spending on educational institutions by level, selected countries, 2011 percen tage of spen ding from pu bl ic sources Country

Higher education

Primary/secondary educationa

94.5 89.5 84.7 81.1 80.8 77.5 67.1 66.5 57.4 45.6 34.8 34.5 30.2 27.0 24.2

97.2 100.0 87.9 90.9 91.8 91.1 82.6 96.2 89.7 83.6 91.6 93.0 85.7 80.7 78.3

Denmark a Sweden Germany Czech Republic France Spain Mexico Italy Canada a,b Australia United States Japana United Kingdom South Korea Chile

s o u r c e : OECD 2014: 245. a  Some levels of education cross traditional boundaries between secondary and postsecondary education. b   Year of reference is 2010.

Higher education is a different matter. Here public and private alternatives very often coexist. South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia have quite high private expenditures for college- and university-level education—half or more of all spending in these countries is private. Most of this spending comes in the form of tuition fees. By contrast, low tuition fees have remained a distinctive feature of Western European countries, even during the current period of enthusiasm for market-oriented public policies. Austria, Germany, and most Scandinavian societies provide higher education almost exclusively through public institutions and public funding (OECD 2014: 230). Table 1.2 shows the proportion of public funding relative to private funding at all school levels for 15 developed countries. Given the preponderance of governmental control of schooling today and the nearly universal attendance of young people through age 14, it is remarkable to think that education in Western Europe and the United States before the late 18th century was almost entirely private or church run. It is even more remarkable that formal schooling, even in the elementary and early secondary school years, was limited to only a small upper crust instead of covering 100 percent of the age group.

thinking sociologically As befits the social expenditure devoted to it, schooling is a much-thought-about and highly organized activity. In this respect, it contrasts sharply with the haphazard character of most other kinds of education. However, the organization of schools has also been criticized for serving the needs of society (or society’s elites) to the detriment of



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individuals. Neither the level of planning nor the criticisms are surprising once we appreciate that schools are powerful institutions. They are society’s major means of shaping its young and of sorting them for future roles.

The Logic of Curriculum As educational organizations, schools have many advantages compared to the less formal processes of learning in everyday life. These advantages have to do with schools’ selectivity and sequencing of curricular materials, their efforts to maintain strong boundaries between what they do and do not allow into the classroom, and their sustained focus on learning. 1. Selectivity. Schools are highly selective about what they teach. Overt commercialism, popular fashions, popular music, street language, and racial and ethnic prejudices are among the subjects usually selected out. Language and literature, math and science, history, social studies, and a few other subjects are nearly always selected in. To some degree, communities choose what they want to allow into the relatively purified environment of the schools, but these decisions must be made through arguments focusing on intellectual merit. Sometimes these choices become part of political conflict in communities. Should sex education be taught? Should world history take a global perspective or a national perspective? Because schools emphasize intellectual merit, however, these conflicts only very rarely permit purely popular elements to infiltrate the classroom environment. 2. Boundaries. Schools make efforts to maintain strong boundaries in relation to the outside world. Teachers and administrators defend the curriculum and classroom against many undesirable features of the environment outside the school. In classrooms, for example, older children do not learn how to creatively torment younger children, although they may learn this in their families or neighborhoods (or on school playgrounds). They do not learn how to swear or give free rein to prejudice. High- and low-status identities that exist outside the school are, in principle if not always in fact, treated with indifference within its confines. It does not matter whether a student is rich or poor, Protestant or Catholic, male or female. The controlling identity is supposed to be the student identity. What happens in the academic environment of the school is all that is meant to count. 3. Focus. Everyday life is full of learning, but it is episodic. Learning occurs as a by-product of other activities, such as getting the chores done, fooling around with friends, or talking about the day. Only in schools is a focus on learning sustained and continuous. Because the focus is on learning, classrooms involve plenty of explanation, many examples to help students understand new material, and lots of repetition. The attention of the classroom may waver from learning, but it does not waver for very long in most classrooms. 4. Sequencing. The curriculum of the classroom, compared to the curriculum of everyday life, is sequenced for efficient learning. It is organized in a progressive way. Features that are fairly fundamental and accessible to the young are mastered first.





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Later lessons build on earlier learning. Building on prior knowledge makes lessons more easily comprehensible and allows teachers to monitor student progress in learning elementary tasks before more complex tasks are attempted. Through these four features of content organization, schools provide students with opportunities to escape the limitations of the social groups into which they were born. Most education that occurs outside schools simply reproduces the skills, worldviews, and customs of a particular group. In contrast, schools at their best provide a kind of magic carpet on which students can escape the confines of their particular group and make contact with a broader environment. We cannot be too idealistic about this, of course. Schools are far from perfect learning environments. Teachers and other students are cursed at regularly in some school corridors, and some schools have violence and bullying problems. But at least we can say that the great majority of schools are organized to limit and minimize these intrusions.

The Underside of Schooling Not everyone sees the basic principles of school organization in such a positive light. Among social critics, schools are often described as threatening and dispiriting places, where the young are subjected to a regimen based on equal parts academic fear and mind-numbing boredom.1 Needless to say, theirs is a picture of schooling that compares unfavorably with the free-flowing, creative, and nonthreatening character of more informal educational processes. Here is what one critic, John Holt, had to say about American schools: To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid. . . . Infants are not stupid. Children of one, two, or even three throw the whole of themselves into everything they do. They embrace life, and devour it; it is why they learn so fast, and are such good company. Listlessness, boredom, apathy—these all come later. Children come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is dead, or at least silent. Open a first grade or third grade to questions and you will be deluged; fifth graders say nothing. (1964: 157)

Schools are relatively purified and elevated environments, but they are quite clearly also hierarchical, rule-bound, strictly disciplined, relatively impersonal, and continuously graded environments. Schools are, in these respects, the first performance-based bureaucracies that most people encounter. A clear chain of command descends from school board to superintendent to principals to teachers, with students at the bottom of the chain. The rights and obligations of students, teachers, and administrators are strictly regulated by formal administrative rules and by informal rules of decorum, whose violation typically elicits sharp censure. The personal interests and needs of students, who may be considered little more than immature workers, are typically of less interest to teachers than is their success at mastering their lessons and conforming to classroom rules. Testing is a continual vexation felt in many a brow, palm, and bladder. Moreover, in most schools, relatively little about classroom life is spontaneous or charged with emotion. John Goodlad’s research group studied one thousand American classrooms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He summed up the results of his investigation as follows:



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The physical environment of most of the classrooms [was] devoid of amenities likely to provide comfort, unattractive or at least aesthetically bland, and cramped for space. They lacked decoration in the form of wall hangings, prints of good paintings, contrasting colors on walls, doors, and cupboards. . . . The picture is of increasing drabness as one moves upward through the grades. [The] relationship between teachers and classes of students was almost completely devoid of outward evidences of affect. Shared laughter, overt enthusiasm, or angry outbursts were rarely observed. . . . I wonder about the impact of the flat, neutral emotional ambience of most of the classes we studied. Boredom is a disease of epidemic proportions. (1984: 226–27, 229–30, 242)

Holt’s judgment, shared by generations of critics, was that schools are “where children learn to be stupid,” by making them fearful of their performance and bored by the ways they are expected to learn (1964: 157). However, those who are more sympathetic to the practices of the schools see the same characteristics deplored by Holt—discipline, rules, and tests—as precisely the characteristics that allow immature students to learn difficult lessons with some measure of efficiency and success. The evidence is mixed on this point, which may be why the argument has persisted for 250 years. Most students adapt relatively easily to a structured environment and do not find school particularly alienating. This is especially true for students whose home life has a consistent level of order and whose parents are supportive of the educational mission of the schools (Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson 1997; Ho and Willms 1996). Indeed, for some students, schools provide a relatively engaging and supportive refuge from the vicissitudes of an unstable home life, where fostering and nurturing behaviors are less in evidence. Moreover, both teacher morale and student learning appear to be enhanced in schools that are relatively structured. Good teacher morale, for example, is associated with high levels of confidence in the support for them provided by principals and with clear rules about teachers’ rights and responsibilities (Moeller 1964; Liu and Meyer 2005). Higher levels of student learning are associated with good order in classrooms (Coleman and Hoffer 1987; Arum et al. 2003); with the amount of time spent on task rather than in freeform or classroom management activities (Edmonds 1979); and even with the amount and difficulty of the material covered during a term, provided that the material covered is age appropriate (Dreeben and Gamoran 1986).

The Management of Motivation Even so, the management of motivation in performance-oriented bureaucracies is never an easy task, and it is particularly difficult when the people from whom performance is required are children or young adults who are surrounded by others of their own age. Children are naturally full of energy, and they have limited attention spans. Some intelligent children (as judged by the staff) receive more than their share of attention in school, placing others in their shadows. Similarly, some children are able to resist the promptings of emotion and exuberance better than their classmates and are often appreciated by teachers for their restraint. Those who do not stand out or stand out negatively are inclined to withdraw interest from the school and may encourage others to do so as well.





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Some students—a large number in some schools—are unable or unwilling to adapt to the school environment and are chronically unhappy in it. The task of stimulating and channeling motivation is naturally difficult under these circumstances. It is made more difficult because some of the most effective devices used in motivating adult workers, such as wages and salaries, are not available to school authorities. Teachers and schools consequently work in an emotional terrain studded, figuratively speaking, with land mines of potential student disengagement or even overt resistance. In their efforts to stimulate and motivate children, schools rely on organizational blueprints and strategies that go well beyond simple classroom discipline and whatever rapport may develop between teachers and students. These blueprints and strategies are foundations of the social order of the school. By social order, I mean the norms of conduct, orientation, and identity into which children are inserted and with which they must learn to comply if they want to avoid the school disciplinarian. Elements of the social order of schooling include the organization of space and time, the use of rituals to both differentiate and integrate students, the creation of status hierarchies, and the use of standardized membership categories. Some elements of this social order are not formally organized; instead, they emerge through the joint activity of teachers and students in the everyday life of the classroom. Looking with fresh eyes at these everyday features of schooling can help prepare us for thinking in a more analytical way about how schools operate as institutions. Structure: The organization of time and space. In schools, space and time are organized to both control students and provide psychologically useful intervals of separation between staff and students. The physical spaces into which children are allowed are strictly delimited, and the school day is cut up to avoid leaving students much time away from the eye of watchful authorities. Certain physical spaces, the teachers’ lounge, for example, are designated for staff alone for them to regroup and let off steam during class breaks. Certain time periods, such as recess and lunch, are designed to let children group spontaneously and release pent-up energy. Movement between activities is strictly regulated. Bells organize access to classroom space during the day. Student access to certain other school spaces, such as the principal’s office or the nurse’s office, is restricted, and students must be directed to them by their teachers. Structure: Rituals. Schools also rely on rituals for shaping and motivating students. Rituals are focused gatherings that channel group attention and involvement in a particular direction and generate collective enthusiasm for the school. Rituals fall into two categories. Differentiating rituals highlight those who best conform to school ideals. These differentiating rituals include tests, performances, and award ceremonies. The difficulty with differentiating rituals is that although they affirm the hierarchical divisions of the school and may increase motivation among some students, they may also decrease motivation among those students whose loyalty to the school is already weak. Integrating rituals, for collective identification with the school, balance differentiating rituals. Integrating rituals focus attention on emblems of the school or activities and allow the participation of large numbers of students. These integrating rituals include pep rallies and sporting events, dances and other school-sponsored social activities, academic and extramural competitions with other schools, and the celebration of school traditions



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or school heroes that builds sentimental attachments to the school (B. Bernstein 1975: chap. 2). Structure: Multiple status hierarchies. Students are integrated into the life of the school also because school authorities allow students to explore many different paths for gaining status. In general, loyalty to the school is easier to retain when many roads to status are available than when only the academic road exists. This is why schools affirm their primary purpose through tests and awards to scholars but also encourage the emergence of nonacademic hierarchies based on good looks and popularity, athletic ability, musical and dramatic talents, and participation in student government. Indeed, in the majority of American secondary schools, the most athletic and the most popular students are far more admired by their classmates than are the top scholars (Coleman 1961; Tye 1985; Milner 2004). One reason high school is often a more pleasant experience for students than middle school is that high schools generally offer more extracurricular activities and thus more routes to status. Even the nonconformist student underground sustains a kind of loyalty to the school. Membership and status in this counterculture make school at least bearable for some students, however rebellious their stance against school authorities. Many intelligent administrators consequently take the position that the student underground is a valuable part of the life of the school, even though these administrators may themselves be a frequent object of its scorn. Structure: Standardized membership categories. In general, things would go much worse if schools simply bestowed benefits on the quick-witted and motivated few while blasting the confidence of the majority. Indeed, many individual differences in performance are obscured by broad standardized membership categories, so that students with highly unequal achievements are treated more or less equally. The category of high school graduate, for example, is treated as a meaningful element of the American social structure, even though high school graduates include some people who have mastered a great deal of school knowledge and some who can barely read and write. Similar ambiguities emerge from other widely used educational categories, such as that of history course, four units of credit, and credentialed teacher. Some history courses are tough; others are easy. Some units of credit are demanding; others are not. Some formally certified teachers know how to inspire and connect; others are inept. These categories are treated as standard by schools, and precisely because they are treated as standard, they support the schooling enterprise as an institution (Meyer and Rowan 1978). If high school graduates were seriously compared to one another or if credentialed teachers were examined closely for evidence of equal competence, profound doubts about the system might very well arise. Insofar as people assume that the categories mean something, they do mean something, and the business of schooling goes along with a good level of success, churning out graduates, credit hours, majors, and teachers. (We should not push this argument too far. No doubt, if performance and school categories managed to be completely unconnected, public support of schooling would suffer.) The existence of these standardized membership categories also contributes to the ability of schools to maintain motivation. It is easier to maintain motivation when legitimacy





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is allocated in large measure by membership in a category rather than by differences in individual performance. If the category of high school graduate was available only to those who succeeded at a high proficiency level, a great many young people would drop out of school and pursue activities in which they had a better chance of feeling accepted and appreciated. Emergent elements: The community life of schools. Emergent properties of everyday interaction in school also help maintain the social order of schools. In the classrooms of the young, where children remain together throughout the day, a community life usually emerges, a village-like atmosphere that provides pleasure to those who are villagers, however temporarily. Running jokes, pleasing forms of recognition (“our little detective,” “our speedy weaver”), and even absorbing forms of half-serious conflict (“the king of the boys vs. the queen of the girls”) create an atmosphere of community. Myths and legends about previous students and teachers also abound, especially about those defined as odd or unsavory by the majority. Sometimes, stories about these characters of school folklore remain long after the original parties have left the school. These myths and legends also contribute to a moral order of the school by characterizing the boundaries between the normal and the deviant as defined by the student body. In larger schools, as children move past the primary grades and experience for the first time the continuous breakup of relationships in their hour-by-hour movement through classrooms and subject matters, this kind of community-like atmosphere fades. Recurring temporal patterns also knit together the classroom community. The energy and attention of teachers and students alike follow the rhythms of the school day, week, and year as if traveling on the current of a powerful river. Two former teachers, Ann ­Lieberman and Lynne Miller (1987), perceptively describe the American variant of these school rhythms. A daily routine exists: taking attendance, continuing from yesterday, introducing today’s material, winding down, and making assignments. Days are punctuated by interruptions, with some settling down required after each interruption. Mondays are often hard for everyone, and Fridays are hard at least for students who are already thinking of the weekend. In the annual rhythm, fall is a time of promise, with a downward spiral from the excitement of the new school year through Thanksgiving and a brief resurgence between Thanksgiving and Christmas. For many, January is brief. February is very long, and the promise of summer stirs first in March. The final weeks of the school year are filled with activities, and then the patterns learned and shared are abruptly put to an end on a Friday in June. These rhythms are elements of school organization that influence the behavior of all who are involved.

sociological theories of schooling As you might have already sensed, the underlying coherence of schools makes them an eminently suitable subject for sociology. Sociologists are trained to analyze the relationships that define the workings of organizations and institutions, the social and historical context in which these relationships develop, and the actual behavior of people



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in concrete settings as opposed to the idealized accounts that people sometimes give of their behavior.

Theories of Schooling and Society Theories of the causes and consequences of schooling were once divided between structural-functional and social power (or conflict) theories. The first emphasizes societylevel interests and the construction of an institutional order to serve those interests; the second emphasizes elite interests and the unequal distribution of resources between social classes. I argue that the choice between these two approaches is a false one. Both can help us develop a good sociological understanding of schooling, and neither has proved entirely sufficient on its own. Structural-functional theories. The structural-functional approach emphasized the capacity of institutions to reduce the randomness of human action and channel human action along specified lines (through structures) to meet socially approved ends (or functions). A student, for example, might feel like breaking out into dance on top of his desk during a lesson, but unless he is truly reckless, he will not do it, because schools channel action along other lines—ostensibly in the direction of learning course materials. They also back up their efforts to channel action with incentives (like grades) and sanctions (like detentions and suspensions). Talcott Parsons (1951), a leader of the structural-functional school, described the elementary structural characteristics of any social institution: • Institutions have responsibility for a particular socially defined collectivity. In schools, collectivities are groups of age-defined children, living in some proximity to one another and treated as students, and the staff, the teachers, who are hired to instruct them. • Personnel in an institution are organized into status-roles. “Status” refers to privileges and responsibilities within a hierarchy of authority. “Roles” refer to expected behaviors, which can be monitored and controlled by others higher up in the hierarchy. In schools, students, teachers, and administrators are the key status-roles. Each one has a defined position, privileges, and responsibilities, and each one has a set of behavioral expectations associated with its activities. Teachers, for example, inject their unique personalities into their roles, but all teachers will be expected to spend time introducing and explaining new material, writing important information on the board, correcting mistakes, asking questions related to lessons, and so on. • The practices in institutions are strongly influenced by norms, or the rules and conventions that regulate behavior. Norms can relate to what is not allowed to happen in the institution (e.g., what kinds of teasing and taunting are impermissible). Or they can relate to what is expected to occur in the institution (e.g., how much time is supposed to be spent on reading compared to math). Institutions reward action in accord with norms, and when norms are broken, sanctions come into play— ranging from expulsion at one extreme to a raised eyebrow and a frown at the other.





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• Institutions are legitimated by values, or the ultimate purposes to which the institution is committed. In the case of schools, these values include the effective transmission of school knowledge and codes of good conduct. Authorities often appeal to values to legitimate their actions, resolve conflicts, and rechannel action. Schools, like other institutions, are seen by structural-functionalists as serving important society-wide purposes. Parsons (1959) argued that schools in modern industrial societies are charged with socializing students into the culture of achievement and with aiding in the selection of students for demanding positions in the occupational structure. No society, Parsons argued, fully succeeds in removing family advantages from the process of adult status attainment, but schools contribute to achievement-based mobility by rewarding academically able, conformist students from lower-status backgrounds. Parsons and his colleagues recognized that the values and norms of the schools were not accepted by all. Some students fail to meet the schools’ performance demands and may come to reject these demands, leading to dropout and delinquency. Other students identify much more strongly with the culture of peer popularity than with the culture of school achievement, leading to tensions between the two ranking systems. For Parsons both hierarchies were important feeders into key positions in the occupational structure; socially adept adults, the winners in the popularity realm, were desirable recruits for leadership, persuasion, and performance roles, while intellectually capable adults, the winners in the academic realm, were desirable recruits for professional technical roles. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977, 1978) offered what became an influential revision of the structural-functional theory of schooling. It emphasized that institutions are rooted more in widely recognized cultural categories than in shared societal values and that they are important not because they reduce randomness and meet social purposes but rather because they provide legitimacy. For Meyer and Rowan, a school may or may not educate students effectively, but if it faithfully mirrors the organization of other schools, it will be accorded legitimacy in the eyes of the public. It can use that legitimacy to muster the resources it needs to survive. This approach leads to the surprising conclusion that schools do not need to succeed in educating students (at least not very well) to succeed in gaining legitimacy from the public and other organizations in their environments. But whether they educate well or not, they must conform to existing legitimating categories to succeed as organizations. Social power theories. Meyer and Rowan’s insights are valuable, but a weakness of their approach, shared by structural-functionalism, is that it de-emphasizes the power of elites (and later the state as an instrument of elite interests) to design institutions that reflect their own interests and ideals more closely than those of society at large (Lockwood 1956; M. Mann 1986). This weakness is the central focus of a leading alternative to structuralfunctionalism: social power (or conflict) theory. For conflict theorists, the powerful are the designers of institutions, and they are also the main beneficiaries of these designs (see, e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976). In some respects, conflict theorists have the stronger side of the argument. It is clear that the interests of the powerful have been an important influence on schooling from the



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beginning. The first formal schools began because they served the needs of religious and political leaders for scribes. The first compulsory schools in Europe served the interests of rulers in creating loyal subjects who would be willing to pay taxes and bear arms. Indeed, throughout the history of schooling, we can see the imprint of powerful groups creating and transforming schools. In the United States, the large business corporations provided the decisive models for what was believed to be the one best system of schooling, which became popular during the Progressive Era—a system based on standardized school districts, strict hierarchies of authority, age-graded classrooms, and regular testing for performance evaluation (Tyack 1974). The influence of elites continues to shape schooling in the United States. For example, a few influential academics, business leaders, and politicians worked together to institute a regimen of high-stakes testing in the United States in the 1980s. This change cannot accurately be described as reflecting the consensus of society as a whole. In fact, many students, teachers, and parents do not think high-stakes testing serves the interests of children or that it leads to the development of higher-level thinking skills. In this case, as in so many others, policy was shaped by a political coalition, not by society. Corporate leaders and other elite groups are not the only source of influence on school policies. Members of well-organized social movements have sometimes had an impact as well. In the United States, for example, the implementation of multicultural curricula can be attributed to social movement activists of the 1960s and 1970s who demanded more attention to issues of race and gender in the school curriculum. In general, however, business leaders (and their allies) are better able to organize and implement plans for change, because they have better access to the levers of state power. The social power approach also correctly emphasizes that the interests of the main actors in schools—students, teachers, and administrators—are not always in alignment. Teachers, for example, may feel that principals need to back them up in all discipline cases, while principals may worry about alienating the parents of a misbehaving student, particularly if those parents are influential in the community. Such conflicts of interest are common in schools (as in other institutions). These conflicts of interest must be taken into consideration, along with the smooth coordination and control of actors in statusroles emphasized by structural-functional theory. Although we should be wary of all views that do not offer an analysis of the social power interests served by schooling, we should be equally skeptical of the opposite position: that the interest of power elites is all that matters in the organization of schooling. Let us consider a leading social power view of schooling developed by the self-proclaimed radical economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976). Bowles and Gintis argue that schools serve the interests of business elites by creating a docile labor force, used to taking orders from authorities, and by legitimating a highly unequal distribution of wealth and income. For Bowles and Gintis, the widely accepted idea that schools are based on equality of opportunity and earned rewards provides a powerful legitimating ideology that masks the perpetuation of a system that is decisively skewed in favor of the privileged. Few will dispute that schools in many communities fail to deliver on their promises to provide real channels of upward mobility for disadvantaged students. But are schools





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really decisively shaped in the most important ways by business elites? Well before the era of capitalism, schools fostered a degree of docility from students, and they have always supported the authority of teachers. How could they not, when students are admitted to learn and teachers are paid to teach? Schools have also attempted to foster qualities other than docility—including passionate engagement with learning and independent thinking. These efforts, which have always met with mixed success, precede capitalism by more than a millennium. It is true that schools have, throughout their history, helped reproduce the advantages of the privileged few. This is far from unique to schooling in capitalist societies. Indeed, schooling before the age of capitalism was far more unequally distributed than it is today. The ancient Greek academies, so admired today for their probing discussions of philosophy and life, were designed to train the sons of the aristocracy to rule by developing their strength of mind and their rhetorical skills. Schools today are in many respects less authoritarian and more egalitarian than those of the precapitalist era. Moreover, they do not sort primarily for business occupations. Instead, they seem designed mainly to search for talent for the intellectual and professional occupations. This is clear from both the subjects taught in primary and secondary schools (history, literature, science, math) and those that are usually not taught (business management, accounting, the history of entrepreneurship). A Weberian alternative. A somewhat more complex view than that provided by Bowles and Gintis is therefore required. More persuasive theories of schooling emphasize the multiple interests that human beings have pursued through schooling. One particularly instructive theory of schooling is that of Randall Collins (1977). Collins argues that schools have been devised to serve three distinct human interests: (1) allow students to acquire practical skills that yield advantages in occupational guilds and labor markets, (2) affirm membership in a status group through transmission of esoteric knowledge, and (3) allow students to acquire credentials that provide access to offices in large organizations (and thereby to limit eligibility for these positions to holders of the required credentials). In Collins’s theory, the main action shifts away from the shaping of schools by society or wealthy elites to the pursuit of (or demand for) different types of formal education by individuals who are attached to the various strata and classes in society. Collins explicitly links his conception of the interests served by schooling to the German sociologist Max Weber’s (1946c) famous triad of power resources: market power, cultural power, and political power. One of the appealing features of Collins’s theory is that different types of schooling are shown to have distinctive qualities related to the interests they serve. Practical-skills schools typically offer stripped-down curricula oriented to the efficient transmission of occupational skills with few frills attached. Competence is demonstrated by performance rather than by passing long sequences of courses. Flight schools provide a good example today; as soon as a person can clearly demonstrate that he or she knows how to fly, the work of the school is done. Schooling for status-group membership, by contrast, is always impractical in the sense that it focuses on subjects that have little direct value in the labor market. In ancient China, these subjects were calligraphy, literature, and poetry; in ancient Greece, philosophy and mathematics; in 18th-century England, classical languages



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and literature. These curricula develop cultivated persons who can be recognized by other members of a status group as one of their own. The emphasis is on refinement and esoteric knowledge, whether religious or secular. Finally, Collins shows that schooling for access to bureaucratic positions is highly legalistic and based on a strict accountancy of course units, course sequences, and degree requirements. Exams play an important role in allocating people to tiers in the system. Unlike practical-skills schooling, competence is demonstrated through persistence and series of formal evaluations. This type of schooling leads to the production of occupational specialists who can be expected to demonstrate loyalty to their organizational superiors. By examining multiple forms of schooling and the social interests behind them, Collins points us in the right direction, but his is not the last word on schooling as a social institution. First, it is important to understand that the relative autonomy of institutions—their efforts to seal themselves off from their environments—is at least as great as the influence from their environments. Institutions never simply serve powerful interests. They develop processes and interests of their own (in the case of schools, the nurturing of academic talent is one), which they very often pursue at some distance from the interests of the most powerful groups in society. (Think of how many children of successful alumni have been denied admission to selective colleges and universities because they lack a sufficient level of demonstrated academic ability.) In addition, interests originally left out of the construction of the institution may effectively demand influence in the institution once it is well established. Processes of accommodation to conflicting interests and (limited) democratization are particularly common in the case of public schools. Think of the shift from Eurocentric to multicultural curricula in American schools in the late 20th century or the more recent opposition of some suburban and inner-city parents to common core standards. It is very difficult for taxpayer-supported, locally controlled institutions to serve only the interests of the groups that were decisive in their founding. Collins’s analysis is also overly demand driven. The consumers of education have all the power in his theory. The interests of the suppliers of schooling are barely discussed; Collins seems to assume that a response will always be forthcoming to demand for different types of schooling. As we have seen, however, elite groups do not simply respond to demand. They have typically been the primary designers of schools. Church and sec­ ular leaders supplied early schools to train political leaders, scribes, and theologians, and they did so in ways that reproduced their group’s culture and extended its influence. The compulsory and publicly funded character of primary and secondary schooling in the modern era means that the state has had a great impact on the amount and type of schooling students receive (Fuller and Rubinson 1992). Since the late 19th century, states have sought to raise the educational level of their populations and to produce a disciplined and technically competent workforce while appealing to democratic sentiments of the populace and preserving some spheres of schooling for the training of elites. A final limitation is that Collins’s theory shows a tilt toward middle- and upper-class people, who are able to use schooling to advance their interests. Unfortunately, compulsory public schooling is implicated in the reproduction of inequality as much as in status





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affirmation and the production of mobility opportunities. For this reason, it is important to focus on students who fall by the wayside, as well as those who stay the course. In this book, I retain an interest in the themes of structural-functionalism; I investigate schools’ persistent structures, their means of channeling action, and their larger social purposes (overt and hidden). At the same time, I incorporate themes from the social power tradition, including the Weberian variant of that tradition represented by Randall Collins, when analyzing such fundamental issues as (1) the interests in society that give rise to schools, (2) the beneficiaries of schooling, (3) the sources of conflict within schools, (4) the sources of failure to realize institutional values, and (5) the sources of change in school structures and practices. I do not take the view that conflicts over schooling are invariably dominated in the long run by a particular class or interest group. Instead, most conflicts involve coalitions of groups jockeying for position and policy influence. In K–12 schooling, conflicts are ultimately adjudicated by the state, either through executive powers of regulation, through legislation, or by the courts. The resolution of conflicts sets the institutional preconditions for subsequent rounds of conflict and accommodation. For example, if the Supreme Court had allowed prayer in U.S. public schools, the stage would have been set for further instantiations of religious belief in the curriculum and practices of schools. But it did not allow prayer, and consequently those who desire a stronger role for religion have little foundation for pursuing an argument.

Advantages of a Comparative Perspective Now that we have the beginnings of a theoretical perspective, we can think about how best to study the institutions of schooling. Sociological arguments and theories are built in large part on comparison. If we want to know whether the United States is particularly schooling conscious, for example, we need to compare indicators of schooling consciousness, such as per capita spending on schools, for the United States and other countries. If we want to know whether the kind of training teachers have makes a difference in how well they teach, we need to compare otherwise similar teachers who have graduated from different kinds of training programs. If we want to know whether class size makes a difference in learning, we need to compare how much is learned, on average, in small and large classrooms. This book is comparative in a broader way than most. Sociology is at its best when it has a truly global focus. From a scientific point of view, the most important reason for taking a global view of schooling is that it allows us to compare more varied data. It is hard to understand the forces playing on schools if we limit our experience to a country in which only a certain number of these forces are at work. For example, let us say a social scientist hypothesizes that countries with centralized national ministries for schooling have more equality because budgets and instructional materials tend to be standardized across the entire country. This question obviously could not be answered by looking at the United States alone, because American schooling operates within a system of decentralized state and local control. The answer to this question would require a broader canvas of comparison.



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Even those who are not scientifically inclined can learn from the experiences of other cultures. The value of global comparisons is not just that the practices of other peoples are intrinsically interesting, although they are intrinsically interesting. Nor do practical interests alone encourage us to look beyond our own shores, even though the world is, in some ways, growing more interconnected with every passing year. The truth is, even if we are interested only in our own society, we cannot always know much about it without thinking about the experiences of others. What seems to be a unique problem in the United States may, in fact, represent an example of a more general phenomenon. For example, many Americans think of the race problems in the United States as a uniquely American dilemma. However, comparative study suggests that African Americans in the United States may have comparable experiences to those of other highly subordinated minorities, such as the Oriental Jews in Israel, the Burakamin in Japan, or North Africans in France (Ogbu 1978). Accepting this conceptual shift raises the further interesting issue of whether any other society has done a better job than the United States in integrating highly subordinate minorities through schooling and, if so, how other societies have done it. Conversely, what many people believe to be an established fact—say, the relationship between small classes and higher achievement scores—may turn out to be less general than we imagine. In many East Asian countries, classes of 40 or more are not uncommon, and class size appears to have little relation to achievement (White 1987). This fact raises the further interesting question of what goes into creating an atmosphere in which 40 children can concentrate effectively together. By looking at the experience of other peoples, we can also test possibilities that we have contemplated for ourselves. Americans love to think about ways to improve their schools, but the ideas that are proposed often have only the charm of novelty without a supporting practical wisdom. Given the reforms that have been proposed in recent years, we should be able to profit from considering the experiences of societies that, like England, have instituted market-based voucher systems, or like Germany, have maintained work-related apprenticeship programs for teenagers. To appreciate what it might mean to make standardized testing a still more important part of the school experience, we could look at East Asian societies, where achievement is high but adolescents are exposed en masse to the searing ritual of “exam hell” (Rohlen 1983) and are given to making fervent prayerful offerings in the hopes of a high score (Zeng 1996).

three levels of analysis Sociological analysis can be compared to photography: like skilled camera work, it requires facility in the use of a number of lenses. In particular, sociologists must work with the equivalent of wide-angle lenses when they are concerned with very large-scale social changes. They must work with middle-horizon lenses when they are concerned with the everyday operation of institutions as they exist at a given point in time. And they must master the close-up, telephoto lens to examine the workings of institutions as they exist





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Where Are the Best Schools in the World? In 1991, Newsweek magazine devoted a special section to what it called the best schools in the world. It suggested sending children to Italy for kindergarten, to New Zealand to learn reading, and to the Netherlands to learn math. Once they are literate, children should, according to Newsweek, go on for science training in Japan, where they would learn through hands-on techniques and wait to learn principles until after they learn practical applications. They should take foreign language instruction in the Netherlands, where two foreign languages are required. For high school, children should be sent to Germany. The editors of the magazine lauded the multitrack system in Germany, where only the top third go on to academic study leading to a university, and the majority combine apprenticeship training with job-related academics. The United States is not completely absent from this list of bests in the world. Newsweek considered the United States to excel in arts education and in graduate training. Articles like this are at least as interesting for what they tell us about contemporary educational ideals as for their specific recommendations. The preferences in this article reflect concerns about academic achievement. A different set of choices would almost certainly have been made in the 1960s, when wellto-do people like the editors of Newsweek often thought schooling should also improve cross-cultural understanding and individual creativity. Nevertheless, as comparative social science does, the article helps expand our horizons. It encourages us to value a wider range of international experience than we might otherwise be exposed to. It suggests ways the experiences of other countries might be relevant to improving our own institutions. Careful readers, however, will also be wary of the methods by which this list of bests was chosen. Other journalists, with different sources, might well have chosen different schools and different practices. For example, according to international achievement tests, mathematics teaching is apparently about as effective in Switzerland now as it is in Japan. Indeed, a more recent journalistic treatment of the world’s best schools by Time magazine, with an even more intense focus on academic achievement, cited five East Asian countries—Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan—as standing at the top because of their eighth graders’ scores on international science and math tests (McSpadden 2015). It is also important to remember that the practices of one country can seldom be imported wholesale into another country’s educational system if social conditions are not conducive to their adoption. For example, foreign language teaching in the Netherlands is effective partly because students in this small country near the center of Europe will inevitably be called on to speak other languages. By contrast, American students grow up speaking English, the language of international business and science, and are consequently relatively insulated from pressures to learn new languages.



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schools as social institutions T a b l e 1 .3 Levels of sociological analysis of schooling

Level of analysis

Major concerns

Macro-historical: development of school structures and purposes

Origins of school purposes and structures in comparative perspective Historical change in school purposes and structures in comparative perspective Consequences of school purposes and structures for society and particular groups in society Organizational structures and practices for channeling energy and attention Environmental influences on schooling Interests and relationships of major categories of actors Consequences of institution for learning, socialization, and social selection Structural influences on interaction within schools Methods used to develop learning communities Interaction-based successes and failures in instructional activities Consequences of school interactions for learning, socialization, and social selection

Meso-institutional: operation of schools as social institutions in particular times and places

Micro-interactional: staging and interaction processes involved in classroom activities

in small-group and face-to-face interactions. In the analysis of social institutions like schooling, each of these levels is important.2 The broadest perspective is the macro-historical level of analysis; the second, the mesoinstitutional level of analysis; and the third, the micro-interactional level. These levels are not always easy to distinguish, because actions at the higher levels are part of the context in which patterns at the lower levels develop. Nevertheless, they are sufficiently distinct to be discussed separately. Table 1.3 summarizes the major concerns of sociologists of schooling at each of these three levels.

The Macro-Historical Level To understand the social institutions we inhabit, we need to know how they came into being and their role in social organization at different points in time. The macro-historical level of analysis is critical for understanding the development of the current purposes and activities of schools. Schools have developed for many different reasons, but the most important are to teach the culture of a status group, cement political loyalties to a ruler, and prepare young people either for public life or for an occupational craft. In the West, the ancestors of our contemporary primary, secondary, and tertiary schools developed for very different reasons and at very different times. Compulsory primary schools were invented in the early 18th century by modernizing kings and emperors, who wanted to teach the rudiments of literacy to their subjects while building an identification among young people in the hinterlands (most of whom had weak attachments to the state) with the language and national heroes of the political center. The predecessors of our elite secondary schools have an ancient pedigree in private Greek academies, where teaching of philosophy and rhetoric was explicitly rooted in the life conditions and ideals of an aristocracy interested





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in preparing its sons for public life. The predecessors of today’s universities developed during the Middle Ages. They carried on traditions of secular and sacred learning but were most important for educating young men who intended to enter a handful of learned professions: medicine, law, the clergy, and university teaching itself. We can see clearly at this level of analysis that institutions of schooling have always been stamped by the interests and ideals of particular groups and organizations. The interests of kings and emperors were connected to the origins of primary schooling; those of the governing classes of the ancient world, to the origins of the Greek academies; and those of the church and the ruling classes of European feudalism, to the founding of universities. The historically developed ideologies of these classes and institutions are very often decisive for the organization of schools. Imagine how different schooling would be if the ideals of the medieval craft guilds had somehow come to dominate secondary schooling. If they had exercised this influence, we would likely see many fewer courses in the liberal arts and sciences than we do. Schools sometimes change when new classes or new organizational interests gain power. For example, state-controlled primary and secondary education arose in early modern Europe when the Protestant Reformation disrupted the Catholic Church’s control and nation-states expanded into this newly freed institutional space (Durkheim [1938] 1977). Schools also change when new connections are made between existing schools, when new populations enter schools, and when new market incentives develop. For example, vocational education became a part of secondary schooling in the United States around the turn of the century, at a time when new populations (mainly from immigrant families) were entering secondary schools for the first time. Those who were already involved in the secondary schools had a market interest in preserving the value of the high school degree, and others had an interest in gaining access to these valuable degrees. In the end, a compromise was worked out: academic education for those headed for higher levels in the academic and class structure and vocational education for the majority of the new entrants (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985; Labaree 1988). Class interests were surely involved here but so were market incentives, demographic changes, and newly strengthened connections between primary and secondary schools. Thus, as we look at the multicolored threads that make up the fabric of educational history, we see a smaller number of golden threads: influences that stand out more strongly than others. The connection between state power and democratic ideology has been particularly important in our own time as a force in the development of schooling throughout the world. (It was important as early as the 1820s in the highly democratic United States.) Our contemporary systems of schooling reflect the working out of connections between new and surviving forms of schooling, the gradual expansion of student aspirations from lower to higher levels as the previously normal attainment levels no longer satisfy ambitions for upward mobility, the differentiation of curricular tracks to satisfy markets for educated labor, and the creation of standardized models of schooling that flow from the center to the peripheries of power. Exactly how these forces are manifested in any given country depends on how much power is held by the coalitions that support existing forms of schooling and how conflicts



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among educators, political parties, and other interests are resolved. The structure of schooling is, therefore, not exactly the same throughout the world. As we see in Chapters 2 and 3, people’s life experiences are very strongly influenced by differences in these structural forms. The status pride of pre–World War II British university graduates was distinctly related to the small numbers of secondary school students who had the chance to enter universities. These small numbers were an outcome supported by the state’s alliance with the elite graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. The feverish effort of Japanese students approaching the end of their high school years is shaped by the decisive importance of secondary-school-leaving examinations for later life success in Japan. The historical development of schooling demonstrates the futility of talking about schooling as functionally connected to the needs of society as a whole. Even today, schools serve the interests of some groups better than others. Students from highly educated and well-to-do families tend to do much better in school than students from less advantaged families. Those whose interests are not fully satisfied by the dominant form of schooling may have incentives to develop their own schools, as in the case of Christian academies, home schools, and charter schools today. These alternative schools, developed to affirm the status culture or improve the opportunities of underserved groups, may join the field of organizational competitors in the next round of historical development. Indeed, from a macro-historical perspective, one of the most important changes of the last two decades is the growing privatization of schooling, all the more remarkable for an institutional sphere that was more or less exclusively state controlled and financed for 150 years. Privatization has taken many forms, from the rise of multibillion-dollar tutoring industries in many countries to the creation of alternative school structures, either partly or wholly outside the public system (Davies, Quirke, and Aurini 2005). Macro-historical analysis is challenging because it requires looking at institutions not simply in terms of their origins and development but also in comparative perspective. Other societies, with different traditions and different coalitions of power, are a natural context from which to better understand one’s own social institutions and their development.

The Meso-Institutional Level Most sociological work on schooling is conducted at the middle-horizon, or institutional, level of analysis. At the institutional level, sociologists stop the historical clock and focus on schools as they exist at a given point in time. Institutional analysis is important because it shows us how schools are organized and what kinds of forces they respond to in their environments. It can also help us understand why schools do not work as well as they might. Institutions can be defined as arrangements developed to perform particular sets of tasks or regulate particular activities by limiting the number of ways these tasks and ac­ tivities are accomplished. Sociologists distinguish institutions from organizations. Insti-­ tutions provide categories and rules that apply across a wide range of organizations per­ forming the same general tasks (see, e.g., Haveman and Rao 1997). Thus, Middletown





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Elementary School is a specific school organization, but it shares many structural similarities with other elementary schools, such as similar categories of personnel—principals, teachers, and students—and a similar arrangement of the school day. These are among the institutional features of schooling. Institutions reduce randomness by encouraging conformity across a wide variety of organizations performing the same general tasks. Marriage, for example, is an institution that regulates sexuality and child rearing by organizing married couples’ action along a limited set of socially prescribed paths. Schools in contemporary societies are institutions that (1) transmit school knowledge to the young, (2) attempt to shape students’ conduct and values, and (3) sort students for positions in the class and occupational structure. Schools are organized to channel energy and attention along lines approved by authorities; they are situated, however, in a larger social environment from which they cannot be fully insulated. They are composed of nominally cooperating categories of primary actors whose interests are, however, rarely in complete harmony. Institutional analysis, therefore, can be divided into three parts: (1) analysis of the organizing structures and practices through which action is channeled, (2) analysis of power and influence in the broader environment as it influences the institution, and (3) analysis of the roles and interests of key actors. Analysis of structures and practices for channeling action. The structures and practices of school life are strongly influenced by the larger purposes schools have come to serve. In the contemporary world, these purposes have mainly to do with the transmission of subject matter material the schools want students to know (i.e., cultural transmission), the values and behaviors they want students to express (i.e., socialization), and the identification of academic winners and losers (i.e., social selection). Energy and attention are focused on these purposes (with some down time, of course, for less regulated interaction in lunchrooms and corridors and on playgrounds). Schools are highly structured, even regimented, settings, less so than armies, but more so than, say, fraternities or sororities or even many workplaces. The school hierarchy is designed, above all, to enforce rules and settle conflicts about what should be occurring in the classroom. School and classroom rules also direct energy and attention by defining approved activities. Teachers in classrooms are central to the flow of student energy and attention during class periods. They initiate and direct most of what happens in the classroom. Students may resist teacher-centered initiatives, but the cost of resistance can be steep. Much of the institutional channeling of energy and attention occurs through language, backed by rewards and punishments. But not all of it does. Some of this channeling also occurs in the physical and temporal markers that escape notice because they become part of everyday routine. Spaces are defined, time is divided, instructional groups are formed, and routines are developed—and these are part of the means of producing schooling. Students may learn to follow the teacher’s directions as one way of producing schooling, but their minds and bodies are also propelled into different physical spaces by bells that demarcate the beginning and ending of classes and by class schedules that divide time and create a particular mix of students and teachers in particular physical spaces.



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Analysis of influences in the external environment. Although schools, like all insti­ tutions, attempt to insulate themselves from their environments, the activities and effectiveness of schools are nevertheless greatly influenced by their environments. These environments include both the structure of relationships among schools at different levels and schools’ ties to outside groups in the community. The flows of students between levels of schooling constitute one important feature of the schooling environment. In the developing world, many students do not complete primary school. In the developed world, primary school is now a universal feeder to secondary schools, but students may be split at the secondary level between students who are expected to move on in the educational system and those who are expected to move out to the labor market. In other cases, the great majority of students experience an academic secondary education. In addition, at any given time, a certain range of alternative schooling types exists in the environment, and these forms are at least potentially organizational competitors. If two-year colleges do not exist in a society, they are not an option for secondary school graduates. If they do exist, they may compete for students with four-year colleges, trade schools, and the labor market. Analysis of competition and market share must therefore be a part of our study of the relations among schools. Schools are connected not just to one another but also to a broad range of other groups and organizations in society. For example, the organization of public schools closely follows the laws and policies of the state under whose jurisdiction they lie. Schools are influenced also by local communities and by employing organizations through their demand for occupational labor. Schools are also connected to educational organizations, such as textbook publishers and professional associations of educators. We can see how much the external environment matters simply by comparing schools in wealthy and poor neighborhoods. We are likely to see quite a bit more conformity in wealthy neighborhoods and students who are more engaged in their schooling. Most kids will arrive on time for their classes and at least pretend to be paying attention during class. The story can be very different in poor neighborhoods. The level of attention will likely be much lower in most classrooms. More swearing will be heard in the corridors, and some teachers will act in harsh ways toward students. Misbehavior (by the school’s norms) will be common, and some students will call it a day after lunch. Why? Students in poor neighborhoods tend to be less invested in schooling. One reason is that schools are not as rewarding to them as to students from affluent backgrounds. Different environmental influences will attract more or less attention from sociologists depending on the particular issue under consideration. For example, the quality of teaching in public schools is highly dependent on the quality of teacher-training institutions. It makes sense to pay close attention to admissions requirements and the curriculum of teacher-training institutions if we are interested in the quality of teachers in a society. On the other hand, if we are interested in the amount of uniformity that exists in schooling, we will want to pay more attention to the degree of centralized control exercised by the state. When schools are under the jurisdiction of a central government (as they are in Sweden and Japan and were, until recently, in Italy and France), many features of public schooling will be uniform throughout the country: the level of expenditures per student,





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the course materials studied, and the kinds of training that teachers must have. In decentralized systems like the United States, where schooling is a state and local responsibility, quite a bit more inequality and variation exists in what and how much students learn (Han and Buchmann 2016). If we are interested in comparing levels of student engagement and achievement between schools, we will want to pay close attention to the socioeconomic composition of the community from which the school draws its students. Analysis of the interests of the major actors in the institution. The three major catego­ ries of actors within schools are students, teachers, and administrators. In the broader community, parents are a fourth important set of actors. These actors are involved in an enterprise that can be described as at least largely cooperative. Institutional structures and practices that are operating as intended ensure a working accommodation, if not a true consensus. Observers from Mars would no doubt be impressed in the similarities of schooling around the world. Classes form at regular times and follow similar routines, including solving problems, presenting projects, and taking exams. Administrators work with teachers to solve behavior problems in classrooms, and teachers work with students to transmit curricular materials. However, the relationships between the major actors are not entirely cooperative. This is because the major actors have at least slightly different interests in schooling. Students and their parents are mainly the carriers of popular aspirations (including demands for practical education) and normative expectations about effort, teachers are mainly the carriers of school knowledge and educational standards, and administrators are mainly the carriers of the existing rules of school organization and resource distribution. Administrators are also subject to political pressures that few teachers experience. When differences of interest exist, some degree of tension or even outright conflict can be expected. Teachers, for example, may want students to work harder than students would want to work if left to their own devices. Teachers may challenge resource allocations of administrators if they feel that their classrooms are underfunded, and administrators may attempt to enforce unpopular rules.

The Micro-Interactional Level of Analysis Virtually every situation in school involves encounters between people. The microinteractional level of analysis is concerned with what happens in these encounters. Analysis of this immediate experience of schooling is critically important for showing how all the possibilities of schooling—mastery of course materials, dutiful compliance, confusion, disengagement, active hostility—are set into motion. The important elements are what people bring into their encounters, the way they present themselves to one another, and the way those presentations are interpreted and acted on. The context of interaction is as important as the process of interaction itself. To use a theatrical metaphor, the staging, scenery, costumes, and props are as important as the lines exchanged between the actors. The staging represents the preexisting understandings that influence the action on the stage. In the classroom, the staging includes the experiences and motives that students, teachers, and administrators bring with them to



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the classroom; the definition of the situation that prevails in their encounters; and the numbers and kinds of other actors who share the classroom stage. For example, the kinds of interactions that take place vary greatly between classrooms in which large numbers of disengaged students are gathered and those in which small numbers of highly engaged students are present. Although the staging of interaction is important, much of the best micro-level work focuses on the gestures and spoken lines of the actors, the process of face-to-face interaction itself. Sociology is a complex study because, unlike inanimate objects, people make interpretations of one another’s actions and expressions. Sociologists use videotape, transcripts, and their own observation to home in on how people represent themselves to others through their dress, language, and behavior; how others interpret those representations; and the responses people develop in light of those interpretations. This three-step process—expression, interpretation, and response—occurs simultaneously on both sides of every interaction. Conversations can be thought of as many bits of interaction strung together, and relationships can be thought of as strings of interactions across time. For example, if a young man wants to project an image of toughness, he may sport a buzz cut, beard stubble, mirrored sunglasses, tattoos, and a torn shirt, and he may work out to maintain an impressive physique. He may speak little and, when he does, primarily in short bursts laced with obscenities. Most people will interpret this display as characteristic of a dangerous person and want to steer clear. The young man’s friends, however, may interpret the same representations as the essence of a stand-up kind of person unwilling to let the world take advantage of him. And the young man’s mother might interpret his symbolic actions as a stage on the road to adulthood. The young man, meanwhile, is making interpretations of these other people’s symbolic representations and is responding to them in light of his understandings. He may choose to practice his tough guy persona on his mother—or respond appreciatively to her maternal support. By showing how both successes and failures of classroom life can arise from the ways actors interpret and respond to the symbolic expressions of others, micro-interactional analysis can add to our understanding of some of the most basic issues of mass schooling. Micro-analysis can be particularly important for showing how effective teachers manage their authority and construct learning communities and for revealing some of the less obvious causes of static and distortion in the teacher-student interchange. Authority is a basic requirement of classroom life because neither order nor learning is possible without it. However, the management of authority requires considerable skill. Writing in the 1930s, Willard Waller catalogued the various means by which the adults of his time represented themselves as respect-worthy figures (the Old Soldier, the Mother, the Favorite Aunt, the Man about Town) and the repertoire of social control procedures (from raised eyebrows and withering comments to suspensions and expulsions) that teachers of his time used to maintain their control over classroom life (Waller 1932). Since Waller’s time, problems in the management of authority have received more attention. On one side are studies of the deterioration of authority in the classroom from policies and legal rulings that were intended to protect students from arbitrary authority but have often led to the empowerment of the least engaged students (Arum et al. 2003). These





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studies have shown how informal treaties lowering performance standards can develop between teachers hoping for popularity and students interested in reducing their work effort (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985). On the other side are studies of teacher judgments that create or reinforce social inequalities. These studies have demonstrated the important role of teacher expectations in producing high and low levels of student performance (Rosenthal and Jacobsen 1968). They have shown that teachers sometimes typecast students as academically mediocre simply on the basis of their dress, cleanliness, and language before they really know much about their academic abilities or interests (Rist 1970; Erickson 1975). Once teachers have established their authority, they must construct a successful community of learners. In the United States, the most effective teachers combine clear task leadership with strong projections of personality and character. They maintain high and challenging standards but also work on maintaining rapport. They may use the language of community to include lower-achieving students and by doing so to gain allies for their work in the classroom (Mehan 1993). The expectations of students and teachers can, however, vary greatly from culture to culture. Therefore, different kinds of teachers are effective in different societies. In Japan, teachers expect students to work patiently through their errors and accept that errors are an important part of learning to be overcome through hard work. The idea that students have greater or lesser abilities is practically irrelevant. Japanese students, in turn, expect their teachers to be technically skilled performers, rather than, for example, encouraging helpers or subject matter specialists (Stevenson and Stigler 1992). As long as these expectations are mutually met, the educational connection is successful. Throughout the world, confusion and misunderstanding are as much a part of classroom life as clarity and comprehension. Many of these breakdowns come from disengaged teachers, who have lost sight of the value of instruction, or unmotivated students, who do not feel the value of actively participating in the hard work of learning. Other breakdowns may be caused by students’ limitations in comprehending the material presented or teachers’ limitations in presenting it well. Clearly, however, breakdowns also occur even when both students and teachers have accepted the legitimacy of classroom effort and are trying to approach their work in a sincere way. Take the following example from England of how students in one school were labeled as either dull or intelligent. In this study, workingclass children were more likely to ask very basic questions of their teachers and to ask why they needed to learn the material. Middle-class children might have had the same questions but were more likely simply to absorb the material, assuming that eventually they would understand why they were being asked to learn it. Teachers tended to see the first type of students as dull and the second as intelligent. Another interpretation would be that middle-class students had learned to be deferential—that they were, in a sense, less engaged in active learning (Keddie 1971). Along similar lines, Hugh Mehan (1993) showed how the stance and language of technical expertise can be used by teachers to deauthorize parents as specialists on their children’s behavior, in spite of parents’ daily observations of those behaviors. Such studies help us understand why interaction in the classroom and between school and community so often fails to accomplish as much as it might.



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the scientific and humanistic faces of sociology Sociology is an unusual discipline in that it presents both a scientific and a humanistic face to the world. It is both a set of propositions about human social relations and a way of understanding and appreciating the world around us. Sociologists who identify themselves primarily with the scientific side of the discipline have developed a number of propositions to explain patterns in human social relations. They have also developed a large number of empirically based generalizations about the causes of social phenomena. For example, in later chapters I show that several factors are well established as important influences on student learning, including parental expectations, the composition of peer groups, the level of teacher qualifications, and the amount of time devoted during the school day and year to learning. We would not be able to draw conclusions about which influences are most important without rigorous scientific studies. Because of their rigorous methods, sociologists are sometimes in a position to suggest ways to improve our institutions of schooling. For example, by looking at different kinds of teaching under experimental or near-experimental conditions, researchers have developed a clearer sense of the behaviors used by effective and less effective teachers. Similarly, we now have considerable evidence that smaller classrooms and smaller schools can at times build a sense of community among students, which, in turn, creates a stronger commitment to schoolwork (see, e.g., Finn and Achilles 1990). When educators and policy makers take findings like these seriously, they can lead to improvements in how well schools work. But the discipline has something else to offer in addition to scientific principles and policy advice. Max Weber ([1921] 1978), one of the greatest of the founding fathers of sociology, thought that the discipline’s major contribution would lie in its capacity to enrich human judgment. By digging beneath the surface of debates and studies and by wrestling with difficult issues, sociology provides exercises that build and enrich judgment. ­Sociology also allows us to see into the character of our institutions and the consequences they have for our lives. It can also help us see the forces at play in the actions of others and the ways our own actions may be influenced by a specific set of socially conditioned understandings. Looked at in this way, sociology offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the world and our places in it. It is not surprising, therefore, that sociology includes a gallery of institutional landscapes and human portraits and not only data files for testing hypotheses and producing mathematical formulas. The pictures in this gallery can be jarring, because the opportunities and constraints of the social structure often give rise to false hopes and draining struggles. We see, for example, some educational reformers who are buoyed by public acclaim for their efforts to improve schooling but are unable to demonstrate to the satisfaction of researchers that the changes they champion actually improve learning. We see intensely people-oriented teachers who are led by the uncertainties of teaching to build walls around their classrooms, depriving themselves of the human contact they prize so highly. And we see the rebels among working-class adolescents who, through their acute sense of moral superiority to the rule followers among their peers, prepare themselves for lives of numbing labor.





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Some of the portraits are vivid spots of color on a relatively colorless canvas. Many of these portraits involve the transforming power of human cooperation and human connections: the electrical charge of a class that is humming along on all cylinders, the graceful gesture of a young person who stands up in support of a fellow student who seems to be faltering, or perhaps that rare occasion when a teacher interprets a sullen young person as having potential at the same time that the young person begins to see the teacher as a trustworthy ally. Although we will be dismayed by the pictures in the sociological gallery as often as we are reassured by them, we do not have to look hard to see a discipline fully engaged in understanding human relationships in all their complexity.

organization of the book The remainder of this book takes up issues that are important to anyone interested in schooling. Readers will see the guiding influence of the theoretical framework outlined in this chapter, a perspective that combines an interest in both social organization and social power. They will see an effort to address issues of schooling at the macro-historical, meso-institutional, and micro-interactional levels of analysis. They will see the adoption of a global comparative perspective on schooling and a willingness to draw on both the scientific and humanistic foundations of sociology. Chapters 2 and 3 provide an overview of schooling in the industrialized and developing worlds. These are the chapters most concerned with the macro-historical level of analysis. In these chapters, I discuss the rise of schooling and the forms schooling has taken in several societies. I also discuss the major issues facing schools in rich and poor societies. Chapters 4 through 7 examine the major contemporary social purposes of schools: the transmission of school knowledge, the socialization of personality and conduct, and the sorting of students for positions in the class and occupational structure. These chapters rely primarily on macro-historical analyses to examine the development of these purposes and on studies at the meso-institutional level to illuminate the current issues surrounding them. Chapter 8 takes up issues related to the teaching and learning of school knowledge. This is the chapter in which the micro-interactional level of analysis plays the largest role. Chapter 8 examines the forces outside and inside classrooms that influence the interaction of teachers and students and the successful transmission of school knowledge. Part of the interest of sociology derives from what it can tell us about how to improve our institutions. Chapter 9 looks at school reform movements and policies. It brings together evidence about the effectiveness of such reforms as educational vouchers, magnet schools, business partnerships with schools, and community outreach programs. Accountability and equity-based reforms are the special foci of Chapter 9, because these reforms are the most influential of the recent efforts to make schools work better. In a concluding coda, I take a step away from the empirical regularities of schooling to look at the organizational and cultural ideals we can strive for to make good on the possibilities of schooling and the ingredients that go into making high-performing schools.

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schooling in the industrialized world

This chapter examines the structure of schooling in industrialized societies. By “industrialized societies,” I mean those in which most people are employed in manufacturing and service industries rather than in mining, agriculture, or village commerce. Because of the higher productivity of industrialized economies and their domination of world markets for finished goods and business services, people living in industrialized countries have higher average incomes and living standards than people living in developing countries. The industrialized world includes the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, all the countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia, the most developed countries of the old Soviet bloc in Central Europe (such as Hungary and the Czech Republic), Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and several of the industrial powers in East Asia, including South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. A sharp distinction between the industrialized and the developing world can be misleading. Life in the inner-city ghettoes of the United States and in the peripheral zones surrounding cities like Rome and Paris can be just as poverty stricken, crowded, and chaotic as life in any developing country. Meanwhile, urban centers and industrialized regions as modern as any place on earth can be found in Mexico and India, which are still considered developing countries because of their high rates of rural poverty. Even so, the situation of the average citizen of industrialized and developing countries remains different enough for the contrast to continue to matter. For the past 70 years, most citizens in industrialized countries have been able to count on economic growth and security from the devastations of war on home soil. Most have also had the advantage of stable and comparably responsive political systems. These advantages have allowed a steadiness and regularity in the development of schooling that is not common in the developing world—and particularly not in the rural areas in which most people live. In the 18th century, a few European rulers began the experiment of creating mass statefunded educational systems out of what had been a patchwork of sites for teaching basic literacy and job-related skills to the children of workers and peasants and the masterworks of culture to the upper classes. Many other rulers, fearing that education would lead to rebellion, were slow to see the advantages of schooling for the masses. But by the turn





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of the 20th century educators and political leaders throughout the industrialized world had accepted the idea of compulsory state-supported schooling as an institution for the masses. Schooling systems soon developed more ambitious goals than teaching basic literacy and numeracy. The introduction of national examinations for selecting students for university-level education proved to be an important development. Chinese dynastic leaders had for centuries relied on examinations to select candidates for higher levels of education and ultimately higher positions in the state bureaucracy, but this mechanism was introduced in Europe only at the end of the 18th century. It became institutionalized first in Germany during the early 19th century (Vanderstraeten 2004) and subsequently spread to other parts of Europe. Examinations encouraged discipline and focused attention, but some sociologists argue that they came at a price insofar as the educational functions of the school became subordinated to its selective functions. Sociologists have been sensitive to the workings of this social-sorting machinery for a long time, as the 1927 comments of Pitirim Sorokin indicate: “Up to the last few years, the school was regarded primarily as an educational institution. Its social function was seen in ‘pouring’ into a student a definite amount of knowledge, and, to some extent, in shaping his behavior. . . . At the present moment it is certain that the school . . . is at the same time a piece of social machinery, which tests the abilities of the individuals, which sifts them, selects them, and decides their prospective social position” (Sorokin [1927] 1959: 188). Our starting point, then, must be to see that we are discussing, throughout the developed world, huge mechanisms for transmitting basic knowledge, socializing students’ conduct, and selecting students for positions at different levels in society. Schooling can be understood as a fundamental part of the economic development and regulatory apparatus of the state, well supported by taxpayers because of its capacity to create productive workers and better-informed citizens. It is a highly organized (and, therefore, frequently effective) government activity. School districts and schools themselves have the advantages of highly developed bureaucratic organization, with the stability and clarity that bureaucracy brings. Indeed, some parallels with military organization exist: children are expected to show discipline in the classroom, teachers keep them moving briskly through their paces, and we even call some classroom exercises drills. Industrialized countries also have professionalized teaching forces. Teachers are generally well educated (nearly all have baccalaureate or higher-level degrees) (OECD 2014: 496–515). They have studied methods of instruction and been required to demonstrate at least minimal competence in the classroom through practice teaching. They continue with in-service and other professional development programs during their careers. The majority of students from industrialized countries are well prepared to learn when they come to school thanks to familial support for learning, exposure to learning media, and preschool experiences. They stay in school much longer than students in developing countries (by as much, on average, as six to eight years more). Living in modern, fastpaced, demanding societies serves these students well in schooling. Most adapt quickly to the performance expectations of the school. Some excel and most others attempt to comply with expectations that they keep their grades up. Students in the industrialized



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world consequently score considerably higher than students from developing countries in international assessments of mathematics, science, and reading (see Chapter 4). Indeed, none of these features of schools, teachers, or students is characteristic of public education in the developing world.1 The following are among the main questions I address in this chapter: Just how did these huge “machines” for educating and sorting children come into being? In what ways are they similar to one another? In what important respects do they differ? Do the differences affect students’ life chances and consciousness? If so, how? Are structures of schooling in the industrialized world becoming more or less similar over time? We can appreciate the many similarities in school organization and social context that we find in the industrialized world, but it also makes sense to think about differences in the design of schooling systems and what consequences these differences have for students. I show that some important features of schooling do vary among the industrial societies and that these differences have consequences for students’ experience of schooling. Consider, for example, schooling in three countries: the United States, Germany, and Japan. In the United States, in any given school, most students receive much the same curriculum through the end of high school. Schoolwork is not so demanding for most students that it takes up all their time. Students have considerable time for socializing with friends, participation in extracurricular activities, and later, part-time work. College entrance tests do not keep anyone out of postsecondary education, though they will be an important factor in determining admission into a small number of highly selective colleges and universities. The anxiety these tests create generally lasts for only a short time before and after the exam. Most students want to continue past high school to get the kind of degree that may give them a leg up in the job market, but it is not generally considered a life-ordeath matter to drop out before completing a degree. Many people return to college later in life to finish degrees or retool their skills. Contrast this relatively open structure and the comparatively easygoing attitude it fosters with the systems of two other wealthy industrial democracies: Germany and Japan. In Germany, children are divided, usually by age 10, into one of three types of schools. This placement will have a decisive influence on the future life trajectory of most children. Those who are placed in the lower track usually leave school as soon as they possibly can. Students who graduate from schools in the middle track, as most do, have the opportunity to attend continuation school part-time while participating in state- and industrysupported apprenticeships (see the box “The German Dual System of Vocational Training”). Between school and work, they are adults at a time when American teenagers are still at the beginning of their period of deciding what they want to do with their lives. For those preparing for university during the time comparable to American high school years, the curriculum includes what many Americans would consider college level work, including two foreign languages and advanced math and science courses. In Japan, the intensity of elementary and secondary schooling is greater still, though the structure involves much less tracking than in Germany. The school week and year is long and intense, with fact-laden drills being a staple of instruction in the upper grades. At the same time, students seem to enjoy school in part because of the skill of their teachers





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and the expectations of their parents. Extracurricular activities are not discouraged, but students have less time to devote to them than American teenagers. After school, most take additional classes at juku, and many also attend these supplementary schools on Saturdays, although Saturday classes are no longer compulsory. The amount of effort expended on studying for tests makes sense: performance in school matters greatly for later life success. A rigid pecking order of high schools, universities, and subject fields, in turn, determines who will be eligible for the more desirable jobs in Japanese companies and government agencies. Given the fatefulness of exam scores, it is not surprising that a popular saying among Japanese teenagers has been “Fail with five, pass with four”—the five and the four referring to hours of sleep after nighttime study! I begin by discussing the historical setting in which contemporary structures of schooling developed, focusing on the key difference between systems founded for purposes of elite preparation and those founded on the ideals of democratic uplift. I discuss the common forces of increasing demand for schooling and increasing government interest in schooling that have influenced countries throughout the industrialized world. I then develop an overview of schooling structures in the industrial world, comparing the United States and Germany as distinctive cases with respect to tracking and restrictiveness. I also consider two European national systems, England and France, which have expanded opportunities dramatically at the upper levels, though in meaningfully different ways. Finally, I discuss the Japanese system, which resembles the American system in structure but produces many more college graduates and much better results in terms of students’ proficiency in core subjects. (I reserve a more in-depth discussion comparing students’ academic performance across the world for Chapter 4. But be prepared to be impressed by the performance of students from several East Asian countries and by the family commitments and teaching cultures that help produce these results.) In the last section of the chapter, I discuss the forces and interests that have shaped the schooling systems of the industrialized world. I also show that these systems are beginning to resemble one another much more than in the past under the influence of transnational coordinating organizations.

schooling in comparative-historical context The expansion of state-supported schooling began from two distinct starting points in the early 19th century: In Europe, the assumption was that schooling beyond the primary level was for elite preparation. By contrast, in the United States (and the other Englishspeaking democracies of the New World), the assumption was that schooling served public purposes—notably the development of a character structure fit for a self-governing republic—and was therefore a general good that should be widely provided. Following the Meiji Restoration in the mid-19th century, Japan followed the democratic uplift model as well. (So too did the former Soviet Union, but with a very different set of objectives. See the box “Schooling in the Former Soviet Union.”) These two different starting points left an important imprint on the direction and timing that system-building efforts took. The premises of elite preparation encouraged more



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highly structured tracking at the secondary level, as well as restricted access to higher education. The premises of democratic uplift encouraged predominantly academic schooling, more flexible and limited tracking at the secondary level, and wider access to higher education at a much earlier stage of system development. The extension of secondary and higher education to broad swaths of the population consequently occurred much later in Europe than in the United States.

The Origins of Public Primary Schools Although Americans were the innovators in the expansion of secondary and higher edu­ cation, Europeans were responsible for the development of the first state-supported primary schools designed to enroll all children. In a few cases, enlightened monarchs, hop­ing to elevate the cultural level of their subjects, were responsible for these initiatives. This was true, for example, in the case of Frederick IV of Denmark, who created the first mass public schooling in the 1720s. More often, however, the motives of princes were profoundly conservative, as in the case of the compulsory schooling legislation of Frederick the Great of Prussia (a once independent country that is now part of Germany) in 1763. Prussia, dominated by the landed Junker class and its spirit of military service and bureaucratic efficiency, provided the world with the basic organizational structure of modern schooling, including teacher-training institutes, age-graded classrooms, common curricular standards, and examination-based assessments for promotion. The Prussian teacher has been described as the military commander of the classroom. (Indeed, many European powers thought that Prussian successes on the battlefield started in the drilling of students in primary schools.) Some advanced efforts of instruction, based on drawing out the natural curiosity of children, were adopted in Prussia in the early 1800s, but Prussian educators sought mainly to teach basic literacy and to instill a sense of loyalty to the emperor (Bendix 1968: 244–45). Efforts to strengthen patriotism, through stories of national heroes and national achievements, became important throughout Europe in the 19th century, as leaders recognized that the children of the working classes might someday be needed by their kings and ministers for fighting in wars under the banner of the nation-state. In later years, motives for maintaining and expanding public schools were mixed in complex ways, with interests in labor-force development becoming more important over time. The adoption of compulsory public schooling occurred more quickly in some European countries than others. In the early-adopting states, like Prussia and France, free and compulsory public schooling was introduced in the early 1800s. In these countries, political leaders maintained autonomy from both the church and the landed upper classes and had at their service a highly professional civil service bureaucracy. In late-adopting states, like England, free and compulsory public schooling became law only near the end of the 1800s. In these countries, the state was very closely aligned with the upper classes, and the upper classes were content to allow the church to provide rudimentary schooling for the working classes and the poor (Cubberley 1922: chaps. 22–24). Neither early adopters nor late adopters expected children of the industrial working class or the rural peasantry to go beyond a few years of primary schooling.





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State-supported compulsory primary schools had later beginnings in the United States than in Denmark or Germany. In the colonial United States, literacy was taught primarily in the home or in neighborhood dame schools. Laws providing for public schooling were on the books as early as the mid-1600s, but this public schooling came to be associated exclusively with the poor. In most places, public schools fell into disuse or disrepute. Schools that taught more advanced subjects or occupational skills charged fees. Apprenticeships, rather than formal schooling, were a popular means of learning trades and professions (Edwards and Richey 1963: chaps. 1–3). Nearly all the leaders of the American Revolution were advocates of free and compulsory public schooling for the primary grades. Many favored compulsory schooling to build national identity and help the poor recognize those superior in qualities of command. A few agreed with the more idealistic views of New York governor George Clinton that the state would gain advantages to morals, religion, liberty, and good government from “the general diffusion of knowledge” (quoted in Welter 1962: 24). However, the federal government had no jurisdiction over schooling, and few state leaders had the resources or the inclination to establish public primary schools. Instead, the 1830s and 1840s were the period of mobilization for what came to be known as the common school movement. Early leaders of the movement, such as Henry Barnard of New York, visited Prussia to examine its public school systems firsthand. Horace Mann, the leader of the common school movement in Massachusetts, is the most important figure in the development of public schools in the United States. Mann’s speeches expressed the view that the current generation is but the temporary keeper of the property and civilization of the country. Because the succeeding generations must be saved from poverty and vice and prepared for the adequate performance of their social and civic duties, those who refuse to enlighten the intellect of the rising generation were, he said, guilty of “degrading” the human race (quoted in Cremin 1957: 75–77). The most urbanized states took the lead in the development of public schooling, particularly Massachusetts and New York. Communities developed public schooling in a piecemeal fashion, and a wide variety of funding arrangements were tried, including partial public support to supplement fees. Struggles were fought with taxpayers over finance and with churches over control of the curriculum, but by the 1840s, free and compulsory public primary schools were well institutionalized in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The spread of public primary schooling to the western and southern United States occurred mainly in the 1850s, although attendance remained spotty and facilities primitive in many communities (Edwards and Richey 1963: chaps. 9–10).

The Premises of Elite Preparation In Europe, the extension of rights to schooling did not extend beyond primary schools. Instead, the sons of landowners, wealthy merchants, and professionals monopolized the upper levels of schooling. Indeed, the secondary schools and universities were among the institutions most closely associated with preservation of the culture of the old aristocratic ruling class. They had their origins as institutions for the training of sons of the nobility (who took their primary education from private tutors). Secondary schools slowly



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developed as a means of preparing the next generation of the elite for a university education. Although radical ideas of extending access to secondary schooling were entertained by European politicians from the 1840s on, these ideas were resisted by most politicians as encouraging unsuitable instruction for the laboring poor (see, for example, Cross Commission 1888, cited in Archer 1979: 742). In the representative view of Jules Ferry, a progressive education minister in the French Third Republic, confraternity and true democracy required a first mixing of the rich and the poor on the grounds of the school, but such a democracy did not require mixing to extend beyond the primary level (Ferry, cited in Archer 1979: 643). Fee requirements and entrance examinations that built on the culture of the propertied classes prevented all but a small number of working-class students from pursuing the academic degrees that were necessary for admission to universities. Only exceptionally talented and motivated working-class children were sponsored by school administrators or private patrons into the elite (Turner 1960). Strong vested interests naturally developed around the preservation of a very rigorous secondary and higher education requiring knowledge of esoteric and difficult works. Secondary school teachers in the academic tiers and university professors were strongly committed to maintaining educational quality and selectivity (Husén 1965; Heidenheimer 1973). Together with their allies in government, they successfully resisted efforts, typically led by socialist or labor parties, to expand access to academic secondary and higher education. Even in a country like Sweden, which was governed by the leftist Social Democratic Party for most of the 20th century, public education did not shift in the direction of untracked secondary schools until the early 1960s, and even then the shift was strongly resisted by secondary school teachers and university professors whose values were shaped by the elitist assumptions of the institutions in which they found employment (Heidenheimer 1973).

The Premises of Democratic Uplift By contrast, public secondary schooling got an early start in the United States. The first public high schools were established in Massachusetts in the 1820s and spread to other cities in the next decades. Very few attended these public schools, because admission was usually by examination. Private, fee-requiring academies remained more popular. Nevertheless, by the latter decades of the 19th century American educators (and also educators in other English-speaking democracies of the New World) were arguing that all children had a right to secondary schooling, sentiments that would not be common in Europe for more than a half century. The goals of democratic uplift, advanced by educators like Horace Mann, were often explicitly mixed with fears about the customs of new immigrants. Both primary and secondary schools were used for socializing (sometimes known as Americanizing) the more ambitious of the immigrant newcomers along the lines of the civic and moral ideals favored by the country’s Protestant and conservative upper classes. Indeed, compulsoryschooling laws were enacted earliest in states with numerically dominant Anglo-Protestant majorities (Meyer, Tyack, et al. 1979; Benavot and Riddle 1988).





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Economic arguments also played a role in the popularity of public secondary schooling in the United States. Americans looked at mathematics teaching, for example, simultaneously as creating a more rational citizenry and offering practical value in commerce (P. Cohen 1982). The ideals of civic virtue and economic pragmatism mixed easily in the minds of many 19th-century Americans. The first public high schools, for example, dating from the 1830s, were meant to create well-disciplined (but not overly cultivated) elites of young people for managerial and commercial occupations (Labaree 1988). Higher education for “the common people” also got an early start in the United States. Church and civic pride led to the erection of hundreds of small private colleges in the early 19th century, some of which were tied to land speculators’ hopes for higher property values in tracts surrounding the colleges (Labaree 2016). The idea of using higher education for practical occupational and applied research purposes led to the passage of the first Morrill Act in 1862. This act created land-grant universities, whose land deeds were granted free of charge by state governments. These new public universities were intended to provide practical training in mechanical sciences and agriculture, together with education in the liberal arts, for young people from all walks of life. No European university system of the time could have contemplated a similar act. The intellectual elite that dominated the European university systems would have considered the possibility of extending higher education to the sons of farmers and factory workers a hopelessly misguided (and dangerously radical) idea. What explains the difference between the United States and Europe in the premises from which they began developing more expansive schooling systems? First, no wellentrenched aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic groups existed in the United States (or the other English-speaking democracies of the New World) to guard the universities and secondary schools as bastions of a status-linked high culture. (This kind of defense in the United States was limited to a small segment of the system: the elite private preparatory schools and the colonial colleges later known as the Ivy League.) The enfranchised groups were overwhelmingly small-property owners. The interests of this small-propertyowning class, particularly when joined to the evangelical force of Protestant idealism, greatly encouraged the use of state power for purposes of creating a virtuous citizenry. The populism of Andrew Jackson’s presidency helped extend this spirit in a more democratic direction by advancing the idea of education as the right of all in a democracy. The pragmatic spirit of the small-property-owning class, storekeepers and farmers, also supported the use of schooling as a means of teaching economically useful subjects.

The Rising Demand for and Supply of Schooling In the late 19th and early 20th centuries states throughout the industrialized world began to extend the period of compulsory education to the secondary school years. What was behind the expansion of educational expectations? Occupational change contributed to increased receptivity to educational expansion in secondary and, later, higher education. During the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the number of lower-level white-collar administrative



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jobs increased, while the number of farm and industrial blue-collar jobs decreased. This occupational change encouraged expansion of secondary school enrollments, as employers began to look for more qualified workers for the new white-collar positions (Trow 1961; D. Brown 1995). During the second half of the 20th century, the growth of professional, technical, and managerial jobs created conditions for another wave of educational upgrading. Professional, technical, and managerial jobs grew to more than one-fifth of total employment in most industrialized countries by the end of the century (Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996), and these occupations employed a still-higher proportion—about one-quarter of all workers—in the United States by century’s end (Wyatt and Hecker 2006). It would be wrong, however, to think that occupational change was the only factor influencing the rapid increase in educational attainments during the 19th and 20th centuries. Population changes in the form of greater life expectancy and lower fertility, beginning in the 18th century, should be considered another deep structural influence on demand for schooling, because it allowed more people to raise their sights from the daily struggle for survival (Baker et al. 2011). Within this context, some families may see additional schooling as providing important social benefits, such as the prospect of mixing with a higher class of people. Others may see it as a way to escape the problems plaguing their home communities. When enough families begin to make the sacrifices necessary for their children to receive more schooling, higher aspirations become a defensive necessity, even for families whose members are not particularly ambitious; simply maintaining the family’s reputation in the community may require more schooling for the younger generation than the older generation received. Popular demand for more schooling can contribute to political party platforms that call for expanded educational opportunity, but popular demand does not put shovels into the ground to build schools. Governments must be convinced that adding more and higher-level state-supported schooling is a social as well as an individual benefit. Education slowly emerged as a popular governmental solution to many economic and social problems. All governments in the industrialized world have seen the decline of routine manual-labor jobs and the growth of jobs in the service sector. Moreover, all have witnessed the prevalence of unemployment among those who leave school early, as well as the scourges that so frequently accompany unemployment (crime, substance abuse, and family instability, to name just three). The dynamic of changing expectations works in the case of governments as much as in the case of popular demand; once policy makers become convinced that current levels of education are not sufficient, they may feel they have little choice but to expand educational opportunities further. By the end of the 20th century many policy makers embraced the idea of the knowledge society as an analytical lens and one that helped justify policies ranging from raising the school-leaving age to reducing the difficulty of secondary-school-leaving exams in order to expand access to higher education (see, e.g., OECD 1996b). The form and rate of educational expansion, however, varied considerably across countries. The United States was not the only country where the premises of democratic uplift prevailed. Highly centralized governments, such as those of Japan and the former Soviet





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Union, were able to make large-scale changes far more quickly than could be made in decentralized systems. Fully developed public schooling systems were operating in Japan within a few years of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and in Russia within a few years of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 (Cummings 2003). By contrast, the expansion of secondary schooling proceeded slowly in most of Europe because of the resistance of conservative parties, the upper classes, and the civil service bureaucracy, whose members claimed upper levels of education as their own. Very often in Europe social demand for more education was directed by state policy makers toward the development of separate vocational secondary schools or occupational tracks within comprehensive secondary schools. The state and industry played an active role in creating vocational schools in the German-speaking world and in some of the Scandinavian countries in the later 1800s. In these countries, the state took a paternalistic role in relation to the working classes, trying to prepare them for likely fates in the emerging industrial system. The new technical and vocational schools provided job-related training to many adolescents who, government officials assumed, were not destined to continue their studies beyond the minimum level. Labor unions and socialist parties typically supported this state activism because of their interest in using public education to reinforce identification with the working class and, by extension, with the political parties that claimed to represent that class. Expansion beyond primary school was slower still in countries like England that were dominated by the philosophy of laissez-faire individualism. Throughout Europe, restrictive policies prevented much change in access to upper secondary schools and universities until after World War II. In the 1930s, for example, fewer than 5 percent of French students attended secondary schools (Neave 1985). The French began, very hesitantly, to reform their schooling system in the 1940s and 1950s to allow more students to attend and complete secondary schooling. Policy makers in many other countries were still slower to adapt to changing occupational structures and labor market conditions. In England and Sweden, for example, policy makers contained social demand for schooling in highly restrictive structures through the early and mid-1960s. During the first decades of upper secondary school expansion in Europe, rigorous secondary-school-leaving examinations kept the proportion of students going on to universities at a low level. Over the last three decades, however, the European countries have adjusted their examination systems to permit a larger pool of students to enter higher education. In England, for example, the once famously difficult school-leaving examinations were adjusted to increase the pool of students eligible for higher education and reduce the high numbers leaving school at age 16. These changes had the desired effects: between 1986 and 1996 alone, the proportion of 18-year-olds qualified for higher education jumped by 50 percent (Deer 2002). And school leaving at age 16 dropped by more than 50 percent. Still more dramatic changes in examination pass rates have occurred in France and several Scandinavian countries. Thus, governments have played an important role in slowing and hastening changes in educational attainment. All governments have tools at their disposal to retard, encourage, and channel demand for higher levels of schooling. These tools include using fee



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requirements, tracking students into academic or vocational programs through examination results and teacher recommendations, changing the length of time to attain a degree, and creating credentials and qualifications to signal levels and types of human capital development and thereby influence employers’ hiring decisions. At the same time, pressures for expansion have led to a generally similar march of enrollments throughout the industrial world. The educational revolution—the “silent revolution,” as some have called it (see Baker 2014)—has unfolded in waves. First, primary enrollments reached saturation in the early and mid-20th century. Next, secondary enrollments climbed, first in lower secondary schools and then in upper secondary schools. These enrollments have now reached the saturation level in nearly all industrialized societies, although some societies, including the United States, continue to have relatively high dropout rates. And finally, beginning in the 1960s, the proportion of the age group enrolled in postsecondary education began to grow. Policy decisions to expand postsecondary education were common in the 1980s. Consequently, participation in postsecondary education grew rapidly in nearly every industrialized country in the 1990s, a pattern that continued and accelerated in the 21st century (OECD 2014: 83; see Figure 2.1). These general similarities in the expansion of schooling are of prime importance, but so too are the remaining differences in national systems. Comparison between several national systems can highlight the importance of inherited institutional structures, deepseated social divisions, and distinctive policy choices as these influences interact with popular and state interests to expand schooling and to rationalize it in relation to the demand for labor.

Percentage of relevant age group enrolled

120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1950

1955

1960

1965

1970 Tertiary

1975

1980

1985

Secondary

1990

1995

2000

2005

2010

Primary

Figure 2.1 Elementary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratios for industrialized countries, 1950–2010 s o u r c e : Schofer and Meyer 2005; UNESCO Institute for Statistics UIS.Stat database, http://data.uis.unesco.org/. n o t e : Gross enrollment ratios = total enrollments divided by the total number of people in the relevant age group (as determined by government definitions). Gross enrollments are multiplied by 100 to yield the percentages reported in the figure. Gross enrollment ratios can exceed 100 because of errors in the numerator. N of countries varies by year from a low of 31 to a high of 44.





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five schooling systems In this section I discuss five distinctive structures of schooling found in the industrialized world, those in the United States, Germany, England, France, and Japan. In a feature box I also briefly discuss the schooling structure developed in the former Soviet Union, a system that attempted during several periods to favor children of the working class but did not fully succeed in doing so. For comparative purposes, we need discuss preprimary and primary education only briefly because these levels of schooling are becoming more and more alike across the developed world. Today, major efforts are being made throughout the industrialized societies to extend schooling earlier in the life cycle, both because of the prevalence of women’s employment and because preschool arguably improves children’s learning readiness. On average, 75 percent of three-year-olds in European Union countries now attend preprimary schools on a voluntary basis, and attendance at age three is universal in a few northern European countries, such as France and Denmark (OECD 2014: 213). If both preschool- and baccalaureate-level completion become commonplace, educational life expectancy will soon be 17 or 18 years for the majority of students in the industrialized world, compared to the 10 to 12 years that were typical only a little more than a generation ago. All these societies offer reasonably similar curricula for primary school students, emphasizing the three Rs combined with quite a bit of socialization for orderliness and industriousness (see Chapters 4 and 5). One important structural difference at the primary level remains, however. Some countries have relatively powerful government ministries of education; others organize public education in a more decentralized way. Sweden and Japan remain as examples of systems that are more centralized than others (although they too have encouraged greater autonomy of municipalities in recent years). Standardized national curricula, funding patterns, and personnel requirements are characteristic of centralized systems. In other countries, financing, administration, and planning are decentralized at either the state or the provincial level, as in Germany and Canada, or at the state and local levels, as in the United States. Most European systems combine centralized funding and goal setting with decentralized decision making about allocation of funds and choices of textbooks and teaching methods (Eurydice 2012).2 Americans favor not only local control but also decentralized financing of schools on the grounds that such schools will be more responsive to the particular interests and concerns of the communities in which they are located. For example, communities that prize diversity or want particular subjects taught may be able to express their values more clearly in their classrooms than if they operated under the dictates of a national ministry of education. However, local financing can have drawbacks; the most important is that it can foster high levels of inequality between communities in school resources and staffing. In locally controlled systems, per student expenditures can vary significantly, because the tax base to support schools differs among communities.3 In addition, decentralized systems vary dramatically in the level of challenge they introduce into educational standards and curricula, a variation that research suggests is associated



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with lower net performance on international tests of educational achievement (Han and Buchmann 2016). Although the importance of centralized funding and standard setting should be kept in mind, the major contrasts among schooling systems in industrial societies are found not at the primary or even at the lower secondary school level (typically grades 6 through 8), but at the upper secondary school level (typically grades 9 through 12, corresponding to American high school years—in some countries, also including grades 13 and 14). These are the grades in which students begin to approach either higher education or the labor market. Major differences are also found in the structure of what most of the world calls tertiary education and Americans call postsecondary or higher education.4

United States and Germany: Schooling Opposites? Among the more populous countries in the industrial world, few schooling systems appear to be as different as those in Germany and the United States. The German schooling system is highly differentiated at the bottom and (relatively) undifferentiated at the top; the American system is the reverse. Germany. Following their primary education, German schoolchildren were divided at the age of 10 on the basis of teacher recommendations among three distinct kinds of schools stratified by academic prestige (Lehmann 1994). The Hauptschule, which is now in the process of being phased out in all German states, was designed for children who, it was assumed, would eventually work in blue-collar, crafts, and lower-level service jobs. (The relatively few remaining Hauptschulen have become associated with the children of Turkish and other non–Northern European immigrants who are disadvantaged in German society, one of the most important reasons why they are closing.) The Realschule is designed for children who are expected eventually to work in lower-level administrative and technical jobs. The Gymnasium alone is for academic study leading to the university and eventually to the more intellectually demanding professions and executive management. A relatively recent innovation, the Gesamtschule, combines all three levels in one school and consequently provides greater opportunities for movement across levels. At the end of the lower secondary years, students receive certificates that allow them to continue schooling or to move into vocational training. Most students from the Gymnasium continue their general education studies in preparation for the Abitur exam and the university; students from the lower levels of the Gesamtschule and students from the Realschule move into the dual system of vocational training. Students who are more manually inclined train for trades, and those who enjoy working with people train for business and service occupations (Brauns and Steinmann 1997). From an American perspective, the most distinctive part of German schooling is precisely this dual system of apprenticeship training. Here, students spend part of their time working in apprenticeships to learn a trade and part of their time in continuation schools funded by the state to provide more theoretical approaches than a purely practical apprenticeship would allow. This system has helped to produce high skill levels among German workers. A passing mark on the Abitur signals successful completion of secondary school and provides the necessary admission ticket to higher education. German students who pass





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the examination are entitled to enroll in any German university and (with a few exceptions) in any field of study they desire. In this sense, higher education institutions differentiate among students hardly at all. Students who make it through academic training in secondary school are considered to have demonstrated their readiness for higher-level study. This situation contrasts markedly with the American system, which is much more open but can make no such confident assumptions about the preparation of students for higher-level study (see, for example, Lehmann 1994; Shireman 2016). As in much of Europe, higher education in Germany is publicly supported and attendance essentially free for those admitted. Even so, only about two in five young people in 2012 entered one of the approximately 400 institutions of higher learning in the country, including technical colleges and universities (German Rectors’ Conference 2015).5 The technical colleges, or Fachhochschulen, are similar to American community colleges and have been a center of growth in recent years but still enroll only about half as many students as the approximately 100 universities in the country (German Rectors’ Conference 2015). In the first few years of the 21st century only about 15 percent of the age group received university diplomas (OECD 2013a: 3). Efforts to standardize higher education throughout Europe, under the guidelines of the 2000 Bologna Agreement, negotiated as part of the integration of the European Union, led to the introduction of three-year university degrees in Germany. These were at first resisted by the German professorate to a greater degree than in other EU countries, because professors in Germany did not accept the idea of universities as mass institutions and because they did not believe that they could condense four-year courses of study into three years. However, the three-year degree has now become standard in Germany, as it has in the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, change in the proportion of students receiving university degrees has been slow. In 2013, only about one-quarter of 25- to 34-year-olds had attained university-level degrees (OECD 2014: 44), one of the lower rates in the developed world. University education has been strongly oriented to the arts and sciences and is chosen by those who have a more theoretical and research orientation. Through the end of the 20th century, universities were considered equal to one another. This undifferentiated structure began to give way in 2006, when the German government began to provide funding for what it termed “centers of excellence.” Eleven universities received substantial additional funding from the government on the basis of accepted proposals and are now sometimes referred to as “elite universities” or “the German Ivy League” (Vogel 2006). In addition, a number of research groups at German universities have won this designation and the funds that go with it. The equality of esteem among German universities is slowly changing, although the distinctions have not generally trickled down to influence the choices of undergraduate students. United States. Consider the contrasts between German and American schools. At the time when German students are separated into entirely different types of schools (or tracks within Gesamtschulen) on the basis of their likely occupational fates, American students remain in comprehensive schools studying the same curriculum. Indeed, very few middle school or high school students are formally tracked throughout the school day, and the great majority takes academic courses (though of differing rigor), combined



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 The German Dual System of Vocational Training  In Germany, tracking begins at age 10, and schooling opportunities are limited for those in the lower tracks. Yet German workers at all levels enjoy greater income equity than the workers in most industrial societies, including the United States. One important reason for this equity is Germany’s dual system. The system is dual because it combines further schooling and on-site apprenticeship training for a near majority of German youths above age 15. Compulsory schooling ends in Germany after 10th grade, typically at age 15. Not long ago, some 60 percent of German youths moved into the dual system at the end of compulsory schooling, but today the proportion is under half. Most of these apprenticeship programs run for three years. They include training for a great variety of occupations, from auto mechanics to banking, though the great majority is in the skilled crafts. More than 350 apprenticeship occupations exist in Germany; doctors’ assistant, dispensing optician, machinist, and oven builder are examples. A typical week includes three or four days of work with a private firm in apprenticeship and one or two days in a local vocational school. The schools emphasize practical skills but include academic material related to these practical skills. John R. McKernan Jr. (1994) reports on one lesson involving a procedure for bending metal. While the students were learning this procedure, the teacher was also writing on the board the formulas related to the stress capabilities of the metal. Classroom learning also includes continued exposure to subjects that would be found in an American high school—languages, math, and social studies. Apprenticeship students are paid an allowance equivalent to 20 to 25 percent of the full wage paid to a journeyman worker. These allowances are not much to live on, but they are adequate for the large proportion of apprenticeship students who continue to live in their parents’ home. Training under the dual system is meant to be broad, and students in the course of their training usually rotate through a number of jobs. Even so, the upward mobility of German workers with apprenticeship credentials is more limited than in many other industrial countries. The relatively restricted mobility of German workers is compensated by the high wages that prevail in German industry. Many argue that these wages reflect the high levels of skill typical of workers trained in the dual system. The high skill levels might also help explain the historically strong popularity of the system with German employers. The major industrial and commercial firms take part in the apprenticeship system, even though they have no direct financial incentive for doing so. Companies support apprenticeship training through dues they pay to one of two national business associations. Apprentices are not required to stay with the companies that train them, and indeed most leave their companies within a year of leaving the apprenticeship program (Maurice, Sellier, and Silvestre 1986).





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In recent years, the system has come under criticism by employers and some social scientists, primarily for its lack of flexibility but also for its cost (Blossfeld 1992; Euler 2013). Many firms do not want to contribute as they have in the past to apprenticeship training. This has given rise to contracteducation options and state-run vocational courses without firm-based apprenticeships. Yet the foundations of the system remain largely intact. The dual system has also found many proponents outside Germany. France adopted the dual system for many skilled crafts in the 1990s, and it is an increasingly popular option in French education (Ministry of Education 2010). Similar structures also exist in several Eastern European and Scandinavian countries and in many East Asian countries. The adoption of the dual system has not always gone smoothly, however. Firms often lack the patience or funds to implement the system fully, and pride in craft also varies across countries (Euler 2013). Some College and Career Academies in the United States include design features similar to those found in the dual system (see Stern, Dayton, and Raby 2010 and Chapter 9), but technical and vocational education is so firmly entrenched in two-year colleges that it seems unlikely Americans will ever have incentives to embrace German-style firm and school-based ­ apprentice­ ships.

perhaps with one or two vocational electives. Although some high schools offer vocational programs, they are weakly linked to the labor market, and students have few incentives to enroll in them. For the majority, career preparation is a part of higher education rather than secondary education. The top 15–20 percent of American students take their school studies seriously and enroll in at least some honors courses. These are the students who compete for admission to selective colleges and universities. Parents of this highly motivated one-fifth of students will often sacrifice to help their children prepare for college admissions. These sacrifices may include paying for private schools (about 10 percent of high school enrollments), relocating to a better school district, looking for the best teachers within schools, encouraging a diet of advanced courses (those capable of being converted to college credit), hiring tutors, paying for test-preparation courses, and making many financial and time investments in cultural enrichment activities (Lareau 2003). But for most, school is more interesting for its social diversions than for the opportunities it provides for learning (Milner 2016). The drop-out rate was once among the highest in the developing world but has declined in recent years. Nevertheless, about one-quarter complete their schooling with a high school degree or drop out before completing high school. The majority of high school graduates enroll in two-year community colleges or nonselective four-year colleges. Forprofit colleges (now enrolling more than 10 percent of undergraduates) are increasingly popular among those who return to college following work or military service.



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The knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake fields of the arts and sciences are more important in the United States than in most of the developed world. Nevertheless, about half of community college students are enrolled in occupational-vocational programs, and since 1970 about 60 percent of four-year college students have enrolled in an occupationalprofessional program, with business being the most popular field (Brint et al. 2005; Brint et al. 2011). With some exceptions, these occupational programs are only weakly linked to the labor market; employers have little direct influence on what is taught, and the government does not attempt to promote postsecondary occupational programs to firms through the establishment of the elaborate systems of qualifications that are found in countries like France and Sweden. By avoiding tracking, supplying many places in higher education, and ideologically encouraging upward mobility through higher education, the American system operated effectively through the last half of the 20th century to expand the number of people with higher degrees. Through the mid-1990s, about 40 percent of high school students entered four-year colleges and universities, and another 25 percent entered two-year community colleges. (For-profit colleges barely existed.) About one of three 18-year-olds eventually graduated with a bachelor’s degree (NCES 2014). At the time these were the highest enrollment and graduation rates in the world. Since that time continued growth in postsecondary enrollments has not led to a proportional increase in degree attainment. Baccalaureate attainment has failed to climb much above one-third for the 30- to 34-year-old group (OECD 2014: 44). Many European and East Asian systems now produce a higher proportion of university graduates than the United States (and suffer a lower proportion of college dropouts). One reason is that the proportion of students in community colleges and for-profit colleges now equals the proportion studying in four-year colleges. These are institutions with low success rates in graduating students. As I discuss further in Chapter 6, both the growing income gap between rich and poor and the increasing cost of a four-year college education have contributed to declines in the relative productivity of the U.S. system. Nevertheless, the idea of opportunity remains very important in U.S. education. No high school student is barred by virtue of his or her degree from pursuing higher education. Many stop out or drop out before reentering postsecondary institutions, and some take as many as 8 to 10 years to finish degrees. The system has drawbacks for those who are not academically motivated but lack encouragement and options to pursue occupational courses of study until they finish high school. And, of course, lack of resources and poor preparation regularly spoil dreams of upward mobility through higher degrees. Higher education is a much larger and more differentiated enterprise than in Germany. In addition to more than 2,500 four-year colleges and universities, there are now more than 1,000 community colleges and perhaps as many as 3,000 for-profit colleges. Fewer than 50 highly selective colleges have dominated the U.S. News and World Report rankings of “best colleges” for decades. These schools admit fewer than 10 percent of those who apply for admission. Nearly all of these colleges are private, and they include universities with billions of dollars of endowment, such as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, as well as well-endowed smaller colleges, such as Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore.





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This large and highly differentiated system of higher education has helped the United States excel in research and graduate training. Eighteen of the top 25 research universities in the world are located in the United States (Center for World-Class Universities 2014). More than 3.6 million Americans have doctoral degrees (U.S. Census Bureau 2015: table 1)—a higher number than anywhere else in the developed world. As graduate degrees become more important in contemporary knowledge societies, the early expansion of research universities in the United States has created a competitive advantage.

England and France: Modernizing Class-Divided Systems Policy makers in England and France made concerted efforts, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, to modernize systems that were once strongly divided by social class. In ­England, the goals of policy makers have been to keep students in school beyond the minimum school-leaving age and to make it easier for them to enroll in postsecondary institutions. In France, a major goal has been to build higher education enrollments through the interconnected expansion of occupational training options in upper secondary schools and higher education. England. English schooling was renowned two generations ago for the upper-class ambiance of its elite secondary schools and ancient universities and for the 11-plus examination that divided children among three separate institutional tracks at that tender age on the basis of examination results (grammar schools for high-scoring kids, technical schools for those in the middle, and secondary modern schools for lower-scoring kids). It is no wonder that stereotypes of English schooling emphasized the aristocratic character of higher education—schooling was dominated by the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, and most working-class students wanted to leave schooling as soon as they possibly could. Indeed, the majority of students—some 60 percent in the 1960s and 1970s—dropped out of school at the minimum school-leaving age and went off on their own to seek employment. This was by some measure the highest rate of early school leaving among the wealthier European countries. Only the most promising students remained to study in what the British call the sixth form (grades 11 and 12) for the demanding General Certificate of Education advanced-level (A-level) exams (Eckstein and Noah 1993: 48–50). Those who passed two of these difficult exams were qualified to enter the universities, but fewer than one in five adolescents made it that far, and not many more than 10 percent completed university-level degrees (Eckstein and Noah 1993: 173–74). Paul Willis’s study of the counterschool culture of working-class students attending a secondary school in the midlands of England provides a flavor of the discontent, which developed in response to class divisions, as well as the boys’ antipathy to what they saw as the false promises of the schools: “The lads” specialize in a caged resentment which always stops just short of outright confrontation. Settled in class, as near a group as they can manage, there is a continuous scraping of chairs, a bad tempered “tut-tutting” at the simplest request, and a continuous fidgeting about which explores every permutation of sitting or lying on a chair. During



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private study, some openly show disdain by apparently trying to go to sleep with their head sideways down on the desk, some have their backs to the desk gazing out of the window, or even vacantly at the wall. There is an aimless air of insubordination ready with spurious justification and impossible to nail down. . . . Comics, newspapers and nudes under half-lifted desks melt into elusive textbooks. A continuous hum of talk flows around injunctions not to, like the inevitable tide over barely dried sand, and everywhere there are rolled-back eyeballs and exaggerated mouthings of conspiratorial secrets. (Willis 1979: 13)

Educational policy during the last generation has been intended to expand the educational attainment of students from middle- and working-class backgrounds—to reduce the number of lads and increase the number of grads. Yet the formerly class-divided structure of English schooling has created unique problems for policy makers. In their efforts to bring the system into alignment with schooling in other industrial societies, English policy makers have been forced in two directions. For those who could be induced to stay in academically oriented curricula beyond age 16, they pushed in the direction of American-style expansion of higher education opportunities. For those who could not be induced to stay in such schools, they expanded in the direction of German-style apprenticeships and job training. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the tripartite structure and the 11-plus exam were replaced with untracked comprehensive schools. In the 1980s, the government introduced a national curriculum to set standards for a unified primary and lower secondary education rather than a class-divided system. During Margaret Thatcher’s administration in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the government also introduced the further education (FE) colleges to reduce the amount of school leaving at age 16. These colleges provided vocational and academic options for 16- and 17-year-olds. These schools are not considered tertiary level and are consequently more like the German apprenticeship training system than like American community colleges or the German Fachhochschulen. The FE sector now enrolls an increasing number of adults and part-time students. The government also introduced new qualifications to encourage students to remain in school after age 16. These National Vocational Qualifications consisted of modules of coursework and practical experience; some 6,000 were introduced between 1979 and 1986. The new vocational qualifications were taken up by employers as desirable credentials for jobs that did not require higher education. (They proved overly cumbersome, however, and were replaced by a simpler system.) In 2007 the English Parliament approved raising the school-leaving age to 18, basing its decision primarily on the collapse of unskilled jobs in the economy and the resulting increase in unemployment of early school leavers (House of Commons 2015). Changes in higher education were equally extensive. In the 1980s, the government changed the secondary-school-leaving examination to allow students with a wider range of coursework to take and pass the examination. In 1991, the John Major government introduced the General National Vocational Qualifications as a bridge between vocational training and traditional academic qualifications. The qualifications provided national curricula in more than a dozen occupational fields and were marketed to employers as





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providing a mix of academic and practical skills that would be transferable across firms and industries (Brauns and Steinmann 1997). Students could obtain these qualifications in tertiary-level programs. The government established a three-year bachelor’s degree and integrated the two tiers of higher education—polytechnics and universities—into a unified structure of higher education. Most of the former polytechnics were renamed universities. New performance measures were introduced to allow universities to compete with one another to improve their standing on the basis of research productivity (Thompson, Tyler, and Howlett 1995). Each of these steps can be interpreted as an effort to catch up with educationally more advanced countries, beginning from an unpromising starting point: working-class students who were alienated from the ideology of schooling as a mode of social advancement and institutions of higher education with roots in the highly cultivated professional and landed classes. The changes resulting from these policies have been dramatic, even if the shadow of the old system remains. Today, fewer than 8 percent of UK 16- to 18-year-olds are classified as outside the net of education and training (House of Commons 2015)—quite a contrast with the 60 percent who left school at age 16 in the 1960s and 1970s. The FE sector enrolls approximately one-third of all 16- and 17-year-olds and an even larger number of adults (Department for Education 2013). Some four hundred FE colleges, equivalent to grades 11 and 12 in the United States, offer a mix of technical, vocational, and academic courses. Many students pursue vocational qualifications for middle-level jobs and move directly into the labor market. However, a small proportion of 18-year-olds (8 percent in 2010) also begin study for undergraduate degrees in the FE sector (Parry et al. 2012). Some adults also eventually enroll in higher education after attending the FE colleges. Higher education has also been thoroughly transformed since the 1980s. The proportion of the age group attending college doubled in the seven years between 1988 and 1994 alone (OECD 1996a: 333). The development of sixth-form colleges (colleges where students could prepare for university entrance while working part-time) through the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 was an important feature of this expansion, because it allowed more students to study while working. Today, more than 40 percent of UK adults, ages 30 to 34, have baccalaureate-level credentials, a proportion well above the European norm of one-third (OECD 2014: 83). Thus, a system that was once among the most restrictive in Europe has surpassed the mainstream. The English accomplished this feat by standardizing the three-year bachelor’s degree, broadening opportunities to take the examinations needed for college entry through expanding the number of courses that count as qualifying, and expanding the path to higher education through the sixth-form colleges and to a lesser degree through the FE colleges. Each of these changes has motivated more students to aspire to stay in school for the bachelor’s degree. English higher education has remained highly stratified in prestige, with the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the top rank and the University of London following not far behind (and more prestigious in some science and medical fields). The Russell Group includes other universities whose faculties are engaged in research. In the



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new competitive funding system, highly entrepreneurial universities in the Russell Group, such as the University of Warwick, have found ways to move up the ranks (B. Clark 2004), and others have found ways to distinguish themselves in particular fields. Even so, these so-called redbrick universities founded in the 1950s and 1960s and, especially, the former polytechnics lag well behind Oxford, Cambridge, and London in prestige and resources. The students who have been admitted to these venerable universities are convinced of their merit and show little of the diversity consciousness evident among students in comparable American universities (Warikoo 2016). France. The French were among the first to provide nationwide primary education. In 1830, French educational minister François Guizot introduced plans, which had already been discussed at the time of Napoleon, to develop a national system of basic education, highly centralized, broad in content, rigorous, and—in the spirit of the French Revolution—completely separate from organized religion. (The rigor of French primary schools cannot be doubted. Until the 1980s, about half of all schoolchildren repeated at least one grade.) Secondary school, however, remained the preserve of the elite. “A sharp line was drawn between primary education, which was for all young people, and secondary education, which was for the select few” (Cummings 2003: 19). As late as the 1930s, only 4 percent of French youth were admitted to the lycées, the French secondary schools. These students were almost exclusively from upper-middle-class or upper-class families (Neave 1985). The French began a long process of democratizing secondary schooling after World War II by adding a common curriculum in lower secondary schools and by reducing the amount of grade repetition (which nevertheless remains high by American standards). By the late 1950s, French prime minister Charles de Gaulle and his planners began to make inroads in democratizing secondary education. However, even in 1965, after more than a decade of reform effort, only one-fifth of French students studied in the lycées, and just half of those were able to pass the baccalauréat examination (widely known as le bac), which alone permitted admission to universities. The baccalauréat was acknowledged as one of the most demanding examinations in Europe (Eckstein and Noah 1993). The majority of students took vocational courses or general education courses (cours complémentaires), which led to nonuniversity qualifications. This situation changed radically in 1985, when the French minister of education, JeanPierre Chevènement, influenced by experts forecasting the need for more students who had passed the baccalauréat, created two new types of baccalauréat exams and raised the expected secondary school completion rate to 80 percent of the age group (de Meulemeester 2003). Today, at age 16, students are divided by academic achievement and interest into academic (in lycée general or lycée classique) and occupational streams (in lycée professionnel). The majority pursues technical or vocational training at the lycées professionnels. A fairly common practice is for students to take a general upper secondary school diploma at age 16 or 17 and then study additional subjects to qualify for employment in an occupational field. Students can prepare for a wide variety of occupational specializations. Well over 200 types of vocational certifications can be obtained on completion of studies. At the





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lowest level, these schools emphasize work orientation for future semiskilled workers. At the highest level are specialized courses for future technicians and junior managers; in the middle are highly specialized courses for apprentice skilled workers. Nevertheless, secondary school streaming in France has fewer consequences than it does in other countries because of the close connection between occupational training in secondary school and occupational training in postsecondary institutions. As planners hoped, higher education occupational credentials have become increasingly important in the labor market, and 60 percent of students in the age group now enroll in some form of postsecondary education (World Bank 2016b). Many study in short-cycle programs of two years that are not considered university level. Several different types of short-cycle diplomas and degrees are awarded. A sample of specialty areas include art and applied art, agriculture-food processing, mechanics, electronics, speech therapy, social work, and business services. Thus, occupational programs in secondary school frequently lead to more occupational training in postsecondary education. Standard university degrees are three years, followed by a two-year master’s degree for those who pursue further qualifications. The three-year university degree is intended to combine theoretical, methodological, practical, and applied teaching, as appropriate for each major field. As in the case of short-cycle higher education, university education is more thoroughly occupationally oriented than is the case in either Germany or the United States. The road to the baccalauréat once led exclusively through the academic lycées. Now, a majority of students who take le bac come from the lycée professionnel. Traditionalists have complained about high pass rates on the exam, recently running near 90 percent (Savre 2013). The proportion eligible for higher education, because of a passing score on the baccalauréat exam, shot up from 300,000 in 1970 to nearly 600,000 in 2013 (Moison 2014). The exam can take up to six hours, but the demanding ritual has a happy ending for nearly all who submit to it. Thanks to the relaxation of examination requirements, the introduction of shorter degree programs, and the dominance of vocational qualifications in higher education, the proportion of young adults (ages 30 to 34) with tertiary-level credentials has grown substantially. Indeed, by 2013, including both short-cycle (two years) and longer-cycle (three or four years) programs, 44 percent of French young people had attained tertiarylevel degrees, only 2 percent fewer than the proportion of Americans in the same age group who had attained postsecondary degrees (OECD 2014: 44). The French, unlike the British, have achieved these results by creating occupational pathways that begin in upper secondary schools and culminate in postsecondary credentials. The top 7 to 8 percent of upper secondary school students compete for a much more valuable prize than university admission. Following an extra year or two of very intensive preparation, these students take the demanding concours examination, which alone allows for admission to one of the grandes écoles. The most prestigious of the grandes écoles were established during the late 18th and early 19th centuries as institutions for training future state administrative and military leaders. Today, there are more than 200 grandes écoles, each training students for an identifiable field, such as engineering, business, or public administration.



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Admission to the most selective of the grandes écoles is considered quite a bit more important in French society than admission to Ivy League colleges would be in American society, because graduation from one of these institutions more or less guarantees a life in or close to one of the command posts of French society (Suleiman 1978; Bourdieu 1996). These are state-funded institutions, but they are funded at an elevated level. As the sociologist Christine Musselin has written, “The poor material situation of French universities is greatly aggravated by the fact that higher education budget breakdowns are highly favorable to grandes écoles, to the detriment of universities” (2004: 149). Indeed, per capita state spending on students taking preparatory classes for the concours exam is twice as large as per capita spending on matriculated university students (see OECD 2013b: 126–27). Among French sociologists, there has been a strong suspicion that social background contributed to shaping teachers’ evaluations of their students who were preparing for admission to the grandes écoles. Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the distribution of evaluative comments in a girls’ preparatory school found, for example, that the taxonomy of adjectives . . . is organized according to the hierarchy of “inferior” [lower-class] qualities—servility, vulgarity, clumsiness, slowness, poverty, etc.; “medium” [lower-middle-class] qualities—pettiness, narrowness, mediocrity, accuracy, conscientiousness, etc.; and “superior” qualities—sincerity, expansiveness, richness, facility, expertise, finesse, ingenuity, intelligence, culture, etc. . . . The most favorable epithets appear more and more frequently as the social origins of the pupils rise. . . . Parisian origins constitute an extra advantage. (Bourdieu 1988: 202, 198; sentences reorganized for clarity)

 Schooling in the Former Soviet Union  One of the more unusual cases in the industrial world’s taxonomy of school­ ing systems no longer exists. For students of the sociology of schooling, the in­ terest of the former Soviet Union lies in the purposes schooling served in that society and the tensions that existed between a class-oriented ideology and the industrial interests of the state. After the revolution of 1917, Soviet leaders quickly modernized Russia’s backward educational institutions. This was another important example of what I call democratic uplift, but rather than attempting to make academic education available to the children of workers and peasants, Soviet education took a distinctive ideological turn toward the celebration of industrial labor. Thousands of new primary and secondary schools opened in a matter of years, and teachers were trained under the strict dictates of the workers’ state. In the Soviet Union, experience with manual labor was included as part of the curriculum throughout the elementary years, and both the brightest and least motivated students were expected to become competent at industrial





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arts (Bronfenbrenner 1970). Efforts were also made to socialize children into the norms of collective life. Most children’s games in the old Soviet Union emphasized cooperative activity rather than competitive activity. Teachers encouraged competition, but this competition was rarely between individuals, as it is in the United States. Instead, students sitting in a particular row of desks would compete with other groups formed in the same way. In this way, students were encouraged to develop norms of shared contribution to group performance (Bronfenbrenner 1970). The structure of social selection in Soviet schooling, however, was not much different from that of other European systems. Tracking began at age 14 and competitive examinations were used to allocate access to higher education and the elite positions that were connected to graduation from higher education. Ironically, for most of the 70-year history of the Soviet Union, schooling provided relatively little opportunity for children from the industrial working class and the peasantry. Indeed, schooling was more thoroughly dominated at the upper levels by the technical and administrative elite than were the schooling systems of most bourgeois democracies. Competitive examinations for admission to higher education favored children whose parents had higher levels of formal education (Dobson 1977; Kerblay 1983). This de facto preference appeared to many Soviets to violate principles of the workers’ state, and it led to episodic attempts to reform the system so that children from working-class and peasant backgrounds would have greater chances of success. A prominent example was the Soviet class-affirmativeaction era of 1927–1931. During this period, Joseph Stalin changed admission policies in higher education to give preference to candidates from workingclass and peasant backgrounds. Many scholars have interpreted the policy as an effort by Stalin to not just actualize Soviet egalitarian ideas but, more important, build a cadre of extreme loyalists among the new men who were favored by his policies (Fitzpatrick 1979; Bailes 1979). After just a few years, Stalin’s experiment foundered on complaints of educators and managers about the quality of the new cohorts of university graduates, and competitive testing was reinstituted. Other episodes of class affirmative action occurred under Nikita Khrushchev in 1958–1964 and again under Leonid Brezhnev in 1969–1970. Thus, educational policy in the old Soviet Union oscillated between overriding concerns with talent discovery and social efficiency and overriding concerns with equality. Efficiency concerns, which promoted greater reliance on testing, favored students from more privileged backgrounds; equality concerns favored the lower classes to a greater degree. In spite of the Soviet Union’s proletarian ideology, talent discovery and efficiency concerns came first for all but 12 of the 70 years of Soviet rule.



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Japan: A High-Performing Test-Based System Japan has been one of the most educationally progressive countries in the world since the mid-19th century. The leaders of the modernizing Meiji Restoration of 1868 declared ­immediately after taking power that every child should be literate and attend school regularly. They looked to Europe and the United States for models. Amazingly, as many as 25,000 new schools were founded in just a few years following the Charter Oath of 1872 (Cummings 2003: 94–95). These schools looked very much like their American ­counterparts: A typical school had an external wall around a playing field, with the school prominently visible from the front gate. . . . [T]he new elementary school was a two-storey frame building of brick construction covered over with plaster and with hard wood floors. Students were expected to proceed down the pathway from the front gate to the front entrance of the school, . . . and put on their slippers. Proceeding down the hall, there were two classrooms on each side and at the back there was one room for the principal and a second for the teachers, and on the first floor there were additional classrooms. Rather than allow the children to sit on mats [as earlier schools had], the classrooms provided wooden desks for each child. (Cummings 2003: 95)

The elementary schools were “beacons of modernity, with their European architecture, their expectation that children sit on chairs at desks, and that all young people regardless of class or gender should study together in a common classroom.” The Japanese adopted the American preference for academic education for the majority. Elementary schools provided courses covering “subjects as diverse as physical and moral education and science and world geography” (Cummings 2003: 96). The pre–World War II fascist period interrupted these progressive developments, and the U.S. occupation of Japan following the war imposed new elements of the U.S. structure, notably comprehensive secondary schools. Schooling in Japan remains academic in orientation, both at the elementary and secondary levels. Today, fewer than 5 percent drop out of upper secondary school; slightly more than 15 percent take terminal upper secondary degrees, primarily in vocational subjects; and more than 75 percent go on to some form of postsecondary education, half to universities and half to junior colleges (MEXT 2012). Japan has one of the highest tertiary-level completion rates in the world at 60 percent (OECD 2015), a figure that includes both two- and four-year college degrees. To be sure, some important structural differences between the American and Japanese systems do exist: First, the system is centrally controlled; curriculum, teacher salaries, and per student expenditures are all equalized across communities. The Japanese also have small, but highly separate, vocational tracks in upper secondary school for students who have done poorly in their early years of study or prefer to work with their hands. These vocational tracks have strong links to employers (Rosenbaum and Kariya 1989). As in France, the Japanese also maintain an elite system of top-ranked public universities, the most important of which are Tokyo and Kyoto universities. These institutions are intended to prepare future corporate, government, and scientific leaders.





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Although the Japanese schooling structure is comparable in many respects to the American structure, student achievement (as measured by standardized scores on international tests) is significantly higher, especially in the fields of science and mathematics, with much less variation around the mean. Although racial-ethnic homogeneity in Japan may contribute to these results, many other industrialized societies—such as Austria and Italy—are nearly as homogeneous and yet do not produce similarly strong results. Here we can see that social expectations and targeted investments matter. Japanese families materially support and morally enforce expectations that children will work hard and achieve good marks in school. Family pride is very much connected to the school performance of children, especially male children. School is therefore a central interest in Japanese families, and nonworking mothers often buy their children’s textbooks so that they can know exactly what their children are studying (White 1987). The large family expenditures on education—some one-third of total family spending—are perhaps the best indicator of the motivational push provided by the Japanese family for educational achievement (Shields 1992). If a child fails in school, it is the fault not of the child only but also of the parents and the teacher.6 Many features of Japanese schooling also encourage proficiency in subject matter learning. The prevailing view among the Japanese is that learning is not a matter of ability but effort. Because all students are seen as having the ability to succeed, the Japanese system includes no streaming and no repetition of classes. Course materials are set nationally at a challenging level. The school day is long, and summer vacations are short. Students are expected to support one another in learning. This is a feature of the Japanese cultural emphasis on group harmony, or wa. If a student is having trouble learning a lesson, the rest of the class is expected to help the student. Group problem solving and other forms of student participation encourage students to engage with learning. As I discuss in Chapter 4, teachers have retained a high status in Japanese society, bolstered by the legal requirement that they be paid more than other civil servants (OECD 2011a). Boys are encouraged more than girls. Family pride remains tied to the success of sons rather than daughters, and Japanese families continue to emphasize the appropriateness of women in helping roles rather than directing roles (see, for example, Fujimura-Fanselow 1985). Women attend postsecondary education at the same rate as men, but the majority enrolls in two-year occupational training colleges. Nearly 90 percent of these two-year college students in Japan are women studying in such traditionally female fields as home economics, nursing, teaching, counseling, and humanities. In spite of reforms intended to increase women’s participation in four-year colleges, only 43 percent of four-year college students are women (compared to 55 percent or more in many countries of the industrialized world) (MEXT, n.d.). Even with strong family support for achievement, the effort of Japanese students would not be as high if academic performance mattered less in determining life opportunities. In East Asia, competitive examinations have a long history as a precondition to training for state service. It is therefore not surprising that standardized national testing has played an exceptionally important role in Japan (as it has in other East Asian societies). For many decades, upper secondary schools have been ranked by their success in placing graduating



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students into prestigious universities. Newspapers report annually on schools’ results on examinations, and parents want their children to attend the higher-ranked secondary schools. Students take tests for admission to these preferred high schools, thereby beginning a long period of pressure to do well on admissions tests. For university admissions, students take two types of tests: first, the national achievement test, administered to all students applying for university admissions, and second, each university’s individual admissions test. Test performance is closely connected to college and university admissions. The prestige of the university attended and the field of study are, in turn, tightly connected to the jobs students can obtain after graduation. Particular universities are closely associated with particular firms, and even when they are not, they are closely associated with higher and lower levels in Japanese organizational life. As Thomas Rohlen writes, Japan has built a well-oiled “educational machine” for harnessing effort: A simple but powerful formula . . . has dominated Japanese secondary education ever since the establishment of middle schools: the difficulty of a school’s entrance exams is the crucial measure of its students’ talent. Employers choose to allow this criterion of school reputation, rather than an individual’s grades or subjects studied, to guide their selection of personnel for managerial jobs. Entrance exams thus become the route to success. (Rohlen 1983: 58–59)

It is no wonder that Japanese students refer to the period of intense preparation for the testing that will so strongly influence their life fate as “exam hell” (Rohlen 1983). Key differences among these five systems are summarized in Table 2.1.

 Exam Hell, Hong Kong–Style  Imperial (and later, national) exams have been a central part of the selection of elites in East Asia from the time of the Tang dynasty in the late seventh century CE. For millennia, high marks on these exams alone could provide access to coveted positions in the state bureaucracy. The historians Hoi Suen and Lan Yu (2006) chronicle the lengths to which exam takers would go to pass these highly competitive examinations. These included sneaking substitute test takers in to take exams, hiring calligraphers to copy notes onto tiny rolls of paper, and continuing to take exams into old age in the hope of finally passing. Hong Kong, adopted what might have been the strictest system of elimination through examination in the modern era. Before reforms in the early years of the 21st century, only the top 2 percent finished a university education, and exam-based competition started unusually early. Entrance into good primary schools was exam based. Another exam was necessary for entry to secondary school. Still another determined qualification for entry into sixth form (or university preparation). By the time the most highly selected children had finished their educations at the highest level, they would have passed as many as seven highly demanding examinations (Morris, McClelland, and Ping





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Man 1997). Hong Kong moved toward school-based (rather than national) assessments in 2005–2007 and made further major changes in its examination structure in 2009. Today there is only one major national examination, at the end of secondary school. High scores on this test are used to qualify students for entrance into sixth form for university preparation (Cheong 2009).

Ta b l e 2 . 1 Differences in schooling structures in five industrialized countries pr i m a ry a n d l ow er sec on da ry scho ol i ng Country

Tracking in separate institutions

Equity in per capita spending

Japan France United States United Kingdom Germany

No No No No Yes (beginning age 10)

Yes Yes No No No

u pper sec on da ry scho ol i ng

Country United Kingdoma United States Japan France Germany

Graduation rates for general (academic) programs (2012 %)

Graduation rates for vocational programs (2012 %)

~80 ~80 ~70 ~50 ~50

~10 —b ~20 ~75c ~45

postsec on da ry educ ation

Country United Kingdom Japang United States France Germany

Percentage of cohort (age 30–34) with tertiary A qualifications (2012)d

Percentage of cohort (age 30–34) with tertiary B qualifications (2012)e

~40 ~35 ~35 ~30 ~20

~10 ~20 ~10 ~15 ~10

University equality esteem

Strength of linkage between elite universities and elite positionsf

No No No No Yes

Strong Strong Moderate Strong Weak

s o u r c e s : Quantitative data from OECD 2014: 44, table A1.3a, 67, table A2.1a. a  In normative time, students in the United Kingdom complete upper secondary school at age 16. Those intending university entrance then study in “sixth-form colleges” for two years. Others who graduate from upper secondary school study in “further education colleges,” where they combine academic and vocational studies in preparation for careers. However, some students do qualify for university from the FE sector. b  Formally designated vocational tracks are rare in the United States, and national-level statistics are not collected on vocational enrollments. c  Many students in France finish upper secondary school general programs by age 17 and then take additional secondary school courses to qualify for occuaptions and/or university tracks in those occupational fields. This is why international statistics show French students with moderately high graduation rates in general courses and very high graduation rates in vocational programs. d  “Tertiary A” refers to university-level (baccalaureate-level) qualifications. e  “Tertiary B” refers to short-cycle postsecondary qualifications similar to American community college (associate-level) qualifications. f  These categorizations are reputational. Except in the United States, empirical studies are dated. For the U.S. case, see Brint and Yoshikawa 2016 and Cappelli, Hamori, and Bonet 2014. g  Japanese data are for 25- to 34-year-olds.



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school structures, life chances, and student consciousness Now that we have taken a tour of five schooling systems, we are in a position to ask whether and how differences in school structures matter for students. The two big questions are whether differences in educational structure affect the life chances of students from different social classes (and racial-ethnic backgrounds) and whether they affect the consciousness of students.

School Structures and Life Chances Sociologists know that certain kinds of school structures can be detrimental to the life chances (or upward mobility opportunities) of working-class and low-income students. A generation of post–World War II reformers found that systems that separate children early in life lower the probabilities that working- and lower-class students will continue schooling through secondary school or enter college (Halsey, Heath, and Ridge 1980; Husén 1965). In addition, this generation of reformers established that very rigorous secondaryschool-leaving examinations (or college entrance examinations) also reduced the intake of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into higher education. Thus, it was not surprising that when Scotland shifted its rigorous A-level examinations to an exam that tested students only on course materials all students had encountered in their school work, pass rates soared, particularly among students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Gamoran 1996). The connection between academically challenging tests and a family’s cultural level (as measured by advanced educations and professional or managerial occupations) is strong, whether one looks at the French concours exam (Bourdieu 1988), the English A-levels (Halsey, Heath, and Ridge 1980), or even the SAT exam in the United States (Soares 2007: chap. 6). However, structures of schooling are clearly not the primary influence on the prospects of attainment for lower-class groups. Perhaps most important is the fact that dynamic educational systems themselves create new opportunities for students from lower-income and less educated families by providing them with valuable credentials and by bringing them into contact with students from more privileged backgrounds. In this respect, educational expansion seems itself to be a powerful prescription for improving the circumstances of working-class and lower-middle-class students (see, for example, Breen et al. 2009). Life chances are also directly influenced by developments in the world of work. If young adults live in dynamic economic regions, even those employed in what appear to be low-level service jobs will find that their salaries and quality of life tend to improve because of the spillover effects of the high incomes and expanding opportunities of the companies in those regions (Moretti 2013), as has happened in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, for example. Moreover, some structures that in theory should limit the life chances of lower-income students do not appear to be as detrimental in practice as theory suggests they should be. For example, the early tracking system in Germany is not as detrimental to the life chances of working-class students as it would be in the absence of the excellent skills produced by the country’s dual system of vocational training. Similarly, the high proportions





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of students in vocational tracks in French upper secondary schools do not seem to have been detrimental to the life chances of most working-class students, because the tracks connect rather seamlessly to further occupational training in tertiary education. These complexities require us to develop a sophisticated view of the relationship between schooling structures and students’ life chances. Although some early tracking and testing structures were undoubtedly connected to the perpetuation of social inequalities in the past, in our era educational expansion itself seems to be more important for reducing inequalities than restrictive structures are for preserving them. The rising tide of educational attainment lifts many boats. Students from the poorest backgrounds are still highly disadvantaged in schooling systems throughout the industrialized world, but the opportunities of those from working-class and lower-middle-class families have improved compared to earlier eras. Some of this improvement reflects occupational upgrading, but much of it is linked to higher levels of educational attainment (Breen et al. 2009; Shavit, Arum, and Gamoran 2007: chap. 1). (I discuss the effects of educational expansion on social mobility in more detail in Chapter 6.) Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) bring home the force of these points. The United States and Germany seem to be schooling opposites, but on some important measures their outcomes are quite similar. While most OECD countries have seen sizable upward educational mobility from one generation to the next, about half of U.S. and German students attain the same level of education as their parents did (OECD 2014: 88). In the case of the United States, this comparatively high level of intergenerational immobility is likely because of the slow growth of college graduation rates. In the German case, it likely has much to do with the success of the dual system. Moreover, U.S. and German students are among the most likely in the OECD to experience downward educational mobility, meaning that a relatively large proportion of students (more than 15 percent) have attained lower levels of education than their parents attained (Figure 2.2). Restrictiveness and selective examinations may have something to do with this in the German case. In the American case, inadequate preparation in secondary schools and high college drop-out rates are probably the more important factors (Bound, Lovenheim, and Turner 2009). School structures may be more important for the distinctive mobility paths they create than for their system-level effects on students’ life chances. The German system, as we have seen, creates strong links between apprenticeships and skilled blue-collar jobs and lower-level technical jobs; the French and Japanese systems create strong links between elite higher education institutions and top corporate or government management. In the United States, top management in the energy industry is dominated by graduates from a handful of public universities located in southwestern states, while top management in the financial services sector is dominated by graduates of elite private colleges located on the Eastern Seaboard (Brint and Yoshikawa 2016; Rivera 2012). Studies of how school structures affect students’ life chances should, therefore, continue to focus not just on such matters as the difference that early branching and rigorous college placement tests make for the reproduction of social inequalities, as an earlier generation of reformers did, but also on the institutional policies and social networks that link specific school sites and specific job sites.



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Status quo: below upper secondary education Status quo: upper secondary or postsecondary nontertiary education

Upward mobility

Status quo: tertiary education

Downward mobility Russian Federation South Korea Finland Flanders (Belgium) France Ireland Poland Netherlands Canada Estonia Sweden Japan Australia Average Spain United Kingdom Denmark Norway Italy Slovak Republic United States Austria Germany Czech Republic

% 70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

0

10

20

30

40

50

Figure 2.2 Percentage of 25- to 64-year-old nonstudents whose educational attainment is higher than (upward mobility), lower than (downward mobility), or the same as (status quo) that of their parents, 2012 s o u r c e : OECD 2014: 88. n o t e : Countries are ranked in descending order of the percentage of adults with low literacy proficiency whose parents have attainment below upper secondary education. The sample for the Russian Federation does not include the population of the Moscow municipal area.

School Structures and Consciousness In some ways, students throughout the industrial world are now participants in a global youth culture. Blue jeans, popular music, cell phones, shopping malls, and the adventures of increasing independence are great attractions nearly everywhere. However, underneath these familiar activities lie some important national differences in students’ outlooks on the world, and these differences are related to the design of schooling in different countries.

60

70 %





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You may already have pictures in your mind of national student types based on stereotypes from books or movies: the cultivated Briton; the hard-driving Japanese; the optimistic American. Some writers argue that national types are best explained as products of a unique national character or of particular historical experiences. However, differences in institutional structure are probably the immediate source of some national differences in adolescents’ personality and outlook. Differences in schooling structures may be connected to such diverse features of consciousness as the perception of status boundaries, the willingness to concentrate intensively, the extent of opportunity consciousness versus class consciousness, and even levels of confidence about the future. (I use the cautious word “may” because the cross-national evidence is not yet completely convincing about some of these outcomes.) How might school structures be related to something as seemingly unrelated as where people draw status lines? The answer is that lines of institutional demarcation are also lines of social distinction. In Germany and Sweden, where all state universities are considered prestigious, the distinction between the university and nonuniversity educated is what matters. In the United States, where colleges and universities are extremely numerous and diverse, status is connected instead to the selectivity of the college (and, at least equally, to the selectivity of a field of study). Similarly, in societies like France, Japan, and England, which have very strongly delineated elite tracks, a major status distinction divides graduates of the elite universities from everyone else. The kinds of testing and job linkage structures that develop in schooling systems also affect student consciousness. The extraordinary discipline of Japanese secondary school students makes sense because exams figure decisively in admission to higher education, and higher education figures decisively in later careers. The high investment of Japanese parents in the education of their children is, of course, another factor that encourages this intensity. But this, too, is connected to the strong ties between schooling success and adult status. Surely, the cultivation and air of superiority that once marked British sixth formers (those in the final two years of preparation for university) were connected to the fact that fewer than 20 percent passed the advanced-level qualifying exams that allowed for university admission. By contrast, the lesser importance of college admissions tests in the United States and the loose connection of schooling to jobs work together to blunt academic competitiveness in secondary school. In such a system, interests in popular culture and peer group friendships tend to fill the space unoccupied by academic pursuits (Milner 2016). More inclusive systems tend to give rise to higher levels of opportunity consciousness than class consciousness (Brint and Karabel 1989: 220–25). Few American students experience obvious blocks to their educational mobility, such as rigidly separate vocational tracks or life-defining examinations. The sense that the future remains open is pervasive in such a system. The more restricted systems give rise to a sharper sense of what is possible for people of a certain social class. In much of Europe, at least until recently, the vertical vision of the upwardly mobile was not as common as in the United States, and a sense of identification with one’s own social class was consequently somewhat more common. In recent decades the vast expansion of educational attainment in Europe, together



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with declining union membership and rising consumerism, has, by contrast, encouraged more opportunity consciousness and a loosening of class identifications. (See Michelat and Simon 2004: 142–45.) A sense of the possibility of upward mobility through schooling does not necessarily translate into a firm confidence about the future, however. Young people are rarely more anxious than at the stage of life in which their fate is undecided. For the majority of students, the American system pushes fateful decisions far out into late adolescence and early adulthood. In systems where occupational choices occur earlier, students’ expectations are also shaped and stabilized earlier—and, for most, the period of anxiety about finding a footing in life is reduced accordingly (Buchmann and Dalton 2002; Schneider and Stevenson 1999).

explaining the variety of schooling structures Some sociologists think of institutions as composed of parts that vary together as a system. For these sociologists, changes in one part of the system encourage other adjustments until a new equilibrium is reached. Other sociologists reject the systems metaphor and focus instead on the social context, institutional inheritances, and policy decisions that give rise to distinctive institutional designs. The comparative historical approach provides a better guide in the case of school structures, but the systems approach merits at least brief discussion.

The Systems Approach It is possible to think of schooling as a system of interrelated parts, albeit much more loosely connected than, say, an automobile engine’s parts. These schooling parts include, for example, the organization of tiers and tracks, the amount of screening that occurs because of standardized testing, and the strength of linkages between schools and jobs. The parts of schooling systems seem to some researchers to bear a logical connection to one another. For instance, compared to more open and inclusive systems, more restrictive systems might seem logically to be built on clearer distinctions between tiers and more testing to determine who will be selected into higher tiers (B. Clark 1983; Eckstein and Noah 1993). Indeed, as I have shown, policy makers can influence the flow of students through levels of schooling by introducing occupational options and qualifications, changing the requirements for key examinations, and adjusting the length of time necessary to obtain degrees. However, system elements do not always mesh as expected. High academic standards in secondary school would seem logically to go with low rates of university enrollment. But the Japanese have both high standards and high enrollments in university-level education. Conversely, the Swedish system produces comparatively few university graduates, even though it de-emphasizes testing and provides financial aid to all students who need it. As these examples indicate, we will be misled if we imagine that a strong systems logic forces the key parts of schooling systems to vary together. (See Table 2.1.)





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If systems logic will not take us very far, what, then, can help explain these differences in institutional design? In my view, we should focus instead on how political decisions about schooling have been made in the two generations since the end of World War II and, no less important, on the social and organizational context in which these decisions have been made. To develop explanations for structural differences in schooling, we need good comparative political sociology combined with good comparative public policy analysis.

The Comparative Historical Approach There can be no simple answers to the question about how countries have ended up with one of a handful of structural designs for schooling. Good answers are possible, however, if we keep in mind the following essential elements: (1) the two starting points from which contemporary systems developed and the similar pressures to which governments responded in the post–World War II period; (2) the institutional legacies, internal social divisions, and regional models that influenced national schooling designs; and (3) the role of policy makers in channeling demand along lines consistent with national (or transnational) social and economic development goals. Different starting points, common pressures for change. Changes in schooling systems since World War II have been, above all, the result of government efforts to respond to changing expectations about how much education is enough and to channel these changing expectations in the direction of national economic development goals. The major decision has been whether to adopt the American model of general and academic secondary education for most students and relatively open access to higher education or whether to retain traditional European tracking structures and, especially, more restricted access to university-level education. Most governments at first compromised between these two models by increasing access and equalizing curricula at lower levels while pushing differentiated curricula back later in the secondary school years (Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams 1983). Indeed, among the industrial societies, with few exceptions, only the English-speaking democracies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and some East Asian countries (such as Japan and South Korea) enroll a majority of upper secondary school students in academic curricula. In most of the German-speaking world and in France, Italy, and several countries in the former Soviet Union, the majority of upper secondary students are enrolled in prevocational or vocational programs (OECD 2014: 68; see also Altinok 2012). Expansive tendencies in the U.S. system were already well established before World War II. Substantially more students graduated from upper secondary school and attended college in the United States than anywhere else in the world. In particular, the large number of colleges and universities already established in the United States before the war encouraged competition for students and consequently high levels of college going. American policy makers reinforced these expansive pressures first by stating shortly after World War II that at least one-third of the college age cohort had the intellectual capacity to obtain higher education credentials and later by adopting social reform goals in the 1960s for improving the opportunities of minorities and women. These commitments



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led to the creation of relatively generous financial aid programs and affirmative action policies aimed at increasing rather than limiting college enrollments. The conditions prevailing in Germany following World War II provide a sharp contrast to those in the United States. In Germany, decentralization and a divided reform movement permitted conservatives to contain the rising social demand for schooling within a highly tracked structure. The Germans lacked a crusader who could push reform to the top of the agenda against the fears of conservatives about the quality of academic schooling and the fears of the well-organized left that a reformed system would lead to the more complete subordination of workers. In the more conservative German regions, the idea of common secondary schooling for all students never gained a hearing (Heidenheimer 1973). Most teenagers enrolled in the dual system of vocational training. The success of the dual system reduced pressures for expansion at higher levels of the system. The German example suggests that high wages and skills in industry are correlated with reduced demand for higher education, whereas low wages and skills in industry are correlated with high demand for higher education credentials (Maurice, Sellier, and Silvestre 1986). In the mid-1960s, with the election of a Labour government, the British belatedly abandoned their system of highly tracked lower secondary schooling. However, they maintained a higher education system very nearly as restrictive as the one in Germany. Since the 1970s, the English have engaged in a self-conscious policy of modernization, which has greatly reduced this legacy of class division without yet entirely eliminating it. The result has been a complete overhaul of English secondary schooling and higher education since the 1970s: the introduction of the FE college sector and youth credits and apprenticeships for school leavers, the creation of a unified higher education system, changed examination requirements, and a weakening of the influence of Oxford and Cambridge over academic culture in England. Faced with less serious social cleavages, most European governments adapted more quickly than the English to increased social demand for schooling while continuing at first to accommodate the quality concerns of academic elites. Most did so by democratizing lower levels of secondary schooling while introducing highly differentiated occupational streaming in the upper secondary schools and, later, in postsecondary education. France is a notable example of this approach. More recently, European governments have watered down college entrance examinations and introduced opportunities for vocational students to obtain postsecondary credentials, thereby greatly expanding their higher education systems. Institutional legacies, internal social divisions, and the influence of regional neighbors. Institutional legacies provide both constraints on policy makers and in some cases unusual opportunities to claim comparative advantages. The large and diverse set of colleges and universities in the United States certainly represented an opportunity for policy makers to build a more educated workforce than was possible in the rest of the developed world until the 1980s and 1990s. American leadership in higher education continues because of the prominence of its leading research universities, another advantage of the early development of higher education institutions, particularly those that were well supported by states or private donors. The German dual system has presented a unique opportunity





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to claim a comparative advantage in the development of skilled workers, one that has been well noted and copied, albeit with mixed results, by policy makers in several countries (Euler 2013). By contrast, in spite of widespread concerns about the quantity and quality of vocational education in the United States, the institutional inheritance of community colleges as primary engines for vocational education makes it very unlikely that an apprenticeship system could ever find root in the United States. The French grandes écoles, an inheritance of the Napoleonic era, have been both a point of pride and a constraint on the development of other French universities, whose funding is weak because such a high proportion of state support goes to the preparation of future leaders in the classes préparatoires and the grandes écoles. In much of Eastern Europe, the legacy of the Sovietera emphasis on worker-centered education has left a legacy of support for vocational education in secondary schools, one that continues in spite of evidence that vocational education is associated with lower net performance on international tests of educational achievement (Altinok 2012). Choices about the shape of schooling systems have also been influenced by countryspecific social divisions. In England, exceptionally strong class divisions limited the prospects of educational reform longer than in most of Europe and led to the development of an entirely new institution, the FE colleges, as a class-friendly response to government interests in reducing early school leaving. Racial-ethnic and religious differences can also matter. Turkish immigrants in Germany and North African immigrants in France, for example, remain largely outside the higher education structures of those countries, and only the beginnings of affirmative action policies have been considered as mechanisms for increasing participation of immigrant groups in higher levels of the educational system. The sharp gender divisions in Japanese society have largely kept women out of the competition for the most desirable spaces in higher education long after gender has faded as a determining factor in many other developed societies. This division has also encouraged the unique development in Japan of two-year colleges oriented to the training of women for sex-segregated occupations. It is clear that structural elements pioneered by a particular country are more likely to have an influence on nearby regional neighbors than elsewhere. This is evident in the borrowing of the British three-year bachelor’s degree initially by the French and later by the European Union as a whole. It is evident also in the influence of the Japanese examination system and Japanese principles of education within the East Asia region. Similarly, the German-speaking Austrians and Swiss have developed school systems with very similar designs to the Germans, including early tracking, an emphasis on apprenticeships following lower secondary schooling, and comparatively low levels of university enrollment. The role of policy makers’ choices. Within these contexts, the decisions of national policy makers (and increasingly transnational policy makers) cannot be underestimated. Policy makers have been able to influence the flow of students through the system by building new types of schools, introducing new occupational curricula and qualification levels, changing examination requirements, and altering the length of degree programs. Schooling remains largely a state responsibility, and educational ministries in all industrial countries have been interested in coordinating school studies with the occupational



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needs of their economies. In general, they tend to consider the workforce of the future as requiring higher levels of schooling. These similarities reflect a universal recognition of the state’s interest in an educated citizenry and in the connection of schooling to labor market circumstances. They also reflect the revolution in expectations that has been one of the fruits of industrialism and affluence, as well as rational fears about the work prospects of those who leave school early. They have led to many distinct efforts to coordinate school and work, including the dual system and Fachhochschulen in Germany, the FE colleges and polytechnics in England, and the proliferation of educational qualifications for occupational entry in France (and in many other countries). In recent years, higher education enrollments have been allowed to trend upward throughout the developed world in response to the perception of an increasing labor market demand for advanced credentials. This has often required adjusting requirements for secondary-school-leaving examinations to allow students from technical and vocational programs to take the exams and creating new postsecondary curricula in vocational fields. At the same time, the value of the leading university degrees has been preserved, both through limiting admission to high-demand fields (such as medicine) via numerus clausus mechanisms and through maintaining high levels of selectivity in elite institutions. In these ways, modern educational systems have managed to satisfy both social demand for increased educational opportunity and upper-class interests in the production and reproduction of an elite stratum. A good case can be made for looking at the schooling systems of the industrialized world through a national and regional rather than a global lens. By examining six schooling systems (including that of the former Soviet Union) in some detail in this chapter, I have suggested as much. If we focus on shared structural elements, we could identify regional clusters among the Anglo-American democracies, in the German-speaking world, in East and Southeast Asia, in Northern Europe, and in the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet bloc. (For a valuable contribution along these lines, see Cummings 2003.) Yet the policy actors advocating a single global model of schooling are at least as influential as those who reinforce national and regional models. The United States was the first transnational actor in the post–World War II period. The U.S. system of mass secondary and, later, mass higher education exercised a pervasive influence following World War II as the rest of the industrialized world struggled to recover from war and the United States provided support for the development of American-style institutions. Over the last several decades, international organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union (EU), the OECD, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the World Bank have facilitated convergence by disseminating policy and statistical information among member states and by promoting a common set of educational policy recommendations. We can see the coordination of transnational policy elites in recent primary and secondary school educational policies that have encouraged decentralization of decision making about texts and resource allocations to the school level and greater accountability at the national level through school-based assessments and international testing programs (OECD 2014). Coordination is also notable at the postsecondary level. The Bologna Agreement, for





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example, has led to higher levels of postsecondary degree completion throughout Europe by means of the standardized three-year bachelor’s degree, followed by the two-year master’s degree. Given the consensus of educational policy makers and the influence of their tools to promote coordination, the schooling systems of industrial societies may tend to converge still more in the future.

conclusion Industrialized societies produce higher levels of educational attainment than developing societies. Schooling is more organized and teachers are better prepared. The foundations of schooling systems in the industrialized world are very similar to one another. But schooling structures have not yet converged completely. The American educational structure resembled a giant missile-staging system insofar as it gave students a strong boost toward higher levels of education. The great majority of students studied and still study general or academic subjects until they reach college. The upward propulsion carries large numbers into higher education, where for the first time consequential forms of differentiation begin. The German system, by contrast, resembled a branching system of train tracks that split a short time after the train leaves its originating station. Trains on the separate tracks carry children destined for different kinds of work. Between these two extremes were systems that differentiated students later than the Germans but earlier than the Americans. Systems like those in France start off looking like the American common schooling system but placed most students into vocational courses of study by age 16. These systems at first limited entry into higher education to the academically oriented minority. The size of the academic and vocational layers in differentiated systems can vary substantially. Some, such as the Japanese and American systems, push children along together through age 16 and then separate them into a relatively narrow vocational track, a bulging middle track for students engaged in general academic curricula, and a thin layer of elite training. Most systems, however, direct a majority of students into programs leading to vocational qualifications. Until recently, the vast majority of vocational students moved directly into the labor market upon completion of upper secondary school programs (or before). Since the mid-1980s, most governments in the industrialized world have encouraged both larger academic tracks in secondary school and the possibility for movement from secondary school vocational programs into tertiary-level occupational education. Contemporary differences in schooling structure do not result from any deep-seated patterns of national character or culture. Rather, they help produce aspects of national character. Status identifications, for example, are associated with the most prominent lines of school differentiation. Undifferentiated higher education systems create status lines based on occupational expertise rather than aristocratic elitism. By contrast, those systems in which elite tracks are sharply differentiated produce status systems strongly marked by elitism. Other characteristic expressions of national culture from the extent of class and opportunity consciousness to the extent of intensity or carefree confidence are, I argue, also connected to structures of schooling.



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These structures are largely the result of political decisions made by policy makers beginning from two different starting points and in response to the common pressure of increased social demand for schooling. The two different starting points are the premises of democratic uplift and elite preparation. These premises reflect different class and ideological circumstances at the beginning of the age of mass schooling. In the United States, the dominance of the small-property-owning class and evangelical Protestantism supported premises of democratic uplift. In Europe, the dominance of propertied and cultivated elites in a more class-divided society supported the premises of elite preparation. These two starting points led to radically different levels of enrollment at higher levels of schooling in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning from these two distinct starting points, governments have been inclined to supply more education in the hope of fostering social, economic, and technological development. They have sometimes produced and sometimes responded to increasing social demand for educational opportunities. Modern educational systems have not followed a single standard-design model. Instead, they have shown the influence of political forces (such as degree of centralization), social forces (such as the strength of class, racial-ethnic, and gender divisions), and institutional legacies (such as the prestige and endowments of elite universities). Policy makers have worked to expand educational opportunities, and particularly to provide more opportunities connected to the labor market, within national contexts shaped by these forces. Schooling systems in the developed world are gradually becoming more alike. Industrialized countries, for example, require attendance of children for at least 10 years between ages 6 and 16. All have, in addition, made efforts to push education back into the preprimary years and to democratize secondary schooling and higher education so as to provide greater opportunities for students from less advantaged social backgrounds. The concern for access, together with the conviction that future work will require higher levels of knowledge and skill, makes higher education a growth sector throughout the industrial world. Chapter 3 shows that the governments of developing countries have many of the same interests and objectives, but their schooling systems face a different set of circumstances— most notably, greater physical insecurity and economic need among students and many fewer resources with which to provide schooling for all.

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schooling in the developing world

According to the United Nations, fewer than 50 countries (of 188) are highly developed (UNDP 2014). The remaining countries are at varying levels of development, including more than 80 that would qualify by any measure as struggling to provide adequate income and health and education resources to their populace. The developing world includes most of the Southern Hemisphere: much of Latin America and the Caribbean; some of the war-torn lands of Southeast and East Asia, such as Cambodia, Myanmar, and North Korea; islands like Papua New Guinea in the southern Pacific Ocean; the southern Asia peninsula that includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; many of the Arab countries of the Middle East (though not most of the Gulf States); and virtually all of Africa. Some people living in industrialized societies envy the rich folk knowledge of rural people in these less developed parts of the world. They believe that people in these areas interact in a simpler and more satisfying way with their environments. These sentiments echo those of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1964). Writing in the mid1700s, Rousseau criticized the unnaturalness of urban, commercial civilization and exalted the greater sense of integration of societies untouched by the corrupting influence of urban civilization. However popular these views may be on a few college campuses in the industrial world (and among supporters of Green parties in Europe), the leaders of less developed countries have consistently rejected them—and for compelling reasons. Most inhabitants of imagined idyllic villages actually live in destitute conditions, lacking the amenities of the modern world, from indoor plumbing to cell phones. The historian Daniel Kevles summed up this reality well: Stripped of the gauzy romanticism of myth, the pre-industrial village was for most people a place of exhausting and unremitting subsistence labor, harnessing men, women, and children to the mind-numbing tasks of farm and household. It subjected most of its inhabitants to local prejudices, enforced ignorance, and arbitrary power, while leaving them vulnerable to devastating diseases and early death. (Kevles 1995: 4)



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Under the circumstances, it is little wonder that modernization has been the great rallying cry of people in less developed countries. “Modernization” refers to the cluster of social processes—economic development, improved communications and transportation, the creation of progress-oriented mentalities—that are both the cause and the effect of movement from poverty-stricken traditional societies to prosperous industrial societies. The leaders of the world’s less developed countries have consistently seen schooling for the masses as a symbol of progress and modernity and as a means of economic development. In the words of Sékou Touré, the leader of the independence movement in Guinea: Man’s social behavior and economic activities are directly conditioned by the quality of his education. It is in order to free the youth of this country from all the social evils inherited from the past that [we] are anxious to develop educational facilities and allocate an important share of [the] budget to educational purposes. (Touré 1965: 125)

The hopes of leaders like Touré have not been completely realized in the developing world. This chapter considers schooling in the developing world in the context of the aspirations of modernizing leaders and the obdurate problems they face. The chapter concentrates on three major topics: (1) how the schooling systems in the developing world have been influenced by colonialism, postcolonial politics, and indebtedness; (2) the successes and failures of schooling in the contemporary developing world; and (3) the complicated relationship between schooling and economic development. Other important topics, such as patterns of teaching and learning in the developing world, are discussed in later chapters of the book.

background of schooling in developing societies To understand schooling in the contemporary developing world, it is necessary to understand something of the impact of colonialism, the hopes inspired by nationalist movements, and the specific problems that hamper development: poverty, traditionalism, and physical insecurity. In recent years, these problems have become less pronounced in many countries but have worsened in a few.

The Colonial Legacy Nearly all developing countries were once colonies—that is, they were under the direct administrative rule of one or another of the European powers—or in the case of several East Asian countries, under the rule of Japanese colonial power. The Americas broke free from European rule in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but most countries in Africa, the Near East, and Asia won their independence only in the past 70 years. Between 1945 and 1968, 66 countries gained political independence from colonial rule. Thus, most of the developing world consists of rather new states. Colonial rulers were mainly interested in raw materials, cheap labor, and acquiescent subjects. Schooling for the masses was sometimes considered helpful for creating a more productive and sympathetic workforce, but it was a comparatively low priority. Racism played a major role in shaping the attitudes of the colonizers to the colonized. In the





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absence of strong official support, Christian missionaries sometimes introduced formal education as a way of evangelizing the indigenous populations. Some improvements in schooling occurred after World War II, perhaps as a reaction to the genocidal racism of the Nazis, but they remained in line with colonial interests, rather than those of the indigenous peoples. Little technical or agricultural schooling was provided, and schooling was infused with the content and ethos of the colonial powers. It also continued to be racially segregated and unbalanced. At the higher levels, schools enrolled the children of virtually all the colonial administrations but less than 1 percent of the ruled. For example, of the 25,000 secondary students in Kenya in the years before independence, only 8,000 were Africans (Eshiwani 1985). It is not surprising that the outlooks of rural people in this period were inwardly turned and parochial. When the political scientist Daniel Lerner (1958) asked poor farmers in Turkey to comment on the policies of the government, the farmers looked at him with blank, amused, or quizzical expressions. It was impossible for them to put themselves in the role of distant authorities or to understand why they might want to. But colonialism did provide fertile ground for the nationalist movements that fought for independence. Typically, nationalist sentiment emerged first among the country’s native-born elites, who had been exposed to high-quality elementary and secondary schooling and usually to higher education abroad. These were the people whom colonial administrators depended on to help manage the indigenous population and support colonial government and business enterprise. Nearly all the leaders of the nationalist struggle in what we now call the developing world—Gandhi, Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah, Mohammed V, U Nu, Jinnah, Ben Bella, Keita, Azikiwe, Nasser, Kenyatta, Nyerere, Bourguiba, Lee, Sékou Touré—came from the gentry and professional classes and studied at the most important universities in England and France, such as the London School of Economics and the Sorbonne (von der Mehden 1969: 72–90). Anticolonial ideas and sentiments, cultivated in discussions at universities, were among the unintended exports of the Western metropoles to their colonies in the rest of the world. The Chinese case is consistent in many respects. Sun Yat-sen, a nationalist and democratic leader of the early 20th century, also came from a comfortable family background but received his education in Hawaii and Hong Kong, returning as a revolutionary leader to confront the dynastic warlords who had ruled China for millennia. Korea and Manchuria fell briefly under Japanese colonial rule, and after the defeat of Japan in World War II, China played a role in their liberation.

Continuing Problems Measured in historic terms, life in most of the developing world today is improving at an encouraging pace. People now live longer on average than before, are more likely to have enough food to avoid hunger, and are more often literate (UNDP 2014). Most countries made substantial gains on indicators of economic and social progress during 1990–2008. These gains were led by improvements in health services, which reduced maternal and child mortality, and by increasing literacy rates and skill development. More governments



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were able to introduce social protection measures, such as income support, to protect the most vulnerable. Even so, average growth in national income per capita, longevity, and educational attainment slowed in most countries following the worldwide economic recession in 2008, and the 30 least developed countries have made little or no progress on these indicators since 1990 (UNDP 2014: 34). Modernizing leaders in many countries continue to be faced with resistant problems related to poverty and inequality, traditionalism, and physical insecurity. In sub-Saharan Africa and some other countries, such as Bangladesh and Haiti, these problems remain acute. Poverty and inequality. Income inequalities between countries remain very sizable, with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2011 ranging from more than $40,000 in the most highly developed countries to less than $3,000 in the least developed countries (UNDP 2014: 199). Wealth inequalities are greater still. In 2011, people residing in just 15  highly developed countries owned more than 85 percent of the world’s wealth. The wealthy countries were led by the United States, whose citizens held more than one-fifth of wealth (Davies, Lluberas, and Shorrocks 2012). Virtually every economic and social indicator—trade, living standards, health, schooling, and political stability—show dra­ matic gaps along the divide between fewer than 50 countries with high national income per capita and the remainder of the world’s 140-plus countries. Literacy is a basic tool for navigating the world. It is very nearly universal in the developed world but still under 50 percent in 10 sub-Saharan African countries (and occasionally below 20 percent for rural women) (UNESCO, n.d.). In industrial societies, completion of primary education is essentially universal; in the least developed countries primary school dropout rates frequently exceed 40 percent of the youngest age cohort (UNDP 2014: 194–95). Perhaps most noteworthy of all: public expenditures on schooling per inhabitant are on average 20–30 times lower in the developing world than in the industrialized world (UNDP 2014: 195). Textbook sharing between many students (or lack of textbooks altogether) is still the norm, not the exception (Cummings 2008: 200–201). In every respect, the material conditions of schooling in developing countries are worse than the material conditions of schooling in the industrial world. In low-income developing countries, and particularly in rural areas, primary school students may attend an open-air school or study in a shabbily constructed building that lacks such basic educational resources as maps, globes, science equipment, and library books. The teachers in these schools have less formal education on average than high school graduates in the United States. Students may share their classrooms with more than 50 other children, a good many of whom are chronically undernourished, parasite ridden, and hungry. A team of Indian social scientists describe one rural school in a poor province: The children huddle in two rooms on sacking brought from home. The second room is very dark. There is no teaching equipment whatsoever. . . . Children write on their slate, or play. The playground is full of mud and slime. . . . There is no toilet. . . . The only teaching aid available in all schools is a stick to beat the children. (PROBE Team 1999: 40–43)

Poverty of this magnitude is invariably a scourge of schooling. The differences are well illustrated by a study by Uday Desai (1991) of the factors statistically associated with





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school dropout in an Indian village. Living in a slum and not having educational supplies in the home were two factors, both obvious enough. But two other factors also stood out: not having bathroom facilities in the house and living far from a source of drinking water. In rich countries, we tend to forget how much simple physical energy may be necessary to cope with the basic demands of life. Parents of poorly nourished children are often unwilling to allow their children to attend school. This simple fact is an important explanation of relatively low primary school completion rates in the poorest regions and countries of the world. The developing countries of Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Arab states are, in general, not as impoverished as countries in sub-Saharan Africa or the rural areas of the South Asian peninsula that includes India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Indeed, it is frequently better to think of the wealth of countries of the world in terms of a continuum rather than a sharp break between rich and poor. Book ownership is one such graded measure on this continuum. Studies of book ownership are now less common because the focus has shifted to other media. Nevertheless, books remain central to literacy. Earlier estimates by United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) indicated that in the industrialized countries, every inhabitant owned on average five books. In the better-off developing countries, such as Chile and Ukraine, every 5 to 10 inhabitants owned one book. In the very poorest countries, such as Chad and Niger, people outnumbered books by 50 or more to 1 (UNESCO 1994: 32). Traditionalism. Poverty is also associated with another impediment to development: traditional outlooks, which revere the way things have always been. The sociologist Edward Shils noted that the timeless ways of the past weighed heavily on the ambitious plans of leaders of the new states: Fealty to rulers, respect for the aged, bravery in war, obligations to one’s kin, responsiveness to the transcendent powers which make and destroy men’s lives—these are [the] virtues [of traditional societies]. . . . The freedom of the individual, economic progress, a concern for national unity and dignity, and an interest in the larger world have little place in the outlook. (Shils 1975: 496)

Certain groups in developing countries suffer particularly from these traditional outlooks. Women (especially rural women) are acutely disadvantaged in many developing countries, because their role is socially defined to be central in the private sphere of the family but entirely secondary in the public sphere (Alrabaa 1985; Robertson 1985). In most of the developing world, rural populations are more resistant to changing established ways than are urban groups. (In countries like China where rural populations are migrating in large numbers to cities, this resistance to change is much weaker, and many people see education as closely connected to their future opportunities or those of their children.) Often the schooling gaps between these more traditionally oriented groups and other members of the society are extreme: UNESCO estimates that of the 780 million adult illiterates in the world, two-thirds are women. In extreme cases, half of women may be illiterate compared to one-quarter of men (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2014). Urban-rural



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differences are frequently severe. Not long ago in Colombia only 20 percent of rural children finished primary school compared with 60 percent of urban children (UNESCO 2005). In nine countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, and Zambia), fewer than two out of three youths were projected to be able to write by 2015 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2013). Poverty and traditionalism create the basis for a half-hidden, half-open conflict between schools and families. In rural areas, children are valuable workers on family farms. This is especially true when farms are large enough to require the work of many but budgets are too tight for the employment of hired labor. Compulsory schooling may be entirely ineffective in the face of these opposing economic incentives. Researchers have attributed a good part of the high dropout rates from elementary school characteristic of many developing countries to precisely these factors. A generation ago, minors in rural Paraguay, for example, contributed on average one-quarter of the family income, and in rural Indonesia boys could earn as much as 40 percent of the family income as agricultural laborers (UNDP 1994). Even in cities, young children can be important auxiliary earners for their families, or they may be turned loose at young ages to fend for themselves. In the mid-2010s, the United Nations estimated that 150 million children worldwide, equivalent to half the American population, lived at least for brief periods on the streets (UNESCO, n.d.). Another factor contributing to high dropout rates is the disconnection between the experience of school life and the experience of home and community life. In her reminiscence of an early visit to rural Mexico, the anthropologist Nancy Hornberger suggests several bases for alienation from schooling: In the mountains outside of San Cristobal, Mexico, [I wondered] what the Tzotzeilspeaking children think and feel as they sat in the freezing cold morning fog, on unfamiliar school room chairs, listening to a language no one spoke in their homes, required to attend school by an unknown and distant state. (Hornberger 1987: 210)

Although success in school may be supported in the expressed values of the village community, such success in fact exposes students to social and psychological tensions. Successful students in a village near Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania were labeled by peers (and sometimes by their families) as “disrespectful” and caught up in “European ways.” The cross-pressures led many to avoid studying, both at home and in public, and also to experience repeated bouts of illness (Stambach 1998: 504). Physical insecurity. Sheer physical security is also far more likely to be an issue in the developing world than in industrial societies. Physical insecurity can come from war, rebellion, famine, malnutrition, or epidemic. In Cambodia, for example, school enrollments were greatly reduced for some 20 years as an indirect result of the state terrorism of the Pol Pot regime (Kingdom of Cambodia 1994). The situation is not very different in other countries suffering from the devastation of years of civil war, religious and ethnic conflict, drug trafficking, or territorial wars with nearby neighbors. In summer 2016, 67 countries were involved in wars, including more than half the world’s poorest countries (Wars in the World 2016). This violence has brought devastation and cultural stagnation to countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine,





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Yemen, and large parts of Colombia and Mexico. AIDS was a mass killer in sub-Saharan Africa at the turn to the 21st century, reducing average life expectancy to 47 years (UNDP 2003: 2). Since 2000, life expectancy has improved worldwide but nevertheless remains below age 55 for both men and women in 9 sub-Saharan African countries (WHO 2014). Children and young adults cannot concentrate on school lessons when they fear for their lives or see little hope for the future because of constant warfare or disease. Two U.S.-trained anthropologists, Adel Assal and Edwin Farrell, describe the disruptive effects of the civil war in Lebanon during the late 1980s: “[Many students] spoke of the constant sound of guns and bombs. They related experiences of schools closing during bombardments and children manifesting physical symptoms such as stomach aches” (1992: 278). Because of the constant movement of the population to avoid unsafe areas, many students were transients, and some of the best teachers left, often for other countries. The numbing effects of war showed up most often among the older children. As students got older, school became more meaningless. With the passing of play at adolescence, many of these young people seemed to be more lost than they were as children. Boredom appeared to be the state that came with the perception that their lives were being wasted (286). If boredom can be defined as an irritated state of disinterest, this finding makes sense. Interestingly, the same kinds of effects can be seen in U.S. inner-city schools surrounded by outbreaks of violence. Low enrollments and high dropout rates are typical of countries in which the problems of physical insecurity are acute. Indeed, several countries hard hit by war—Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Somalia—experienced negative rates of enrollment growth in the 1980s (Lockheed and Verspoor 1990: 24). Among the countries with the lowest “school life expectancy” rates are Rwanda, Sudan, and Yemen, all countries that have experienced decades of fighting. Children attend school for an average of three to four years in these countries (UNDP 2014: 178). Thinking about the impact of violence and disease in the developing world, I am reminded of the historian Marc Bloch’s conclusions about the end of the European Dark Ages and the beginning of sustained European development in the 10th and 11th centuries: However much may be learnt from the study of the last [barbarian] invasions [in Europe], we should not allow their lessons to overshadow the still more important fact of their cessation. Till then these ravages had in truth formed the main fabric of history in the West as in the rest of the world. Thenceforward the West would almost alone be free from them. . . . This extraordinary immunity was one of the fundamental factors of European civilization in the deepest sense, in the exact sense of the word. (Bloch 1961: 56)

Some hopeful signs about the continuation of learning can arise even in countries like Afghanistan that have been devastated by war. The educational scholar Dana Burde (2014) studied community schools set up in large houses or mosques by teachers from the local community. These schools are supported by aid organizations that deliver governmentapproved textbooks and supplies and train teachers and parents to oversee the schools. Burde’s team found that these community schools increase enrollment and test scores significantly for all children and especially girls. As the distance between homes and



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schools increased, enrollments fell. Afghans clearly wanted their children, including their girls, to be educated, but they did not want them to walk long distances in a still unpacified country. The Afghan government has been integrating these schools into the larger educational system, certifying teachers and finding ways over time to pay their salaries.

education, politics, and society Educational policy in the developing world has developed in two phases. During the first 30 years following World War II—the immediate postcolonial period for most of the developing world—the basic outlines of and rationale for a Western model of schooling were widely accepted. Nevertheless, quite a bit of variation in organization and accepted practices existed. Some of this variation arose from differences in preexisting traditions or commitments to different development philosophies. In addition, the kinds of regimes that held power frequently made a decisive difference. Leftist intellectuals in power built on existing traditions to push mass schooling forward as energetically as they could. In other countries, the landowners and military men who held the reins of power (either throughout the period or at least for many years) tended to be wary of the costs and the potential control problems associated with a more educated population. They were usually more restrictive than expansionist in their thinking about schooling. By contrast, the second postcolonial generation (from the mid-1970s to the present) has been marked by declining influence of the politics of ideological passion and by increasing adherence to a new standard model of schooling designed for efficiency and equity under conditions of constrained governmental resources. This new model has been energetically promoted by international donor agencies, particularly the World Bank and the United Nations. Although this model has become popular throughout the developing world, the poorest and most war-torn governments have lacked the resources and the capacity to do much more than aspire to conformity.

The First Postcolonial Generation Certain commonalities in postcolonial schooling have existed since the first days of independence, because leaders in the developing world from the start emulated features of the modern and progressive schooling systems of the West. The sociologist Alex Inkeles marveled at the pervasive diffusion of a standard set of concepts, institutions, and practices that defined schooling throughout the world. Even in remote and isolated villages, he observed, schools, teachers, and curricula were organized and acted in remarkably familiar ways. We perhaps take for granted this sort of standardization in a railroad system or an airline, he wrote, but “that such consistency should apply as well in a realm which would seem to permit endless diversity [is] notable” (Inkeles and Sirowy 1983: 304). The following are some of the structures and practices that conformed to a standard pattern throughout the world in the first postcolonial generation: • Public responsibility for schooling was a well-institutionalized principle, and this responsibility was generally administered by a central ministry of education with a formal inspectorate to oversee the conduct of education throughout the country.





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• Schooling systems in every country established an articulated ladder consisting of preschool, primary, secondary, and higher education. • Attendance was compulsory for several years throughout the world. • Teachers nearly everywhere were formally prepared and certified. • The administrative hierarchy of superintendents, principals (or headmasters), and staff was commonplace. • The length of the school day and the school year were standard within a relatively narrow range across the world. • The subjects taught in the formal curriculum had a surprisingly high level of consistency worldwide. Primary school curriculum everywhere consisted of approximately 50 percent of the time spent on language skills and mathematics, with language skills receiving the most attention. Science, social studies, and arts were given approximately equal time during the week—about half as much time was spent on each of them as on mathematics (Benavot and Kamens 1989; Lockheed and Verspoor 1990). • Formal testing was used throughout the world to measure how well students had learned curricular materials. Inkeles’s study of the world’s schooling systems circa 1980 found a marked convergent tendency over time in nearly half the 30 elements of school structure and practice he investigated and a slower and more moderate convergence in 4 others (Inkeles and Sirowy 1983: 326–27). Why were elements of the Western model adopted so widely in the postcolonial world? Some analysts would describe this outcome as one face of Western hegemony. This interpretation is certainly plausible, but it is by no means self-evident. Emulation is not the same thing as domination, and emulation can become a means to greater not lesser autonomy. As John W. Meyer and his colleagues observed in a study of educational adaptation in Botswana, “It is not obvious that the interests of [Western] agencies gain or that Botswana’s interests lose in the transactions involved” (Meyer, Nagel, and Snyder 1993: 467). Like the early promoters of mass public schooling in the West, leaders of the new states envisioned societies made up of individuals who were entitled to have access to literate culture and who could be socialized for active and enlightened citizenship. They also saw schools as contributing to national economic development. From these premises, some common lines of educational action followed. At the same time, it is clear that Western agencies and experts helped disseminate forms of organization and practices that became part of the standard model of schooling. When we talk about a global model of schooling, we are talking in effect about a Western model of schooling. Varieties of schooling in the postcolonial world. Although a number of premises and practices were rather widely shared from the beginning, schooling in the developing world remained diverse in other respects. One reason for variation was that, after independence, governments often adopted distinctive practices of their former colonizers. These were familiar and accepted parts of the school environment for the first postcolonial generation. Thus, secondary school examinations in English-speaking Africa were modeled on the British O-level examinations, and only Anglophonic Africa had the distinctive British



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institution of the sixth form as a period of preparation for examinations. In former French colonies, high rates of grade repetition were common, just as they had always been in France (Foster 1985). Some scholars have noted that students’ levels of educational aspiration were higher in former British colonies of Africa compared to former French colonies, and they argue that this discrepancy reflected the somewhat greater support for native schooling typical of British administrators influenced by missionary initiatives (Foster 1985). Governmental policies on vocational education also varied, because some governments evaluated vocational education positively in relation to development goals, whereas others did not. The communist and socialist countries of the developing world, with their ideological commitment to manual labor, were the most strongly wedded to rapid expansion of vocational education (Carnoy and Samoff 1990). In some nonsocialist countries, such as Ghana and Zaire, vocational education was considered the quickest route to developing a modern, technically trained workforce. In other countries, however, vocational education had little appeal because it offended the status aspirations of upwardly mobile young people and their parents. Vocational education was particularly unpopular where national leaders had attended European universities and where upper-class social mores disdained manual labor. Even in countries like Ghana, which championed vocational preparation, implementation was often weak or nonexistent because of the desire for higher-status academic curricula (Foster 1965). Many countries overproduced secondary school graduates in the postindependence period because the demand for academic schooling exceeded the development of white-collar and professional jobs in the economy. Both Egypt and India, for example, produced far more secondary school and university graduates than they could employ, and both, as an unintended consequence, became exporters of high-talent workers to other countries (Harbison and Myers 1964: 183). Countries in the developing world also differed in their levels of tolerance for nontraditional forms of control. In Kenya, for example, the government tacitly supported the harambee (self-help) schools, which ran parallel with the official system and were meant to provide an alternative to government-funded schools. Similarly, the miniban (people-run) schools provided a stopgap in postrevolutionary China, particularly in rural areas, for more than a decade, until they were ultimately eliminated or brought under government control (P. Deng 1997: 105–12). In most places, however, governments sought to bring all educational institutions under their control. Populist and authoritarian leaders. The greatest differences in the educational policies of the new states stemmed from the social and ideological character of the regimes that held power. Powerful mass-mobilizing populist leaders and status quo–oriented authoritarian leaders are no longer familiar political types to people in the industrialized world, in which the institutions of market-oriented democracy hold sway, but they loomed large in the early postcolonial developing world. Mass-mobilizing leaders are those who make direct and regular appeals to the aspirations of the poor for a better life and attempt to stimulate the energy of the people for the purposes of nation building and economic modernization. Mass-mobilizing leaders run a gamut from those committed to completely revolutionizing society to those content





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 The Harambee Schools of Kenya  In the East African country of Kenya, for a generation after independence, a large number of secondary schools were operated under community authority rather than under government authority. These harambee (self-help) schools were unlike educational institutions anywhere else in the world. Whole communities paid for them through donations and self-assessments. They were operated under the authority of local religious or other community organizations. Some were assisted by the government, but most were independent except insofar as curricula and other standards were approved by the Ministry of Education. The harambee schools grew out of traditions of community organization in Kenya. In Swahili, harambee means “all pull together.” Residents in an area would join together to provide private, voluntary financial assistance, materials, or labor for a project. Neighbors, for example, might contribute a few shillings toward the construction of a borehole, a cattle dip, or some other facility from which all could benefit (Widner 1992: 61–62). When Jomo Kenyatta took power following Kenyan independence in 1963, he institutionalized the harambee system as part of his nation-building effort. School projects quickly became central to the harambee movement. In most communities, clan elders, church leaders, primary school committees, and local notables became the focal points in efforts to raise funds for a harambee secondary school. The school committees used local materials and voluntary (usually female) labor to get the schools started. They collected donations and sometimes enforced levies on households and local traders. They hired headmasters to administer the schools and continued to contribute through donations and self-imposed levies for the continuation of the schools. The harambee schools fostered community pride and frequently were more responsive to community concerns than would be true of bureaucratic governmental organizations. At the same time, however, they were also subject to abuse by not only intriguing politicians but also private speculators and nonaccountable headmasters. Businessmen occasionally operated harambee schools as educational franchises, hiring cheap instructional labor and using fees for their own enrichment. Headmasters sometimes diminished community enthusiasm for the schools by refusing to spend sufficient time listening to questions and explaining their actions (Anderson 1975). Later, community overreach became a serious problem. Expensive projects proliferated in the early 1980s and often remained half finished because of the financial burdens the projects placed on poorer residents (Widner 1992). Though high educational standards were maintained in some of the harambee schools, they soon devolved into a distinctly lower tier of secondary schooling in Kenya. Just a decade after independence, the harambee schools



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were attracting only the marginal secondary school students. Those who did well on the primary-school-leaving examinations were allowed to enroll instead in the national schools or, at a step lower, in government-maintained schools (Dore 1975: 69–70). As a result, harambee school graduates often had trouble finding good jobs. One response was the development of harambee technical institutes, but they enrolled only a few thousand students each year (Eshiwani 1985). In the early 1990s, the Kenyan government took responsibility for all harambee schools and no longer distinguished between them and government schools (Rugh and Bossert 1998). If there is a lesson in the harambee experience, it has to do with the difficulty of maintaining the spirit of gemeinschaft (community) in a modernizing society. Started in the spirit of traditional community, harambee schools quickly became a means of supplying the social demand for more schooling in a way that did not directly cost the government. They just as quickly fell to the bottom of the Kenyan secondary schooling system, and they also fell prey to a host of modern problems—from the intrigues of party politics to the speculations of unscrupulous businesspeople to the unresponsiveness of hired bureaucratic officials. That they nonetheless persisted as long as they did is testimony to the adaptive powers of peasant communities to more modern conditions and to the ability of modernizing politicians to find new purposes for old traditions.

to make relatively modest changes in the life chances of the poor. The ideals that inspire mass mobilization clearly vary, but they create three distinctive types of leaders: • Anticolonial and nationalist leaders operating in competitive democracies. For example, leaders like Mahatma Gandhi of India were motivated primarily by anticolonial sentiments and favored democratic forms of nation building. • Militant leftist leaders controlling dominant-party or single-party states. These include socialists such as Gamal Nasser in Egypt, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and communist heads of single-party states like Mao Tse-tung of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba. • Religious militants, like the ayatollahs of Iran, who are now important in parts of the Islamic world. Status quo–oriented leaders are those whose highest priority is to maintain social order and stability. These status quo–oriented leaders are also of three main types: representatives of traditional dynastic families, civilian dictators, and military leaders. Even today, traditional ruling families, such as the al-Aziz as-Sa’ud in Saudi Arabia and the as-Sabah in Kuwait, dominate many of the oil-producing Arab states of the Middle East. Dynastic families also played an important role elsewhere in the developing world, particularly in Latin America and Africa, though they did not manage to hold on to direct state power





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for long. By contrast, civilian dictators and military men have repeatedly come to power in the developing world when elite interests have been challenged by popular unrest. In Africa, for example, most countries have experienced episodes of military rule, and 41 percent of all regimes between 1970 and 2007 were military rulers (Caruso, Costa, and Ricciuti 2012). The schooling policies of these types of leaders reflected their ideologies. The most radical mass-mobilizing governments—those in China, Cuba, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas—made extraordinary efforts to bring about social and political transformation through schooling. They mounted intensive literacy campaigns, set up thousands of adult education centers, insisted on the combination of vocational and academic schooling (including requirements that urban students work in the countryside), and restricted higher levels of schooling to concentrate on the schooling of the poor. They usually also engaged in highly charged campaigns of political resocialization to create new socialist men (and women) (Carnoy and Samoff 1990). The literacy campaigns were among the most ambitious accomplishments of massmobilizing socialist and communist leaders. The first mass literacy campaign was mounted by the Chinese in the mid-1950s at a time when some 85 percent of the country’s largely rural population was illiterate. The Chinese did not achieve universal literacy, but they did, by official estimates, cut illiteracy by two-thirds (Arnove 1986). In Cuba, shortly after the revolution, Fidel Castro closed the schools and sent 250,000 teachers and university students to the countryside with instructions to achieve a fully literate population in nine months. Cuba was already highly literate. The Cuban government’s official estimate was that the campaign cut illiteracy from 21 percent to just below 4 percent. Nicaragua under the Sandinistas also launched a literacy campaign (Arnove 1986). Official numbers of people educated by these campaigns are widely disputed, but the campaigns clearly made a difference. These efforts show that if goals are highly specific, methods sharply focused, and the population sufficiently motivated, major cultural changes can occur in a very short time. (In the case of Cuba, some scholars have argued that the costs of training were so high and the level of new literacy achieved so modest that the literacy campaign cannot be classified as the rousing success the revolutionaries claimed. See Fagen 1969: 54–55.) Socialist and communist leaders have been justly criticized for their failures to bring freedom and prosperity to their countries. But they did have some successes in social policy. Their schooling policies often equalized opportunities between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. During the period of the Cultural Revolution (1964–1972) in China, for example, the large gaps in educational attainment between urban and rural children, and between boys and girls, narrowed appreciably (Hannum 1999). This equalization had significant costs for intellectuals and professionals, who were sent into the countryside to work and to learn from the peasantry. Some Chinese intellectuals of that era recalled to me studying in their huts by flashlight, terrified of being caught with a book. Most mass-mobilizing leaders have had more modest goals, and they often had to live with the compromises inherent in democratic government as well. The desire to improve economic opportunities for the poor has, however, been a constant among massmobilizing populist leaders whether socialist or not. As the economists Frederick Harbison



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and Charles Myers put it, mass-mobilizing nationalist leaders were invariably interested in “massive and immediate expansion” of schooling (1964: 179). Mass-mobilizing leaders in the early postcolonial years spent more on schooling as a proportion of gross national product (GNP) than would have been predicted simply by looking at the wealth of their countries or the levels of enrollment they inherited (Garms 1968). The policies of status quo–oriented authoritarian leaders provide a striking contrast. Dynastic rulers invariably have wanted to preserve traditional society as much as possible and to allow modernization to take place slowly if at all. They have been aligned with the largest religious organizations, the largest landowners, national and international business elites, and the military. They are invariably quite distant from the aspirations of the poor. Civilian dictators supported by the military (such as the Duvalier family in Haiti, the Park family in South Korea, and the Mobutu family in Zimbabwe) have also aligned themselves with the interests of national economic elites. The United States supported many of these civilian dictators during the Cold War, because of their favorable attitudes toward multinational firms and their strong commitments to suppressing communist and socialist movements. By contrast, military men have often come to power promising reform and modernization. They have sometimes acted decisively on these promises, as, for example, in Peru in the mid- and late-1960s (Stepan 1978) and, to a lesser extent, in Ethiopia after 1974 (Liebenow 1987). More often, however, after short-lived efforts to build support through reform measures, they have shown themselves to be far more interested in social control and stability than in social reform. Whereas most mass-mobilizing leaders in the developing world saw schooling as an investment in national development, authoritarian leaders tended to highlight the costs of educating the populace and to fear the independence of educational institutions. They restricted educational funding, and when they feared unrest, they also repressed academic freedom. The consequences of authoritarian rule are well illustrated by the history of South American schooling during periods of military rule. Studies of educational expenditures in these countries from the 1950s and 1960s show that under equivalent conditions, military leaders spent less on social welfare than civilian regimes did. Military regimes were marked, in particular, by rapid increases in social spending to establish legitimacy, followed by equally rapid returns to the status quo (Schmitter 1971). The patterns have been more complicated in Africa, where military governments often succeeded dynastic leaders who had been even less interested in schooling for the masses (Odeotola 1982). Nevertheless, a leading student of military government in Africa concludes that studies suggest “better development under civilians than under military rule” (Liebenow 1987: 153–54). As in Latin America, some military regimes had a reforming disposition at the time they assumed power but lost it over time. Other evidence confirms the relationship between authoritarian rule and restrictions on schooling for groups considered to be unreliable by the regimes. When military leaders came to power in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s, they closed down public schools in many urban working-class districts, fired teachers thought to be hostile to the regime, and reopened schools only gradually when loyalists could be





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recruited to teach and administer them (Hanson 1996). In Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, university enrollments were restricted, radical students expelled, dissenting faculty silenced or fired, and university autonomy in matters of self-governance strictly curtailed (Levy 1986). One consequence of status quo–oriented leadership was to shift the benefits of schooling away from the poor and in the direction of the well-to-do—more precisely, to those among the well-to-do who were politically conservative or disengaged from politics. These regimes characteristically had a negligent attitude toward the poor and cultivated the wealthier classes so that they could stay in power. In countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay before the movement toward democracy of the late 1980s, children from the most poorly educated families had no more than a 5 percent chance of entering a university, but children whose parents had university educations had a 50 percent or more chance of admission. Because higher education was well supported by the state in the form of free tuition and other benefits, but loans for living expenses were hard to obtain, the state ended up providing larger subsidies for the schooling of the affluent than for the schooling of the poor (Schiefelbein 1985: 196).

 From Social Democracy to Neoliberalism in Latin American Higher Education?  Latin America was renowned for decades as the home of a distinctive model of higher education— one that rejected the ivory tower for a more open and accessible university structure. In the so-called Córdoba model, originating in an Argentinian student movement in 1918 at the National University of Córdoba, the university was to be remodeled to allow democratic cogovernance by students, faculty, and alumni. It was to be oriented toward the solution of economic, political, and social problems rather than the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It would provide access for the poor and working classes through free tuition and expanding enrollments. It was intended to expand the extension function to provide expertise for community development in agriculture, industry, and lifelong learning. It would have autonomy from state intervention and complete academic freedom. These social democratic features of the Córdoba movement were joined by an expectation of faculty production of original research and faculty selection through open competitions based on their academic research. The model played an influential role in university development throughout much of Latin America for more than four decades, though it never fully toppled the ivory tower outlook found in societies like Brazil and in some of the Catholic universities. Universities like UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), the Central University in Caracas, and the University of Chile were founded on the principles of the Córdoba movement. During



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periods of populist uprising, students made Latin American universities centers of movements to transform society, not infrequently leading to bloody clashes with the police and military. The model of the university based on the Córdoba movement experienced increasing difficulties beginning in the 1980s. As the higher education scholar Andres Bernasconi puts it, “Public universities, suffering the consequences of their own failures . . . have seen massification, politicization, irrelevance to economic development and bad management eat away at their legitimacy” (2008: 43). Student influence proved to be stronger for maintaining idealism than for sustaining educational quality and effective management. A new model gradually took the place of the Cordoban university. Carlos Torres and Daniel Schugurensky associate the new model with the “hegemony of neoliberal discourses and policies” (2002: 430). The neoliberal university, they argue, decreased state subsidization; diversified sources of income via tuition, fees, and partnerships with business; introduced quality-assessment mechanisms through faculty evaluation and other measures of accountability; and sometimes also based salary increases on performance metrics such as increases in graduation rates or citations to faculty research. In these ways, Latin American universities joined the emerging global consensus on university funding and regulation originating in transnational coordinating agencies. The neoliberal university certainly did not triumph everywhere. Socialist leaders resisted this movement, sometimes to an extreme degree. But their visions did not include the autonomy of the university from the state. In 2003, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez founded the Bolivarian University of Venezuela by decree to bring higher education to the masses. Envisaged by Chávez as eventually enrolling one million students, with the help of 190 satellite classrooms, Bolivarian University came to enroll more than 180,000 students. The result according to one regional expert, Francisco Marmolejo, has been unprepared institutions, nonexistent infrastructure, and 300 students in classrooms that once held 15. “You end up with a system where hundreds of thousands of people have degrees that are totally useless” (Marmolejo, quoted in “The Struggle to Make the Grade” 2011). Others have called Bolivarian University “a thinly disguised propaganda factory that takes advantage of the country’s most vulnerable citizens” (N. Clark 2013). Similar populist movements to expand higher education enrollments for the poor have developed in Chile and Brazil under leftist parties. In Latin America, disagreements about the role of universities in public life remain heated, with the left favoring greatly expanded access and risking economic irrelevance and the right favoring neoliberalism and risking the social opportunities for upward mobility provided by expanded access.





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The Second Postcolonial Generation In the second postcolonial generation, two distinct trends in schooling, leading in opposite directions, have been evident. On the one hand, schooling systems in the developing world are becoming more similar to one another. Some of this convergence is based on a decline in the politics of passion and an increase in technocratic planning at the national level. Most of the change, however, is based on the World Bank and other donor and coordinating agencies promulgating models of school policy that have had a worldwide influence. On the other hand, countries in the developing world are becoming less similar in their economic and social circumstances, leading to major improvements in schooling in some countries and stagnating or even deteriorating conditions in others. The waning of left and right. Today, both mass-mobilizing and status quo–oriented leaders are on the wane in the developing world. Communism and socialism no longer represent inspiring political ideals for many policy makers. Charismatic anticolonial leaders have become national symbols rather than active forces in social transformation, and state bureaucracies in the developing world have begun to operate much as state bureaucracies do elsewhere. Altogether, the politics of passion has greatly subsided. Insofar as mass-mobilizing leaders can still be found in the developing world, the revolutionary leaders of Islamic states are arguably the most important examples. (Antiglobalization activists are also important, but none, with the exception of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, have thus far gained state power.) It is, of course, tempting to see these leaders as status quo–oriented authoritarians rather than as mass mobilizers, because they strenuously resist change in matters of religious doctrine and are repressive of the rights of dissenters. Yet in regard to schools, Islamist leaders have often acted more as mass mobilizers. Overall, government expenditures for public schooling as a percentage of GDP tend to be higher in countries like Iran and Libya than elsewhere in the developing world, and literacy rates are also a little higher (UNDP 2003). Like previous mass-mobilizing leaders, leaders of Islamic states have wanted to use schooling to support the cultural development of the masses and nationalist sentiment (though in these cases, nationalist sentiment that has a religious sectarian cast). They have, however, also insisted on orthodoxy in fields touching on morality and politics, not unlike the communist mass mobilizers of the Cold War era. Status quo–oriented authoritarian governments in the developing world are also yielding, although not yet completely. In the 1980s, civilian governments took over in all countries in Latin America previously ruled by the military. These new civilian governments have seemingly consolidated the power of democracy, and in the process expanded opportunities for schooling. Some military governments in Asia, such as those in South Korea, and Africa, such as the brutal regime of Idi Amin in Uganda, also gave way to civilian control (Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1986). Few countries today are under the direct rule of the military. But autocratic rulers, including many who run sham elections, remain a force in the world. Nearly one in three African countries remained under the rule of autocrats through the early 2010s (CIA 2015). Nonelected autocratic rulers also remain common in the Gulf States.



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With the development of democratic regimes, incremental, expert planning has become the norm in the developing world. The premises of this planning, however, have been set by external policy analysts and particularly by analysts and policy makers associated with the World Bank. The role of the World Bank. Those who have tried to explain the remarkable similarities among schools throughout the world have usually emphasized the role of models drawn from the experience of mass schooling in the West and promoted by international agencies and international schooling experts. These well-promoted models provide a kind of cultural grid for the rest of the world (Meyer, Ramirez, et al. 1979; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992). Such an analysis helps explain why so much similarity existed from the beginning in postcolonial schooling systems, but it does not explain very well why these systems have changed over time. In fact, the standard model of the first postcolonial generation has changed significantly over the past quarter century. The new elements include an increasing consensus about what kinds of resources and practices are necessary to improve learning, more reliance on private funds to support schooling, a decreasing emphasis on vocational education in primary and lower secondary schooling, and a widely accepted methodology for evaluating schooling policies. These new elements were largely the product of the research and advocacy of the World Bank, and they were strongly supported by other donor agencies. The World Bank, located in Washington, D.C., is an institution financed by the wealthiest industrial countries that provides loans and advice to the developing world. The educational researchers of the World Bank have accumulated large amounts of data about the developing world and analyzed it in a rigorous way and have come to conclusions about what works and what does not work in schooling. Sociologists know that successful agents of change combine knowledge, a commitment to action, and access to the levers of power (Etzioni 1968). Many efforts to improve schools have the first two ingredients in this recipe but only rarely the crucial third. This is the great advantage of the World Bank’s reform efforts: it has not only knowledge and commitment but also the clout to follow through effectively. In a developing world that depends on international lending, the World Bank’s research findings are broadly comparable to the power of the ideology of early nationalist leaders, and its power of the purse is broadly comparable to the popular support enjoyed by the first generation of nationalist leaders. In the mid-2010s, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, funded primarily by China, began to take leadership in international lending (Perlez 2015), but the World Bank’s historical influence remains unsurpassed. World Bank researchers do not see eye to eye on every issue, but they have developed a coherent framework for analyzing how schooling funds should be spent given a country’s available resources. This framework combines a concern for the efficient use of resources with a concern for equity in the distribution of resources between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. The policy approach might be called “back to basics” at the primary level combined with a let-the-market-decide philosophy at the postprimary level. World Bank researchers concluded that most educational policy making was a disaster, with too





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much funding of higher education relative to primary schooling, too much funding of vocational education relative to general education, and too little private investment in schooling relative to public investment. They argue that developing countries have the best results when the following criteria are met: • Schooling budgets are allocated largely to primary schooling, especially when primary schooling is not yet universal. • Resources for the unschooled are freed by reducing the length of compulsory schooling. • Private schools are tolerated as a way to reduce the pressure on hard-pressed public resources. • General education, which is more flexible and less costly, is emphasized over vocational education. • Meeting social demand—giving people the schooling they want and will pay for— is emphasized for levels above primary schooling (and in the poorest countries, also at the level of primary schooling). • Subsidies to higher education are returned to the lower levels of society in the form of special scholarships for the poor. • Wage differentials between graduates of different schooling levels are maintained so as to provide incentives for further human capital development among those who are able to finish primary school (Psacharopoulos 1986). The World Bank also expresses consistent views about what kind of learning should take place in classrooms and how that learning can be enhanced. In the 1980s it took a stand against vocational education as an ineffective and costly substitute for sound general education. In the view of World Bank researchers, vocational education is an inefficient and ineffective means of economic development. According to World Bank researchers, the major contribution of formal schooling to agricultural development is through the provision of literacy and numeracy rather than through the development of practical or agricultural curricula in the schools (Psacharopoulos 1987). The World Bank began to revise this view in the early 1990s. Reviewing the literature on vocational education and training (VET), the bank proposed that such training is beneficial in cases in which jobs already exist and training is related to demand. As a supply-side mechanism, these researchers argued, VET typically failed; not surprisingly, rates of return were low when little demand for trainees existed. It also advocated use of enterprise- and skilltraining centers as a more efficient and effective substitute for vocational training in the schools (Adams, Middleton, and Ziderman 1992). In recent years, the World Bank has worked to improve the quality of VET in the developing world. A recent project in China focuses on modernizing the curriculum into “modular, competency based” elements and moving teaching away from preparation for examinations and toward student-centered engagement activities such as case studies and group projects. The project also focuses on improving VET teacher training (World Bank 2013a). Quality in learning, according to the World Bank’s researchers, can be achieved in the developing world through trained teachers, adequate instructional materials (especially



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textbooks), increased time on academic tasks, exams to monitor progress, and provision of basic nutritional requirements where possible through school lunch programs (Lockheed and Verspoor 1990). Attractive buildings and new equipment, curricular reforms, and even smaller class sizes are not considered to be as important to educational progress (Gannicott and Throsby 1992). According to a World Bank–sponsored study, structured class time; active, hands-on learning; and parental involvement improves literacy learning even if “class size is allowed to float up a little” (Fuller et al. 1999: 33). Unlike most advocacy groups, the World Bank has the leverage to insert its vision of good schooling into the official policy documents that serve as models for practice.1 For the most part, the power of the World Bank is indirect. It recommends and advocates, but it is rarely so heavy-handed as to insist on conformity with its recommendations as a precondition to the provision of loans. Nevertheless, in their hopes of gaining World Bank approval, leaders take its recommendations into account. This implicit power is supported by the direct contribution donor agencies make to schooling in the developing world. The World Bank was for many years the largest external donor for educational projects, with annual lending commitments of more than $2.35 billion (Jones 2006). This was only a small proportion of the total government spending on public schooling, but its loss would nevertheless have been greatly missed. The leverage of the World Bank was based on the reliance of economies on development loans and their high levels of indebtedness. A basic principle of power is that the more one party depends on another for external resources to survive, the more likely that party is to conform to the wishes of the resource provider (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). Thus, countries badly in need of development loans are more likely to conform to the recommendations of donor agencies than those less in need. Those countries less in need of World Bank development funds—many in East Asia fit this criterion as do an increasing number in South America—were in a position to go their own way in schooling policy. Debt ratios began declining in the 1990s. However, many developing countries remain deeply in debt. In 2011, as many as 42 countries reported external debt ratios above 50 percent of gross national income (World Bank 2013b: 21–23). These countries often spend more on debt service than they do on health and schooling. It is not surprising that they take the recommendations of the World Bank and other donor agencies seriously. Those parts of the world that fail to emulate the standard model promulgated by the World Bank and other donor agencies do so far more often because of deficient resources and governmental corruption than because of ideas or traditions opposed to the recommendations of donor agencies. The World Bank’s school policy recommendations, based on years of study, seem eminently sensible, but room exists for debate. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s the World Bank consistently argued for freeing resources devoted to higher education for support of lower levels; the governments of some developing countries believed that students simply would not have enough money to attend universities without substantial subsidization. Many African universities were known to have good academic standards. Should they have become much smaller and havens for the wealthy? Without substantial state subsidization, that is what would have happened. The World Bank’s position makes sense given the scarcity of resources available to many governments, but an argument





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can be made on the other side. Indeed, by the beginning of the 21st century, World Bank economists had changed course, arguing that developing countries should begin to invest in their postsecondary educational systems if they hoped to compete effectively in the global economy (Hopper 2002). A single dominating model can reduce variation in useful ways (by reducing the amount of wasted effort) but also in potentially problematic ways (by discouraging new ideas and adaptive responses). One size does not necessarily fit all. We can see this in the diversity of reactions to a new World Bank policy advocating decentralized school management. This seems like an eminently sensible idea—decentralization should ideally create more initiative and accountability at the local level—but it has met resistance in places like Indonesia. Studies of implementation in Indonesia attributed inaction to traditions of deference to authority and related definitions of teachers as “dutiful civil servants.” “Western notions of local autonomy . . . are both puzzling and distasteful to many Indonesians. For the Javanese, at least, such notions conflict with their perception of a unified source of power and authority and are thus difficult to accept” (Devas 1997: 365). Much as in population genetics, variations in social systems can be important for the new directions they suggest or for their more suitable fit to particular circumstances. Industrialized societies, after all, have developed a number of quite different working structures of schooling. These provide a useful range of possibilities to consider, as well as solutions that may be better adjusted to national history and social context than any single model could be. Diverging economic trends. The developing world now includes both a large number of economic success stories and a number of areas of stagnation. It also includes a middle range of countries, making more gradual or mixed progress in reaching development goals. Figure 3.1 illustrates the historian Paul Kennedy’s (1996) two versions of a tour through the developing world (shown as dashed lines). One is a “cornucopian tour” through the “success belt.” The other is a “doomster’s tour” through the “disaster belt” (1996: 22). I have superimposed new cornucopian and doomster tours (shown as solid lines) for the 2010s based on data from the United Nations Development Programme (2014). The new map looks similar to Kennedy’s, but with more “doom” in the Middle East and Central Africa and more success in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a measure used by the United Nations to determine the quality of life in all countries of the world. The top category, very high human development, consists, with a few exceptions, of countries that most global observers would consider part of the developed world. The other three categories consist of countries at various stages of development, from China, with its fast-growing economy, to several West and Central African republics at the bottom of the list. The HDI includes measures of gross national income per capita, longevity, and educational attainment. Sixteen countries have shown average annual growth in the HDI of more than 1 percent in every decade since 1980. Relative to their level of development in 1980, these countries are success stories. They include such fast-developing countries as Turkey, Iran, China, and India. They also include still quite impoverished countries, such as Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Benin, Gambia, Mali, and Niger, as well as war-torn Afghanistan. Fully onethird of the world’s countries have experienced greater than 1 percent average annual



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schooling in the developing world Doomster’s tour AZERBAIJAN UKRAINE

KAZAKHSTAN UZBEKISTAN

TURKEY CHINA

SYRIA IRAN

EGYPT

INDIA (interior)

HAITI CHAD

SIERRA LEONE

THAILAND TOGO GHANA COTE D’IVOIRE

LAOS

MYANMAR

AFGHANISTAN GUATEMALA HONDURAS NICARAGUA

CAMBODIA

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

LIBERIA

DR CONGO

BOLIVIA

Cornucopian tour RUSSIA

KAZAKHSTAN AZERBAIJAN TURKEY

CHINA (coastal) IRAN

MEXICO

INDIA TAIWAN THAILAND

COSTA RICA PANAMA COLOMBIA

SINGAPORE GABON INDONESIA

BRAZIL BOTSWANA CHILE ARGENTINA

SOUTH AFRICA

mid-1990s

mid-2010s

Figure 3.1  Two views of the developing world s o u r c e : Data from Kennedy 1996; United Nations Development Programme 2014.

growth in their HDI in at least one decade since 1980. Some of these countries—including Hong Kong, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait—are now classified as countries with very high human development (UNDP 2014: 163–66). As economic circumstances have diverged in the developing world, so have some schooling circumstances. Most countries in the developing world now enroll virtually all of the relevant age group in first grade, graduate 85 percent or more from primary school, and send at least two-thirds on to secondary school. Among the most educationally





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progressive countries in the developing world, secondary school enrollment rates are above 75 percent of the age group, and higher education enrollments may reach 45 percent or higher. This level has been reached for example, in Barbados, Costa Rica, Cuba, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay (UNESCO 2012: 122–27; World Bank 2016b). By contrast, few students in the least developed countries have the family support to stay in school for long—sometimes even to attend at all. Because of governmental budgetary constraints, secondary schools and colleges could not accommodate everyone even if students did have the wherewithal to continue. The poorest developing countries, therefore, allow natural attrition, combined with primary-school-leaving examinations, to limit the number of students continuing to secondary school. Published reports suggest that primary completion rates under 50 percent are not uncommon in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Secondary enrollment rates are reported as high as 67 percent (in Ghana) and as low as 18 percent (in Niger). Tertiary enrollments in sub-Saharan Africa are still invariably below 15 percent and more often 5 percent or less (World Bank 2016b). Many countries do not report educational statistics to international agencies, presumably because their records are unreliable, incomplete, or do not show them in a positive light. In the poorest countries, the amount of actual time spent on learning is frequently also much lower than reported. A careful study of actual school time in Haiti in 1984 shows that the official version of the school year was far from fully realized in practice. The school day often began late, teachers were frequently absent on Tuesday and Friday market days, and 48 public holidays were celebrated instead of the official 28. With unofficial school closings and delayed openings, the functional school year was only 70 days, 40 percent of the international standard. A study of 15 village schools in India found that two-thirds of the teachers were absent at the time of the investigators’ unexpected visits, and the substitute teachers did little more than keep a semblance of order among the pupils (Dreze and Sen 1995: 125). In Malawi, the school year is 192 days—higher than the international standard—but one-third of those days are during the rainy season, when the roads are impassable and students cannot go to school (Benavot and Gad 2004). One study of class time in a poor region of rural Peru found that only 6 percent of the total time that students were at school was devoted to academic instruction. The rest of the time was spent on recreation periods and sports competitions, waiting during adult meetings, time lost to teacher absences, housekeeping activities, and unsupervised desk work. Some social scientists see a correspondence between the way schools are organized and the roles students will play in later life: As can be seen in the descriptions of planting, watering, cleaning, cooking, child care, long walks and so on, Quechua children are expected to handle many practical, physical jobs themselves; correspondingly, they are apparently not expected to handle intellectual jobs, even with the teacher’s help. (Hornberger 1987: 216)

Persistent Issues in School Quality Because they focus on enrollment rates over time, most social scientists and policy analysts see significant progress in educational development virtually throughout the developing world. But are they looking carefully enough?



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Certainly the enrollment statistics look promising. Most countries in the world are approaching universal completion of primary school, and about 80 percent of students worldwide now transition to lower secondary schooling (UNESCO 2012). Gross enrollment rates in upper secondary school of 40 to 80 percent were common in developing countries by the early 2010s, and some developing countries, such as Honduras and Costa Rica, with very committed governments did significantly better than that (UNESCO 2012: 237). Debt relief has been an important reason for the improvement in the number of years children stay in school. In sub-Saharan Africa debt burdens became unsustainable in the 1990s, and creditors began to provide debt relief in return for assurances that portions of unpaid debts would go toward poverty-reduction initiatives. Before the launching of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative in 1996, debt-service payments often exceeded infusions of new development aid (UNCTAD 2004). Through mid-2013, the two major debt-relief initiatives of the world’s creditors, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, had cost about $116 billion (International Monetary Fund 2013). This debt relief allowed sub-Saharan African countries to invest in health and schooling, reversing a 20-year decline in which even the capacity to monitor what was happening with textbooks, teacher’s pay, and enrollments had been lost in a number of countries (Heyneman 1993: 513). Sub-Saharan Africa continues to receive a large proportion of the tens of billions of dollars of development assistance flowing from the industrialized world to the developing world. Are students learning? Although students in the developing world are staying longer in school, that does not necessarily mean they are learning. According to a national survey by Uwezo Kenya, an evaluation organization, only half of third graders in Kenya can read a simple monosyllabic paragraph drawn from a book in the second-grade curriculum. The paragraph reads, “Look at my hair. It is long and black. I like my hair. I wash it on Sundays” (Sandefur, Watkins, and Green 2013). Moreover, staying in school did not help most of these students. In Kenya only one in three poor readers could read this same simple paragraph after spending a fourth year in school (Sandefur, Watkins, and Green 2013). In India and Pakistan, only one in five students makes progress in reading after another year in school following third grade. Even after eight years of schooling in rural India, only one in three children can read simple paragraphs. In Peru, 60 percent of students make it through ninth grade, but only 20 percent of those who complete ninth grade are fully literate, according to a 2011 international assessment (Hanushek 2013). The problems of poverty, malnutrition, illiterate parents, unqualified teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and limited availability of textbooks present barriers that improvements in the sheer number of years of schooling should not be allowed to hide (Sandefur, Watkins, and Green 2013). Indeed, development economists are converging on the view that sheer number of years in school is not a good measure of educational outcomes that contribute to economic growth. Instead, many now argue, the focus should be on how much students are learning, as indicated (at least approximately) through scores on international assessments. When we examine these cognitive measures, the picture is discomfiting. The proportion





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of fully literate students in recent cohorts was less than one-third in 11 of 14 developing countries studied by Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann (2008), and it was only 5 percent in Ghana, 7 percent in South Africa, and 8 percent in Brazil. The majority of children are not fully literate because they did not enroll, dropped out of primary or lower secondary school, or ended their lower secondary education without acquiring minimal reading skills. Teacher absences and resource shortages are large and continuing problems. Using unannounced visits from enumerators, Nazmul Chaudhury and his coauthors (2006) found an absence rate for primary school teachers of 27 percent in Uganda, 25 percent in India, 19 percent in Indonesia, 14 percent in Ecuador, and 11 percent in Peru. Even when teachers were present in the classroom, they were not necessarily teaching. Although enumerators found three-quarters of teachers in their classrooms in Indian schools, half were not teaching when the enumerators arrived. In 1995, Kenyan researchers found that 80 percent of students were in classrooms that had less than one English textbook for every 20 students (Glewwe, Kremer, and Moulin 2006). More than 40 percent of pupils in Sri Lanka did not have a place to sit when researchers visited schools there in 2005 (Zhang, Postlethwaite, and Grisay 2008). Privatization. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that development policy makers have wondered whether states have the will or the resources to properly educate their citizenry. Privatization of public schooling is a worldwide trend, as governments seek to cope with huge social demands on limited budgets. Several South American countries have experimented with more comprehensive forms of privatization, offering subsidies to private schools (as in Argentina) or vouchers to parents to use at either public or private schools (as in Chile and Colombia). The private school share of enrollment is consequently larger in South America than in the rest of the developing world. The most comprehensive experiment occurred in Chile in the 1980s and 1990s. Vouchers were given to parents and could be used at private or public schools. Many students from all classes shifted to private schools, but the higher the income level of the family, the more likely they were to use vouchers for private schooling. Three-quarters of families in the top income quintile enrolled children in private schools, compared to one-quarter of families from the bottom two quintiles. Costs of transportation and limits on information about private schools led to less participation of the poor. The economist Martin Carnoy concludes, “Higher income groups take advantage of private alternatives . . . and (have the) ability to access schools where average achievement is higher” (1998: 336). The Chilean experiment is now considered to have been a failure because it greatly increased educational stratification rather than raising the quality of education across the board. Studies have come to mixed conclusions about whether private school subsidies and voucher programs lead to educational improvements in the other South American countries that have experimented with them. In a study of 10 South American countries, students in private schools consistently performed better than students in public schools. However, when researchers statistically controlled for both individual socioeconomic status and the higher status of peers found in private schools, the private school effect across the 10 countries averaged zero. Students in a few countries showed small positive effects



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for attending private schools, and others showed small negative effects (Somers, McEwan, and Willms 2004). The debate about the contribution of privatization continues. Some studies in Africa and South Asia find that students’ performance in private schools is significantly better, even after controlling for family backgrounds and academic aptitudes. Others find no difference after statistical controls are introduced and argue that a first priority of governments should be to provide free, high-quality education to all students through the public system (Sanderfer, Watkins, and Green 2013). One point seems clear: if access is the issue, a system that is based primarily on public education will greatly outperform a mixed public-private system. William Smith and Devin Joshi (2016) compared the trajectory of the two countries that enroll nearly half the world’s school-age children: China and India. Both countries had low primary school enrollments in the mid-20th century. At that time China began investing heavily in public primary schools, while India concentrated on building a first-rate higher education system. India allowed private providers to fill part of the gap created by policy makers’ priorities for public spending on postsecondary education. The result was that the average years of education for school-age children in China increased from 3.2 years in 1964 to 7.7 years in 2000, while the average years for Indian children increased much more slowly and remained at about 4.4 years into the early part of the 21st century. Private schools took a much larger share of enrollments in India at every level, including more than half of enrollments at the upper secondary level. Ironically, in spite of the Indian government’s emphasis on postsecondary education, Chinese higher education enrollments have now greatly eclipsed Indian higher education enrollments, in large part because they are built on the broader base produced by investments in public primary and secondary education. The issues surrounding privatization are complicated by the fact that public secondary schools in much of the developing world charge fees for attendance, while some private schools charge only very low fees. The provision of free public education is supported by the observation that any fee will be a hardship for families earning only a few dollars a day. Yet there is also the sad truth that parents are expected to pay bribes in countries like Kenya for the “privilege” of having their children ineffectively educated in public schools (Sanderfer, Watkins, and Green 2013).

schooling and economic development For social scientists and planners, one of the most important issues has been the role of formal education as a factor in economic development. Students of schooling and economic development have posed several key questions: How strongly is an educated labor force associated with economic development? Is mass schooling a necessary precondition for economic development? Is it more a consequence of development than a cause? Or is it a contingent factor important in some cases and not in others? These questions have been debated by development scholars for more than a generation. For many years, two major theoretical perspectives existed concerning the role of schooling in economic development. One is usually known as dependency theory; the other, as human capital theory. These have been challenged and at least partially replaced





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in recent decades by theories of state-led development, which emphasize contingencies and view human capital development as one important factor among others. The successes of several high-performing Asian economies lend empirical support to theories of state-led development.

Dependency Theories In the 1960s and 1970s, many social theorists argued that the developing world suffered because the developed world continued to exploit it even in the absence of colonial structures. Developing countries thus remain dependent on the industrial societies. One version of dependency theory, the world system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), argues that countries in the world are connected by the functions they perform in the world economy. Periphery states—most of the former colonies of the developing world—supply raw materials to core states—the industrial societies that refine, combine, and assemble those materials into products. Those products may be sold in home markets or in global markets, including in the countries where the raw materials originated. For example, large quantities of sugar cane are harvested in some tropical countries and exported to the United States, where they are turned into sugar and combined with other ingredients to be resold to the rest of the world as candy bars and other products. The raw-material periphery states are poor and backward; the complex-operations core states are wealthier and forward looking. Exports do not always improve the situation of periphery states, because most profits are restricted to the local landowning elites and the merchants (who, if foreign nationals, remit profits to the home country). Export earnings therefore provide precious little capital for diversifying local economies. A relatively few people may gain wealth from their roles as overseers and middlemen in world economic transactions, but most of the population remains rural and is engaged in small-scale farming either for subsistence or for local markets. Others are employed as cheap hired labor for multinational agribusiness, mining, or sweatshop industry. Semiperiphery states lie between these two poles. They export some raw materials to the core states but also produce some products for regional or global consumption. They are economically not as advanced as the core states, but they are also not as poor as the periphery states. World system theorists consider countries like Chile and Thailand to be semiperipheral. Dependency theorists place little faith in schooling as a force in economic development. They argue that low levels of school funding and enrollment are closely connected to the country’s location in the world division of labor. International business most needs the developing world to supply cheap labor for extracting raw materials and producing some commercial products. Even nationalistic governments that wish to develop their schooling systems usually do not have enough money to do so effectively. Dependency theorists conclude that resources spent on schooling serve not disadvantaged groups and the poor but rather landowners and local and international businesspeople seeking large pools of cheap but competent labor (R. Clark 1992).



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It is difficult to avoid seeing one obvious flaw in dependency theory: for national and multinational business, expanding markets in developing countries is at least as important a goal as employing cheap labor. In fact, larger markets for the goods and services in which developed countries specialize will not evolve unless the people in developing countries accumulate more disposable income. Dependency theorists have also not been able to explain why some countries move into the core of the world capitalist economy from the semiperiphery and others into the semiperiphery from the periphery. Nor have these theories been able to account for the different levels of development among countries that have very similar populations and natural resources. The tens of billions of U.S. dollars in assistance provided by donor organizations to developing countries cannot be explained apart from their desire to help the people of these countries reap the benefits of greater prosperity—and the long-term interests of donor countries in the growth of new consumer markets. The evidence indicates that rapid population growth, ethnic and class hostilities, and the corruption of officials have scuttled the development hopes of many developing countries more thoroughly than the profit seeking of international business ever could. For example, the devastations brought by invasion, civil war, and tyranny have kept Cambodia stagnant until quite recently, while nearby Thailand, an ethnically very similar society, developed rapidly. Conversely, far-sighted economic policies, useful strategic alliances, and determined and cohesive leadership have promoted development in countries where world system or dependency theories would not have expected it. No better explanation exists for why Estonia and the Czech Republic, for example, should be poised on the edge of economic prosperity while many of its next-door neighbors in the former Soviet bloc continue to flounder.

Human Capital Theory The overwhelming majority of development scholars in the West subscribed to human capital theory, the leading rival to dependency theories throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Human capital theory assumes that economic development is possible for any country whose schools are fully developed and uses its human resources. Education is at the center of human capital theory, because the theory is based on the importance of a well-educated workforce for economic development. In a well-known book, Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth (1964), the economists Frederick Harbison and Charles Myers laid out what was by that time the conventional wisdom among development scholars who accepted human capital theory: The builders of economies are elites of various kinds who organize and lead the march toward progress. Their effectiveness as prime movers depends not only on their own development but on the knowledge, skills, and capabilities of those whom they lead as well. Thus, in a very real sense, the wealth of a nation and its potential for growth stem from the power to develop and effectively utilize the innate capacities of people. Human resource development, therefore, may be a more realistic and reliable indicator of modernization or development than any other single indicator. (14)





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To develop the innate capacities of the people, it was believed that public investments in formal education were essential. Social scientists who studied the developing world during this period found moderate to strong correlations between a country’s investment in schooling and its GNP per capita (Schultz 1961; Denison 1962: chap. 7; Harbison and Myers 1964). These findings were sometimes taken as support for human capital theory. At the same time, researchers recognized that some countries invested more in schooling than their economic level seemed to warrant and that other countries had comparatively dynamic economies in spite of low levels of investment in schooling (Harbison and Myers 1964). A good many researchers in the human capital school concluded that human resources development alone was not sufficient to produce economic growth. Harbison and Myers, for example, wrote: Human resource development is only one of many factors which are associated with economic growth. The availability of petroleum and mineral resources, world markets for particular agricultural commodities, the population-to-land ratio, the stability of political institutions, social and cultural traditions, the existence of a will to modernize, and a host of other factors are also influential. (1964: 114)

C. Arnold Anderson and Mary Jean Bowman (1965) noted that pre–World War II income levels were a much better predictor of postwar income levels than were prewar schooling levels. Later scholars raised new questions about human capital theory. Some believed that the less careful human capital theorists had assumed a causal relationship that the data simply did not support. Instead of investments in schooling creating a hardworking and skilled workforce to carry forward economic development goals, it might simply be the case that richer countries could afford to spend more on education (see, e.g., Collins 1979: chap. 2). This argument likely does apply to some countries that have leveraged beneficial trade relationships and strong macroeconomic policies to invest more heavily in their educational systems, but the jury is still out about the causal relationship. Moreover, in most developing countries spending on education is not highly correlated with students’ performance on international tests of academic achievement (Hanushek 2013). Recent developments in human capital theory have shifted the emphasis from the quantity of schooling to the quality of schooling. Instead of focusing on the number of years of schooling students achieve, contemporary human capital theory focuses on how much students learn, as indicated by international test results. According to Eric Hanushek, one of the leaders of this new school of human capital theory, cognitive skills measured by international tests “are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and most importantly to economic growth” (Hanushek 2013: 204). Hanushek estimates that one standard deviation improvement in achievement is related to long-run economic growth that is higher by 2 percentage points. Although this focus on cognitive skills is an improvement on previous formulations of human capital theory, it continues, in my view, to ignore some of the deeper and more complex causes of economic development.



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State-Led Development Theories Today, social scientists who study development largely reject the dependency and human capital theories in favor of a more complex view of the relationship between schooling and economic growth (see, e.g., Evans 1995; Kohli 2004). A well-educated labor force is often an important factor in development, and a poorly educated labor force can certainly be an impediment. However, other factors are at least as essential to sustained economic growth. These include a stable and well-trained state bureaucracy, effective economic policies and trade alliances, and the avoidance of war, political tyranny, overpopulation, and overborrowing. Economic development is like making a cake. Several ingredients are required in the mix—eggs, flour, sugar—and many other items available in stores, such as mustard and ketchup, should be kept as far away as possible. Without one of the required ingredients, the cake will not taste right, and the same is true if any one of the banned ingredients somehow gets into the mix. High levels of schooling and widespread cognitive skills are, therefore, best considered both a contributor to economic development and (perhaps as often) a consequence. Investment in human capital through schooling does not in itself lead to high rates of economic growth. At the same time, it can contribute to economic growth, if mixed with the right development policies, by helping create a disciplined and skilled labor force. Examples from South America make the point. In the years following World War II, the most educated nations in Latin America were Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, but none of those countries moved to the forefront of economic development in their region. Indeed, the social upheavals of industrialization and political conflict produced brutally repressive military dictatorships instead of the rapid growth reformers had anticipated. Their elegant constitutions were torn up, their congresses closed, their courts rendered a sham (Skidmore and Smith 1989: 372). These countries have recovered economic leadership in South America over the last two decades, and both Chile and Argentina are now ranked by the UN as highly developed. But they could not have done so without transitions to democracy, governments that recognized the importance of exports for development, and targeted aid from the donor community. Schooling quality, on the other hand, remains problematic, with high levels of truancy, low-quality teachers, and scores on international tests that consistently rank in the bottom third of participating countries (Fiszbein 2014). Chile has made the largest strides in education of the three, but high-quality education in Chile remains very unequally distributed between affluent and poor families, as it does throughout South America. By contrast, highly developed Japan experienced a decadelong recession beginning in 1991 caused by a speculative-asset price bubble. It took Japan 12 years to recover its GDP to 1990 levels (Krugman 2009). But throughout the period the Japanese educational system continued to perform at a high level, indicating from a different angle the limited and contingent connection between human capital development and economic prosperity. The high-performing Asian economies. We can better understand the relationship between economic and schooling development if we look in some detail at the world’s greatest economic success story of the past quarter century: the eight high-performing





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Asian economies (HPAEs). In addition to Japan, these high-performing economies include the four tigers—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan—and Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, which joined the group in the past three decades. The four tigers are now core members of the elite club of highly developed wealthy societies, and the other three countries are not far behind. Another Asian economy, market-Leninist China, has also shown remarkable economic gains. Figure 3.2 shows patterns of growth and income inequality in several countries of the developing world in the mid-1980s. The figure shows that the highest-performing economies in this period were disproportionately concentrated in East Asia. It suggests, in addition, that growth in these economies was not accompanied by the same high rates of income inequality found in the high-growth countries of Latin America. This concentration of East Asian economies at the top of the growth charts encouraged social scientists to look for the sources of what has been called the East Asian miracle (see, e.g., Amsden 1989; World Bank 1993). 8 South Korea

7

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Taiwan, China Hong Kong

Singapore

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Figure 3.2  Income inequality and growth of gross domestic product, 1985–1989 s o u r c e : World Bank 1993: 4. n o t e : Income inequality is measured by the ratio of the income shares of the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent of the population.



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By 1965, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore had achieved universal primary schooling, well ahead of other developing economies. Even Indonesia had a primary school enrollment rate of 70 percent. These high enrollment rates continued in later years through the secondary level and began to be evident in higher education (World Bank 1993: 43–46). In general, enrollment rates at different levels of schooling in the HPAEs have tended to be higher than predicted for each country’s income level, meaning that they were investing more in schooling than countries at a similar level of GNP per capita. Between 1970 and 1989, for example, real expenditures per pupil at the primary level rose by 355 percent in South Korea, compared with 64 percent in Mexico, 38 percent in Kenya, and just 13 percent in Pakistan (World Bank 1993: 45). Remember, however, that per pupil expenditures may reflect economic growth, which allows for more spending on education. Schooling is far from a completely independent part of the East Asian miracle. Educational institutions, like most other institutions in these societies, have benefited from lower birthrates than are found in the rest of the developing world. Lower birthrates mean that resources do not have to be stretched as far, class sizes are manageable, and everyone can be accommodated. Most have also benefited from the absence of political conflict, famine, and disease—factors that have limited progress in such nearby countries as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. (Victimized by each of these plagues, China also experienced stalled development until it instituted market-based economic reforms in the 1980s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.) East Asian countries have clearly benefited from good family learning environments, which are built partly on the educational achievements of the previous generation and partly on the comparatively small number of children in each home. Instead of thinking of schooling as an important variable in the development formula, it would be better to think of it as part of a virtuous circle of influences. Without doubt, the most important part of this virtuous circle is economic progress itself. As an economy grows, more resources become available for schooling children. The more people who are educated and the better the quality of the schooling they receive, the better the social environment they provide for the next generation. It can be argued that economic policies, not a commitment to human capital development, led the way in East Asia, but they actually went hand in hand. We can only speculate on whether the economic policies of the HPAEs could have been successful without the strong commitment to formal education that accompanied them. Japan was the first East Asian economy to reach full industrialization, and its influence was great, first as a colonizer of Korea and Taiwan and later as a model for many of the later-developing HPAEs. Following World War II, Japan promoted the development of several weak industries by offering protective tariffs and formal incentives for introducing advanced technology. It also established so-called rationalization cartels to remove inefficient firms from export markets. Government policies in the other HPAEs have not been based on a single model, but they have all actively supported export industries and imposed high tariffs on imports to protect domestic industry. In several countries, capital markets were not free. Governments repressed interest rates and directed credit to guide investments. The HPAEs have





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also developed an effective regional economic alliance for shared growth, with investment flowing first from Japan to the four tigers and more recently from these economies to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. The success of the East Asian economies is also built on comparatively low levels of social welfare spending, which reduces the threat of overborrowing to finance government debt (see World Bank 1993: 79–103). Looking at the success of the HPAEs in relation to the rest of the developing world, it appears that they have truly built the better mousetrap and that the mousetrap has been built by state-based development elites. Adrian Leftwich (1995) lists four characteristics of the successful developmental state (many of which are shared by fast-growing economies outside East Asia): • a determined and cohesive developmental elite • relative autonomy of the development elite from intrusive political and military forces • a competent, powerful, and insulated economic bureaucracy to carry out and monitor policies • a weak set of social class actors, such as labor unions and local business interests Export-oriented development (rather than the development of national industries to market imported products) seems to be a centerpiece of most successful development states, as is the creation of strong trade and investment alliances with other regional powers. For example, Botswana, a comparatively successful African development state, benefited from trade with and investment by South Africa and Zimbabwe (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001). As Gershon Feder (1983) observes, growth can be generated by not only the increase in capital and labor but the reallocation of existing resources from the less efficient nonexport sector to the high-productivity export sector. The export of diamonds was a big part of the success of Botswana, but many countries have mineral wealth that does not lead to economic development. Policies that encourage export-led development depend on a stable and well-trained state economic bureaucracy that knows how to leverage the benefits of leading exports. In thinking about the full implications of the high-performing East Asian economies, it is worth remembering that nearly all of these highly disciplined societies achieved economic success at the expense of a degree of political freedom and legal protection for citizens. All four of the little tigers were ruled by dictators, or near dictators, during the period of their initial advance, and the severity of some of the regimes is legendary. In Singapore, even small infractions, such as spray painting private property, could bring a bruising caning at the hands of authorities, and political dissent was not tolerated. In South Korea, the civilian president Park Chung-hee used laws authorizing arbitrary arrest and detention and laws suppressing free association, expression, and assembly to harass and control political opponents and labor activists. Schooling in the HPAEs reflected both the competitiveness of their economies and the authoritarianism of their political regimes. The current period looks comparatively liberal by comparison. For Americans, it is a disturbing fact that the habits built partly in fear of authoritarian governments have



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been important as foundations for the impressive educational and economic success of these societies. Factors related to development success. We can now draw some conclusions about the role of schooling in economic development. Schooling can aid economic development, and economic development certainly tends to improve schooling, but the correlations hide as much as they reveal. Low-income countries in the developing world sometimes have high levels of literacy, high primary school enrollments, and good university systems. By the late 1970s, Kenya, the Philippines, Peru, and Chile, for example, all reported primary school enrollment rates well above 75 percent (Carceles 1979), but their per capita growth for the 1965–1989 period lagged behind countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, which had yet to reach high levels of enrollment in the primary grades (World Bank 1993: 31). The problems of developing countries stem more often from political turmoil, overpopulation, disease, ineffective economic policies, and foreign debt than from schooling policies. The pitfalls for developing countries are many, and a strong commitment to schooling provides no magic ladder out. Only when a commitment to human capital development through schooling is combined with political stability, declining population growth, effective (typically, export-led) policies for the advancement of trade and industry, and macroeconomic stability to prevent overborrowing can a low-income developing society begin to experience strong rates of growth and development.

conclusion Most countries in the developing world have been independent for only 60–70 years. They inherited many features of schooling from the colonial powers. In their administrative and curricular structure, schools look very similar the world over. In addition, some particular practices of the colonial powers continued to leave their stamp on schooling in the newly independent states. Grade repetition, common in France, was, for example, also more common in the former French colonies. The first generation of colonial leaders included many mass-mobilizing intellectuals and many status quo–oriented dynastic families and military rulers. The policies of these two groups tended to differ greatly. Mass-mobilizing intellectuals were schooling expansionists. They launched literacy campaigns, invested heavily in schooling, and were responsive to the schooling interests of the poor. Status quo–oriented leaders were more leery of schooling expenditures and repressed dissent that arose among students. Because of their relative indifference to the poor, their schooling policies tended to subsidize the well-to-do. The second postcolonial generation has been marked by an increasing level of convergence in school policies but increasing differences in economic conditions. The new standard model of schooling bears the imprints of the decline of political passions in the developing world and the influence of donor agencies like the World Bank. The World Bank has successfully promulgated a model of schooling that encourages primary public schooling bolstered by private spending at higher levels of schooling, modernized vocational education and training, improved teacher training, and evaluation of education





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policy through a mix of efficiency and equity criteria. Over the last decade, it has also encouraged spending on tertiary education. In spite of more standard policies, the poorest countries of the developing world have seen their school systems stagnate as a result of governmental corruption, war, weak economic development policy implementation, and continued population growth. Where the problems of the developing world are greatest, so are the problems of schooling. Three theories have sought to explain the role schooling plays in economic development. These are the dependency, human capital, and state-led development theories. The contemporary evidence tends to support the third of these theories, which focuses on the role the state plays in encouraging development through supporting export industries, regulating capital markets, and encouraging regional growth coalitions. Schooling in this theory is a factor of lesser importance in economic development than in the human capital theory, but it is a more important factor than the dependency theory allows. It is less important than state economic policies as an engine of growth, but it can play a role in economic development by helping create a disciplined and skilled labor force. In Chapter 2 and this chapter, I discuss the structure of schooling in the industrialized and the developing world. Drawing primarily on the work of macro-historical sociologists, I show why schooling systems have developed as they have and some consequences of different structures. We now turn, in Chapters 4 through 7, to a discussion of three major purposes of schooling in the contemporary world: the transmission of school knowledge, socialization, and social selection. Chapter 4 begins this new discussion by looking at the defining purpose of schooling for most educators, the transmission of knowledge.

4

schools and cultural transmission

Schooling has three major purposes in contemporary societies: the transmission of school knowledge (the topic of this chapter); socialization, or the training of values, attitudes, and habits of conduct (the topic of Chapter 5); and social selection, or the sorting of people for higher- and lower-level jobs in the occupational and class structure (the topic of Chapters 6 and 7). These purposes underlie the familiar activities of schools. When students read silently at their desks or work on problems at the blackboard, they are studying the knowledge that one generation of educators considers important to transmit to the next generation of students. When students are told to sit still, concentrate, and do their own work, they are being socialized—in this case into habits of industriousness and independence. When they are directed on the basis of grades and test scores into more demanding or less demanding courses of study, they are being evaluated in ways connected to social selection. By “transmission of school knowledge,” I mean specifically the instruction of the uneducated members of a society by school authorities in the facts, theories, interpretations, and reasoning abilities that are considered to be consequential for the cognitive development of the individual and the transmission of culture in the larger society. In modern societies, the transmission of school knowledge occurs through a curriculum of subjects distributed over blocks of time in the school day. The curriculum can be defined as “a historically specific pattern of knowledge, which is selected, organized and distributed to learners through educational institutions” (Kliebard 1992: 181). It is important to keep in mind that the knowledge transmitted through schooling is only a subset of all knowledge in the world. As I discuss it, the study of the transmission of school knowledge consists, first, of the subjects and course content that go into making up the curriculum and, second, of the extent to which this material is successfully transmitted to the next generation. (The sociology of classroom interaction is discussed separately in Chapter 8, because teaching and learning are connected not only to the transmission of school knowledge but also to socialization and social selection.)





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In my view, the study of cultural transmission should include investigation of what educational authorities want students to learn and how much of what is transmitted is actually learned by students. The chapter therefore takes up four topics: (1) how the school curriculum developed historically, (2) the social forces that have shaped curricula, (3) what the contemporary structure of curriculum looks like in different parts of the world, and (4) how well students in different countries learn course materials. The chapter begins by examining the relative importance of the transmission of school knowledge compared to the other main purposes of schooling: socialization and social selection.

how important is the transmission of school knowledge ? It may seem obvious that the teaching of subject matter is the most important purpose of schooling. But is it really? Undoubtedly, some types of school knowledge—basic literacy and numeracy, for example—are essential equipment for living in most places. Everyone living in urban areas needs to be able to read the written word and to tally lists of numbers in order to survive independently in daily life. As one climbs the occupational ladder, higher levels of reading comprehension are usually required, and so, sometimes, are higher levels of quantitative understanding (Rosenbaum and Binder 1997). Even so, some good arguments can be raised for the view that the transmission of school knowledge is for society a less important outcome of schooling than either socialization or social selection. Let us examine some of the more persuasive arguments: • Both individuals and societies rely on a number of different knowledge systems for orienting conduct. In adult life, the knowledge taught in school does not necessarily count for more than other forms of knowledge, such as common sense, popular culture, merchandising, folklore, and religious belief. Nearly everyone recognizes that other knowledge systems compete with school knowledge for influence in everyday life. School knowledge might count more for those who run our institutions, but for the majority of people this is doubtful. Moreover, some of these other knowledge systems, such as popular culture and religious traditions, have become more, not less, important in shaping cognition in many parts of the world. • Beyond transmitting basic skills of literacy and computation, schools do not actually succeed very well in transmitting the lessons of the curriculum. Some students, of course, pull in school knowledge like magnets in a field of iron filings but not the majority. Little that is taught in school sticks in most students’ minds for long. A British book of humor, 1066 and All That, contends that it is the first “truly memorable history of England,” because unlike any other history book, it is the only one devoted to what adults actually remember from their school lessons, as opposed to what they are supposed to remember (Sellar and Yeatman 1931). In addition to “103 Good Things” and “5 Bad Kings,” the book includes “2 Genuine Dates.” Two other dates of the four originally included



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“were eliminated at the last moment after research . . . revealed that they are not memorable.” The book has the cheeky wit to say what most teachers could not dare to admit: school knowledge has a short half-life for most students, when it has a life at all. • Much of what educators count as transmitting knowledge might be better interpreted as socialization messages or moments in the process of social selection. The treatment of value messages as cognitive content happens frequently. For example, some lessons in social studies are based on how other people see the world. The real lesson here is that we should not judge others too quickly. The purpose of such lessons is more to create socially approved attitudes than to transmit a formal body of knowledge. But the problem of treating all school lessons as cultural transmission goes much deeper than this. When few students feel an intrinsic interest in the materials they study and few use these materials when they are adults, knowledge might very well be regarded as more relevant to the process of social selection than it is to the process of cultural transmission. Learning is important, in other words, because it allows the schools to identify students who are academically able and conscientious and who can, therefore, be encouraged to go on to higher levels of schooling. Sociologists have long argued that the adoption of examinations fateful for future opportunities in school or careers carries a high price, because when they were introduced the selective function of schooling began to overwhelm and reorder the educational function (see, e.g., Sorokin [1927] 1959; Warner, Havighurst, and Loeb 1944). If we concentrate on the majority of students, rather than the academic elite, we might conclude that the transmission of school knowledge, beyond basic reading and calculating, is neither the most important nor the most successful activity of the school. This would not be a happy conclusion for most teachers, of course. Although these are plausible arguments, the curriculum and the transmission of school knowledge are important for sociologists to examine for several reasons: • The curriculum provides an official and authoritative picture of what an educated person is expected to know. Although many students fail to absorb much from the official curriculum, it stands as an ideal of what society expects the well-educated person to know. In that respect it shapes the official knowledge culture of the society and provides a status boost for those whose achievements approach that ideal. • Mastering the school curriculum has practical importance as a means of gaining a livelihood for many people, and it also influences the way many people do their work. School knowledge is, in this sense, building material for much work, particularly in the upper reaches of the occupational structure. Of course, it is not the only influence on work activities. Even top professionals rely on practical knowledge gained at work as much as they rely on school knowledge, but school knowledge is a





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backdrop for gaining this practical knowledge and often it is also a direct reference point. Architects could not build without some knowledge of geometry and architectural design principles, even though building also requires such practicebased skills as selling clients on ideas and nurturing the loyalty of a work group. • In every modern society, the subjects taught in school are, partly as a consequence of their importance in the upper reaches of society, surrounded with an aura of special significance. The prestige of the ideals represented by school knowledge is very often a factor in what people think they should be paying attention to. People may refer to school knowledge when they are trying to make a serious point or are communicating with high-status people. Recognition in the curriculum is a form of cultural status, and it exercises a kind of charismatic authority in society. For this reason, struggles for symbolic centrality can be fierce. People who advocate the theory of intelligent design against evolutionary theory, for example, do so partly because they want their intellectual views to be included in the symbolic center of society. • The mental operations involved in learning curricula—reading, interpreting, calculating, making inferences, comparing, analyzing—are important features of adult life, whether or not adults remember much specific content from their school lessons. From this perspective, the content of lessons is less important than the practice of engaging in mental activities connected to learning that content. To go a bit further, we might argue that without relatively difficult course content, it is unlikely that these mental capacities could be developed as well. Every report assignment requires students to learn skills of research and organization. People could not make convincing arguments, in all likelihood, without prior training in examining a variety of perspectives and bringing evidence to bear on them. Efforts to solve problems in a step-by-step way may reflect processes learned in solving the logical problems posed in philosophy or math classes. Most people could not readily construct spreadsheets, for example, without considerable prior training in logical reasoning. Learning how to learn is another important part of the experience of schooling. A lawyer might not remember many of the cases discussed in her classes on torts, but she almost certainly remembers how to research cases and how to construct arguments on the basis of legal reasoning. • Even those who do not carry the torch of secular learning into their adult lives do often find something of considerable value in their school lessons. This value may come from a variety of sources—from a useful knowledge of correct grammar and pronunciation, or a way of dissecting arguments, or a flash of insight brought on by a particular work of art. A good many people gain the lifelong habit of reading through school; they become frequenters of libraries and subscribers to periodicals. It is also true that the high cultural aspirations underlying the teaching of the core subjects of curriculum can serve as an inspiration to teachers and students to strive to know more.



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Are these contributions as important as the contributions that schools make to shaping students’ attitudes, orientations, and conduct (socialization) or to selecting winners and losers in the stratification sweepstakes (social selection)? Possibly not, but they are important enough to warrant our full attention as part of the study of schools and ­societies. After all, the ostensible purpose of schooling is to bring teachers and students together so that students can learn curriculum. In this and subsequent chapters (see especially Chapters 8 and 9), I am interested in how well schools are achieving this end, insofar as we can tell from national and international test results, even as I explore other outcomes of schooling.

curriculum making and curricular change Why do children study English, math, basic science, and social studies in elementary school rather than, for example, business principles, computers, ethics and morality, and American ethnic cultures? Or, even further afield from current practices, why not ask students to study car maintenance, popular music, consumer awareness, and pulp fiction? Asking these kinds of questions leads us to the heart of the social organization of school knowledge. One common way of looking at the school curriculum is to say that science and mathematics are taught because they explain why things happen in nature, and the humanities are taught because they provide insights into the human condition. Ideas about increasing our understanding of our own and other cultures usually provide comparable justification for social studies. These ideas echo the famous lines of the 19th-century English educator and essayist Matthew Arnold ([1869] 2006), who argued that certain subjects and works must be taught because they represent “the best which has been thought and said” (5) and therefore produce a fully humane reason, a mind that is not only logical and efficient but also fully open to experience and sophisticated in judgment. However appealing these sentiments sound (I confess they still sound appealing to me), they are not too helpful as a guide to how materials actually come to be represented in school curricula. They fail to provide an accurate historical grounding and suggest a greater stability than in fact has existed. School curricula are not very stable over time. New subjects like environmental science have gained ground, and old subjects like Greek and Latin have declined in importance. Except in scientific fields, the major lessons taught are also not very stable. Current judgments of intellectual value are not always very similar to past judgments, and other than a handful of enduring authors, such as Homer and Shakespeare, the reputations of authors and works rise and fall continuously. The popularity of even these authors is largely restricted to one cultural region: Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. To understand the rise and fall of subjects and authors, it is necessary to move away from the idealistic humanism of Matthew Arnold to the less high-minded but more illuminating realms of social and cultural history. Perhaps surprisingly, given the flux of school subjects, a few generalizations can be derived from the study of curricular history.





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This study suggests that a handful of key factors have been most important in shaping the school curriculum: • the purposes of different levels of schooling at the time they were first organized • the interests and ideals of social groups (such as the upper classes and the state) insofar as they have been involved in curriculum making • the formation of a ladder structure with each level defined relative to the others • the shift from moralistic to developmental approaches as a basis for conceptualizing the relationship between children and society • the changing size, composition, and aspirations of student populations at different levels of schooling • the maneuvering of rival bands of educators (and citizen support groups) for influence on the basis of their commitments to particular visions of curricula Each of these factors will enter into my discussion of the rise and fall of school subjects. Paying attention to these influences helps sociologists explain why boundaries exist between academic and nonacademic subjects, how these boundaries have been adjusted over time, why new subjects come into being, and why subjects gain and lose popularity over time.

Three Early Institutional Sources of Curriculum Our contemporary schooling systems did not originate in any single curricular purpose. Instead, three distinct purposes played roles: (1) rudimentary learning, (2) liberal learning, and (3) occupationally specialized learning. Each purpose was linked historically to a distinct level of schooling and then migrated between levels as the current ladder structure of schooling, running from preschool to university, was constructed during the course of the 19th century. We can gain a sense of the origins of our contemporary systems by examining the subjects taught in ancient Greece and Rome to children and young adults at different ages and the spirit in which they were taught. Primary schools, which have existed sporadically since ancient times, were developed to teach basic literacy, numeracy, and morality. In ancient Greece, girls were not allowed to attend school and were educated at home. In ancient Rome, both boys and girls attended these schools. They were called ludi, a name that translates into “play,” suggesting the mix of work and play at these schools. Classes were taught by educated freedmen or slaves. The goal was to convey rudimentary knowledge that would equip children to participate in adult life even if they did not continue schooling. (Boys from wealthy families did not attend ludi and were instead taught at home by private tutors.) Most children did not continue beyond age 11. Those who did were exclusively boys. Secondary schools (known as grammar schools) educated students who were in what we would today call the middle school grades and served as an extension of the primary schools, just as middle schools do today. Beginning at age 11, boys who continued school learned Greek and Latin, often through the study of poetry. (Homer was a staple.) Students



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received a smattering of other subjects, including geography, mythologies, history, and ethics. The ancient Greeks taught a wide range of subjects in what we would today call upper secondary schools. Beginning at age 15, boys studied not only rhetoric and literature but also science, philosophy, music, dance, and gymnastics. In ancient Rome, by contrast, boys progressed to schools of rhetoric, which focused on the composition of speeches and typically included only study of literature and ethics in addition to rhetoric. For the Romans, to be a good citizen meant to be a good speaker. Romans consequently dropped most of the Greek secondary school subjects that were not considered useful for these purposes (Bonner 1977). Higher education introduced the idea of liberal learning. In ancient Athens, young men from elite families attached themselves to particular teachers in institutions of higher learning, modeled on the original Academy of Plato. The leaders of these academies were philosophers or rhetoricians of high rank. The academies were the pinnacle of higher learning in the ancient world. Typically, the young men who studied in them were in their late teens or early 20s. The ancient academies contributed the idea that students should learn advanced ideas in a range of fields as part of their preparation for the world, or as we might say today, their general education. They also contributed the idea that discourse between teacher and pupil is the ideal method of instruction. Different academies offered varying menus of subjects (or authors) to study, but literature, philosophy, and mathematics were the subjects most frequently taught. The ideal of a liberal education played a decisive role. The term “liberal,” in this context, means “freedom of the mind” and is opposed to the “servility” of following others blindly. The purpose of the ancient academies was to develop young men who were fit to govern by exposing them to the accumulated wisdom of great minds (and to challenge them constantly to defend their ideas and to acknowledge the good ideas of others), thereby preparing them for the active life of a leading citizen (Marrou [1948] 1982). Universities developed primarily as institutions for professional skills training for men from the upper reaches of society and those who were ambitious to join those ranks. In the East, advanced training for occupational specialization had existed since the time of the Han dynasty (200 BCE). The ultimate aim of professional training was preparation for state service. In the West, universities—a distinctly new institutional form—were a product of the late medieval period. They grew up as bands of students surrounding renowned scholars and teachers (Rashdall [1895] 1936). Their underlying purpose was to provide training for the learned professions—that is, the clergy, medicine, law—or the teaching of these subjects. In this sense, the medieval universities were ultimately vocational in purpose. Yet they were not narrowly vocational. Because they trained young men for liberal as well as learned professions, they were based on the premise that specialized occupational training should be founded on and constantly supplemented by broad liberal learning. In the course of creating the integrated ladder structure of primary, secondary, and higher education that we have today, state elites and educational reformers mixed the originating purposes of the four levels in new ways. Perhaps most important, primary and secondary education absorbed some of the inspiration of the liberal arts ideal. The ideal of occupationally relevant education, associated with the medieval university, spread





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to secondary schooling, where it has coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with a continuing emphasis on general education. Universities have continued to offer a mix of liberal and occupational options, but occupational curricula retain the stronger influence in most industrialized societies. Since the rise of the reformed German universities in the early 19th century, the pursuit of new knowledge through research has become an important third element in the structure of universities, together with occupationally specialized and liberal education. College (and postgraduate) education in most of the world follows the occupational preparation pattern today, although of course with a much wider range of occupations offered. The United States is a rare case insofar as the liberal arts ideal continues to inform lower-division work in colleges and universities, while occupational objectives are central for most students in upper division (Brint et al. 2005). In most countries other than the United States, general education is associated with secondary school, while postsecondary institutions focus on occupational preparation. The three-year baccalaureate, which has become standard throughout the European Union, has accelerated the commitment of the Europeans to occupational education in the postsecondary years. Students have the option to study pure subjects that are not directly connected to the labor market— subjects like sociology and foreign languages—but even these subjects are frequently treated as preprofessional programs. Liberal learning. Because of the worldwide influence of the Western model of cur­ riculum we can say that the ideal of liberal learning has had the most diffuse influence globally. This ideal now infuses secondary education and in some countries also the lower division of university education. It retains influence as well in the upper division of college for those pursuing the pure, or basic, fields of knowledge. Many schoolteachers and faculty members in nonquantitative fields endorse the liberal arts ideal as the centerpiece of their curricular philosophies. The ideal of liberal learning has helped differentiate public and nonprofit private schools from trade schools, because they assert that education is about more than becoming skilled at a trade or profession. Rather, it is about becoming a fully developed human being. The ideal can be described as aristocratic in origin, both because its ultimate purpose was to prepare students for governance and because, at the time this ideal originated, only aristocrats had the leisure to study. In the ancient Western world, the liberal arts tradition was born in a dispute between the two kinds of teachers, orators and philosophers, who prepared upper-class students for public life (Marrou [1948] 1982; Kimball 1986). For the orators, rhetoric and related disciplines were the culmination of education, because they prepared students for the active public life of the citizen. For the philosophers, scientific studies were most important because they provided training in the truths underlying the appearances of everyday life. Our contemporary arts and humanities derive from the first tradition; our contemporary sciences derive from the second. In the Hellenistic world, created by the conquests of Alexander the Great, liberal education gained many of the connotations that it has today. The old dispute between orators and philosophers as to which form of knowledge was superior achieved a kind of curricular compromise in the Hellenistic world, with both branches included among the septem



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artes liberalis (seven liberal arts). The important contrast continued to be between liberal and servile. Education for servility both in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds included all subjects intended to prepare students for a practical trade rather than for political or cultural leadership. As canonized by Martianus Capella in the fifth century CE, the seven liberal arts consisted of the trivium (three subjects: general grammar, formal logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (four subjects: arithmetic, geometry, music and harmonic theory, and astronomy). Writers and scholars, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Varro, were influential in the maintenance of these fields as the basis for elite education in ancient Rome. Although scorned by many early Christians because of their lack of connection with scripture, the liberal arts appealed to cultivated Christian bishops who wanted their writings to be considered part of the higher culture (Jaeger 1961). Having won church sponsorship as a means to express Christianity’s competitive level of learning, the liberal arts formed one of the foundations of the medieval university, together with training in the learned professions of law, medicine, and theology. The ideal of a liberal education, therefore, had from the beginning a status-defining character. But this status-defining character lost its association with the aristocracy once it was adopted by modernizing states and their educational ministries. It is therefore wrong to reduce the social meaning of the liberal arts curriculum to its status-defining elements. Under the influence of the modernizing founders of mass secondary schooling, liberal culture provided an image, theoretically available to all, of what it means to have a fully formed consciousness. Indeed, it is one of the great triumphs of democratic societies to have aspired at times to make this education for the freedom of the mind available to all students rather than limiting its availability to the governing elite alone. Modern curricular organization: Standard time blocks. The liberal arts have provided a content base and philosophical ideal that remains resonant to this day, but the temporal structure of curricular organization changed once the tutorial and academy forms of delivering instruction declined. Before the era of mass secondary schooling, master teachers worked with students in a much less formal and much more personal way. They read works with a single student or a few students but not in a strictly ordered way and not always during strictly prescribed periods of time. (This pattern persists in some graduate programs and in the undergraduate colleges of Cambridge and Oxford in England.) The contemporary arrangement of the school day into standardized blocks of time based on a sequence of subject matter is a product of the Protestant Reformation and, even more so, of the transition from elite to mass schooling under public control. The first appearance of the term “curriculum” occurs in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1633. Here we see the creation of a deliberate order, each subject in its own time block. “Curriculum,” writes David Hamilton, “was to Calvinist educational practice what discipline was to Calvinist social practice” (Hamilton 1980: 14). This arrangement took the free-flowing exchange between students and teachers and reformed it into a time grid. Public school bureaucracy, with its need to coordinate large numbers of students and teachers, shows a strong affinity for more standardized forms of ordering and classifying knowledge (Goodson 1988; Bidwell and Dreeben 1992). Subject matter divisions, along





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with spatially separated classrooms and standard time units, are the kinds of highly organized, rule-bound practices on which bureaucracies thrive (Bidwell and Dreeben 1992: 359). It is not surprising that the rise of urban mass schooling under public bureaucratic control led to far greater organization and monitoring of subject matter divisions.

The Conflict of Ideologies in the Modern Period Many sociologists assume that the way a society selects and classifies knowledge “reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control” in the society (B. ­Bernstein 1971: 47). This brings out an important point: the curriculum does not exist as an emanation from the brows of wise men and women; it has been created through the struggles of people whose ideologies reflect their material and ideal interests. During the period following the rise of compulsory schooling, the main contenders have been educational theorists and researchers, business leaders (and their allies in the business-oriented middle classes), wealthy idealists (and their allies among intellectuals and liberal-minded professionals), government planners, and activists connected to social movements. The cultural historian Raymond Williams (1961) suggests that curricular changes have reflected the relative power of these contending groups. Table 4.1 schematizes Williams’s argument.1 Although Williams’s framework is useful, it is important to avoid the pitfalls of overly schematic thinking when considering arguments about the social bases of curriculum. Specific groups can be identified with a particular vision of curricular priorities, but not everyone in a group lines up in the same way, and as a new vision of curriculum becomes popular it attracts support from many different quarters. (As I show below, factors other than group conflict, such as the numbers of students reaching different educational levels, also contribute to the outcome of curricular struggles.) A few who advocated mass public education, such as Frederick II in Denmark, were influenced by Enlightenment philosophers and hoped to disseminate the advantages of a liberal education more broadly in the population. Through the diffusion of liberal culture, reformers thought, democratic polities could retain the virtues of the ancient Greeks Ta b l e 4 . 1 A typology of educational ideals and policies Social group

Ideology

Educational policies

Aristocracy/gentry

Liberal arts

Businesspeople, managers, technical professionals Wealthy idealists/ intellectuals, liberal professionals Government planners

Occupational specialist Liberal arts expansion

Nonvocational courses in arts and sciences emphasizing cultivation, character, and judgment Vocational, occupational-professional curricula, providing training for marketable skills Expansion of upper-class education, providing opportunities for the enriched cultural development of all students Vocational and semiprofessional curricula, providing training for positions in the economy and state Adding curricula to reflect experiences of underrepresented groups

Social movement activists

Utilitarian/ technocratic Cultural inclusiveness

s o u r c e : Adapted from Williams 1961.



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and Romans while building popular support for elevated cultural standards. By contrast, the occupational specialist ideology carried by businessmen and the business-oriented middle classes, including Benjamin Franklin in the United States, encouraged training for marketable occupational skills. Beginning in the early 20th century, the primary school curriculum was disrupted by the struggle between traditionalists who wanted to focus on mastery of a few core subjects and progressives who wanted to encourage development of the whole child through the introduction of such subjects as art and physical education. The first view has had more appeal to the conservative, business-oriented middle classes, while the latter has appealed more often to wealthy idealists and their allies among intellectuals and liberal professionals. The developmental approach, which began with the educational theories of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in the late 18th century and was developed by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall in the 19th century, has had a continuing influence, both in the United States and in other developed societies. This influence can be seen in the range of subjects included in the curricula and the participatory methods by which they are studied, methods that include group work, hands-on manipulations, and field trips. The school accountability movements of the later 20th century represent a recent example of the reassertion of traditionalists who want the schools to focus more attention on core subjects and drilling to improve performance. In the upper secondary school grades, the main contest has been between supporters of liberal arts and academic education and supporters of occupational and vocational education. The curriculum has changed to accommodate these two ideas about the good society: a democratic and humanistic ideology that has demanded equality and opportunity based on a common and elevated academic curriculum and a utilitarian ideology that has emphasized differentiation by individual ability and practical, job-relevant training for most students. Not surprisingly, when the commercial and industrial wing of the middle class has exercised the greatest power over curriculum, the study of science and mathematics has usually been favored over humanistic studies, because the former have practical applications to business and industry. Another influential group in the era of mass public schooling, government planners, has typically favored using curriculum as a mechanism of workforce planning, linking educational qualifications to labor market opportunities. In this respect government planners have generally allied with the business classes. Social movement activists have entered the picture episodically to demand better representation in the curriculum of the groups whose interests they represent. During peak periods of immigration in 19th-century America, for example, ethnic advocacy groups sometimes won greater attention in the schools for their group’s language and cultural achievements. In one instance, German American parents succeeded in passing laws in several states that mandated German instruction when a quota of parents in a community petitioned for it (“German Immigration” 2004). Beginning in the 1960s, social movement activists successfully mobilized to expand curricula from primary school through postsecondary education to represent the art, thought, and historical contributions of people whose voices were at that time infrequently represented in curricula—notably, women,





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racial-ethnic minorities, and those from non-Western cultures The aspirations of these groups were supported by government planners who sympathized with them and foresaw the need to incorporate the contributions of a diversifying population (see discussion below of the rise of multicultural curricula). In postsecondary education, the liberal arts ideal has become increasingly marginalized; it is now associated mainly with fractions of the middle class whose work involves texts and images (e.g., artists, writers, librarians, and teachers). Occupationally specialized education has, by contrast, appealed to the dominant fractions of the middle class: businesspeople, managers, and higher-status professionals such as engineers and doctors (Bourdieu 1984). The role of government planners has been to support the preferences of the business-oriented middle classes and to broaden and rationalize the state’s interest in workforce planning. They have introduced new occupational curricula into secondary and postsecondary education and linked support for educational programs to labor market projections. Thus, the modern curriculum stands as a compromise between the major interests summarized in Table 4.1. Across the world the movement has been toward (1) teaching basic skills in the lower grades to prepare students for academic studies while adding other subjects that can contribute to the more complete development of the child, (2) the retention of some liberal arts requirements in secondary school, together with the addition of vocational courses and tracks for all but an academically oriented minority, and (3) occupational training for the great majority in tertiary education. The United States, Japan, and a few other countries are exceptions, insofar as occupational specialization tends to begin later, and the liberal arts tradition remains strong both in secondary schools and during the first two years of university education. In most of the world, the cultural broadening and personal development values of liberal education have been in retreat (see, e.g., Brint 2002; and Brint et al. 2005 for the U.S. case).

The Rise and Fall of School Subjects The conflict of ideologies forms the background for the study of the modern curriculum, because it tells us where support has existed in society for the several phases of restructuring that have occurred. Before we examine the contemporary structure of curriculum in countries around the world, it is important to begin to think about more specific influences and some of the personalities involved in the rise and fall of school subjects. Consider the American secondary school curriculum. Like characters in a play, school subjects enter and depart the stage. Classical languages and literatures, Greek and Latin, play leading roles in the early acts only to retire into the shadows in more recent acts. Physics, calculus, and foreign languages make a later entrance, are relatively silent at first, and then slowly swell into important supporting actors before falling back again into the shadows for the majority of students in the current era. Life-adjustment subjects like money management and personal appearance come in as the stage is set for the 20th century and are more or less dispatched during the Cold War period only to reenter in altered forms in the 1960s. If we take a long enough view, we can see a great pageant of



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comings and goings. What is true for subjects is true at an accelerated rate for authors, ideas, and theories. How do sociologists explain these dramatic goings-on? The most important part of the explanation has to do with the reigning definition among educators about the purposes of a particular level of schooling. As understandings of these purposes change, so do the subjects in the curriculum. These understandings, in turn, often reflect not only the group interests discussed above but also the influence of new types of students entering the institution and the aspirations that these new students bring with them. Primary school subjects. Primary schools at first focused on teaching basic literacy through reading and writing and the reinforcement of moral precepts (Tyack and Hansot 1982). The integration of literacy training with moral instruction is clear in the readers and themes assigned by educators. As David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot observe of 19thcentury textbooks in the United States, Above all, the textbook writers were careful not to confuse the pupils with wishy-washy morality. . . . The rules were always clear: Never Drink, Never Smoke, Work Hard, Tell the Truth, Obey Authority, Trust Providence. . . . [Student themes from the mid-19th century] suggest how deeply the absolutist morality of the evangelical movement became interwoven with a work ethic and ideology favoring the development of capitalism. (Tyack and Hansot 1982: 27–28)

From these sparse beginnings, many new subjects entered the primary school curriculum. These subjects include mathematics and science, arts and physical education, and social studies. In the era of mass public education, arithmetic already had strong advocates by the end of the 18th century. Because it was seen as having the power to “improve the logical and rational faculties of the mind,” it was closely associated with ideas of civic virtue, and it was championed by such leading figures of the American republic as Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster (P. Cohen 1982). France and Prussia also adopted arithmetic early. In those countries arithmetic was associated with ideals of rationality championed by the enlightened despots Napoleon I and Frederick the Great. The addition of arithmetic to the primary school curriculum illustrates how children in the Age of Enlightenment were already coming to be seen as capable of enhanced mental development. However, it was not until the middle of the 19th century that most countries adopted mathematics as part of their primary school curriculum. The widespread adoption of mathematics was associated with the rise of industrialization (Kamens and Benavot 1992), and educators’ sense that rudimentary mathematics could provide a practical benefit to children entering jobs in industrializing economies. Science lagged behind arithmetic as a primary school subject, partly because it represented a threat to countries with national religions. The conflict between the Catholic Church and science created particular resistance in Catholic countries. However, by the middle of the 19th century, it too had entered the primary school curriculum in many Protestant countries, where it was seen as “adding to the capacities of individuals to be loyal and productive citizens” (Kamens and Benavot 1992: 113).





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Excellence in the arts and physical activities were among the classical ideals of education, and Swiss-German educators considered them important for all students from the beginning of mass primary education in Western Europe. But Anglo-American educators did not at first include them in primary school curricula, because they had a narrowly book- and morality-based view of essential educational subjects. However, in the late 19th century, the image of children underwent a decisive change in the United States. No longer expected simply to conform, children were redefined under the influence of educational and cognitive psychologists as maturing organisms with developing capacities in many areas of mental, expressive, and physical life. In the 1890s, G. Stanley Hall and others in the child-study movement led a campaign to rethink the curriculum “along the lines of a natural order of development of the child.” The goal was to derive a curriculum “in harmony with the child’s real interest, needs and learning patterns.” Only then would the natural power within the child be “unharnessed” rather than constrained by strict discipline and dull recitals of facts typical of the teacher-centered school (Kliebard 1986: 28). Under this new cultural understanding, public schooling came to include aesthetic and physical education, as well as traditional academic subject matter. The new conception also led to much more attention to the socioemotional development of children and the use of trained professionals to counsel troubled children. The new child development philosophy gained a firm foothold in the schools for the first time in the 1920s, when many more students were beginning to enroll in secondary schools, and primary schools were consequently shedding their identity as institutions providing only rudimentary and terminal instruction for the young. One other change in the primary school curriculum is noteworthy: history has ceded part of its share of the curriculum to social studies. This transition is far more recent, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas history once focused on key personalities and conflicts in the rise of national power, social studies focuses on the groups and institutions that make up society and sometimes compares the styles of life, outlooks, and practices of people in one country to those in other countries. One controversial theory to explain this change is that the symbols of national power became less important as the bureaucratic state ceased to depend on charismatic sources of authority. For the sociologist David Kamens, this transition represents the passing of the “heroic phase” of nationalism: The construction of national myths, symbols and monuments has given way to the prosaic work of institution-building. . . . As the sacredness of the “nation” declines, learning facts, names and dates becomes a less compelling task of schooling. [Moreover], other cultures and societies gain credibility as objects of analysis, from [which] useful lessons may be drawn. (Kamens 1992: 77)

Although this explanation has merit, it needs to be qualified to account for wartime influences. War and other national crises increase the centrality of historical exposition related to the defining moments and symbols of national power and resilience. The study of history is a way for schools as instruments of the state to remind students of their civic obligations and stimulate emotions surrounding national loyalties.



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Secondary school subjects. Understandings of the purposes of secondary schooling have changed, in an almost mirror-like fashion, with the changing composition and aspirations of the students they have enrolled. Changes in curricular emphases regularly accompany the expansion of opportunities for secondary schooling and the more diverse composition of students that expansion brings. Martin Trow (1961) identifies three major stages in the transformation of secondary schooling in the United States: (1) as a preparatory institution for elites, (2) as a terminal institution for the majority, and (3) as a preparatory institution for the majority who will be going on to higher education. Each transformation, Trow argues, brought a new curricular emphasis in secondary schools. When secondary schools played a preparatory role for only a small fraction of the age group, classical subjects predominated. Secondary education was education for membership in an elite status group with esoteric knowledge unrelated to occupational success. Those so trained could recognize one another as part of the educated elite. In the West, these classical subjects included Latin, Greek, philosophy, history, and geography, together with a smattering of mathematics and science; in the East, they included classical literary texts, calligraphy, and religious philosophy. Secondary schools became less singularly wedded to liberal arts as they became mass rather than elite institutions. Although a residue of aristocratic humanism remained an important force in Europe, many of the subjects that were central to the classical curriculum (particularly Latin, Greek, and philosophy) declined greatly in centrality with the expansion of the number of students attending secondary schools. As soon as large numbers of nonelite students were admitted to secondary schools, pressures built for a more modern curriculum. This modern curriculum included courses in rhetoric and English composition, French, German, Latin, astronomy, chemistry, physics, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, political economy, moral science, mechanical drawing, and bookkeeping. The transition from the classical curriculum based on Greek and Latin to a modern, comprehensive curriculum occurred much earlier in the United States than in Europe, more or less simultaneously with the introduction of the first public high schools in the 1820s and 1830s (Labaree 1988: chap. 6). The comprehensive curriculum was closely associated with the democratic and utilitarian premises of American schooling, and it remained far more popular in the United States and in the Americas generally than in Europe or in the developing world (Kamens, Meyer, and Benavot 1996: 138). Science began to be introduced in Europe in the mid-19th century in lectures and demonstrations, but it did not become a formal part of the curriculum until the 1870s. The introduction of scientific education at higher levels of schooling was resisted by those with a strong stake in the status culture of humanistic education of gentlemen. The classical curriculum held out longest in countries like England, in which higher education, as a preserve of the landed aristocracy and learned professions, was highly independent from the modernizing interests of business and the state. It was not until the turn of the 20th century that scientific specializations became available to secondary students in Britain and then in only a limited way (Keeves 1986). Throughout Europe, new curricular options in secondary schools, based on either national languages and literatures or math and science, were introduced in the early





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20th century, but the classical curriculum retained its centrality until the great expansion of European secondary education in the 1950s and 1960s (Kamens, Meyer, and Benavot 1996: 131). At that time, the two new curricula became increasingly popular: one for students concentrating in arts, humanities, and modern languages and the other for students concentrating in mathematics and science. The secondary school curriculum remained academically oriented for the majority only as long as university enrollments were low and secondary schools enrolled relatively small numbers of students. Once secondary school replaced primary school as the terminal phase of schooling for most students, strong pressures developed to differentiate academic and vocational tracks. In the United States, the pressures to create vocational tracks began to build before the turn of the century,2 but these pressures were largely resisted until the first decade of the 20th century, when tens of thousands of new immigrants entered high schools. Demographic change pushed curricular change. Some influential educators of the Progressive Era favored expansion of the curriculum to suit the perceived interests of less academically oriented students. The educators, such as Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David Snedden, helped usher in “the incredible range” of courses that would one day find their way into the high school curriculum (Kliebard 1992: 166). In the 1920s, five out of six schools offered curricula in industrial arts or commercial subjects (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985). So-called life-adjustment curricula were also particularly popular during this period, with students studying such nonacademic subjects as money management, personal hygiene, and dating behavior (Cremin 1961: chap. 9). Explaining these changes, the educational historian David Cohen and his colleagues write, American educators quickly built a system around the assumption that most students didn’t have what it took to be serious about the great issues of human life, and that even if they had the wit, they had neither the will nor the futures that would support heavy-duty study. (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985: 245)

In Europe, the change in the number and composition of students attending secondary schools led also to an elaboration of vocational options. The tradition of elite secondary schooling was modified to include practical training in one of two ways; in some countries, new vocational schools were established; in other countries, a lower tier of vocational studies was added to existing academically oriented institutions. But the effect was essentially the same: schooling became less about preparing a cultivated elite for positions of power and more about preparing middle- and lower-income students for a wide array of potential job opportunities. After World War II, secondary schools in the United States took on a new role, in Martin Trow’s (1961) terms, as mass-transfer institutions to colleges and universities. Vocational subjects once again diminished in importance, because they served little purpose for the growing number of students who were now planning to attend college. Yet because higher education remained relatively exclusive, more demanding academic subjects such as foreign languages, physics, and calculus also gained stronger support. In the United States, Cold War planners’ needs for language specialists, area specialists, and physical scientists no doubt played an important role in the promotion of these subjects by the schools.



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The continued growth in higher education enrollments eventually led to declining enrollments of high school students in the most challenging academic subjects as well. Foreign languages, physics, trigonometry, and calculus all enrolled a smaller proportion of secondary school students in the 1960s and 1970s than they had in the immediate postwar years (Goodlad 1984; Ravitch 1995). These subjects were seen as too difficult for high school students and therefore the preserve of higher education. For the most part, only private schools and public schools in affluent suburbs continued to support them. With the shift from elite to mass higher education, colleges and universities became more an extension of secondary school than a distinctive prize for the academically talented. However, in the early 1980s social scientists and educational reformers began to emphasize the importance of rigorous curricula for students’ persistence and success in college (see, e.g., Alexander et al. 1982). As a result, momentum grew to restore a more rigorous curriculum in the secondary schools. The consequences of this movement have been most notable at suburban high schools educating the children of college graduates. But such difficult subjects as physics and calculus—now connected to preparation for national priority careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)— have reemerged in many nonaffluent schools as well. In Europe, class-divided secondary education persisted through the 1960s. In most countries, government planners attempted to reduce class divisions and increase higher education enrollments, but they did not do so by eliminating vocational programs from secondary schools. Instead, vocational qualifications proliferated (Stern, Bailey, and Merritt 1997), and policy makers added new pathways from vocational programs to postsecondary institutions. This process has gone furthest in France, where a near majority of university students now enter universities from the lycées professionnels, which specialize exclusively in vocational and technical programs. But nearly every European country has found ways to improve access to higher education for secondary school graduates of vocational programs. As discussed in Chapter 2, most have done so by increasing the types of tests that allow access to postsecondary education and by inducing changes in the pass rates of these examinations. Even in Germany, some graduates of the dual system are now admitted to universities and polytechnics. Higher education majors. The higher education curriculum literally offers something for everyone—from Egyptology to nematology—but changes in student preferences for specific fields are nevertheless evident. Classical subjects and the humanities generally have declined, while natural and social sciences have increased in popularity. In an influential book, the sociologists David John Frank and Jay Gabler (2006: 56–63) make an intriguing and empirically grounded analysis of the shift from classics and humanities to the social and natural sciences as the leading university subjects during the course of the 20th century. Their analysis is rooted in neo-institutional theory and focuses on globally institutionalized understandings of reality rather than the thrust and parry of disciplinary movements grounded in market and status-group relations. Specifically, they argue that the global institutional frame of knowledge changed dramatically in the 20th century, elevating human capacities to act and to know and reducing human uniqueness attributed to divine creation. They associate these changes with decreases





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in attention to the humanities, increases in attention to the natural sciences, and sharp increases in attention to the social sciences. They also identify a second source of change in dominant structures for organizing knowledge, one that moves from fixed category schemes and hierarchical structures of knowledge to the dynamism of network-based assembly of knowledge structures. They associate these changes with decreased attention to the basic disciplines and increased attention to applied fields. Some skepticism is warranted about arguments that root causality in macro-level ontological and organizational changes that cannot be easily measured. But whatever the causes that underlie the rise and fall of university disciplines, it is clear that the changes in faculty composition that Frank and Gabler hypothesized did for the most part occur. Using three separate data sources, they counted faculty composition from a single centrally important university in each nation-state beginning in 1915 through 1995. The three sources gave slightly different estimates of changes over time, but they were all pointed in the same direction, showing sharp declines in the humanities and large increases in the social sciences and applied fields. (Proportions of faculty in natural sciences actually declined a little, a problem for their theory.) Although I find the empirical data supporting this theory extremely valuable, I think the theory itself ignores important influences on the distribution of student majors. Utilitarianism, or the perception of practical value, is a natural outcome of the extension of higher education opportunities to students who are not particularly academically oriented, and it is a major reason why many students choose to enroll in applied fields. Their choices are encouraged by government planners who have strong preferences for supporting fields that are thought to contribute to economic development and those in which labor shortages are evident. The difficulty of different subjects of study also matters. Many students struggle with calculus, in particular, as well as with the abstractions of scientific and philosophical fields. Consequently, failure rates from scientific fields that require calculus are considerably higher than they are from fields that do not require advanced mathematics. This simple fact goes a long way toward explaining why national priorities now favor natural science disciplines, but student numbers have not followed to the degree government planners think they should.

Multiculturalism: A Case Study of Curricular Change Course content—the specific authors, works, interpretations, and theories taught— naturally changes at a much faster rate than the broader subject matter requirements. Some have suggested that changes in course content reflect changing power relations in society (Bernal 1987). Such writers see a correspondence, for example, between periods of widespread social criticism and the popularity of the Romantic poets in English literature courses and between feminism as a force in the political environment and gender as a popular topic in social studies courses. Of course, such correspondences can sometimes be found; curriculum can be a mirror to important movements in society and culture. In my view, the understanding of most movements of thought should not be reduced to reflections of social causation. New insights are as important as new social



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conditions—and they are much more important in many cases. A complex attitude is required of those who are interested in tracing the arc of content-level change; scholars should be aware of the forces in the social environment that may influence the reception of ideas, while appreciating the independent influence of the particular insights provided by the ideas and conceptualizations that come into play. An extended example can help make this point: The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould conjectured about the affinity between Darwinian gradualism and the Victorian style of political reform and contrasted gradualism in evolutionary theory with the theory of punctuated equilibrium that he developed jointly with Niles Eldredge. The theory of punctuated equilibrium posits that rapid evolutionary change sometimes occurs because of mass extinctions, whether from climate change or cosmological events. In Gould’s telling, his receptivity to the idea of disjunctive change was influenced both by the social movements of the Civil Rights era and by his father’s dialectical view of history (Gould and Eldredge 1977: 146). Yet the way biology is taught today owes more to the research insights of scientists like James Watson and Francis Crick than to any resonance or affinities with developments in social or political life. Punctuated equilibrium itself has been assimilated as a special case in evolutionary theory that remains fundamentally gradualist in orientation. Systematic studies of changes in course-level content are rare. Even when efforts have been made to conduct such studies (see, e.g., Graff 1987), few generalizations can be drawn from them; these studies lie more in the realm of intellectual history than sociology. To attempt to provide sociological generalizations about changes in course-level content would be a fool’s errand. Instead, I examine a single dramatic case of content-level change into which sociological analysis can provide insight: the rise of multiculturalism in the humanities and social studies curricula that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The debate over multiculturalism. Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the protagonists in the debate over multicultural curricula, writes, Few commentators could have predicted that one of the issues dominating academic and popular discourse in the final [decades] of the twentieth century—[at the same time as] the fall of apartheid in South Africa [and] communism in Russia . . .—would be the matter of cultural pluralism in our high school and college curricula and its relation to the “American” national identity. (Gates 1992: xi)

Indeed, this debate was conducted at a high emotional pitch. On one side of the controversy were defenders of traditional great works and traditional Western values; on the other, an alliance of minorities, women, literary theorists, and postmodern philosophers who wanted to revise the established canon of great works and, sometimes also, the scheme of identifications and values they saw as underlying it. One side argued for the permanent relevance of the classics of Western thought; the other, at a minimum, for the inclusion of subordinated voices, particularly those of women, minorities, and representatives of non-Western cultures. The word “multiculturalism” barely existed in public discourse before 1980 (see R. Bernstein 1994: 4), and the influence it exercised in a period of less than 20 years must be considered nothing short of phenomenal. Near the end of the 20-year conflict over





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multiculturalism, the conservative thinker Nathan Glazer, perhaps with a tinge of resignation, titled his 1997 book We Are All Multiculturalists Now. The transformation of the curriculum in a multicultural direction is clearest in primary schools. Students now read African and Asian folktales, and they have their imaginative passports stamped with the impressions of countries throughout the world rather than only those of Europe and America. The customs of many different lands are studied. Walls and hallways are decorated with pictures of famous women and famous men of non-European ancestries, as well as those of a few famous white men. Many high schools have added minority and women writers to their English curricula, and some have introduced world literature courses. High school textbooks have moved away from a concern with the doings of presidents and prime ministers and begun to play up the contributions of women and minorities. They have also frankly recognized the failings of American society to fully integrate racial and ethnic minorities (Fitzgerald 1979). The scope of change has also been impressive in higher education. A survey of some two hundred institutions in 1990 showed that one-third of colleges and universities had multicultural general education requirements, either as part of required core courses or as part of college distribution requirements (Levine and Cureton 1992). One-third of the schools also offered coursework specifically in ethnic and gender studies. More than half of colleges and universities reported efforts to introduce multicultural themes into departmental offerings. These efforts were largely in the nature of add-ons to existing curricula rather than replacements for traditional courses (29). At the same time, entirely new courses have been added, some of which attract a larger number of students than traditional courses. By the early 1990s, the fastest-growing course offerings in university history departments have been Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe; Western European and English history courses have declined in number (Frank, Schofer, and Torres 1994). Explaining the success of multiculturalism. Glazer (1997) argues that multiculturalism grew out of the failure of academic culture to integrate African Americans. Although it is clear that the alienation of African Americans (and other racial-ethnic minorities) fueled movements of collective cultural assertion in the United States, Glazer’s is not a satisfying explanation. Multiculturalism is, after all, on the agenda throughout the world, not just in the United States. Multiculturalism can be interpreted as simply the successful stretching of the traditional cultural value of pluralism to include those who have, for no particularly good

 Three Multiculturalisms  Despite the prevalence of multicultural course content, the debate over multiculturalism continues to be intermittently rancorous, largely because three very different visions all go under the same label. The most moderate of these visions—which I call Multiculturalism 1—is culturally expansionist. It is essentially another name for cultural pluralism,



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albeit a cultural pluralism with a stronger interest in the representation of women, minorities, and non-Western cultures than earlier versions of cultural pluralism. This variant of multiculturalism advocates exposure to different cultures, but it does not necessarily advocate a devaluation of works traditionally considered to be classics of Western thought. This is the conception to which many well-established advocates of multiculturalism, such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., self-consciously subscribe. Multiculturalism 2 adds a controversial dimension; it is culturally relativistic in addition to being culturally expansionist. Its advocates see all cultures as having a similar validity, and they therefore protest against an education based on the rank ordering of texts or cultures. For this second form of multiculturalism, the ideal curriculum would draw more or less equally from the works and histories of many different peoples. Ruth Benedict, a prominent early anthropologist, said all cultures are “coexisting and equally valid patterns of life, which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence” (1934: 278). The stance of cultural relativism allows sociologists to put themselves in the shoes of others and avoid unconscious bias, but if taken too far, it can lead to an unwillingness to interrogate the ethics, values, or practices of groups other than one’s own. The distinctive characteristic of Multiculturalism 3 is ethnocentrism. It seeks to show the oppression of subject groups, and it is self-consciously critical of dominant groups, whose privileges are often interpreted as the result of the exploitation of subordinate populations. Most writers and educators associated with this form of multiculturalism are not really multiculturalists at all; they want to focus more or less exclusively on their own particular group and have very little interest in exploring the cultures of other groups. Afrocentrists, critical race theorists, and some feminist scholars fit into this group (see, e.g., Asante 1987; Bell 1992). The experience of minorities is seen as separate and antagonistic to the dominant order, not part of a common human experience. The best solution might be to dispense with the term “multicultural” altogether and to substitute in its place three terms: cultural expansionism, cultural relativism, and ethnocentrism. These clearer terms would not solve another problem, however: the tendency of writers to collapse more moderate forms of multiculturalism into less moderate forms. Thus, the cultural relativist asks, “If we want to expand the representation of groups in the curriculum, why shouldn’t we also treat each one as equal in importance?” And the ethnocentrist asks, “If every group is essentially equal in importance, why not focus on the special contributions and problems of the particular group with which I personally identify?”





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reason, been left out up to this point. It is true that ideals of cultural pluralism have been a part of the American creed since the 18th century (see, e.g., de Crevecoeur [1783] 1912), but opposition to cultural pluralism has usually been a more important influence in public schooling. Typically the impetus was to integrate members of immigrating ethnic groups into the dominant culture, not to recognize and appreciate their cultural differences. For this reason, it is too easy to say that multiculturalism triumphed because it resonated with American society’s underlying support for pluralism. For a more complete answer, it is necessary to look for the deeper social and economic currents that have been working under the surface controversies and look at the mobilization of social and legal movements for change. By doing so, we search that familiar sociological ground, context. Demographic factors are prominent among these deeper currents. Both the university and the larger society have changed dramatically in their demographic composition since the 1950s. American society is still mostly white, but the white proportion dropped from 90 to 75 percent between the censuses of 1950 and 1990, and by 2000 white males made up only about a third of the population. Most immigrants no longer come from Europe, but from Asia and Latin America, and the fastest-growing groups are the three major racial and ethnic minorities: African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics/Latinos (Riche 1991). Colleges and universities have also changed in ways that make both the student body and the professorate look more like that larger society. Students from racial-ethnic minority groups had begun to attend college in sizable proportions by the late 1960s and 1970s (Karen 1991), and these gains accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the demographic change in the country, as well as the economic interests of college administrators in larger enrollments and the ideal interests of administrators and faculty in racial integration (Karen 2002). In the early 1990s, when the battles over multiculturalism raged, the new academic generation—those who had not yet received tenure—was more representative of the broader population than previous generations had been: 40 percent female and almost 17 percent from underrepresented minority groups (Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster 1995). Economic globalization was another important supporting current. Since the end of the Cold War, we have seen the full internationalization of capitalist exchange and the internationalization of the business elite. Japanese, European, and North American firms are tied through complex networks of joint ownership, joint capitalization, and franchising. Financial markets have become fully internationalized among the richer powers, with changes in one stock exchange affecting the other major exchanges. Travel and tourism continue to grow as a part of the global economy, and other forms of international exchange, from scholarly conferences to food and musical influences, also have become commonplace. It is not surprising under these circumstances that multiculturalism has triumphed perhaps most quickly in elite institutions, including the once Anglophile private boarding schools (Khan 2011). These schools, like other elite spheres, have become internationalized over the past several decades. They admit increasing numbers of international students, and the parents of native-born students see, through their own experience, that their children will be living in a more globally integrated world.



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Social movement mobilization was necessary to build latent forces into an active political force. As Henry Louis Gates observes, “Ours was the generation that took over buildings in the late 1960s and demanded black and women’s studies programs and now, like the return of the repressed, has come back to challenge the traditional [curriculum]” (1992: 19). Indeed, much of the originating spirit behind multicultural curricula can be found in the political protest and identity politics of the 1960s. Consciousness-raising through appeals to group pride (e.g., “black is beautiful”) became a central part of political mobilization during that period. Many of the battles between multiculturalists and their critics reminded outside observers of nothing so much as a superannuated version of 1960s generational conflict, with older but still-angry protesters confronting stooped but intellectually unbending defenders of the Western canon of great works. Legal requirements provided a final lever of change in some states and institutions. By the late 1970s, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 34 states had addressed multicultural education through legislation, regulation, guidelines, or policies, and most of these states screened for content deemed racist or sexist (Rosenfelt 1994: 28). Universities also changed their general education requirements to include representation of women and minorities in the curriculum. The institutionalization of multiculturalism in official policies lent legitimacy to efforts to take account of the contributions and experiences of minorities and women. Given the demographic changes in all industrialized countries, it seems very likely that multicultural curricula will become even more important in the future. But in North America and Europe the extent of change could depend on how strong the countermobilization of conservative whites becomes. Highly educated white parents indicate less interest than others in making multiculturalism a priority in schools. According to David Sikkink and Andrea Mibut, “The status of the highly educated creates an interest in a rigorous academic regimen, which they see as in conflict with making diversity education a priority” (2000: 41). More important, the rise of Islamic terrorism has sparked debates in the West about the limits of multiculturalism and has been an important feature of the countermobilization of white ethnonationalists (see, e.g., Cameron 2011; Stathman et al. 2005). It is possible that a countermobilization of conservative whites could successfully reassert the centrality of the Western cultural tradition should the conflict with militant Islamists grow more intense. One point is clear: sociological study of the curriculum cannot ignore the influence of social movement activism, whether of the right or the left. A highly mobilized activist minority, especially if it has allies in political power, often prevails over an unorganized or defensive majority.

global structures of school knowledge I have discussed the historical rise and fall of subjects. Now I turn attention to the contemporary structure of curriculum, both in primary and secondary schools. Given the many changes in school subjects and curricular emphases over time, it is both notable and surprising that a high level of agreement exists throughout the world today about the major subjects that should be taught in primary and lower secondary schools and even about the amount of time that should be allotted to these subjects. Agreement is much





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lower in upper secondary schooling, where divisions between academic and vocational orientations remain sharper and governments have worked out a variety of accommodations between the two.

Global Curricula in Primary Schooling The core subject areas in official primary school curricula throughout the world are national languages and literatures, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, art and music, and physical education. Moreover, the amount of time officially allocated to these subjects is fairly similar throughout the world. Language instruction—reading, writing, and grammar—is the dominant curricular category in primary education; virtually everywhere in the world between one-fifth and one-third of class time is devoted to language instruction. Almost all of this instruction is in the national or official language. Mathematics and natural sciences have increased somewhat in importance over time, with about 20 percent of class time going to these two subjects in the pre–World War II period and closer to 25 percent now, albeit with some substitution of computers and technology for natural sciences. In virtually all countries, math is given at least twice as much class time as science. Most of the remainder of class time is given over to arts and music, social studies, and physical education. The time allocated to these latter subjects has been remarkably stable: approximately 25 percent of class time in the pre–World War II years and 25 percent of class time 60 years later (Benavot 2008; Cha 1992; Meyer, Kamens, and Benavot 1992; OECD 2014: 428–32). Table 4.2 shows the amount of time governments have expected teachers to spend on primary school subjects in two time periods, the 1980s and the 2000s. Overall, researchers find an average of approximately 750 hours each year of official instructional time in primary school classrooms, with increases of about 25 hours a year from grade one through grade eight (Benavot 2008; OECD 2014: 436). This figure represents about threequarters of the amount of instructional time advocated in policy recommendations of international organizations such as the World Bank and UNESCO. Official instructional time also varied greatly among countries. Even among the industrialized countries in the OECD, instructional time varied between 600 and 1,000 hours per year in the early 2010s (OECD 2014: 436). Students in Poland and Hungary had much more time to play and socialize with friends than students in Australia, Chile, and the United States. Surprisingly, in an age of education for all, official instructional time has declined in some grades and regions. The global leveling off of mathematics instruction is particularly surprising given the emphasis of international organizations on STEM education. The only regions that show an expansion of instructional time between the 1980s and the 2000s are Latin America, the Caribbean countries, and the Arab states (Benavot 2008). These regions are moving toward conformity with global norms. Although the similarities in time allocations by subject matter are impressive, some atypical patterns do stand out. Teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean are expected to spend somewhat more time on foreign languages than are teachers in most other parts of the world. And teachers in Latin American, the Caribbean, and Central Europe are expected to stress mathematics more than teachers in other regions (Benavot 2008). Western European and North American countries have emphasized aesthetic and physical



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Ta bl e 4 . 2 Percentage of total instructional time allocated to subjects in primary school curriculum, 1980s and 2000s Grade 1

Grade 2

Grade 3

Grade 4

Grade 5

Grade 6

38.4 38.6

37.6 37.8

34.5 34.7

32.6 31.4

31.4 27.8

30.7 26.2

19.4 19.9

19.4 20.1

18.7 19.4

17.8 18.7

17.3 18.0

16.7 17.5

4.3 3.6

4.6 3.7

6.4 5.3

7.3 6.1

7.9 7.2

8.8 8.7

0.3 0.9

0.4 0.8

0.4 1.0

0.3 1.2

0.4 1.6

0.3 1.9

6.1 5.8

6.4 5.9

7.9 7.4

9.7 9.4

11.0 10.5

11.7 11.6

5.8 4.6

5.5 4.5

5.4 4.3

5.2 4.1

4.9 3.9

9.9 12.5

9.5 11.9

9.3 11.6

8.6 10.5

7.6 9.7

7.1 6.7

7.1 6.6

6.6 6.5

6.1 6.1

5.7 5.8

5.6 3.3

6.4 3.8

7.0 3.7

7.7 4.7

8.7 4.6

3.3 5.1

3.5 4.7

3.1 5.1

3.5 5.4

3.9 5.3

l a nguage 1980s 2000s m athem atic s 1980s 2000s sciences 1980s 2000s

computers/technology 1980s 2000s social sciences 1980s 2000s

r el igious/mor a l educ ation 1980s 2000s

5.7 4.8

a esthetic educ ation 1980s 2000s

9.8 12.6

ph ysic a l educ ation 1980s 2000s

7.1 6.8

s k i l l s /c o m p e t e n c i e s 1980s 2000s

5.6 3.3

e l e c t i v e s /op t ions 1980s 2000s

3.4 5.0

number of cou ntr ies 1980s 2000s

83 124

84 124

83 125

83 125

81 127

77 125

s o u r c e : Benavot 2005: table A3, table 5.

education more than countries in other regions, while Asian countries have given somewhat more institutionalized attention to moral education (Meyer, Kamens, and Benavot 1992: 51; Benavot 2008). Time spent in other subject matter spheres is not as consistent throughout the world. Religious education takes up one-sixth of class time in the Middle East and Islamic North





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Africa but has no role in Eastern Europe and only a minor role elsewhere. Whether religion is taught in the schools seems to depend primarily on whether the country has an established national religion (Meyer, Kamens, and Benavot 1992: 77). In the past, global variation in primary school studies has been closely associated with economic development. Higher levels of development were associated with more time allocated for arts and mathematical education and less time spent on practical education (Meyer, Kamens, and Benavot 1992: 56). The causes of these associations are perhaps selfevident, given the preparatory role primary education plays in developed societies and the importance of mathematical reasoning in industrial and commercial life. However, practical education is now in slow decline throughout the world, while the amount of time governments expect teachers to devote to subjects such as computers, technology, and the environment is increasing. Civics is another subject that has grown in importance, reflecting the democratic transitions in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc. More countries are also allowing students to choose among elective subjects for a small part of the school week (Benavot 2008). Thus, in these data we see both the progress of technology and of efforts to control it in light of environmental fragility. In the rise of electives, we also see a minor trend toward greater individual choice. Researchers led by John W. Meyer and Aaron Benavot have been largely responsible for collecting these data on trends in curriculum organization. According to Meyer’s theory of institutionalized global culture, a revised version of which we saw earlier in the chapter in the work of Frank and Gabler (2006), the modern system of school knowledge is based on a vision of modernity, originating in the West, linking individual development and social progress. This vision of modernity has become institutionalized on a worldwide basis in large part because developing states have modeled their curricular structures on those of the core states in the world economy. In addition, the core states have taken an active role in diffusing their ideals about the purposes of schooling and methods for realizing these purposes. To be accepted as a fully modern state, according to this theory, national leaders feel the need to adopt Western notions of how to link rational persons to progressive nation-states through the medium of mass schooling.3 Is the global system of school knowledge rooted in an abstract vision of modernity, as Meyer and colleagues argue? An alternative explanation might very well emphasize the practical politics involved in emulating the curriculum of core powers in the world economic system or the cognitive advantages of Western-style curricular organization. But one point cannot be disputed: Meyer, Benavot, and their associates have done an enormous service by establishing just how similar curricular designs across the world are at the primary and lower secondary school levels. A fair summary is that primary and lower secondary school curricula designs are the result of the acceptance of standard models of curriculum, spread by transnational organizations originating in the West, combined with the continuing influence of some regional cultural preferences and national historical legacies (Benavot 2008).

The Limited Translation of Policy into Classrooms Of course, instructional time is not always used in the ways anticipated by governments. Time is always lost at the beginning and end of class as students compose themselves or



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shift attention to a new lesson. Teachers may spend considerable time creating order in the classroom. They may spend time wandering from the topic with personal stories and reminiscences. They may be absent or late. Substitutes generally have a much tougher time gaining traction in the classroom. They are easy marks for a disorderly class. Even if official instructional times are honored faithfully, the content of instruction may vary considerably from that contained in policy guidelines about the topics and methods of instruction. Benavot (2012) studied one of the sources of policy slippage: the independence of textbook content from official government policy guidelines. Examining grade-five and grade-six mathematics and reading texts in several developing countries (though without representation of sub-Saharan Africa), Benavot’s team found a very low level of alignment between textbook content and government policy. Content areas in textbooks aligned with government expectations less than 50 percent of the time in every one of the up to three dozen countries studied. Alignment was lower in reading than mathematics, perhaps because mathematics is a more universal language. In reading, alignment between policy and textbooks was occasionally below 10 percent. Textbooks, on the other hand, were quite similar to one another throughout the developing world. Benavot’s team showed a long list of common content in mathematics, both in the topics covered and the skills in calculation and problem-solving embedded in the textbooks. The texts often emphasized data collection, data representation, and interpreting data in addition to such traditional subjects as whole numbers and fractions. The means of teaching literacy skills varied much more between countries—textbooks in some countries used stories and tales, while others more often used journalistic and historical content. Even so, the textbooks sought to build many of the same skills— identification of specific information, development of inferential skills to understand implicit elements in the text studied, and development of a range of evaluative judgments about the texts (i.e., whether they were coherent or incoherent, precise or vague, complex or simple). This study and others like it prove that government documents should not be taken at face value. Government prescriptions may or may not be followed in instructional materials, and instructional materials may or may not be used faithfully or well by teachers.

Global Variation in Secondary School Curricula Lower secondary school (the middle school years in the United States) is treated by most governments as an extension of primary school, albeit with longer school days and some opportunities for electives. Perhaps the most surprising outcome of studies of the middle school years is the diminishment of time allocated to mathematics in grades seven and eight. This surprising finding is balanced somewhat by increases in time allocated to computers, technology, and environmental education (Benavot 2008). It is clear that essentially the same subject matter core exists at the lower secondary level of schooling as in primary school. Throughout the world, this core consists of language instruction, mathematics, natural sciences, and social studies. Moral and religious instruction, arts and music, and





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physical education are also prevalent but of secondary importance (Kamens and Benavot 2006; Benavot 2008.). Comparative studies of upper secondary school curricula (the high school years in the United States) are more limited than those of primary and lower secondary school curricula, in large part because much more variety exists at the upper secondary level. Changes in curricula are also frequent, as governments experiment with ways to motivate students to continue with their studies beyond the secondary level (cf. Kamens and Benavot 2006). A great contrast exists between the European and American models. The Americans (and those influenced by the American model) provide a comprehensive or general curriculum, along with some measure of course selection through electives. The Europeans, by contrast, divide upper secondary education into curricular tracks, each emphasizing distinctive contents (Kamens and Benavot 2006). Until recently, the academic programs in Europe and East Asia were more demanding than those in the United States, but that is less true today because governments in Europe and Asia have reduced secondary school requirements in order to encourage more students to continue their studies, while larger numbers of U.S. students haven chosen rigorous courses of study to improve their chances for admission to selective colleges and universities. In the developing world, secondary curricula show both the impact of Western influence and in many cases a special interest in science and mathematics curricula, which are privileged for their potential to contribute to the creation of modern economies. Specialized math and science programs have grown significantly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, regions that have been dominated by political elites committed to strategies of rapid industrialization (Kamens, Meyer, and Benavot 1996: 134–35). Academic streams. In the United States, separate curricular specializations do not exist, and a comprehensive curriculum dominates secondary schooling. English, math, science, and social studies each takes up one to two periods a day in both junior and senior high school. Arts and physical education are somewhat more likely to be electives, but most students take them. In the view of critics, the elective system in American high schools has sometimes made secondary schooling look more like shopping malls than focused learning environments. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find a hundred or more courses listed on the books at the larger American high schools (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985). American students can often choose electives from a large menu on the basis of casual interest as much as academic intentions. Lightweight courses, such as marriage and family or personal finance, continue to be popular with non-college-bound students. Beginning in the 1990s government policy analysts and educational experts successfully championed the idea that more students should be taking rigorous courses (see, e.g., Adelman 1999; Horn, Kojuku, and Carroll 2001), advocacy supported by the increasing number of students vying for slots in selective institutions. In 1990, only 7 percent of high school students took calculus; in 2009, the proportion was more than twice as high (16 percent). Similarly, in 1990, about one in five American students took physics. In 2008, more than one-third did (36 percent) (NCES 2015a: 170). It seems likely that



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longer sequences of language instruction have become more common as well, given the increase in the proportion of secondary schools with advanced placement tests for foreign languages, up from 12 percent in 1987 to 21 percent in 2008 (Rhodes and Pufahl 2008). In Western Europe as well as in East Asia, students intending to enroll in universities are divided into separate curricular tracks, or specializations. The four most common of these specializations are (1) classical languages and literatures; (2) modern languages and literatures; (3) economics, social, and policy studies; and (4) mathematics and natural sciences. Students enrolled in these curricular specializations take a different mix of coursework. 1. The classical curricula, which are now very much in decline, concentrate on classical languages (Greek and Latin), other languages, and a limited amount of science and math. Instead of social studies, they generally include history and geography. Philosophy is often required as well. 2. Modern languages specializations focus on modern foreign languages and literatures. Most require at least three languages. Languages and literature courses outnumber math and science courses at a ratio of approximately two to one. Classical languages and philosophy are generally minor or nonexistent parts of these curricula. 3. Economics, social, and policy studies have grown in importance. In most of Western Europe, and particularly in Scandinavia, these social science specializations have replaced modern foreign languages as the most popular choice for academically oriented students. Cultural studies are incorporated in these curricula, but the emphasis is on such subjects as economics, policy studies, and sociology (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training 2009). Older social studies subjects, such as history and geography, are of declining importance. 4. Mathematics and natural science specializations are a mirror image of the modern languages curricula. About twice as much time is spent on math and science compared to languages and literature. In addition, social science tends to be of minor consequence, with hours that would otherwise be allocated to social studies absorbed by additional courses in the math and science core. Math and science curricula are everywhere associated with economic progress. For this reason, math and science concentrations have become more prestigious than the once dominant classical curricula even in many core European countries like France (see, e.g., Neave 1985). These curricula have been more prestigious in East Asia from the advent of mass secondary schooling. Secondary school curricula in Western Europe and East Asia were once renowned for their rigor. In recent years the number of compulsory hours and units has decreased significantly, however, as governments sought to encourage entry into higher education. Table 4.3 summarizes the compulsory courses required in the first year of upper secondary school for university-bound students in two countries with national curricula, France and Japan, during the 1980s and the 2000s. In the 1980s, both countries had tougher required courses than the United States, and they also permitted a more limited range





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Ta b l e 4 .3 Compulsory courses in the first upper secondary year for university-bound students, France and Japan, 1980s and 2000s France, 1980s

Japan, 1980s

French (5 hours) History/geography (4 hours) Modern language (3 hours) Physical science (3.5 hours) Biological science (2 hours) Mathematics (4 hours) Physical education (2 hours)

Japanese (5 credits) Social science (3.5 credits)

France, 2000s

Japan, 2000s

French (4.25 hours) History/geography (3.25 hours) Modern language (2.5 hours) Physical science (2.75 hours) Biological science (1.25 hours) Mathematics (3.5 hours) Physical education (2 hours) Civic education (0.25 hour) Second language (varying hours) 1 elective course (varying hours)

Japanese (4 credits) World history (4 credits)

Science (6 credits) Mathematics (6 credits) Physical education (5 credits for boys, 3 credits for girls)

Science (2 credits) Mathematics (3 credits) Physical education (3 credits) 1 or 2 additional coursesa (varying credits)

s o u r c e s : Holmes and MacLean 1989: 77, 209; MEXT 1998: chart 3; SNES 2004. Information on France provided by Christine Musselin. Information on Japan provided by Takehiko Kariya and Satorishi Ogawa. a  In Japan, additional required courses, to be taken at some point in upper secondary school, include arts, foreign language, home economics/home life, and information studies.

of electives for first-year students. Electives were common in the final years of secondary school in France and Japan, but they had a very different meaning. They were used to prepare for secondary school leaving and university entrance examinations in the students’ major field or fields of concentration. For example, Japanese students expecting to specialize in science at the university would typically devote 80 percent of their electives to additional science courses (Holmes and McLean 1989: 208). In recent years, the trend has been toward reduced course loads, both in France and Japan. Both governments have explicitly attempted to reduce students’ required course loads (Benavot 2008). Vocational streams. Academic preparatory curricula are, as a general rule, far more standardized than curricula leading out into the job market. Indeed, it is very difficult to generalize about secondary school vocational curricula across national boundaries because of the tremendous diversity in these curricula and because of the frequent changes government planners make in occupational streams and options. European secondary schools offer as few as a handful of vocational programs or as many as dozens. In addition, as many as four levels of vocational qualifications can be found in European schools: basic, intermediate, upper secondary (or maturity), and tertiary. Furthermore, some countries introduced distinctions based on breadth or specificity of vocational qualifications. The system of Scottish National Certificates represents an extreme in the customtailoring of vocational training. Through the 1980s and 1990s, National Certificates were available in 3,000 modules, each representing 40 hours of study. Students could use them to prove qualifications for particular occupational functions. In 1999, the National



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Certificates were replaced by an equally complex system, but one with a tendency to culminate in somewhat longer courses of study. Similarly, in France a wide array of vocational options is offered, accompanied by dozens of qualifying degrees and certificates. These include separate streams for commercial subjects (such as accounting and finance), human service subjects (such as social welfare work), and manual subjects grouped by processes (repair) or materials (metallurgy, electronics). In other cases, governments have organized vocational education into a small number of national programs. The Swedish case provides one illustration. The 13 national vocational programs offered in upper secondary schools include child care and recreation, business and administration, construction, foods, electrical and energy, handicrafts, health care, hotel and restaurant management, natural resources, property maintenance, industrial technology, and vehicles. Like students in the academic programs, students in vocational programs are required to take courses in core subject areas (English, arts, physical education and health, math, general science, social studies, Swedish language, and religion) (Skolverket 2011). The national programs are designed by the Swedish ministry of education, and the same course content is offered throughout the country. (The industry and technology programs focus on local occupational demand.) As in most other European countries, students in Sweden are able to transfer from vocational programs in secondary school to advanced occupational training programs in universities. In the United States, the situation is more complex than in countries with national curricula, because variation exists from state to state and even from school to school. Most high schools now include vocational courses as options in a single comprehensive curriculum. The only way to determine which students are concentrating on occupational preparation is to look at transcripts. Those who take 20 percent or more of their classes in occupationally related coursework are often categorized as vocational students. Vocational students usually sample a range of occupationally related coursework rather than concentrating in any one area (as they would in Europe). They may also take quite a bit of nonacademic coursework that is not related to preparation for specific jobs (i.e., courses in typing, personal finance, or shop). In schools serving working-class communities, a wide range of occupational courses (such as cosmetology, machine repair, and bookkeeping) may be offered, while hardly any vocational courses may be offered in schools serving upper-middle-class communities. This led to concerns about the consequences of curricular tracking in poor communities and occasionally to complaints about the few options for nonacademic students in affluent communities. Over the last two decades, many countries have experimented with new ways of integrating academic and vocational studies. In 1994, the Japanese introduced an integrated vocational-academic high school pathway that combines career development and university preparation. Enrollments in specialized colleges offering higher diplomas in industrial, commercial, and other vocational fields represent one-third of higher education enrollments in Japan. Further education colleges in England offer a combination of academic and vocational training for students interested in obtaining vocational credentials following the end of compulsory schooling. In France, vocational education





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is threaded throughout the system, beginning in lower secondary schools. In Germany, the dual system has been continuously upgraded in intellectual content to the point that some now consider the apprenticeships comparable to the U.S. two-year college associate’s degree (Stern, Bailey, and Merritt 1997). Indeed, universities and polytechnic institutes in Germany have started to accept some dual-system graduates. Even in the United States, long an advocate of academic secondary school education, integrated programs have shown some modest growth in high schools (Grubb 1995).

schools’ limited success in cultural transmission At one time, secondary schools were content to transmit knowledge in a few key subjects to children of the propertied and educated classes. Now they attempt to transmit relatively demanding knowledge content to all adolescents. By historical standards, the ambition of schools must be judged as impressive. But contemporary schools have had only limited success in transmitting the lessons of the curriculum to the majority of students. Although most students fail to perform well on national educational assessments, this does not mean that they are necessarily lacking in motivation or intelligence. In fact, judging by IQ scores, today’s young people are smarter than their parents’ generation. James Flynn, a New Zealand researcher, discovered “massive gains” in IQ scores over time in 14 countries he studied (Flynn 1987). Flynn’s findings should lead us to wonder whether kids are not smarter than they let on in tests—or perhaps whether our expectations for performance are just unusually high by historical standards.4

The Nonintellectual Interests of (Most) Students The acquisition of school knowledge is undoubtedly very important for the top 15– 20 percent of secondary school students, who are competing for slots in selective colleges and universities. It is particularly important for the top 1 or 2 percent of students, who will become the scholars, intellectuals, and scientists of the future. These students  de­ velop a significant degree of mastery of course materials. Their successes are also impor­ tant for society insofar as everyone profits from the knowledge and ­energy of this aca­ demically oriented stratum. Locating students with high-level intellectual potential is, of course, one of the main purposes of schooling, and schools succeed very well in these efforts.5 Schools are much less successful in transmitting subject matter knowledge to the majority of students. The facts are clear enough. Students do not remember much course content after the final test has been given (Bunce and VandenPlas 2011; Collins 1979: 17–19). What little they do remember continues to erode at a fast rate. When most students look back on their schooling, most people have vague memories of liking or not liking particular instructors, but they remember very little of the material covered in class and cannot clearly identify concrete knowledge they acquired. The majority of students also do not consider learning to be the most memorable feature of the schooling experience. Instead, they speak more often of the opportunity to socialize, to see and to be seen with their friends. Moreover, in the status system of



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adolescent society, academic success ranks low. Athletic and dating success are more highly esteemed, and in some national studies membership in the academic elite actually ranks lower than membership in a gang as a badge of status (Tye 1985; Milner 2016). Even college students largely reject intellectual identities. Those who take a real interest in their coursework sometimes do not retain intellectual interests after they finish their schooling. Without support from a larger circle of friends and acquaintances, the intellectual interests developed in school tend to fade (Feldman and Newcomb 1969; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991: chap. 12). In many countries, including the United States, judgments of admirable qualities in others are much more likely to focus on economic success or moral character than on cultivation and intellect (Lamont 1992).

Declining Performance? The apparently poor performance of American students on national educational assessments became a cause for widespread alarm in the 1980s. Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn’s What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (1987) was one of a number of studies and commission reports that called attention to the troubled state of learning among American high school students during the period. Ravitch and Finn reported average scores in the failing range on two national assessments: American high school students scored, as an average, only 54.5 percent correct in history and only 52 percent correct in literature. Among the dispiriting findings for educators: only one-third of the students could identify the date of the Civil War within a 50-year time frame, and only about the same proportion could identify the theme of George Orwell’s novel 1984. Other reports of the era showed that 30 percent of high school seniors could not locate Great Britain on a map (Sowell 1992). Many studies showed evidence that student performance, particularly in secondary school, declined significantly between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, a consequence in part of less demanding curricula.6 Assessments like these have been given on a national basis for more than 40 years now through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Long-term trends dating from the 1970s are available for 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds on both reading and mathematics using what the U.S. Department of Education identifies as comparable assessment instruments. Between the 1970s and 2012, small but significant improvements were observed for 9- and 13-year-olds in reading, and more substantial improvements were observed for both ages in mathematics. Average mathematics scores increased by 30 points for 9-year-olds and 20 points for 13-year-olds. But performance has been virtually unchanged since the 1970s for 17-year-olds in both reading and mathematics (NAEP 2013: 7, 29). There is one encouraging sign even for 17-year-olds: the gap between white and minority students is closing in both reading and mathematics at all three grade levels (Whitehurst 2005; NAEP 2013: 16–18, 38–40). Yet performance levels have remained low for the majority of students if examined in light of the tests’ standards of academic proficiency. For example, in the 1990s approximately 40 percent of American students at all grade levels scored “below basic competence” in mathematics, and only 20 percent at any grade level reached the “proficiency” level that the assessment’s governing board considered within reach of all students





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 A Manufactured Crisis?  Were American schools failing badly in the 1970s, or was evidence of failure exaggerated as part of a policy agenda determined for other reasons? This was a bitter debate—with contemporary relevance. The debate originated in the heated atmosphere of the late 1970s, when policy makers believed that the poor performance of the American economy could be attributed, in part, to the defects in public schooling. Just as the Japanese economy appeared to be outperforming the American economy (“Japan as Number One” proclaimed one book title of the period (E. Vogel 1979), so Japanese schools appeared to be outperforming American schools. In the formulation of the presidential commission report A Nation at Risk, American society had declared “unilateral educational disarmament” by failing to insist on high standards from its public schools (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983: 1). Were the facts behind the calls for reform accurate? Critics, led by the educational researchers David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, called them into question. In their book The Manufactured Crisis (1995), Berliner and Biddle argue that very few national assessments showed a true decline in scores between the 1960s and the 1980s. The often-noted decline in scores on the SAT beginning in the late 1960s were real—but probably represented a difference of only about six to nine correct answers—on a test of 138 items. More important, the number of students taking the SAT increased during the period. “Sharply larger numbers of students from the lower-achievement ranks in high schools, from minority groups, and from poorer families began to take the SAT during those years” (20). They argue that other tests, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), showed essentially no change during the critical period, and some showed improvements for students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. “Surely this should have been a matter for rejoicing, not alarm,” observe Berliner and Biddle (20). Berliner and Biddle are no less critical of international comparisons. Above all, they fault these comparisons for failing to take into account differences in opportunity to learn. Not all eighth graders, for example, are exposed to algebra. It would be unfair to fault them for poor performance on items requiring knowledge of algebra. When American schoolchildren were compared to students in other countries who studied the same level of materials, they performed as well or better than these students. Berliner and Biddle also criticize the tendency of critics to focus on average scores and to ignore levels of dispersion around the mean. The real crisis in education, they argue, is the lack of attention to the educational needs of students from the poorest states and communities. True reform, they observe, would aim to improve the educational opportunities available in these disadvantaged places.



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Berliner and Biddle suspected that champions of educational vouchers played an important role in creating this “manufactured crisis.” If public schools were failing to educate students, advocates of vouchers could argue that students should be given an opportunity to choose private schools, using public funds to support these choices. The Manufactured Crisis set off a firestorm of protest among the advocates of standards-based reform, and Berliner and Biddle were themselves criticized for slanting the evidence. Lawrence Stedman (1996) provides perhaps the best review of the evidence. Stedman concludes that, overall, well-controlled studies show high levels of stability in test scores between the 1950s and 1980s. However, more than one test showed declines in the 1970s. Only part of the decline in the SAT, which began in the 1960s, could be attributed to demographic change in the test-taking population. Perhaps half the decline could be attributed instead to changes in schools or the value American society placed on learning. Stedman faults Berliner and Biddle’s data on opportunities to learn, too. American students who took algebra in eighth grade did perform as well as Japanese and Taiwanese students, but it turned out that they were a far more selected group and studied much more algebra in eighth grade than did the Japanese and Korean students in the sample. This controversy reminds us that political commitments can sometimes lead researchers (usually subconsciously) to collect and interpret data in ways that support their position. A complete picture of the evidence from the 1970s indicates that standards-based reformers had some valid reasons for concern but that they also used data selectively, relied on flawed data, and exaggerated the dimensions of the crisis, as did their critics. The same problems plague educational debate today. Multiple-choice recall testing usually produces a bleak picture of how much students know. This background knowledge is not irrelevant to ­learning—most good students have lots of background knowledge that they can accurately recall. But it is by no means the only important end product we might want to measure. More authentic assessments provide evidence about whether students can interpret relatively sophisticated reading passages, solve challenging math problems, and produce cogent essays. We might also want to know if students have developed an enthusiasm for learning or whether it has simply become an unrewarding grind for them. It may be true that the public schools were improperly labeled as failing in the 1970s and 1980s and that they are often improperly labeled as failing today. But they still have a long way to go if they hope to be truly successful in the ways that count for building engaged, reflective, deep-thinking adults.





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(Ravitch 1995: 79). Since the 1990s proficiency levels have not improved significantly in reading. Part of the reason is that fewer students now say they read daily for fun (NAEP 2013: 26–27). Proficiency levels have, however, improved for students of all three ages in mathematics, in part because more students are taking algebra in lower grades and more are taking calculus in higher grades (NAEP 2013: 46–49).

International Comparisons The evidence suggests that the “1066 and all that” effect is relevant throughout most of the world. It is hard work to master school knowledge, and the payoffs for this hard work are by no means self-evident to many students. School knowledge is not especially memorable to most students, whether they are attending classes in Bangkok, Paris, Johannesburg, Cleveland, or even Kyoto. However, students in some East Asian countries, as well as students in some Northern European countries, appear to be an exception to this rule, as are students in Canada and Australia. International educational assessments have been conducted since the mid-1960s in the core subjects of reading comprehension, mathematics, and science and in a few other subjects. These international assessments provide evidence about how well U.S. students are performing in relation to students in other countries. Special precautions have to be taken when interpreting the findings of these studies because a variety of technical problems limit the comparability of scores across nations (see, e.g., Husén 1979; Inkeles 1979; Noah 1987). For example, not all countries have sampled their schools adequately or looked at an exactly comparable set of students. If variables such as the poverty rates in different countries or actual exposure to tested materials are not included in the reporting of results, the gross results may be misleading to compare (Berliner and Biddle 1995: 51–63; Carnoy and Rothstein 2015). Not all countries participate in international testing, and many countries do not participate regularly, making comparisons across time difficult. Perhaps most important, performance on standardized tests may not reflect the actual knowledge of students very well. Anthropologists such as Jean Lave (1988) have shown that students are able to solve relatively complex problems when they are engaged in activities with their friends that are of immediate significance. The same students who give random, uninformed responses on tests may show a quick grasp of mathematics when they are cutting carpets for their families’ businesses or playing number games with their friends. Thus, the ability to express knowledge may be highly contextual. We should be careful, then, not to make too much of these results. Nevertheless, if the findings are taken with the proper number of grains of salt, they can be used as indicators of how well schools are doing in transmitting school knowledge. The major international test today is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which examines reading, math, and science for 15-year-olds. This test has been conducted by the OECD five times since 2000. Other tests with lower levels of participation are the Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test of fourth-grade reading comprehension and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests of fourth- and eighth-grade mathematics and science, both conducted by an international consortium



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of educational researchers. PIRLS has been conducted three times since 2001 and TIMSS five times since 1995. Not surprisingly, the largest differences are between students from industrialized countries and students from developing countries. International assessments for grades four and eight show that students from high-income countries average in the 500 to 600 range on tests of mathematics, science, and reading, while students from low-income countries average 150 to 200 points lower (Ravitch 1995: 83–89; NCES 2011; OECD 2012; Mullis et al. 2011; TIMSS 2011). In some developing countries, such as Burkina Faso and Yemen, scores suggest random responses to test questions (NCES 1996; TIMSS 2011). The international results also show a wide variation in scores within developing countries, reflecting in part the very large differences in quality between urban and rural schools (Lockheed, Fonancier, and Bianchi 1989). Most developing countries do not participate in the international assessments, perhaps wishing to avoid comparing the achievement of their students with students in the developed world. It may be a promising sign—the mark of competitiveness—that many Persian Gulf States, some North African states, and many states in South America do regularly participate in international testing in spite of their students’ relatively low scores. Results from the three international tests show that students in only one participating country score consistently high on all major international tests. That country is South Korea. Students in Japan are in close second place. They consistently score high on mathematics and science tests but not quite as high on tests of reading comprehension. If we focus on the test with the highest number of countries participating on a consistent basis, the PISA age-15 tests, we can see that students in some countries tend to have high average scores whenever they are tested. In addition to South Korea and Japan, these countries include Australia, Canada, and Finland. In mathematics and science the Netherlands joins this consistently high-scoring group. By contrast, students in five participating countries have consistently low average scores: Greece, Israel, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. With the exception of Israel, these are countries in which youth unemployment is very high and gross domestic product growth is low. Overall, students in the United States score in the middle of the pack. They often score relatively high at the early grade levels (tested through PIRLS and TIMSS) but tail off by grade eight (in both PISA and TIMSS). Variation between classes, races, and regions is higher in the United States than in most other countries, in large part because inequality is more pronounced in the United States than in most other developed countries. State benchmarks on TIMSS demonstrate that even between-state variation is high in the United States. Students in Alabama score well below the international means on the TIMSS math and science eighth-grade tests, while students in Massachusetts score at levels that are consistent with students in East Asia (TIMSS 2011). An analysis of PISA results by Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein (2015) shows that U.S. students’ relative performance would be better if the social class composition of its national samples was more similar to that of comparison countries. It also shows that U.S. student performance looks better when tests are well aligned with the curriculum taught in states than when it is not well aligned. Their analysis shows that disadvantaged





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students in the United States are making more rapid gains than disadvantaged students elsewhere. Thus, the findings of international assessments, far from demonstrating the dismal state of learning in the United States, support those who think that American students are not performing that poorly compared to students in other countries. The average American eighth-grade student reads well by international standards and is above the international mean in math and science. (Other international tests suggest that they also know more about government than students in most other countries.) Given the findings on international tests, it may be time for our national educational scolds to stop berating American students for trailing far behind the international competition. Given the level of inequality in American society, the international test results of American students can more plausibly be interpreted as better than expected. Among countries in the developed world, high and low performers shift quite a bit from test to test, from grade level to grade level, and from year to year. Tests show some big improvements over time—for example, in fourth-grade mathematics for students from Finland, Portugal, Slovenia, and the United States. They also show some large declines— for example, for students from Austria and the Czech Republic on the same test. It is an open question whether these changes are meaningful. Efforts are made to standardize sampling as much as possible, but year-to-year changes should be interpreted cautiously. Much depends on how students are chosen to take the test and what incentives they perceive for performing well. Students in countries with relatively high average scores often show relatively little dispersion around the mean. The same is true of many low-scoring countries. Students from both Finland and South Korea scored very high on the 2006 PISA test of science. In both cases, the standard deviations around these mean scores were also among the lowest. Similarly, students from Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain scored very low on the test, and they too showed low standard deviations around the mean scores. This indicates that teachers in high-performing countries are succeeding in pushing up performance among better students without leaving most other kids in the dust. Similarly, the results suggest that teachers in low-performing countries do not succeed in motivating potentially high-achieving students and may be teaching to the low end of the class. (For further discussion, see Chapter 8.) The mathematics and science tests perhaps bear the closest scrutiny. Mathematics and science are important subjects for technologically advanced societies. They are the best single indicators of students’ ability to succeed well in higher education. In addition, the problems of translation that plague test constructors are minimized in tests of math, simply because the symbolic language of math is universal. On tests of mathematics and science, students from several East Asian societies (notably Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Shanghai, Singapore, and Taiwan) have outperformed American students by a considerable margin. Students in other countries—notably Canada, Finland, and the Russian Federation—also consistently outperform American students. Even in the highest-scoring countries, however, national averages typically fall within a standard deviation of the mean for the entire test population (less than 600 on tests with



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a normalized mean of 500). Moreover, at least within the developed world, the amount of variation in scores within countries is always higher than that between countries. This shows that no country has a monopoly on high- or low-scoring students, and all countries struggle to narrow test-performance gaps.

Explaining Cross-National Differences in Test Scores Country differences in average test scores can be explained by a combination of factors internal and external to the schools. The important factors internal to the schools are the kinds of materials that are taught and the methods used to teach them. A wellfocused curriculum, which requires exposure to higher-level knowledge and skills but does not attempt to cover too many topics, can lead to better average performance (NCES 1996: 37–38). Teachers who have sufficient time to plan lessons, talk to other teachers about their lesson plans, and incorporate problems connected to students’ everyday life experience are also more likely to have a positive effect on learning. (See also the discussion of teaching and learning in Chapter 8.) Individual classrooms and even whole societies can vary on these dimensions. The biggest differences between American students and students from higher-scoring countries is that American students are typically asked to cover too many topics and have fewer opportunities to learn more demanding curricular materials than their counterparts in East Asia. Teachers often do not let lessons sink in through repetition and practice (Berliner and Biddle 1995: 54–58; Hiebert et al. 2003). The most important factors outside the schools are parents’ investment in their children’s education, the availability of alternatives that draw children away from schooling, and the consequences for later life of school achievement. If parents invest time, effort, and money in their children’s education, they will tend to encourage good performance. If regular times are set aside for homework and few distractions from study exist, either in informal socializing or work opportunities, more students are likely to concentrate on their schoolwork. A major issue in reading achievement is the steep decline in the proportion of students who read for fun on a daily or near-daily basis (NCES 2013). It is virtually impossible to gain proficiency in higher-level reading or writing skills without engaging in regular reading for pleasure as a child. Finally, a strong link between school performance and later opportunities also focuses attention on school. When children do not feel that schooling is relevant to their futures, they will not take schooling as seriously. Again, both individual classrooms and societies can vary in these ways. Figure 4.1 provides a graphic representation of the forces I have described as relevant to different levels of performance on international mathematics and science assessments. Academic focus is partly a result of taking demanding courses. In the United States, educators define a “rigorous curriculum” as four years of English, three years of foreign languages, four years of math (including precalculus or higher), three years of science, three years of social studies, and at least one honors (or advanced placement) class. About one in five high school graduates completes this rigorous curriculum. Researchers have





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Before and during schooling

During schooling

Level of economic development (industrialized or developing)

Lesson content 1. Challenging content 2. Interesting content

Investment of parents in schooling 1. Time 2. Energy 3. Money

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Following schooling

Teaching technologies 1. Well-sequenced lessons 2. Repetition 3. Regular error correction 4. Educational resources

High scores on international assessments

Consequences of school performance for later life 1. Admissions to higher education 2. Access to good jobs

Absence of distracting activities 1. Television 2. Work 3. Friends

Figure 4.1  Model of forces affecting national achievement in educational assessments

shown that those who complete a rigorous curriculum attain significantly higher grades and have better persistence in college than students who have taken less demanding curricula (Adelman 1999; Horn, Kojuku, and Carroll 2001; Klepfer and Hull 2012). Academic focus is also an important influence on international test results in the developing world. Cuban children, for example, score significantly higher than children in other Latin American and South American countries on mathematics and reading assessments. These results persist even after controls for socioeconomic status are introduced. Martin Carnoy and Jeffrey Marshall attribute the success of Cuban schooling to the efforts of the government to provide the necessities of life to all families and to prevent children from being involved in activities that pull their focus away from school. The socialist government in Cuba, for all its faults in economic development and human rights, has created greater equality and better social services than can be found elsewhere in Latin or South America. Cuban children consequently have few of the problems of hunger, homelessness, or poor health that are found in other developing countries. They have little or no access to such activities as drug use, gang involvement, or child prostitution. The government effectively restricts each of these activities. Neither classroom nor schoolyard fighting is tolerated, and this turns out to be a frequent and important disruption in some other Latin and South American countries (Carnoy and Marshall 2005).



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National Test Performance and Economic Competitiveness Newspaper editors and politicians like to use international comparisons to sound alarms about the threat that poor school performance poses for the future prosperity of the country. These kinds of warnings have in the past been effective for focusing attention on schools, but they are not based on sound arguments about the factors influencing economic performance (see Collins 1979: chap. 1; Blaug 1987; Berliner and Biddle 1995). There is a growing consensus now that international test results do tell us something about economic competitiveness, but they do not tell the entire story. The economists Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann (2011: 171–89), joined by many colleagues, have made a compelling case that international test results are better predictors of macro-economic growth than average years of educational attainment, a measure that once dominated discussions of human capital and its relationship to growth. They report studies showing a statistically and economically significant positive effect of cognitive skills, as measured by test results, on economic growth between 1960 and 1990. This effect, they report, “dwarfs the association between quantity of schooling and growth” (174). Their simulations suggest that if countries raised the average international test performance by one-half standard deviation, they would realize a gain of approximately 1 percent annual growth in the long run in endogenous growth projections. International test results do tell us something about the level of mobilized human energy, or industriousness, in a society. In this respect wanting to join the global community by participating in international tests of achievement signal societies that are mobilizing for advancement. It follows that international comparisons may be more important for developing countries than for industrialized societies. Better retention of school knowledge surely would not produce modernized economies overnight in the developing world. But together with political stability, wise use of resources, and continued debt mitigation by donor organizations, it would place the upcoming generation of students on a better footing to meet future development goals. Achievement on international tests is, at most, only one factor that is important for explaining economic development. Consider just two counterfactuals: it is well known that the performance of American high school students took a nosedive in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s (Ravitch 1995: chap. 3). Yet by the time these mediocre students began to take leading roles in the economic life of the country, the economy was humming along nicely. The United States rebounded from the economic slump of the 1970s in large part because a devalued dollar made U.S. industries more competitive in those industries in which it had lost market share (Berliner and Biddle 1995: 92). The schools were responsible neither for the slump nor for the rebound. By contrast, the economic troubles of the 1970s occurred under the watch of the supposedly diligent students of the 1950s. Similarly, the Japanese have had one of the best educational systems in the world since the 1960s, but their educational attainments were powerless to prevent the so-called lost decade of the 1990s (which extended to the first decade of the 2000s), when their asset bubble burst and inadequate government policies to stimulate the economy failed to restore prosperity. The evidence suggests that, in addition to the role cognitive skills play in sustaining growth, swings in economic performance have causes all their own (see Ramirez et al. 2006).





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Sustained macro-economic growth requires new discoveries and inventions as well as a well-educated labor force (Moretti 2013). Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that educators in the educationally most successful countries in Europe and East Asia are starting to question international tests of reading and mathematics as the sole decisive indicators of school quality. Instead, they are beginning to look to evidence of effectiveness in fostering innovation, creativity, and leadership (Ferrari, Cachia, and Punie 2009; Vincent-Lancrin, Collard, and Tan 2013). Similar sentiments have influenced criticism of international testing in the United States as well, though these criticisms have formed as yet only a weak undercurrent in U.S. educational thought (see, e.g., A. Kohn 2000). Comparisons of international test results may tell us more about the homogeneity of a country’s population and prevailing levels of inequality than about the country’s likely economic fate. Some of the wealthiest countries in the world—including England, France, Germany, and the United States—have ethnically diverse populations and relatively unequal distributions of income. It should come as no surprise under these circumstances that their students’ test performances are just middling relative to other developed countries, and the standard deviations around their mean scores are comparatively large. By contrast, East Asian countries are more ethnically homogeneous and less unequal than countries in Western Europe or the United States. Their test scores are also higher and the standard deviations around their mean scores lower. Two other countries that tend to do well on international tests, Finland and Canada, are also comparatively homogeneous and egalitarian. Support is also missing for the related notions that more knowledgeable citizens will necessarily raise the level of public discourse or that they can raise the tone of popular culture. If political discourse has deteriorated into dishonesty and manipulation—and who can say with certainty that it is worse now than in some earlier eras?—this has much more to do with the vastly increased scale of government and partisan organizations, including the partisan media, and the gulf that consequently separates average citizens from their leaders. Similarly, if public taste has fallen—and, again, who can confidently say that it has?—this must surely have more to do with the capacity of the media to stimulate the eardrums and galvanize the eyeballs than with the failings of schools. In short, if the results of international comparisons cause people to feel dissatisfied with the state of knowledge transmission in the schools, they should justify improvement as desirable in its own right rather than because it will magically boost competitiveness, strengthen democratic government, or improve public taste. It can be argued that better learning is desirable because learning alone has the capacity to improve students’ faculties of logic and judgment and to deepen their experience of the world. If a commitment to learning for these legitimate reasons has positive spillover effects in other arenas, so much the better.

conclusion The transmission of knowledge is the most obvious purpose of schooling. To investigate the transmission of school knowledge, it is necessary to examine how subject matter materials become part of the curriculum and how successfully these materials are transmitted to students.



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Contemporary structures of school knowledge originated in three separate interests: the state’s interest in providing rudimentary literacy training, the aristocracy’s interest in preparing its offspring to govern, and church and professional interests in reproducing occupational specialists. These were the important historical bases, respectively, of primary, secondary, and university education. Over time, primary schooling has broadened to encompass a wider range of mental, expressive, and physical capacities; secondary schools have become divided between academic tracks leading to the university and occupational tracks leading (in most cases) to the job market. Many polities have encouraged occupational qualifications to proliferate in both secondary and higher education in order to encourage greater articulation between schooling and the labor market. Correspondingly, humanities and arts fields have become less important than science, technology, and business specializations. In general, these changes reflect the growing importance of the utilitarian ideology of government planners at successively higher levels of schooling. The changes are also closely connected to organizational developments (particularly the creation of articulated ladder structures linking primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling) and demographic influences (especially the increasing number of students moving from primary to secondary schooling and then on to higher education). Some broadening trends in the culture of the developed societies, such as the rise of progressive child development philosophies and increased sympathy for cultural pluralism, have also influenced curricular developments. Ideas about the well-rounded child have greatly influenced curriculum at the preschool and primary levels, and multicultural themes and sensibilities are making inroads throughout the world in the arts, humanities, and social studies fields. Today, primary school curricula are very similar throughout the world. Most schooling concentrates on national language and literature and, to a lesser degree, math and science. The arts, physical education, and social science are also represented throughout the world, though they are not allocated as much time in the curriculum. John W. Meyer and his associates have argued that this global curriculum structure reflects an originally Western, but now globally institutionalized, vision of modernity linking individual development to national purposes. Secondary school curricula are far more varied. Except in a few East Asian and AngloAmerican countries, the majority of secondary school students enroll in courses leading to vocational qualifications. Vocational students must take a number of traditional core subjects, however, during the course of their studies. European academic tracks feature earlier specialization between humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences compared to American academic tracks. Until recently, vocational curricula channeled students directly into the labor market, while academic curricula channeled students into universities. The two tracks were sharply segregated and class divided. In recent years, policy makers have created pathways from vocational programs into universities, and they have also experimented with new ways of integrating academic and vocational studies. The old distinctions between job training for the working classes and academic training for the middle classes no longer hold with the same force as before. However, elite tracks continue





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to exist in many countries, and these remain largely the preserve of affluent and highly educated families. By historical standards, the capacity of contemporary schooling to transmit knowledge is impressive. In the early part of the 20th century, fewer than 5 percent of Europeans even received an upper secondary education. Today, completion of upper secondary education has reached 80 to 90 percent in most countries of the developed world. Yet schools have not succeeded in bringing the majority of students to high levels of achievement. Only 15–20 percent of students in most industrialized countries show real proficiency in the mastery of school subjects. Students from industrialized societies tend to perform better than students from developing societies on these tests, but no countries consistently outperform all others. In general, American students score high on tests of reading comprehension, and East Asian students score high on tests in mathematics and science. In recent years, American students have begun to catch up in these subjects. Differences among countries largely reflect the greater opportunity students in East Asia have to learn more challenging and better-focused course material. Factors external to the schools also help explain country differences in student performance. High levels of parental support for learning, the existence of regular times for study, and strong rewards in the job market for good school performance all contribute to better scores. So too, in all likelihood, do ethnic homogeneity and income equality. The results of national and international assessments have often been irresponsibly reported and used for political purposes. Contrary to many published reports, no iron-clad links have been established between a country’s average score on international education assessments and its level of economic competitiveness, civic virtue, or public taste. Inaccurate and biased reports about student performance on international assessments have raised the level of public concern about schooling, but they have also misled many people to think that schooling is of singular importance to the solution of economic and social problems.

5

schools and socialization

The early 19th-century American school reformer Horace Mann observed that it is easier to create a republic than to create republicans (Cremin 1957: 14). By this, Mann meant that the self-restraint and virtuous conduct that make representative government possible do not necessarily come naturally and must therefore be created by society’s institutions, particularly by its schools. Mann’s observation suggests the important role that schools have long played in the socialization of children. Sociologists use the term “socialization” to describe the efforts of the carriers of a society’s dominant ways of life to shape the values and conduct of others who are less integrated into those ways of life. In schools, the teaching and administrative staff are the principal agents of socialization, and students are the socialized population. (However, students can also try to socialize adults into the ways of student culture—and some teachers do end up adopting features of student culture, at least in limited ways.) Students also socialize one another, primarily outside class, into the values and practices of student society. The effort of school authorities to socialize students is undoubtedly one of the major activities of schooling, and it might be the schools’ most important activity. Think how often students’ attention and behavior is organized in school around the schools’ ideas about acceptable conduct. Every time teachers say, “I need your attention,” they are implicitly socializing students to be responsive to authority. Every time they hand back a paper with a smile or a frown, they are socializing students to value work well done in the eyes of the school. The early sociologist Émile Durkheim ([1923] 1961) thought that the most important function of schooling in modern societies was to develop habits of conduct. He argued that the schools should be organized to encourage students to build strong selfdiscipline, a capacity for attachment to groups, and sufficient autonomy for independence and creativity. Of these, Durkheim placed particular emphasis on self-discipline: “Indeed, what is most essential in character is the aptitude to exercise self-control, the faculty of restraint . . . that enables us to contain our passions and desires and to call them to order” (9). He thought the self-discipline required by study would be particularly important in





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democratic societies “because the conventional barriers which forcibly curbed desires and ambitions” in previous societies “have partly fallen away” (42). Schools undoubtedly play a secondary role to families in socializing children. The more impersonal institutions of society cannot duplicate the powerful mix of emotional intimacy and consistent attentiveness typical of family life. Families create the capacity for trust and self-control out of which healthy egos develop. Even so, schools are organized to form personalities for a public world in which intimacy and attentiveness are not always in generous supply. Schools specialize in the creation of people who can adapt to impersonal work environments and who can pursue their interests with people who are neither kin nor close friends. Without lengthy exposure to the socializing environments of the school, most children would not be as well prepared as they are for adult life. This chapter begins by describing the three types of socialization that take place in schools (behavioral, moral, and cultural) and then discusses the historical development of the schools’ socializing role in relation to the dominant social structures surrounding schools. The remainder of the chapter analyzes two distinct sites of socialization in contemporary schools: the classroom and the playground (or peer spaces). By the playground, I mean all school spaces outside the classroom: the corridors, lunchrooms, and extracurricular activity rooms, as well as playgrounds themselves. (In postsecondary education, the term “peer spaces” is clearly preferable.) Classrooms are the spaces in which lessons of industry and work-related achievement are principally taught. Playgrounds and peer spaces are the arenas in which friendships and coalitions are formed and broken, status hierarchies are expressed and challenged, and children learn to balance self-assertion and self-control in informal social life. If teachers are the primary agents of socialization in the classroom setting, the popular boys and girls are the primary agents of socialization in these other school spaces, together with the student’s own circle of friends.

three dimensions of socialization It is instructive to think of socialization as involving three dimensions: efforts to shape (1) behavior, (2) moral values, and (3) cultural styles. The differences in these dimensions become clearer when we consider how students who conform primarily on one of these dimensions are characterized. Students are described as well behaved by authorities if they conform behaviorally; good, if they are seen to conform morally; and well adjusted, if they conform culturally. 1. Behavioral conformity. Training for behavioral conformity involves activities related to the body, its mechanical actions, and its instruments and adornments. In schools with strict disciplinary environments, students may, for example, be required to sit erect with their eyes on the teacher, raise their hands before talking, stay in their seats unless they are excused, have their pencils sharpened at all times, and have their textbooks with them in class. They may be subject to explicit dress and grooming codes. If students are punished for failing to comply with these requirements, the school is attempting to use its powers of control to socialize



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for behavioral conformity. Conduct is behavior regulated over a long period. The goals are self-regulation and internalization of the expectations of authorities, although they are rarely completely achieved. 2. Moral conformity. Training for moral conformity involves activities related to the production of an internalized sense of judgments about right and wrong. Judgments of the goodness and badness of conduct are central in this domain, and they are typically based on the staff’s advocacy of abstract virtues and values. Teachers may talk about the importance of such virtues as honesty, tolerance, courage, hard work, or fairness. They may also assign reading materials that illustrate the consequences of not being guided by these moral virtues. At higher levels, more complex moral issues may be raised, involving the collision of two goods or finer judgments of others’ actions. Clearly, socialization for behavioral conformity and that for moral conformity overlap in practice. Nevertheless, it is possible to have a high level of behavioral conformity without much in the way of moral conformity, as cheating and sexual harassment scandals in military academies demonstrate. (In peer groups, pressures for moral conformity may elevate values and practices that the schools at their best resist—for example, the values of physical beauty and extroversion accompanied by practices of aggression against physically unattrac­ tive or introverted students.) 3. Cultural conformity. Training for cultural conformity, or acculturation, is more a matter of learning approved styles and outlooks. In the better Parisian secondary schools, for example, students are expected to express themselves vividly, with memorable phrases and sharp wit (Bourdieu 1988). If a student makes a very witty remark in class, the teacher will smile in appreciation or attempt an equally witty riposte. By contrast, in secondary school in a Central European or Scandinavian republic, it may be more important for students to demonstrate conspicuous thoughtfulness: to probe beneath the surface appearances and to ask questions that get to the heart of a difficult problem. These styles and outlooks reflect the cultural logic of a particular group or time or place. It is, for example, reasonable to expect that centers of learning in cosmopolitan capitals like Paris will reflect the quick pace and brilliant surfaces of urban life, whereas those in relatively isolated regions show a deliberativeness that appears unduly stiff and reserved to urban sophisticates. Students of acculturation tend to be cultural relativists; they try to understand the social logic that produces distinctive cultural styles, but they do not usually think that cultural styles and outlooks have universal validity in every environment. Even when schools emphasize all three types of conformity, they may be more successful in one area than others. For example, military cadets are required to conform to an enormous number of behavioral rules. If they do not salute in a crisp fashion, they can be sent back to barracks. If their boots do not show a spit shine, they can be forced to clean out latrines. Behavioral conformity is vitally important in military academies because wellexecuted response to orders is vitally important in the military (ultimately for survival of





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the individual and the unit). By contrast, faculty in art schools may expect students to take pride in thumbing their noses at behavioral and moral conventions, as the famous battle cry of bohemia, épater le bourgeois (literally, to shock or flabbergast the middle class), demands. But acculturation is unavoidable even in this nonconformist environment. To be accepted by other nonconventional people, would-be bohemians must conform to the expressive style and outlooks typical of their group. They may need to be able to talk knowledgeably about obscure poets or musicians and to shift smoothly between attitudes of enthusiasm for the offbeat and world weariness in the face of the familiar. A would-be bohemian who does not act in these ways is not well suited for bohemian life. Discussions of the role of schools in socialization are often muddled by the failure to keep these three dimensions distinct. Many conservative critics, for example, suggest that schools are failing in the area of socialization because they have stopped emphasizing moral virtues. In the introduction to The Book of Virtues, former U.S. secretary of education William Bennett writes, Where do we go to find the material that will help our children in [the] task [of develop­ ing moral literacy]? The simple answer is we have a wealth of material to draw on— materials that virtually all schools and homes and churches once taught to students for the sake of shaping character. That many no longer do so is something this book hopes to change. (1993: 11)

Although Bennett raises an important issue in this passage, he is highlighting one dimension of socialization while playing down the other two. It may be that behavioral and cultural conformity are more valued by contemporary authorities than subscription to a common set of moral virtues. Schools need to develop a certain minimum level of behavioral conformity, and they cannot help but acculturate students in some way. And, in my view, they have not abandoned the field of moral instruction as completely as Secretary Bennett and other critics contend.1 However, as we see in this chapter, both the specific socialization messages and the techniques used to socialize schoolchildren have changed greatly over time.

socialization in comparative and historical perspective School socialization environments can be described heuristically as fitting one of four major ideal types: • The village/communal pattern has relatively lax behavioral control, relatively low levels of explicit moral training, and accommodation to the rhythms of village life. • The industrializing pattern has very high levels of behavioral control, high levels of training for moral conformity, and acculturation primarily to the world of mechanical production. • The bureau-corporate/mass-consumption pattern has impersonal control through rules and routines, relatively lower levels of moral discussion and training, and



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many more choices in classroom and extracurricular life. Students are acculturated to a world of bureaucratic business organization and mass consumption. • The elite pattern has existed at the upper reaches of all societies, but the specific forms of elite socialization have varied greatly from society to society because of differences in the outlooks of the groups decisive in the formation of the schools, the geographic location of the schools, and other influences. As social structures change, so do the dominant patterns of socialization in schools. The first transformation is from the relatively free-flowing village/communal pattern to an industrial pattern characterized by very stringent demands for behavioral control and moral conformity. The latter type of school is evident in many developing countries today, and it continues to exist in poorer neighborhoods in developed countries. In these schools, students are closely monitored for behavioral conformity and are expected to follow a large number of detailed rules. The environment is more highly moralized, and work assignments are typically based on rote memorization, filling in answers on rather undemanding worksheets (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Anyon 1980; Cookson and Persell 1985). Today, the majority of schools in the wealthier societies have made a second transformation: from the industrial to the bureau-corporate/mass-consumption pattern. Some of these changes are the result of conscious emulation of the leading organizations in society; some, an unconscious reflection of changing expectations in the larger society. The term “bureau-corporate” refers to expectations that come from the world of work, while the term “mass consumption” refers to expectations that come primarily from the worlds of marketing and leisure. These two distinctive emphases are combined in the socialization messages of contemporary schools in the developed world. Elite education exists in nearly every nonsocialist society, and in spite of manifold difference in content and style, it also exhibits some common characteristics. These common characteristics are based on the dominance of the upper classes in the composition of the school, the heightened expectations for student performance both inside and outside the classroom, and the tasks and activities used to meet these heightened expectations within the context of institutions that are removed from the rest of the world and encapsulate the lives of students in a nearly total way. Table 5.1 compares these four ideal-type socialization environments. Within countries, the dominant socialization pattern does not necessarily sweep away the others. In some cases, a mix of elements may be present. Laurence Wylie (1974) described a village school in the south of France in the 1950s that seemed to mix elements of the village/communal and industrializing patterns. A favored child was allowed to wander unimpeded from classroom to classroom. Each teacher gave him a hug. The teachers did not have the same expectations for every child and were tolerant of those who were not succeeding. At the same time, the teachers maintained, and the parents insisted on, a rather strict climate of authority in the classroom with severe punishments in the few cases of lying or stealing (Wylie 1974: chap. 4). The rule was “Children must never dispute the word of the teacher.”





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Ta bl e 5 . 1 School socializing environments dim ensions of soci a l i z ation Environment

Behavioral

Moral

Cultural

Village/communal

Relatively lax

Industrializing

Strong explicit emphasis

Relatively weak emphasis Strong explicit emphasis

Bureau-corporate/ mass consumption

Largely embedded in rules and classroom organization Largely implicit (based on behavior modeling)

Relatively weak emphasis and more pluralistic Relatively strong emphasis and highly ritualized

Accommodation to rhythms of village life Preparation for world of industrial production and nation building Preparation for impersonal organizational life and consumer choice Preparation for world of power and privilege

Elite

One other qualification is necessary: the circumstances of the local economy or the social class composition of the school may influence socialization patterns. In the United States, the bureau-corporate/mass-consumption pattern now predominates in most middle- and upper-middle-class communities. But the other three socialization environments can also be found in some locations. The elite pattern continues, of course, in private day and boarding schools (and in a diluted way in advanced placement tracks of some suburban public schools). The village/communal pattern can still be found in some of the poorest rural areas of the country; for example, among Mexican farmworkers in the Central Valley of California or in the poorest sections of the Mississippi delta. The industrializing pattern can still be found in some urban working-class schools. Parents tend to be strong proponents of class-conditioned socialization. Uppermiddle-class parents expect more self-directed and creative schoolwork for their children, in large part because their own occupational careers require self-direction; working-class parents often demand tough discipline and strict compliance with the teacher’s direction, in large part because they have found compliance at work to be a fundamental expectation of their employers and a precondition of their continuing employment (M. Kohn 1972; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Lareau 1987). Schools both reflect and reinforce these parental expectations while adding some distinctive features of their own.

The First Transformation: From Village to Factory The least developed countries are those in which the routines of public life are also least entrenched and where the intimate cultures of family and village still take precedence. The classroom environment in such countries tends to be relatively informal, and expectations for attendance, attentiveness, or performance cannot be easily enforced. Individual transgressions, such as poor academic performance and spotty attendance, are readily forgiven. Not too much is expected of teachers, either. A good example comes from Nancy Hornberger’s fieldwork in rural Peru: “Over the seven day period, out of 50.5 hours spent at school by the children 30.5 hours were [spent out of the classroom]



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as follows: 16.5 hours in recreation periods, 4.5 hours in sports competitions, 3.5 hours waiting during adult meetings, 3.5 hours in which teachers were absent during school, and 2.5 hours in line-up activities” (1987: 211). She adds that a fifth of the classroom time consisted of housecleaning activities, such as sweeping up the classroom. At somewhat higher levels of economic development, the classroom climate changes. Few countries have managed to achieve sustained economic growth without the “industrialization” of schoolchildren. The informal ways of the village are replaced by values connected to readiness for and exertion at industrial work. The value of strict obedience to authority is communicated to students through classroom discipline, and classroom life is consequently harsh. This harshness does not always apply to early childhood education. Instead, schools in many countries provide a warm and nurturing environment for early primary schooling, with rugs and overstuffed furniture easing the transition from home to school. But regimentation takes over in the later primary grades. In some countries, such as Germany in the later 19th century, the influence of factory-style discipline was heightened in the upper primary grades and secondary schools by a nationalist ideology that stressed preparation for war (Ringer 1979: chap. 2). In other industrializing countries, such as the United States from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries, industrial-style work discipline was mingled with liberal doses of Protestant-influenced moral instruction (see Tyack and Hansot 1982). Not all countries leapt into the modern era on the heels of industrialized schools. In slow-industrializing countries, the era of mass schooling preceded industrialization. In these countries, socialization took a different path at first. In the early 1800s, the SwissGerman reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi argued that all children could develop their intellectual and moral capacities if schools encouraged them to do so in a less regimented environment. He introduced methods of teaching in parts of modern Switzerland and Germany that aimed to inspire children’s interest in learning rather than fill their heads with mechanical drill. This effort to adapt schooling to the natural interests and development of children dovetailed in these countries with the state’s interest in separating formal schooling from religious control and connecting children to a new model of modern personality and national purpose. The English, by contrast, developed mass schooling after rather than before industrialization. The industrialization of school socialization also went to the greatest lengths in England. At the same time that Pestalozzian ideas were being adopted in the Germanspeaking world, the English were beginning experiments with the harsh Lancasterian system. The system is named after Joseph Lancaster, who developed a plan in which one teacher, assisted by several of the brighter pupils, would teach from 200 to 1,000 students in one school. The pupils were sorted into rows, and each row was assigned to a monitor. The teacher first taught these monitors a lesson from a printed card, and each monitor took his row to a station at the wall of the room and proceeded to teach the other children what he had learned. The Lancasterian schools were organized in a largely mechanical fashion. The Manuals of Instruction gave complete directions for the organization and management of monitorial schools, the details of recitation work, use of apparatus, order, position of pupils at their work, and classification being minutely laid down (Cubberley





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1922: 341). The schools were very popular between 1810 and 1830 in England and other early industrializing countries but fell out of fashion by 1840. The low expense of Lancasterian schools could not compensate for their inability to sustain the interest of hundreds of children at a time. In many eastern cities in the United States, the first free schools were of this type, and indeed Lancaster spent most of the last 20 years of his life organizing schools in the United States (Cubberley 1922: 360). In many locales, schooling in the United States remained highly repressive, even after the popularity of the Lancasterian system waned. No doubt Puritan asceticism, aligned with industrial work discipline, influenced the unusual severity of schooling in the United States. Children were relentlessly schooled to be obedient, regular, and precise in their habits. Classrooms were organized not so much to stimulate the intellect as to create well-disciplined workers. The phrase “toeing the line” still had a literal meaning. Joseph Rice visited hundreds of urban classrooms in the eastern United States to collect data for his book on the public high school at the turn of the 19th century. In one school described by Rice, during recitation periods (periods in which students demonstrated that they had memorized a text), children were expected to stand on the line, perfectly motionless, their bodies erect, their knees and feet together, the tips of their shoes touching the edge of a board in the floor. The teachers, according to Rice, paid as much attention to the state of their toes and knees as to the words coming out of their mouths: “‘How can you learn anything’ asked one teacher, ‘with your knees and toes out of order?’” (1893: 98). Disciplinary practices varied from classroom to classroom, of course, but they were generally strict. At Philadelphia’s Central High School, two evaluations were taken every hour—one for scholarship, the other for conduct. Demerits for disciplinary infractions (such as laziness or insubordination) were deducted from the student’s grade point average at the end of term, influencing class rank and chances for promotion. In 1853, the principal of Philadelphia’s Central High School described this system of discipline: The whole machinery of the school, like an extended piece of net-work, is thrown over and around [the student], and made to bear upon him, not with any great amount of force at any one time or place, but with a restraining influence just sufficient, and always and every where present. Some of the most hopeless cases of idleness and insubordination that I have ever known have been found to yield to this species of treatment. (Quoted in Labaree 1988: 18)

Teachers, too, were tightly controlled. In smaller communities, in particular, female teachers were told what they could wear, where they could travel, how late they could be out, and whose company they could keep. In many places, they were prevented from marrying or joining early feminist organizations. Men had more leeway in most communities. Nevertheless, rules such as the following from one Southern California school were not uncommon: “Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity, and honesty” (Oak Glen School 1873). Classrooms in the 19th-century United States were also more highly moralized places than they are today. The schools taught a bundle of virtues that reflect three primary



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moral traditions: the Judeo-Christian moral code of honesty, decency, tolerance, love of goodness, and kindness; the Protestant work ethic of industry, enterprise, planning, and frugality; and the republican-nationalist “civil religion” of patriotism, bravery in battle, love of freedom, respect for the rule of law and the Constitution, and responsible participation in the institutions of political society. The explicit moral teachings of the schools reflect the schools’ historical interaction with three waves of nation-building ideas. The first and second of these waves occurred more or less simultaneously. From the 18th-century beginnings of mass schooling in Europe, children were taught to be good and patriotic subjects and also to follow the moral norms of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Bendix 1968). A third wave of ideas followed the advance of capitalist industrialization in the early 19th century. It encouraged thrift, sobriety, and hard work. The waves of social change brought on by the rise of the nationstate and industrialization left similar imprints in the socializing objectives and practices of schools throughout the world. In the United States, most children in the middle and late 19th century learned to read from the McGuffey Readers, in which “the rules were always clear: Never Drink, Never Smoke, Work Hard, Tell the Truth, Obey Authority, Trust Providence” (Tyack and Hansot 1982: 27). Like a church with its Bible, the rural school with its McGuffey Readers was to be a small “incubator of virtue” (4). Leading educational historians have argued that such rules were based on a tight interweaving of the “absolutist morality of the evangelical movement,” the faith in “civic virtue” of 18th-century republicanism, and “entrepreneurial economic values.” The common school supported capitalism by rationalizing wealth or poverty as the result of individual effort or indolence and by making the political economy seem to be not a matter of choice but of providential design (24). These schools, it was hoped, would be the natural seedbeds for both hard-driving entrepreneurs and their industrious and abstemious laborers. The same emphasis on behavioral conformity and stern morality found in 19thcentury American schooling can be found today in industrializing parts of the developing world. Consider the following, rather extreme, description of disciplinary practices in modernizing Lebanon: Those who received failing grades were asked to line up in the front of the room. The teacher took a long, thin wooden stick and slapped the first boy’s open palms. Others were slapped across the face, on the hand, or across the body with the wooden stick. Once the punishment was meted out, the teacher began explaining the answers to the quiz in his seemingly relaxed, friendly manner (S. Howard 1970: 129). Here, too, the interests of developing states in organizing self-discipline combine with religious injunctions to produce a climate of strict behavioral expectations and strong moralization. Well-adjusted students in these authoritarian systems are, at least publicly, not very willing to criticize the harshness of their teachers. One boy explained why teachers hit: “He hits us because his conscience will hurt him when he doesn’t help us to discover the good path. Truly, the teacher is a candle that melts and melts to light the road of virtue, love, and goodness. He is the messenger of civilization” (S. Howard 1970: 130). In the developing world, corporal punishment in the classroom remains an all-too-frequent





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experience. For example, in India 65 percent of schoolchildren interviewed in a recent study reported being beaten at school (Morrow 2015). Directions to maintain orderliness and industriousness remain common in primary schools in developed societies. However, the behavioral and moral order of the school has also become more impersonal over time and more open to choice and variety. These changes are still more pronounced at the secondary school level.

The Second Transformation: From Factory to Office and Shopping Mall In later stages of economic development, the industrializing pattern gives way to what I call the bureau-corporate/mass-consumption pattern. This is a long phrase, but it is necessary to capture the conjunction of structurally embedded rules and explicit choice opportunities that are at the heart of this socialization pattern. This second transformation created the school socialization practices that most American students experience today, particularly in secondary schools. A number of forces came together following World War I to produce the new pattern, which was less obtrusive in behavioral control (depending more on rules than personal admonitions), less highly moralized, and less single-minded in concerns with productivity. Instead of preparing students for factory work, schools began preparing them for work in bureaucratically organized business enterprises and for a consumer-oriented life of choice and variety. These forces arrived somewhat later in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world than they did in the United States, but they have been apparent in Europe since the 1960s and in East Asia since the 1990s. The Progressive Era’s (1896–1918) emphasis on administrative solutions to social problems played the midwife in this transformation. The triumph of scientific managers moved the schools out of the hands of people who were obsessed with personally rooting out evil and put them into the hands of people who favored structural forms of control. With the right rules and organizational practices, educators like George D. Strayer and Ellwood P. Cubberley believed, it would be unnecessary to install a miniature autocracy in each classroom. Authoritarian methods were, in any event, coming under criticism by developmental psychologists, who saw them as creating a regime of fear in the classroom rather than an environment conducive to active exploration and learning. At about the same time, schools came to be seen as institutions responsible more for the development of mental abilities than for the development of character. Secondary schools had always been more purely cognitive in orientation, but conflicts over what constituted good character in a country newly self-conscious of its multiethnic population led both primary and secondary schools to tread more gingerly on moral topics than they once had. If the movement toward a more student-oriented ethos began in social engineering and the desire to avoid controversy, it ended in the integration of consumerism into the life of the school. First, schools were seen as a place to have fun as well as to work. Later, they were seen as places to choose among subject matter alternatives rather than to conform to standardized curricula. Toward consumerism. As early as the 1920s in the United States, profiles in popular magazines of “heroes of production” (i.e., business, scientific, and political leaders) were



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giving way to profiles of “heroes of consumption” (i.e., sports and entertainment celeb­ rities) (Lowenthal 1957: chap. 4). At the same time, football became popular and began at­ tracting increasing numbers of students to college (Riesman and Denney 1951). Sports and later other extracurricular activities (band, glee club, drama, and so on) became a focal point for high school students in the 1920s and 1930s. Arthur Powell and his colleagues quote one high school principal of the period observing the difference in interest gener­ ated by extracurricular activities and regular instruction: Extracurricular activity “pul­ sates with life and purpose,” the principal noted, whereas the formal curriculum “owes its existence to a coercive regime, loosely connected and highly artificial” (1985: 257). In the curriculum, social engineering justified as consumerism began in the early 1900s. Educators were determined to meet the needs of secondary school students who would not be attending college by providing more practical coursework. Under the influence of a lifeadjustment philosophy popularized after World War I, this emphasis on student interests gradually branched out to incorporate students in academic and general education tracks. Courses were provided to students to prepare them for balancing a checkbook, dating, driving, and raising children. After a swing back toward academic rigor in the Sputnik era, consumerism flowered again in the late 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. Department of Education counted thousands of course titles on high school campuses at the end of the 1970s, with the vast number in relatively undemanding general education programs, such as moviemaking, health education, and driver’s education (Angus and Mirel 1995). At the height of the era of student consumerism in the late 1970s, three social scientists, Arthur Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David Cohen, studied a dozen American high schools and published their findings in The Shopping Mall High School (1985). How different their portrait is from the factory-like regimens described by Joseph Rice and others a century earlier: “Most educators are proud of the mall-like features of high schools. ‘The nice thing about [our] school,’ a teacher explained, ‘is that students can do their own thing. They can be involved in music, fine arts, athletics, sitting out on the south lawn—and nobody puts them down for it’” (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985: 11). For Powell and his colleagues, the “shopping mall high school” had three distinctive features: • Variety. The schools offered a wide variety of consumer opportunities, from curricular opportunities like fine arts to extracurricular opportunities like sports to noncurricular opportunities for socializing with friends. • Choice. The schools placed choice in the hands of the consumer. The customer had real power not only to decide what to take and where to go but also how much effort to expend. Many schools, Powell and his associates found, allowed “negotiated treaties” between students and teachers rather than strict requirements handed down from above. If teachers agreed to keep requirements at an achievable minimum, students agreed to comply with the course requirements and to remain civilly attentive. The specific nature of the agreements were open to implicit or, in some cases, explicit bargaining. • Neutrality. The schools were neutral about the choices students made. One choice was more or less as good as another (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985: 11).





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Powell and his colleagues exaggerate the all-encompassing character of the movement toward consumerism, perhaps to bring out the changes in socialization practices as dramatically as possible. The term they coined, “shopping mall high schools,” is, therefore, misleading: the socialization pattern found in today’s schools includes socialization for a world of consumer choice and for a world of bureaucratic regulation. Consider the ways organizational abilities are emphasized in the schools: students make appointments, manage time, fit things into their schedules, and are urged to plan and keep themselves on track. It also cannot be convincingly argued that production pressures are ignored as much as the image of the shopping mall suggests. Teachers assign homework and expect it to be in on time. Bells ring, and corridors clear. Tests, papers, and grades remain an obsession—even more so in recent decades given the schools’ heavy emphasis on accountability. Preparation for work life in a highly organized and competitive society thus remains at the center of the school’s socialization mission, along with preparation for a life of variety and choice in the consumer marketplace. Evidence from other industrial societies. The same transformation from the factorylike regimen of the 19th-century school to the bureau-corporate/mass-consumption model of today can be seen throughout the industrialized world. However, in Europe this transformation began only well after World War II, when secondary schooling became for the first time a form of mass rather than class education, and it began to take root in the industrialized societies of East Asia only in the 1990s when educators began to worry about the lack of creative opportunities in classrooms. In the United States, the new environment was created by administrators looking for ways of appealing to the interests of new students while adjusting to the modern world of corporate organization. In Europe, students themselves demanded change, often against the resistance of more conservative administrators and faculty. Student demands for more choice and variety in schooling became popular slogans during the student uprisings of 1968 and included in France a manifesto for the “outright rejection of the capitalist technocratic university” (Vachon 2001). Although sparked by days of rage over the American war in Vietnam, these demands were precipitated at a deeper level by the large numbers of students moving on to higher grades and by the greater affluence of the industrialized world in the second postwar generation. Student protest led to more informal relations between professors and students and curricular changes to accommodate the interests of students in popular culture, sexual liberation, the environment, and non-Western cultures (Boudon 1979). As the Italian novelist Umberto Eco remarked, Even though all visible traces of 1968 are gone, it profoundly changed the way all of us, at least in Europe, behave and relate to one another. Relations between bosses and workers, students and teachers, even children and parents, have opened up. They’ll never be the same again. (Quoted in Lumley 1990: 2)

The changes could be seen even at Wylie’s village school in southern France. When he revisited the village in the 1970s, Wylie was amazed that “the belief in hierarchy [had] given way to a concern for each individual’s will, a mutual respect, a tolerance of differences that I would never have thought possible. In most families, there [was] acceptance



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[of the young people’s new independence], though tinged perhaps with nostalgia” (1974: 382–83). In East Asia, the changes came even later, but they are now in full force. Merry White (1994) described Japanese secondary school students as grumbling about the rules that regulate school life, concerned with the choices they are offered, and very interested in exploring cultural styles associated with independence. Socializing and consumerism are as much at the center of Japanese adolescence as are the academic expectations of the schools. More recently, schools in many East Asian societies have added periods of time for “creativity” and “integration” in response to criticisms about the lack of choice and the overly didactic quality of instruction in the schools. The East Asian economic crisis of the early 1990s stimulated considerable rethinking about the purposes and processes of schooling. The Singapore experience is exemplary. In 1997, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong announced a new initiative, Thinking Schools, Learning Nation, which was intended, in part, to provide more flexibility and choice for students. In the speech announcing the initiative, Tong said, “What is critical . . . is that we fire in our students a passion for learning, instead of studying for the sake of getting good grades in their examinations. . . . [Our] schools must be crucibles for questioning and searching, within and outside the classroom, to forge this passion for learning” (Tong 1997). Curricula and assessment changes put greater emphasis on project work and creative thinking. The Ministry of Education also mobilized new technologies to enable new kinds of self-directed and collaborative learning (Lee et al. 2008). Choice became a major part of the initiative, and new schools encouraging specialization in arts, mathematics and science, and sports were founded. As the minister for education stated two years before the new policy was enacted, Singaporean schools should be “a mountain range of excellence . . . with different shapes and colours, inspiring all our young to follow their passions and climb as far as they can” (Shanmugaratnam 2005). The bureau-corporate/mass-consumption socialization pattern may be an American original, but it has gained strength in all advanced societies, because it corresponds to the impersonal bureaucratic regulation and freedom-loving mass consumption priorities of early 21st-century life.

 Socialization in Elite Preparatory Schools  Elite schools provide training for students identified by school authorities as potential leaders of the future. At one time, wealthy parents, and particularly birth into a socially prominent family, would have been the major qualification for admissions. Since the 1960s, academic qualifications have become a more important factor. Academic promise has become increasingly important, because elite colleges and universities now seek to enroll classes with more uniformly excellent academic records. This has made the private schools a refuge for many academically gifted children who might fail to thrive in





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public schools. Even so, because elite preparatory schools can cost as much as $30,000 per year and scholarships are rare, family economic standing remains a very important influence on who applies for admission to an elite preparatory school and, therefore, on who is admitted. One of the great advantages of elite schooling lies in training for the representation of power in face-to-face interaction. Through modeling the behavior of fellow students, children at private preparatory schools can acquire a refined sense of the accepted manner in which power is expressed in a democracy: good spirits and an easy manner with obvious social inferiors, an aloof attitude (which can be aggressively enforced, if necessary, through snubs and smirks) toward social inferiors who encroach too closely, and true frankness only with recognized social equals. In addition to a rigorous academic curriculum, emphases on near-universal participation in sports and performing arts remain common at elite preparatory schools, because exceptionally competent and compelling public performance remains an important aspect of the expression and enactment of power and status in society. The powerful must be capable of performing with aplomb in public. Otherwise, approved cultural styles in elite preparatory schools differ and reflect the idealized values and lifestyles of the primary stratum to which the school caters (in the case of very traditional schools, the stratum to which it catered at the time of its founding). In the United States, private day and boarding schools were founded, for the most part, in the late 19th century for the children of the old, prominent families. They were founded as a way of maintaining social distance from parvenus, the large numbers of new rich who had risen during the Gilded Age. These schools, located in rural areas of New England, inculcated the values of American patricians: a very high level of self-control; taboos on discussions of wealth; a constant admonition to be involved in service activities for the public good; an efficient, businesslike approach to assignments; the expectation that knowledge is to be used rather than simply memorized; and a sense of earned entitlement to the privileges and power of high social status (Cookson and Persell 1985). By contrast, British public schools (the equivalent of American private boarding schools) reflected the imprint of the colonial administration of the British Empire, with its emphasis on sports as a proving ground for the battlefield, chapel as an essential feature of a world-transforming Christian mission, and earnest effort in the classroom. In the most prestigious of the public schools, such as Eton, student styles also showed the imprint of the dandyism of the English aristocracy (McConnell 1985).



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In Germany, elite secondary education did not occur in separate private boarding schools, but rather in the urban gymnasia supported by public funds. The values of the Bildungsburgertum—the educated upper middle class—strongly shaped German elite secondary education following the uni­ versity reforms of the early 1800s (Ringer 1969). This class sharply distinguished itself from the business-oriented upper middle class by emphasiz­ing internal cultivation and external civility. It was highly intellectual and sought to distinguish the higher court of cultural values from the self-inter­ested be­ havior of everyday commercial life (Ringer 1992). The sense of distinction between cultivation and commerce was carried furthest in Germany, largely because of the weakness of the German business classes in a coun­try  long dominated by the landed aristocracy, the civil service, and the mili­tary. Traces of this cultural influence remain in the German gymnasia but the schools have trended in the direction of the rest of the industrialized world, including somewhat less demanding curricula and increased choice. They seek to produce a well-rounded student. Consequently, participation in athletics is compulsory as are courses in religion or ethics. Acculturation in French elite secondary education, by contrast, was shaped by the powerful mix of Parisian wit and civil service precision, as these became embedded in the teaching traditions of the grandes écoles founded during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era to form military, industrial, and administrative leaders for state service (Suleiman 1978). The grandes écoles, located in and around Paris, exercised a tremendous influence on the socializing patterns of the French academic secondary schools, not least of all because the leading stratum of French secondary school teachers was trained at one of them, the École Normale Supérieure. Though carried on with public funds, the elite system has been maintained in France as a distinct track in upper secondary education (Bourdieu 1996), just as it has been maintained in the private boarding schools of the United States and England. Students in the classes préparatoires in France are required to study very long hours if they hope to pass the concours exam. Passing marks on this test, in turn, allow for entry into one of the grandes écoles and a virtual guarantee of high status in later life. Because of the amount of study required to succeed in the classes préparatoires, the Anglo-American patterns of accomplishment both inside and outside the classroom are less evident in France. In France, accomplishment in the classroom is what counts, above all. This accomplishment is measured by a confident assertion of self in classroom discussions, as well as by the quality of thinking expressed in written work.





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Elite Education: Accomplishment and Confidence in Work and Play Elite preparatory schools provide a very different pattern of socialization, which can be characterized as requiring exceptional accomplishment and confidence in both work and play. The goal of elite education is well-rounded, well-prepared, confident students who are competitive for admission to elite colleges and ultimately for the strenuous life of a top-level executive or professional (Kingston and Smart 1990). Students at elite boarding schools nearly all come from well-educated, upper-income families. A sprinkling of highly motivated scholarship students round out the classes. The students take much more rigorous classes than students at public schools (Cookson and Persell 1985; Khan 2011). In the upper grades, reading lists and problem solving are aligned with college-level work, rather than high school level work, often quite a bit above the work assigned in most colleges. Typical reading lists in literature include Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and James Joyce. Even the school’s most outstanding sports star must complement his or her athletic virtuosity with good grades to receive the school’s acclaim (Gaztambibe-Fernandez 2009). Needless to say, that would not be necessary at most public schools. High-pressure conditions are essential to forging the extreme self-confidence that private schools are intended to foster. Many private schools, for example, require attendance at chapel talks, given to the entire school. School years often begin or end with completion of strenuous climbing expeditions. High expectations are also evident in extracurricular activities, particularly sports. At many prep schools all healthy students are required to participate in an extracurricular sport, whether they are athletic or not. After-school life is time-consuming and intensely competitive, including mixers with students at nearby prep schools, contests of many types, and expectations for many hours of volunteering. The old phrase “grace under pressure” still applies. Indeed, in some countries, such as France, the academic expectations for students accepted into elite preparatory education are even higher than they are in the United States. (See box “Socialization in Elite Preparatory Schools” for further discussion of elite education from a comparative-historical perspective.) There are no easy escapes from these pressure-cooker environments. In Erving Goffman’s (1961) terms, they closely resemble “total institutions” insofar as they are physically isolated and regulate contact with the outside world in a highly restricted fashion. Most of life is subsumed by the school community, intensifying the regulatory force of the institution. No wonder some students burn out or consume large quantities of alcohol and drugs to cope with the stress (Cookson and Persell 1985). Prep school students today are being prepared for a world of global markets and multicultural democracy. This has led to the enrollment of many more foreign students and a greater appreciation for non-Western cultural works. As Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell (1985) put it, elite preparatory schools provide the educational and extracurricular contexts that help students “prepare for power.” Today we would add that the conditions for exercising power encourage a global perspective and a multicultural peer group in



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the place of the national perspective and homogeneous peer groups of the past (see also Khan 2011).

socialization messages in the classroom I now look in greater detail at the practices of classroom socialization in contemporary schools and the extent to which these practices are successful in channeling students’ behavior, moral sentiments, and cultural orientations along school-approved lines. Today’s schools continue to buzz with socializing messages in the classroom and on the playground. But some of the most effective means of socialization are not part of the verbal buzz. Instead, they either frame the boundaries of acceptable behavior or are embedded in the very fabric of school routines. It is helpful to think of classroom socialization as organized around a core of relatively effective rules and routines surrounded by rings of less insistent (and therefore less effective) moral instruction. The core consists of rules backed up by enforcement measures and routines that acculturate students to the worlds of impersonal organization and consumer choice. These routines include such everyday features of schooling as lining up, working independently, choosing among options, and taking tests. Surrounding this core are rings of moral instruction. One ring consists of explicit moral instruction—the overt teaching of moral virtues that is found mainly in the elementary grades. Another ring consists of implicit moral instruction. Some of this instruction occurs through exposure in later grades to the moral lessons of literature and history. Some occurs through observation of the exemplary actions of teachers and principals. Figure 5.1 diagrams this conception of classroom socialization.

The Core: Oral Direction, Impersonal Rules, and Embedded Practices As we might expect for societies making the transition from village to factory patterns of socialization, both corporal punishment and frequent reference to rules are used in schools in the developing world. Corporal punishment is used in spite of UN passage of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1979, which intended to ban it (Morrow 2015; Zolotor and Puzia 2010). Corporal punishment remains commonplace in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. (Corporal punishment also remains on the books in 19 American states, though it appears to be used infrequently.) In most developed socie­ ties, including all of Europe, teachers and principals no longer force students to behave by whacking them across their bottoms or pulling the short hairs on their necks. Instead, teachers exert their rule in the classroom through oral emphases on orderliness. In a study of 64 Southern California classrooms, Mary Contreras, Michael Matthews, and I found that messages about orderliness constituted just over 70 percent of all teacher-initiated socialization messages. These messages reflected the teachers’ efforts to quiet the students, to keep them from answering questions unless they were recognized first, or to redirect their straying attention to the task at hand (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001). The next most common oral messages (13 percent) concerned work effort. Teachers frequently implored students to work hard on assignments or to give a task their





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Outer rings Implicit moral instruction 1. More complex lessons of literature and history 2. Teachers as moral exemplars Inner ring Explicit moral instruction

The core 1. Oral direction 2. School rules 3. Embedded practices: assignments, testing, lining up, school categories, spheres of specialized identities, etc.

Figure 5.1  Zones of socialization in contemporary classrooms

all. Messages that explicitly addressed moral virtues other than orderliness and industriousness were rare. In addition to these oral directives, students are also socialized into an impersonal order in which rules and routine practices construct the boundaries of legitimate conduct; within those boundaries, students are relatively free to act as they wish. Because these rules and practices are built into the very fabric of schooling, they soon become taken for granted. Sociologists have sometimes used the term “hidden curriculum” to describe lessons of socialization that are embedded in the very fabric of schooling, in its official categories, and in its constantly repeated routines. School rules. School rules define the serious infractions that require punishments: hurting other children, insulting teachers, being disruptive in class, cheating, and the like. School rules may also prescribe where students can be at different times during the day and the conditions under which they may leave their classrooms. Rules represent the prerequisites of bureaucratic life: being where you are supposed to be, doing your job, interacting in a peaceful way with coworkers, and accepting the authority of bosses. When rules are broken, consequences can range from a sharp rebuke to missing recess and up to physical removal from the classroom and suspension from school. The number of socializing rules in schools varies by society and level of instruction. In the United States, primary schooling is very heavily encased by rules. Secondary schooling



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depends, to a greater degree, on the internalization of these earlier experiences with rules. This pattern is the norm in most of the developed world. In Japan, children remain strongly embedded in group-centered moral life through primary school and emerge into an impersonal, rule-bound setting only with the arrival of secondary schooling (White 1994). The hidden curriculum. In addition to explicit rules, sociologists have uncovered a number of embedded practices and school routines that play a role in students’ socialization. Children are naturally egocentric and inclined to demand the regard of others and the freedom to pursue their own interests as they see fit. Schools as institutions are just as naturally opposed to allowing the natural egoism of children free expression. All of the lining up at school—for a turn at the water fountain, in anticipation of lunch or recess, for dismissal at the end of the day—requires students to learn patience. Because groups at school are relatively large, more patience and waiting for others is usually required than at home. Things happen at school not because students want them to happen but because it is time for them to occur. The denial of desire that schools require is cumulatively important. The crowded condition of classrooms makes delayed gratification inevitable and requires students to deal with delays, denials, interruptions, and distractions (Jackson 1968). School practices also socialize students into a life of evaluation based on individual performance. The three-step pattern of assignment, performance, and evaluation, repeated over and over in schools, reinforces a child’s disposition to distinguish his or her own efforts and feeds directly into the high premium placed on occupational success in modern societies. Evaluations at school are more formal, more performance based, more public, and more consequential for adult status than those at home. Rewards are also generally for individual rather than group achievements. Because evaluation is so important in school, it teaches not only the norms of hard work and individual achievement but also various stratagems for managing evaluation while protecting the ego. As Philip Jackson points out, students learn how to enhance praise, publicize positive evaluations, and conceal negative ones (1968: 26). Those who are evaluated poorly may learn to disengage, play it cool, not get involved, and mask cheating. School practices also socialize acceptance of authority. Every time a teacher invokes a rule, makes an assignment, or calls for an answer, her or his authority is reinforced. Obedience and even docility are part of the life of labor, and the transition from classroom to factory or office is made easily by “those who have developed ‘good work habits’ (which is to say responsiveness to authority) in their early years” at school (Jackson 1968: 26). The spatial and temporal organization of schools itself expresses authority relations. Students are not allowed free access to certain spaces: the principals’ offices, the teachers’ lounges, or the counseling rooms. The staff even controls students’ access to classrooms. Students are required to be out of hallways and off the grounds at certain times. (Schools catering to upper-class students often have less rigid control over space, perhaps to encourage greater self-direction rather than conformity.) At least two other modes of orientation required by bureaucratic life are also taught in schools. One is the habit of considering oneself a member of some larger category of people. In schools, categories of people often matter more than individual personalities. Members





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of the red group may be first in line to use the computer during a particular week, and members of the blue group the next week. Third graders as a group may be given certain rights and responsibilities, such as the right to use certain equipment on the playground and the responsibility to clean up the playground on certain days. Through these repeated processes of grouping, schools give students experience in making social comparisons in categorical rather than particular terms. Pupils learn to distinguish between persons and the social positions they occupy. This orientation is important in bureaucratically organized societies, in which people are constantly being asked to view themselves as members of particular categories such as those with a particular level of taxable income or having a similar job grade and to accept the duties and privileges consistent with those categories.2 Students also learn to express only specific, situation-relevant parts of their personalities. The whole person rarely matters in the school classroom. What counts is how good at math the student is or how good at social studies. The whole personality is divided into parts, and students learn that only one or a few features of their whole personalities may be relevant at any given time. This type of understanding, too, is important in bureaucratically organized societies. Whether a pilot is good company or likes sports is less relevant to passengers than how well he or she can fly a plane. The routine practices of offering variety and choice are the key to the consumer side of classroom socialization. Contreras, Matthews, and I found that variety was an important part of classroom life in the eight Southern California primary schools we studied. Teachers interspersed periods of group work with lectures, problem discussion, and individual seat work. Students in some schools changed classrooms periodically during the week to be taught by subject matter specialists. They had options to explore different activity centers in the classroom. Even their textbooks emphasized variety. Literature texts sampled every genre, from poetry to journalism, usually in rather small bits (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001). The trend toward variety and choice in secondary schools may have been reaching its outer limit at the time Powell, Farrar, and Cohen published their study of shopping mall high schools (Ravitch 1995: 48–58). Even so, the choices available to students at the larger secondary schools do continue to resemble the variety of choices they face on a Saturday shopping expedition: dozens of extracurricular activities, scores of electives, hundreds of social networks and possible identities, and only a relatively small number of common requirements. Schools and families as socialization sites. Schools are well suited to prepare people for impersonal bureaucratic environments in ways that most families are not. In particular, school classrooms have two advantages over families for this purpose: • Classrooms are the first performance-oriented bureaucracies in which children spend a good deal of time. Unlike families, classrooms are explicitly defined as performance-oriented places and organized by relatively distant agents of authority. Teachers are, in this respect, children’s first bosses and schoolwork their first job. • Classrooms include many more children than families do, and the relationships that develop are broken at the end of the school year. Children do not have the



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same teacher every year or continue with exactly the same children. The large groups in classrooms and the annual discontinuity of classroom life limit the deep emotional attachments characteristic of families. The interest of teachers is, by necessity, limited to specific aspects of the child and is somewhat more distant emotionally. This impersonality becomes more evident as children progress from the early primary grades to the later primary grades, and it is more or less completely true by the time children reach secondary school. Table 5.2 shows these differences between families and classrooms. Because parents are usually more concerned with the whole child and have a personal, direct authority in the household, “families lack the resources and competence to effect the psychological transition to adult life” in impersonally organized settings (Dreeben 1968: 85). The construction and reinforcement of social hierarchies. At the same time, schools also contribute to the creation of hierarchized social structures in ways that many welleducated families clearly would not and do not do. Nominally, schools are class-, gender-, and color-blind places, but many nevertheless contribute to the socialization of inequality through the differential ways they treat boys and girls and the differential ways they treat students from varied home, class, and racial-ethnic backgrounds. A classic study by the sociologist Ray Rist (1970) focused on the ways teachers in kindergarten, first, and second grade in one Washington, D.C., school treated the children in their classes. He found that from the earliest grades, teachers substituted signs of class status for indicators of academic aptitude. Before they had a real chance to demonstrate their level of interest in school, students whose hair was not well combed, those who wore hand-me-down clothes, and those who spoke nonstandard English were identified as less able academically and received less attention from teachers, while those who presented themselves as middle class in appearance and language were treated as potential academic stars. Schools were said to play a gatekeeping role by closing the gate on those who failed to conform to the middle-class norms supported by the schools. Examining counseling sessions, Frederick Erickson (1975) showed that students from lower-status families who were performing poorly in school could sometimes bridge the distance between themselves and school authorities if they shared outside interests with counselors and could Ta bl e 5 . 2 Structural differences between classrooms and families Classrooms

Families

Yearly promotion Relatively large group size Heterogeneous composition Broken relationships High child-to-adult ratio Narrow, homogeneous age grouping Narrow range of activities and events Little privacy Situationally relevant facets of personality Achievement-based

No yearly promotion Relatively small group size Homogeneous composition Unbroken relationships (except in cases of divorce) Low child-to-adult ratio Mixture of several ages Wide range of activities and events Some privacy Complete-personality relevant Affection-based

s o u r c e : Adapted from Dreeben 1968.





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thereby find a basis for sympathetic conversations. But the great majority of students were unable to locate points of comembership. Today teachers and counselors are trained to treat all students as potentially successful, and differentials in the treatment of students based on signals of class status may be in decline. But ethnographers have discovered that other forms of differential treatment based on social identities continue to shape interactions in classrooms. The sociologist Karin Martin (1998) studied five preschool classrooms and found consistent differences in the treatment of girls and boys. Preschool teachers touched boys to prevent violence. They touched girls to fix their hair or clothing. Girls were touched more often than boys and, according to Martin, taught thereby to be quieter than boys. Boys were allowed more relaxed behavior than girls. For Martin, these early socialization experiences are part of the apparatus of society that leads women to feel more constraint in the disposition of their bodily appearance and in their freedom of expression. Similarly, impoverished racial-ethnic minority boys are often closely policed as early as primary school, in part because of teachers’ fears of violence and in part because of race-related assumptions about what behavioral outbursts mean. Disciplinary action, including suspension and expulsion, are higher for African American boys in the United States, for example, than any other group in the schools. As early as grade 11, school personnel may label boys as bound for jail or unsalvageable. Although most of the boys so labeled will dispute or reject these predictions, the label is a powerful reinforcement for the actions of school personnel and an influence as well on the boys’ own self-conception. Responses of schools and teachers to behavior issues through labels that stick can thereby contribute to the process that creates the pipeline from schools to prison for African American boys from unsettled families (Ferguson 2001).

Two Rings of Moral Instruction: Explicit and Implicit It is often assumed that moral instruction has been completely drained out of public schooling. No doubt, some school districts have become leery of stepping on toes by imposing any set of moral values, and others may feel that the traditional types of moral instruction are old-fashioned. Nevertheless, moral instruction has not disappeared from the public schools. In our study of Southern California classrooms, Contreras, Matthews, and I found that the values of hard work and persistence in the face of adversity were emphasized in both teacher-initiated interaction with students and literature and social studies texts (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001). These are entrepreneurial and effort-oriented virtues. We found less evidence for the centrality of such other traditional moral virtues as kindness, compassion, honesty, and fairness. Other researchers have found somewhat more support for these virtues. They find that many primary school teachers continue to use stories involving well-known heroes (such as George Washington and his apocryphal cherry tree) or familiar fables (such as the ant and the grasshopper) to inculcate moral virtues. Teachers (by overwhelming majorities) also say that schools should teach common core moral values, such as honesty, punctuality, responsibility, and industriousness (Farkas and Johnson 1996). And some social studies and reading textbooks continue to emphasize



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such traditional values as honesty, courage, compassion, persistence, bravery (Sharp and Wood 1992). Contreras, Matthews, and I also found evidence for the importance of two relatively new school values. One is self-esteem. Schools make many efforts to make children feel good about themselves through recognition in the classroom and school assemblies. One organizational reason for this is that, as higher levels of educational attainment have become the norm, school authorities have had a stronger incentive to make every student feel a part of the school community. The other new value is respect for diversity. This value was communicated through classroom activities, such as tracing ancestry on maps, and in the lessons of literature and social studies texts. More than four out of five teachers said that “helping students to learn to appreciate other people’s cultures” was a very important priority of the schools (ranking at 8 or above on a 1–10 scale), and nearly every schoolroom now includes posters of famous women and minorities, along with the white men who once presided almost exclusively (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001: 173). Textbook studies confirm a dramatic increase in concerns with pluralism and the contributions of the many groups that make up American society (Fitzgerald 1979; Wong 1991; cf. Elson 1964). Thus, recent empirical studies provide qualified support for the view that “the national [identifying symbolism] has been enlarged rather than abandoned” (Tyack 1999: 79). Such a change would be consistent with Durkheim’s ([1893] 1964) thesis that societies evolve from states of cohesion that are based on a common and obligatory moral order to ones that are based on pluralistic and balance-oriented moral orders, buttressed by a cult of the individual, as their social structures grow more complex. On the other hand, one of the remarkable features of contemporary schooling is how little of it is related to building the autonomy Durkheim prized as a foundation for independence of thought and creativity. A very large number of teachers’ messages are directed toward gaining compliance; students are repeatedly told to follow directions and be quiet. But almost none are directed to encouraging independent thought or supporting unconventional views. Also missing are explicit mentions of aesthetic or intellectual values (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001). Citizenship is an important concept in schools, but it has nothing to do with the right to speak one’s mind or dissent. Instead, it has been translated into organizational terms to mean respecting others, following rules, and supporting the authority of the staff (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001). Cross-national variations in moral education. Some important cross-national varia­ tions exist in the organization and content of moral education. One of these differences is the extent to which schools create curricular boundaries around moral education. In most of the developed world, moral instruction is interlaced with the regular curriculum. In the United States, for example, discussions of Abe Lincoln’s honesty take place in relation to lessons in American history. By contrast, many developing countries, as well as many developed Asian countries, devote explicit time every day to moral or religious education. Imagine an American student taking a test on morality in public school, which is commonplace in Singapore, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in East Asia. Separate periods for moral instruction presumably produce more commitment to moral norms, although they may create more transparent forms of hypocrisy as well.





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Another important difference has to do with the location of control over moral instruction. In a few countries, the primary responsibility for enforcing behavioral and moral conformity is the student group, rather than the teacher. In Japanese nursery schools, for example, teachers do not pull children out of the group for misbehaving. Nor do they talk to children about behavior problems. Instead, they rely on other children in the class to censure those who are misbehaving. As Catherine Lewis notes, “[These] practices may promote strong internalization and ultimately high compliance while maintaining the role of the teacher as a benevolent, though perhaps not quite indulgent, figure” (1995: 84). In other words, group-based authority may increase the legitimacy of behavioral norms while allowing teachers and school administrators to be seen in a more sympathetic light than they might otherwise be. A similar emphasis on peer authority can still be found in British public schools (which would be called prep schools in the United States). Sixth-form leaders (students of 16 to 17 years old) are selected to help the staff organize and discipline younger students. These prefectures train selected students in habits of command and encourage student leaders to use their energies on behalf of the staff rather than on behalf of their potentially rebellious classmates. At Eton College, for example, the most famous of the British public schools, prefects are members of the Eton Society, also known as Pop. The members of Pop wear fancy waistcoats, braided tailcoats, stick-up collars with white bow ties, check trousers, and a floral buttonhole. They enjoy tremendous prestige among the younger boys. In the past, members of the Eton Society could hand out whippings without the authorization of any housemaster, but corporal punishment by boys was banned in 1970. Today, members of the Eton Society must rely on words to keep their charges in line. Nevertheless, as one observer has noted, “Boy power is still strong and anyone coming [to Eton] from another school is struck by the weight and importance of boy opinion,” represented at its pinnacle by the members of Pop (McConnell 1985: 212). Just as in the case of Japanese peer authority systems, the prefectorial system has long been credited as one of the hidden reasons for the cohesiveness of British elites. The content of moral instruction also varies considerably around the world in response to particular political, religious, and pedagogical traditions. In the former Soviet Union, for example, respect for manual work, a centerpiece of communist ideology, filtered into moral instruction in numerous ways. Heroes of labor were celebrated, special times were set aside for manual labor, and the moral virtues of workers and peasants were celebrated (Bronfenbrenner 1970). In Japan, “school education became an institutional nexus between family, community and policy and, in turn, served to diffuse various formal doctrines which advocated industry in work and in learning, as well as loyalty and filial piety, and strengthened the Confucian moral order and the emperor system.” (Fujita 1989: 126). In Israel, the rabbinical tradition of aggressively questioning what one reads, exploring paradoxes, and commenting on commentaries shows up in the qualities of mind that leading academic secondary schools try to cultivate. Singular individuals are also sometimes important. In areas of Europe (particularly Italy and Germany), for example, the progressive pedagogy of the Swiss school reformer Pestalozzi encouraged moral teaching based on a sense of the splendor and balance of nature.



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Secondary schooling and moral complexity. As students move up the grades of public schooling, moral instruction either diminishes greatly or becomes increasingly implicit and complex. It diminishes most completely for students who enroll in general or vocational programs in secondary school. Industrial work values continue to be stressed (Oakes, Gamoran, and Page 1992), but otherwise, moral instruction fades from the official curriculum. By contrast, moral instruction increases in complexity for students who enroll in the academic programs, particularly those who take a large number of courses in humanities. Exhortations to be honest, hard-working, courageous, and kind are replaced by far more challenging lessons, just as in mathematics class simple addition is replaced by quadratic equations. The moral instruction of the humanities operates at a more refined level than the inculcation of virtues promulgated by conservative critics of schooling. Not every student has the capacity to take moral lessons from literature and history, but these lessons are the stuff out of which the higher forms of moral judgment are created in the humanist tradition. For example, the widely assigned George Eliot novel Middlemarch expresses some poignant contradictions of moral life: how, for example, a dedicated scholar, for all his knowledge and hard work, can suck the blood out of those to whom he is closest, and how an otherwise admirable doctor can desire to please his beloved wife so much that he goes deeply into debt to support her expensive tastes. Through examples such as these, motivated students can learn that even widely proclaimed virtues can, at times, be pushed too far or fail to be sufficiently balanced by other virtues. Students may also learn that many situations in life involve not a choice between right and wrong but between two rights. In Huckleberry Finn, for example, the meaning of civilization is debated from many sides. Is it obedience to the law and cultivated manners? Or is it the ability to empathize with the personality and situation of others, regardless of reigning conventions? A further question is raised: How do we judge a civilization that emphasizes the former and considers the latter to be relevant only for members of the subordinate status groups? Simple answers are not possible for some questions like these, but discussion can help bring out what is at stake and the range of defensible positions. Teachers as exemplars. Most schoolteachers are aware of their role in socializing the young and try to express values through their actions in the classroom. In the primary grades, for example, they usually express the values of kindness and empathy. They have, as Phillip Jackson observes, “a knack for discerning latent grace in the awkward gesture” and “applaud those who try no matter how slight their success” (Jackson, Boorstrom, and Hansen 1993: 259). Teachers have different strengths as exemplars, and what they have to teach is therefore more evident to some students than to others. One teacher may make precision and clarity important values in her classroom and express respect for these values through the carefulness of her handwriting, the persistence of her correction of imprecise language, her attention to detail in the working through of a proof. Another teacher may express the moral importance of truly engaged activity by throwing his whole body into a lecture, by beaming with pride when a student gives a good answer to a difficult question, or by cheerfully brushing off an annoying interruption. Another may express the moral





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importance of digging beneath the surface by patiently leading students ever deeper into a short story, by suggesting alternative interpretations, or by engaging in Socratic questioning of students’ answers. Dramatic gestures aid in the expression of teachers’ values. An erect posture, neat handwriting, the lingering of a poised piece of chalk at eye level—all can express heightened respect for precision. Thoughtful stroking of the chin, dramatic exclamation at the discovery of a right answer, a long pause before sweeping away a shallow interpretation— all of these can convey a heightened respect for digging deeper.

How Successful Are School Socialization Messages? Sociologists have largely failed to study whether students actually internalize the schools’ socialization messages. Many students of socialization apparently assume that the messages repeated most frequently are in fact absorbed (see, e.g., Dreeben 1968), especially if they affirm messages that are prominent also in families and popular culture. However, no one has really studied this matter very carefully. It is difficult even to know how this could be studied, since students do not live in a vacuum, unexposed to influences outside school. What we do have are ethnographic studies suggesting that students are only minimally attached to the behavioral norms of the school. In working-class schools, swearing at mean teachers when they are out of earshot is very common (Plank et al. 2001), and rebellious students, opposed to everything the school stands for, attract the admiration of many of their peers (Willis 1979; MacLeod 1987). Cheating, we know, is rampant in school; as many as two-thirds of American high school students say they have cheated on a test during the past year (Josephson Institute 2008). Most students may pragmatically accept regulation by authorities, but they do not necessarily internalize the values of authority figures. Moral conformity, in particular, is not as easily gained as behavioral conformity. If the schools’ values are supported by students’ families and local communities, they are likely to be accepted. If they are not supported outside the school, they may be treated with a good deal of skepticism or flatly rejected. The dominant moral culture of schools reflects the social conditions of people who have some authority in society (or identify strongly with those who do) and who are, in addition, not extremely cosmopolitan or worldly in outlook. It is, therefore, most congenial to those who are upwardly striving or located in the broad middle of the social structure. At a minimum, it always confronts opposition on at least two fronts: from the practical opportunism of the have-not classes and from the worldliness of upper-class sophisticates (see Bourdieu 1984; Collins 1988: 208–25). Even when the moral teachings of the schools are accepted in principle, they may not have a strong impact on behavior, because the incentives associated with selfishness, dishonesty, laziness, and cowardice are always great. Moreover, organizational biases sometimes undermine even simple moral lessons. Schools, for example, subscribe to the value of honesty, but often inadvertently reward cheats who are motivated by the equally high importance schools attach to achievement. Schools preach equality of opportunity but are notorious for tamping down the ambitions of lower-status children. Most schools



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proclaim the importance of sturdy independence, but they do not approve of instances of student nonconformity if they threaten staff authority.

socialization messages outside the classroom The school playground is an important part of childhood socialization, and it has been perhaps too little appreciated by sociologists. (By contrast, many children are obsessively interested in the lessons of the playground and of the social media that help to shape the culture and social structure of playgrounds.) If classrooms are an introduction to bureaucratic life, the playground is an introduction to impression management and the negotiation of social networks. School experiences outside the classroom prepare children for adult life by teaching them about self-assertion and self-control in informal relations among friends and acquaintances. The values of the classroom and the playground often coexist peacefully, but in some secondary schools, adolescent values crowd out school values. Like the classroom, the playground has important structural features that are different from those found in students’ homes: • On the playground, adult authority is present in the form of monitors, but this authority is in the background. Adult presence prevents anarchy, but adult distance allows a maximum opportunity for group-directed activity. • Many children mix on the playground, and freely chosen interactions with a relatively large number of children are, therefore, theoretically possible. • The members of school playgroups are usually similar in age but are usually not close neighbors or family members. Because they are spheres of monitored but largely self-directed activity involving a variety of interaction possibilities among others who are neither very close nor very distant, playgrounds have advantages over close friends and family for the development of skills in informal social relations. Age similarity limits the social distance between children, but the aggregation of many acquaintances creates a wide opportunity for cementing, altering, and breaking relationships. The variety of possible contacts allows children to develop increasingly refined judgments about the possibilities and problems of social interaction.

The Playground and Informal Social Life On the playground, children must learn to deal with bullies, tagalongs, tattletales, false friends, snobs, and other familiar childhood types. Deciding how to react to these types of classmates can refine a child’s social judgment. How should one deal with aggression from another child—by confronting the child, by raising a coalition against her, or by trying to avoid the harassment by diving under the bushes when she passes? Under what conditions should a higher authority be informed, and when is this action interpreted as failing to stand up for oneself? When does friendship fall over the line into dependency? How much should acquaintances be trusted with valuable information? When does such





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information cement a friendship and when does it increase one’s vulnerability? How much effort should one make to win the friendship of an aloof but desirable child? When should one speak out and when should one wait to assess the situation further? How can one express pride in abilities and achievements without fostering resentment among those whose achievements may not measure up? Through confronting these and similar issues, children may become skillful navigators of relationships (see, e.g., Bettie 2002; Milner 2016; Thorne 1995). Without a great many experiences in dealing with these issues, children would be less prepared for adult life. These lessons clearly apply in adult interactions with friends, potential mates, and acquaintances in the community. But they are no less applicable to social relations at work. Much occupational activity can be thought of as political labor, in which people take and avoid taking stands and in which they maneuver to make useful alliances, to avoid encumbering connections, and to defuse potential conflicts (Collins 1979: chap. 2). Some sociologists have long seen the experiences of the playground as an important socializing complement to the experiences of the classroom. Talcott Parsons (1959), for example, pointed out that not all high-status jobs in industrial societies require high levels of academic ability. Social skills are particularly important in many managerial and sales jobs and also in promotional and public service work. In Parsons’s view, those who gain status on the playground but not as much in the classroom form the pool of future occupants of jobs that require high levels of social skill and emotional labor (for example, salespeople, public relations people, entrepreneurs, and actors). They are also the future central organizers of adult friendship networks. Those who gain status in the classroom but not as much on the playground form the pool of future occupants of jobs that require high levels of scholarly and analytical ability (for example, scientists, engineers, professors, civil servants, and technology managers). Those who gain status both in the classroom and on the playground are likely to be future achievers in the upper levels of occupational and public life (for example, corporation executives and upper-level managers, college presidents and deans, doctors, lawyers, research entrepreneurs, and politicians). Finally, unless they are late bloomers, those who lack status in both domains are unlikely to become socially dominant personalities. Although the playground provides opportunities for experimenting with identity, it is far from a domain of true freedom and fluidity. Indeed, some inequalities are more apparent on the playground than in the classroom. While teachers usually try to mix boys and girls in classroom activities, boys and girls usually separate from one another on the playground. In primary schooling, the dominance of boys is evident in their ability to control large, open play spaces; label girls as ritually polluting (girls are primarily responsible for cooties on most playgrounds); and invade spaces occupied by groups of girls. Thus, the playground can be a space in which some social relations—particularly gender and gender-related aggressiveness—are reproduced in a more faithful way than in the classroom (Thorne 1995). Status systems based on skills and attributes prized by the dominant children rule the social order of the playground. The social divisions of the playground—cool/uncool, jock/brain, tomboy/sissy—overlap with meaningful divisions



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in adult informal social life. Because these social divisions are strongly supported on the playground by the dominant children, they exalt some children more regularly and wound others more deeply than adult social divisions usually can. By the time young adults enter the labor force, they have usually developed emotional capacities that allow them to occupy positions close to the centers of work or community life or a lack of confidence that leads them to retreat to the margins. Many of these cumulatively decisive emotional experiences occur on school playgrounds. Most young people from poor and working-class minority backgrounds want to fit into middle-class society. They are responsive to the idea of opportunity and what it can mean for their lives, but in practice they also gain status by conforming to the nondominant forms of cultural capital of their own groups. Most African Americans, for example, are able to switch codes from black to white when it is advantageous to do so, but some resent having to do so. Many gravitate toward their ethnic in-group and the esteem they receive for “acting black”—by using black vernacular and adopting black dress, popular culture, and behavioral preferences. The deference they receive from blacks for “acting black” is often higher than that they receive from whites for “acting white” (Carter 2005). Cultural comfort level is thus a primary reason why adolescents sort themselves into enclosed groups based on gender and racial identities. Julie Bettie’s (2002) ethnography of adolescents in the Central Valley of California showed that girls affiliated with others on the basis of whether they came from settled or hard-living families, their future aspirations, and their racial identities. White “preps” and Mexican “preps,” both from settled families and both holding college aspirations, rarely interacted. Similarly, white “smokers and rockers” and Mexican “cholas,” both from hard-living families with noncollege aspirations, also went their separate ways. Peer status groups frequently enforce conformity through harsh means, including insults and social ostracism—what sociologists often call “othering.” Among heterosexual males, the term “fag” is used, for example, by boys to enforce a normative masculinity that is at once anti-intellectual, physically aggressive, and confrontational (Pascoe 2011). Similarly, the use of the term “slut” is frequently used by high-status girls to sexually shame lower-status girls who may in fact be much less sexually active than they are (Armstrong, Hamilton, and Seeley 2014). For all its verbal violence, the playground is ideally—and often enough in practice—an arena of experimentation and change. It is a place where children practice making and breaking friendships and where they try out new identities, which may prove rewarding. It is a place where children watch on the border of socially organized spaces and make forays across the borders at times, as when a popular boy decides to play with the girls for a day or girls join the boys’ kickball game. It is a place where children can learn to use verbal aggression to fight unwanted labels as much as to enforce the existing status hierarchy.

Adolescent Society and the Schools As children grow into teenagers, friends become an increasingly central part of the incentives to attend school. Because of the nonacademic interests of most adolescents, many adults fear that the influence of adolescent culture undermines adult authority and





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 James Coleman and Adolescent Society  Before 1950, few young people had enough discretionary time and money to develop their own tastes, their own popular heroes, or their own sense of values. They were either children, under their parents’ tutelage, or adults out on their own. The relatively autonomous stage of adolescence with its emotional passages, strong peer identifications, and ritualized rebellions against adult authority hardly existed. Some of the key forces bringing youth culture into existence were the freedom afforded by mass ownership of automobiles, the ability of teenagers to find part-time work while attending school, the relaxation of social mores to allow for earlier and less supervised dating, and the lengthening of the time children were expected to remain in school. In the 1950s, these forces came together to create for the first time a sense of adolescence as a separate stage of life. Young people developed their own popular heroes, such as Elvis Presley and James Dean, and they were served by multimillion-dollar popular culture and apparel industries. Similar forces were leading to the spread of a youth culture throughout the wealthier liberal democracies, with capitals of youth culture in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris. At about this time, educators began to worry about the harmful effects of adolescent culture on the academic commitment of the young. Many educators felt that the status hierarchy of young people reinforced values, such as sexual attractiveness and rebellion, that made the work of schooling more difficult. As in the Chuck Berry song “School Days,” students could not wait for the last school bell to ring, so that their real lives could begin. James Coleman (1961) was the first sociologist to examine the influence of American adolescent culture in an empirically rigorous way. Coleman’s study of 11 Indiana high schools in the late 1950s confirmed the importance of alternative status systems running parallel to the official status system of the schools. In the American Midwest, Coleman found, it was not so much ducktail haircuts and souped-up cars that posed the major threats to the academically oriented status order of the school. Instead, it was the more conventional alternative interests of teenagers: athletics and the opposite sex. Coleman asked high school students whom they admired most: outstanding students, outstanding athletes, or the students who were most popular with the opposite sex. Both athletic and popularity stars were far more likely to be admired than academic stars. The leading crowds set the tone in the schools that Coleman studied, and they had the effect of accentuating values generally prevalent in their communities. In communities where academics had little status, the leading crowds were even less interested in academics. Coleman expressed concerns about the influence of adolescent society, but unlike the more rigid educational moralists of his time, he did not see adolescent society as an evil to be contained and marginalized by adult



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authorities. Adolescents were not entirely cut off from adult society; their status systems recognized the values of adult society in many ways, not least in their tendency to ascribe highest status to boys and girls who excelled in both popularity and studies. Moreover, the effects of the adolescent society varied across the genders (girls were more responsive to adult authority than boys), from social class to social class, and from community to community. Coleman recognized that the fun and freedom of adolescent society represented no long-term threat to adult society—for most it was a stage in life that would be replaced by the responsibilities of adulthood. Since Coleman, others have recognized how easily co-opted the style rebellions of adolescent society are by businesses seeking to sell goods to teenagers. By adopting the music and the attitudes of teenage cool, marketers can raise corporate profits on everything from sunglasses to mobile devices (Milner 2016).

does not adequately prepare children for adult life.3 This seems to be a perennial concern among adults, and there are enough examples of teenagers ruining their lives to keep up interest in the topic through the foreseeable future. But social science research makes clear that adolescent society is not as different from adult society as many parents fear. Even those teenagers who are deeply alienated may not stay that way; many alienated adolescents grow up into well-adjusted adults once they take on the responsibilities of jobs and families. In addition, adolescent friendship groups reinforce many of the same values as adults. For example, adolescents socialize emotional control by criticizing those who do not show it and calling them crybabies. And in most cases, if teenagers do not act with acceptable honesty or show up at appointed times, they will be loudly criticized until they conform or are forced to find new friends. How important is adolescent society? For the culture of adolescent alienation to penetrate deeply, the separation between the world of adults and the world of adolescents must be great and the amount of time adolescents spend exclusively with friends their own age must also be great. Both national and class differences are evident in the level of separation of the two worlds. In Sweden, for example, greater balance existed in the past among the reference groups influencing adolescent identities: the family, school, local community, and friendship group. No single force has been as dominant as peer groups now are for many American adolescents. In Sweden, these four socializing forces each have had distinct times during the day and week in which they were considered legitimately central (Andersson 1969; see Schalet 2000 for the Dutch case). In Japan, where schooling takes up such a large amount of time and consciousness, the role of the peer group is circumscribed throughout secondary school. In college, friendship groups play a much larger role, however. Some who have studied Japanese society argue that the primary function of college friendship groups is to prepare young adults for the intense work group culture of Japanese business and professional life (White 1994: chaps. 4 and 6).





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However, in the United States and many other societies, adolescent society has for some time enjoyed great autonomy. The discretionary income that comes from part-time work, the freedom that comes from access to cars, and the distinctive sensibility that comes from the fashions disseminated by the popular culture industries all contribute to this autonomy. The rise of two-earner families is another important element creating separation between the world of adolescents and that of adults. When they are not in school or at part-time jobs, most adolescents now spend their time alone or with friends, fooling around, surfing the Internet, or streaming media (Shapiro 2015). The sources of status in adolescent society continue to be decidedly nonacademic. The physical foundations of social dominance in adolescent society—athletic ability and good looks—remain firmly in place. The social groups that form around athletic and attractive students continuously recharge the emotional energy of the leading cliques and enforce boundaries between these cliques and other students. In a study of several thousand junior high school students, Kenneth Tye (1985) found that good-looking students were identified as the most popular students in school by nearly two out of five students. Athletes followed them in popularity (23 percent). In Tye’s study, even gang members (15 percent) were considered more popular than smart students (14 percent). Academically oriented students were not at the very bottom of high school status hierarchies—the large, neglected mass of unpopular and unknown kids were at the bottom. But they were miles from the top and subject to considerable verbal hostility, as the common put-down terms “nerd” and “geek” indicate (for similar findings, see also Adler, Kless, and Adler 1992; Clasen and Brown 1986; Milner 2016). From the point of view of the dominant kids, every other group in adolescent society is part of a lower caste, and many are equivalent to untouchables. Fortunately for these others, many activities allow achievement of valued identities and thereby a strengthened ego. Band, newspaper, yearbook, theater, debate, and other extracurricular groups foster their own status hierarchies. Social class is a strong influence on the extent to which peer values become allconsuming in the life of adolescents. Even in the United States, the dominant pattern in the middle and upper-middle class (and also among upwardly mobile minorities) is compartmentalization of peer and adult influences. Peer values tend to dominate in areas related to informal social life and discretionary consumption: styles of language and emotional expression; dating practices; and preferences in movies, clothing styles, music, and the like. Adult values tend to dominate in areas of long-range planning: the importance of keeping up good grades, going to college and preparing for high-paying and high-status jobs, and selecting acceptable people for dates (see, e.g., Boocock 1972: 230–39). Some more thoroughly alienated middle-class rebels exist, but in most suburban schools they have too few compatriots to form a self-sustaining critical mass (Willis 1979). In others, they band together as a small nihilist or bohemian minority (Milner 2016). Antischool peer cultures. Although overstated, the concerns of adults about adolescent alienation are not entirely unfounded. Perhaps one-fifth to one-quarter of all adolescents is deeply alienated from adult middle-class society. And schools in the poorest communities must usually deal with much higher proportions of these alienated students.



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Antischool peer groups are increasingly common among adolescents who have little adult supervision and are not planning on attending college. The compartmentalization of peer group influence gives way to a more complete encapsulation of adolescent experience by the values of one’s friends; in other words, peers become the central arbiter of all facets of behavior and orientation. This level of immersion in adolescent culture is strongly associated with problem behaviors: smoking, profanity, and vandalism among younger teens and drug and alcohol use, school dropout, and early pregnancies among older teens (Jessor and Jessor 1977). Similarly alienated attitudes and behaviors can be found in the peripheries of large European cities where few programs exist to incorporate immigrants into the dominant culture and where young people have little hope of gaining secure employment after leaving school. But in these impoverished neighborhoods the stakes can be even higher for the host societies. Alienation is expressed not only by involvement in criminal activities, but sometimes also by identification with ideologies that espouse violent extremism (see, e.g., Packer 2015). Sociologists have raised several objections to conventional ways of explaining the rise of antischool peer cultures. Rather than drawing attention to deficiencies of character or family life, as many polemicists do, they have tended to look at disparities between the probable life trajectories of students and those assumed by the schools. Students who are most alienated from the schools are those who see no linkage between their current school activities and their anticipated adult status and activities (Stinchcombe 1964; Willis 1979; MacLeod 1987). Educational exchange is the exchange of respect and deference for valued knowledge: Students conform to gain knowledge that is valuable to them; teachers provide knowledge to gain conformity that is valuable to them. On the students’ side, knowledge itself is of primarily instrumental value; it leads to qualifications, which in turn lead (so students hope) to higher status and income. For boys and girls on a trajectory toward unemployment or menial jobs, the legitimacy of the educational exchange often fails completely. When it breaks down, so do the foundations on which the socializing role of the school rests. When the breakdown is profound, the school is likely to confront a disruptive antischool culture. The most powerful and provocative sociological portrait of an antischool culture remains Paul Willis’s (1979) study of Hammertown boys in the Midlands of England. Willis makes the point that the most defiant boys he studied were the ones with the strongest sense of dignity and self-respect, not the most defeated. The kids who were upstanding and would not take bull joined the antischool culture—these Willis called the “lads”— those who were passive and compliant were called “ear’oles” (for ear holes, that group’s most prominent physical and moral characteristic, according to the lads). The lads were in some respects more realistic than the ear’oles. They refused to accept the official ideology of equal opportunity when the world, as they knew it, offered little real opportunity. Ironically, the lads with their boisterous high spirits, quick wit, and determination to have “laffs” at the expense of teachers and ear’oles alike paved their own paths into a life of insecure manual labor. They were not tracked by the school into lower-class jobs so much as they tracked themselves into those jobs. Their sense of moral superiority to students who passively conformed led them to embrace forms of labor that they considered a valid





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alternative to the tight controls of white-collar jobs. However, the form of work they chose as the better alternative would eventually tear at their high self-esteem. England has had an aggressive and rather oppositional working-class adult culture, so it is not surprising that in America, where this sense of class opposition is largely missing, antischool cultures reveal more drug- and alcohol-laced withdrawal than active rebellion. An American antischool group studied by Jay MacLeod (1987) shared many of the values of Willis’s lads but had more trouble escaping the dominant culture’s definition of success. Their outlooks were more pessimistic and resigned than those of Willis’s lads. Unlike the lads, they saw no hope in working-class jobs for the expression of an independent spirit, and they expressed their alienation not by holding the authority structure up to ridicule but by consuming what MacLeod describes as huge quantities of alcohol and drugs. Can adolescent alienation be reduced? Some argue that the best approach to re­ ducing adolescent alienation is to control the influence of antischool cultures through tight security and strict enforcement of rules. These steps help schools in depressed neighborhoods to muddle through, but they are, by definition, unlikely to create any real sense of connection between alienated students and the school authorities that oversee them. These places seem more like prisons than schools. At a time when many are aware of the problems of adolescent alienation, it is not surprising that calls for more job-relevant secondary schooling on the German model of apprenticeship training are also growing stronger. But unlike the German dual system, vocational schooling in the United States, with its low status and uncertain connection to the job market, has not provided adolescents with a strong sense of purpose or motivation to succeed (see, e.g., Grubb and Lazerson 1975; Grasso and Shea 1979). Some believe that the schools’ current emphasis on accountability is leading to stronger commitment among at-risk students, because they receive more regular feedback on the state of their academic skills (Carnoy, Loeb, and Smith 2003). The evidence is not yet in on this hopeful hypothesis, but other studies suggest that alienation and dropout have been largely unaffected by the accountability movement (Kaufman, Alt, and Chapman 2001). In some localities, a single-minded emphasis on accountability has further drained all spontaneity out of the classroom and may in the end compound problems of alienation. An alternative approach worth considering, according to MacLeod (1987), would be for schools and teachers to try to stimulate thinking while being more realistic about the life chances actually facing alienated young people who, quite realistically, do not believe that middle-class success through academic achievement applies to them. Schools should, in his view, provide more teachers who can relate to students in nonstigmatizing ways and provide assignments that are materially relevant to these students’ likely life trajectories. The one teacher who was able to reach MacLeod’s alienated working-class kids dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and gave them assignments for papers on such topics as the origins of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the experience of life in prison. Clearly, the mild hedonism of the adolescent society of the 1950s has given way to a more sullen and disenchanted mood in economically depressed communities today. The growing gap between rich and poor is an important backdrop against which this new mood has developed. Upper-middle-class parents pour time and money into enrichment



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activities for their children to help them develop the time-management skills and cultural resources that lead to academic and life success (Lareau 2003). Poor and working-class families lack the information and resources to do the same and very often face work, life, and health disruptions that would impede their efforts in any event (Cooper 2014). Hopes about accountability notwithstanding, confident solutions to the problem of adolescent alienation are in short supply.

conclusion Schools attempt to control behavior, and they often attempt to influence or shape moral values and cultural orientations. These three dimensions of socialization overlap in practice but are analytically distinguishable. It is possible to define four historically important school socialization environments: (1) the village/communal pattern, (2) the industrializing pattern, (3) the bureau-corporate/mass-consumption pattern, and (4) the elite pattern. These patterns can be found at different stages of a country’s economic development and, within countries, also in schools primarily serving different social class populations. Socialization practices in the industrial pattern are particularly harsh. They are based on personal control, rigidly organized work discipline, and a highly morally charged classroom setting. In the United States, the transformation of schools from the village/ communal pattern to the industrial pattern occurred in the mid- and late 19th century, and the transformation of secondary schools from the industrial to the bureau-corporate/ mass-consumption pattern occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. Elsewhere, the second of these transformations occurred only well after World War II. Classrooms and playgrounds provide distinct sites of socialization at school. The first is most relevant for socialization into institutional life, and the second is most relevant for socialization into informal social networks. School classrooms and playgrounds are organized in ways that acculturate students in ways that families cannot duplicate. In the classroom, the impersonality of adult authority and the annual breaking of relationships acculturate students to the demands of bureaucratic life. On the playground, the relative distance of adult authority and the presence of many nonintimate peers provide opportunities for children to learn to maneuver in informal social networks. Classroom socialization practices in contemporary schools can be conceived of as involving a core of rules and routine practices and outer rings of moral instruction. The core of rules and practices creates effective pressures for behavioral conformity and acculturation to bureaucratic and mass-consumption ways of life. Embedded practices (such as lining up, working independently, making curricular choices, thinking of oneself as a member of a larger category, and being examined for special competencies) are often discussed by sociologists as elements of the hidden curriculum of schooling. Although schools have been accused of renouncing moral instruction, primary school teachers continue to represent some ethical, entrepreneurial, and patriotic values in a positive way. Two new values have, in addition, become part of the moral curriculum: self-esteem and diversity. In secondary schools, students have the opportunity to learn more complex moral lessons by reading history and literature. Teachers also model much





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behavior that can properly be considered moral. Students resist the socializing messages of the schools if the messages are too discordant with the culture of their homes and neighborhoods. The organizational pressures of schooling, moreover, sometimes conflict with or even undermine their moral teachings. The playground is the site of socialization for informal life in social networks. Here students learn skills in self-presentation, friendship making, conflict making, and conflict resolution. These skills help adults maneuver in informal social networks. Although playgrounds offer many opportunities for developing these skills, they are also stratified in many of the same ways as adult society. Indeed, social divisions of gender and aggressiveness, at least, are stronger on the playground than in the classroom. Students often self-select into groups along social class, race, and gender lines on the basis of their experienced comfort level in the group and sometimes also because of the barriers thrown up against them by other groups. Peer influence increases as children grow into teenagers, but the degree of influence of adolescent society varies. In most middle- and upper-class communities, regardless of country, adolescent lives tend to be compartmentalized, with parents and other adults having the largest influence on long-term plans and peers having the largest influence on immediate life experiences and styles of expression. Antischool peer cultures exist primarily among teenagers whose long-range life plans have least to do with schooling and who are therefore alienated from the basic educational exchange: opportunities to acquire valuable knowledge in return for behavioral compliance. It is likely that the number of alienated adolescents has grown over time as adolescent and adult societies have become more separate and as the income gap between rich and poor has widened.

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The goals of mass schooling at first had little to do with the awarding of credentials that would help people find work. Instead, schools were intended to teach basic literacy and calculating skills, shore up morality, and create loyal citizens. Before the early 20th century, most men in the United States, for example, either inherited the family farm or trade or went off on their own to find the best work they could. Many were literate, but few had finished high school. African Americans were excluded from all but the most rudimentary education, and women, though they might have been educated beyond bare literacy, were not in a position to convert educational achievements into pay because they were expected to work in the home. Schools played a largely noneconomic role in other countries as well. Now schools are central in the process of sorting and allocating people to jobs. This is true in every industrialized society. Not every child learns the course content or the socialization lessons of schooling, but every child is by definition subject to the schools’ performance assessments. For this reason, social selection is considered by many sociologists to be the most consequential activity of contemporary schooling. School performance from first grade through high school can lead one squirming six-year-old toward a life as a jet-hopping executive and another toward a life of shifting from one low-paid job to another. The connection between schooling and social selection is important enough that I devote two chapters to it. Paradoxically, schools are important both for providing opportunities for social mobility and for the reproduction of inequalities. Mobility and inequality can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. They are not mutually exclusive, because it is entirely possible for schools to provide upward mobility opportunities for some students from disadvantaged backgrounds while legitimating the reproduction of class status for many others. This chapter concentrates on the themes of opportunity and mobility. The directing questions are: How did a system develop that required most people who wanted to gain or transmit privilege to work through achievement in the schools? Should we expect such





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a system based on advancement through educational credentials to be more or less fair to people born into lower-status groups? Have the opportunities for people born into lower-status groups improved or declined over time with the rise of this credential system? Chapter 7 concentrates on the theme of inequality. The key questions in that chapter are: How do the circumstances of the lower social classes, members of racial and ethnic minority groups, and women contribute to the reproduction of inequalities through schooling? And to what extent do school structures, such as class size and tracking, reinforce or exacerbate these inequalities? I begin by identifying the forces that have made schooling more important in the process of social selection. This section focuses on two key changes: (1) the expansion of schooling, which has encouraged a connection between mobility aspirations and educational credentials, and (2) the tighter connection between educational credentials and higher-status, better-paying jobs.

constructing educational ladders of ascent “To get ahead in life, you need an education.” Most of us have heard this familiar refrain from our parents and friends. Income and labor market statistics bear out its truth. People holding master’s degrees in today’s U.S. labor market, for example, will earn on average about twice as much as high school graduates, the difference in 2010 over a lifetime being $2.7 million versus $1.3 million (Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah 2011). Over the last four decades, income differences by educational level have increased dramatically, the result of stagnation in wages for young adults with lower levels of education (Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane 2006; Bernhardt et al. 2001; Katz and Murphy 1992; NELP 2014) combined with growth in salaries for young adults with higher levels of education (Baum, Ma, and Payea 2013; Carnevale, Rose, and Cheah 2011; Murnane, Willett, and Levy 1995). The gap in earnings between people with higher and lower levels of education is larger in the United States than in most other industrialized societies (OECD 2014: 142–43). Whereas college graduates in the United States earned 74 percent more than high school graduates in 2012, the gap elsewhere was closer to 50 percent more—and in some more egalitarian countries such as Sweden and New Zealand it was under 30 percent more. Nevertheless, with rare exceptions, throughout the industrialized world the earnings gap between the highly educated and the less educated has been growing (OECD 2014). Very large gaps in health and well-being, and voting and civic participation, also exist between those with college education and those who have not attended college (for an overview, see Brint and Proctor 2011). Thus, educational achievement is associated with a wide range of circumstances that improve people’s quality of life.

Opportunity Consciousness and Educational Expansion To understand how schooling came to play such an important role in the process of social selection, we must first understand how the idea of upward mobility was reinvented in the early and mid-20th century as a promise of schooling rather than the expected



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outcome of hard work in a trade. As you will recall from Chapter 2, the United States was a pioneer in the expansion of schooling, partly because schools became important in the Americanization of the millions of new immigrants who came into the country in the 19th century and partly because reformers believed that schooling could build skills, good work discipline, and democracy at the same time. Even in the United States, however, expansion of secondary schooling was slow. As late as 1910, only 15 percent of American adolescents graduated from high school. But even before World War II, the changes were extraordinary. By 1940, high school graduation rates were already over 70 percent, and 15 percent of high school graduates were going on to higher education (Snyder 1993: 18). These rates were three to five times higher than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Schooling and opportunity in the United States. Before the Civil War, the United States was, economically, a nation of small-property owners—farmers and shopkeepers. Most knew how to read and write but had little in the way of formal education. Although opportunity was an important part of the national creed, in the early days of the American republic, opportunity meant the possibility for a white man to grow to the full measure of his capacity (women and minorities were not usually part of the story), free of the limiting ties of feudal relations. This “full measure of capacity” had noneconomic as well as economic connotations. It referred to competence, character, and satisfying social ties, as well as economic status (see Lasch 1995: chap. 3; Wuthnow 1996). The idea of opportunity as a chance to move into a higher status in the world only gradually entered American consciousness, and it did not become a very important view until after the Civil War (Lasch 1995: 66–74). Just before he became president, Abraham Lincoln expressed a vision of the ideal of the self-made man: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him” (1953: 478–79). For Lincoln and many others of his time, business, not education, was the major road to opportunity for the self-made man. The self-made man grew his business or his farm by outthinking and outworking his competitors but not necessarily by getting more schooling than his competitors. (Many believed that luck played a crucial role, too, as exemplified in the Horatio Alger stories that were so popular in the decades following the Civil War.) The expansion of schooling was closely connected to an entirely new kind of opportunity consciousness from the one Lincoln expressed. With the rise of corporations and the closing of the frontier at the end of the 19th century, the fate of the self-made man came to seem increasingly threatened. Self-employed farmers and shopkeepers were no longer the dominant economic group in the country. More and more people were becoming employees of large organizations. Clearly, if the American dream of individual advancement was to survive under these new conditions, other pathways to upward mobility would be required. Schooling seemed at first an unlikely alternative. Businessmen regularly condemned college training, with its emphasis on fine thoughts and high-flown sentiments. They claimed that it made young people unfit for “the real world” (Wyllie 1954: 101–5). Even so, some philanthropists began to perceive the nation’s school system as a replacement for the





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faltering promise of business entrepreneurship. Andrew Carnegie, for example, believed that schools and colleges should be made into “ladders upon which the aspiring can rise” (1889: 663). In the late 19th century, the country’s schooling system hardly fit anyone’s idea of a well-built ladder. Professional schools did not require the completion of four years of college for admittance, and colleges did not require the completion of four years of high school. Over the next generation, however, the patchwork of American schooling was reorganized into the ladder structure that reformers like Andrew Carnegie advocated, thereby providing a mechanism to keep the American promise of opportunity at the very moment when fundamental changes in the economy were threatening to destroy it (Brint and Karabel 1989: 3–6). A suddenly awakened thirst for learning does not explain why young people began to graduate in large numbers from high school in the years between the two world wars and why they began to attend college in large numbers after World War II. Instead, the most important factors were changes in the occupational structure and the increasing incentives for investment in education. Between 1900 and 1940, white-collar jobs almost doubled in the American labor force: from one out of six at the turn of the century to almost one out of three by 1940. Between 1940 and 1970, professional and managerial jobs also rose: from one out of seven to almost one out of four (U.S. Census Bureau 1975: 139). Shortly after World War II, American sociologists began observing that the traditional channels of upward mobility through business ownership and shop floor advancement were declining and that higher education was in the process of taking their place (see, e.g., Warner 1949). Some young people enjoyed schooling for its own sake, but many more then as now were primarily interested in using higher degrees as tickets to the better jobs in society, jobs that were becoming more plentiful during this period. And the government, convinced of the need for a more highly educated labor force, encouraged this view by supporting the building of secondary schools and colleges and by providing financial aid support, first in a limited way and then more generously, for those who wanted to attend college but lacked the economic means to do so. Following World War II, the proportion of young people attending college grew dramatically, helped at first by the federal government’s loans and by scholarships for returning soldiers through the G.I. Bill. In 1940, about 15 percent of 18- to 21-year-olds attended either a two-year or a four-year college (U.S. Office of Education 1944: 4). Just 30 years later, in 1970, the comparable figure was well above 40 percent (Peng 1977). Not everyone who enrolled in college after World War II graduated with a degree; in fact, only about half did. Even so, this rate of college going yielded a tremendous increase in the size of college enrollments, particularly given the nearly threefold increase in the numbers of 18- to 21-year-olds between 1940 and 1970 thanks to the postwar baby boom. Higher education did not, of course, fully replace entrepreneurship as an avenue to economic opportunity. Indeed, throughout the last half of the 20th century, the proportion of self-employed people never fell much below 10 percent, and it has even grown a little in recent years. By late in the first decade of the 2000s, business owners represented between 10 and 15 percent of the labor force. Most were owners of small businesses with no one else on payroll but themselves (U.S. Census Bureau 2007, 2012). Self-made



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businesspeople have been prominent in enclaves of the wealthy and among ambitious newcomers in immigrant communities. Nevertheless, building a business is a risky and arduous task. Businesspeople must weather downturns in the business cycle, shifting patterns of consumer preferences, and economic development changes affecting their business locations. They may be roused at night by phone calls reporting fires or theft. In view of the uncertainties of entrepreneurship, a large proportion of businesspeople prefer that their children pursue the less risky path of professional training rather than following in their parents’ footsteps as entrepreneurs. Schooling and opportunity worldwide. All societies have mechanisms for allocating people to jobs. A few have been even more inclined than the United States to use schools for this purpose. For instance, educational credentials played a more important role in social selection in the former Soviet Union than they did in the United States, and they also became important for this purpose earlier. Because entrepreneurship was not an alternative, socialism allowed ambition only one channel: through schooling. From the time of the great bureaucratization of Soviet society in the 1930s, the only means by which ambitious young people could succeed was through higher education credentials (augmented by Communist Party membership). As one Soviet immigrant to the United States put it, “In the USSR, there is no capital except education. If a person does not want to become a collective farmer or just a charwoman, the only means [he or she has] to get something is through education” (quoted in Geiger 1968: 156). During the early 20th century, the Japanese also placed an enormous weight on education to produce leaders for all sectors of society (Cummings 1985). In most of the industrialized world, educational credentials played a smaller role for a longer period of time than in the United States. In-house promotion was the major avenue of advancement for the ambitious. Middle managers and technicians were plucked off the shop floor, not off graduation procession lines. For example, in England, a very late developer of mass higher education, rates of upward mobility were not much different in the immediate postwar period than in the United States, but many more mobile people rose because of recognition for good performance on the job than for their advanced educational credentials (Kerckhoff, Campbell, and Winfield-Laird 1985). The same forces that led to change in the United States wore down the resistance of European educators and politicians a generation later. As in the United States, occupational change was an important factor. As corporations and state institutions grew, so did the need for white-collar workers. Perhaps even more important was the developing sense among politicians and ordinary citizens alike that schooling could be used as a ladder to a better economic future and to full participation in the modern world (Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992). After the end of World War II, and especially in the 1960s, much of the rest of the world adopted the American model linking schooling to opportunity. Once governments decided on the necessity of mass schooling at the lower secondary level and, later, at the upper secondary level, the growth of enrollments in most countries showed an expansionary force that outstripped whatever might have been expected from occupational change alone. No doubt parents’ efforts to defend their families’ social position were partially responsible for the vast growth of enrollments; at particular points, it





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became necessary to send children to higher levels of schooling, if only to protect them from social and economic disadvantage in the face of higher education aspirations among other families in their communities. But a change in consciousness—the growing sense that schooling could provide opportunity—also helped propel the educational revolution. This change in consciousness can be likened to what occurs in a large-scale social movement or religious awakening. It was especially apparent in the developing world, where mass schooling was stimulated less by economic interests than by social and political ideals. Schooling had once been considered irrelevant to life (or even a resented feature of colonial subjugation), but it came to be viewed as “the way” to integrate people into “the grand project of nation-building” and individual development (Fuller and Rubinson 1992: 12).

The Tightening Connection Between Educational Credentials and High-Status Jobs The desire for opportunity can be enough to increase the numbers of students attending higher levels of schooling, but it does not in itself improve the likelihood that such hopes will be realized. Only a tight link between educational credentials and jobs can do that. The other facet of the schools’ changing role in social selection, therefore, has to do with the monopolization (or near monopolization) of access to the most rewarding jobs and the best economic opportunities by the holders of educational degrees and certificates.1 Credentials and labor markets. Today most societies have moved toward credentialbased systems of social selection like the one that has become familiar to us in the United States. Higher education credentials are now required for a wide range of professional occupations and for many other white-collar jobs in large organizations. Even in business management, once less degree obsessed, higher education requirements have become the norm for those interested in moving up the corporate ladder. Since the 1960s a master’s degree in business administration from a top-ranked business school has become an important ticket of admission to the executive suite (Useem and Karabel 1986).2 One result of the rise of educational credentials as essential currency for access to jobs has been the proliferation of specialized occupational jurisdictions off limits to anyone without the accepted educational credentials. Professional associations, governments, and educational institutions have each played a role in carving the job structure into this jigsaw puzzle of occupational jurisdictions controlled by the holders of specialized credentials. Each of these institutions has had a stake in the expansion of the credential society: professional associations are evaluators in the accreditation process and, indirectly, also in the licensing examinations for their occupational jurisdiction. They want to guarantee high-quality performance so as to maintain their respectability. Governments have a stake in the regulation of occupations and colleges; and educational institutions provide the medium of exchange—degrees and certificates—that keeps the wheels of the system turning (Abbott 1988; Brint 1994: chap. 2). In the United States the last quarter of the 20th century was a key time for the monopolization of access to professional and managerial occupations by those holding



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baccalaureate or higher-level degrees. As late as 1980 many occupations that most people today consider requiring higher-level educational credentials remained open to those without college degrees. My research team and I found that occupations in which more than 50 percent but less than 80 percent of workers held baccalaureate or higher-level degrees were the ones in which baccalaureate-level credential requirements grew rapidly after 1980. We called these partially enclosed occupations—partially enclosed, that is, by educational requirements—because baccalaureate-level credentials were common among those working in the occupation in 1980 but by no means universal (Brint et al. 2012: 296). These partially enclosed occupations became more or less fully enclosed by the close of the 20th century. In other words, access to them became limited to holders of baccalaureate or higher-level degrees. These occupations included many in scientific and technical fields (atmospheric and space scientists, agricultural and food scientists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, materials engineers, computer scientists, and foresters and conservation scientists) and many in health occupations (health administrators, occupational therapists, and dieticians and nutritionists), and business occupations (accountants and auditors, management analysts, and operations and systems researchers). They also included some occupations in communications fields (reporters and editors, archivists, and librarians) and in social-science-related fields (social workers, economists and market researchers, sociologists, and social scientists) (Brint et al. 2012). Specialized credentials are also necessary for many skilled crafts jobs. People who repair watches and cut hair obtain specialized credentials that require courses of study and sometimes also years of apprenticeship, as of course do electricians and plumbers. These jobs are very important, without question. But they have not been the focus of sociologists’ interest in the relationship between educational credentials and jobs. In this section, I consequently focus on the relationship between college-level credentials and jobs in professional and managerial occupations, those that constitute the highest-status and most of the best-paying jobs in advanced economies. Three theories of the link between higher education credentials and good jobs. Econ­ omists and sociologists have been debating for a long time why good jobs tend to be mo­ nopolized by those with higher education credentials, even though employers do not like to pay high wages yet must pay a wage premium to employees with higher degrees. The debate focuses on three explanations: (1) human capital, (2) signaling, and (3) statusgroup preferences. Human capital was the most common explanation from the period following World War II through the mid-1970s. For human capital theorists, higher education contributed to the development of skills required for the professional, technical, and managerial jobs, jobs that were proliferating as brute physical labor and routine clerical processing declined. Just as physical capital allowed businesses to become more productive and profitable, so human capital enhancements through education allowed individuals to become more productive and thereby gain higher wages in the labor market, wages that more than offset the opportunity costs of pursuing higher levels of education (Becker 1964; Mincer 1970, 1974). It should be emphasized that human capital theorists never focused solely on cognitive skills, such as quantitative reasoning or written expression; they also





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emphasized that some noncognitive qualities, such as dependability and interpersonal skills, were developed in schools and that these qualities could also improve productivity. In the 1970s signaling theory developed as a leading alternative explanation for the link between college degrees and good jobs. Like human capital theory, this explanation accepted the essential accuracy of the neoclassical economics model of competitive labor markets and the associated implication that more productive workers are more valuable to employers, holding constant their supply. Where the signaling explanation diverged came down to what, exactly, the contribution of college was to enhanced productivity. Signaling theorists argued that most of the skills or attributes valuable to employers were already instilled by the time students finished high school. All that was necessary was to identify those most richly endowed with those abilities. The identification and certification of talent was for signaling theorists the primary function of college, not the development of students’ human capital (Spence 1974). Those who had prestigious educational credentials could advance to the head of labor queues, even if they had not further developed their human capital during their college years, provided that the reputational strength of the degree was stronger than the reputational strength of alternative degrees. Moreover, the signal could be more about adaptability and trainability than about job-relevant skills per se (Thurow 1973). Status-group preference is the third explanation and the only one that takes a skeptical view of the association assumed by economists between educational credentials and productivity. Social scientists in this camp argue that higher education credentials are signs of kinship with the culture of employers more than anything else. In their view employers choose the highly educated over the less educated quite simply because they remind them of themselves. Thus, the highly educated form a kind of pseudo-ethnic group whose members, like those of any other status group, recognize one another based on a social evaluation of honor and a common lifestyle (Collins 1975: chap. 3). The highly educated speak, present themselves, and dress in ways similar to their employers. For example, they do not usually have visible tattoos, use profane language in public, or record loud music on their answering machines. They tend to be deferential to authority and able to interact well in management-led work groups. The sociologist Lauren Rivera (2012) shows that people in leading East Coast consulting, financial, and legal firms, for example, see images of themselves in the ambitious new recruits from Ivy League colleges they interview. The applicants share similar travel, sports, and cultural exposure experiences unavailable to most without Ivy League degrees. The recruiters also expressed the view that these applicants had to be good if, like the recruiters themselves, they had made it into Ivy League colleges. They were people with whom they would be happy to spend a night in an airport if their plane was delayed, recruiters told her. Other cultural similarities are evident among the broader stratum of college graduates. They are more likely to engage in healthy diet and exercise practices, higher levels of book reading, lower levels of television watching, to have comparatively liberal attitudes on social issues, and to attend church less frequently than those without college degrees. (For an overview, see Brint and Proctor 2011). For those who focus on status-group preferences, the economic benefit of a college education, if there is one,



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comes from the greater ease of understanding and the lesser friction created by those who share a common culture. Pay is based on admittance to the authority structure rather than skills that boost the productivity of the firm. Which of the explanations is correct? Human capital is a broad concept, and it is not surprising that most economists, following the lead of Gary Becker (1964) and Jacob Mincer (1970, 1974), did not attempt to measure it directly and instead took educational attainment as an acceptable proxy measure. However, this identification introduced a proven-by-fiat or tautological quality to the argument by equating productive cognitive and noncognitive skills developed in college with educational attainment rather than with direct measures of the skills themselves. Recent work by economists Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann, and their colleagues demonstrated that scores on international educational achievement tests are a much stronger influence on individual labor-market outcomes as well as macro-economic productivity than sheer number of years of education (see Hanushek and Woessmann 2011: 160–87). This makes sense; some students improve their skills while in school, and others do not (Arum and Roksa 2011). At the same time, noncognitive development may be substantial even when cognitive development lags; college provides regular experiences that build on the habits developed in earlier years, including expectations for attendance, participation, acceptable levels of performance on tests and presentations and the self-management to keep classes and other obligations in balance. A good case can be made that college reinforces and deepens the noncognitive human capital developed in earlier years and that it creates new or improved cognitive skills at least for the students who take their coursework seriously (and, not incidentally, have enough challenging coursework to take seriously). But even improved approaches to measuring human capital do not address the fundamental challenge posed by those who adhere to signaling theory: If those who went to college were already more skilled before they enrolled in college than those who did not, at least a portion of the earnings advantage they enjoy cannot rightly be attributed to what happened to them in college. The signaling and status-group preference theories make other telling points about the cognitive side of human capital development. Other than a few highly technical occupations, academic content does not appear to be closely tied to the skills most jobs require. English majors may have characteristics that make them desirable employees, but those characteristics do not usually have much to do with their knowledge of William Shakespeare or James Joyce. What is more, the information learned in school is not remembered long enough to do most students much good on the job. Most English majors cannot provide off-the-cuff quotes or interpretations of more than a passage or two from their favorite writers, if that. Course knowledge in other fields has a similarly short half-life once final examinations have been turned in (Collins 1979: 17–19). Moreover, grades in school been not more than modestly correlated, if at all, with success in work life (Capelli 1992; Dye and Reck 1989; Klitgaard 1985; cf. Bowen and Bok 1998: chap. 5). Although we cannot rule out the likelihood that cultural comfort contributes to employers’ preferences for highly educated applicants, the obvious problem with the theory of status-group preference is that it is not clear why employers would want to pay a hefty





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wage premium simply for being able to associate with people who are similar to themselves if someone less expensive could perform the job just as well. It is also not clear how employers willing to make such decisions could stay in business. Could assumptions about productivity actually be more important than productivity itself when significant salary savings are at risk? This seems doubtful, and good studies about what employers look for in employees confirm that skills and behavior matter (see, e.g., Rosenbaum and Binder 1997). It seems likely that the connection between educational credentials and good jobs remains controversial largely because educational credentials play diverse roles in the labor market. Some credentials are what the sociologist David Bills calls “informationrich” measures of competence (and, therefore, stand as meaningful indicators of human capital) (2003: 457). These include, for example, industry-certified training programs for entry-level computer systems jobs, and they also include degrees from accredited engineering schools for higher-level technical positions. Others are decent and low-cost, if imprecise, indicators of job-related skills, attitudes, and trainability. A community college degree in medical records technology would be a good example of a weak, but nevertheless potentially valuable, signal. Some other credentials may serve primarily as symbols of background and breeding—and have a status value quite distinct from their capacity to signal anything about job competence. Some nontechnical positions in the diplomatic corps are examples of jobs in which background and breeding, burnished by private school education, can be decisive. So are some jobs involved in public relations and sales of expensive consumer goods. Still other credentials “may be trusted” and “yet provide misleading information about the productive capacity” of the people who hold them (Bills 2003: 457). Indeed, some irreverent social scientists took pleasure in showing that education could produce a “trained incapacity” for some jobs that require higher degrees—for example, that aloof and cerebral psychotherapists might do less good for their patients than untrained people who simply showed empathy and acted as compassionate friends (Hogan 1979). After all the evidence is weighed, it seems likely that the connections between higher education credentials and good jobs has been propelled primarily by the applicantscreening needs of large organizations and by their willingness to accept college degrees as plausible and generally valid signals of economically valuable traits, including trainability (Bills 2003; Thurow 1973). People who run large organizations have incentives to find efficient ways to process applicants and fill positions. Educational credentials have proved to be the most cost-effective way to limit the pool of eligible applicants while aiding in the hiring of people with organizationally valuable qualities (DiPrete and Grusky 1990). Whatever the mix of reasons for the college wage premium, it is clear that the advance of the credential society becomes self-propelling and all but inexorable as long as credentials provide a sense of legitimacy and an expectation of value. The more educational credentials become essential, the more jobs come to require credentials, regardless of whether advanced levels of education are required for satisfactory performance in a job (see Berg 1970). Thus, it is not surprising that with the advance of credential-based access to jobs, higher education degrees have become important for some jobs that would in



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other days have been picked up through apprenticeships or by people who worked their way up from the shop or office floor. For example, a health records technician degree from community college may be required for assisting large hospitals and health maintenance organizations in keeping track of patient, doctor, and insurance records. Admittedly, medical records are more complicated than they once were, but it is debatable that they are so complicated as to require two years of formal study in a postsecondary institution. Is a college degree necessary to manage a sports equipment store or a fast-food franchise? Probably not if the intellectual demands of the job were all that counted, but most franchise managers do nevertheless have college degrees, because of the reassuring signals of competence and reliability a college degree sends—and the opposite signals that dropping out or just finishing high school send. Given the ubiquity of credential requirements, modern societies are also prone to credential inflation, as the sociologist Randall Collins (1977) has argued; once degrees become the norm for a given occupation, the pursuit of still-higher-level degrees and specializations can easily become the most desirable option for those who want to differentiate themselves from the pack of ordinary degree holders. The aspiration for upward mobility can thus act to ratchet up credential requirements above what they might otherwise be. Occupations that once required a baccalaureate degree, such as schoolteacher or accountant, can feel the pressure to upgrade educational requirements for these reasons rather from the greater complexity of the occupation, even if increasing complexity is the usual reason given for upgrading educational requirements. Colleges and universities have been only too happy to encourage this inflationary pressure because of the new markets for degrees that open.

meritocracy or social reproduction ? I now turn to the second question posed at the beginning of this chapter: Should we expect a system that relies heavily on educational credentials for social advancement to be more or less fair to those born into less advantaged groups than systems that do not rely so heavily on educational credentials as bases for advancement? On the surface, an education-based system for sorting people into jobs may seem fairer than any previous system. It is easy to think of reasons why it should provide greater opportunities for able and hardworking children from lower-status families to move up while requiring children from higher-status families to at least prove themselves in school if they want to maintain their advantages. Among those who approve of the credential system, schools are likened to an elevator in which everyone gets on at the same floor but, depending on how well he or she does in school, gets off at a different floor corresponding to a particular level of occupational prestige and income. Yet almost from the beginning, some critically minded sociologists worried that exactly the opposite would occur: that advancement through schooling would be less fair to those closer to the bottom of the class structure than advancement through hard work or commercial enterprise had been. In 1949, the sociologist W. Lloyd Warner observed that the intense intellectual competition of the modern schooling system could easily





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deflate working-class aspirations more often than it nurtured and rewarded them. Warner observed that his own studies of social stratification offered something less than strong encouragement to those who would like to believe that education is providing an adequate substitute for entrepreneurship and hard work on the shop floor as means of upward mobility or that it would lead to a more even playing field (1949: 25, 29; see also Boudon 1974). Do schools really operate like elevators, giving everyone the same opportunity to get on at the ground floor and go up as far as their ability and effort allow them? Or are they more like conveyor belts stacked one above the other, depositing people on floors not too dissimilar from the ones from which they began? Two perspectives, corresponding to these two different images of social sorting, have developed in response to questions about the distribution of opportunity in the credential society. The first can be described as revolving around the idea of meritocracy and the second as based on the idea of social reproduction.

The Rise of Meritocracy? The term “meritocracy” was coined by the British sociologist Michael Young in his satire The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), a book about an acutely unhappy society of the future. In this society, people with high measured IQs rule with an increasing sense of entitlement while those with low measured IQs toil miserably without even the comforting sense of the unfairness of the world. In Young’s satire, a populist revolt, led by women who had been left out of the meritocracy, eventually overthrows the system. Although Young himself was highly critical of the pretensions and inequities engendered by meritocracy, the term has developed more positive connotations today, and it has come to mean rule by the most intellectually able. Higher levels of effort are also sometimes included as a criterion for membership in the meritocracy, but other possible merits (for example, those of good character) are usually left out of the discussion on principle. (It is difficult to identify a person’s true qualities of character except when they are seriously challenged.) The idea of meritocracy was in circulation before the term was coined. James Bryant Conant (1938, 1940), then president of Harvard University, wrote two important articles at the end of the Depression era laying out the rationale for a radical change in the organization of the social selection process. His ideas closely corresponded to the modern conception of meritocracy. Conant argued that democracy did not require a “uniform distribution of the world’s goods” or a “radical equalization of wealth.” What it required instead was a “continuous process by which power and privilege may be automatically redistributed at the end of each generation” (Conant 1940: 598). Conant and other mid-20th-century reformers considered schools to be the primary mechanisms of this redistribution. They assumed that talent was not concentrated at the top of the social class structure but was instead rather widely distributed throughout it. By giving every student, from the most humble to the most privileged, an equal educational opportunity at the beginning of life, society would be in a position to fairly select only those most qualified by brains and sweat to occupy the command posts at the top. Even better, from Conant’s democratic point of view, this natural aristocracy of talent would be re-created fresh in every new generation.



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The idea of meritocracy combined a principle of aristocratic leadership and a principle of democratic selection, or equality of opportunity. To the extent that the theory of meritocracy is true, we would expect that the people at the top of the job structure would be those who are the most intellectually able and hardest working and that these people would come from a wide variety of social backgrounds. We should also find quite a bit of reshuffling of positions from one generation to the next.

The Persistence of Social Reproduction? Theorists of social reproduction have argued that Conant’s automatic redistribution at the end of every generation does not occur. Instead, they argue, the aristocracy of talent is another name (and a highly misleading one) for what is in most cases inherited and socially transmitted status. The only difference for these theorists is that under a system in which advancement depends on educational credentials, the upper classes must transmit their privileges in ways that go through rather than bypass the educational system. Those already advantaged by the social order are precisely the ones who are most likely to be selected by it in the next generation under the guise of meritocracy. For these theorists, the supposed fairness of meritocracy does not exist because the schooling system frequently fails to see the potential of those who do not inherit the language, culture, and values of the upper and upper-middle classes. In the words of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, two prominent theorists of social reproduction, “To reproduce the labor force, the schools are destined to legitimate inequality, limit personal development to forms compatible with submission to authority, and aid in the process whereby youth are resigned to their fate” (1976: 266). Social reproduction theorists argue that social class, racial-ethnic, and gender hierarchies limit society’s ability to identify merit. They point to examples like the following: Imagine a girl born into a Spanish-speaking family in Southern California. Let us assume that she has high cognitive potential. Nevertheless, linguistic differences may make her shy in front of native speakers. She may have little in the way of consistent structure in her household, and this may make it difficult for her to adjust to the highly structured school environment. Because her parents have limited command of the English language and little formal education, they may not know how to stimulate her interests in school or even think that this would be desirable. Lack of support for intellectual activity in the home may lead her to look for attention and praise in more consistently validated areas of life such as participation in religious rituals, socialization with friends, or engagement in traditionally feminine arts like crafts work and cooking. The children she plays with may care as little about school as her parents do, and they may even mock her if she expresses an interest in school. Her parents may feel uncomfortable talking to teachers and may therefore avoid school conferences and working the system on their daughter’s behalf. Such a girl may be born with great potential but become less meritorious over time from the point of the school’s evaluative norms. Social reproduction theory began in Europe as a critique of the social class biases in the schooling system (B. Bernstein 1961; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). The work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has been particularly influential—and for good





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reason. Rather than focus on only differences between rich and poor, Bourdieu theorized several forms of capital: social (family- and school-based networks), cultural (high status knowledge), scholastic (degrees), symbolic (seemingly self-denying moral actions that actually build a person’s reputation), and economic (wealth and income). In the world of Bourdieu, class fractions compete with one another by laying claim to larger portions of society’s rewards on the basis of the stocks of capital in which they specialize. Thus, people who come from families with higher levels of cultural than economic capital will naturally be inclined to invest heavily in schooling to convert their cultural capital into scholastic capital and eventually into economic capital (Bourdieu 1986). Bourdieu’s work focused on social classes and class fractions. However, critically minded social scientists quickly began to argue that the educational deck can be equally or even more completely stacked against racial and ethnic minorities (Ogbu 1978) and women (Byrne 1978; Hall 1983). Subsequent research has shown that educational attainment is not the major reason that women are treated unequally in the labor market. Women tend to perform better than men in school. That makes gender quite a different influence on mobility than either class or race and ethnicity (and I consequently hold off on considering issues of mobility and inequality as they affect women until Chapter 7). To the extent that the theory of social reproduction is correct, we would expect to see a high level of status transmission through the schooling system, rather than automatic redistribution of high-status jobs to the best and the brightest of every generation regardless of their social origins. Moreover, if social reproduction is a primary (latent) function of schooling, high grades and test scores should count less than social background as a predictor of who gets ahead in schooling and on the job. Adjudicating between these two perspectives is more complicated than it at first seems. First, it is helpful to determine how much mobility actually exists in societies, a question that has been approached from more than one angle. Then we can get to the heart of the matter: identifying the role that education plays in mobility and how much of that role can be attributed to the transmission of advantages owing to students’ social origins. If educational attainment is strongly related to social origins, and education is strongly related to subsequent adult attainments, the social reproduction perspective would find support because education could be interpreted as a mechanism for transmitting privileges. If, on the other hand, educational attainments have little relation to social origins but a strong association with later job status and income, then meritocracy would appear the stronger argument. At the same time, we should recognize that the influences that help explain status attainment among individuals may not be very helpful for explaining mobility and inequality among groups. This is particularly true if important sources of mobility for individuals, such as high standardized test scores, are not particularly common among members of lower-status groups.

how much mobility ? Many college graduates see that they have attained higher levels of education than their parents. They also have the sense that their lives are improving compared with those of



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their parents. They may have bigger houses and nicer cars, jobs in clean offices rather than grimy factories, and more chances to travel and see the world. They are tempted to attribute these positive changes in their work lives and standards of living to the educational levels they have achieved. This experience of great improvement in living conditions over a generation is not as common today as it was in the last half of the 20th century, but it is still common enough for people to assume that they owe their success in life to educational opportunities. But this crediting of life success to educational attainment does not take into account the changes in the occupational structure and living standards that would have pushed many people up the occupational structure whether or not they had achieved more education than their parents. Sixty years ago the sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Hans Zetterberg (1956) pointed out that occupational upgrading was occurring in all industrialized societies, despite radically different historical experiences, widely varying forms of government, and highly divergent schooling structures. Subsequent studies confirmed that similar occupational changes occur in all industrialized societies and that these changes occur whether a society has a restrictive or expansive system of secondary and higher education (Featherman, Jones, and Hauser 1975; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). For example, Switzerland, which until recently graduated less than 10 percent of each age cohort with university-level degrees, experienced occupational upgrading similar to that of the United States, which graduated 30 percent of each age cohort with postsecondary degrees (OECD 1996a). Someone has to fill the new professional, technical, and managerial jobs even if educational systems do not expand at all. Indeed, in countries with relatively few university-level graduates, less educated people were in fact recruited from the shop floor and the office pool to fill higher-level jobs (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992: 303–4). We can call the mobility that derives from occupational change structural mobility. Sociologists have found ways to disentangle the effects of structural mobility from mobility that is independent of structural change by looking at the association of individuals’

 How Much Mobility in Industrialized Societies?  Whether all industrial societies have similar rates of occupational mobility is a much-debated question in sociology. Seymour Martin Lipset and Hans Zetterberg (1956) provided one of the first answers to this question on the basis of comparable cross-national data. Against the views of some celebrators of American exceptionalism, Lipset and Zetterberg argued that the level of mobility found in the United States was not substantially different from that found in a number of European nations. All modern societies seemed to show high rates of mobility, with more upward than downward mobility. Once industrializing societies reached a takeoff point, according to Lipset and Zetterberg, fairly common rates of mobility could be expected. Later researchers discovered much more variation in the employment and occupational structures of industrial societies than Lipset and Zetterberg





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projected. Different occupational structures provide different distributions of occupations and therefore affect the rate of mobility. However, the intergenerational flows between occupational classes were similar (Grusky and Hauser 1984). When sociologists looked at flows from father’s occupation to son’s among just three major classes (professional and managerial, small business and routine white collar, and blue collar and farm workers), they found that between 40 and 60 percent of men had changed from their father’s occupational class (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). Of these changes, upward movements exceed downward movements by between two and three to one and occasionally by more than three to one (chap. 6). In the United States, 55 percent of men born between 1900 and 1970 moved within the three broad class categorizations, and 45 percent were stable. Among men who were mobile, upward mobility exceeded downward mobility by almost three to one (40 percent upwardly mobile; 15 percent downwardly mobile). These rates, for the most part, fit comfortably within the range of other industrialized societies (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992: 330). Today, the Lipset-Zetterberg thesis has been amended more than abandoned. Occupational structures are not as similar as Lipset and Zetterberg suggested, but flows among occupations appear to be similar across a wide variety of industrial societies (Featherman, Jones, and Hauser 1975; Grusky and Hauser 1984; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). Like Lipset and Zetterberg, more recent researchers have found that the amount of upward mobility does not continuously increase with level of industrial development, and greater fluidity is not associated with the nature of a country’s schooling or political system. In short, economic progress creates new occupational structures (especially, more managers and professionals) and therefore more upward mobility from one generation to the next. If occupational change is the most important force behind intergenerational mobility, it is clearly wrong to attribute intergenerational mobility to the expansion of schooling. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that the expansion of schooling often accompanies economic progress and occupational change. Such were the circumstances of the period between World War II and 1980. For the most recent generation, evidence has accumulated that rates of upward mobility have reached a plateau or are decreasing in advanced industrial societies like the United States (Bradbury and Katz 2005; see also Scott and Leonhardt 2005: A18). One additional finding stands out: occupational mobility is frequently greater for countries like Norway and Sweden, where the level of economic inequality is lowest. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that the greater the equality of initial conditions between social classes, the greater the equality of opportunity for children born into the lower classes (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992: 388).



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origins and destinations, as measured through odds ratios, while controlling for changes in the marginal counts of occupational categories in mobility tables (Hout 1989). The remaining mobility after taking into account structural change is usually termed relative mobility, or social fluidity. Until recently, relative mobility accounted for only a small proportion of the total mobility experienced by individuals across generations, while structural mobility accounted for most of it (Hout 1988; see also Torche 2015). It is not surprising, therefore, that in the industrialized world, sons tended to exceed the occupational statuses (Duncan 1961) and class locations (Erikson, Goldthorpe, and Portocarero 1979) of their fathers and that correlations between fathers’ and sons’ social standing were only moderate, in the range of 0.3 to 0.5 (see Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992; Jencks et al. 1972, 1979). Income measures also showed moderate levels of inheritance.3 A recent study in the United States, using tax data drawn directly from the Internal Rev­e­ nue Service, found an intergenerational relationship of 0.34 (Chetty et al. 2014), indicating that a 10 percent increase in parents’ earnings leads, on average, to a 3.4 percent increase in the children’s income. Intergenerational relationships in wealth are almost certainly higher, given the much larger inequalities in wealth and the many ways to shield wealth (Oliver and Shapiro 1995). Income relationships in Western Europe are comparable to those found in the United States, ranging from 0.2 to 0.5, with the Scandinavian countries consistently showing lower relationships (Fox, Torche, and Waldfogel 2016). By contrast, studies in Latin America indicate that economic mobility is more limited than in Northern Europe or North America. Relationships of around 0.6 and 0.7 have been found in Brazil and Chile (Dunn 2007; Ferreira and Veloso 2006; Nunez and Miranda 2010), higher than those found in the United States using the same methods (Bjorklund and Jantti 1997).

who gets ahead? individual-level studies We can now turn to the heart of the matter: What role does education play in social mobility? Is its role large or small? Is it a stand-in for social origins, simply a means of transmitting privilege that upper-class families have learned to use to good effect, or is its influence largely independent of social origins? How we think about the role education plays in mobility depends on whether we take individual characteristics or group comparisons as our unit of analysis. The factors that bear on individual life opportunities do not necessarily tell us much about the circumstances faced by the majority of people born into a given stratum of society. If we want a rounded picture of the role of education in mobility outcomes, it is important to look at studies of both individual-level achievement and group differentials. I show that, both in individual- and group-level studies, the case for meritocracy (and decreasing class advantage) is much stronger than many believe, particularly if one looks over many generations. But there are signs that status inheritance may be increasing for the most recent cohorts, and particularly in the United States.

Status Attainment Research Most of the early studies of the “Who gets ahead?” question examined the individual-level characteristics that make a difference in the kinds of occupations and incomes people





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eventually attained. These individual-level studies were known as status attainment studies. They showed that social origins influenced educational attainments and that educational attainment had a very strong influence on later life success, independent of social origins. Status attainment research is based on causal modeling within a temporal framework, beginning with a child’s social status at birth and ending with adult occupational status and income. Among the influences that intervene during the life course are test scores and educational attainments. During the heyday of status attainment research (roughly the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s), the status attainment approach dominated sociological studies of mobility. Parental social status and individuals’ measured cognitive abilities were seen as independently influencing later life events, such as educational attainment (Sewell and Shah 1967). Educational attainment, in turn, was seen as directly influencing adult occupational and income attainments (Blau and Duncan 1967). Most of the advantages of high-status families were seen as transmitted through the educational system. Some additional, relatively minor effects of social background were seen as operating independently of educational attainment, meaning that sons from affluent families had a somewhat better chance of achieving high incomes even if they did not convert their social origin advantages into high-level educational attainments. In refinements of the status attainment process using social psychological variables, researchers also modeled influences such as parental and teacher expectations and friendship group influences (Sewell, Haller, and Portes 1969). Still more refined models included such variables as course-taking patterns and participation in extracurricular activities at school (see, e.g., Jencks et al. 1979). Breakthroughs in statistical modeling gave this school what seemed at the time to be a compelling analytical framework. In addition to allowing researchers to look at the attainment process in a temporal framework, status attainment models used partial correlation coefficients to measure the direct and indirect effects of focal variables, such as father’s occupational status or son’s cognitive ability, while holding other variables in the model statistically constant. Thus, status attainment researchers who were interested in the independent effect of a father’s occupation on son’s adult income sought to compare people who were similar in every way except for their fathers’ occupations—people who had equivalent measured cognitive abilities, equivalent levels of aspiration, and equivalent educational credentials. They then decomposed how much of this effect was from the influence of fathers’ occupation on children’s educational attainment and how much of this effect could not be accounted for by fathers’ occupational influence on children’s educational attainment. In the language of status attainment research, educational attainment mediated the influence of fathers’ occupation on adult income, representing an indirect effect of social origins, but some part of this influence was also independent of educational attainment, representing a direct effect of social origins. Findings for U.S. white, nonfarm males. For that part of the variation in people’s adult attainments that could be explained statistically, social origins and measured cognitive ability both showed up as important explanatory factors, primarily because both influenced the likelihood that a person would obtain more education. Children with high test scores or excellent grades were more likely to end up with good educational credentials even if



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not born into a high-status family. The reverse also held true: growing up in a high-status family meant that a person was likely to end up with decent educational credentials, even without particularly high test scores or top-flight grades. Although social origins influenced chances for occupational and income success, through their association with higher-level educational attainments, grades and test scores were the more important influences on educational attainment. Standardized test scores and, especially, high school grades were the best predictors of educational attainment, measured by number of years of schooling or highest degree level achieved (see, e.g., Alexander et al. 1982; Camara and Echternacht 2000; Harackiewicz et al. 2002). For men who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, family background helped predict grades and test scores, but the relationship was not strong, and it also had a modest direct effect on how much schooling a person was likely to receive regardless of grades and test scores (Jencks et al. 1979; Featherman and Hauser 1978). The following is a simple illustration of the role that social background and cognitive ability played in the educational attainment process: Status attainment researchers showed that children who experienced the great postwar expansion of higher education were rewarded for both birth status and measured ability. Bright children whose fathers had blue-collar occupations were less likely than other bright children to obtain a college degree. According to the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), children with the highest verbal IQs (measured here as the top 14 percent on a word-recognition test) whose fathers were unskilled blue-collar workers had more than a 50 percent chance of completing college in the 1950s and 1960s (see Table 6.1).4 Given the overall college completion odds of the era (one in five), this is a very good probability of completing college, but it is not as high as the 80 percent likelihood of graduating enjoyed by those with the same high level of verbal intelligence but whose fathers worked in professional or managerial occupations. And it is not as good a chance as the 70 percent completion rate enjoyed by all children, regardless of measured ability, who were lucky enough to be born into families in the top tenth of the occupational ranks (Hout, Raftery, and Bell 1993: 46). Findings like these suggested that it was wise to interpret schooling as an important demonstration arena in which both brains (especially when combined with hard work) and socially transmitted status characteristics attracted positive notices and in which neither was entirely sufficient to ensure high levels of success. Note that social background seems to have become a more important factor for more recent cohorts. As Table 6.1 shows, among men and women born between 1955 and 1971, at a time when more students were going to and completing college, socioeconomic background was substantially more important as an influence on obtaining a college degree than it was for earlier cohorts, while verbal ability, as measured by the GSS wordrecognition test, diminished in importance. To be sure, social origins and academic achievements were not the only variables that counted in the educational attainment process. These studies also provided a perspective on what we might call the microstructures of success. Other factors bearing on educational attainment included the following: having grown up in an intact two-parent household, having families and friends who valued education, taking academic courses (particularly





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Ta bl e 6 . 1 Chances of completing college by father’s occupation and GSS word-recognition score, U.S. men and women, born 1946–1960 and 1955–1971 a. respondents born 1946 –1960 Students with median scores (%)

Students with top 14 percent scores a (%)

20 38 26 18 15 12

70 81 82 65 60 54

Students with median scores (%)

Students with top 10.5 percent scores (%)

33 59 47 39 19

33 63 45 38 18

All occupations Professional Manager Clerical/sales Skilled blue collar Unskilled blue collar b. respondents born 1955–197 1

All occupations Professional Manager Clerical/sales Blue collar

s o u r c e : General Social Survey (GSS). Cohort A (men and women born 1946–1960) tabulated by Michael Hout. Cohort B (men and women born 1955–1971) tabulated by Kristopher Proctor. a  Verbal ability is based on a 10-item word-recognition test. Top 14 percent for cohort A = 9 correct. Top 10.5 percent for cohort B = 9 correct.

math and science), and having strong personal aspirations to succeed (Jencks et al. 1979; Jencks, Crouse, and Mueser 1983; Sewell, Haller, and Portes 1969; Sewell and Hauser 1975). The people who tended to move up were those who had the habits and skills that brought success in school: regularity, diligence, and reasoning ability. Boys who took leadership positions in extracurricular organizations as adolescents also tended to have greater occupational success (Jencks et al. 1979: chap. 5; Willingham 1985; A. Howard 1986). People who did not have any of these characteristics certainly did get ahead at times, just not as frequently.5 This accounting can make educational success seem merely the product of putting the right set of variables together. In fact, the blunt language of sociological variables hides the truth that individual and group cultures create habits that condition probabilities for success or failure. Sociological variables do not create the self-denying habits of study that encourage educational success. Only concrete people (helped by their friends and family) do that. Staying in school and achieving good grades is largely a product of the academic ethos—the self-discipline to study when others are out with friends, socializing and having fun (Rau and Durand 2000). Most people know someone like a former student of mine, let us call him Jonathan, who was born into a working-class (and non-English-speaking) family but spent hours and hours in the library in an effort to be the best-prepared student in class. They also usually know someone like another former student, call her Karen, who came from a wealthy and prominent family and had many rare life experiences (her family’s name was attached to a performance hall on campus) but never felt the deep, inner need to work hard enough to stand out. To develop an academic ethos, students must have a sense that their commitment to study will be rewarding. Many students, particularly



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minority students, hover on the edge of commitment, unsure that the benefits of commitment will outweigh the costs in lost friendships and the threats to self-concept represented by academic evaluators (Morgan 2005; Steele 1997). One other important message of these studies was that luck played a major role in what happened to people in the labor market. The studies showed that most of the variation in American adult men’s early occupational status and income levels could not be predicted by characteristics like social origins, cognitive ability, or educational credentials. In other words, the unexplained variance in the ultimate dependent variables greatly exceeded the variance that could be explained by variables in the models. Later researchers plausibly speculated that quite a bit of the unexplained variation in life fates had to do with the ups and downs of companies, industries, or regions (Haveman and Cohen 1994). Indeed, a good case can be made that although it is theoretically possible for school systems to select people on strictly meritocratic grounds, it is not possible for market economies to do so. Markets do not reward according to the same standards of merit as schools but simply according to the economic value of goods and services offered and such contingencies as new, more efficient or higher-quality firms entering a market (Goldthorpe 1996). Moreover, some of the variation in economic outcomes has to do with being in the right place at the right time and other sources of good or bad fortune. People are subject to the vicissitudes of history, accident, employers’ whims, and their own good and bad decisions. Many unmeasured individual differences are presumably involved too, such as the ability to sense and act on opportunities in a changing environment. Comparative studies of status attainment. For many years, the samples and measures used in status attainment studies in different countries were not similar enough to allow meaningful comparisons (Treiman and Ganzeboom 1990; Ganzeboom, De Graaf, and Treiman 1992). Even today, consistently measured variables in comparative studies are limited to a small number of potential influences on attainment. Most comparative studies of status attainment look only at family origins, educational attainments, and adult status. Some studies have also looked at gender influences. The influence of cognitive abilities, aspirations, family size, race and ethnicity, and other factors that have proved to be important in the American case cannot be investigated, because good comparative data is missing. Nevertheless, some very general cross-national patterns became evident. One was a pattern of underlying similarity in the process of status attainment. As in the United States, educational qualifications are now more important than social origins throughout the industrialized world in determining how likely people are to succeed, and they have also become more important in some developing economies, such as Vietnam (Korinek 2006). At the same time, social origins always helped determine how much education a person was likely to obtain. For the most part, the moderately high association between class origin and educational attainment fell into a similar range across the industrialized nations. However, the formerly socialist countries of Hungary and Poland were apparently able to dampen the influence of social origins on middle-level educational attainments (and during some periods also on higher-level qualifications) by strongly encouraging able working-class





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students (Ishida, Muller, and Ridge 1995; Muller 1996). Similarly, during the Cultural Revolution in China children from well-educated families experienced downward mobility because of government preferences for the children of peasant and worker families (Buchmann and Hannum 2001). Conversely, France stood out for the persistent strength of the ties between higher-status families and the upper levels of the educational and occupational system (Bourdieu 1996; Garnier and Hout 1976; Muller 1996). It is not surprising that social reproduction theory originated in France. Upward mobility through schooling was distinctly limited in England as well (Kerckhoff 1974; Garnier and Hout 1976), another country in which social reproduction theory showed great popularity. Early scholars of schooling in the developing world found evidence that the quality of schooling had a greater impact on achievement than family background—in the words of Stephen P. Heyneman and William A. Loxley, “The poorer the country, the greater the impact of school and teacher quality on achievement” (1983: 1184). However, a series of methodologically improved studies in the 1990s and the decade following yielded evidence that refutes this conclusion. Weak states are more common in the developing world, and weak states are associated with extreme regional disparities in school supply and poor school quality (Buchmann and Hannum 2001). Regardless of national levels of wealth, family factors are more important predictors of educational achievement than are school factors in most developing countries (see, e.g., Baker, Goesling, and LeTendre 2002; for an overview, see Buchmann and Hannum 2001). In countries such as India and Brazil, higher levels of schooling are out of reach of the great majority, and stratification remains deeply rooted in family social standing (Kelley 1978; Treiman and Yip 1988). The elite send their children to private schools, while poorly financed government schools serve the poor.

The Limitations of Status Attainment Research The limitations of status attainment research became more evident over time. Perhaps the most important limitation was the tendency of status attainment researchers to focus on the most advantaged subset of the population. Most of the work in the status attainment tradition focused on white, nonfarm males, because of data availability and because of the weaker attachment at the time of women to the labor market and the high levels of unemployment experienced by minorities. Some critics wondered whether status attainment researchers simply considered the attainment of women and minorities to be somehow less important than the processes affecting white men. Not only did minorities and women obtain less education than white men; their educational credentials were significantly less valued in the labor market than the credentials of white men (Goldin 1992; Kerckhoff 1976; Treiman and Roos 1983). There were other important limitations as well. Because of data availability, the studies were also typically limited to outcomes of early adult occupations and incomes, missing completely the development of adult careers into midlife and beyond. Moreover, different schools of thought generated different conclusions—for example, those that focused solely on social origins and academic achievements were skeptical of the value of adding social psychological variables and those that added social psychological variables were



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equally convinced that the attainment process could not be understood without them. Few status attainment researchers fully appreciated the historical context in which they worked—that the relationships they found might have reflected the conditions of a period when higher education was expanding from elite to mass access and occupational change ensured high levels of structural mobility. The changing interests of scholars were perhaps the most important reason for the sense that status attainment research was declining in utility, if not intellectually exhausted, by the end of the 1980s. In sociology a new generation of scholars began to focus on the challenges and barriers faced by specific groups (notably, women, minorities, and immigrants) and on the economic structures that shaped the life chances of these groups. They also showed that paths varied considerably depending on more specific circumstances of birth. For example, while educational attainment accounts for the great majority (about 85 percent) of the association between fathers and sons in intergenerational occupational status, it accounts for much less (only about half) of the intergenerational association of total family income (Torche 2015: 49). Educational level is closely tied to measures of occupational status, because nearly all high-status occupations, such as doctor and judge, require advanced degrees. By contrast, people who obtain high incomes are sometimes able to do so by mobilizing family business networks. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that inheritance of social class standing among professionals is almost entirely predicated on the attainment of advanced educational credentials, while the inheritance of class position among self-employed businesspeople largely bypasses the educational system (Ishida, Muller, and Ridge 1995). These findings are consistent with the position of Pierre Bourdieu (1986) concerning the incentives for members of different class fractions to use means of advancement that favor their distinctive forms of capital. When one looks at mobility as a function of distinctive social class locations, rather than in terms of continua of occupational and income statuses, a common core pattern emerges in industrialized societies, one that includes at least moderate inheritance of class location (always evident, though with less inheritance at the bottom than the top of the structure), hierarchical divides (it is harder to move long distances than short distances in the social class structure), sectoral barriers (notably, a strong barrier between agricultural and nonagricultural classes), and affinities between specific pairs of class locations (for example, a connection between self-employed fathers and upper-level managers) (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). In spite of these limitations, the individual-level studies in the status attainment tradition tell us many interesting things, and some are clearly as true now as they were a generation ago. The amount of mobility in the system was and no doubt remains high enough to make us wary of sweeping indictments of the class system or the race system and laments about the impossibility of breaching their barriers. In the industrialized world, many thousands of people do breach their barriers every year. The aspirations of a person’s family and friends and that person’s own drive to succeed make a difference even for those who are not born into high-status families. Perhaps most important, these studies tell us that people who finish higher-level degrees—whether because of family expectations, high intelligence that maps well onto the structures of schooling, or just





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sheer persistence and ambition—have an advantage in the labor market, even if they are not otherwise advantaged. A surprising finding from one of the classic studies of status attainment was that if a person had to choose just one characteristic on which to rank well above most of his or her peers—and was average on all other characteristics—the best choice would be high-level educational credentials. Although it may seem counterintuitive, high-level educational credentials would be a better choice than being born into a wealthy family, being exceptionally good looking, or having an unusually charming personality—again, assuming an average score on all the other characteristics (Jencks et al. 1979). The problem is that this singular choice condition holds in fewer and fewer cases. Children from affluent families nearly always attend and graduate from college, and children from poor families rarely do. Children from affluent families often score at the top of cognitive tests, and children from poor families rarely do.

who gets ahead? group-level studies Thus, the findings for groups do not necessarily point in the same direction as the findings for individuals. Because all the important factors in the opportunity equation are correlated, it is not possible to use individual-level studies to make final judgments about the opportunities of social classes or racial-ethnic minority groups. What is true for exceptional individuals may not be true for groups.6 An example of the level of correlation between several key individual-level characteristics is shown in Table 6.2 for a sample of American white, nonfarm males in the 1960s, at a time of increasing educational opportunity. The data are from one of the world’s best-studied surveys, the first Occupational Change in a Generation (OCG I) Survey, supplemented by IQ correlations from other surveys. If we exercise great caution, we can compare these correlations with those for a later cohort of American males from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), shown in the second panel of ­Table  6.2.7 Background, ability, and outcome data are at least moderately correlated in both surveys, and some of the correlations are quite high. Correlations of 0.5 can be considered high in social science; a correlation this high means that one-quarter of the variance in the score of interest can be explained by the correlated variable. Several variables in both panels are correlated at this level or only a little lower. Some key correlations are higher for the more recent survey than for the earlier survey. For example, father’s occupation and education are more highly correlated with son’s IQ and son’s occupation in the later survey. Son’s education is also more highly correlated with his income. Although the advantages of upper-class groups to make key educational transitions have narrowed from earlier to later cohorts and throughout a wide range of societies, some advantages persist in all developed societies. Moreover, recent data from the United States suggest that social reproduction may be becoming more common at the highest levels of education and that the link between education and income may be tightening. I discuss the findings of group-level studies separately for social classes (including income strata) and racial-ethnic groups. This separation is necessary because findings for



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Ta bl e 6 . 2 Estimated true correlations, background, and status characteristics of U.S. men, surveyed in 1962 and 1996–2002 Father’s schooling

Father’s occupational status

Adult son’s schooling

Son’s AFQT score

Son’s ­occupational status

— 0.640 0.426 0.358 0.350 0.214

0.640 — 0.485 0.382 0.440 0.287

0.426 0.485 — 0.680 0.648 0.353

0.358 0.382 0.680 — 0.502 0.349

0.350 0.440 0.648 0.502 — 0.441

0.214 0.287 0.353 0.349 0.441 —

— 0.629 0.451 0.458 0.372 0.274

0.629 — 0.447 0.420 0.396 0.280

0.451 0.447 — 0.648 0.680 0.409

0.458 0.420 0.648 — 0.578 0.400

0.372 0.396 0.680 0.578 — 0.445

0.274 0.280 0.409 0.400 0.445 —

Son’s earnings

1962 a Father’s schoolingb Father’s occupational statusd Adult son’s schoolingb Son’s AFQT score Son’s occupational statusd Son’s earnings 1996 –2002 a Father’s schoolingc Father’s occupational statusd Adult son’s schoolingc Son’s AFQT score Son’s occupational statusd Son’s earnings

s o u r c e s : 1962 data from Jencks et al. 1972: 337; 1996–2002 data calculated from NLSY79 by Florencia Torche. n o t e : AFQT = Armed Forces Qualifying Test. a  Data for 1962 include white, nonfarm males. Data for 1996–2002 include all men. b  Education is measured by the highest grade of school or college completed. c  Education is measured by the number of years of completed schooling. d  Occupation is measured using the Duncan scale of occupational prestige. Data for 1996–2002 are adjusted using the update by Gillian Stevens and David Featherman (1981).

social classes and income strata do not necessarily parallel those for racial-ethnic groups. Class and race provide different platforms from which to consider the role of education in group-level mobility.

Mobility Opportunities Through Education: Social Class One way to think about the contest between meritocracy and social reproduction is simply to look at the extent to which people born at the upper and lower ends of the social spectrum are likely to end up near or in the stratum of their birth. By doing so, most social scientists have concluded that neither the theory of meritocracy nor the theory of social reproduction adequately fits the data. One study of recent cohorts suggests that U.S. men born in the top 10 percent of family income have had about a 40 percent chance of ending in the top 20 percent of income by midcareer, while those born in the bottom 10 percent of family income had about the same chance of ending in the bottom 20 percent of income (Bowles and Gintis 2005). This is a fair amount of intergenerational transmission of privilege—certainly a lot more than we would see by chance. But in a system that truly reproduced class status and income levels, we would predict that stickiness at the top and the bottom would be considerably greater than it seems to be in fact. Other studies using more sophisticated statistical methods indicate that children of wealthy parents in the United States are more likely to remain wealthy than children of





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poor parents are likely to remain poor (Eide and Showalter 1999; Fertig 2003; Mitnik and Grusky 2015; Torche 2013). There are several reasons for the greater stickiness at the top of those born into upper-income families. The upper classes care deeply about passing on their advantages. Many upper-income parents will do what they can to give their children advantageous experiences, such as searching for the best schools in town and providing extra educational resources in the form of tutoring or private school education; rare cultural experiences, such as travel to foreign countries; or opportunities to interact regularly with motivated peers. The Berkeley economist David I. Levine noted that American children born into the economic elite have “a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced” (quoted in Scott and Leonhardt 2005: A17). Social class and educational transitions. Given this context, how much is education implicated in providing opportunities for children born into less advantaged strata of society to experience upward mobility? Studies of group differences consistently find declining correlations between fathers’ occupational status and children’s educational attainments over the course of the 20th century. Such findings would certainly seem on their face to support the meritocracy argument. But this declining correlation does not necessarily mean that class inequality has been reduced at the highest levels of the system where credentials are most valuable. Instead, the lower correlation over time reflects two factors that tell us little about the opportunities of less advantaged groups: (1) the higher average levels of schooling in the population and (2) the decreasing variation in the amount of schooling children receive. The sociologist Robert Mare (1980) first proposed a method for distinguishing between correlational results attributable to the expansion and standardization of schooling experiences and those attributable to the selection and allocation of students from different class backgrounds. He did so by viewing the educational attainment process as a sequence of transitions (for example, between elementary and lower secondary school and between lower secondary and upper secondary school). At each stage in the sequence, a student can either make a transition or discontinue. The odds of making any transition from a lower to a higher level can then be computed by social background characteristics over a series of cohorts. The most convincing studies using the educational transitions framework show a declining influence of social origins on educational transitions at the higher levels in the educational system. Throughout the 20th century, upper-class families maintained an advantage in the transition to tertiary education in every one of the eight countries studied by Richard Breen and his colleagues (2009), but this advantage narrowed over the course of the 20th century in each of the countries. Over successive birth cohorts Breen’s group found greater equality in the transition from primary education to secondary education, and greater equality in the transition from secondary to tertiary education. In some countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Ireland), educational inequalities were large for the oldest cohorts but declined quite considerably beginning in the mid-1930s. In other countries, including Sweden and the Netherlands, class inequalities in educational attainment were relatively small even in the oldest cohorts and continued to narrow in the latter part of the 20th century.



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Breen and his colleagues pointed out that there are good reasons to expect such a narrowing of inequality in transitions to higher levels of education. These reasons include generally strong economic growth, attendant improvements in the conditions of the working classes, the social safety net provided by welfare states, better teacher qualifications, and the lengthening of the school year. Figure 6.1 provides a visual depiction of both the continuing advantages of the upper classes throughout the period and the narrowing of these advantages as one moves from the oldest to the youngest cohorts. Because degrees are the keys to later life success, the picture presented by Breen and other scholars is one of continuing though narrowing class differences in tertiary-level access and completion and near equality of opportunity for those who complete tertiary education regardless of social origins.8 The U.S. pattern is similar to that found in Western Europe: class advantages in transition to tertiary education persist but narrow appreciably over time, and completion of Germany

France

Italy

Ireland

Great Britain

Sweden

Poland

Netherlands

0 1 2

4

0 1 2 3

–2 19 4 25 –3 4 19 35 –4 4 19 45 –5 4 19 55 – 19 64 08 –2 4 19 25 –3 4 19 35 –4 4 19 45 –5 4 19 55 –6 4

–6 4

19 08

–5 4

19 55

–4 4

19 45

–3 4

19 25

19 35

24

64 19

08 –

54

55 –

19

45 –

–4 4

19

–3 4

35 19

25 19

08

–2 4

4

19

Log odds

3

Cohort I

II

III

IVab

IVc

V+VI

VII

Figure 6.1 Ordered logit models for educational attainment in eight countries for men (class-origin effects over cohorts) s o u r c e : Breen et al. 2009: 1495. n o t e : Class I = upper-level professionals and managers; class II = lower-level professionals and managers; class III = routine nonmanual employees in administration and commerce; class IVab = small employers; class IVc = farmers; class V + VI = skilled manual workers and lower-grade technicians; class VII = semiskilled and unskilled manual and routine sales and service workers, agricultural workers. Class I is classes I and II in Ireland and Poland and classes I, II, and IVa (small employers with employees) in Britain.





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baccalaureate-level education equalizes opportunity for occupational and economic success across the social class spectrum (see, e.g., Hout 1988; Torche 2011). The sociologist Florencia Torche has referred to this as the “meritocratic power” of the college degree (2011: 797). One wrinkle introduced by Torche is to question whether the limited effects of social origins on later life success apply also to those who complete graduate and professional degrees. For the most recent cohorts, she finds instead a U-shaped pattern in which social origins influence the occupational and economic success of those with advanced degrees but do not influence the occupational and economic success of those with college degrees. As graduate and professional degrees become more common, class advantages in the probability of later life success for those holding them will become a topic worthy of investigation throughout the industrialized world. Ironically, the results of studies of educational transitions suggest that the societies ideologically most committed to eliminating class differences have often failed most completely to eliminate them at the higher levels of schooling. For instance, leaders of the former Soviet Union periodically instituted class affirmative action, which substantially changed the composition of the educated classes but only for brief periods. Findings from elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc suggest that policies designed to increase the opportunities of students from working-class families were usually undermined by political corruption before they could be fully institutionalized. The advantages afforded by university education were so great that anxious parents used the various means at their disposal, from intimidation to bribery, to win places for their children or children of important clients. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, corruption was commonplace, usually in the form of favors done for children of powerful officials but sometimes also in the form of outright bribes or “thank-you money” (Mateju 1993: 257; Szelenyi and Aschaffenburg 1993). Corruption was so widespread, in the words of one critic, that far from suffering any disadvantage, “the elite and its successors were allowed to operate almost entirely free from meritocratic competition” (Mateju 1993: 257). Even in Japan, a country noted for its apparently meritocratic test-based system of educational selection, the patterns do not indicate lesser rates of social reproduction than elsewhere in the industrialized world. In fact, sons from professional- and managerialclass families in Japan have a very low probability of downward mobility. More advantaged parents typically buy additional private tutoring for their children in the attempt to ensure the kinds of educational successes that are necessary for white-collar employment (Ishida, Muller, and Ridge 1995). The Scandinavian difference. In Scandinavia, working-class students have more nearly caught up to middle-class students in their chances of making transitions to higher levels of schooling. Given the strong connection between higher-level educational credentials and labor market success, the comparative findings show quite clearly that no universal law exists for “privileged classes [to] always find ways to maintain their relative advantages” (Jonsson 1993: 126). Indeed, the most consistent finding in comparative mobility studies is that children in countries like Sweden and the Netherlands with low inequality experience relatively higher rates of mobility, while children in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom with high inequality experience relatively lower rates of mobility



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(Smeeding, Erikson, and Jantti 2011: 8). Such findings lead to interesting questions about the Scandinavian difference: Why have class inequalities in educational transitions been lower in Scandinavia than elsewhere in the world? And why have they been lower for a much longer period? In all likelihood, changes in the conditions and attitudes of workers have been the most important cause of the higher rates of intergenerational mobility through education found in Scandinavia. Jan Jonsson writes that the greater chances of working-class people over time are attributable primarily “to an equalization in living conditions due to decreasing income differences [and] welfare state redistribution. In addition, those characteristics of manual labor which limit workers’ ability to give practical support and encouragement to their children [exhausting work, long hours, etc.] have become less common or severe” (1993: 126). Others have argued that the existence of paid family leave after a birth, highquality preschool education, and other work-family policies are important contributors to the Scandinavian difference (Esping-Andersen 2004; Waldfogel 2004). However one apportions specific credit for the Scandinavian difference, the studies all point to the unusual commitment to equality of opportunity found in these societies. In these societies policies to improve the conditions of the working classes have found sustained support, regardless of the political parties in power, and they have had a positive impact on the mobility opportunities of working people (see Erikson and Jonsson 1996).

Mobility Opportunities Through Education: Race and Ethnicity In recent years race and ethnicity have received even more attention from mobility researchers in the United States than social class, but comparative studies of the impact of race and ethnicity are far less common. This is partly because of the variability of the racial-ethnic composition of different countries and the consequent difficulties in making meaningful comparisons. Clearly, in many countries racial-ethnic minorities face much tougher circumstances than do native-born workers. In Europe, the peripheries of great cities are filled with immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who are very disadvantaged in competition with native-born white Europeans. Many immigrants are attracted to countries in which the low-wage sector is large because they know that employment opportunities, however precarious, will be plentiful (Alba and Foner 2015: 53). At the same time, in all advanced societies a stream of immigrants with high levels of human capital are also welcome. These people are already highly educated and emigrate to seek professional and managerial jobs. Under the circumstances, studies of educational transitions by race and ethnicity make little sense. Class divisions among immigrant minorities would explain most of the transition rates. Poor children from immigrant minority backgrounds do not have the means (or the social acceptance) to use the educational system effectively, while highly educated immigrants bring with them the tools to do so. In this context, the United States may have a slightly better record than most other countries, at least insofar as African Americans and Mexican Americans have found paths into the middle class. One of the signal achievements of American society following the





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Civil Rights era was the creation of an African American middle class (Wilson 1987). It is now possible to see African Americans and other underrepresented groups throughout the class structure and at every income level. Affirmative action policies were a significant cause for this advancement. As the political scientist Ira Katznelson has written, “If affirmative action did not exist, the United States would be a vastly more segregated country. . . . [Because of affirmative action] it is no longer conceivable to imagine American society without [the] gains to racial integration in our universities, firms, professions, and public bureaucracies promoted with the backing of judicial opinion and governmental regulation” (2005: 148–49). At the same time, race continues to play a major role in the degree of stickiness experienced by those born into the top and bottom of the income distribution. Thomas Hertz (2005) found that 30 percent of whites born into the top decile of income remained there in adulthood compared to just 4 percent of blacks. The situation was reversed for those born into the bottom decile; 17 percent of whites born in the bottom decile remained there as adults compared to fully 42 percent of blacks. In the United States impoverished African American children experience disadvantages far in excess of poor children in countries with stronger social safety nets and more equitable educational systems. These disadvantages include single-parent households; the social ills of inner-city ghetto neighborhoods; the deprivations of poverty, including malnutrition; and frequently enough, also cultural isolation. Gang and individual violence, military-style policing, and racial bias in the court system have conspired to produce high levels of incarceration among poor African American men, who make up about 12 percent of the male population but 60 percent of the male prison population (Sentencing Project 2016). Some Latino immigrant groups are also at risk for ending up in precarious and low-wage jobs. Latinos have comparatively high rates of high school dropout. About one-fifth of second-generation Mexican men do not finish high school (Alba and Foner 2015: 184). Whatever its failings for the poor, education has been a primary cause for the creation of a black middle class. Aided by their drive to succeed, as well as in some cases by affirmative action, most African Americans have entered the middle class by obtaining a college education and then entering a professional occupation (Wilson 1987). Advancement through education has also been important for Asian American immigrants (Lee and Zhou 2015) and only a little less so for Latino immigrants, who more often rely on small-business ownership for advancement. Moreover, gaps in U.S. postsecondary entry by race and ethnicity have narrowed appreciably over time. Between 1995 and 2009, for example, freshman college enrollment more than doubled for Hispanics, while increasing by 73 percent for African Americans (Carnevale and Strohl 2013). Among 2004 high school graduates who enrolled in postsecondary institutions immediately following high school graduation, racial-ethnic gaps were not large, ranging from 73 percent of Hispanic high school graduates enrolled to 90 percent of Asians (NCES 2012: 170). But graduation gaps have persisted and remain sizable. Nearly 70 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander students who entered a four-year college in 2007 completed within six years, compared to 58 percent of white students, 46 percent of Hispanic students, and only 39 percent of African American students



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(NCES 2014: table 326.10). Clearly, minorities are breaking the access barrier, but their prospects for degree completion are not advancing at the same rate. Comparative studies. Scholars have only recently begun to explore international variation in mobility by race, ethnicity, and immigration status and the role of education in fostering or impeding this mobility. One recent study, by the sociologists Richard Alba and Nancy Foner (2015), compared the fate of lower-income immigrants in four European countries (Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands) and two North American countries (Canada and the United States). The study concluded that when it comes to the integration of low-status immigrants—in terms of jobs, income and poverty, residential segregation, electoral success, children’s education, and intermarriage—there were no clear-cut winners and losers among the countries studied. Each society failed and succeeded in different ways. However, Alba and Foner found that sons and daughters of immigrants to the United States were somewhat more likely to make their way into professional life by the second generation than were immigrants in the other countries they studied. At the same time, residential segregation and immigrant poverty levels were higher in the United States than in the other countries they studied. Throughout the developed world most second-generation immigrants improve dramatically on the educational attainments of their parents’ generation while remaining quite a bit behind native-born white populations. The rate of improvement varies quite a bit from society to society and from group to group, and some of this is because of the structure of schooling systems. In the highly tracked German system, secondgeneration immigrants were, until recently, typically trapped in the lowest school track, the Hauptschule, where opportunities for future upward mobility were limited. (As discussed in Chapter 2, the Hauptschulen are now being closed.) Skill development, as measured by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading and mathematics tests, was particularly negatively affected by the German system of early tracking (Alba and Foner 2015: 179). So too were educational opportunities. As of 2007–2008 only 7 percent of second-generation Turkish students were attending universities in Germany compared to 20 percent of native-born men and women (183). By contrast, skill development and educational attainment was unusually strong in Canada, where Asian immigrants predominate and highly educated Asian families share information and successful practices with less-educated new arrivals (183). Britain is a more surprising exception to the rule of second-generation immigrant disadvantage relative to native-born groups. Children of disadvantaged groups in the immigrant generation, such as Afro-Caribbeans and Pakistanis, appear to have caught up to the native white British in terms of university credentials, although these credentials are rarely obtained from the top universities (Alba and Foner 2015: 186–88). This unexpected result could be attributable to the frequent preference of native Britons for vocational credentials through the further education colleges as opposed to seeking university attendance, or it could be attributable to the capacity of immigrants to act on their perception that high-level educational credentials are necessary to compensate for the discrimination they face in the labor market.





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Some immigrant groups have been more easily and more fully integrated than others. In Canada and the United States, immigrants from China and South Korea have experienced a smoother path to mobility because of the higher levels of education of their families, families’ strong emphases on educational attainment, and positive stereotyping by teachers, among other factors (Lee and Zhou 2015). By contrast, Muslims in Western Europe have shown particularly low levels of integration on most measures, and according to Alba and Foner (2015) experienced less complete integration into European societies than into the two North American societies they studied. In France, an extreme case, onequarter of North African young men leave school without obtaining a secondary school credential. Basic demographics have worked against European Muslims; a much larger proportion of immigrants in Western Europe are Muslim than in the United States. This makes them stand out to a greater degree and fosters negative stereotyping. In addition, European countries have expected Muslims to assimilate to a secular mind-set. Because of the secular orientation in most of Western Europe, claims based on religion, and Islam in particular, have had much less acceptance and legitimacy than they have had in the United States. The constitutional principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state have allowed Muslims more space to develop their own religious communities in the United States. Finally, policies such as affirmative action that have aided the incorporation of minorities in the United States do not exist (at least not at the same level) in Western Europe. The results of the failure of Western European societies to incorporate Muslims (and Muslims’ failures to seek incorporation) are evident in the social ills that are found in the impoverished, Muslim-dominated suburbs of major European cities. These social ills include all those found in American ghettos and barrios (such as crime, drug use, and unemployment) and some that are not found there (such as support for political extremism among some alienated young men) (see, e.g., Packer 2015). The Malaysian and Indian experiments in racial-caste equalization. The conditions encouraging greater racial-ethnic equality are similar to those that have led to greater class equalization in Sweden and the Netherlands. Greater ethnic equality requires strong support in society for equalized conditions and governmental policies aimed at reducing inequalities in housing, schooling, and jobs. Affirmative action has in every case been an important influence on minority group prospects for mobility. Effective policies to reduce racial-ethnic inequalities are, however, rare in most industrialized countries. The most ambitious effort to improve the condition of minorities through affirmative action began in India as early as 1950 when the new postcolonial constitution enshrined the idea that lower-caste and tribal groups should be guaranteed quotas in publicly funded universities and public employment. This policy represented an effort to overturn a rigid and very ancient system of caste-based stratification (see, e.g., Milner 1994). The nationwide acceptance of affirmative action for members of the Dalit (or “untouchable”) caste and scheduled tribes was not fully realized, however, until the 1990s. The so-called reservation system currently mandates 22.5 percent of places in publicly funded higher education and public employment to members of the lower castes and members of tribes



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who live outside the caste system. Studies of the consequences of the policy have rendered a mixed verdict. Some who benefited from the policy were not in fact poor. Enforcement mechanisms were weak, and consequently some public sector employers have simply failed to comply (Deshpande 2005). At the same time, through higher education, members of the lower-caste Dalit advanced in the labor market. Their representation at the senior levels of the civil service increased by a factor of eight between 1965 and 2010, and their representation is near parity with their portion of the population at more junior levels of the civil service. However, private firms are not bound by the policy and for the most part ignore it. The advances due to the policy came at considerable expense. In more demanding majors, such as engineering, students from lower-caste families experienced high levels of stress, depression, loneliness, and disorientation compared to counterparts in easier majors. Their weaker performance in these more demanding majors lent credence to the mismatch thesis—that is, less prepared students fare better in less demanding programs (Frisancho, Robles, and Krishna 2012). Some have concluded that the gains for lower-caste individuals were more than offset by the losses of those displaced from higher education (Bertrand, Hanna, and Mullainathan 2010). And the policies, fairly or not, have not improved the reputation of the civil service for competence. They have also episodically generated backlash, some of it violent. More sanguine observers have concluded that the negative outcomes of the policies were the price that India had to pay if it wanted to become a more equitable society (Deshpande 2005). As the box “Ethnic Minorities, Affirmative Action, and Equality of Opportunity” shows, in Malaysia a comprehensive government effort succeeded for a time in reducing large inequalities between the Chinese, Indian, and native Malay populations at the same time that educational attainments for all three populations increased. But even this successful policy has encountered recent problems. Although the extent of backlash can be exaggerated, many mobile Chinese and Indian businesspeople and their families have rejected affirmative action by choosing to leave the country, creating the so-called Malaysian brain drain (World Bank 2011). Nevertheless, the relative harmony of Malaysian ethnic relations remains rare in the region.

 Ethnic Minorities, Affirmative Action, and Equality of Opportunity  The few countries that have improved educational opportunities for ethnic minorities have generally made it a priority to do so. They have usually also built on relatively weak ethnic status boundaries, with some inconsistencies in power across sectors. Malaysia represents a notable recent effort to improve educational opportunities for minorities, one that illustrates these principles. The Chinese and Indian populations in Malaysia have traditionally controlled most of the wealth in the country, and the indigenous Malays have generally held political power. After years of tension and some racial rioting, the country’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced in 1971. The NEP mandated Malay representation in the economy through ethnic ownership quotas, hiring quotas, participation in the armed forces, and educational scholarships. The





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government also funded rural development, including irrigation and infrastructure projects. Between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of corporate assets owned by Malays rose from 2 percent to 20 percent, and the incidence of poverty declined by 35 percent (UNDP 1994). Results in the late 1990s and the next decade continued to be impressive in some ways but less impressive in other ways. Group income disparities have continued to fall, but income inequality within groups has risen since the late 1980s. Moreover, reports have increased of abuse of ethnic privileges by politically connected families. As the 2004 Human Development Report put it, “While the specific socio-economic targets of the [NEP] have been largely achieved, national unity has remained somewhat elusive” (UNDP 2004: 70). More recently, the World Bank has discussed the so-called Malaysian brain drain, as more affluent Chinese and Indian families migrate out of Malaysia to countries without such extensive projects to reduce racial-ethnic disparities (World Bank 2011). The extent and import of the out-migration is disputed by experts. Many continue to see Malaysia’s policies as having created more harmonious interethnic relations, particularly in relation to nearby countries such as Indonesia, and credit much of Malaysia’s success to its efforts to improve the conditions of native Malays. Nevertheless, out-migration illustrates how carefully affirmative action policies must be designed and managed to reduce resentment and flight by affluent groups. Where ethnic groups are completely shut out of the more prosperous spheres of the market economy and where sharp and consistent lines of ethnic and cultural stratification exist, even comprehensive government programs usually cannot improve the educational opportunities of minorities. Countries such as New Zealand and India, for example, have attempted at times to implement far-reaching plans to improve the condition of their primary disadvantaged minorities but with little success. The key difference seems to be in the relative status of the minorities in question. In cases involving castelike minorities, reform policies will not be implemented with enthusiasm by the dominant group or embraced with enthusiasm by the disadvantaged group. The degree of social distance that develops between majority and minority groups in these systems, and the attendant emotions of superiority and shame, can prove to be too much to overcome.

The Rise and Fall of Equalized Opportunity in the United States? I conclude this chapter by looking in more detail at recent changes in American society and education that jeopardize the progress the United States made in providing equality of opportunity following World War II. In the immediate post–World War II period the United States ranked with Scandinavian countries for its success in equalizing opportunities for higher-level educational transitions and consequently for equalization of



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opportunities for economic advancement. The American path was based not on greatly improved conditions for the working classes but on a rapid expansion of higher education accompanied by very substantial state subsidies for lower-income and minority students. As Michael Hout and Daniel Dohan put it, The Swedish path [to equality of educational opportunity] goes directly through existing class barriers, lowering them over the course of the century; the American path goes around them, expanding the system so much that class-based selection is irrelevant, because so few students are mustered out. (1996: 229)

Why did more women, minorities, and working-class kids go to college during this period? Both economic optimism and state support were at work. Real incomes were rising, and the long stretch of general prosperity supported an optimistic outlook among working people. They became more willing to invest in the possibility of an even better future for their children (particularly if, because of financial aid, they did not have to invest too much). Moreover, thanks to the powerful postwar economy, professional and managerial jobs were growing at a much faster rate than other jobs. Young people and their parents were more willing to make the sacrifices required to attend college because they knew that good jobs would probably be waiting for them at the end of their studies. Meanwhile, the government provided the means by which those who finished high school could go on to college without suffering crippling economic burdens. Public colleges and universities were well supported by state governments and required only nominal fees for attendance. The best public university system in the country, the University of California, for example, required students to pay fees of just $84 a year in the mid-1950s (less than $800 in 2005 dollars) (Liaison Committee of the Regents of the University of California and the California State Board of Education 1955: 405), and these fees increased only moderately through the 1970s. For those who had trouble making the payments, generous financial aid packages were available. The G.I. Bill allowed World War II veterans to attend any college that would admit them. From the mid-1960s through the end of the 1970s, the federal government also provided subsidies for low- and middle-income students to attend college. Extremely high levels of institutional financial aid complemented these government subsidies. Financial aid from all sources reached a peak of $20 billion in 1975–1976 (Congressional Budget Office 1992: 7). These efforts had a measurable impact. Hout (1989) found that the effect of social origins on the subsequent career success of young men dropped by 50 percent between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Hout attributed this change to the increased openness of higher education and the strong advantages of college degrees in the labor market. Although employers hiring at lower educational levels remained sensitive to applicants’ social backgrounds, employers of college graduates adopted more universalistic selection practices. Thus, for the first time, college degrees eclipsed social background as a source of subsequent career advantages. In the United States, the age of increasing educational opportunity ended around 1980 (Lucas 1996; Mortenson 2014). College enrollments continued to grow for all groups after 1980, but racial and especially class gaps in both college entry and college completion also





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began to increase. A generational comparison helps illustrate the growing gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged groups in spite of increases in overall educational attainment. For a sample drawn from 1961–1964 birth cohorts, postsecondary entry rates were 58 percent for the top income quartile, 38 percent for the third quartile, 32 percent for the second quartile, and 19 percent for the bottom quartile (Bailey and Dynarski 2011: 120). But for a sample drawn from among those born later, between 1979 and 1982, 80 percent of students from the top quartile enrolled in college, 60 percent from the third quartile enrolled, 47 percent from the second, and only 29 percent from the lowest income quartile (120). In other words, there was continued progress in the sheer numbers of students from all quartiles entering college but gaps grew in the proportions entering college from the top and bottom income strata—a gap of about 40 percent between top and bottom in the earlier cohort but about 50 percent for the later cohort. Moreover, virtually all the growth in college completion came from among students whose parents’ earnings fell in the top quarter of the income structure. As Figure 6.2 shows, in the 1979–1982 cohort college graduation rates rose above 50 percent for children born into the top income quartile studied by Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski but remained under 10 percent for those born into the bottom income quartile (Bailey and Dynarski 2011: 121). Some saw these growing class and racial inequalities as an ironic outcome of the triumph of meritocracy itself. This argument was popularized in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s best-selling book, The Bell Curve (1994). By giving opportunity to less advantaged students from all social backgrounds, Murray and Herrnstein argued, the postwar meritocracy took the cream of the most able children from lower-status families,

Fraction completing college

0.75

0.54 0.50

0.32 0.36 0.25

0.21 0.09

0.00

0.17

0.14

0.05 Lowest quartile

3rd quartile

2nd quartile

Top quartile

Income 1961–1964 birth cohorts

1979–1982 birth cohorts

Figure 6.2 Estimated college completion rates for American students by income quartile and year of birth, 1961–1982 s o u r c e : Adapted from Bailey and Dynarski 2011: 120.



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leaving an increasingly large cognitive gap between the social classes in America. This argument does not hold up to serious scrutiny. People with very good test scores are simply not as concentrated at the top of the class structure as Murray and Herrnstein suggested. Sociologists found a narrowing, not a widening, of cognitive differences between social classes and racial groups as one moved from older to younger cohorts (Weakliem, McQuillan, and Schauer 1995; Hauser et al. 1996). This increasing cognitive equality may be the result of a more similar cultural environment experienced by lower- and upperincome Americans, thanks to television, movies, and the Internet, or it may result from the success of schools in raising intellectual standards (Alexander 1997). In either case, the growing gaps in educational outcomes at a time of increasing access cannot be attributed to the concentration of high IQ scores at the top of the class structure. Why, then, does the college dropout rate continue to be so much higher for low-income and underrepresented minority students, and why are gaps between lower-income and upper-income groups growing? One set of explanations focuses on the students themselves and examines factors such as insufficient academic readiness or inadequate financial resources that may slow or derail their academic progress. Undoubtedly, academic preparation is on average lower among students from the bottom quartiles of the income distribution. Moreover, despite extensive efforts to provide financial assistance to needy students, the financial resources available to low-income students do not always meet their full financial need, placing greater stress on their families to identify resources for college completion. Many low-income families are loan averse and encourage their children to work to put themselves through college, a choice that can greatly lengthen time to degree and may lead to non-completion if work interferes too much with study (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005: 399–402; King and Bannon 2002). A second set of explanations look at the types of institutions in which lower-income and underrepresented minority students tend to congregate. Minorities enroll mainly in open-access two- and four-year colleges (particularly community colleges and for-profits) or historically black institutions, while whites and Asians enroll disproportionately in colleges and universities that select among applicants (Carnevale and Strohl 2013). Completion rates in public community colleges and historically black colleges and universities are low. Only one-fifth who enter these institutions leave with a degree in three years (U.S. Department of Education 2014: table 326.20), and minorities are less likely to graduate than others (Dougherty and Kienzl 2006). Transfer rates from two-year to four-year colleges are also low. Fewer than 25 percent of entering community college students transfer to a four-year college (Dougherty and Kienzl 2006). Most of those who enter community colleges and become stuck in remedial programs are from minority racial-ethnic backgrounds (Attewell et al. 2006; Bahr 2010). These are typically colleges and universities with limited resources, meaning they have low-paid instructors and modest counseling and other student services. In all likelihood, both poor academic preparation and institutional failings have played roles in the growing college achievement gaps. The economists John Bound, Michael Lovenheim, and Sarah E. Turner (2009) compared two cohorts of high school graduates, from the high school graduating classes of 1972 and 1988. Although much higher





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proportions of high school graduates entered college from the class of 1988, the percentage of students who completed four years of college within eight years declined from 51 percent for the earlier cohort to 46 percent for the later cohort. These declines were concentrated in two sectors enrolling a large portion of all students: less selective four-year public institutions and two-year community colleges. The researchers attributed most of the decline in community college completion to the lower academic qualifications of entering students but most of the decline in completion at four-year public institutions to characteristics of the institutions themselves, including insufficient course offerings, insufficient seats in courses, and the consequent crowding of students into large lecture halls where engagement tends to be low. Public policy plays an important role in narrowing or widening the disadvantages of birth. Since 1980 the public resources available to support equality of opportunity at the college level have declined. At public universities, fees have risen at nearly three times the rate of inflation since 1980, much faster than the incomes of all but the very rich. Students now very often wait to attend college until they are older or attend part-time while they are working 20 to 30 hours a week (Baker and Velez 1996). Many students from lower-income and less educated families are now limited to attending low-cost community colleges for at least two years, where they are surrounded by part-time and vocationally oriented students and not as strongly encouraged by their peers to persist to a bachelor’s degree. Fully adequate financial aid is also harder to come by. In the early 1980s loans replaced grants as the primary form of federally provided student financial aid (Congressional Budget Office 1992: 7). Studies show that this shift has had little or no impact on high- and middle-income students but has appreciably affected low-income students. Many low-income students must now enroll in less expensive schools or drop out altogether (GAO 1995). Because of the close connection between educational attainment and lifetime earnings, such disparities in college completion portend limited economic opportunities for those at the bottom of the economic ladder and continued economic stratification in the country as a whole. Budget cuts and tuition increases in the last decade have increased at a particularly high rate in public institutions, the institutions that serve most students of modest means. Efforts by donors and colleges themselves to raise completion rates for disadvantaged groups have had more than a modicum of success in some notable cases. However, they have not yet found ways to match the impact of these deeply rooted systemic obstacles to equity in college access and especially college completion. Sociologists in the United States once scoffed at social reproduction theory, because it seemed ill suited to a society in which intergenerational mobility was the norm. The United States might never have been the beacon of opportunity that its panegyrists believed, but structural mobility combined with considerable social fluidity did create high levels of post–World War II mobility. Education has the potential to narrow the gaps between rich and poor and between racial minorities and nonminorities. But it must be accompanied by adequate preparation in early grades, financial supports for college attendance, and institutions that can deliver on their promise of opportunity. The United States is faltering in these areas. For that reason, “children born into different economic circumstances



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can expect very distinctive economic futures. . . . Although no one would be surprised that children from higher-income families enjoy some advantages, [new research] reveals [these advantages] to be dramatic” (Mitnik and Grusky 2015: 9). Thus far, neither private giving nor state tuition and financial aid policies have proved adequate to the task of reversing these growing opportunity gaps. By contrast, capitalism with a strong welfare state, as practiced in Scandinavian countries, has provided more equal education, better economic supports for working-class families, and housing and other subsidies that level the playing field more than a little. Indeed, facing the same challenges of global economic competition over the last quarter century, few governments in the developed world have allowed the ideal of equal opportunity for all to slip as far as the United States. Would Americans trade the material wealth of a highly unequal, free-market capitalist society with comparatively low taxation rates on the rich for the greater equality but much higher taxation found in most of the Scandinavian social democracies? The majority of affluent Americans definitely would not make that trade-off; and lower-income Americans have not, until recently, had much to say about the issue. In the United States a low-tax, relatively unregulated market system provides extraordinary rewards to innovators who contribute to the dynamism of the American economy (Moretti 2013). Yet it is true that high levels of innovation can and do occur also where taxes are much higher and incomes much more equal. Switzerland consistently leads the pack in knowledge and technology outputs per capita, and Sweden and the Netherlands score at comparable levels to the United States (Dutta, Lanvin, and Wunsch-Vincent 2015).

conclusion Social selection is the most important function that schools perform today. The importance of schooling in social selection is, from a historical perspective, a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning only in the first decades of the 20th century. It has depended on the rise of an opportunity consciousness, the attachment of this opportunity consciousness to schooling, and the tightening of the connection between schooling and jobs through the rise of credential-based access to jobs. In the credential society, educational attainment has become the single strongest correlate of getting ahead in adult life. All other factors being equal, it is more important to have high-level educational credentials than to be born into a wealthy family, to have high measured intelligence, or to have good looks or a charming personality. Three theories have attempted to explain the link between high-level educational credentials and good jobs. These are theories based on human capital development, signaling, and status-group preferences. Social scientists have raised troubling questions about human capital theory, particularly in relation to its claims concerning the development of cognitive skills during the college years, and they now more often see higher education credentials as signals of talent and trainability that allow for efficiencies in the screening process for jobs. Nevertheless, all three have continuing relevance for some jobs and at some levels of the economic hierarchy.





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Another key question concerns the beneficiaries of the credential society. One argument is that modern societies are meritocracies in which the brightest and hardestworking people tend to succeed, regardless of their social origins. The opposed argument is that educational expansion makes little difference on the level of social reproduction in society. This level of social reproduction is thought to be rather high and essentially stable, whether or not higher education is relatively restricted or relatively inclusive. Both individual- and group-level studies help evaluate these competing ideas. Indi­ vidual-level studies compare the life trajectories of people with different sets of characteristics. These studies illuminate the life opportunities of people who reached college age in the 1950s and 1960s. They indicate that the most important influences on educational attainment are high grades and test scores. Other factors also help people  com­ plete higher-level degrees: support from family and friends, taking and doing well in de­ manding courses, and high personal aspirations. Parental social and economic status never drops off as an important influence on children’s success, but family social and economic advantages work primarily by raising the likelihood that sons and daughters of affluent families would obtain higher-level educational credentials. Higher-status parents also are more likely to provide the motivation climate that leads children to do well in school, surround themselves with supportive peers, take harder courses, and adopt high expectations for themselves. Individual-level characteristics associated with higher attainments are correlated with one another. Group-level studies, therefore, provide a different perspective—one that emphasizes the distribution of opportunities between classes, races, and genders rather than individual variation within these groups. Group-level studies suggest that class inequali­ ties in attaining the most valuable levels of education have decreased over time. College ac­cess has become more equal over time in all industrialized societies that have been stud­ ied. The Scandinavian societies stand out particularly in this regard. Class gaps in educational attainment have been relatively narrow for a long time, and they have continued to shrink for the most recent cohorts. Equality of opportunity is greater in countries where equality of conditions is also greater and governments strive to provide better working conditions and more generous supports for families. It is more difficult to draw generalizations about the role of education in providing opportunities for racial-ethnic minorities, because the circumstances of these minorities vary so much from society to society. Second-generation immigrants typically have higher levels of educational attainment than their parents, but characteristics of schooling systems, such as early tracking, and characteristics of the groups themselves, such as rejection of the secular mind-set, can lead to very large gaps in educational attainment among second-generation immigrants. Compared to many industrialized societies, the United States stands out for its success in reducing racial and ethnic gaps in schooling outcomes. Affirmative action has played a significant role in fostering these improvements. The realization of the meritocratic vision requires a set of societal supports, which include at a minimum (1) movements toward the equalization or at least the narrowing of the economic divisions between classes and strata in society, (2) high state subsidies for public higher education relative to the absolute costs of attendance, and (3) widespread



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availability of financial grants for qualified lower-income students. The American experience since World War II demonstrates the importance of these societal supports. The era of equalized opportunities peaked between 1945 and 1980. However, once tax rates on upper-income families declined in the 1980s, so did the supports for equalized opportunities, leading in time to increasing gaps in college completion rates by family income in spite of larger numbers of students entering postsecondary education. There are many barriers to the use of education to equalize social class and racialethnic conditions. Some of them have to do with the preparation and finances of disadvantaged groups. Some have to do with differences in school quality. Some have to do with the availability of affordable higher education. And some have to do with levels of social support for the families of workers and the poor. Although education has not fully equalized opportunities for students from lower economic levels or racial-ethnic minority backgrounds, it has nevertheless proved to be an effective mechanism for improving opportunity throughout the industrialized world when one looks over a century-long time frame.

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schools and social selection: inequality

The study of those who are not selected in the school sorting process is not as comforting to contemplate as the study of those who are able to use schooling to help them move up in the social hierarchy. Yet for every few students who get through school successfully at every critical stage, many are left behind. In the United States today, for example, approximately one-fifth of high school students do not graduate with their classes, a figure that rises to more than 50 percent in the poorest minority communities. By the time the academic race finishes with the awarding of professional or doctorate degrees 18 years or more after first grade, more than 90 percent of each age cohort has fallen by the wayside. As I demonstrate in Chapter 6, neither the theory of meritocracy nor the theory of social reproduction adequately explains the distribution of opportunities linked to schooling. Too many factors other than academic merit figure into the status attainment process to sustain a theory of meritocracy, and too much mobility through schooling occurs to sustain social reproduction theory. These two perspectives provide no more certain understanding of inequality than they do of mobility. This conclusion is perhaps a little surprising. Academic performance, the primary factor for those who advocate the meritocratic perspective, would seem to be the logical source of inequality in schooling. After all, the ranks of the academically successful seem to be erected on the backs of those the school system defines as not able or not willing to master the curriculum—those who read haltingly, calculate badly, and perhaps begin to consider most instruction a joke. Certainly, differences in academic ability and motivation are intended to determine and to legitimate the unequal rewards of schooling. But the ideal of meritocracy is damaged by its assumption that school success represents an abstract quality of merit and school failure represents its opposite. It is true that children differ in their academic aptitudes, just as they differ in their aptitudes for soccer or art. But genetic advantages have to be activated and directed to make a difference. Nurture (the social environment) is, therefore, a codetermining factor from the beginning.1 Children who grow up in neglectful environments can fail to be recognized and stimulated, even if they have strong innate abilities for cognitive activity. In attentive and



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stimulating environments, even modest aptitudes may be maximized. The advantages of privileged parents help them illuminate and direct sparks of acuity in their children. This is the major reason good students are as common as crickets in some communities but rare specimens indeed in other communities. We use the term “intelligent” to describe children who perform well on standardized tests. In doing so, we fail to appreciate the extent to which good test results are socially produced by families and communities. Just as important, we also fail to recognize that tests measure only certain kinds of intelligences. Charles Darwin’s son observed that Darwin used to say of himself that he “was not quick enough to hold an argument with anyone” (Francis Darwin, quoted in Baker 1974: 447). Darwin might have thought slowly, but he clearly thought well. Among other qualities, tests measure the ability to solve problems quickly, check answers and not guess, eliminate obviously wrong answers, and stay calm under pressure. These qualities would be better described as test-taking abilities than as dimensions of intelligence. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg (1988) argues, intelligence might be better thought of as the capacity to plan, analyze and solve problems, and execute on solutions. Some of these abilities can be demonstrated on paper-and-pencil tests, but the true test is what people do in the real situations they face in life. A convincing underlying idea of intelligence includes a great many qualities that tests do not even attempt to measure—for example, the ability to change behavior to respond to challenging new situations, the ability to accurately judge the costs and benefits of different courses of action, the ability to read people and respond appropriately, the ability to express oneself forcefully and persuasively, and perhaps most important, the capacity to think deeply and creatively about problems and situations. These kinds of intelligences can be very relevant to life success, but they have little or no relation to doing well on timed paper-and-pencil tests. Thus, although many people are conditioned to think of tests as measuring intelligence, this label is not completely appropriate. What tests do measure are kinds of intelligences and personal qualities that are particularly relevant to contemporary school systems, because schools, like tests, reward quickness, answer checking, calm nerves, and a good storehouse of cultural knowledge (Block and Dworkin 1976). It is worth noting here that fairness has become a particular sensitivity for educators, one that might have created a new set of blinders. Educators worry that they are overlooking students who would be successful with the right combination of nurturance and firmness and that they are too prone to see talent in the faces and actions of students who remind them of themselves. This can be inhibiting. Anthony Smith, the former president of Magdalen College at Oxford University, put it this way: In the realm of sport we accept without question the need to identify and train those individuals who can demonstrate an innate superiority over others—while insisting that the opportunity to become thus singled out be made available to all. But in the realm of education we are not confident as to whether it is right to pluck out the innately excellent from the crowd, nor even how to define those qualities of mind and perhaps, too, of personality that might constitute excellence. (Smith 2006: 7)





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It is possible that educators’ willingness to promote academic excellence vigorously declines as their concerns about fairness expand. The problems with social reproduction theory are equally impressive. In its concern with showing that the educational deck is stacked against members of all subordinate groups, social reproduction theorists often neglect important differences among these groups in the resources they hold and the types of hostilities they face; important differences in the institutional structures they encounter, from family expectations to labor market biases; and important differences in the adaptive strategies they develop for making the best of their circumstances. Indeed, not all social inequalities are reproduced through schooling. It is true that lowincome people and members of some minority groups face long odds in the school system, but what of another group that remains highly disadvantaged in many parts of the world: women? In most countries in the industrialized world (and a few in the developing world), young women’s educational attainment surpassed that of young men in just one generation, between the 1950s and the 1980s (Jacobs 1996). In the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, women are more successful in enrolling and persisting in college, and they achieve better grades than men (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). Moreover, subordinate groups do not all face the same set of conditions in schooling systems. Schools may bear considerable responsibility for maintaining inequalities when they allow children to get past the first few grades without a solid basis in reading and writing (Farkas 1993) and when they employ tracking structures that contribute more to demoralization than to learning (Oakes 1985). But members of some subordinate groups enter schools that aim to equalize opportunities—schools, for example, in which tracking is de-emphasized and resources are directed toward those who need them. Strong, wellfocused school systems are more equalizing institutions than they are institutions that increase inequalities. Learning gaps between groups, for example, tend to shrink during the school year and grow during the summer months (Downey, Von Hippel, and Broh 2004). Yet some schooling structures can reinforce or even exacerbate inequalities. The view of schooling and inequality developed in this chapter is based on examining the interplay of group circumstances and institutional structures. The chapter concentrates on groups (or, more accurately, social categories) rather than on individuals, because larger structural patterns are most evident when groups are the unit of analy­ sis. Group circumstances include the resources members of groups bring with them to school and the prevailing definitions of the group’s place in society. Resources can be cultural (for example, valuable knowledge or predispositions toward knowledge), social (valuable network ties), economic (wealth and income), and in some societies also political (for example, membership in ruling parties). Institutional structures include school tracking structures, labor market structures, and government policies (like compensatory programs for the disadvantaged) that are related to the reduction or persistence of inequalities. In addition, this view looks at human beings as actively developing strategies to improve their circumstances. Through their adaptive strategies, groups and their individual members can over time come to identify with the values of the schooling system—or to develop alternative pathways into the occupational structure.



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Academic ability

Social environment Inequalities in school-based selection Government policies

Adaptive strategies Structures of schooling

Figure 7.1  Factors affecting the development of educational inequalities

Figure 7.1 shows the factors that contribute most to explaining inequalities in schoolbased selection. Each of the factors ideally requires careful attention, but this chapter will not be able to address all five completely. In particular, I have little more to say about academic aptitudes (which nearly all researchers now consider to be codetermined by heredity and environment), and I only touch here on the important subject of how government policies can affect educational inequalities. (I discuss the topic of school reform policies at greater length in Chapter 9.)

three major bases of inequality The first step is to think about what people from different backgrounds bring to the schools, and the best place to start is with groups on either side of the most important social divides. Three major bases of social inequality are social class, race-ethnicity, and gender. Immigration status is another important base of social inequality. I discuss it in the section on race and ethnicity, because immigrant status is best seen as relevant for understanding the relationship of racial-ethnic minorities to schooling. Religion can be an important social divide as well, but it too is often entangled with social class and ethnicity, and for the purposes of this book it is most important as an institutional influence when it leads to the creation of schools run by religious authorities outside the public system or when it encourages distance from the secular culture of the schools. Social class, race-ethnicity, and gender are not fateful to the same degree for educational attainment. The specific circumstances of subordinate groups bear on their success or





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failure in school. These group circumstances are based on the resources and experiences the group brings to schooling and how positively or negatively the group is viewed by the larger society. Public schooling is a system that requires and rewards academic commitments and academic performance. Thus, the group resources and experiences that are most directly important to success in school are cultural resources, attitudes about schooling, and motivational follow-through. Beneath these immediate influences usually lie deeper layers of economic and social support or economic and social disorder. Society’s attitudes are also important, because they influence how subordinate groups are treated by dominant groups. High levels of social distance, which make it very difficult for members of a subordinate group to succeed, are at work in all societies with rigidly structured class, racial-ethnic, or gender divisions of labor. Social distance is communicated in many ways—from parents telling children that “he’s not the kind of boy you want to be friendly with” or “girls don’t do that” to teachers subconsciously lowering their expectations for members of subordinate racial and ethnic minority groups. Frequently, members of the subordinate group experience feelings of inadequacy—in some cases high levels of anger and resentment—as a response to the majority group’s expressions of social distance and prejudice. These two underlying factors—group resources and societal definitions of the group’s place in society—vary from group to group and society to society. In fact, research shows that students from lower socioeconomic classes are nearly always disadvantaged in schooling; racial and ethnic minorities are sometimes even more disadvantaged than members of native-born working classes but are also sometimes not disadvantaged at all; and, at least in many affluent societies, girls tend to be more successful than boys in schooling, though labor market disadvantages for women persist. For these reasons, I characterize social class as a constant divide, race and ethnicity as a varying divide, and gender as a declining divide. See Table 7.1.

Social Class: The Constant Divide Socioeconomic advantages are based on the distribution of wealth, income, and prestige in society. These are the most valuable resources a society has to distribute, and they can be leveraged into additional advantages in position and opportunity. All societies distribute these social status and economic resources unequally, and social class is consequently the most durable and consistent social structural influence on educational inequality. As indicated in Chapter 6, there are several ways to measure socioeconomic advantages. They include occupational status, social class location, and economic resources. In many areas of life, wealth and income are the key resources of inequality. They allow people, for example, to buy houses in neighborhoods surrounded by other wealthy people and thereby gain important contacts and the admiration of others who cannot afford to live in these neighborhoods. At the same time, studies suggest that parental education and, to a lesser extent, parental occupation are the features of socioeconomic status that matter most for children’s school performance and attainment. It is parents’ own knowledge and past success in school—plus their ability and motivation to pass on knowledge and habits for



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schools and social selection: inequality T a b l e 7. 1 Key Social Divisions in Relation to Educational and Employment Opportunity

Basis of inequality

Characterization

Indicators

Social class

Constant divider

Race/ethnicity

Varying divider

Gender

Declining divider

Worldwide advantage to upper-class/upper-income students in educational attainment Worldwide advantage to upper-class/upper-income students in adult occupational and income attainments Lower-than-average educational achievement of highly subordinated minorities (i.e., those experiencing legal or social discrimination for generations, including involuntary migrants and conquered peoples) Limited differentiation by the third generation for most migrating ethnic groups Higher-than-average educational and occupational attainment by the second generation for skilled, commercially oriented, or book-centered groups Decided female advantage in overall educational attainment and achievement throughout the industrialized world Continuing female disadvantage in some physical science and mathematics fields in the industrialized world but not in all developing countries Evidence of slowly declining gender gap in leadership positions Continuing female disadvantage in labor market opportunities throughout the world

success—that matter most. A parent without a secondary school degree or much interest in education might be able to buy a computer or mobile device for her children, but these are no substitute for daily usage of good grammar and advanced vocabulary, discussion of books, and help with computational skills that a more educated parent can provide. Social class and educational advantages. I use the terms “social status” and “socio­ economic status” (SES) interchangeably to cover the resources (educational, occupational, and economic) that differentiate locations in hierarchies of power and privilege. Students from more advantaged homes and neighborhoods are more likely to • have the economic resources to purchase instructional materials and educational services (e.g., computers, tutors, tuitions) that are not available to students whose parents have less money; • enter the schools with knowledge and values that encourage school success; • be surrounded by an atmosphere of parental knowledge about and active involvement in schooling; and • present themselves in ways that teachers associate with good students (e.g., standard, unaccented English; neat appearance; good manners; the tendency to ask questions and seek help rather than stay silent). These last points merit further discussion. However hard they may try to remain fairminded and clinical in their judgments, some schoolteachers and counselors do feel subconsciously more comfortable with students who look and sound like themselves. These feelings are based on status symbols—nice or worn clothes, good or poor grooming, deferential or boisterous manners—and sometimes unconscious biases as well. At the





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same time recent work in sociology suggests that after decades of diversity training, most schoolteachers have learned to treat students from different backgrounds quite similarly in class. The different fates of students from higher SES backgrounds is more often associated with the sense of agency higher SES parents bring to bear to improve the educational circumstances of their children through locating their homes in good school districts, seeking out the strongest teachers in the school, sharing knowledge about the school and its teachers, attending parent-teacher conferences, and volunteering in schools. Middleclass parents also coach their children to behave in ways that attract teachers’ attention— for example, by asking questions and seeking help rather than by remaining silent and trying to solve problems on their own (Calarco 2014). Speech can be an important influence. Teachers frequently make status associations on the basis of students’ use of proper grammar and wide vocabularies. These linguistic abilities are the products of class environments more than innate intelligence. Training for public speech is itself class conditioned. The sociolinguist Basil Bernstein (1961, 1975) emphasizes that middle-class and working-class speech patterns differ appreciably in the degree to which subject and object references are made explicit or left implicit. In public settings, middle-class speech tends to make all subjects and objects explicit. For example, a middle-class speaker would say, “The boy threw the ball through the window, and the window broke.” The working-class pattern leaves subjects and objects implicit. For example, “He threw it, and it broke.” In Bernstein’s terms, schools are built on the middle-class elaborated speech code rather than the working-class restricted speech code. Teachers often judge users of the restricted code to be less intelligent than users of the elaborated code. The public use of slang is also much more common in the speech of children from poor and working-class homes, as are dialects that create disconnections. Many students from low-income minority backgrounds can code switch, using ethnically preferred styles with peers and school-preferred styles in school, but not all care to do so. Others do not have the motivation or the skill to do so (Carter 2003, 2005; Paulle 2013). People from lower-status backgrounds often tend to be less comfortable interacting with authorities, including teachers. A study by the sociologist Annette Lareau (1987) reveals the power of some of these hidden advantages of social class. Lareau studied parents’ involvement with their children’s schooling in two communities. In the predominantly working-class community she studied, she found that parents were not much involved with their children’s educations, not because they did not care but because they were ashamed of their own weak academic skills (such as a limited vocabulary or poor spelling). They were also likely to defer to teachers as the experts. In the predominantly middle-class community she studied, on the other hand, the educational skills and occupational prestige of parents matched or surpassed those of their children’s teachers. Middle-class parents were not afraid to intervene on their child’s behalf—for example, to bring up problems in the classroom or to request particular teachers for the following year. They also had the necessary economic resources to manage childcare, transportation, and time off for meeting with teachers; hire tutors; and become intensely involved in their children’s schooling. Parents from higher and lower social class statuses have the



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same affection and concern for their children but different capacities for acting on these concerns in the ways that promote their children’s school success. Rungs in the ladder: Variation in class outlooks toward school. Class advantages and disadvantages set boundaries on ways of looking at the world and one’s place within it. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1979: chap. 3) referred to distinctive outlooks and forms of self-expression that arise out of recurring social circumstances as habitus. The insouciance and improvisational outlook of jazz musicians and the hunched shoulders and dogged determination of scholars can be seen as expressions of habitus insofar as they reflect the imprint of habitual practices in the conduct of a particular way of life. Bourdieu himself used the term most often to characterize recurring patterns of social class outlook and expression, which he saw as inculcated by families and reproduced over time under the influence of recurring social class conditions. Following Bourdieu, we can look at class habitus as an influence on the educational prospects of children. We must, however, temper Bourdieu’s tendency to overgeneralize. Quite a lot of variation exists among children from the same social class backgrounds, depending on their aspirations, their levels of intelligence, and their particular interests in life. Most of the very poor do not have the resources or the stability to treat schooling in a completely disciplined and attentive way. People who have grown up in relatively stable family circumstances fail to comprehend just how unstable life can be for Americans in the bottom fifth of family income. One of the most startling findings of a careful evaluation of one educational reform program in inner-city Milwaukee was that even the very highly motivated parents who enrolled their children in the program ended up moving at such a high rate (more than 50 percent changed schools from one school year to the next) that the impact of the program itself could not be truly evaluated (Witte, Bailey, and Thorn 1993). Bad nutrition, poor health, insecurity, and anxiety are common products of severely disorganized and stressful lives. So, too, following on their heels, are irregular effort, confusion, alienation, and defensive boredom. For the children of stably employed but low-paid workers, habitus encompasses a wider range of possibilities. The class habitus embraces both soldierlike conformity and hellraising rejection of authority. There are those who choose a conformist path but usually lack enough ease with intellectual materials to be considered promising scholars by their teachers; others who choose a path of rebellion, having “laffs” and engaging in small subversive acts at the schools’ expense; and still others who withdraw behind a vaguely resentful wall of silence (Willis 1979: 29; MacLeod 1987). The creation of an identity as a student is no mean task even for very able workingclass children if they have not been exposed to intellectual activity and high academic expectations in the home. Consider some of the hurdles that are involved in creating a good-student identity: successfully meeting difficult academic challenges, accepting labels (ambitious, smart) that may seem ill fitting, overcoming doubts, and negotiating the skepticism or outright hostility of friends and family who may see success in school as an act of abandonment or rejection. The writers Richard Hoggart (1957) and Richard Rodriguez (1982) have provided rich portraits of working-class scholarship boys who soak up knowledge like a sponge and rack up awards for academic performance but have no





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sense of intimate connection to the works they so compulsively absorb. Many are tempted to give up the chase, and of course some do give it up (London 1979; Strauss 1959). Rodriguez eloquently describes the pain and pride upwardly mobile working-class children experience as they separate from family and community through immersion in school: Yes, my parents were proud. I knew it. But my parents regarded my progress with more than mere pride. They endured my early precocious behavior—but with what private anger and humiliation? As their children got older and would come home to challenge ideas both of them held, they argued before submitting to the force of logic or superior factual evidence with the disclaimer, “It’s what we were taught to believe.” These discussions ended abruptly, though my mother remembered them on other occasions when she complained that our “big ideas” were going to our heads. More acute was her complaint that the family wasn’t close anymore, like some others she knew. Why weren’t we close, “more in the Mexican style”? (Rodriguez 1982: 605)

Moving up the social ladder, we can observe the habitus of the children of organization men and women. Students from these middle-management families exhibit more frequent and more accomplished conformity with institutional expectations, a matterof-fact, businesslike approach to institutional life. Habits of regular behavior learned in the family allow an easier negotiation of school demands, and higher parental expectations about schoolwork create an atmosphere of support for good performance in school. Children are able to balance their needs for a degree of spontaneity with the demands of formal organizations. Relatively few students at this social level may be truly intellectually oriented, but most will be able to perform up to an acceptable academic standard because schools and teachers value regular effort and good organizational habits (including loyalty to the goals of the organization). In this stratum, students from professional and academic families with high levels of cultural capital (esoteric and refined knowledge valued by authorities) will usually be encouraged to engage with the intellectual side of schooling more than students from families whose heads of household have organizational authority and financial resources but relatively little cultural capital (Bourdieu 1973). At the top of the class structure, many children will have the resources and confidence to see themselves not just as vessels to be filled with knowledge but as active participants in the employment of people and projects, capable of using knowledge for their own purposes (Cookson and Persell 1985; Gaztambibe-Fernandez 2009). They learn to advance their interests in an assertive way and to act on the school world as much as they are acted on by it. Here students may see themselves as colleagues of the teacher in the quest to understand and use knowledge. The upper professional classes are the natural incubators of students who have creative interests, whether in the arts or sciences. For less academically inclined upper-class children, the class outlook also embraces a path of withdrawal from serious engagement with the school and, instead, immersion in personal projects and cultivation of social contacts in preparation for making an impact on the world (Khan 2011). Of course, these are just sketches, and many shades of variation exist within social classes. But class defines the circumference of alternatives. It is very possible to be a



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 Preparing for Power  The Saint Grottlesex private preparatory schools in New England are the most prestigious private secondary schools in the United States. They include such famous names as Saint Mark’s, Saint Paul’s, Saint George’s, Groton, and Middlesex Schools. These schools, and those like them, have been the core of the elite tradition in the United States. The families of as many as 40 percent of each school’s students have been for generations listed in the Social Register, the arbiter of elite social status in the United States. Other students come from newer generations of intellectually or economically prominent families. The schools were founded, many in the 1880s and 1890s, explicitly to reinforce the dominance of an old-money upper-class culture socially and geographically separate from the newly rich arrivistes of the Gilded Age. In their classic study of selective private boarding schools, Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell (1985) found that these schools are designed, above all, to socialize high-achieving students, many of whom come from upperclass backgrounds, for future positions of power. With their emphasis on character-building activities, challenging assignments, demands for creative engagement, and encouragement of self-reflection and intellectual debate, these schools provide a quality of educational experience that few public high schools can approach. Cookson and Persell refer to the schools as “status seminaries” (1985: 22). Students are required to read deeply and widely, learn to interpret from a variety of angles, and see knowledge as something that they could use themselves for practical purposes. Students are encouraged to build facilities, write plays, and apply ideas to controversial public policy issues. Students are constantly set against star athletes, writers, and orators in competitions for extracurricular glory. Famous graduates, from presidents on down, come to visit, so that students can be close enough to touch power and personally observe the manners and attitudes of the powerful. And the schools provide resources for a wide range of educational experiences: from field trips to see the greatest works of the Italian Renaissance to internships with think tanks. Even the landscape and architecture at these schools are designed to give students a sense of being in a special and exalted place: Andover students can read in the wood-paneled Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, look at works by American artists such as Eakins, Homer, and Whistler in the Addison Gallery or just relax in the Cochran Sanctuary, sixty-five acres of landscaped beauty which includes a brook, two ponds, and natural wild areas as well as manicured lawns and flower beds of rhododendron and laurel. (Cookson and Persell 1985: 45)

The connection between beautiful surroundings, power, and high expectations is not lost on students. One headmaster reported the following statement





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from one of his charges, “This school requires quality in what I do, because I have leaded glass windows in my bedroom” (Cookson and Persell 1985: 48). Shamus Khan’s (2011) ethnography of one of the most famous of the schools, Saint Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, finds many similarities and a few differences from the period studied by Cookson and Persell. The student population is more diverse and more international than before. In addition to women and students of color the school welcomes openly gay students—something that would not have been possible a generation before. Khan finds a strong emphasis on meritocracy at Saint Paul’s—it is not who you are but what you do that counts in the eyes of teachers and administrators. Nevertheless, a divide exists between those who are the hardest workers at Saint Paul’s—often women and international students—and those who have come as legacy students. The ease of the legacy students allows them to traverse social boundaries and make connections in ways that the technically adept do not easily manage. The new elite, Khan writes, learn to navigate a more diverse world and one in which high and popular culture intermix. Criticism that prep school background gives an advantage in elite college admissions has encouraged the schools to focus ideologically on merit, but below the surface the advantages of birth into powerful families persist.

working-class conformist, dutifully following the teacher’s directions, or a working-class rebel, flouting the middle-class pieties of schooling. But it is very nearly impossible to adopt the outlook of the organizational careerist or that of the aesthete, because these outlooks are not found frequently enough within the milieus of most working-class students to serve as models. During the course of schooling, there are literally dozens of ways to disengage from the schools’ demands for performance. The great majority of students do fall away from the demands of schools, either early or late in their careers. Social class influences the rate at which these disengaging behaviors are expressed. People with fewer resources for succeeding in school tend to express them early in their school careers. These patterns of disengagement include frequent daydreaming, frequent expressions of anxiety in performance situations, rejection of curricular materials outside a narrow sphere of interest, interpreting the classroom primarily as a stage for comic antics, and emphasizing social relationships as the only important feature of school life. Other patterns of disengagement are class conditioned in a more essential way. Self-protective, sometimes truculent defiance in the face of an unfamiliar academic culture is more common among the working classes and the poor, and feelings of intellectual superiority to the grinding routines and rituals of school are more common in the upper classes. Schools reward forms of cultural capital that replicate the knowledge structures embedded in curricula (as well as the conforming conduct that assures teachers that their



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authority is recognized and valued). Nondominant forms of cultural capital also exist. These nondominant forms provide status resources for those whose culture is not accepted by schools. For working-class Southern boys, knowledge of stock car racing, hunting, and country music can provide status resources in peer groups (Milner 2016: 149). For low-income African American youth, nondominant forms of cultural capital may include knowing the latest slang terms, rap artists, dance steps, and styles of dress in African American popular culture. In many cases nondominant forms of cultural capital provide advantages with peers but create distance from the dominant forms of cultural capital valued by schools (Carter 2003, 2005; Paulle 2013). Those who can code switch between dominant and nondominant forms of cultural capital can gain status with both peers and teachers, but this is a tough balancing act and one that can easily lead to ostracism by peers who are uninterested in identifying with the cultural capital prized by schools. Worldwide evidence of social class effects. Styles differ, but class advantages and disadvantages are very much the same the world over. Even socialist regimes did not succeed in integrating the poor equally into their schooling systems. The political scientist Walter Connor (1979) examined several obstacles to mobility through education in the former Soviet Union, a state ostensibly devoted in principle to promoting the interests of workers and peasants. He found that the children of the peasantry were disadvantaged in a number of ways: • Peasant children lacked the heat in their bedrooms that would allow uninterrupted study. • Peasant children were less often disciplined for poor school performance. • Educated adult role models were absent. • The interests of fellow students did not facilitate academic involvements. • Peasant schools were poor in resources. • Work competed for students’ attention. • Teachers were less able and experienced because of the low status of peasant schools. • Stipends in higher education were inadequate, and students from families that could not supplement the stipends often had to take extra jobs (Connor 1979: 207–11). In other words, class mattered, even in a place like the Soviet Union where it was ideologically impermissible for class to matter. The magnitude of the problems faced by the lower classes varies from one country to the next, but the types of problems are not fundamentally different. Differences in class circumstances nearly always lead to differences in school-related background knowledge, attitudes about schooling, and motivation in relation to schooling. As I show in Chapter 6, class differences in educational attainment have narrowed over time in industrialized societies, but children from upper-status groups nevertheless retain an advantage in transitions to the highest levels of schooling where credentials matter most. Communities and families as mediators of class. Clearly, not all people in the same social class face exactly the same circumstances of life. The rhythms and patterns of life





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vary greatly, for example, between urban and rural workers. Because their environment demands greater efficiency and organizational ability, urban working people in virtually every society acclimatize better to the schooling system than do farmworkers. In addition, schooling is more relevant for urban occupations than for rural occupations, and urban schools are often better supported and better organized than rural schools. Children in rural areas are more often engaged in labor to support their families (Ersado 2005; Hannum 2003). For these reasons, the lowest rates of school completion and the lowest test scores are typically found in rural areas (UNDP 2014: 63–64). Community social context also matters. In high-poverty areas, the lack of family and community stability spills over into the style of interactions that are distinctive in the schools. Schools in these communities are highly volatile environments in which gang members often rule the corridors (and, without saying much, also most of the classrooms). Teachers have trouble maintaining control in these classrooms; some students are in near-constant motion, and others are easily provoked into verbal disruption. In some high-poverty schools, teachers can teach only 15 minutes at a time, or what amounts to one full day a week. In these classrooms, which so mirror the instability and violence of poor communities, school is stressful and draining for students and teachers alike (Anyon 1997; Paulle 2013). The working-class child attending school in a generally affluent community can  receive the cultural benefits of the locale regardless of his or her family’s economic situa­ tion (Fischer et al. 1996: 83). These children are placed in an environment that expresses a higher value on good school performance than most predominantly working-class schools do. It is not surprising that graduation and college attendance rates are higher for working-class students who attend predominantly middle-class schools (McDill, Meyer, and Rigby 1967; Fischer et al. 1996). Conversely, children living in a neighborhood marked by concentrated poverty are more likely to associate with peers who are uninterested in school and therefore to become themselves uninterested in school, both because of the models of status in the community and because of patterns of differential association (Wilson 1987: chap. 2). A wide range of research indicates that the socioeconomic composition of schools matters for the trajectories of students (see, e.g., Palardy 2013). Finally, family structures related to social class, but not the direct product of social class, also make a difference. Children whose parents are unmarried, separated, or divorced are more common in lower-SES neighborhoods, as are unstable families. Children from single-parent and unstable households face emotional and financial hazards that other children do not face. Most studies find that living in a one-parent household (particularly a single-father household) has at least a small negative effect on children’s grades, attendance, and behavioral adjustment to school (Biblarz and Raftery 1999; Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson 1997). Many families in tight economic circumstances are tempted to choose the most promising child as the family star and invest more heavily in this child’s education (Conley 2004). Style of life also matters greatly. Children from hard-living or unstable families typically lack family structures that correspond to the order and behavioral control expected in schools. Their homes are more full of drama and conflict than others and may lack regular routines. It is not surprising that children from these families



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can experience greater challenges adapting to the orderly environment of the school (Coe, Davies, and Sturge-Apple 2016).

Race and Ethnicity: The Varying Divide Racism can be defined as unequal treatment of a subordinate group by a dominant group on the basis of skin color.2 Racism has been a feature of Western societies for more than 500 years, since the time of first contact between explorers from Spain and England and the technologically undeveloped native peoples of the New World. In the United States racism was once built into law, with African Americans counting for less than whites in the Constitution, being prevented from attending the same schools as whites, and barred from marrying whites. Racial laws have been prevalent in other societies as well, including Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid. For the most part the days of legally enforced racism are now over, but de facto racism continues in many societies. In racist societies, contacts between majority and minority groups are rare, and relations between groups are marked by (often unspoken) prejudices and fears. The African American sociologist W. E. B. DuBois identified the color line as the major social problem of the 20th century (DuBois [1903] 1995). It remains one of the major problems of the 21st century. Race has been the most obvious social divide and race relations the cause of the most troubling problems in American society. Native Americans were subjugated by whites and have lived largely outside white society on tribal reservations. In the South, blacks were denied formal education before the Civil War and then allowed only in schools that were poorly funded and rigidly segregated (Walters, James, and McCammon 1997). Circumstances for blacks in the North were not much better. The power and confidence of one group seems closely tied to the poverty and dissatisfaction of others. Racial disparities in education, occupation, and especially income and wealth continue to be profound. Ethnicity is a more difficult identity to define than race and one that is less stable over time. It consists of the ensemble of distinctive cultural practices that identify a group with a common ancestral location or some other tie, such as religious identity, that binds the group together as a cultural entity. Jews, for example, are both a religious group and an ethnicity. They worship together, but they also share a common history and community existence in other ways. This common history and community experience takes the form of distinctive variations in language, song, culinary preferences, style of interaction, and figures who inspire group pride. Members of the same ethnic group often feel a greater sense of comfort with fellow members than with those outside the ethnic group. Most groups that have migrated to their current home country from another location share ethnic group characteristics. People in the United States from Italian, Irish, Dominican, and Vietnamese backgrounds, for example, retain some ethnic group characteristics even as they may become highly assimilated by the third generation. Sociologically, race and ethnicity are intertwined but analytically separate. Blacks can be identified (in most cases) by skin pigmentation, creating the color line of which DuBois wrote, and they also share many ethnic characteristics that skin color may help perpetuate but are more directly connected to their common history and community existence.





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When a group’s identifiable physical characteristics (especially skin color) and distinctive cultural patterns intersect with distinct positions in the labor market, the opportunities for bigotry and discrimination by the majority group and incentives for separation from the majority by the minority group increase. (For more on the importance of skin tone, see Hersch 2006.) These factors also set the stage for backlash among members of majority groups when they perceive that once-disadvantaged minorities are making progress at their expense. At the same time, social scientists have become increasingly skeptical of the concept of race, because so much genetic variation exists within races and particularly because race is often used by bigoted people to make group differences seem more permanent and unalterable than they actually are. Sociologists are aware, too, that racial characterizations of groups vary over time and are therefore in large measure historical constructions. During the period of their peak immigration in the early 20th century, the Irish, for example, were often considered nonwhite by other Americans (Jacobson 1998). The Nazis considered the Jews a separate race, but now we think of Jews as members of a religious group and an ethnicity. For these reasons, many sociologists prefer to use the terms “majority group” and “minority group” to refer to people differentiated by power, physiognomic and skin pigment differences, and ethnocultural characteristics. I sometimes use these terms. However, because race is still firmly a part of everyday language, I also use the term “racial and ethnic minorities” at times. Racial and ethnic hostilities are in the news in many parts of the world—everywhere from Israel and Sudan to Paris and Hungary. Within nations, tensions typically arise from conflicts over employment opportunities. The demand for relatively cheap labor leads to higher levels of immigration of racial and ethnic minorities, but high levels of immigration can also contribute to interethnic competition and conflict. European societies once relatively homogeneous now have large populations of workers from Asia, Africa, and the Arab world, and the tensions between native-born and immigrant populations spike at various times. These spikes in conflict have structural roots in the unemployment or underemployment of native populations. Tensions flare under these conditions when immigrant populations grow, whether by refugees seeking political asylum or by migrants seeking economic opportunities. Anti-immigrant politicians raise the temperature by blaming immigrants for creating economic hardships or lack of safety. Religion can add a toxic mix to these social tensions when it inspires ideologically based interethnic violence, as it has in Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, and much of Western Europe. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that many people assume that race and ethnicity are the most important bases of social inequality. But this is not entirely true. Racial and ethnic differences can, at times, be more consequential than class differences (as they have been in the case of blacks and whites in the United States), but they can also be much less important than class differences (as they have been in the case of Asians and whites in the United States). If racial and ethnic differences were the most consistently important bases of social inequality, it would be hard to explain the great success of Cuban Americans and Korean Americans in the United States.



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Why do race and ethnicity matter so much in some cases and so little in others for a group’s ability to take advantage of schooling opportunities? The sociologist Stanley Lieberson (1961) argues that groups migrating voluntarily to a new land have strong incentives to assimilate into the culture of their new country. Although relations might very well be tense for a while with the majority group, in the long run the new group could expect to be integrated into the host society. By contrast, he argues, groups conquered by a technologically superior power are less likely to be assimilated easily, both because the majority group is unlikely to fully accept those it has conquered and because the colonized rarely accept their conquerors. In our own country, those groups that have suffered most at the hands of European settlers—conquered groups (the Native Americans) and once-enslaved peoples (the African Americans)—have been less completely assimilated into American society, including the schooling system, than groups that have voluntarily migrated. Lieberson’s theory explains quite a bit of variation in racial and ethnic relations across societies. However, it fails to take sufficient account of the power of restricted economic opportunities, exclusionary laws, and cultural prejudices. These forces can make even voluntary immigrants into social outcasts, resulting in the kinds of antagonisms Lieberson associates with conquest. Therefore, we should think as often of the social conditions groups currently face as of their original circumstances as conquered or voluntarily migrating peoples. Assimilation is typical for most groups by the third generation, but this is by no means a universal law (Waters 1990; Waters and Jimenez 2005). Those who are restricted in becoming citizens or who experience high levels of residential segregation and discrimination in the labor market may remain highly separate into the third generation (Alba and Foner 2015). A typical story for immigrant minorities—true for groups like the Mexicans in the United States, the Algerians in France, and the Turks in Germany—is that parents with very limited educations migrate for economic reasons. Parents who have not had much education themselves are unable to provide guidance to their children about expected behaviors in school or how to do homework assignments. The language of the home country is the dominant language spoken in the home, leaving children with a linguistic mismatch relative to the majority group. In many cases these linguistic deficiencies persist throughout the period of formal schooling. The children stand out because they look different from the majority and may also practice a different religion than the majority. These differences contribute to isolation from native-born students and at least some degree of social distance from teachers. Culturally disadvantaged immigrant students need more attention in the classroom, but instead they usually receive less attention (Alba and Foner 2015: 192). Knowing the language of colonizers can be an advantage for immigrants. This inheritance helps explain the relatively faster rate of assimilation and greater school success of Antillean and Surinamese children in Dutch schools relative to children of Moroccan and Turkish origins and of the similar relatively strong performance of Indian and Afro-Caribbean children in British schools relative to immigrants from outside the English-speaking world (Alba and Foner 2015: 184, 186). By contrast, bilingualism has





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been shown to be a factor conducive to the school success of upwardly mobile Hispanic students. Students who speak both Spanish and English seem to have an easier time in school than students who speak Spanish only or English only. This is perplexing, since English is the official language. However, the research suggests that bilingual students have a wider range of potential contacts for information and help. They can receive help from Spanish-dominant and English-dominant speakers (Rumberger and Larson 1998). Having to negotiate between two languages may also have some cognitive benefits. The brain develops greater plasticity when it is required to think in more than one language. The same positive findings for Spanish-English bilingualism seem to apply to other ethnic groups as well, as long as both languages are strongly supported in the family (Portes and Hao 1998). The special situation of caste-like minorities. Few people believe that Korean Americans or Cuban Americans are as disadvantaged in the United States as African Americans. The first two groups rank near the top of average incomes—higher than whites from English ancestry—the last near the low end. Compared to other minorities, those who are most disadvantaged are restricted by employers to the lowest-level jobs in society, live in highly segregated communities cut off from the rest of society, and may be represented in the culture of the majority group as violent, unclean, greedy, promiscuous, unintelligent, or superstitious. In the West, these epithets have dogged the trail of minorities at least since the time of the expansion of the Roman Empire. One problem for members of these caste-like minorities is that no way of acting improves the judgment that members of the majority group make of them. If they are agreeable, they are scorned as servile. If they are assertive, they are criticized as overbearing. If they are good-natured, they are regarded as fools. If they are cautious, they are condemned as untrustworthy. With the group’s increasing success in society, these responses change, although they often change in a very uneven and grudging way. Middle-class members of the group may be accepted, while lower-class members remain as ill-treated as before. Caste-like, or highly subordinated, minorities develop responses to their situation that are characteristically different from those of less poorly treated minorities. They frequently reject the legitimacy of the institutions of the dominant groups and emphasize solidarity among themselves. Members of these groups often develop a sense of themselves as victims and outcasts. Because they are denied status in the terms valued by the larger society, men from these groups, in particular, frequently develop an alternative status system based not on respectability but on reputation for eye-catching behavior. The anthropologist Margaret Gibson captures some of the dimensions of reputation in her ethnography of a highly subordinated group on one of the Caribbean islands she studied: You earn a reputation by how well you talk, by how tough you are, by your willingness to fight even if you lose, by how successful you are with women, by the dollars in your pocket and your willingness to spend them, and by your ability to lead others, no matter the direction. (Gibson 1991: 180–81)

As a consequence, high levels of criminal activity and apathy are usually found among highly subordinated minorities, reinforcing the majority group’s low opinion of them.



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Highly subordinated minorities are found in many societies besides the United States. They include West Indians in Britain; Turks in Germany; Maoris in New Zealand; Burakumin, Okinawans, and Koreans in Japan; Roma in the Czech Republic; Arabs and Oriental Jews in Israel; and the Irish in Great Britain (Ogbu 1978; Fischer et al. 1996: 192). Consider the following characterization: Members of [this] minority, many of whom were brought to the country as slave labor, are at the bottom of the social ladder. They do the dirty work, when they have work. The rest of the society considers them violent and stupid and discriminates against them. Over the years, tension between minority and majority has occasionally broken out in deadly riots. In the past, minority children were compelled to go to segregated schools and did poorly academically. Even now minority children drop out of school relatively early and often get into trouble with the law. Schools with many minority children are seen as problemridden, so majority parents sometimes move out of the school district or send their children to private schools. And, as might be expected, the minority children do worse on standardized tests than majority children do. (Fischer et al. 1996: 172)

Who are they? They are Koreans in Japan, members of the same group that disproportionately number among the top achievers in the United States (Lee 1991). Members of caste-like minorities invariably perform less successfully in school than do other minorities. Although the available data are not perfectly comparable, in every case reported these groups show a pattern of limited effective commitment to schooling, low test scores, and low levels of educational attainment (Fischer et al. 1996: 191–94; cf. Downey 2008 for the case of African Americans in the United States). Frequently, these outcomes are taken by members of the majority group as evidence of the minority group’s intellectual inferiority. However, the more fundamental causes are typically grounded in social relations. The restricted economic opportunities of these groups discourage a sense that schooling is a bridge to future possibilities. Residential segregation fosters isolation from more advantaged groups and a differentiation of attitudes from the majority. In the United States, residential segregation by income has increased over time (Bischoff and Reardon 2014). And stigmatized identities can create feelings of resentment and alienation from the authority structures of the larger society, including the schools. Some voluntary immigrants, who express the expectation that the new host society will provide better economic opportunities, also develop a high level of separateness from the host society, because they experience discrimination when they arrive and because they emphasize religious or cultural practices that maintain the group’s separate identity and status. For this reason, the alienated culture of caste-like minorities can develop even when migration is entirely voluntary, as appears to be the case among many Muslims in contemporary Western European societies. While they give strong verbal endorsement of schooling as a way of getting ahead, Muslim youth often exhibit “very weak . . . attitudes, efforts, and persistence supporting the . . . pursuit of school success” (Merry 2005: 20). Gradual improvement in the circumstances of members of caste-like minority groups does occur in more open, pluralist societies, as the cases of African Americans in the United States, Oriental Jews in Israel, and even Koreans in Japan demonstrate. But improvement





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often requires a very high level of commitment by both the government and leaders in the minority communities. Only a few societies have succeeded in approximating full multiethnic integration and equality. Most of these societies are found in Latin America, where racial mixing (originally through force during the period of conquest), a history of class-based politics that has at times propelled minorities forward, and the humanistic philosophy of the Latin American Catholic Church have all played a role in reducing racial stratification (van den Berghe 1970: chaps. 2, 3, and 6). However, even countries, such as Brazil, with generally strong records of integration and intermarriage have not achieved full social equality between racial groups. The common experience of prejudice. Even in self-consciously pluralistic societies, immi­ grant groups experience prejudice and discrimination at first. The United States provides an example of long-term absorbing power combined with fierce short-term prejudice. The historical record shows that members of immigrant groups were regularly taunted by other children (and not infrequently by their teachers) for their foreign dress and manners and ridiculed for their unfamiliar accents. A memoir by the literary critic Alfred Kazin powerfully conveys the sense of strangeness that many immigrants felt and the anxiety induced in them by adult authorities (first represented by teachers and principals): It was never learning I associated with that school: only the necessity to succeed, to get ahead of the others in the daily struggle to “make a good impression” on our teachers, who grimly, wearily, and often with ill-concealed distaste watched against our relapsing into the natural savagery they expected of Brownsville boys. . . . It was not just our quickness and memory that were always being tested. Above all, . . . it was our character. . . . [T]he very sound of the word as our teachers coldly gave it out from the end of their teeth, with a solemn weight on each dark syllable, immediately struck my heart cold with fear—they could not really believe I had it. (Kazin 1951: 17, 20)

Members of new immigrant groups usually appear lacking not just in character but also in intellectual ability, a conclusion that IQ tests have been only too prone to validate. During World War I, for example, the average IQ score of U.S. enlisted men who were Polish immigrants or their children was 85—a full standard deviation below the population average (Sowell 1981: 9). These low test scores were more a function of unfamiliarity with the dominant language and culture than anything else. Men of Polish heritage now score above average on IQ tests. Nevertheless, in the first half of the 20th century, many teachers and school administrators stereotyped Polish and other Eastern European immigrants as dim-witted and fit only for manual labor. In later years, new immigrant groups, particularly those like Mexicans with limited English and darker skins, faced the same limitations in cultural resources, parents who could not help much with schoolwork because of overwork and limited English. And they faced the same pattern of educational discrimination: enrollment in less demanding schools, teachers who could not appreciate their circumstances or their latent abilities, and counselors who recommended that even the brightest students lower their sights to skilled blue-collar employments. American society embraces the ideas of cultural pluralism and equality of opportunity. To some degree, schools act on these beliefs by developing programs to encourage talented



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children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In addition, living standards are higher than in most other parts of the world. These factors may help explain why, in spite of high levels of residential segregation and limited labor market opportunities, blacks and Latinos in the United States do not express highly alienated attitudes toward schooling (AinsworthDarnell and Downey 1998; Downey 2008). Schooling is seen as a way out of crime-infested high-poverty areas. Faster-rising minorities. One important reason that race and ethnicity are properly characterized as a varying divide is that some immigrant groups become assimilated into host societies and move up the socioeconomic ladder faster than others. The success of fast-rising minorities is often attributed to their superior drive or intelligence. However, the truth is that members of these so-called model minorities typically come to their new country with advantages not enjoyed by other groups, and these advantages are more important than drive and intelligence (which are the products of success as much as the causes). Highly mobile groups almost invariably bring urban skills with them to their new country. Although they were very poor, most immigrant Jews, for example, were urban merchants or artisans. In more recent years, Cuban, Korean, and Indian immigrants have come largely from merchant and professional backgrounds. These types of immigrants are well prepared for an urban, commercial society; they bring habits of conduct and experiences that help them succeed (Steinberg 1981). They are used to the fast-paced, calculating urban life and high levels of organization typical of cities. By contrast, less mobile groups have typically come out of agrarian settings and traditional peasant cultures. This is true of Irish, Sicilian, Mexican, and African American immigrants. Cultures that celebrate study of the written word, sometimes for religious reasons, also help prepare children for success in schooling. By contrast, oral cultures, for all their glorious banter and song, provide a much less advantageous preparation (Sowell 1981). Keeping just these two factors in mind, it comes as no surprise that the mercantile, Torah-studying Jews were one of the faster-climbing groups in the American educational system or that the agrarian, storytelling Irish experienced a slow and difficult advance (Steinberg 1981; Sowell 1981). The sheer number of immigrants is another factor in explaining the variable rates of assimilation and advance among ethnic groups. Lieberson implies that prejudice unfurls like a flag with larger numbers of immigrants (Lieberson 1980: 368). The phrase Yellow Peril was coined in response to the large surge of Chinese immigration in the late 19th century, not the small Japanese immigration during the 1890s and early 1900s. Indeed, the groups that have had the most difficult time making their way in American society have been part of the largest immigrations. The nearly two million Irish who came to the United States between 1830 and 1860 were the largest immigrant group until the massive, four-million-person black migration from the South to the North in the 30 years between 1940 and 1970 (Sowell 1981: 211). In the United States, the immediate effects of very large immigrations have been to reduce the level of prejudice against earlier-arriving groups while intensifying opposition to the new group and placing it squarely at the bottom of the social ladder (Lieberson 1980).





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Some groups encourage behavior patterns that lead to greater success in schooling. Asian Americans are often characterized as a model minority, and their success has sometimes been used as a cudgel against other groups whose progress through schooling and in the labor market has been slower. Using ethnographic data from the Los Angeles region, the sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou (2015) placed the model minority image in context. Compared to other immigrant groups, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants have been highly educated and highly selected from their countries of origin. These preimmigration advantages include a success frame that strongly encourages school achievement and eventually working in one of four high-status fields: medicine, law, engineering, or science. According to Lee and Zhou, the emphasis on education is so strict that an A– grade is referred to as “the Asian F” by some Asian American families (2015: 56). Asian Americans may also be distinctive for the aid they provide to new immigrants. This aid consists, notably, on advice about how to navigate the U.S. educational system. In this way working-class members of these groups benefit from the knowledge gained by those with deeper roots in American society. Because Asian American students do often excel in the classroom, teachers think of them as superior students, creating a positive stereotype, which can enhance the performance of members of the group. Finally, the Asian emphasis on effort as more important than ability no doubt reinforces the practices and standards that lead to school success. Lee and Zhou focus on Chinese and Korean heritage students living in the Los Angeles area. They leave out Vietnamese, Thai, and Filipino immigrants whose school achievements are less impressive, raising doubts about the generalizability of the success story they want to tell about East Asian immigrants to the United States. A typical pattern for children from some Asian immigrant families is to study around the dinner table, with older children helping younger children. These patterns of intense cooperative learning continue into college, where Asian children often form study gangs, whose members organize their lives around common classes and shared academic goals (Miller 1995: 276). Chinese, Japanese, and Korean parents do more than have high aspirations for their children; they enforce practices and standards that permit these aspirations to be realized. Children are rewarded for strong academic performance and strictly controlled when their performance does not meet expectations. The consequences of Asian American commitment to school success are evident in measures of school performance. Our best data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests given annually in several subjects to national samples of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds. Asian Americans were too few to measure accurately in the early years of the test from the 1970s to the 1990s. Beginning in the 21st century their performance has consistently exceeded that of whites. Moreover, the Asian-white gap has been growing in 8th- and 12th-grade math (NAEP 2013). By contrast, relatively large gaps remain between the school performance of the most disadvantaged racial-ethnic groups in American society (African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans) and that of the more advantaged groups (whites and Asian Americans). When the tests began in the early 1970s African American and Hispanic students scored one standard deviation or more below white students, at all three age levels in both reading and math. This means that the average score of minorities was approximately at the level of the bottom third of



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whites. Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the achievement gap narrowed significantly; group differences closed by nearly one-half standard deviation at the younger grades and by only a little less than that at the upper grades (Whitehurst 2005). However, since then gaps have not closed appreciably. The one positive sign is that white-Hispanic gaps have continued to narrow in 8th-grade reading (NAEP 2013). These differences in performance carry over into college achievement. Asians are now more likely than whites to both enter and graduate from postsecondary institutions, while Hispanics and blacks continue to lag, particularly in graduation (Bailey and Dynarski 2011). Schools have become more attuned to ideas about ethnic pluralism than they once were, and they have introduced multicultural curricula in an effort to share the bounty of world culture and to make members of all groups feel welcome in school. These multicultural emphases in the curriculum seem, in fact, to help members of minority groups feel less alienated and improve the learning environment in schools—some argue they improve the learning environment for students from all groups (Zirkel 2008), but they do not solve the fundamental problems of racial and ethnic stratification. They may even allow a false sense of progress and avoidance of more important realities, such as the need for economic investment in minority communities, reduction of residential segregation, and creation of demanding cultures of academic achievement.

Gender: The Declining Divide For most of human history, women have had much less power than men. Their status was tied to the reproductive cycle and enforced by social expectations about women’s roles and, not infrequently, also by the physical strength of men (Blumberg 1984). Not until the 1820s and 1830s, with the upsurge of liberal and democratic ideals in Europe, were more than a few isolated public calls for women’s emancipation heard. Even though women made faster progress in the United States than elsewhere, through the 1950s they remained in a distinctly inferior, home-bound position and were often frustrated by the narrow circumferences of their lives (see, e.g., Friedan 1963). Given the long history of women’s subordination, it is amazing how much things have changed in a generation. Indeed, the changes have been so striking that we can fairly ask whether gender might become statistically irrelevant as a factor in social selection in most economically developed societies within the next quarter century. From a global perspective, women are in a particularly complex situation today. In societies where women continue to be kept out of the public arena, they have disadvantages comparable to lower-class groups. They may lack the economic resources, the social ties, and the cultural experiences to compete with men. Some societies restrict women almost completely to the private sphere of family life. By contrast, middle- and upper-middleclass women in more gender-equal societies have the cultural background to navigate their way in society. They are increasingly developing the economic clout and supportive social ties that help as well. In their performance as students, women may even enjoy some distinct advantages, owing in part to the concern with culture and social relationships that are part of traditional feminine roles. Yet a couple of distinct disadvantages of gender





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also continue to exist. Most important, women can be physically identified by appearance and are therefore relatively easy to discriminate against when discrimination has heightened advantages for dominance-seeking males. Patriarchal versus gender-progressive societies. Differences in women’s situations de­ pend most on whether they live in patriarchal or gender-progressive societies. Patriarchies are societies in which men dominate more or less completely. Women are excluded from the public and business life of the society and are restricted to the family circle. Their main role is procreation and child-rearing. In patriarchal societies, stereotypes about women’s incompetence in male spheres abound, and men can get away with using physical force in their relations with women. Although elements of patriarchy remain in every society, some societies have minimized these elements considerably over the past several generations. In most of these countries, women’s educational parity is relatively recent. An exception is the United States, where women reached parity with men in secondary school and college attendance beginning in the late 19th century, partly because of the high female enrollment in teacher training colleges (Jacobs 1995). By contrast, Germany and the countries geographically and culturally close to Germany (Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland) remained notably unequal with respect to women’s opportunities in higher education and, to a lesser degree, in secondary education. Gender inequality in education was the norm to an even greater degree in the most developed countries of East Asia (Japan and Korea). Factors that have led to the eclipse of patriarchy include the demographic transition toward having fewer children, typical of families following industrialization, and the technological advances that allow women to better control their fertility. They also include the rising expectations that come with women’s participation in the paid labor force and with their increasing levels of formal education (Huber and Spitze 1983). A self-reinforcing cycle occurs: as women’s child-rearing demands decline and their contributions to family income increase, their power in family decision making and the allocation of household tasks increases (Gerson 1985; Wolfe 2013). Effective organization is another important reason for the changing circumstances of women. Encouraged by the broader social changes, women’s organizations have lobbied effectively to change negative stereotypes, improve women’s opportunities in the workforce, and expand legal protection against male violence (see, e.g., Stromquist 1993). The defining characteristics of patriarchy are still very much evident in the poorer countries of the Middle East, in many East Asian societies, in South Asia, and in most of Africa. On the other hand, the United States, the other Anglo-American democracies, Western Europe, and most Latin American societies can be considered gender progressive or at least markedly less patriarchal. Gender discrimination has not entirely disappeared from these societies, but parity has been reached in some important spheres of social life, and the overall climate for women is no longer suffused with the assumptions of male power and control. Patriarchal and gender-progressive societies show clear differences in how much educational opportunity women can expect. In the developing world, the largest disparities in the educational enrollments of men and women have historically been found in



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sub-Saharan Africa; the South Asian societies of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; and Muslim societies in North Africa and the Middle East. The disparities were smallest in Latin America (Stromquist 1989). In the mid-2010s, of 164 reporting countries, gaps of 10 percent or more in boys’ and girls’ secondary school attendance were found in 36 countries, or nearly one-quarter of those reporting. Of these, 16 were sub-Saharan African countries, 10 were Muslim North African or Middle Eastern countries, and 5 were Eastern or South Asian countries. India trailed the pack with gaps of 30 percent between girls’ and boys’ secondary school attendance; Afghanistan and Iraq were not far ahead of India (UNDP 2015). Gender gaps in postsecondary attendance and completion are not wide in the Middle East, but two of the world’s most populous countries, China and India, continue to show wide gender gaps in higher education. Women’s university enrollments are well under 50 percent in both countries. Discriminatory practices, such as requiring markedly higher test scores for women, have recently been introduced in China to limit women’s enrollment in higher education (Tatlow 2012). The Islamic world represents a study in contrasts. On the one hand, gender equity in schooling has been reached in some of the oil-rich and Western-oriented Persian Gulf States, such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UNDP 2015). In Kuwait more women than men are enrolled in higher education, and women are overrepresented even in science and engineering fields (United Nations International Conference on Population and Development 1995). In Muslim-majority Indonesia, pre-Islamic cultural traditions have, until recently, encouraged gender relations that are more equitable and relaxed than those in the Gulf States. Some other Muslim countries, such as Turkey, are divided between urban middle-class settings, in which women’s relatively unfettered contact with the world is a given, and poorer urban and rural areas, in which highly gendered practices and prohibitions remain the norm. In traditionally religious Muslim countries, girls are sequestered at puberty, prohibited from contact with the opposite sex, and prepared for engagement and marriage to a chosen man. To symbolize their conformity to these traditions, girls begin wearing veils to shield their faces from men. This induction to the traditions of purdah, or female seclusion, leads, predictably, to early withdrawal from school (Shah and Eastmond 1977). Societal correlates of gender inequality. The work of Roger Clark has shed light on the forces that create and reinforce gender inequalities in the developing world. His 1992 study shows that countries with higher per capita incomes were more likely to have greater gender equality in schooling. As we have already seen, economic progress is strongly associated with conditions that make women’s lives less restricted. Countries with many ethnic groups generally had less gender equality, too, perhaps because it is politically difficult to extend educational opportunity when many ethnic groups are competing, in some cases violently, for preeminence. And for the countries studied, Islam showed up as a negative influence on gender equality in the countries where it was the dominant religion. By contrast, in the industrialized world a great deal more equality exists between men and women, and women on average outperform men in school. Indeed, in 2014 the proportion of women graduating with university degrees at the average age of graduation (up to age 30) was higher than the proportion of graduating men in each of the 30 reporting





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countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an organization of wealthy democracies (OECD 2014: table A3.1b). The proportion of women with university degrees has now surpassed men even in the traditionally male-centered German-speaking world and in East Asia (table A3.1b). About 140 women are enrolled as undergraduates in the United States for every 100  men. Women’s grades are higher than men’s in secondary school and college, and they are more likely to complete postsecondary degrees (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). Women also significantly outnumber men in universities in the European Union, partly because they are far more likely to finish upper secondary schooling and partly because their performance in secondary school is better on average (OECD 2011b). Women consistently outperform men on tests of verbal achievement, and they are not far behind, on average, on tests of mathematics achievement (OECD 2011b; DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). Indeed, many colleges and universities are experiencing a shortage of male applicants, and some college administrators have even talked openly about what amounts to affirmative action for men to maintain gender balance in admissions (see, e.g., Britz 2006). Much of the increased emphasis on sports in small colleges in the United States is directly related to the recruitment of male students. Girls study more, receive higher grades, and say they like school more than boys do. But  why? It almost certainly has little or nothing to do with innate ability. But it may have a lot to do with socialization. First, girls’ emphases on cooperative play and inter­ personal communication are well suited to classroom life, where a climate of order and civility rules. Competition, of course, is important in the classroom, but few boys expe­ rience academic competition in the same visceral way that they experience physical com­ petition. It is possible that girls’ skills in interpersonal communication help them be more effective in sharing valuable information about reading materials, assignments, and teacher expectations. Second, the capacity to concentrate and comply with authority may be a factor. To the extent that women are expected to enforce propriety in families, they are well trained for the propriety climate of school, where students’ willingness to comply with the teachers’ authority over long periods is one key to success (Michelson 1989). Indeed, in some countries, including the United States, the schools’ emphases on cooperation, communication, and compliance are considered effeminate by boys from working- and lower-class backgrounds. In these communities, boys who do well in school are ridiculed—labeled with the names of flowers or slang for female genitalia—while high-achieving girls avoid such censure (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). Where it exists, this social control boys impose on one another encourages the preeminence of girls in the educational sphere, as boys focus on upholding their reputations for aggressive masculinity outside the classroom (Gibson 1991; Morris 2012). Continuing forms of gender discrimination in schools. Although women now experience few barriers to educational access and advance, the research is less clear about whether women continue to experience disadvantages in how they are treated in schools. In both preschool and elementary school, boys show a more assertive style of speech and also take up more physical space (Martin 1998). Certainly, boys also often dominate the classroom in negative ways by requiring more disciplinary talk than girls do. On the playground



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boys occasionally invade the space of girls with impunity and can effectively label girls in pejorative ways when girls attempt to reclaim space (Thorne 1995: chap. 6; Morris 2012). Early studies of the climate for women in college classrooms showed that instructors were more likely to maintain eye contact with men, allow men to give longer answers in class, allow men to complete answers without interruption, nod and gesture in relation to men’s remarks, and amplify on men’s comments. It was even common in some classrooms for instructors to attribute remarks made by a woman to a man (Hall 1983; Wilkinson and Marrett 1985). The situation today is clearly very different. Reports of continuing discrimination against women, through exclusionary or demeaning micro-behaviors that lead women to feel uncomfortable in the classroom, are still heard at times, especially in science, math, and engineering classrooms. Few such reports are heard in arts, humanities, and the more interpretive social science fields, where women are in the majority and usually greatly outnumber men among the most engaged and active students. At the same time, one in four U.S. college women report that they have experienced unwanted sexual advances by men (Gross et al. 2006; Koss, Gidycz, and Wisniewski 1987). Even controlling for measured ability, gender remains a crucial element in choice of field of study. In the United States, some fields, such as art history, English, and psychology, are dominated by women, but women continue to be less represented in math, engineering, and physical science fields. Outside the United States, engineering is the most consistently male-dominated field. In no country reporting to UNESCO in 2010 were women even 50 percent of engineering graduates (see 2010 data in UNESCO’s UIS.Stat database, at http://data.uis.unesco.org). Worldwide, excluding engineering, the patterns are much less consistent in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. According to UNESCO data, women represent 50 percent or more of all science degrees in 20 countries of 86 reporting countries. Perhaps surprisingly, only one of these countries, Italy, can be counted among the most highly developed countries in the world. Instead, most of the countries with large proportions of women scientists and engineers were located in the Middle East or in Central and Eastern Europe. In most of the industrialized world, the  more math-oriented the field, the less female it tends to be. In the wealthy democracies that are members of the OECD, women, for example, make up only about one-third of math and computer science enrollments (OECD 2011b). This cannot be solely a story of men working to keep women out of remunerative fields. In the United States and many other developed societies, such remunerative fields as medicine, law, and business have all become gender equal over the past generation (though women remain overrepresented in nurturing subspecialties such as pediatric medicine and family law) (Jacobs 1995). The sociologist Maria Charles (2011) has made a provocative argument about the sources of these international differences, one that draws less on discrimination against women than on the contexts in which women choose whether or not to pursue science. In her view, advanced industrial societies encourage individual self-expression more than national development needs. When individual selfexpression is paramount, according to Charles, women feel greater freedom to “indulge stereotypically gendered selves” and choose occupations that are represented as appropriate and rewarding for women, even if they are less lucrative. In the face of some continuing





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male resistance and with the freedom to pursue stereotypically female alternatives, many women develop the view that they are not good in math-related subjects and not interested in them (OECD 2011b).3 Women, education, and work. Women remain highly disadvantaged in converting their educational achievements and credentials into high pay. At most educational levels in the United States, full-time working women earn on average about 82 percent of men’s earnings; roughly the same ratio holds for female and male PhDs as for female and male dropouts. This is actually a little better than women’s to men’s pay ratio in countries like Korea, Japan, and Germany, where male advantages have transferred from schooling to work. Indeed, the United States stands close to the middle of the pack in women’s to men’s pay among OECD countries (OECD 2011b). In no country do women earn on average as much as men (OECD 2011b). For men and women with tertiary degrees, field concentrations partly explain these differences in pay, but they obviously do not explain the differences at lower levels of education. Instead, the inequities in earnings reflect that occupations are more sex segregated than schools and that predominantly female occupations are poorly paid compared with predominantly male occupations (Charles and Grusky 2004; Reskin 1993). Some of the inequities also reflect the more interrupted work lives of women and their lesser chances of receiving specialized on-the-job training, which can perhaps be considered indirect consequences of male power. Most economists attribute the rest of the difference in the pay of men and women to the direct effects of discrimination (see, e.g., Osberg 1984: chap. 7; Goldin 1992). However, recent work suggests that gender convergence in pay would occur in the near future if all occupations were more flexible in the hours they required for work or the times those hours were committed (Goldin 2014). In the developing world, the gender gap in earnings is not consistent across studies, and different studies give conflicting evidence on regional and country variation. Fewer women work full-time outside the home in the developing world, but those who work fulltime do not invariably experience greater gaps in pay than are typical in the developed world. One study using World Bank household survey data found larger gaps in South Asia than in OECD countries and smaller gaps in the Middle East and parts of East Asia for full-time workers (Nopo, Daza, and Ramos 2011). Job-related discrimination appeared to be a larger influence for women with low levels of education and for women working part-time than it was for women with higher levels of education and full-time workers (Nopo, Daza, and Ramos 2011). These findings must be taken with several grains of salt. Better comparative data will be required before authoritative judgments can be made about women’s opportunities worldwide. Nevertheless, good reasons exist to believe that gender will become a less significant influence in the labor market in the future. In the first place, more and more jobs in postindustrial societies involve communication and consultation in service industries rather than heavy physical labor. Women are at least as well suited to these jobs as men. Moreover, as the pool of career-oriented women increases, men have more difficulty hiring and promoting men on grounds other than demonstrated competence. Women’s organizations and women’s support networks contribute to equalization of opportunity



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by continuing to challenge discrimination in an active way. International organizations such as the OECD and UNESCO have helped drive this agenda to equalize opportunities for women. As more women are promoted, men’s sensibilities change, however slowly and unevenly. Education is not yet as useful a stepping stone to well-paying jobs for women as it is for men, but it might very well become as useful by the time the next generation of girls reaches working age.

school organization and tracking structures If the circumstances of the groups and strata of which they are a part shape the educational experiences and trajectories of children, so too do the institutional structures of schooling. Therefore, an analysis of schooling and inequality cannot stop with an examination of students’ social circumstances or the attitudes of dominant groups toward subordinate groups. The institutional structures of schooling also affect educational inequalities. Among the institutional structures that have received the most attention from sociologists are the way resources are distributed between and within schools, the extent to which and the ways in which schools are tracked, and the types of tiers that exist in schooling systems. (For an early overview, see Kerckhoff 1995.)

School Resources Can school resources reinforce or even exacerbate inequalities? The answer is yes. In decentralized systems, school financing can be based, in large measure, on local property taxes. The higher the valuation of property, the more tax is collected for schools. In many states, richer school districts spend more per pupil than poorer districts, and this difference can reach as high as one-third more (E. Brown 2015). Differences in spending at this level cannot help but maintain and reinforce social inequalities. Which students will want to go to school every morning: students whose school is modern and attractive, with clean grounds and well-manicured lawns, or students whose school is falling apart, with toilets that do not flush, grounds littered with cigarette butts, and walls covered with graffiti? Differences in spending lie behind differences in physical facilities. Often they also lie behind differences in teacher and principal quality, because good teachers and good principals are attracted to well-kept schools with high-achieving students where pay may, in addition, be higher. Systems with central financing of schools—like those found in France, Sweden, and Japan—have the virtue of equalizing resources across communities. In the United States, most states have now moved toward combined local and state financing of schools. This means that school funding has been substantially equalized across communities. Yet differences remain in almost half of states, and these differences are exacerbated by the capacity of parents in affluent communities to raise voluntary supplemental funds. These funds are used to support field trips and after-school activities such as sports, debate, and theater. But how important, really, are resources as an influence on learning when compared to the socioeconomic composition of schools? The conventional wisdom is that they are





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not very important or not important at all. This conventional wisdom reflects a key finding of the Coleman Report from the mid-1960s—that the social composition of schools mattered greatly for student performance, while school spending mattered very little once social composition was taken into account and statistically controlled (Coleman et al. 1966). When first publicized during the heyday of the Lyndon Johnson administration’s War on Poverty this was a shocking finding; it threw cold water on the optimistic assumption that social problems could be solved if government only had the will to spend the funds to solve them. The phrase “You can’t solve problems simply by throwing money at them” became popular following the publication of the Coleman Report. Clearly, one implication of the Coleman Report remains true: resources alone are not enough to improve schools. This has been demonstrated in literally hundreds of studies. A review of over 400 studies of student achievement by the Stanford economist Eric A. Hanushek shows no strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources after variations in family input are taken into account (Hanushek 1997). Similarly, in Europe per-pupil expenditures show at best a very modest relationship with improvements in students’ standardized test scores and more likely no effect once very poor countries are excluded from the analysis (OECD 2011c). In the developing world, the conventional wisdom for many years was that there was a reverse Coleman effect—that school resources were more important than socioeconomic composition in the production of learning (Heyneman and Loxley 1983). The reason might have been that many schools in developing countries lacked such basic materials as textbooks, maps, globes, blackboards, chalk, and school supplies. Little learning occurred under these circumstances, regardless of differences in the socioeconomic composition of the school. However, David Baker and his colleagues argue that there was a “spreading Coleman effect” throughout the world (Baker, Goesling, and LeTendre 2002: 312). As mass education became better institutionalized, they argue, basic materials for learning became widespread in most developing countries, equalizing conditions between schools. The schools’ socioeconomic composition became more important under these circumstances and remaining differences in resources less important. Baker’s sample includes many countries that were not included in the original Stephen P. Heyneman and William A. Loxley (1983) study, including quite a few that come from the more developed regions of the developing world. Nevertheless, the bulk of the evidence now suggests that socioeconomic composition becomes more important than school resources after a threshold of basic school resources has been achieved (see, e.g., Buchmann and Hannum 2001; Gamoran and Long 2007). Why resources are not enough to change schools. Consistent with these results, policy analysts can point to any number of examples of very well-funded schools in poor neighborhoods that have failed to turn around the educational trajectories of their students. In the 1990s, for example, under a court-ordered desegregation plan, Kansas City, Missouri, provided increased funding for a number of schools in poor neighborhoods. These schools were equipped with beautifully landscaped grounds, high-tech gyms, and state-of-the-art computer classrooms, but the impressive facilities alone could not overcome a climate of poor preparation and low expectations among students (Orfield



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1994). More recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other philanthropists poured $200 million into Newark, New Jersey, schools in an effort to show the world how poor urban schools could be transformed over the course of only a few years. The result: math and reading proficiency scores actually fell from their already low levels for Newark public school students during the period of Zuckerberg’s involvement (Russakoff 2015). Conversely, scholars and policy makers can point to any number of modestly funded schools that have outstanding motivational climates and good learning results. Catholic schools are often cited as examples of schools with modest funding and good results (Bryk, Lee, and Holland 1993; cf. Davies 2013). Schools on military bases are another good example (Smrekar et al. 2001). So, too, are the relatively spartan but highly disciplined and challenging Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, whose success with poor and minority children has been well documented (see, e.g., Tuttle et al. 2015). Even so, the conventional wisdom about school resources has been challenged around the edges in recent years. As researchers use more sophisticated methods to examine the distribution of resources within schools, they discover that schools distribute resources unequally between programs, thereby influencing how much learning occurs among different groups of students (Bryk and Raudenbush 1988). This is a salient issue for studies of inequality. If higher-status students, or the honors classes in which they tend to enroll, are disproportionately favored in allocations, patterns of inequality will be reinforced rather than reduced. Research has also shown that additional resources can have a schoolwide influence if they are allocated to practices and instructional conditions that enhance learning (Barr and Dreeben 1983; Elliott 1998). But the nature of these practices and conditions remains in dispute (Wenglinsky 1997). The addition of ancillary teaching staff to help struggling students is one resource expenditure that is demonstrated to make a positive difference on student learning in many schools and in many countries (Chalmers et al. 2010; Cobb-Clark and Jih 2013), but of course few schools can afford the luxury of full-time teacher’s aides. Class size reduction. The evidence for another policy intervention, class size reduction, is mixed but also not as compelling as advocates had hoped. This is a well-studied topic, and the literature includes sophisticated studies using random, controlled experiments and some that show careful attention to issues of endogeneity (especially the tendency of placing higher-performing students in larger classes and low-performing students in smaller classes). Some of these studies find sizable increases in learning when classes are reduced to 18 or fewer students and bigger improvements in early grades and for minority students (Krueger and Whitmore 2001). Others find much smaller or inconsistent improvements on standardized tests. And still others find no significant improvements. (For an overview, see Chingos and Whitehurst 2011) Class sizes show no consistent relationship to student learning in any of the European countries for which good data are available. Instead, it appears that well-qualified teachers can handle large classes, but less-qualified teachers may need smaller classes to be successful (Woessmann and West 2006). Indirect supporting evidence for the stronger role of teacher skill can also be found in studies of student performance in East Asia, where class sizes tend to be very





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large by American standards but students also perform better than American students on international tests of mathematics and reading comprehension (see Chapter 8).

Ability Groups, Tracks, and Tiers In the sociology of schooling, the terms “track” and “tracking” refer to hierarchical structures that group children by perceived or tested ability and lead toward more or less advantaged destinations. Because there are many types of tracks in schooling systems and some are more consequential than others, I make the distinction between ability groups, tracks, and tiers. Ability grouping refers to within-class groups that are used to help students at different levels of preparation work with other children who are roughly at their level. It is most common in the early grades of primary school as students begin to learn to read and calculate. Tracking, as I use the term, occurs within schools and across classes. It is a way of grouping children of similar ability or interest across a number of classes. As I show in Chapter 2, at the upper secondary level most national educational systems track students by curriculum and expected trajectory, either within comprehensive schools or by splitting students into different institutions. Tracks in Europe often cut across subjects so that students are grouped by perceived or tested ability throughout the school day. The United States has adopted a more flexible system of tracking in secondary schools, with untracked classes intermixed with tracked classes. Math is the most commonly tracked subject, with a stable three-quarters of secondary schools reporting tracking students in math. Science is the next most likely subject to be tracked. Other subjects are much less frequently tracked (Loveless 2013). Tiers refer to separate, hierarchically ranked schools enrolling students of the same age group. Europeans use the analogous term streaming to refer to the allocation of children to entirely different schools where they study with students who have similar perceived abilities and interests. Examples of tiers include the tripartite system of secondary schooling found in Germany, in which children are separated by academic ability into three types of schools leading to lower and higher levels in the class structure. They also include the multiple tiers found in systems like the United States’, in which students are separated in secondary school between selective private and open-access public schools, in postsecondary education between two-year and four-year colleges, and in four-year colleges and universities into the several strata of academic selectivity. Critiques and justifications of tracking. Both ability grouping and tracking have had checkered histories in the United States. In the 1980s liberal scholars and advocacy organizations called attention to the potentially discriminatory consequences of the practices and their potential to demotivate students in the lower-ability groups and tracks (see, e.g., Oakes 1985). Both practices declined in the mid-1990s but became popular again in the next decade after state and national accountability legislation placed a premium on educational progress for all groups and all grade levels. By 2006 three times as many first-grade teachers reported using ability grouping as had done so in the mid-1990s at the



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height of the detracking movement. The use of ability grouping also increased dramatically between 1998 and 2009 in the fourth-grade classes studied in the NAEP (Loveless 2013). The United States is not the only society in which ability grouping is common at the primary level. Students in Ireland and Hungary are also regularly divided by ability, or “readiness” (OECD 2004: 410). But ability grouping is not common in most of Western Europe or East Asia. Instead, many OECD countries require grade repetition for those students who do not make expected progress (OECD 2012: 73–74). Neither ability grouping nor grade repetition is very common in the more egalitarian and racially homogeneous societies of Scandinavia and East Asia (73–74). As with ability grouping, the popularity of tracking fell in the mid-1990s, following a decade of critique, and rebounded in the next decade when attention shifted to accountability for student learning outcomes (OECD 2012). The U.S. government promoted a new track structure, divided by the rigor of the package of courses taken. Those in the rigorous curriculum take more math, science, English, foreign languages, social sciences, and moredemanding elective courses than other students (Horn, Kojuku, and Carroll 2001), and ambitious high school students have complied by taking as many advanced placement (AP) courses as possible in order to test out of lower-division general education requirements in college. The number of AP test takers doubled between the first few years of the 21st century and the early 2010s, reaching more than one million by 2013 (College Board 2014b). Educators often feel that ability-based grouping and tracking is in the interests of students and teachers alike. They argue that it is only logical to group students with similar abilities and interests, because learning is enhanced when people are able to learn at a comfortable pace—when they are neither held up for slower learners nor forced to keep pace with faster ones. Educators (and parents) who approve of tracking also argue that different methods and curricula may be appropriate for students at different ability levels. In theory, students who are placed in slower reading groups or tracked into less demanding classes are expected to gain confidence when they are not forced to compete with students who learn at a faster pace. Certainly, it makes little sense to hold back academically able children in slower reading groups for the sake of equity. Counselors want to do the best they can for students. Sometimes they recommend that a student try a less demanding curriculum and then later transfer to a more demanding curriculum. But not many students transfer back into more demanding classes. In places where opportunity consciousness is (or could be) strong, tracking can justly be described as a way of encouraging less advantaged and less successful students to lower their expectations to conform to the assessments educators have of them (B. Clark 1961). The dilemma for counselors is that low-achieving students placed in demanding classrooms can also fall behind and become alienated if teachers are not attentive enough to their needs. In some classrooms, the extra attention required for students who are behind can disturb the classroom focus for students who are learning at a faster rate. Ability grouping and curriculum tracking have serious arguments on their side, but arguments also exist against them because of their tendency to depress the motivation of lower-status children. The questions for sociologists are: What does the research evidence indicate about the consequences of tracking? Does learning improve for children who are





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grouped and tracked by ability? Do upper-track students gain more than lower-track students? And do ability grouping and tracking make a difference for students’ trajectories over and above what we would expect on the basis of background and measured academic ability alone? Ability grouping: What the studies say. Even equity advocates find some positive effects for ability grouping the lower grades. At the elementary level, studies from the 1980s found that ability grouping in key curricular areas, such as reading and math, raised mean achievement levels a little over what mixed-ability grouping accomplished (Chorzempa and Graham 2006; Oakes, Gamoran, and Page 1992: 590–91). Many young students learn more effectively when they are grouped with peers at roughly the same level of readiness. At the same time, this research indicated that it was very important to eliminate stigma associated with grouping by ability or readiness level, because children are highly sensitive to stigmatizing identities and can begin to treat one another differently because of them. Neutral names for groups at different levels help. More recent studies have failed to yield completely conclusive findings, though they continue to tip in the direction of positive outcomes for ability grouping in lower grades. A 2010 meta-analysis that examined high-quality studies found a positive-effect size equal to a half year of learning for within-class grouping for both lower- and upper-abilitygrouped students on reading instruction relative to students in ungrouped classrooms (Puzio and Colby 2010). But a study using high-quality data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study found that students who were in lower groups for reading instruction learned substantially less than those in higher groups relative to students in nongrouped classrooms (Lleras and Rangel 2009).4 Tracking: What the studies say. If ability grouping in primary school has at least the preponderant weight of scholarly opinion on its side, the consequences of curricular tracking are far more controversial. Tracking begins later in the school career and is therefore more fateful for students. Even if performance is better for some students in tracked schools, these improvements must be balanced against the distributional con­ sequences of separating better-prepared and less prepared students still relatively early in life. Evidence from the 1980s and 1990s suggested that advanced courses produced better performance among upper-track students than mixed-ability classrooms, but basic courses produced significantly lower performance among lower-track students than mixed-ability classrooms. These results are not surprising: Higher-track students are given interesting assignments, have more challenging expectations, are surrounded by well-motivated peers, and may be assigned more dynamic and effective teachers as well (Gamoran and Mare 1989; Oakes, Gamoran, and Page 1992). Lower-track students, by contrast, are given dull work and surrounded by unmotivated peers. Higher-track students do not appear to benefit as much from tracking as lower-track students suffer from it. The weaker competition and easier material did not improve the performance of lowertrack students. Instead, they lead to less interest in school. Dropout rates among lowertrack students are approximately 10 percent higher than would be expected for otherwise similar students in untracked schools (Gamoran and Mare 1989).



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The stratification consequences of curriculum tracking are typically negative for lower-status groups. These children are more likely to end up in lower curriculum tracks or less demanding courses. Children from higher-status families usually bring more school-related knowledge and higher aspirations with them to school. And most tracking structures, even if they do not rely exclusively on ability and performance measures, do depend considerably on these measures to help determine track assignments or provide guidance for parents in choosing tracked classrooms. Because children from lower-status backgrounds are more likely to have lower grades and test scores, they are also more likely to be assigned to less demanding courses or lower tracks (Oakes, Gamoran, and Page 1992). Estimates from the early 1980s in the United States suggested that low-SES students were approximately twice as likely as high-SES students to participate in vocational programs in high school (NCES 1985: 58). They were also highly underrepresented in math and science courses, and black and Hispanic students were severely underrepresented (32). These track choices and track assignments, in turn, were strongly correlated with subsequent school trajectories. Students in college preparatory tracks were three to four times more likely to enroll in four-year colleges compared with students in general and vocational tracks (Peng 1977; NCES 1985). By contrast, students who took a large number of vocational courses in high school were more likely to drop out (D. Mann 1986). More recent research evidence is consistent with these findings. In the United States, students who take AP exams are overrepresented among Asian Americans, slightly underrepresented among Hispanics and whites, and highly underrepresented among African Americans. Lower-income students (those eligible for free or reduced-price lunches) are highly underrepresented among those who take AP exams. Among students who receive passing marks on AP exams, African Americans are underrepresented relative to their share of students by approximately three to one (College Board 2014b: 30). Lower-income students are underrepresented by more than two to one (36–37). In Europe, the best data come from 15-year-olds who participated in the PISA study. Curriculum differentiation within schools does not tend to show significant differences in track by socioeconomic group. However, across OECD countries, tiered systems tend to have lower levels of socioeconomic inclusiveness and greater variation in performance than systems in which streaming is minimized (OECD 2012: 85–86).5 The sociologist Jeannie Oakes provided dozens of student self-reports that tell us much about the experiences of tracked students and the outcomes of concentrating high and low achievers in separate classrooms in secondary school. When asked what they learned in a class, high-track students respond by saying things like, “I’ve learned to analyze stories that I have read. I can come with an open mind and see each character’s point of view.” Or “[I’ve] learned about different theories of psychology and about Freud, Fromm, Sullivan and other psychologists.” Low-track students respond by saying things like, “Nothing,” or “[How to] waste time” (Oakes 1985: 67, 69, 70, 71). Do these differences simply reflect the native ability and motivation of students? Most social scientists have concluded that the concentration of students with peers in classrooms marked by very different motivational





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climates and very different expectation levels have an independent net effect on students’ schooling experience. Partly because of tracking practices, lower-income and underrepresented minority students receive less instructional time, less demanding and lower-quality educational materials, and less imaginative teaching than other students (Oakes 1994). They are frequently held to much lower standards than other students (Dreeben and Gamoran 1986). OECD data confirm these findings. In highly differentiated systems throughout the developed world, socioeconomically disadvantaged students tend to be grouped into less academically oriented curricula or schools, and this has an impact on their educational aspirations and motivations. These motivational problems are greatly reduced for students in less stratified systems (OECD 2014: 86–88). Without doubt, teaching is a tough job in classrooms marked by high levels of diversity in student involvement in learning (Good and Brophy 1987: 365). Few believe it is fair for motivated students to be slowed down by classmates who are not interested. Moreover, placements in basic courses, if they allow mobility and are seen as temporary, can be much preferable to placing students in a high-achieving class for which they are unprepared (McPartland and Schneider 1996). Yet we are bedeviled by the harm that tracking does to lower-track students; in classrooms where little is expected of students, most of those who are disadvantaged by virtue of their academic preparation and social circumstances can be expected to fall further behind. Important variations in tracking depend on whether it is implemented across a wide range of subjects for students at different ability levels or whether it is implemented selectively in only a few courses. Students’ choices to move between advanced and regular courses depending on their interests and motivations also matter. The distributional disadvantages of tracking can be mitigated if track placements are less rigid and less permanent and if students have choice about the courses they take. When schools allow more mobility in their tracking systems, inequalities between students are reduced (Sorenson 1970; Gamoran 1992). Tiers: What the studies say. Tiers separate students into entirely different schools by ability and often also by ability to pay. Many types of tiers exist in schooling systems. Some societies maintain tiers even at the lower levels of schooling. This form is common in societies influenced by the German tripartite system, including Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, as well as Germany itself. Another form is the separation between elite private schools and nonelite public schools. In some cases nonelite private schools (such as parish Catholic schools in the United States) and elite public schools (admission by test only) also exist, complicating the structure of educational stratification. Within postsecondary education, tiers proliferate and are much more pervasive. The most basic forms are schools, such as community colleges and lycées professionnel, that are oriented to preparing students for nonprofessional careers and those, like universities, that are oriented to preparing students for professional careers. Fine gradations of tiers are sometimes possible identify, such as between nonelite state colleges, public flagship universities, and elite private universities in the United States or at the highest level between unranked graduate and professional schools and ranked programs in the leading research universities.



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The separation of academic and vocational schools is an important form of streaming in Europe. When these tiers separate children at an early age, they are disadvantageous for children from the lower classes. These early branching systems create different motivational climates, different institutional linkages, and have highly crystallized prestige identities. The inequalities that result from these structures are consequently demonstrably large. For many years, working-class students were less strongly represented in preuniversity programs in Germany than in any other country (Husén 1971). This is not surprising. At age 10, many children have not had a complete chance to prove themselves before they are channeled away from preparation for academic secondary schools and professional employment opportunities.6 Most studies have shown that the abolition of early branching systems significantly improves the performance and the educational chances of children from lower-status backgrounds (Husén 1965; McPherson and Willms 1987; OECD 2012).

 Torsten Husén and Swedish Educational Reform  In the years immediately following World War II, no country in Europe moved more decisively away from the traditional European pattern of early tracking than Sweden. A large share of the credit for the reform of Swedish schools in the 1950s and early 1960s goes to Sweden’s social scientists and especially to their leader, Torsten Husén. The tools of social science came to Sweden first in education departments rather than in psychology, sociology, or the other social science disciplines. Thus, the institutional infrastructure for a large-scale research effort on education existed before policy makers developed a strong interest in reorganizing Swedish schools. At the same time, research and policy making were assumed to go hand in hand in Sweden, perhaps because many Swedish academic social scientists had become leaders of the long-time governing party in Sweden, the Social Democrats. The reform movement was fueled by two key studies. Using military service records, Husén discovered a large reservoir of highly able working-class men whose circumstances had not encouraged them to continue schooling. A colleague of Husén’s, Kjell Harnqvist, followed a sample of fourth-grade students for 10 years, estimating talent loss on the basis of the large number of able lower-class students who did not enter the academic ladder (Husén 1965). Reformers faced powerful opponents. Most Swedish professors and aca­ demic secondary school (gymnasium) teachers resisted reform ideas. The ma­ jority of educators expected the movement toward comprehensive schools to harm everyone involved. Comprehensive schools would, they felt, place excessive academic demands on less able students, and the better students would be held back by mixed-ability classrooms. Nevertheless, in 1950, the Swedish parliament passed an educational act providing for a nine-year test of comprehensive schools. Swedish social





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scientists, under Husén’s leadership, studied the consequences. The most interesting and important of these studies capitalized on a naturally occurring experimental situation. The city council of Stockholm decided to implement pilot comprehensive schools in the southern part of the city while retaining the dual system for a short time in the northern part of the city. The two parts of the city had socioeconomically similar populations, so any differences in student outcomes could not be attributed to class differences. Holding the students’ social backgrounds and initial ability levels statistically constant, Nils-Eric Svensson found that the comprehensive system performed better overall. The brighter students suffered no negative consequences, and the lower-ability students performed better throughout their school years than their peers in the tracked system (Husén 1965). Husén and his colleagues had ingeniously questioned the assumptions underlying the selective system, and their results were finally accepted without reservation. The Education Act passed by the Swedish parliament in 1962 mandated comprehensive schools for all students between ages 7 and 16.

A form of streaming familiar to Americans is the differentiation of public and selective private secondary schools. Selective private secondary schools have a modest independent effect on enrollment in selective colleges, even controlling for student background and ability (Attewell 2001). The motivational climate in these private secondary schools is highly focused on achievement and encourages an active relationship to knowledge. Network links between these schools and selective private colleges and universities are also actively maintained. Counselors stay in close touch with admissions officials at selective colleges and universities, and they may even socialize with them. They counsel students on how to prepare winning applications, and they follow up themselves by urging admissions staffs to give their top students careful consideration (Cookson and Persell 1985). Students at competitive public high schools suffer, by contrast, from the tendency of these high schools to focus their college admissions energies on only a few top students (Attewell 2001). Studies of the most selective private colleges show that graduates have significantly increased chances of entering top-rated graduate and professional programs and attaining high incomes, even after background and test scores are controlled (Hoxby 2009). Results are particularly impressive for members of minority racial-ethnic groups (Bowen and Bok 1998; Krueger and Dale 2002). We can also see the importance of motivational differences and institutional links to employers or higher levels in the educational system by looking at cases in which one or both of these influences are missing. Studies have shown that otherwise similar students are more likely to complete their degrees if they start at four-year colleges rather than community colleges (Dougherty 1994; Dougherty and Kienzl 2006; Monk-Turner 1990). Community colleges have traditionally combined low-effort motivational climates and relatively weak linkages to employers. Most of the students have done relatively poorly in high school, so they do not reinforce a strong academic learning climate among their



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peers. Because most students attend part-time and none live on campus, the schools also tend to lack cohesive campus cultures. Students therefore often feel little attachment to the goals of the college. Although community college officials emphasize the strong links between community college vocational programs and good jobs, the linkages are usually not as strong as officials suggest. The colleges have too few resources to cultivate relationships with employers, though individual teachers may do so. The better for-profit colleges often spend much more time cultivating ties to employers, and many do so more effectively than community colleges (Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, and Person 2006: chap. 6; Ruch 2001).7 At the same time, vocational programs that are strongly linked to good jobs can help students in later life. Richard Arum and Yossi Shavit (1995) show that students in vocational programs that offered skills strongly demanded by employers stayed in school longer and earned higher pay than students in generic vocational tracks. This is consistent with findings for the German dual system of vocational training, which is well supported by employers and linked to good jobs (Maurice, Sellier, and Silvestre 1986). It is also consistent with findings that vocational programs with strong ties to employers provide benefits to Japanese students who are not academically inclined (Rosenbaum and Kariya 1989).

The Net Effects of Tracks and Tiers From the perspective of equity, a major question is whether tracks and tiers increase or reduce learning opportunities and later life chances net of what would be expected given students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and academic abilities. The answer to this question is complicated, because placement into tracks and tiers is highly correlated with economic circumstances and academic ability. Moreover, the answer must be pieced together from the strands of multiple studies that look at otherwise similar students who end up in tracks and tiers that are not closely aligned with their abilities. Under the circumstances, any generalizations should be treated as highly provisional. As I read it, the evidence suggests that tracks and tiers may help explain student outcomes net of background and ability when (1) average motivational intensity differs greatly between students in different tracks or tiers, (2) tight institutional linkages are maintained to the more desirable locations at the next level of schooling or the labor market, or (3) they have highly crystallized prestige in the eyes of institutional gatekeepers. Major problems arise when some students are slotted into lower-level courses for their entire school careers, are surrounded by the same peers, and therefore come to be seen by other students as part of the underachieving, “burn-out” group. In these cases, the conditions for a self-fulfilling prophecy are created, in large part, by the school itself. As the work by Jeannie Oakes (1985) and others has shown, ability-based tracking in secondary school can lead to large differences in motivational intensity. Similar variations have been shown for community college students relative to four-year college students of equal measured ability (Dougherty 1994). These differences, in turn, tend to create greater ambition in upper-track students and greater alienation in lower-track students. School-to-school linkages raise the probability that otherwise similar students will be treated differently by admissions officers and is partly why parents will pay large sums to





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send their children to private secondary schools. Private schools that are tightly linked to elite private colleges and universities provide at least modest advantages to students independent of selection effects (Attewell 2001; Khan 2011). School-to-employer linkages can also matter. Some systems cultivate close ties between teachers and employers, and they do so because employers find good employees from among those recommended by teachers they trust (see, e.g., Rosenbaum and Binder 1997; Rosenbaum and Kariya 1989). Vocational tracks and vocational schools that focus on maintaining tight links with employers often improve their students’ chances of meaningful employment (Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, and Person 2006: chap. 6), whereas postsecondary students in vocationally oriented schools that fail to maintain these links would typically be better served by starting in four-year programs (Dougherty and Kienzl 2006). Prestigious tracks or tiers can have confirming effects, independent of the characteristics of the individuals involved. Ivy League institutions provide prestige to those admitted, even for those who are in the bottom quarter of their class, and for most this makes at least a small difference in the labor market (see, e.g., Bowen and Bok 1998; Hoxby 2009; Kane 1998). At the graduate and professional levels, degrees from undistinguished programs reduce chances of attaining outstanding job opportunities, even for those whose achievements are exceptional in nonelite programs. (For evidence on sociology, see Burris 2004). Many recruiters believe that an average student from a well-known program is preferable to the best student from a non-prestigious program (Rivera 2012). Quite a few major firms in the financial, management consulting, and legal communities will not even recruit at schools that are not name brand (Rivera 2012) Tracks need not be distinguished in all three ways (i.e., by motivational climate, institutional linkage, and prestige) to show significant net effects. One or two of these distinctions will do. In the industrialized world, the grandes écoles in France and the top public universities in Japan have among the strongest direct links to high-status occupations. These are well known as the elite tracks. Nevertheless, the motivational press is intense only in the French case (Suleiman 1978). In Japan, virtually all students treat college as a time for enjoying friends and social life between the competitive wars of secondary school and corporate careers. However, the tight and densely networked links between these prestigious institutions and elite jobs give a large net boost to students, even in the absence of a supportive motivational climate (Cummings 1985). Although tracking can reinforce and even add to inequalities among students, this does not mean that schools should adopt comprehensive de-tracking programs. The issue of tracking is vexing precisely because there are no easy solutions to teaching students who come to schools with widely differing levels of preparation and interest. Fortunately, rigid forms of tracking in secondary school are becoming rare in the United States and are being replaced by more flexible systems in which student placements are subject to revision based on performance and limited to a subset of courses (Loveless 2013; Lucas 1999).

adaptive strategies of groups People do not passively accept the circumstances they encounter. Faced with a range of opportunities and constraints, they develop strategies, either consciously or subconsciously,



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for making the best of their circumstances (Bourdieu 1979). At any given time, the choices people make about where to invest their time and energy reflect the relative advantages they have and the options available to them. In relation to schooling, these strategies can be seen as investments and disinvestments in amounts and types of schooling, in the labor market, and in particular occupational beachheads already occupied by members of the group. Time and again, we can see individuals and groups making the most of the resources they have—investing in credentials that have cultural advantages or when they see new opportunities and using social ties to build employment networks in work for which they lack the cultural advantages or the money to continue in education. As I show in Chapter 6, one condition that affects investment decisions is the availability of alternative resources for making a living. It is not surprising that investments in schooling are lower than would otherwise be expected among the children of owners of small businesses and farms (Ishida, Muller, and Ridge 1995). These people do not usually have the same incentive as children whose parents are wage and salary workers to use schooling as a means of gaining economic security. (As the offspring of people who are used to running things, it is possible that they may also tend to find the bureaucratic authority structure of schooling less than congenial.) Most roads to occupational security and success now lead through postsecondary education, but attachments to higher education depend on the alternatives people believe are available to them given their likelihood of success in the educational systems. Alternatives for men include military service and job seeking aided by family social and business networks. Alternatives for women include both of these as well as movement out of the labor market to start a family. For those who have not had great success in secondary education these alternatives can be attractive. At any given time, schooling may appear to be a relatively more advantageous setting than work for members of some groups, or work may appear to be more advantageous than schooling. In the United States, for example, African Americans and women have tended to invest heavily in education as a means of improving their access to desirable jobs. In a race- and gender-sensitive age, they faced a more favorable climate in schooling and in the sectors of the labor market demanding educational credentials (e.g., the professions and the civil service) than they did in the more entrepreneurial sectors of the economy. By contrast, Latinos from the least educated families, seeing limitations to their advancement through schooling because of linguistic and cultural disadvantages, have developed strong niches in skilled trades and entrepreneurship (Bailey and Waldinger 1991). Given these strategic investments, it is not surprising that Hispanics have the highest secondary school dropout rates of any group in American society. In the 1990s, nearly half of Hispanic students who were born outside the United States failed to complete high school (Kaufman, Alt, and Chapman 2001), and even today one-quarter of Hispanic students do not complete high school (Alba and Foner 2015). By contrast, native-English-speaking Hispanics have since the 1980s invested as heavily in higher education as members of other minority groups (Alexander, Pallas, and Holupka 1987). Investment in skilled trades and sub-baccalaureate vocational credentials can also make sense for boys from workingclass backgrounds with average or weaker academic interests (Rosenbaum et al. 2016).





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Strategies sometimes reflect the more specific mix of resources that students bring to schooling. At higher levels in the educational system, students from well-educated families who are not top achievers themselves more often move into humanistic fields, such as literature and art history, where their early family-based cultural advantages can pay off in the prestige market, if not so much on the earnings scale (Mullen, Goyette, and Soares 2003). By contrast, very high achievers from less educated families tend to move into high-paying technical fields, both because they lack the family-related cultural knowledge to succeed in many humanistic disciplines and because they are usually less attuned to prestige competition than to economic security (Davies and Guppy 1997). The mobilization of protest movements to demand policy changes must be considered an adaptive strategy too, because it has been used to improve the educational and employment opportunities of racial-ethnic minorities and women who have suffered from a history of discrimination. When these mobilizations find support in the halls of government, they can become a very effective strategy to remedy historical inequalities and even tip the balance in favor of once-marginalized groups. Typically, conditions have been improving gradually and organizational structures have already been developed to contest for rights before groups mobilize for change. Political opportunities develop when old coalitions of power are fraying and new coalitions are being formed (McAdam 1982). The choices people make partly reflect the existing state of the credential and labor markets. Indeed, in contemporary capitalist democracies, market forces are perhaps the most pervasive influence on individual and group strategies. Improved occupational labor markets increase the supply of credential seekers who see new opportunities opening, and declining labor markets decrease the supply of credential seekers.8 We tend to think of this market orientation as a modern phenomenon, but historical research suggests that it has been influential since the 17th and 18th centuries, at least among groups able to afford secondary and higher education. As the historian John E. Craig (1981) observes, European societies experienced a growing demand for clergy and teachers thanks to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the growth of centralized power increased demand for civil servants. This led to an early surge in higher education enrollments. The later stagnation of higher education enrollments, according to Craig, reflected the greater returns to entrepreneurial activity. Group strategies typically aim to maintain the market value of those degrees to which the group has better-than-average access. The educational historian David Labaree (1988) describes an interesting example of this process in his study of one of the first high schools in the United States, Central High School in Philadelphia. Central High was for many years the only high school in the city. It was highly selective; students had to pass very rigorous exams to be admitted. Even once admitted, students had no guarantee of finishing. Only about a quarter did finish. But those who finished the degree generally found very good employment in the Philadelphia business community. Many went on to become civic and business leaders in the city. For many years, the competitive admission policy of Central High School was zealously guarded by those who had benefited from it. The high market value of the degree helped create strong and ultimately successful pressures for more high schools and more high school degrees. This plenitude reduced the value of



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the high school degree, however. In an attempt to create a new kind of credential-based market monopoly, the high school curriculum was eventually divided into college preparatory and vocational tracks. More recently, the sociologist Sigal Alon (2009) has demonstrated that when demand for places in desirable higher education institutions greatly exceeds the supply of these places, highly educated parents ratchet up their efforts to improve their children’s chances by investing in private schools, test-preparation courses, and information gathering about educational opportunities. Less educated parents cannot keep up with this adaptive mobilization, leading to higher levels of class inequality in admissions and completion. By contrast, when demand and supply are more evenly matched, the upper classes are less motivated to maintain their position through educational investments, and class inequalities may be temporarily reduced. Indeed, much educational history can be written as a conflict between strategies for limiting access to valuable credentials, popular agitation for access to these credentials, fears of declining market value in the face of increased access, and new strategies of monopolization at a higher level in the system developed by those whose position has thereby been threatened. This dynamic expresses a common conflict between market monopolies and democratic politics and is one important source of credential inflation (Collins 1979; Labaree 1988).

conclusion Neither theories of meritocracy nor theories of social reproduction are adequate for explaining patterns of inequality in school performance and educational attainment. Theories of meritocracy embrace an unwarranted tautological definition of merit (i.e., those who succeed are meritorious), and social reproduction theory is too sweeping and blunt-edged to be fully satisfying. By focusing on the connections between group circumstances, institutional channels, and the adaptive strategies groups develop over time, we can develop better explanations than either the theory of meritocracy or the theory of social reproduction permits. Group circumstances include both school-relevant resources, such as cultural knowledge and motivational commitments, and the stereotypical definitions of groups in the larger society. Institutional channels include school tracking structures, labor market circumstances, and governmental policies. Social class, race and ethnicity, and gender are major bases of inequality in societies. These social divisions are not, however, equally fateful determinants of school success and failure. Social class is strongly related to school performance and attainment nearly everywhere, because it is consistently associated with the distribution of cultural resources and motivational attitudes. Race and ethnicity is a varying influence. In some cases, minority racial-ethnic identity is even more important than class; in others, it is of marginal importance or even an advantage. Highly subordinated minorities are restricted in employment, segregated in housing, and stigmatized in the dominant culture. These groups invariably perform poorly in school. Racial and ethnic groups that, by contrast, assimilate rapidly are usually those that come to a host society voluntarily and with urban, commercial skills.





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Gender is a declining factor in educational inequality. Girls are often well socialized for the cultural emphases and orderliness of schooling. In addition, the power of patriarchal social structures has declined in the industrialized world as women have gained control over fertility, won legal rights, and begun to participate more regularly in paid employment. Women still face considerable discrimination in the workplace, however. Schools can accentuate preexisting inequalities. Although school resources are not generally an important influence on educational attainment when compared to the socioeconomic composition of the school, resources can accentuate inequalities within schools if they are devoted primarily to already advantaged students. Ability groups, tracks, and tiers are developed to improve school efficiency by grouping students with similar abilities or interests. Ability grouping in primary schools has a good record of improving student reading skills. School tracking and tier structures can, however, sometimes reinforce and accentuate social inequalities. This is especially true for tracking structures that are highly concentrated in terms of motivational climate, are strongly connected to either high- or low-status occupational trajectories, and have strongly crystallized prestige in society. Early streaming and rigid academic and vocational tracks in secondary schools are among the most likely to reinforce and accentuate social inequalities. It is wrong to think of groups and individuals as passively conforming to their social fates. Instead, they develop strategies to improve their circumstances by weighing the relative advantages of investing in schooling or work and in different kinds of schooling and work. These investment and disinvestment strategies cumulate into the distinctive paths by which groups and individuals make their way in the structure of social stratification, maximizing their opportunities given their prospects in the pathways available to them.

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teaching and learning in comparative perspective

Extraordinary teachers come in a great many types and temperaments. Some, like Mr.  Bixby, Mark Twain’s guide to the mysteries of the Mississippi River, are irascible and demanding, content only with seemingly impossible feats. Others, like the nun who helped Richard Rodriguez overcome his childhood fear of reading, are patient and quietly persistent: At the end of each school day, for nearly six months, I would meet with her in the tiny room that served as the school’s library. . . . [T]he old nun would read from her favorite books, usually biographies of early American presidents. Playfully she ran through complex sentences, calling the words alive with her voice, making it seem that the author somehow was speaking directly to me. . . . I sat there and sensed for the very first time some possibility of fellowship between a reader and a writer. (Rodriguez 1982: 60)

Still others are charming and enthusiastic. Louisa May Alcott describes Jo’s mentor in Little Women, the German philosopher Friedrich Bhaer, as “turning only his sunny side to the world” (Alcott [1869] 1994: 337). For all their differences, writers’ descriptions of extraordinary teachers usually feature a highly personal relationship between teacher and student. The lessons come in private tutorials on a river, in a music practice room, or in the professor’s office or lab. And they come at a time when the student is eager to learn. Frequently, the student’s old ways have proved insufficient for mastering a new situation, and the student is therefore particularly open to changes. The full force of the teacher’s personality and understanding are focused on a mind willing to be transformed.1 Literary portraits of the more impersonal setting of schooling often convey exactly the opposite impression. Teachers are depicted as dull, mind-numbing pedants or vengeful persecutors surrounded by anxious and fearful captives. Consider, for example, George Orwell’s memories of his boarding school life at St. Cyprian’s School in England around the time of World War I: The [headmistress] was a stocky square-built woman with hard red cheeks, a flat top to her head, prominent brows and deep-set, suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of the





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time she was full of false heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang (“Buck up, old chap!” and so forth), and even using one’s Christian name, her eyes never lost their anxious, accusing look. It was very difficult to look her in the face without feeling guilty, even at moments when one was not guilty of anything in particular. . . . Your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled by love rather than by fear. . . . At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a gold-fish into a tank full of pike. Against no matter what degree of bullying you had no redress. (Orwell 1968: 331, 349)

Of course, some great teachers are also found in larger group settings. We have only to think of such virtuosos of the classroom as Jaime Escalante, who exhorted, joked, and goaded his class of mostly working-class Latino students to top marks on the Educational Testing Service’s advanced placement calculus test. Some books, such as Goodbye, Mr. Chips and To Sir with Love, have explored the transformations extracted from jaded and cynical students by great classroom teachers. But in the United States we do not normally expect schools to be places where the joys and deep pleasures of learning prevail. The perhaps most comprehensive study of schooling over the last generation depicts a “general picture of considerable passivity among students and emotional flatness in classrooms” (Goodlad 1984: 113). Why is that? What prevents so many classrooms from fulfilling the empowering promise of education? And why do some classrooms overcome the odds, to hum along with energy and purpose? This chapter takes a close-up view of the interaction between teachers and learners. The chapter is conceived as a funnel, beginning with the circumstances of teachers and students before their meeting in the classroom and moving toward their interactions in classrooms. It begins by examining the identities and interests teachers and students bring with them to the classroom. It then examines features of school and classroom structure that affect teaching and learning but are determined by higher-level authorities or are inherent in the work of teaching. These include the bureaucratic setting of teaching, the number of students in the classroom, the way that the school day is divided, and the inherent uncertainties of success in instruction. Only after the stage is fully set does the chapter take up the lines and gestures of teachers themselves and show how they can lead either to enthusiasm and learning or boredom and frustration. It is not easy to be a good teacher; and being a great teacher is a magnificent accomplishment. The great teachers must combine the skills of a scholar, an actor, a coach, a diplomat, a psychologist, a media designer, and more. (See, e.g., Boocock 1972: 129–49; Goodlad 1984: chap. 4.)2

for whom the school bells toll To understand life in classrooms, we must first look beyond the classroom doors. Both teachers and students bring with them certain experiences that are relevant to what happens in the classroom after the school bell rings. The classroom does not materialize magically without prior contextual influences. For understanding teachers, the key is to think about their backgrounds, qualifications, and preparation before they enter a classroom. For understanding students, the key is to think about what kinds of experiences



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foster high energy and expectations and what kinds of experiences diminish interest and energy or draw it away from the classroom.

Who Are the Teachers? Before teachers ever set foot in a classroom, they are first recruited and trained. Partly because of the people who are recruited and the rigor of their training, teachers have a certain status in society. These circumstances have an influence on how teachers teach and the kinds of expectations they hold for students. Comparative studies show that American teachers once ranked near the bottom of the scale of teacher preparation and status in the industrialized world. Teaching now recruits higher-quality college students than before. The academic qualifications of students preparing for secondary school teaching rank about average among college students, but those preparing for elementary school teaching rank at or near the bottom. But the preparation of teachers remains inadequate in many states. Teacher training can go only so far to improve classroom life, because the organizational realities of schooling often trump the best training. Schools must be organized to reinforce training. Nevertheless, excellent training programs are part of the solution to low-performing schools. In the absence of further reforms of teacher training, we should not expect great improvements in the way that schools work. Personalities and preferences. Teachers who were themselves good students and who were trained in rigorous academic programs are usually more enthusiastic about academics and will set somewhat higher standards for their students than will teachers who were not themselves good students or trained in rigorous programs. The college entrance test scores of education students were for decades lower on average than those of students in other disciplines (Stevenson and Stigler 1992; Berliner and Biddle 1995: 103–5). These scores have been going up in recent years, but they remain well below the national average and continue to lag behind students in all but a few disciplines (College Board 2014c). Prospective teachers have distinctive preferences that influence their choice of career. People who go into teaching do not indicate as much interest in making money as those who go into high-paying fields or as much interest in working with ideas as those who go into science, medicine, or academe. Instead, since studies began on this subject, their most common characteristic relative to those who choose other occupations has been that they enjoy working with people (James Davis 1965). Early studies showed that more than 80 percent of teachers said their major satisfaction came from making a difference in the life of a child (Lortie 1975; Kottkamp, Provenzo, and Cohn 1986). And secondary school teachers do not think of themselves primarily as subject matter specialists. No more than a third of American teachers say they are subject matter oriented. These subject matter specialists gravitate, if they can, toward private schools and wealthier suburban school districts. Since the passage of accountability legislation and particularly the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, teachers’ values have conformed more often to the values expressed in state curriculum standards. This is particularly true for younger teachers who have no context other than state accountability mechanisms through which to evaluate their





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work. Younger teachers tend to focus on how they can teach subject matter to improve the achievement of their students on tests connected to state educational standards. The orientation of the technician now challenges the satisfactions an earlier generation of teachers said they found in watching the transformation of their best students into more able and ambitious learners (Brint and Teele 2008). The people orientations of American teachers have some decided benefits for students. American teachers may be more approachable and sympathetic toward children than their counterparts in much of Europe and East Asia. As the sociologist Philip Jackson and his colleagues observe, American teachers tend to look for strengths rather than weaknesses. They take what students say in class—their contributions to a discussion, for example—and turn these remarks around until they make better sense, asking questions about them or rephrasing them in a way that makes them more substantial than they were when first stated. They applaud those who try, no matter how slight their success. They have a knack for discerning latent grace within the awkward gesture. (Jackson, Boorstrom, and Hansen 1993: 259)

At the same time, American teachers who are far removed from the spirit of academic learning often do not have expectations for students that are as high as those of their European and Asian counterparts. Think of how different doctors, the archetypal clinicians, are from American teachers in this regard. For most doctors, all that ultimately matters is that their patients improve. They diagnose what ails the patient and then prescribe remedies in light of the diagnosis. Good doctors also develop relationships with their patients so that they can make better diagnoses and help them adhere to healthy habits. Although teachers do build relationships with their students, few American teachers regard their students in a clinical spirit. For many, improvement in test scores has become a substitute for clinical inquiry and one that is not adequate to fully assess or help students to grow. For others, pleasures come not just from seeing intellectual growth but also and often primarily from nods and smiles and similar signs of affirmation. Rewards may also come from seeing children improve in their social skills, becoming better adjusted to their peers. These approval-based satisfactions are not inappropriate, but they are very different from the more exclusive interest in improved skills that would be typical of a clinical occupation, an interest characteristic of teachers in some other industrial democracies, such as South Korea and Japan. Recent accountability legislation has encouraged higher standards in teacher training and teacher certification. At the same time, by introducing punitive measures for schools that do not meet performance standards, it also opens the way to the deprofessionalization of teaching. Scripted learning formats, prepared by textbook publishers, became increasingly popular among educators who were eager to find a quick fix for problems in meeting performance goals (California Educator 2002). These scripted learning formats can undermine the initiative and autonomy of teachers by organizing teachers’ work for them. Professional jobs encourage a broad skill set, a spirit of inquiry about the issues afflicting clients, and independent judgment; technicians’ jobs do not.



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Recruitment and training. Teacher training in the United States was once notorious for its lack of rigor compared to training in other industrialized countries. On this subject, the frustrations of critics sometimes reached the boiling point. According to one, “The worst of the [education] schools are certification mills where the minimally qualified instruct the barely literate in a parody of learning” (Kramer 1991: 220). One improvement has been the requirement by most states that teachers take licensing or certification tests before beginning employment. These tests have undoubtedly eliminated some professional malfeasance in the classroom. Increased state requirements for continuing education have also contributed to teacher professionalism. The era of accountability that began in the 1980s and accelerated with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 has arguably helped teachers focus on student learning rather than on classroom atmospherics. Nevertheless, teacher training in the United States remains plagued by a range of problems. Pay for schoolteachers is too low to attract most high-achieving, ambitious students. And prospective teachers do not study a standard curriculum, as most professionals do. Instead, the curriculum varies greatly by program, and only a few provide rigorous, coherent, up-to-date, and practice-oriented courses of study. Perhaps surprisingly, graduation from an accredited program appears to be unrelated to teachers’ performance in the classroom (Kingsbury 2003). This may be because programs in less prestigious institutions are more likely than those in more prestigious institutions to seek accreditation. Because education schools are low in prestige, they rarely maintain high admissions requirements. Instead, they are often used by universities as cash cows, with nearly open admissions, for subvention of more prestigious and expensive programs, such as physics and engineering. Professors in education schools seek to gain prestige in the academic world through publication, but their focus on research rather than practice pulls them away from regular interaction with schools. Consequently, much of the theory taught in education schools is far from pertinent to the daily challenges of school teaching. The limited focus on practice is reflected in the relatively few opportunities for education majors to practice teaching or receive mentoring on their work in the classroom. Education majors typically spend only a semester or less practice teaching and are not exposed to the wide variety of classroom settings that would allow them to understand how their methods should vary depending on the backgrounds and preparation of students. These conclusions were reached following a comprehensive study of teacher training in the United States by Arthur Levine, former dean at Teachers College, Columbia University. Levine concluded that only about one-quarter of university-based education programs could be considered “strong” and that the rest should be closed or radically revamped (2006: 111–12). The problematic state of teacher training in schools of education is compounded by the chronic shortage of teachers and the consequent reliance of school districts on alternative forms of certification. These alternative routes allow practicing teachers to earn credit from full-time teaching while taking some college courses for credit. This would seem to be a poor substitute for professional training in a university setting. But so problematic are the university-based programs that no hard evidence exists that they are actually superior





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to alternative forms of credentialing, judging by students’ achievement gains (Zeichner and Conklin 2005). In short, as the sociologist Jal Mehta has argued, teaching continues to have the trappings of professionalism without the underlying reality. The standards for passing most certification tests are low. Credentials exist, but emergency credentials are given out almost casually whenever demand for teachers is higher than supply. In theory, standards guide practice, but in reality little agreement exists about what constitutes good teaching or adequate levels of learning (Mehta 2013a: chap. 10). Thanks to the work of educational researchers such as Linda Darling-Hammond, we have a good idea about what kinds of qualifications could help improve teacher performance in classrooms. Measures of general intelligence do not correlate strongly with teaching effectiveness. Strong preparation for subject matter teaching is more important in ratings of teacher effectiveness, and knowledge about teaching and learning are even more important than subject matter knowledge. “Those who enter with little professional preparation tend to have greater difficulties in the classroom, are less highly rated by principals, supervisors, and colleagues, and tend to leave teaching at high rates” (DarlingHammond 2000: 47). One way to improve the preparation of teachers would be to require them to fulfill all requirements in a subject matter major other than education and then add requirements in pedagogy so that teachers will know how to communicate to promote learning, supplemented by courses in child development so that they know what kinds of lessons work best with children from different backgrounds and different stages of development. Such a program would take five years to complete. It would be possible to build clinical practice experiences into each of the later years of the program (see Levine 2006: 107–9). In no countries do primary school teachers think of themselves as subject matter specialists. However, in many countries they are recruited from among the better secondary school students, and they also usually express an interest in the intellectual development of their students more than in their social and emotional development. In Japan, for example, prospective teachers do not stay as long in school as American teachers do, but they are more highly selected. Only the top fifth of candidates for teaching jobs pass rigorous screening examinations and are able to obtain the jobs they seek (Stevenson and Stigler 1992). Japanese teachers also spend much longer observing experienced teachers before they are given their own classrooms. In Japan, 20 hours of in-service training is required during the first year after certification. In Germany, requirements are stiffer still. Primary school teachers and teachers in nonacademic secondary schools are now almost all university graduates. Specific requirements for certification vary somewhat from state to state (or, as the Germans say, from länder to länder), but all states require prospective primary school teachers to study for at least three years. They must complete a final thesis as well as a state examination. Three months of clinical work as practice teachers are integrated into this first phase of preparation. Following graduation, during the second phase of training, prospective teachers practice as student teachers for two years and prepare for a second state exam, which they must pass to be certified (Lohmar and Eckhardt 2014: chap. 9).



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Even greater differences in training separate secondary school teachers in much of Europe and Asia from American junior high and high school teachers. In France, Germany, and Sweden, prospective secondary school teachers take their training at universities and major in academic subjects rather than in education. In Germany, upper secondary school teachers have the same two-phase program as primary school teachers, but they must study at least two specialized subjects. In Germany, pass rates for the first state examination have historically been low, no more than 50 percent (Stallmann 1990; Hainmüller 2003). The first phase is followed by a second phase of clinical work and seminar participation. The second state exam consists of a thesis on an educational topic, two observed and graded lessons, and an oral examination (Hainmüller 2003). By this point, teacher training has lasted at least seven years. After a three-year probationary period, in which they are further observed and evaluated, prospective teachers apply to a school district for tenured employment (Eurydice 2014). Finland provides perhaps the leading international example of excellence in teacher preparation, as well as a leading example of how teacher preparation can make a difference for student learning. Finnish students consistently score near or at the top of international assessments, in spite of starting compulsory schooling late (at age seven) by contemporary standards. Many attribute the success of Finnish students to the preparation and status of Finnish teachers. Teaching is an admired profession in Finland, partly because it is difficult to be accepted into a teacher education program. Prospective teachers must complete secondary school, take an entrance examination, and engage in an observed teachingrelated activity replicating a school situation. Top candidates are then interviewed for their interpersonal skills. According to one study, only one in ten applicants for primary school teaching programs is accepted, and only one in four for all levels of schooling, including preschool, kindergarten, and secondary school (Sahlberg 2010). Accepted candidates complete a five-year program at government expense. This program includes extensive study in subject matter specializations and considerable instruction in pedagogy. A master’s degree is required for all teachers at primary level and above. Teacher education programs are intended to build a research and scientific mind-set. Curricula are nationally coordinated but crafted to suit local university contexts. The Finns place a premium on using research to inform practice. According to Pasi Sahl­ berg, “Strategies of cooperative and problem-based learning, reflective practice, and com­ puter-supported education are common in all Finnish university programs” (2010:  3). Prospective teachers also have ample opportunity to develop their skills in clinical  ex­ periences. Practice teaching moves through three levels—beginning, intermediate, and advanced—with higher standards at each level. Practice teachers are observed and eval­ uated by experienced teachers, as well as university lecturers and professors, and they are required to deliver independently constructed lessons to different groups of students. University education is the only pathway to a teaching career; there are no alternative pathways. Social standing and salary. Unfortunately, the leading study of teachers’ status worldwide is marked by significant methodological problems. The results therefore need to be interpreted with caution. The authors find that teachers have a markedly higher





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social status in China and South Korea than they do in the United States or any country in Western Europe (Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez 2013). Teachers’ relatively low pay worldwide tends to work against their status. Moreover, some of the social status of children (who are both loved for their potential and disdained for their lack of adult responsibility) rubs off on those who teach them. Like social workers, teachers are seen as people who help those in need improve their circumstances; their work is not seen as closely connected to the life of the mind (Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez 2013). Country studies using different methodologies have found teachers to be held in high regard in some Western European countries, such as Finland where training requirements are highly developed (Sahlberg 2010). In some other countries, such as Germany and France, teachers in academically oriented secondary schools and college professors are considered to be involved in similar work, which they pursue in a fundamentally similar spirit, as researchers and intellectuals. High status is communicated in the terms used to refer to teachers. The Japanese term for teacher, sensei, implies great respect and applies equally to teachers at all levels, including university professors. In France, where academic lycées are tightly linked to the universities, teachers in them are referred to as professeurs. Teachers are not paid particularly well anywhere in the world. OECD statistics reveal that teachers in seven countries exceeded the average for tertiary-educated workers in 2012. In a few cases (South Korea, New Zealand, and Canada) this higher-than-average pay coincided with higher test scores on international achievement tests. In the remaining 25 countries teachers’ pay averaged less than that of other tertiary-educated workers (though it was close to parity in Finland, Germany, and England). A better measure may be salary at midcareer. In recent years midcareer teachers’ pay (in U.S. dollars adjusted for purchasing power) has been highest in the German-speaking world (Luxembourg, Germany, and Switzerland), and it has also been relatively high in parts of East Asia (South Korea and Japan) (OECD 2014: 457). Students in these countries tend to be high performers on international assessments of mathematics and indeed a moderate correlation (0.40) has been found among high-income OECD countries between midcareer teachers’ pay and student scores on the PISA mathematics assessment (457) (No correlation exists among low-income countries.) Most OECD countries provide additional salary benefits for teachers who take on managerial responsibilities or teach in disadvantaged schools—the latter an eminently sensible policy that has not been embraced by a single U.S. state. About half of OECD countries provide additional salary increases for outstanding performance (typically awarded by the school principal). Salaries tend to vary linearly (and sometimes considerably) between preprimary, primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary teachers in most countries (459). Teachers’ pay in the United States varies considerably from community to community. Among primary and junior high school teachers with 15 years’ experience, salaries average a little more than $40,000 a year—relatively high by world standards but close to the lowest salary for professional occupations in the United States. Wealthier states and communities usually pay teachers much more than the norm. However, cost of living is also higher in these communities, and salary adjusted for purchasing power shows less variation by community type. Figure 8.1 illustrates teachers’ salaries in different countries.

Salary at top of scale and maximum qualifications

South Korea

New Zealand

Portugal

France

OECD average Italy

Sweden

Belgium (Fr.)

Belgium (Fl.)

Austria

Finland

United States

Ireland

Australia

Canada

Netherlands

Spain

Switzerland

Denmark

Luxembourg

Germany

Brazil

Slovak Republic Hungary

Estonia

Czech Republic

Poland

Greece

Chile

Mexico

Israel

Iceland

Slovenia Japan

England

s o u r c e : Adapted from OECD 2014: 458. n o t e : Annual statutory teachers’ salaries in public institutions, measured in equivalent U.S. dollars converted using proportional purchasing power (PPP). Countries are ranked in descending order of starting salaries for lower secondary teachers with minimum training. For Switzerland, the graph shows salaries after 11 years of experience, instead of 15 years. For Switzerland, Belgium (Fl.), Sweden, South Korea, the Czech Republic, and Indonesia, circles indicate salaries at the top of the scale and minimum training, instead of maximum qualifications. For the United States, Sweden, and Hungary, the graph shows actual base salaries. For Belgium (Fr.), the graph shows salaries of teachers with typical qualifications instead of the minimum. For Sweden, the year of reference is 2011. For France, numbers include average bonuses for overtime hours.

Figure 8.1  Lower secondary teachers’ salaries at different points in their careers, 2012

0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

Turkey

Salary after 15 years of experience and minimum training

Scotland

Equivalent USD converted using PPPs

Norway

Starting salary and minimum training

Indonesia





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Higher salaries are an important factor in attracting and retaining high-quality recruits to the teaching profession. However, salary is not the only influence. Finland ranks in the middle of the pack in relation to teachers’ pay at midcareer. The strong performance of Finnish teachers appears to be more strongly related to the selectivity of admissions to teaching programs, the rigor of preparation programs, and the sense of teaching as having a moral mission more important than the material rewards it provides (Sahlberg 2010). It is also important to keep in mind that salaries per instructional hour are also significantly higher in many European and East Asian countries, largely because American teachers spend longer hours in the classroom and less time preparing outside class (OECD 2014: 422–25). In Finland and Japan, for example, actual teaching time is only a little more than half that of American secondary school teachers (425). Teachers in these countries compensate for lower teaching time by spending more time preparing for their classes and working with colleagues on lesson planning. Teachers in the developing world. Poorly prepared and poorly qualified teachers are a far more common problem in the developing world than they are in the industrialized world. These countries experience chronic teacher shortages because of population growth, challenging educational circumstances, and accompanying attrition. Indeed, because more qualified teachers cannot be found, many primary school teachers have incomplete secondary educations, and few secondary teachers are fully qualified with postsecondary degrees. As the educational researcher Marlaine Lockheed notes, “Where teacher education requirements are low, many primary school teachers have a weak background in the subjects they are teaching” (1993: 29). As late as the 1990s, nearly a third of primary school teachers in Nepal had not even set foot in a secondary school. In several African countries, a majority of primary school teachers were not graduates of secondary schools (Lockheed 1993). Those who have little formal education are rarely fit to teach. University qualifications remain rare in sub-Saharan Africa. Xiaoyan Liang (2002), for example, reports that in Uganda only one in four secondary school teachers had the desired qualification of a university degree in education, and 15 percent had no training. The situation in sub-Saharan Africa is complicated by HIV/AIDS, which has killed nearly 10 percent of the teaching force in some countries (Mulkeen et al. 2007). Teachers in poor developing countries have other hurdles to overcome. Most seriously, they cannot always show up for work. They may have to travel long distances to work or to be paid, and these travels contribute to absences. Supervision of family festivals and religious celebrations sometimes keeps teachers out of class. Months at a time can be lost to teacher strikes, which are relatively common. Some countries allow maternity leaves but do not make provisions for substitute teachers. Thus, the rhythms of natural and communal life, along with the inefficiencies of poorly working bureaucracies, make education in the developing world a more irregular phenomenon than it is in the United States or other industrialized countries. Here, the occasional snow day is something that children look forward to for months, and substitute teachers, however embattled they may find themselves in the classroom, do show up in a predictable way when the regular teacher is ill.



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Who Are the Students? Just as teachers come to class with experiences that influence their attitudes and behavior in class, so do students. Chapters 6 and 7 discussed the influence of social class, race and ethnicity, gender, and family motivational climates on students’ outlooks toward schooling. These factors are without doubt the most important deep structural conditions associated with how well equipped and well disposed students are to achieve in school. But several other more proximate factors also bear on the level of interest students bring to learning. These factors include the importance of schooling for job prospects, their activities outside school, and community pressures for achievement. Not long ago, differences in learning styles were also considered very important; more recent studies raise questions about this emphasis. Engagement and disengagement. Throughout the world, students share in the same universe of possible feelings about school. Some enter school full of excitement and confidence, with a reasonably clear sense of what is expected and parental support for their efforts. Others enter school with great trepidation, confused about what is expected of them, and unclear that they will be able to succeed. Still others seem to be at odds with school from the beginning, either because they are unequipped to pay attention or resentful of adult authority or because they would simply prefer to be otherwise occupied. Societies vary in the proportion of engaged to disengaged students. As many as twothirds of high school students in the United States say they are often bored or uninterested in what is going on in class, and one-fifth report being bored daily. They report that they find subject matter irrelevant and that their teachers do not seem to care about them (Center for Evaluation and Education Policy 2010; Yazzie-Mintz 2007). In an earlier survey of 15-year-olds in OECD countries, half of students said they were often bored in school (OECD 2002); again American students placed on the high side, at more than 60 percent. One study, using an innovative methodology involving self-reports of engagement and disengagement at random times during the school day, found that students in Israel reported being engaged in their lessons only slightly over half the time. Interests outside the classroom proved to be a challenging rival to teachers, occupying students 36 percent of the time (Yair 2000). Students in parts of East Asia, by contrast, report much stronger positive feelings about school and seldom report feelings of boredom or restlessness (Stevenson and Stigler 1992: 61–67). At the same time, the stress of high-stakes tests can poison the atmosphere of schooling in the months before national tests such as the gaokao in China (21st Century Education Research Institute 2014). American students have been prime examples of the problems that occur when dem­ ocratic openness is not accompanied by strong community pressure to maintain high academic standards. Except for a minority of academically motivated students (at most, 20 percent of the age group), getting by without working hard has been the long-accepted norm among American secondary school students (Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985; Steinberg 1996). Another very common pattern is to pay attention and study hard only in the courses that are of special interest. Acute levels of disengagement are sometimes common





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among male students who attend urban schools in high-poverty areas. Key indicators are absenteeism and misbehavior beginning as early as sixth grade (Balfanz, Herzog, and MacIver 2007). But disengagement can be a prominent feature of middle-class schools as well. Expressions of disdain for school and support for coasting during school hours show what passes as acceptable and appropriate in student culture. As students have become aware of the income and status gap between college graduates and those without higher degrees, schooling has become more interesting to American students—as it has to students across the developed world. A recent survey showed that more than 85 percent of high school students were interested in attending college and landing careers requiring college degrees (Leal 2015). Even so, students still must balance the demands of schooling against the attractions of other activities. And interest in the rewards of a college degree does not necessarily mean that many students find the content of schooling enthralling. In time allocation, homework ranks below part-time work and social life for most teenagers. The best recent estimates suggest that approximately 30 percent of American high school students age 16 or older work part-time (Jessica Davis 2012). According to time-use data averaged between 2010 and 2014, working students average 8–12 hours per week at after-school jobs—not for the most part because their families depend on the money but because they want to have spending money for cars, movies, and other purchases. High school students spend the majority of their time during the week socializing, watching television, and relaxing or sleeping. During the week high school students average about 30 hours in class or in out-of-class study, or about one-quarter of their time (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015a: chart 8). A statistically significant gender gap exists in time allocated to homework, with girls allocating on average one full hour more per day on homework than boys (Gershenson and Holt 2015), approximately the same difference that separates working and nonworking high school students (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015a: chart 8). Of course, wide variation exists around these means. Although girls average about one hour more of homework per day, the standard deviation for girls is one and a half hours, meaning that the top third of girls are averaging about two and a half hours more a night on homework than the average boy (Gershenson and Holt 2015). Paid work familiarizes students with the labor market and the expectations of employers, but this busy lifestyle can result in insufficient sleep. Working long hours after school has been associated with later bedtimes, shorter total sleep time, and reports of fatigue and sleepiness at school (Mitra, Millrood, and Mateika 2002). Those working more than 20 hours per week are, in addition, at risk for dropping out of school and other sociobehavioral problems, such as substance abuse. Available comparative statistics on labor market participation by students are flawed, because high school and university students are grouped together. But these statistics suggest that students in the United States are not outliers. The average for working students (15–24 years old) from OECD countries is slightly higher than the U.S. figures. Parents in a few OECD countries do appear to set strict limits on students’ hours of work. The proportion of students ages 15–24 working in paid employment in Korea and Switzerland



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is about three times lower than in the United States and about 2.5 times lower than in Israel. In other low-work-hour countries, such as Spain and Italy, statistics are undoubtedly influenced by high levels of youth unemployment for both those in and those out of school (OECD 2014: table A6.5c). The evidence suggests that student engagement with school is highest in East Asia, because families and communities maintain strong pressure on children to succeed. When parents and the community insist that school is the main priority, student engagement usually remains high. When the family and the community do not treat schooling as a priority, secondary schools become warehouses for many bored and disengaged students. Simply offering the promise of opportunities through schooling is not enough to keep student motivation high. It is easy enough for students to see this as an empty promise or merely their birthright. Social pressure supporting the priority of schooling is necessary to maintain real engagement. Are there differences in student learning styles? Learning styles refer to differences among students in the ways they effectively acquire information and knowledge. Accord­ ing to learning style theorists, these differences influence the amount students learn  in school independent of their measured cognitive ability and motivation. Some of the the­ ories focused on cognitive differences between those identified as able to learn better from concrete, hands-on involvement with materials and those identified as better able to learn from abstract conceptualizations. Some theories focused instead on the interactional set­ tings of school, arguing that some students learn better working collectively while others learn better working independently. Other theories focused on the media of instruction, theorizing that some students learn better from visual images, others from sound record­ ings, others from tactile-kinesthetic materials, and others from print media. More com­ plex theories combined these preferences into a larger number of categories of learning styles. Indeed, one overview counted more than 70 distinct learning style theories (Cof­ field et al. 2004). On the basis of more than 30 years of research, it now appears that learning style theories have not panned out. Few of the theories included all crucial elements that would allow a test: (1) consistent attribution to a student of the same learning style, (2) clear connection between the learning style and evidence that students think and learn differently, and (3) capacity to show that people with different learning styles do not, on average, simply differ in ability (Willingham 2009). Research studies were rarely designed to test the theories adequately; those that were well designed generally yielded negative results (Pashler et al. 2008). Some neuroscientists have also expressed a dim view of learning style theories on the basis of well-established observations about how the brain works. According to the Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, the practice of separating students by learning styles should be considered “nonsense” from a neuroscientific point of view: “Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity of the brain” (Greenfield, quoted in Henry 2007). For social scientists, the learning styles of greatest interest were those thought to grow out of the life circumstances of majority and minority groups. One early theory contrasted





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analytical and relational learning styles, the first associated with higher-income, ethnicmajority homes and the second with lower-income, ethnic-minority homes (R. Cohen 1969; Hale-Benson 1982). These terms were used to describe two ways of thinking in and about the world: • The analytical style emphasizes the ability to remove objects from their context and group them on the basis of some common property. For example, a tree, a cucumber, and a flower might all be grouped as vegetation. Students comfortable with the analytical style can look at a sentence, identify the noun from the context of a sentence and generalize about the properties of nouns, where they come in sentences, what relationship they have with other sentence elements, and so on. • The relational style is self-centered in its orientation to reality and tends to lump objects together as all appropriate to a particular context rather than splitting them apart analytically and free of context. For example, a comb, lipstick, pocketbook, and door might be grouped under the conceptual umbrella of getting ready to go out (Boocock 1972: 109). In this way of thinking, each object has meaning in connection with the other objects in the relevant context. Students whose thought processes are based on the relational style would tend to think of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other grammatical elements not as conceptually distinct but as having a meaning in the context of the sentence as a whole. A similar hypothesis underlay the sociolinguistic work of Basil Bernstein (1975), who argued that higher-income, better-educated parents and communities teach children to express themselves in ways that are more often context-free. Sociologists have sometimes used the terms “context-dependent” and “context-independent” as analogues for relational and analytical styles of learning. These cognitive styles were thought to be rooted in home and community practices. Parents who distanced themselves from their immediate surroundings and used grouping and abstracting concepts to experience the world encouraged the development of the analytical style in their children. These parents were thought to be more prevalent in middle-class and upper-middle-class communities. By contrast, parents who were simultaneously more communal and more egocentric in their relation to the world encouraged the development of the relational style in their children. These parents were thought to experience the world through particular things, people, and events rather than abstractions. Detachment from context was a less frequent cultural experience. These parents were thought to be more often found in lower-income and minority communities. It is an open question whether the sociological versions of learning style theory have any more validity than the cognitive versions. While it is clear that the capacity for abstraction is not evenly distributed across students, an important goal of schooling is to create this capacity where it does not exist. One might imagine that the culture of schooling, with its emphasis on analysis and abstraction, would allow students to make the transition from context-dependent to context-independent thinking. The evidence suggests that schooling can do this (Alexander 1997) but that context-independent learning decays more quickly for low-income students during time away from school than it



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does for high-income students. The solution may be earlier exposure to schooling and more days of schooling rather than different types of schooling designed for students from different backgrounds and with different learning styles. Context-dependent, relational classroom settings are, in this respect, analogous to the lower tracks in school. Schools and textbooks do undoubtedly favor the context-independent, analytical style, and it would be a strange outcome indeed if this preference changed in the future. After all, meaningful abstraction is at the center of the Western intellectual experience of the world. The analytical style is also now the dominant cognitive style around the world. The schools’ preference for the analytical style can therefore be justified on both pragmatic and egalitarian grounds.3 As the political scientist Andrew Hacker has written, The abilities and outlooks associated with the analytical style can no longer be adequately thought of as “white” or “Western” or “European,” but are in fact part of a dominant global culture, which stresses not only literacy and numerical skills, but also administrative efficiency and economic competitiveness. (Hacker 1990: 24)

The popularity of learning style theories has been an important factor in leading educators to mix hands-on and conceptual approaches to instruction, group-level and individual-level work, and presentations of material through multiple media. Through such mixing, teachers hope that different modes of instruction will catch the attention of some students and reinforce lessons in heterogeneous classrooms where differences in receptivity to different instructional approaches might exist or might exist situationally. This broadening of techniques is probably a good outcome, even if the theories that fostered it have not panned out. Approaches that insist on one way of learning do not exploit the interconnectivity of the brain or help that interconnectivity to expand. Indeed, schools could undoubtedly do more to develop environments that are conducive to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Research by Robert Slavin (1980) and others has shown that lower-class and minority children frequently learn better in cooperative learning environments, in which members of a group all work together on a lesson. They may also gain more from more continuous feedback. One reason that cooperative learning works well with these children is that it makes them feel less lonely in the classroom. Another may be that it is compatible with the communal style of participation found in many of their homes.

structured interaction and classroom life Teachers and students come to classrooms with socially conditioned experiences and ways of seeing the world, and they meet in a space that is socially structured. Features of this space also affect what goes on in the classroom. This section focuses on three important aspects of the socially structured space of the classroom: (1) its bureaucratic setting, (2) its ecological features (such as the number of students in class and the methods of grouping students), and (3) its instructional culture. These are the stages and frames within which classroom interaction occurs.





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Craft Production Ideals, Bureaucratic Realities In a famous essay on organizations and social structure, the sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe (1959) made a distinction that helps explain why most literary memoirs of outstanding teaching are typically set outside formal classrooms. The distinction is between two types of production systems: • Craft production involves the use of a variety of nonstandardized materials, many nonroutine processes, and the creation of individualized products. Fashion design, custom-made furniture, and specialized computer software programs are examples of craft production industries. Craft industries usually have few levels of management, and managers are generally considered to be less important in the operation than the craftspeople or professionals who conceive and execute the work. • Bureaucratic production involves a standard set of raw materials, routine processes, and standardized products. Paper mills, smelting plants, and automobile assembly plants are examples of industries organized along the lines of bureaucratic production. Because production processes are routinely repeated, coordination and control are typically more relevant concerns than creative work with the materials themselves. Managerial hierarchies are steep, and managers are more important in the operation than the people who make the products. Schooling should ideally be organized as a craft production industry. Students are the raw materials in this process, and they are obviously highly varied when they come to the classroom. They come into schools with many different personalities, interests, capacities, and motivations. The processes that teachers need to use to reach and transform these students are varied as well. Some students require constant prodding, even expressions of exasperation to get them involved. Others might require imaginative, hands-on play. Still others might need large amounts of emotional support coupled with high expectations. Even the final products will not be all the same; they should be “custom built.” Certainly, graduates should meet minimum standards of knowledge, maturity, and self-confidence, but individual talents and interests ought to be given a wide latitude for development as well. Instead, schooling is organized along the lines of bureaucratic production. Students are grouped together in batches and treated as more or less standard vessels into which knowledge can be poured. Teachers have too little time to get to know each student personally, and they must think in terms of methods that work better on average in large groups. The teacher’s authority is central in such a setting rather than the learners’ progress. The classroom is organized by a large number of rules. These may be necessary to keep order in a grouped setting, but they discourage the disorderly discussions out of which important insights and debates can grow. The deep personal connections that are a vital part of memorable educational experiences do not usually have the time or space to blossom in bureaucratic settings. The care



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and creativity we associate with craft production is, consequently, frequently overshadowed by the efficient processing structure we associate with bureaucratic production. Few students receive as much personal attention as would be desirable. This tendency becomes more and more pronounced as students move from primary grades, where they spend all day with the same teacher, to higher grades, where they pass from one teacher to the next as they follow their class schedules. Because teachers in public schools work with large groups of students all at once, they tend to rely on a standard set of teaching techniques, primarily seat work and lectures interspersed with questions. Under these circumstances, they cannot know whether every student who is physically present is also mentally engaged. Their success as teachers is measured primarily by whether they cover the curricular material, whether their students move along without causing too many problems, and perhaps also by their subjective sense of how well their students are doing. Standards-based testing, which promises accountability for short-term retention of school lessons, is a popular mechanism of assessment appropriate for the bureaucratic setting of school. The imprint of bureaucratic efficiency is found also in higher education. This no longer shocks us, but it did shock some of the thinkers who were alive at the time that universities began to resemble businesses. Thorstein Veblen’s turn-of-the-20th-century satire on the industrialization of American higher education focuses on the consequences of academic accountancy for the spirit of scholarship: Because of the difficulty of controlling a large volume of perfunctory labor, such as is involved in undergraduate instruction, the instruction offered must be reduced to standard units of time, grade and volume. Each unit of work required . . . in this mechanically drawn scheme of tasks must be the equivalent of all the other units. . . . These . . . units of academic bullion are increased in number and decreased in weight and volume; until the parcelment and mechanical balance of units reaches a [diminishing] point [which would be surprising] to any outsider who might naively consider the requirements of scholarship to be an imperative factor in academic administration. (Veblen [1918] 1957: 75–76)

Veblen’s satire retains its sting because we can see that mass education is a far cry from the intimacy and personal relation between master and apprentice required for the craft production of scholars. The system of academic accountancy allows universities and other schools to process large batches of undergraduate students, but it is not well designed to invigorate and challenge the mind through long-term personal interaction with serious thinkers. In our bureaucratic batch-production systems, students learn to jump through hoops, but they rarely catch the spirit of learning. To organize schooling as a craft production industry would require one-on-one tutorials and small-group sessions rather than dozens or hundreds of students following a single teacher’s lectures and questions. No society has the resources to spend even a fraction of the money required for such a form of learning. Instead, schools have tried to make bureaucratic education more enjoyable through improved lecture presentations, elective courses, and extracurricular activities. (The only places where tutorials remain the center of education are the two ancient and highly selective English universities, Oxford and





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Cambridge. Liberal arts colleges create something of the same intimacy through small seminar experiences.) This is one reason the tutoring industry is booming in places like South Korea, Japan, and the United States, as parents attempt to supplement low-cost bureaucratic education with brief periods of high-quality craft attention. Although craft production is not practical, given the resources available to public schools, some have argued that the development of greater teacher professionalism would allow teachers to become more effective within the bureaucratic setting of schools. Professionalism would entail better training, stiffer certification examinations, codification of the knowledge base of teaching, the culture of trust in teaching professionalism (as opposed to reliance solely on post hoc accountability mechanisms), the institutionalization of teacher professional communities within schools, and treatment of the profession and the state on relatively equal footing (as opposed to the current dominance of the state) (Mehta 2013b). Clearly, U.S. teachers have a long way to go before they could be considered professionals in the ways identified above, but the evidence of countries such as Singapore, Japan, Finland, and Canada suggests that the current situation of strong state control of schooling and weak professionalism of teachers is not inevitable.

 How Much Has Teaching Changed?  Have you ever wondered whether teachers in your parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ generations taught in the same way as teachers today? Many people assume that teachers were stricter in the past, more likely to stick to the book, and perhaps less forgiving of errors. Yet no one has really known whether these impressions are true. No one, that is, until Larry Cuban decided to find out. In his book How Teachers Taught (1993), Cuban, a former high school social studies teacher and school administrator, looked at a tremendous amount of historical information to decide how much had changed over the course of a century. He examined photographs of teachers and students in class. He looked at textbooks and books used by teachers as resources. He gathered student recollections of their classroom experiences. He collected teacher reports of how they taught. He combed through reports from journalists, administrators, parents, and others who visited classrooms. He looked over student writings in school newspapers and yearbooks. He collected research studies of teaching practices. And, finally, he read descriptions of classroom architecture. From these sources, he gathered detailed descriptions of over 1,200 classrooms for the years 1890 to 1990. These descriptions were embedded in a larger set of data that indirectly revealed teaching practices in almost 7,000 other classrooms. Cuban divided teacher-centered classrooms from student-centered classrooms, and he also accounted for mixed forms. In the teacher-centered classroom, activity follows a strict routine of lecturing, board work, and seat work.



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Students are not free to move around the classroom, and they sit in rows with attention focused on the teacher. Cuban found that highly teacher-centered instruction was most common in the 1990s, especially at the secondary school level, and it was also most common in the nineteenth century. However, some hybrid forms dating from periods of reform had slowly changed the character of American classroom life at the primary school level. Today’s primary schools have more activity centers, more field trips, and more student movement around the classroom than did 19th-century classrooms. Some student-centered reforms have not been adopted, however. Few elementary school classrooms, for example, allow for joint teacher-student discussions about what to study next. In Cuban’s view, teachers’ perceived need to maintain their authority in the classroom explains why some student-centered reforms have fallen by the wayside. Teachers have become less strict and less formal, but they continue to feel the need for control over the essential aspects of classroom organization. Therefore, they implicitly differentiate between an inner core of instructional authority and an outer periphery of social relations. The core includes the lesson content, lesson techniques, and tasks to be done. The periphery includes the arrangement of classroom space, the amount of student movement, the amount of grouping, and the amount of classroom noise tolerated. Teachers believe they need to defend their authority over the core features of classroom life but not as much over peripheral features. As Cuban observes, “Substantial numbers of teachers, concerned with maintaining order and limiting classroom noise, yet attracted to the new ideas about children and their development, struck compromises between what were viewed as essential teacher prerogatives and the new beliefs [about student-centered learning]” (1993: 269).

The ambiguous and uncertain work of teaching. Many years ago the sociologist Dan Lortie (1975) provided a portrait of schoolteachers that increases our appreciation of the difficulties of the teacher’s task in a bureaucratic, mass production setting. Compared with other professions, Lortie argued, school teaching is distinguished by four characteristics: (1) work with large, heterogeneous groups of students; (2) work that requires high levels of group concentration but is marked by many interruptions; (3) work that has multiple goals rather than a single, overriding goal; and (4) work that is performed in an environment generally lacking in collegial support. The first three of these distinguishing characteristics make the work of teaching objectively difficult. The fourth leads to a sense of isolation that reinforces the uncertainties of teaching and has some unique consequences of its own. 1. Large groups, mixed abilities. Teachers typically work with groups of 30 or more students. These students have a mix of abilities, motives, and interests. Even when





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they are predisposed to learn, they may learn in very different ways. Obviously, under these circumstances, a teacher cannot know with any certainly that he or she is getting through to every student. Even if the teacher is getting through, the payoff for the student may not come immediately. A great teacher may, so to speak, turn over the soil without harvesting the crop; lessons may need to sink in. Moreover, even very good teachers inevitably fail with many of their students. And to make matters worse, even when teachers seem to be succeeding, they may not be succeeding very well. Those children who seem to be doing well may simply be gifted students who would do well no matter who they had as a teacher. This situation, Lortie argued, creates a pervasive sense of uncertainty among teachers. Some two-thirds of the teachers Lortie interviewed said they encountered problems in assessing their work, and most of those felt the problems were serious. As one told Lortie, “I feel very inadequate and hopeless at times.” Another said, “It’s only every once in a while when you do see progress. . . . You can go on for an eternity with nothing” (Lortie 1975: 143–44). 2. Permeable boundaries. The objective difficulties of single-handedly teaching large, mixed-ability groups are compounded by the many interruptions during the average school day. For learning to occur in a bureaucratic setting, students must concentrate together on the lessons. However, teachers often find it difficult to control the boundaries around their classrooms. Public address announcements may break in at any time. Distractions, from clanging ambulances to bellowing marching bands, may be within earshot of the classroom. Parents may arrive to chauffeur a child to an appointment, disrupting the flow of activity. The children themselves may be difficult to control or quiet down. These interruptions make it difficult to preserve the high levels of concentration that allow students to learn and practice most efficiently. 3. Multiple goals. The mixed goals of schooling in the United States create conflicts in the minds of many teachers about what they should expect from their students. Academic goals are by no means the only goals that schools care about. Schools also want their students to be socially well adjusted, become good citizens, and be able to develop their specific talents (e.g., in music or art). Increasingly, schools are also asked to provide nutritional, emotional, and moral support to children whose families are unable to do so. Although academic goals are usually most important, they may not be the most important goal for every student. Many teachers are unclear about what priority they should give different kinds of child development goals. Teachers wonder if they are doing their job acceptably if, for example, their students seem to be self-assured and self-controlled but are not making great progress academically. Conversely, those who feel that their students are making progress academically may feel insecure if they do not detect evidence of social and emotional progress as well. 4. Isolation from colleagues. Unlike social workers, nurses, doctors, and other professionals in human services work, teachers are essentially on their own. Even therapists in training, an otherwise isolated lot, talk to their supervisors about



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every patient encounter. By contrast, teachers only rarely interact with their principals or with other teachers on matters of practice. Principals rarely visit classrooms or review class notes. And most teachers do not have a strong collegial culture with respect to the sharing of craft skills. Team teaching is rare, and perhaps because of the uncertainties of the craft, conversations in the teacher’s lounge only occasionally take up issues of practice. The norm is to learn to teach “through trial and error in the classroom” (Lortie 1975: 79). Many teachers jealously guard the perimeters of their classroom, for fear of interference with the one area of professional life they feel they can control: how they teach subject matter materials. The isolation of teachers is reinforced by the lack of staging in the teaching career. Although teacher pay goes up with seniority, few schools have rank systems, with statuses such as apprentice teacher and master teacher. Ranks in professions, like all prestige hierarchies, can be useful for a number of reasons. First, they potentially provide senior guidance for younger recruits. A teacher hierarchy may also stimulate ambitions for career advancement, leading practitioners to give more thought to their craft. In the current unranked structure, many talented teachers simply leave teaching for what they hope will be more lucrative pastures. Behavioral consequences. According to Lortie (1975), these four occupational char­ acteristics encourage a common set of attitudes among teachers: • defensiveness: a desire to protect the sanctity of the classroom from any outside interruptions or any deviations from schedule • conservatism: a tendency to rely on trial and error rather than any more reliable guide to effective practice • pragmatism: an unwillingness to experiment and a hostility to the kind of idealism that asks teachers to do more than get through the day without major catastrophes • elitism: a tendency to favor the few students who provide rewards to teachers through good performance or expressions of approval rather than looking for across-the-board improvements in an impartial and clinical spirit It is easy to see how these attitudes might develop out of the structural circumstances of teaching. People who feel insecure tend to be defensive about what they can control and unwilling to try new ways that could lead, at least in the short run, to further insecurity. They may also be more likely to overvalue signs of acceptance, such as nods, smiles, and words of appreciation. These tendencies are reinforced by the recruitment of so many who are people oriented, looking for emotional rather than clinical satisfactions from teaching. (Certainly, where success is often tenuous and failure common, teachers cannot be blamed for looking for satisfaction from a few high-performing students, the unconscious elitism that Lortie notes as characteristic of teachers.) Finally, people who lack the social support of collegial culture or supervision from more experienced and knowledgeable colleagues are unlikely to change their tried and true methods. Recent studies of teaching reveal a somewhat more mixed picture than Lortie found. The uncertainty of teaching remains as strong as ever and has, if anything, become more





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severe as more students come to school poorly prepared for learning and teachers are expected to show yearly annual improvement in students’ test scores. The sense of isolation that Lortie emphasized remains strong (Hargreaves 1993). Political pressures to legislate what goes on in the classroom and cultural clashes between teachers of different backgrounds and philosophies have reinforced some teachers’ already strong desires to build impregnable walls around their classrooms. Professional learning communities. The isolation of teachers may be slowly changing in the direction of climates that encourage more sharing of craft and professional knowledge. In many countries, teachers regularly share experiences, lesson plans, and teaching approaches. Some observers argue that the collegial culture of Japanese and Korean teachers helps explain the good performance of Japanese and Korean students on international assessments (Hiebert et al. 2003). Teacher collegiality also has strong advocates in the United States, and many school districts are promoting collaborative professionalism through the sponsorship of professional learning communities (PLCs) (Siskin 2003). At their best, PLCs share and interrogate members’ practices in the classroom. They meet regularly, reflect on practice, and collaborate in lesson planning as a way to increase teacher learning and professional growth (Stoll et al. 2006). PLCs can create a shared vision of what counts for high-quality teaching and learning refined over time through ongoing collaborative activity and reflective dialogue among teachers (Louis and Marks 1998). Although the research literature on the effects of PLCs is not strong, researchers have found many instances of positive impacts of PLCs on students, including enhanced motivation and improved performance (Cordingley, Bell, and Thomason 2004). However, PLCs are fragile; personality differences, lack of deep commitment among participants, and changes in school leadership easily disrupt them or render them ineffectual. Moreover, collegiality at this level is not easy to sustain in the face of the daily demands of teaching (Pomson 2005). Longitudinal studies indicate that PLCs tend to have short half-lives (Hargreaves 2004). Some writers argue that teachers choose isolation over collaboration because it allows them to conserve scarce time and energy to meet immediate instructional demands (Flinders 1988: 25) and shields them from the “digressions and diversions involved in working with colleagues” (Hargreaves 1993: 58). Teachers’ desires to seal off their classrooms are apparently strong enough that experiments in staging the teaching career have not succeeded well enough to become widely institutionalized. New teachers often appreciate master teachers for the advice and reassurance they can provide. But master teachers are treated more as potential intruders than as pedagogical leaders by experienced teachers (Griffin 1985; Tauer 1996). Until teachers’ work is better paid and gains higher status in society, efforts to professionalize practice through clinical discussions or career ladders based on demonstrated expertise are unlikely to go far (Ingersoll 2005).

The Ecological Order and Instructional Culture of Classrooms In environmental science, ecology is the study of the relationship between organisms and their environments. Ecological studies can include analysis of the size and type of terrain,



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the climate, the number of species and their population size, the patterns of their interaction, and the forces that change the balance of relationships. If we stretch the metaphor a little, classrooms can be thought of as having an ecological order, too. Dimensions of classroom ecology provide a frame for interaction. Classrooms may be relatively rich in instructional resources (such as maps, textbooks, and posters) or relatively poor. Room arrangement may facilitate interaction with students or it may make interaction more difficult by narrowing traffic patterns or blocking views. They may include relatively many or relatively few students. Teachers may or may not have aides. Instructional periods may be long or short, punctuated by rest periods or not. The school day and the school year may be long or short. Children may be grouped by ability or work in mixed-ability groups. Students’ work may be organized in whole-class instruction most of the time, in individual desk work, or in small-group work. Ecologically minded researchers emphasize that aspects of classroom ecology affect the learning experience and can affect the amount of learning that occurs (Barr and Dreeben 1983). This is certainly true. Classrooms with more resources have opportunities to provide enriched learning experiences. Large classrooms create different sorts of challenges than small classrooms. Classrooms with well-trained aides have additional resources with which to produce learning. Grouping patterns can also speed up the classroom or slow it down (Barr and Dreeben 1983). Among this set of variables, the number of well-qualified adults helping in the classroom appears to have the most consistent influence on student learning (Finn et al. 2001; Slavin et al. 2009). Other aspects of classroom ecology provide a frame for interaction, but the actual activities within the frame are too variable to be consistently associated with learning outcomes. Map resources, for example, can be used to good effect, or they can be left rolled up in a corner or used unimaginatively. Similarly, smaller reading groups can lead to greater learning than larger reading groups, but whether they will do so depends on the skill of the teacher, the interest sparked by the learning materials, and the motivation of the students. Instructional culture refers to the accumulated understandings about teaching and learning that are dominant in a society. Comparative studies bring home the extent to which instructional cultures vary. Some instructional cultures, such as the British, are highly oral. Others, such as the Chinese, are document-based (Cummings 2003). In some instructional cultures, students are expected to be ashamed of their errors, as a sign of incompetence. In others, errors are honored as the only path to learning. In some instructional cultures, teachers tend to use many problems from everyday life. In others, problems are presented abstractly and are not directly connected to problems of everyday life. The work of educational researchers Harold Stevenson and James Stigler (1992) provides a stimulating window into the cultural dimensions of classroom organization in Japan and China compared to the United States. On the basis of intensive study of classrooms in six cities (two cities in each country), Stevenson and Stigler observed variations in the three countries that showed how student expectations and consciousness can be shaped by differences in the instructional culture of the classroom.





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In Japan and China, differences in ability were downplayed and differences in effort placed in the foreground. Errors were not considered to reflect lack of ability but rather lack of attention to the source of the error. Stevenson and Stigler (1992) describe one scene from a Japanese classroom that would likely never occur in a public school classroom in the United States. A young Japanese student was having trouble drawing a threedimensional cube. The teacher called the boy to the board and asked him to draw the cube. The boy failed repeatedly, but the teacher kept the boy at the board, providing help and asking the class whether the boy was improving. The boy showed no signs of embarrassment. Errors were not a cause for embarrassment in this classroom or a threat to selfesteem. They were treated as an index of what still needed to be learned and as a necessary means to improvement. The boy remained at the board for nearly the full hour until he finally produced a passable three-dimensional cube. This type of intensive focus on a particular problem or topic was also more characteristic of Asian classrooms than the race to cover many problems and topics, typical of U.S. teaching culture. Many more problems were introduced in Asian classrooms with familiar, hands-on examples. Students in one classroom, for example, learned about measuring volume by first comparing the amount of liquid contained in bottles of various shapes and sizes. Time use was also markedly different in the Asian and American classrooms. Teachers were in the classroom fewer hours in China and Japan, but they were expected to work on lesson preparation after class. They had much more organized and informal discussion with fellow teachers, which reduced the isolation characteristic of American classrooms. As Stevenson and Stigler (1992) point out, if teachers are overworked in the classroom, they cannot be expected to prepare interesting lessons after hours. The organization of class time also differed. Students were taught to quickly perform classroom routines, such as sharpening pencils, so that teachers had more time to spend on lessons. Japanese and Chinese classrooms included many more recess breaks, once after every lesson and at least five a day. This schedule refreshed the children and made it easier for them to concentrate on the next lesson. Almost as striking were the differences Stevenson and Stigler found in grouping patterns. Instead of dividing students by ability level, as was common in American classrooms, Japanese and Chinese teachers faced mixed-ability groups. In the Japanese han (or small group), faster learners were expected to help those who were having trouble, in effect becoming assistant teachers. Asian teachers spent more time in whole-class instruction than in individual or small-group instruction. Stevenson and Stigler speculated that children felt more involved in class activity if they were learning with their fellow classmates rather than alone at their seats completing workbook assignments. American students, they observe, seemed lonelier than Asian students, more on their own, and less supported by others. In another notable difference, Asian primary school students also helped with classroom discipline, acting as delegates of the teacher in quieting disruptive peers. Although American parents lament the size of their children’s classes, class size does not explain the differences Stevenson and Stigler (1992) found in the effectiveness of teaching practices in the three countries. Japanese and Chinese classrooms include more students than American classrooms, averaging between 38 and 50 students. The Asian



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schools also do not have more teachers. By reducing the time spent on routines and by relying more on whole-class instruction, Asian teachers could effectively teach groups as large as 45 to 50. The fewer hours Asian teachers spent in the classroom allowed them to remain relatively fresh for the high-energy performances of instruction.4

constructing classroom interaction Teachers and students enter an environment that has been created for them by previous generations and existing rules. They have little control over the curriculum, class size, or number of recesses during the day. Once teachers enter the classroom, however, they begin to construct a world through their own actions and through interactions with their students. This last section of the chapter explores the process by which classroom reality is constructed through the interaction of teachers and students.

The Bottom Line for Teachers: Classroom Order The first focus of the teacher’s interaction with students is toward the creation of a sufficient degree of order for learning to occur. If students are whispering to each other, throwing objects at one other, running around the room, or openly ridiculing fellow students, the classroom is too chaotic for learning to occur. Not surprisingly, research shows a strong positive association between good order in the classroom, teacher confidence, and higher levels of learning (Arum et al. 2003; Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore 1982; Newman, Rutter, and Smith 1989). Moreover, principals who do not back up teachers’ efforts to maintain order are cited as a more important source of low teacher morale than job demands or hard-to-reach children (Moeller 1964; Liu and Meyer 2005). Willard Waller (1932), the first important American sociologist of schooling, noted that a natural conflict exists between the teacher’s need for order in the classroom and the spontaneous interests of children. He observed that teachers must simultaneously create a rapport with students and exercise enough authority to maintain classroom order. Waller observed that teachers of his day often worked to create this “mixed rapport” (i.e., rapport mixed with respect or fear) by evoking role types with high cultural prestige (such as “the officer and gentleman,” “the patriarch,” “the kindly adult,” and even “the love object”) (1932: 247–52). Some of these cultural reference points of Waller’s era are dated. However, teachers continue to face the problem of how to create a rapport mixed with respect for classroom order. Somehow teachers must walk the line between too much firmness, which makes some children afraid to try, and too much friendliness, which makes some children feel that anything goes. Most teachers today depend on a clearly communicated and graduated set of responses to misbehavior in the classroom. More than order is necessary, however, for learning to occur. A minimal consensus on the value of learning is also necessary for classrooms to work well. This consensus is not as easy to establish as order. For many students, real agreement about the value of learning would require something like a conversion experience—a change of loyalties from peer group and pop culture to the lessons contained in books. Teachers, however, have three resources for gaining at least minimal consensus on the value of learning. The first





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resource—and historically the most important—has been students’ acceptance of the authority of the teacher and their fear of sanctions. The second is the school’s implicit offer of a valuable exchange—the exchange of marketable knowledge and credentials in return for cooperation and respect (Willis 1979). Exchange of material rewards for compliance also enters the picture through the pervasive use of rewards such as pizza parties, candy, and early release for demonstrations of orderliness and industriousness (Brint, Contreras, and Matthews 2001). Finally, some students are attracted by the substantive interest of the learning materials and activities of the classroom and do not need rewards for compliance.

Understanding and Misunderstanding in the Classroom In Chapter 1, I observe that teachers and their students communicate through symbolic expressions, interpretations of those expressions, and responses in light of those interpretations. This complex interaction process occurs simultaneously on both sides of a communicating pair. One reason that clarity in teaching is of such central importance is that children are not experienced in filling in background information or unstated steps in an argument. Without great clarity and quite a bit of repetition, shadows are likely to fall between the words and expressions of teachers and the interpretations of those words and expressions by students. Some children will find all lessons difficult to understand. Teachers therefore walk a fine line between repeating enough so that all students understand and repeating so much that the better students become bored. Because many children are only occasionally engaged with the classroom, a fair amount of the teacher’s time is spent monitoring students’ attention levels. How often have teachers asked a student what she or he thinks, and the answer is, “Huh? Oh, I must not have been paying attention.” Teachers must also gauge levels of understanding. Teachers repeat the question “Do you understand?” frequently, because answers to this question are necessary for teachers to feel that they can go on. One reason more exciting discussions do not occur in most classrooms is that basic understanding is hard enough to achieve. Unfortunately, even in advanced courses, the amount of material covered rarely permits much in the way of free-form discussion. Comprehension is the sine qua non of schooling systems, not the exploration and discussion of ideas. Even so, ample room exists for incomprehension. Words are misheard or misread, and ideas that seem straightforward to teachers are anything but straightforward to students. Students’ malapropisms prove this, if any proof is necessary. According to one student essay, “In the state of nature, Man is nasty, British, and short.” And another: “The government of England is a limited mockery.” Fledgling essayists write about such topics as “intravenous fertilization” and “cereal killers.” Subject matter may be a translucent plate for teachers, but it can be a thick fog for students. Of more direct interest to sociologists, misunderstandings can also arise from the clash of cultures in the classroom. For example, Asian and Native American children are taught that it is rude or impertinent to look adults in the eye. White teachers may interpret this aversion as a lack of confidence or forthrightness. Similarly, many workingclass children do not share a norm of middle-class society: if you do not understand something, you generally do not admit it and rather assume that it will eventually



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become clear. Middle-class teachers may experience the obvious questions of workingclass students as indications of dullness, when other students may be equally perplexed but too savvy to admit it. Status cues are among the most prevalent unconscious influences on teacher interpretations of their students’ behaviors. A classic study by the sociologist Ray Rist (1970) showed how important these status cues can be. Rist found that teachers in kindergarten classes he studied in Washington, D.C., unconsciously connected indicators of social status with indicators of academic aptitude. Children who wore clean clothes, whose hair was nicely combed, who addressed the teacher respectfully, and who spoke standard English were placed in the top reading group and received the most attention from the teacher. Children who were unkempt, unclean, ill mannered, or poor English speakers were relegated to the back of the class. By substituting status cues for more direct evidence of academic potential, teachers inadvertently undermined their expressed commitments to equality of opportunity. Other studies have confirmed the emphasis of the Rist study on the powerful, but largely unconscious, influence of status cues (see, e.g., B. Bernstein 1975: chap. 6; Erickson 1975). The Rist (1970) study is a useful cautionary tale, but it would be wrong to assume that only people who are very much like one another in social background are capable of communicating effectively. Teachers need not come from the same background as their students or adhere to one set of ideal teaching behaviors to be effective in the classroom.5 By the time most students reach second or third grade, they are relatively skilled in symbolic interaction. They are able to read, adapt to, and learn from different types of personalities. They learn to interpret a teacher’s gestures in the context of his or her particular manner of communicating. Most teachers are practiced in drawing out different kinds of students. Moreover, norms of fairness place boundaries around teachers’ social prejudices. Even studies that find social bias in evaluation usually find that objective criteria about students’ performance, as measured by grades and work effort in class, have a stronger influence on teachers’ and counselors’ assessments of students than indicators of social status (see, e.g., Erickson 1975; DiMaggio and Mohr 1985).

Traditional and Progressive Pedagogy Are there rules for effective pedagogy? Some practices are embraced by virtually all effective teachers, from brass-tacks conservatives to new-age liberals: 1. Explanation. Students require explanation for most curriculum aims and learning goals. For example, no student can understand the meaning or varieties of Baroque art without prior explanation of the main differences between Baroque and other styles of art. 2. Modeling. It is helpful for students to see what it looks like to master a learning goal. The teacher can do this—or, in some cases, other students can serve as models. For example, either the teacher or an advanced student can describe the Baroque elements in a sculpture by Bernini by comparing them to elements in Renaissance or Mannerist works.





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3. Guided practice. Students’ achievement of learning goals requires assistance and practice. Teachers should consequently include a number of instructional activities for students to practice and provide feedback on their performance of these activities. For example, reading about Bernini’s life, sketching one of his sculptures, and watching a film about Bernini’s workshop can all help the art history student better appreciate Baroque art and its greatest exemplar. But only by comparing Bernini’s work to the work of artists from later and earlier periods can Baroque elements be properly understood. Therefore, opportunities to make these comparisons are required. 4. Independent practice. Independent practice makes certain that students can apply the knowledge or skill in a variety of circumstances and that it is deeply understood. Tests on the Baroque could consequently be based on photographs of numerous previously unstudied works of art, with the teacher asking students to determine which ones belong to the Baroque period and why (Marzano 2007). Traditional versus progressive pedagogy. Within the bounds of widely embraced prac­ tices like these, a persistent tension has existed between two influential camps over how to produce better and more engaged learning. Those who support traditional pedagogical practices believe that effective teaching consists of clarity in explanation, step-by-step mastery of subject matter, repetition, and continuous feedback on performance, culminating in letter grades with real meaning. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, advocates of what came to be known as progressive pedagogical practices challenged traditional educators (Dewey [1916] 1966; Cremin 1961). Advocates for progressive pedagogy, led by the educational philosopher John Dewey, took a child-centered view of learning, arguing that stimulating a child’s natural curiosity is the key to effective learning. For the development of motivated, lifelong learners, they argued, it was not enough to produce short-term retention of course materials. They argued that teachers should provide curricula of interest to children, rather than curricula that adults alone judged important. They also argued that teachers should vary their methods, using field trips, hands-on projects, and student-centered discussions to complement lectures, board work, and seat work. In general, the progressives believed in de-emphasizing evaluation and emphasizing knowledge of children’s strengths and weaknesses and, above all, allowing them to learn through doing. Both schools of thought have something important to offer, and both, left to their own devices, can also go badly astray. Studies of teacher effectiveness in the United States have converged on the conclusion that both task leadership and socioemotional leadership are essential. In this way studies of pedagogy replicate the conclusions of leadership studies in other institutional settings (Perrow 1986: chap. 2). Task leadership, a strong point of traditionalists, involves such matters as efficiently organizing activities and schedules, providing clear instructions, monitoring performance, and providing feedback. Socioemotional leadership, a strong point of progressives, involves such matters as developing rapport in the group, creating a considerate and positive environment, contributing to the social pleasures of a work group’s life, listening to concerns of members of the work



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teaching and learning in comparative perspective Ta bl e 8 . 1 Characteristics associated with effective teachers

From traditional pedagogy

From progressive pedagogy

Concentration on task-oriented activities Emphasis on reading and writing Clearly communicated expectations High (but not out of reach) expectations Quick correction of errors Diagnostic quizzes Clarity and repetition in lectures Frequent assessments and feedback Strong (but not exclusive) emphasis on meaningful grades

Varied daily routine Use of many different types of learning materials Student participation Hands-on activities Less lecturing; more labs, projects, and discussions Positive emotional tone rather than flat tone Responsiveness to individual students’ experiences and needs Ample (but not overly generous) praise for students’ achievements and contributions

group, and discussing thoroughly any issues that come up in accomplishing the work. Table 8.1 summarizes the following discussion of effective teaching techniques from both perspectives. One of the most consistent findings in the literature, dating back to the 1960s, is that the sheer amount of time on task is related to the amount of student learning (see, e.g., Fischer et al. 1978; Dreeben and Gamoran 1986). The more time spent on curricular materials and the less time spent warming up, following classroom routines, housekeeping, and sharing nonschool experiences, the better for the learning climate. But a few provisos are necessary. Simply pouring time into make-work will not improve students’ skills. To be effective, higher levels of time on task depend on good class-management practices, well-designed learning materials, and interactive teaching styles. (Time on task probably also has less influence on creative projects that require germination time as well as task completion.) Time on task extends beyond the class period. As seemingly trivial a matter as increasing the number of school days from 175 to 185 has been associated with increased achievement (Goodlad 1984: 96) as have summer learning programs (Heyns 1978). Many students lose a lot of what they have learned during the summer months, when schoolwork is the last thing many children want to think about (Downey, von Hippel, and Broh 2004). Preschool advocates use a similar logic, with supporting evidence: earlier exposure to school can make up for family environments that are not conducive to learning (Kirp 2007). Also supporting the traditionalists’ view, researchers have found that effective teachers have high standards that they expect students to reach. To be precise: expectations should be high but not out of reach, and they should be very clearly communicated and consistently maintained. One especially interesting study by the sociologists Robert Dreeben and Adam Gamoran (1986) brings home the importance of high expectations. Dreeben and Gamoran examined 13 first-grade classrooms in three Chicago-area school districts. When they compared children who had had similar levels of reading readiness at the beginning of the year, they found that scores on reading tests administered at the end of the year varied primarily by the sheer amount of time spent on reading and by the number of words covered over the school year. Neither students’ race nor their family’s





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socioeconomic status showed a significant influence on reading achievement once time on task and total word coverage were taken into account. However, both race and socioeconomic status were correlated with the amount and difficulty of instruction offered by the schools. Dreeben and Gamoran concluded that poor children were often short-changed because their teachers failed to give them assignments challenging enough to stimulate their potential for intellectual growth. Regular assessment is another emphasis of traditional pedagogy that appears to be essentially on target. Prompt correction of errors is necessary so that students know what they need to work on. Frequent diagnostic quizzes can be a major help for this purpose. They can also help students retrieve material for final examinations. Indeed, good evidence exists that the learning climate of virtually every classroom would be improved if teachers gave short, three- or four-question diagnostic quizzes at the end of every class meeting to see whether students were paying attention and whether they had learned the most important points of the day’s lesson. Similarly, regular quizzes on reading help students master material and recall it for later use (McDaniel et al. 2007; Roedinger and Karpick 2006). They can also help reduce achievement gaps between low- and high-income students (Pennebaker, Gosling, and Ferrell 2013). Although these elements of traditional pedagogy are well supported in the educational research, an overly rigid conception of the traditional approach can be counterproductive. Students need to feel that teachers are interested in them and have their interests in variety, experimentation, and exploration in mind. Traditionalists can obtain outstanding performance from the most motivated and able students (and those with strong needs to please authority figures), but they can also turn off less motivated and nonconformist students by failing to spark an imaginative connection with the materials studied. For reasons like these, the research suggests that effective teachers also draw on practices associated with the progressive tradition. They draw, in particular, on students’ experience and natural interests in the world. For example, young children can learn about quantities by repetitive practice of sums or, in some cases more effectively, by working in an imaginary store and making change for their customers. Effective schoolteachers also make their classrooms inviting places by hanging attractive posters on the walls and decorating in other ways. They vary the daily routine, using different kinds of learning materials, from instructional videos to small-group discussions to field trips. Most of all, they encourage students’ active participation by frequently breaking lectures for discussions. Discussions, if they are well led, can make students feel like an important part of the class. They seize on student participation by accepting and clarifying student answers and by using their ideas when possible. They provide praise for good performance, although they do not praise so effusively that praise itself becomes devalued. Finally, effective teachers convey a sense of deep interest and enthusiasm in their own work as teachers. They vary voice pitch and gestures to maintain a vibrant emotional tone, just as anyone who was truly interested in a subject would. Some students are well prepared to focus on curricular materials for long concentrated stretches. But for younger children and children who are less able to concentrate over long periods, classroom organization must sustain shorter bursts of interest. Some teachers



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have the gift for organizing activities that build student commitment to the classroom and ultimately to its academic mission. As Michael Huberman writes, teachers can try to build interest by “acting out legends, singing in class, conducting an apparently aimless physics experiment suggested by pupils, reading parts of a play. . . . [Many teachers] suspect, perhaps with good reason, that [their students’] reactions of amused curiosity or real engagement will pay off further down the line” (1993: 43). Student engagement seems to be highest when students are working on labs, individual or group projects, or participating in discussions (Yair 2000). Engagement is not the same thing as learning, of course, but for most beginning students it is a precondition for learning. A three-year study, led by the educational economist Thomas Kane, found that 60 percent of the nearly 3,000 classrooms studied were competently managed, but only 1 in 5 featured ambitious instruction that asked students to reason and answer more open-ended questions (Kane, Kerr, and Piana 2014). Effective teaching practices may be less common in secondary schools than in primary schools because of differences in school and classroom organization. Primary school teachers have the same children all day. They are able to get to know their 30 children better than a secondary school teacher can possibly get to know the 150–200 students he or she sees during the school day. Primary school teachers may, therefore, feel the need to make the children’s home base an attractive place to be. They also have more flexibility in managing time; they are not chained to the 50-minute subject period as secondary school teachers are. These factors increase the incentive of secondary school teachers to communicate their curricular materials as efficiently as possible. Teacher-centered lecturing, combined perhaps with a small amount of discussion, is widely believed to be the most efficient method for communicating the relatively complex ideas of secondary school courses (see, e.g., Cuban 1993: chap. 8). Secondary school teachers could do better if they were to implement findings from the research literature on how to engage students, but many are more concerned about getting through the day in a challenging environment than they are in using research to rethink tried-and-true practices. The increasing importance of content standards and testing for accountability has encouraged a search for efficiency in primary school classrooms as well. Many teachers complain about the large number of content standards they are expected to teach every month. They feel the need to find effective ways to communicate large amounts of information in a short time. Progressive educators made a good case that techniques of drilling students on knowledge content were killing for the spirit of learning, but the constant pressure of performance standards means the days of “drill and kill” are definitely back. Short-term gains in retention may be found using these methods but perhaps at the expense of longterm interest in a deeper engagement with the world of knowledge the school has to offer. Teacher expectations and student performance. Before the accountability era, dating from the publication of the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s A Nation at Risk in 1983 (see Chapter 9), perhaps the greatest teaching deficiency in the United States was that teachers did not expect enough of their students. Indeed, teachers often reacted to signs of student disengagement by trying to make school less taxing and more enjoyable. Because they feared losing students, they substituted light material they felt





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would stimulate their students to try harder and to be more interested in school (Sizer 1984: chap. 5; Powell, Farrar, and Cohen 1985; Steinberg 1996: 75–76). We have seen improvements, particularly in mathematics teaching and learning, since the accountability era began. But even today, compared to teachers in many other industrial countries, American eighth-grade mathematics teachers tend to cover too much ground using problems of relatively low complexity (Carnoy and Rothstein 2013), an approach sometimes described as “a mile wide and an inch deep” (Schmidt, McKnight, and Raizen 1997: 62). Instead of trying harder when offered light material, most students respond by further disengaging from their studies (Yair 2000). They assume they can pick up what they need to know just in time for the test (Sedlak et al. 1986; Metz 1993). High expectations, we know, play a role in learning, but how important are they? Can high expectations lead struggling students to achieve great things? A famous study by the social psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen, Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968), is often cited in support of the contention that teacher expectations are the single most important key to student performance. In the original study, the researchers chose 20 percent of students at random from each of six classes in a San Francisco school. They gave a test to all students participating in the study, a test they misrepresented as predicting “intellectual blooming.” Rosenthal and Jacobsen then told the teachers of the six classes that the test indicated which students were destined to show large intellectual gains during the academic year (the experimental subjects, of course). Pre- and posttests showed that among first and second graders the experimental subjects did in fact show higher than average gains from the beginning to the end of the year. The obvious interpretation is that teachers had high expectations for the predicted bloomers and that these expectations made a difference in how the children performed. By “facial expression, posture, and perhaps by her touch, the teacher may have communicated to the children of the experimental group that she expected improved intellectual performance” (Rosenthal and Jacobsen 1968: 180). A closer look at Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s study encourages doubt about just how powerful teacher expectations really are. Changes in line with the self-fulfilling prophecy did not occur in the higher grades, and in a few cases the changed scores of the experimental subjects were actually lower than those of the group of students who were not predicted to bloom during the year. Subsequent replications of Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s study have tended to confirm a more qualified view of the power of teacher expectations. It may be that by grade three most children have acquired an academic self-conception that is difficult to revise much in the course of a year. Some may not be capable of doing more challenging work. Many more may not think themselves capable of doing it. Still others may not see enough relevance of schooling to their life goals to exchange respectful attention and hard work required by schooling for the advantages of better understanding and higher grades. Teachers’ expectations are important, but they are not all powerful. Is it possible to measure the value teachers add to student growth? Not surprisingly in the accountability era, policy makers have focused on ways to measure effective teaching as the most direct route to improving how much students learn in school, as measured by their scores on state tests. Value-added models (VAMs) have been a popular approach



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to measuring teacher effectiveness. These models compare the test scores of individual teachers’ students to the same students’ scores from past years and to the scores of other students in the same grade. VAMs have been used in one or another form in teacher evaluations in a majority of U.S. states during the last decade. They have been increasingly promoted or mandated as a component in determining teachers’ compensation, evaluating and ranking teachers, hiring or dismissing teachers, awarding tenure, and even closing schools. However, the results of research studies on VAMs have been inconsistent across and within measures, and results are highly sensitive to the form of measurement and the controls used in studies of the value added (Guarino, Rechase, and Woolridge 2012). In most cases results have been disappointing in terms of the magnitude of the effect of VAMs relative to student input characteristics and system-level influences such as curriculum standards and teacher-training requirements. In a recent study, Morgan Polikoff and Andrew Porter (2014) examined fourth- and eighth-grade English and math teachers in six school districts. They found modest zero-order correlations and very modest regression coefficients for VAMs relative to other influences on student test scores. Even these modest effects disappeared when alternative measures of pedagogical quality were introduced into the regressions. Indeed, most VAM studies have shown that teachers account for only 1 to 14 percent of variation in student test scores (American Statistical Association 2014). (Of course, students’ scores on state tests are only one measure of the success of the work teachers do in their classrooms. Fostering students’ social skills and sparking new interests and curiosity can be just as important or more important.) VAMs are an unproven measure of teacher quality. For this reason, in 2014 the American Statistical Association took the unusual step of criticizing VAMs publicly, concluding that “ranking of teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.”

Cross-Cultural Expectations in Classroom Interaction Teaching methods that mix traditional and progressive elements generally work well in the United States, but they would not necessarily work well elsewhere. A kind and caring American-style teacher might simply confuse Asian students, just as a glib and cultivated European teacher might seem insufferable to most American students. Indeed, different societies provide rather different conceptions of what ideal teaching looks like. These divergent ideals suggest that effective teaching practices are not universal. To be effective, teaching practices must align with the pedagogical ideals of the culture in which they are located and thereby fit the expectations of students who have become attuned to that culture. When these alignments do not occur, students are likely to be confused or hostile and teachers less effective than they would otherwise be. The ideal teacher in China and Japan. In Asia, the ideal teacher is a skilled performer. As with the actor or musician, the substance of the curriculum becomes the script or the score; the goal is to perform the role or piece as effectively and skillfully as possible (Stevenson and Stigler 1992: 166–67). The teacher’s job is to lead students through coherent and engaging lesson plans that bring them eventually to new knowledge. Thus,





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Asian teachers are expected to be lively and responsive to students, and they do not feel much pressure to be sensitive and nurturing. Indeed, Asian teachers are perceived as strict. They give out fewer high marks than American teachers, and they are more likely to scold students (Ban and Cummings 1999). Stevenson and Stigler found that the teachers they surveyed in Beijing chose clarity and enthusiasm as the most important attributes of good teachers, whereas teachers in Chicago chose sensitivity and patience far more often (1992: 166–67). Thus, the cultural ideals of teaching in Asia can be described as skillful performance, clarity, and coherence in lesson planning. As I note earlier, Asian teachers also show a marked appreciation for the role of effort in the process of acquiring new knowledge and the importance of errors to the process of learning. Errors are no shame in China and Japan. They are impediments that can be overcome on the path to knowledge, not indicators of limited aptitude. Teaching styles, of course, vary among the East Asian societies. In Japanese mathematics classes, teachers make an average of eight shifts between whole-class and individual work during each class period. They focus on a few problems during each period, and explain those problems thoroughly. Japanese teachers try to make connections between new material and previously studied material. They also repeat and summarize frequently, so that most, if not all, students are able to understand new material. Teaching in Hong Kong, by contrast, tends to emphasize practice, practice, practice. Students go over procedures until they know them by heart. Both countries show high levels of success in mathematics instruction, but this is not because teachers have the same style. More likely, it is because the expectations of students and teachers are well aligned and because teachers in both countries are not afraid to ask their students to work on complex problems (Hiebert et al. 2003). The ideal teacher in English and French elite education. At the upper reaches of English and French secondary and higher education, teachers embody an entirely different cultural style. The most admired teachers often have “a certain gracious demeanor and a talent for witty and pleasant conversation” (Rothblatt 1968: 190). In this respect, the ideal teacher is a person of broad knowledge who is nevertheless at ease with the repartee of polite society. The “humourless college authoritarians” have always been found in these settings, as well, but the most admired teachers work hard to present the appearance of effortlessness (190). They display their learning through intriguing lecture themes and provocative questioning, and they encourage bantering exchanges between themselves and their students. The English literary critic Cyril Connolly provides a reminiscence of one such teacher at Eton College, the leading British preparatory school: Wells taught the classical specialists; he was a fine cricketer and a judge of claret, a man of taste with a humour of understatement in the Cambridge style. [He] was theatrical, he liked knotty points and great issues, puns and dramatic gestures. He was . . . fond of paradoxes and we learnt to turn out a bright essay on such a subject as “Nothing succeeds like failure” or “Nothing fails like success.” (Connolly [1938] 1973: 220)

Corresponding to the values of their teachers, elite English and French students are expected to show signs of deep learning and creativity, not mere correctness or competence.



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In France, the cult of brilliance reaches its apex in the grandes écoles and in the schools preparing students for admission to these highly selective institutions. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conducted a study of some 150 student records from one such preparatory school for girls. Bourdieu analyzed the remarks made by instructors supporting grades on each of five or six exercises submitted by the girls. He found that the descriptive adjectives “careful,” “conscientious,” and “thorough” were located closer to the pole indicating poor performance (the set of marks anchored by such adjectives as “simplistic,” “vulgar,” and “insipid”) than to the pole indicating excellent performance (anchored by such adjectives as “masterful,” “cultivated,” and “ingenious”). Furthermore, the adjectives “sensible” or “right” were not terms of praise in this hierarchy of academic judgments. They, too, were slightly closer to the pole indicating poor performance (Bourdieu 1988: 195–208). The persistence of the cultural ideal of aristocratic brilliance is a tribute to the staying power of court society, in which serious matters of state mixed with the lightness and wit of high society. As the aristocracy receded in importance in the age of commerce, new classes adapted the old cultural ideals to their particular situations. The gentry (men and women of property and established name in the English countryside), urban professionals, and intellectuals, each in their own way, took up the old aristocratic cultural ideals as a means to express a lifestyle and values markedly different from those of the more consistently sober-minded and profit-conscious business classes. Wit and erudition have often been appropriated as weapons in the struggle for status by culturally privileged segments of the dominant class. Today, the cult of aristocratic brilliance remains important only in those institutions and disciplines least marked by the democratic and bureaucratic revolutions of the era of mass education—in self-consciously elite preparatory schools in continental Europe and in the humanities departments of highly selective undergraduate colleges in the United States. Democracy and science favor the sober and dedicated specialist over the brilliant and cultivated generalist. Even so, it is still too early to write an epitaph for the man of letters as a cultural ideal. So long as there is something to be gained in status from the expression of conspicuous learning united to wit, the cultural ideal that originated in court society will undoubtedly continue to live on as a weapon in the status struggles of the educated upper middle class.

 Homo Academicus and the Consecration of Status  Throughout his career, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was sensitive to the relationship between language and social power. From his earliest studies of the French educational system (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), he has emphasized the connection between professorial evaluations and students’ social class backgrounds. Few students, Bourdieu argues, have the kinds of experiences that allow them to present themselves as highly cultivated. Few travel





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widely, listen to sophisticated discussions at the dinner table, or are encouraged to read serious literature. Professorial judgments, therefore, are in large part social class judgments. Professorial affinities for cultivation and sophisticated wit are, according to Bourdieu, a form of “symbolic violence” directed against the lower classes. Categorizations of one student as brilliant and another as dull are, he argues, reinforcements of the social hierarchy in linguistic terms. The terms are meant to seem to be unbiased assessments of underlying aptitudes, but what they really assess, according to Bourdieu, is the cultural capital of the home environment. In one of his studies, Homo Academicus, Bourdieu continues his critique of symbolic violence by correlating descriptive remarks on student exercises with the social class background of students. Those exercises characterized in the most positive terms tended to be written by children of professors, doctors, diplomats, and executives. Those characterized in the most negative terms tended to be written by children of tradesmen, clerks, and craftsmen (Bourdieu 1988: 195–208). Bourdieu’s work can be interpreted as having greater relevance to France and other Western European societies than to societies like the United States, in which familiarity with art, literature, and history is not a decisive marker of status (see, e.g., Lamont 1992). Nevertheless, Bourdieu should be credited with pioneering efforts to unmask the hidden social codes of academic evaluative language and the role these codes play in the intergenerational reproduction of the culturally dominant segment in society. In his subsequent The State Nobility, Bourdieu continues this work by focusing on the role of the state as “the central bank of symbolic credit” (1996: 376) and its role in the creation of social divisions and dignities through the bestowal of academic titles. He saw these bestowals not through the lens of prestige but rather as an infliction of violence on those lacking these titles. As Bourdieu’s student Loic Wacquant writes in the foreword to The State Nobility, “The violence of the state . . . bears upon us all in myriad minute and invisible ways, every time we perceive and construct the social world through categories instilled in us via our education. . . . The school is the state’s most potent conduit and servant” (1996: xviii). Bourdieu views schooling from the point of view of a class-divided society that is re-created minute by minute by the judgments of the schools, which are in turn heavily weighted toward the culturally advantaged. The idea that schools create thinking and interactive skills that are generative of progressive and productive individuals and societies is alien to his social theory. The lens of Bourdieu is highly illuminating, but other lenses are required for a more complete understanding of the school’s role in social change.



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Teaching cultures in the developing world. Cultural models in the developing world provide a contrast to both the skilled performers of Asia and the clever gentlemenscholars who prepare elites in Britain and France. Teaching cultures in most developing countries are teacher centered to an extreme. Students are expected to copy what is on the board and to memorize textbooks; they are not expected to engage with their textbooks or lessons in any more probing way. The authoritarian methods typical of many developing world classrooms are evident in a study reported by Richard Pfau (1980), which compared classroom behaviors in several fifth-grade classes in the United States and Nepal. In Nepal, some 80 percent of class time was spent on lectures. In the United States, lecturing accounted for just 40 percent of class time. Pfau counted three times as much speaking and questioning of teachers by students in the United States as in Nepal. Group projects, student demonstrations, library research, and field trips were almost unknown in Nepal. In the United States, they accounted for small but measurable increments of activity, approximately one-fifth of class time overall. The findings have been similar for other developing countries (see Lockheed, Fonancier, and Bianchi 1989; Lockheed 1993: 31). The sources of teacher-focused instruction in the developing world are similar to those that made autocratic teaching methods common in 18th- and 19th-century America. Teachers are poorly prepared and teach under difficult circumstances. Children do not reliably show up for class and are often not prepared even when they do attend. Resources are often extremely limited. Only the unusual teacher is willing to take risks by loosening the reins of authority in such circumstances. In some cases, the pressures teachers feel to focus attention on themselves are reinforced by traditional models of authority, which emphasize the decisive role of the leader and the unquestioning deference of followers. In the developing world, teacher-centered methods often go hand in hand with a decided lack of interest in assessment. Studies from the 1980s showed that in the Philippines less than one-third of fifth-grade science teachers, and those mainly in the cities, reported using tests frequently (Lockheed, Fonancier, and Bianchi 1989). In Nigeria, only 10 percent of primary school teachers said they relied on testing as part of their instructional arsenal (Ali and Akubue 1988), and in Botswana, students were observed taking tests only 1 percent of the time (Fuller and Snyder 1991). Recent overviews come to similar conclusions. In the words of the economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, in much of the developing world assessment of student knowledge is “sporadic or non-existent” (2008: 658). We need, then, to take a complex view of cross-cultural differences. Specific kinds of societies give rise to specific teaching ideals, and these ideals shape the expectations of teachers and students alike. At the same time, some basic principles of effective teaching are apparently universal. In developing countries, for example, research shows that significant gains in student performance are associated with many of the same factors that also make a difference in the United States. These include better-qualified and more knowledgeable teachers, larger amounts of time spent in class on academic studies rather than on ancillary activities, more opportunities for students to participate actively in class through questioning and discussion, and continuous evaluation of student progress through the use of tests and other feedback (Fuller and Clarke 1994).





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conclusion Study of teaching and learning requires looking at the characteristics that teachers and students bring with them to the classroom, the social structure of classrooms, the process of teacher-student interaction, and the effectiveness of teaching techniques. Teachers and students meet in the classroom, but their capacities and interests are largely formed outside the classroom. Teachers are most likely to have high academic standards when they have done well themselves in school, have had a rigorous subject matter training, and are highly respected and well remunerated by society. Students are most likely to be engaged with classroom activity when their parents and their communities provide high levels of support for learning, they have enough time to study, and they see the relevance of schooling to their adult life plans. Most portraits of great teachers describe one-to-one relationships, because teaching ideally occurs between an individual teacher who knows how to bring out the best in a student and an individual student who is motivated to learn from that teacher. These portraits suggest that schooling ought ideally to be organized as a craft production industry. Of course, for reasons of cost it is actually organized as a bureaucratic production industry. Teachers in bureaucratic settings face a number of problems. They are subject to a great many rules and can be interrupted from teaching by a number of intruding events. They work with large numbers of diverse and unequally motivated students. They therefore cannot be certain of succeeding with many of their students. In addition, academic achievement is only one goal of schooling; thus, teachers must decide on priorities in a climate of competing expectations. Under these uncertain circumstances, many teachers try to wall off their classrooms, thereby depriving themselves of collegial support. These occupational circumstances can create attitudes of defensiveness, conservatism, pragmatism, and unconscious elitism among teachers. Teaching and learning are further conditioned by classroom organization. These organizational features include the number of students and aides in the classroom, how they are grouped for instruction, the arrangement of the classroom, and how time is divided during the day. A few of these features of organization, such as aides in the classroom and the amount of time spent on task, make a difference in student performance. Other elements are more important for shaping the kinds of interactions that occur. Instructional culture can also be considered part of the classroom structure and is another important element that can affect learning. “Instructional culture” refers to the assumptions about teaching and learning and the practices that prevail among educators. The instructional culture in East Asia emphasizes in-depth coverage of a smaller number of topics than American teachers cover. It also encourages a more favorable attitude toward errors and a sense that effort, rather than ability, is the most important factor in learning. Other societies have developed different cultural understandings of teaching and learning. Comparative studies indicate that a variety of pedagogical styles can be effective, so long as the pedagogical styles of teachers are aligned to the expectations of students. At the same time, learning does not occur if students and teachers are frequently absent, learning resources are extremely scarce, and assessments do not



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occur regularly. Unfortunately, these are common features of schooling in the developing world. Once teachers and students gather in classrooms, they construct a world through their actions and interactions. Classroom order is a prerequisite to all other effective communication. Even in orderly classrooms, communication can break down because of misinterpretations of teacher or student behavior or because of poor instructional techniques. In the United States, a long-running debate has divided advocates of traditional and progressive pedagogical practices. The research evidence supports some aspects of traditional pedagogy (such as clarity and repetition, high expectations, and rigorous evaluation) and some aspects of progressive pedagogy (such as hands-on learning, use of frequent discussion, and use of varied media to convey lessons).

9

school reform

Sociology can tell us a great many things about how schools operate as social institutions in different societies, but can it also help us make improvements in schools? To some extent, the kinds of changes people want to see in schools reflect their values, and sociology cannot tell people what to value. But sociology can clarify the range of values that inspire reform movements. It can discuss the ways that reform movements are mobilized and why they appear at the times they do. And perhaps most important, it can show what kinds of reform policies have been most likely to improve the outcomes of schooling. The term “reform” has a complex history. For most of the 20th century, it was used to refer to changes in schooling that reformers expected would lead to more attention to the interests of students or more fairness and equity for disadvantaged groups—in other words, for changes that we might today call progressive reform. However, over the last generation the term “reform” has been enthusiastically embraced by moderates and conservatives, who see it as providing a positive image for policies intended to make schools more academically demanding and more efficient but not necessarily more student centered or more equitable. School reform in most societies has been a largely top-down affair. Political leaders have developed plans for reorganizing schools and then mobilized support for those plans. Top-down mobilization is also common in the United States, but school reform has often been accompanied by much higher levels of popular involvement in the United States than elsewhere. Even today, at a time when the public has grown indifferent or hostile to many government activities, which are perceived as distant from everyday life concerns, public schools remain an object of intense public interest in the United States (Gallup 2015). Because Americans expect much of their schools and invest so much of their hopes as a society in schools, they are keenly disappointed when the schools seem not to be measuring up.



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 Computers in the Classroom  Computers will almost certainly play an even more important role than they now do in classrooms of the future. This is a little surprising, considering that technology has often been a bust in the classroom. Radio, television, and film have all failed to make large inroads in classroom life (Tyack and Cuban 1995). The difference between these earlier technologies and computers is that computers are interactive and offer a wide range of choice in learning experiences for teachers and students alike. Computers began to enter classrooms some 25 years ago. Their entry into school life has not been without problems. Some schools remain unconnected to the Internet, and the existence of computer resources has become one of the major stratifying resources in school systems, as the phrase “the digital divide” suggests. Just as computer use for analytical purposes has become more and more a marker of high-level jobs, so computer resources have become a marker of better schools. Many teachers continue to use computers for unimaginative drill work, whereas others substitute Internet searches for learning experiences. In the latter cases, “data smog,” or information overload, can be a problem. Where they are used effectively, computers can be a tremendous learning resource. From the beginning, some teachers were able to take advantage of the interactive quality and versatility of computers. For example, one school in rural Louisiana used computers to develop a folk life archive about their community. The students interviewed friends and relatives for reminiscences, folktales, recipes, crafts, and celebrations. They transformed these interviews into files that combined text, graphics, animation, and sound, creating interactive documents with multiple layers of information. The archives fed into classroom activities. Native Americans came into class to help students build authentic Choctaw huts, famous cooks came in to instruct on local recipes, scuba divers came to talk about sea life in the Gulf. Photographs taken at these events were integrated with text in the archives (Gooden 1996: chap. 2). At a school in south Philadelphia, science instructors used computers to aid in the building of a greenhouse and the study of plant life. Computers were used to record growth data, conduct plant growth simulations, and write reports on topics from photosynthesis to acid rain. Students got hands-on experience with plant life in the greenhouse and intellectual reflection on natural processes through the computing facilities. Students and teachers also began to use electronic bulletin boards and networks to do research and establish links with other schools. They shared statistics on water and air quality and other data (Gooden 1996: chap. 3). In addition to the information resources of the Internet, some teachers now have access to enormously sophisticated educational software. Children can





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simulate the growth and management of towns and cities, follow intergalactic space travelers to solve problems that help them save the universe, and look at and listen to different countries of the world while learning history. Thanks to these creative programs, children who attend the country’s best schools will be learning how to do research and how to think in an integrated way at an earlier age than any previous generation. But some spectacular failures are also part of the story. In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent $1 billion for computer tablets for all its schoolchildren, in the hope of creating an enhanced learning environment using an exciting new curriculum provided by a software vendor. The tablets came without keyboards, rendering report typing an onerous task. The curriculum itself was incomplete and hard to use. Worse, many children learned how to hack the computers to play video games and interact on social media. At least $2 million worth of tablets were stolen from the schools. The initiative ended in 2015 with the firing of the superintendent and amid a flurry of lawsuits (Lapowsky 2015). Some observed that the funds would have been much better spent repairing and renovating the broken toilets and sinks in school bathrooms.

a typology of school reforms: the four e’s When we look at the entire history of public education, four primary goals have informed school reform movements. They have been based on efforts to (1) improve efficiency, (2) raise standards of achievement, (3) enhance children’s full range of cognitive and expressive powers, and (4) increase equity by improving the schools educating the least advantaged students. It is therefore only a small stretch to say that the three Rs of school curriculum (reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic) are matched by the “four Es” of school reform: efficiency, excellence, enhancement, and equity. The first large-scale reform impulse, and the one with the most enduring appeal to school administrators, yielded a national movement to improve the efficiency of schooling. These reforms reflected bureaucratic organizational principles and sometimes also preference for market principles of efficient allocation of students to tiers and tracks within tiers. When they were first instituted in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they involved the introduction of new forms of categorizing and organizing personnel, more standardized curricula, and a more widely shared common model of school practices. They sometimes also involved the introduction of new types of schools and curricula (such as commercial and vocational tracks) justified as to improve the efficiency of educating expanding numbers of students with a wide range of abilities and interests. The second reform impulse, excellence (or improved academic standards), has had its strongest roots in state educational bureaucracies and among educational policy makers. Reform movements aimed at improving academic standards encourage stiffer



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requirements, more time in the school day, new evaluation procedures, more demanding educational materials, and the like. State educational bureaucrats and policy makers have periodically expressed deep concern about the effects of lax teaching standards in comprehensive schools on the amount of learning that occurs in the classroom. Since the 1970s they have proposed waves of legislation to raise academic standards, so that students would be better prepared for postsecondary education and the labor market. The third reform impulse has its strongest roots in the teaching staff, but administrators often find it appealing as well. These are reforms connected to enhancement of children’s full range of intellectual and expressive powers. Reform efforts aimed at enhancing children’s development may include such add-ons as music and art programs, physical education, extracurricular activities, and multipurpose or special-purpose rooms. They may also involve more child-centered activities, such as field trips, hands-on science projects, class or schoolwide arts projects, and more colorful and interesting classroom decor. Finally, movements aimed at improving equity are the project of liberal reformers, who wish to use the schools to make society more just. These reforms involve educational programs intended to provide additional or compensatory education for members of disadvantaged groups (such as the U.S. Title I and Head Start programs, which are aimed at the urban poor), integrating socially subordinate groups into better schools (such as desegregation plans), or improving school-based social and health services for members of at-risk groups. It can involve the allocation of extra resources or higher pay for teachers assigned to schools in economically disadvantaged areas. Table 9.1 lists some of the school reforms that fall into each category. In this chapter I focus on two of the four Es of educational reform: excellence and equity. These are the reform purposes that have been squarely in focus over the last several decades, while the other two purposes either have become entrenched in school organization or have receded, at least temporarily, in importance. It is no mystery why efficiency and enhancement reforms have moved out of the main lines of reform thinking. It is because many of the fundamental goals of reformers were achieved. In the case of enhancement reforms, the more extreme ideas of reformers were widely repudiated because they threatened teacher authority or failed to achieve hopedfor results. But I do want to discuss them, at least briefly. Reformers at the end of the 19th century, impressed by the new world of business organization, wanted to make the schools into paragons of efficiency along corporate lines. Thanks to the work of the big-city superintendents of the period, the construction of efficient bureaucratic organization for mass public schooling spread throughout the country. Many of these superintendents had been students of the leading theorists of educational organization of the Progressive Era, Professors Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford University and George D. Strayer of Columbia University. Age-graded classrooms, certified teachers, local schools with designated class periods, students moving from classroom to classroom through standardized blocks of time, school districts led by superintendents, and other basics of contemporary school and district organizational structures are all innovations of this period. The efficient, bureaucratic structures of “the one best system,” identified by the educational historian David Tyack (1974), have certainly loosened around the edges. Students have somewhat more choice in classes, and teachers use a wider variety of materials





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Ta bl e 9 . 1 Types of school reforms: The four Es 1. Reforms promoted to increase efficiency a. New types of schools appropriate to stages of life or levels of aptitude (e.g., junior high schools, community colleges) b. Tracks within existing schools for students of different aptitudes and interests (e.g., vocational tracks in whigh schools) c. Standardized educational categories (e.g., course credit units, standard divisions in the school day, standard training requirements for teachers) d. New forms of district-level organization (formalized hierarchies, standard-sized schools and ­classrooms, articulation arrangements between levels, etc.) 2. Reforms promoted to attain excellence a. Demanding new curricular subjects (e.g., computer science, calculus) b. Upgraded teacher training standards c. Upgraded course standards d. More challenging forms of evaluation (e.g., state or national proficiency tests) e. More rigorous grading standards f. Longer school days and school years 3. Reforms promoted as enhancement of the learning environment a. New types of schools to improve creativity and student interest in learning (e.g., kindergartens, ­a lternative schools) b. Facility/activity add-ons (e.g., multipurpose rooms, extracurricular activities, computer labs) c. Introduction of whole-child development subjects in the curriculum (e.g., art, physical education) d. Student-centered instructional methods (e.g., learning by doing, field trips, open classrooms) e. New forms of whole-child evaluation (e.g., portfolios) f. New classroom amenities (e.g., posters, artwork, movable desks, activity centers) 4. Reforms promoted to achieve greater equity a. Compensatory education programs (e.g., Head Start, Title I, aid for students with disabilities) b. Social integration programs (e.g., busing for purposes of integration, bilingual education) c. Programs targeted for at-risk children and families (e.g., drug education, parent education, AIDS education) d. Early childhood education e. Educational priority zones f. Bonuses to teachers working in schools in low-income communities

and instructional techniques than they once did. Indeed, a mild countercurrent among teachers and parents has maintained that schools are overly organized and regimented; some of those who make these objections have sought alternatives to state-run public schools. In addition, new types of schools, such as magnet schools and charter schools, have developed to teach students with special interests or perceived learning styles. With these exceptions, the main structures of mass public schooling have not changed for over a century. The story of enhancement reforms is more complicated. Progressive educators, inspired by the work John Dewey and other child-centered educators, introduced new subjects and new ways of studying all subjects in the period between the first two world wars (Cremin 1961). Building on the work of developmental psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, who began in the 1890s to rethink the needs of children, these progressive educators wanted to make schoolwork more creative and encourage the expressive faculties of children as a way to engage their minds. This is the period in which movable furniture, eye-catching posters, hands-on experiments, and field trips were introduced into the schools. The influence of efforts to enhance the curriculum through arts education, physical education, electives, and child-centered learning receded in the 1950s, and this retreat has accelerated since the early 1970s, as states and their educational bureaucracies have focused on improving achievement in a few core subjects—notably, reading, mathematics, and science. It would



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not be surprising if we witnessed a progressive revival movement in the future against this narrowing of the curriculum. This would require creativity and initiative to come into policy makers’ focus as underlying sources of personal and economic growth, as it has in countries like Singapore (see Chapter 4). For the time being, however, these interests are not prominent on the public agenda, and their influence is felt mainly in schools enrolling affluent students and those specializing in creative arts and design.

Cyclical Theories of Reform A common image of school reform is that it occurs in cycles, marked by alternating periods of liberal and conservative reform. In these cyclical theories, liberal reforms are defined as those that make the schools more responsive to previously excluded groups, such as children from minority groups, or that take a more child-centered and creative approach to learning. Conservative reforms, by contrast, are defined as those that go back to basics and insist that students work harder to meet rigorous academic standards. In such theories, the 1840s and 1850s (the expansionist phase of the common school movement), the 1910s and 1920s (the peak age of John Dewey’s progressive education), and the 1960s and early 1970s (the period of the Great Society and the War on Poverty) are seen as times of liberal reform. The 1890s (the era of administrative reform and “the one best system”), the 1950s (the era of the Sputnik scare and meritocracy), and the 1980s through the 2010s (the era of public alarm about economic competitiveness and accountability) are seen as times of conservative momentum. In some cyclical theories, periods of liberal and conservative reform are thought to be systematically linked: The more relaxed and inclusive standards brought on by liberal reforms feed into dissatisfaction among conservatives, leading to a new period of conservative reform. But the rigidity of conservative approaches eventually fuels demands for more inclusive and child-centered schooling, leading to a new period of liberal reform, until the cycle begins anew (for a discussion, see Tyack and Cuban 1995: 40–54). Although cyclical theories contain a few kernels of truth, they present too many problems to be accepted as a convincing periodization of the history of school reform in the United States or anywhere else. Some reform efforts do not easily fit the liberalconservative typology, because they do not have a clearly identifiable political character. (What is the political character of the once innovative idea of separating junior from senior high schools, for example?) Others do not fit because they do not fall neatly into the popular designations of liberal and conservative periods. The 1980s, for example, were marked by movements toward both multicultural curricula, a liberal equity reform, and higher standards, a conservative reform. Indeed, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” do not reliably identify the constituencies for school reforms in every case. Today, some political conservatives accept programs to improve schools serving the poor, and many liberals support efforts to raise academic standards and increase accountability. Perhaps most important, as the educational historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) have emphasized, cyclical theories tend to overemphasize policy statements and underemphasize what is actually going on in classrooms. Schools do change—by adding





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new forms of organization, new technologies, and new kinds of students—but “institutional developments in education may have an internal dynamic of their own only loosely connected with the periods of widespread and intense attention to schooling that we call periods of educational reform” (Tyack and Cuban 1995: 47). Scholars and policy makers have been developing a much stronger evidence base for policy interventions over the last two decades. It is possible that the pendulum swings of the past may eventually give way to policy interventions that draw on well-constructed databases and more sophisticated empirical analyses to target areas in which educational reformers can actually make a measurable difference in student outcomes. But it is more likely that research-based policy recommendations will continue to contend for influence with episodic arousals of political passion over the direction of schooling.

Correlates of Successful Reforms Some reforms fade quickly after a year or two of experimentation. Who now remembers the vogue for “whole language” approaches to reading or for “fuzzy math”? These were popular curricular movements only two decades ago. Indeed, many reforms heralded in their day have failed to make a lasting impact. Some educational prognosticators, for example, thought educational television would eventually make teachers obsolete, except as masters of ceremonies for transmissions from the tube. The historical record suggests a great deal more immediate and enduring acceptance of reforms that do not radically alter the prevailing organization of schools, with principals at the center of administration and teachers at the center of a clear structure of classroom instruction and curriculum. These less threatening reforms contribute to increasing the engagement and success of staff and students. Reforms that make school more interesting for students, such as extracurricular activities and field trips, have been popular and therefore easy to assimilate. Reforms that compromise, or seem to compromise, the ability of teachers to discharge their duties and retain their authority in the classroom are ignored by teachers, treated with foot-dragging reluctance, or adapted only at the margins. This explains why some instructional technologies, such as radio and television, promoted by many as revolutionary forces, did not make important inroads into the classroom. They shifted too much authority away from teachers and were therefore used sparingly. They also failed to grab students’ attention as much as more active forms of learning. Similarly, equity reforms that are threatening to important constituencies or cost too much for the perceived good they deliver will always come under criticism. Successful equity reforms mobilize important constituencies that refuse to let the reforms die. Typically, they are also mandated into law in a way that allows compliance to be easily monitored. These factors help explain, for example, the success of bilingual education programs, which were maintained in many states for decades, in spite of the constant criticism they received from “English first” conservatives on pedagogical and political grounds (see Porter 1990). But even relatively effective and low-cost equity reforms may become unpopular when the balance of political power changes, as eventually happened in the case of bilingual programs.



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As summarized by Tyack and Cuban (1995: 57–58), school reforms are more likely to be adopted and last when they • create more efficient organization for administrators; • permit teachers to use more involving instruction (provided that the reforms do not threaten to displace teachers or create burdensome time demands); • give students more incentives to attend school; • do not threaten important political constituencies; and • are backed up by the mandate of law, particularly if compliance can be readily monitored.

excellence reform: the accountability era Although cyclical theories of reform are not completely convincing, it is true that at various times in the nation’s history public attention has focused more on one of the four Es than the others. Since the 1980s, efforts to raise standards to improve student achievement have been in the forefront, and accountability for student learning has been the watchword of reform.

Before Accountability: A Crisis of Declining Standards? The United States was the pioneer in using centrally based external examinations for comparing schools and teachers. The rise of the accountability movement demonstrates the importance of research studies used for political purposes, crisis thinking based on evocations of threats to national well-being, and the development of networks of reformers supported by leading philanthropies and political officials in the rise of educational reform movements. Eventually the policies of advocacy groups become embedded in legislation and are consequently institutionalized through the coercive power of the state (see Mehta 2013a). Not all these elements are evident in the history of successful reforms but most are staples of the top-down mobilization that marks enduring changes to the fabric of schooling. In the case of accountability reform, the call for change followed a series of disappointing studies of the performance of American secondary school students in the 1970s and 1980s. Some educators saw declining quality as an unintended consequence of the previous era’s emphasis on equity (see, e.g., Ravitch 1983). Others pointed a finger at lowered expectations and watered-down curricula designed more for short-term relevance than for long-term educational value (see, e.g., Hirsch 1987: chap. 1). Many measures from the period do suggest growing problems in American schools. High levels of choice among electives tended to reinforce the generally anti-intellectual flavor of secondary school in the United States. The general track (which in some places included such courses as driver’s education, typing, training for adulthood, and home economics) enrolled more than 40 percent of all students in the late 1970s, up from 12 percent in the previous decade (Adelman 1983). By the late 1970s, only the top 5 to 10 percent of students took languages for four years or advanced math or physics. Many schools,





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perhaps as many as two-thirds, dropped calculus and physics altogether (Holmes and MacLean 1989: 34). Average SAT scores fell, verbal scores by more than 40 points. Reports of school violence were also increasing during the period. Each month, some 7 percent of high school students were assaulted by fellow students and as many as 10 percent were robbed (Toby 1980). The alienated atmosphere in many high schools created foreboding and fear. Billy club– and bullhorn-wielding principals like Joe Clark in Elizabeth City, New Jersey, briefly became popular heroes for their no-nonsense approach to school violence. State legislatures hurried to pass laws requiring minimal-competency exams for students and teachers. Portraits of good schools and high-achieving classes in troubled neighborhoods became a popular staple of educational sociology (see, e.g., Comer 1980; Lightfoot 1983; Ravitch 1985). Researchers also propounded lists of the core elements of effective schools (Edmonds 1979; Rutter et al. 1979). Most of these lists played into the worries of the age about declining discipline and lowered expectations. According to the educational reformer Ron Edmonds (1979), even schools in the poorest communities could be effective provided that • the academic mission of the school was pursued diligently by hard-driving principals, • a disciplined and orderly atmosphere was carefully guarded and enforced by principals and teachers, • teachers were well trained and academically oriented, • students spent their time in class on task, • students had regular and demanding homework assignments, and • students received regular individualized attention. A widely publicized study of private and public high schools by James Coleman and colleagues bolstered Edmonds’s conclusions (Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore 1982). This study found that order and discipline were higher in private schools and that expectations were also higher. The findings held for Catholic schools, even those enrolling students from low-income backgrounds. Coleman and his colleagues showed that these academic climate characteristics, lacking in many public schools, had a salutary influence on learning. This influence was apparent even after student background characteristics and academic abilities were statistically controlled. A number of important commission reports from the 1980s urged concerted national action to meet the “crisis” in American secondary schools. The most important of the reports, written by a presidential commission led by former University of California president David Gardner, was A Nation at Risk (1983). Like the other reports, A Nation at Risk recited dismal statistics suggesting educational decline and widespread dissatisfaction with public schooling, and it linked the fate of the American economy in a competitive world to the fate of America’s schools. “History is not kind to idlers,” the report warned. “We are now faced by determined, well-educated and strongly motivated competitors. There is a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe. We have committed acts of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” (National Commission on Excellence in



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Education 1983: 5–6). Social reform movements need to mobilize resources and emotional support if they are to succeed. The accountability movement that began in the 1980s certainly mobilized a tremendous amount of emotional support. As many as 20 prestigious commissions weighed in with complaints about the state of American schools, and the press was filled with reports of danger and decline and ­suggestions for ­reform. As I show in Chapter 4, the accountability movement exaggerated the crisis in schooling. American schools during this period were not guilty of “unilateral educational disarmament.” In fact, some indicators suggest that the schools were performing better than they ever had before (Bracey 1991; Carson, Huelskamp, and Woodall 1992; Berliner and Biddle 1995). The declines in SAT scores partly reflected the increasing numbers of students who were taking the test during the period. Because of the way test scores are calculated, small decreases in the number of correct answers show up as large declines in average scores. At the top end of the scale, one error can drop scores by 50 points (Berliner and Biddle 1995: 16). While providing more opportunities for minorities and women than in the past, the United States continued to produce more scientists and engineers than other industrial countries (Berliner and Biddle 1995: 95–100). Nevertheless, the crisis rhetoric and worrisome statistics of the commission reports precipitated an outpouring of reform legislation and programmatic activity to improve schooling. A majority of states increased high school graduation and teacher training requirements. Many also raised teacher salaries (Sharon Johnson 1985). School leaders tried to implement Edmonds’s (1979) and others’ principles for creating effective schools. These efforts produced a commendable record of improvement. School achievement among American secondary school students increased in the 1980s and 1990s, and American students began to look better on most international assessments of educational achievement. Racial gaps in achievement remained sizable but were reduced by half or nearly so. Some analysts credit state-level reforms of graduation requirements and teacher training as the most important causes of these improvements (Ravitch 1995: 70–85; DarlingHammond 2004).

The No Child Left Behind Act By 1994, the U.S. federal government was building on state efforts to mandate accountability assessments in the public schools by requiring such assessments as a precondition for receipt of federal funds. The movement toward greater accountability for student performance culminated in the enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 by a large, bipartisan majority. Many educators lauded it as the most important effort in the history of the United States to ensure that every child make adequate progress in learning important subject matter materials. Indeed, the act was passed as a deliberate effort to demolish the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” especially for poor and minority students (Bush 2000). Among the important lessons we can draw from the history of NCLB is that unrealistic goals, inadequate resourcing, and design flaws will in the end undermine even popular public policies with widespread, bipartisan support. The major provisions of the act required that schools report adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward meeting the goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading, mathematics, and





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science by the year 2014. Although definitions of AYP and proficiency were left up to the states, the act required that any state receiving federal funds for education must agree to test all children in grades three through eight every year. The tests must be based on challenging standards. Schools were required to demonstrate AYP overall and separately for all major ethnic and socioeconomic groups, for special education students, and for English language learners. The act included very stiff enforcement standards. Schools were required to test 95 percent of their students, and even one student below this cut-off could lead to the school being designated as failing to make adequate progress. States were required to publish report cards of their progress each year. If schools as a whole failed to meet their AYP goals two years in a row, they came in for increased attention and could receive funds to encourage improvement. Students in these program improvement schools were guaranteed the right to transfer to any other district school that was meeting its progress goals. Schools that failed to meet AYP goals for three years in a row were subject to more severe sanctions, including the firing of low-performing teachers, replacement of the administrative staff, and even abolition of whole schools and school districts. An important part of the philosophy of NCLB was that students learn best when they are taught by well-qualified teachers. For this reason, the act required that all current teachers in schools receiving NCLB funds be highly qualified by 2006. Newly hired teachers must also be highly qualified. By “highly qualified,” the act meant that teachers must hold at least a bachelor’s degree, have full state certification, and not have had any certification requirements waived on an emergency or temporary basis. The act’s advocates argued that only very high expectations and powerful sanctions could move the schools in the right direction. They pointed to evidence that schools in Texas, which were subject to NCLB-type accountability standards, made better progress after high-stakes testing than before (Carnoy, Loeb, and Smith 2003; cf. Haney 2000). They also documented many cases of teachers starting to talk to each other more about effective teaching tactics and of principals providing emotional and material support for meeting AYP goals (Siskin 2003). Studies like these suggested that the law could have a positive impact. Critics argued that any benefits of NCLB were likely to be short term. They believed that NCLB set unrealistic long-range targets, which were enforced by overly punitive sanctions. The educational psychologist Robert Linn noted that at the rates of progress at the time, American schools would meet proficiency targets (as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) for 4th-grade math 57 years after the passage of NCLB, 8th-grade math in 61 years, and 12th-grade math in 166 years. To meet the targets by 2014, as the law requires, schools would need to increase their current improvement rates in grades 4 and 8 by a factor of 4 and their 12th-grade improvement rates by a factor of 12. This would be equivalent to the big automobile manufacturers being required to produce engines averaging 288 miles per gallon by 2014 (Linn, cited in Bracey 2003). Because “proficiency” in NCLB had a fixed and absolute meaning, even schools that were showing progress—but not enough progress to meet proficiency levels—were labeled failures rather than being rewarded for improvement.



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Moreover, because children in failing schools were encouraged to leave for betterperforming schools, critics argued the act would, in principle, lead to AYP failure across the board, as high-performing schools began to accept larger numbers of students who had not performed well in the past. Because NCLB was not funded at the level originally authorized by Congress, the funds that might have helped schools improve were in relatively short supply. It is no wonder that some critics referred to the law as the Let No School Succeed act and wondered whether the act was intended to ensure the failure of the public system, thereby paving the way for vouchers and other forms of school privatization (Bracey 2003). Although most parents did not leave failing schools, many reacted with confusion to the proliferation of test results bearing on the performance of their children’s schools. Most states set the AYP bar low; only a few set it high. For this reason, some good schools in the most demanding states have been unable to meet AYP goals and were labeled low performing. By contrast, in states with lower standards, schools with modest records were hailed as successful. The federal government used proficiency levels in the NAEP as a check on state assessments. Proficiency standards in the national test were higher than those used in most state tests. Differences between the states and federal standards sowed confusion in the minds of many parents. Many schools ranked as excellent by their states were considered low performing by the federal government. Parents at these schools wondered who to believe and were discouraged by the effect of negative labeling on school morale—and, perhaps, even on their property values. Because 95 percent of all subgroups in a school were required to participate in testing, a few untimely absences could lead to the labeling of otherwise excellent schools as low performing (Dillon 2004). Americans, in general, reacted in ambivalent ways to NCLB. They rated the quality of schooling nationally higher than before it, but they expressed many doubts about the long-term effects of NCLB. And they continued to express concerns that the public schools were inadequately financed (Rose and Gallup 2004). Some of the weaknesses of NCLB could have been corrected by greater standardization of proficiency measures across the states, allocation of more funds for school improvement efforts, and review and revision of the technical deficiencies in the act’s assessment and enforcement protocols. Even with these corrections, however, it would have been difficult for the public schools to weather what appears in retrospect to have been, in effect, a determined effort to challenge the morale of school administrators and teachers by requiring them to succeed to a degree that no schools in the modern era of mass schooling have ever attained. The act showed no recognition that the social and economic conditions of communities would bear on the capacity of students to reach national proficiency levels within the required time frame. In this respect, the outlook of NCLB was utopian; it was unrelated to the world we actually inhabit.

Outcomes of Federal Accountability Policy During the NCLB era, the public schools were transformed in ways that many Americans (and a high proportion of experienced teachers) did not welcome. In low-performing





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schools, subjects not tested in state assessments were crowded out of the curriculum by tested subjects. These subjects included the arts as well as many core science fields. Recess was eliminated or reduced at many schools so as to allow more time to cover tested subjects. A testing regimen was set up in many schools, so that students took opener tests every morning and were regularly primed through practice tests for state and national tests during the year, adding to the regular testing teachers used as part of normal assessments of curriculum mastery (Brint and Teele 2008). Textbook publishers began to organize teaching in highly standardized ways—telling teachers exactly what and how to teach to meet state learning standards. Many schools in California and other states adopted scripted learning programs in which teachers were told, word for word, exactly what to teach (California Educator 2002). Superintendents and principals rewarded teachers who produced high test results, in some notable cases leading to widespread cheating and miracle schools that turned out not to be miracles at all (Aviv 2014). Predictably, none of this led to the anticipated results of ever-higher levels of proficiency, much less to the unrealistic goal of all students achieving proficiency in tested subjects by 2014. Gains were in fact modest. The federal government eventually allowed states to opt out of punitive NCLB requirements requiring closure of schools whose scores had not increased in five years in exchange for implementing their own accountability systems. By 2013 all but 2 states had applied to opt out, and waivers had been granted to 35 (Polikoff et al. 2013). Many analysts found the main problem to be variation in the standards adopted by the states. In response, beginning in 2009 the U.S. National Governors Association led an effort to develop and implement common core standards in reading and mathematics to correct the limitations of state variations in learning standards and improve the rigor of many of the state standards. By all accounts the common core built on the work of leading educators and the exceptional achievements of states such as Massachusetts where standards were thoughtfully developed and sufficiently challenging. By 2015, the common core had been adopted by 38 of 50 states.1 After years of congressional wrangling, NCLB itself was finally replaced in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act. The act maintains accountability as a national goal, but devolves responsibility for accountability to the states. It advocates reduction of the “onerous burden of unnecessary and ineffective testing” and offers incentives to the states to provide more children with preschool education (White House 2015). The act forbids federal advocacy in the area of curriculum, leaving the states to decide on the common core educational standards and all other curriculum matters.

Accountability in Europe and East Asia As I show in Chapter 2, national examinations for secondary school leaving and university entrance were standard in Europe and Asia for decades before the rise of the accountability movement in the United States. But these examinations were used to determine which students were eligible for higher education, not to determine which schools and teachers merited commendation or condemnation. By contrast, accountability policies



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look to examination results to determine whether schools and teachers are performing effectively. The advent of international tests of reading and mathematics achievement beginning in the 1960s provided the groundwork for future comparisons of the relative effectiveness of different educational systems and schools. Subsequently, the implementation of regional tests in the 1990s and the next decade created a fertile environment for the growth of accountability movements in parts of the developing world as well, particularly in Latin America. In the European Union, reform policies have focused on school-based management, which combines an emphasis on local autonomy for budget allocation and personnel decisions with improved accountability for student learning. The two themes are linked in the minds of policy makers, so I discuss both rather than focusing solely on accountability. The emphasis on local autonomy in decision making stemmed from disillusionment with traditions of central ministry control. Beginning in the 1970s, educational policy makers tied to the World Bank and the OECD judged central administration as creating a straitjacket for schools and as leading to a lack of responsiveness to local community needs and opportunities. (Because of its tradition of local control, the United States served as one model for these decentralization efforts.) Autonomy was implemented in different ways in different European countries but included school-level control over budget allocations, hiring and firing of personnel (if permitted by labor law), setting of teacher salaries, and choice of instructional materials, buttressed by participation in local school councils. European countries have a long history of using school inspections by national or regional authorities for purposes of accountability. Use of centrally based external examinations to compare the performance of schools and teachers took root in OECD countries only early in this century. Between 2003 and 2012, policy makers in most (27 of 38) OECD countries began using student assessments to compare the performance of schools to one another. Unlike the United States, they usually did so by controlling for student input characteristics, thereby providing a more accurate representation of the value added by schools. During this period policy makers were also more likely to use data to monitor and reward teachers’ performance (OECD 2013c: 128). As in the United States, accountability referred to regular measurement of teacher and student performance relative to other schools. Most countries combined teacher evaluations, student performance evaluations, and inspections by external evaluators. Scholars have developed tentative conclusions about the effectiveness of autonomy and accountability policies by comparing students’ results on international tests of achievement for systems that have and have not incorporated specific autonomy and accountability measures. Checks on the robustness of these findings were sometimes possible by looking at different subnational jurisdictions that have adopted varying policies. The results for both decentralization (autonomy) and accountability have been encouraging, but it is also true that not all forms of decentralization have yielded positive results.2 The consequences of autonomy and accountability in the OECD. Dozens of studies have now been conducted to determine whether country variations in autonomy and





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accountability policies help explain student learning outcomes once background char­ acteristics are statistically controlled through measures like the number of books in the house. The educational economists Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have been leaders in the development of these studies. They and their colleagues have collected data from all international assessments and subjected them to a series of rigorous exam­ inations intended to compare the effectiveness of policy interventions (see, e.g., Hanu­ shek and Woessmann 2011; Woessmann 2005; Woessmann et al. 2009). In these studies, several dimensions of autonomy show small but statistically significant net positive associations with student learning as measured by international tests. The general pattern is that students perform significantly better in systems that have introduced school-level autonomy in decision making over within-school resource allocations and personnel. Thus, students tend to perform better, other things being equal, when school administrators have the freedom from central education ministries to make their own decisions about purchases of supplies, choice of textbooks, budget allocations within the school, hiring and rewarding of teachers, and the instructional methods used in the school. The underlying reason may be that administrators and teachers who are free to make these decisions are more responsive to the specific needs of their students and local communities. By contrast, in the same studies scholars have found negative net associations for school autonomy in budget formation (as sent to national ministries for approval) and over subject matter teachers are expected to cover in each grade (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011). Curriculum standardization as set by national ministries has been associated with small but significant net improvements in student performance on math and science using PISA data (Han and Buchmann 2016; Hanushek and Woessmann 2011). Thus it is not decentralization or centralization that seems to matter but decentralization in areas where local knowledge can be important and centralization in areas where high nationwide expectations are necessary to produce results. To the extent that Americans want to improve the relative performance of their schoolchildren on international tests, these findings suggest that the partisans of the common core educational standards have international evidence on their side. The results have been stronger for accountability policies than for autonomy policies, and they have been particularly strong for centrally administered external exit examinations. OECD countries with external exit examination systems consistently outperform countries that do not have these systems, and the differences amount to 20 to 40 percent of a standard deviation depending on the examination year and the countries participating—a sizable effect range for studies based on international comparisons (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011: 145). Beyond external exit examinations, studies have shown better results when assessments are used to compare schools to district or national achievement levels (Woessmann et al. 2009). Very large effects, fully threequarters of a standard deviation, have also been found for the interaction of school autonomy in setting teachers’ salaries and external exit examinations that all students take as a precondition for receiving upper secondary school credentials. This suggests the advisability of policies that link teachers’ salaries to their production of higher levels



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of student learning (Woessmann 2005). However, on the basis of U.S. experience it is fair to warn that high-stakes testing can become counterproductive for students and teachers alike. The consequences of other policy interventions. As important as autonomy and  ac­ countability have proved to be among countries that participate in international assess­ ments of student learning, they are not the only policy interventions that seem to matter. As I argue in Chapter 7, early branching is detrimental to the achievement of lowertrack students and does not contribute significantly to learning among higher-track stu­ dents. This finding has been confirmed by scholars who use international test data to ex­ amine policy interventions (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011: 153–56). In Chapter 8, I emphasize the positive difference on learning that better teacher training and higher teacher salaries can make for improved student achievement. These findings too have been confirmed by scholars who use international test data to evaluate policy interventions (114–15). The educational economist Ludger Woessmann has also identified a relationship between private-sector competition and improved student performance, with an important proviso that, to make a difference, privately operated schools must be eligible for public subsidies. When private schools are funded only by tuition and fees, they do not lead to improvements in country scores, presumably because they enroll mainly wealthy students who would likely do well in any school environment. But when privately operated schools enroll many schoolchildren who are able to bring public funding with them to offset tuition and fees, larger proportions of privately operated schools tend to be associated with higher net performance on international assessments (Woessmann et al. 2009). I believe there is room for skepticism about this result. The result may be driven by a few outlying countries such as South Korea and Japan, where the treatment condition is prominent and test scores are high. Omitted variables, such as higher levels of nationwide educational striving, may help explain the finding. Moreover, given the problem of nonrandom selection of students into private and public schools, these results could prove to be based on selection effects rather than institutional effects. In short, the jury is still out on the role of publicly subsidized private schools as contributors to higher standards in public schools. (See below for evidence on the U.S. case.) The use of international test data, such as PISA results, to investigate educational policy is a promising research direction. The work of Hanushek, Woessmann, and their colleagues provides convincing evidence that policy matters. Yet it would be a cardinal error to think that policy interventions such as those they have investigated will greatly change the impact of schooling in the absence of broader social changes in the circumstances of disadvantaged students, including greater levels of economic security for the poor, home environments that provide stronger support for educational achievement, and difficultto-measure cultural factors that motivate students to apply themselves in school. Because these issues have not been effectively addressed in most countries, including the United States, the socioeconomic circumstances of students and the socioeconomic composition of schools are far more powerful predictors of learning outcomes than any of the policy interventions discussed here.





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equity reform: reducing the achievement gap One approach to addressing the powerful impact of family socioeconomic status on school achievement is to provide additional resources or better teachers to schools that educate the poor. A variety of school-based reforms, ranging from new forms of community collaboration to broader service provision at school, have also been introduced to try to narrow the gap between the performance of schools in wealthy and poor communities. Collectively, these policies address the issue of equity. In this section, I describe the range of policies that have been developed to increase equity and what the evaluation studies say about their effectiveness.

The War on Poverty Era Equity reform in the public schools has a longer history in the United States than elsewhere in the developed world. It began in earnest with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the mid-1960s, the policy platform under which two long-lasting school equity programs were launched: Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, also known as compensatory education, and Head Start, an early childhood education program that began in 1964. Title I began as a program that pulled students out of their regular classes for remedial education services. Following a series of poor evaluations, it was redesigned to extend learning time before and after school and during summer. In addition, the focus shifted from teaching based on rote learning to an emphasis on higher-level thinking skills. Head Start was designed to provide comprehensive educational, health, nutrition, and parental-involvement support for families whose incomes were under the federal poverty line. Head Start was redesigned in 2007 to require that teachers at Head Start centers have baccalaureate degrees, curricula be more hands-on, and more coaching be provided for students and their families. Persistent questions have followed these programs since their inception. The questions have centered on whether expenditures, now in the billions of dollars for both programs, are producing results that are meaningful enough to warrant such high levels of spending. Title I evaluations have been disappointing, showing only very modest statistical differences on measures of learning and socioemotional development between those who participated in Title I and otherwise similar children who did not participate. Moreover, researchers found that many of these modest positive results were attributable to mediating variables such as teacher quality. As the program matured, results were somewhat stronger, though still far from suggesting that the program could reduce the achievement gap between rich and poor (Borman and D’Agostino 1996). Head Start has fared only a little better in evaluations than Title I. As in the case of Title I, the consensus view of Head Start was that it has had, at best, modest effects on children’s educational development (Barnett and Hustedt 2005). Randomized control trials are frequently described as the gold standard in evaluation because they control for selection effects by randomly assigning volunteers to treatment or control groups. Randomized control trials have not been conducted on Title I programs. But one such study has been conducted on Head Start. It concluded that most of



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the educational benefits of Head Start faded by first grade, and for children enrolled as three-year-olds rather than four-year-olds, in particular, there were few sustained benefits. Only the measured quality of parent-child relationships showed sustained improvement through first grade (Weigel 2011). Looking over the results of randomized experiments on Head Start and a voluntary preschool program in Tennessee, Grover J. Whitehurst, the first director of the Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Science, remarked, “The most defensible conclusion is that these . . . programs are not working to meaningfully increase the academic achievement or social/emotional skills and dispositions of children from low-income families” (Whitehurst 2013). President Johnson began compensatory programs to reduce the achievement gap between black and white and between poor and rich children. He thought of education as a foot race in which children from disadvantaged groups, through no fault of their own, started well behind children from advantaged groups. Federal programs, he declared, would place children along the same starting line. In spite of more than a half century of federal aid, educational improvement has remained elusive in the poor and racially isolated communities of urban America, where public schools face the toughest problems financially and socially. The tax base in cities lags well behind that in suburban communities, and many of the urban poor grow up in unstable families, surrounded by the scourges of crime and substance abuse, and in a culture of distrust of majority institutions and values. Federal education policy has proved to be no match for these social and cultural conditions. If we imagine that poor children start President Johnson’s foot race a quarter mile behind, decades of evaluation suggest that federal programs like Title I and Head Start can realistically reduce the gap by only a few dozen steps.

The Comprehensive School Reform Era As the educational historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban put it, efforts to reinvent schools “have often resembled shooting stars that spurted across the pedagogical heavens, leaving a meteoric trail in the media but burning up and disappearing in the everyday atmosphere of the schools” (1995: 111). Nevertheless, the spirit of reform is contagious, and since the Great Society every generation has found inspiration from promising new approaches to improving the educational opportunities of the poor. Another generation of reformers arose in the 1980s, and the reform spirit of this period made heroes of educators who claimed to know how to turn around failing school systems. These reformers thought they could improve students’ achievement through new kinds of instructional work in the classroom, new kinds of relationships in the community, or new schoolwide organizational designs. The efforts of these reformers led to legislation that promoted efforts to rethink schooling for the poor in comprehensive ways. We can classify the reform programs that emerged in the 1980s as standards-based, community-based, or marketbased. The weight of the research evidence indicates that well-designed standards-based programs can perform well, the results of most community-based programs have been disappointing, and market-based programs have a mixed (and highly contested) record. Let us take a look at some of the reform efforts that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s.





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Standards-based programs. One set of solutions emphasized the need for greater inten­ sity in academic work and higher standards. Among the best known of these standardsbased solutions were programs designed by three university professors, Robert Slavin (Success for All), Henry Levin (Accelerated Schools), and Theodore Sizer (Coalition of Es­ sential Schools). The Success for All program began in Slavin’s home community of Baltimore in the early 1980s and spread to many other cities. It provided intensive instruction in reading for inner-city children in kindergarten through grade three. Tutors were the most important feature of the program. They received special training and worked individually with children who were failing to keep up with their classmates in reading. Children were organized for the program by reading level rather than by age. Staff worked with parents to help them assist their children outside class. The children’s progress was monitored on a regular eight-week cycle with feedback to parents (Slavin et al. 1990). Levin’s Accelerated Schools program was based on the idea that all children should be treated as gifted students and given enriched educational materials rather than the watered-down curricula that had become commonplace. Special efforts were made to design curricular material that would be interesting to students but also challenging. The program emphasized thematic units that integrated a variety of subjects into the study of a single topic (Levin 1990). Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools program formed a consortium of schools largely serving the urban poor. Participating schools committed themselves to maintaining essential intellectual goals for all students in a supportive environment emphasizing active learning. The schools otherwise showed little uniformity in approach (Sizer 1986). Community-based programs. Another set of solutions attempted to increase the com­ munity’s involvement in the schools. Many of these efforts focused on parental involve­ ment, others on business-education partnerships. James Comer, a professor in the Yale School of Medicine, was perhaps the best-known advocate of community-based solutions. Comer’s program, which began in New Haven schools in the mid-1970s and soon spread to other states, was premised on parents being potentially schools’ most important resource. Comer’s program organized administrators, teachers, counselors, and parents into three interacting teams: the school planning and management team, the student and staff support team, and the parent team. To facilitate parental involvement, Comer’s management and governance teams designed and carried out a social activities calendar for the school year, with parents playing a primary role in implementing the activities. In addition, parents were encouraged to volunteer in the schools as teacher aides, librarians, study hall monitors, and the like. The Comer program also included a social skills curriculum to teach students how to make good decisions in their interactions with others and mental health teams to deal quickly and comprehensively with specific behavioral problems in the schools (Comer 1980). The guiding principles of Comer’s program are that a positive attitude about the school, community building, and collaboration can lead to student achievement gains. We can classify business-education partnerships as another kind of community-based program. By the mid-1980s, nearly every large city and nearly every large corporation had some type of business-education partnership. The New York businessman Eugene Lang



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stimulated these efforts when he offered to partially pay for college for every sixth-grade student at his Harlem alma mater who stayed in school and kept up good grades. (Ninety percent of the children took him up on the offer.) Following Lang’s lead, hundreds of corporations (and many wealthy individuals) adopted schools in the 1980s. They sent equipment, money, and mentors to local schools to help with instruction and inspiration. Other programs, like the Boston Compact, were implemented by consortia of area businesses and district school superintendents. Participating businesses guaranteed parttime and summer employment to students who stayed in school and kept up their grades (L. Deng 1991). Market-based programs. A third set of solutions sought changes in the organizational structures of schools to overcome bureaucratic rigidities and political intrusions. Of these structural solutions, school choice programs gained the most attention. John Chubb of the Brookings Institution and Terry Moe of Stanford University became well known for advocating choice programs that encouraged schools to compete for student consumers by creating competition between public schools and publicly subsidized private schools. Chubb and Moe (1989) foresaw a time when parents would be free to choose among a variety of schools in the public and private sector. They have been highly controversial from the beginning. In a 1989 book, Chubb and Moe argued that most school reforms of the 1980s were destined to fail and that the real problem with public education was that it was controlled by distant bureaucrats whose jobs were predicated on stifling local school responsiveness and creativity. For them, choice meant the power to innovate and respond effectively to children’s educational needs based on the aligned commitment of parents, teachers, and administrators. Supporters of public education, such as the historian Diane Ravitch, have retorted that choice may kill what is essential about public education: The basic compact that public education makes is this: the public is responsible for the children of the state, the district, the community. We all benefit when other people’s children are educated. It is our responsibility as citizens to support a high-quality public education, even if we don’t have children in the public schools. But once the concept of private choice becomes dominant, the true sense of community responsibility is dissolved. Each of us is given permission to think of what is best for me, not what is best for we. (Ravitch 2012)

School choice programs proved to be popular, not only with conservative policy makers but with parents who were dissatisfied with their public schools (Elmore and Fuller 1996). A variety of choice programs sprang up at this time, each one based on a strong faith in the magic of the market. These included some within-school district plans involving only public schools, some interdistrict plans involving public schools (including, in Minnesota, a statewide plan of very large scale), and some usually small-scale and experimental public-private programs. In the public-private plans, parents are typically given a voucher to pay for their children’s schooling if they chose a private school, or the schools themselves are reimbursed by the public school district.





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Magnet schools were another popular market-based approach. These schools allowed children with special interests in a particular subject (such as computers or the performing arts) to attend schools designed around those interests. Although magnets were originally associated with gifted and talented programs, these quickly became a small minority of the magnet offerings. The vast majority of the programs (almost 90 percent) were based on a particular subject matter emphasis or instructional approach or some combination of specialized curriculum and method (Blank, Levine, and Steel 1996). Some magnet programs specialized in particular instructional approaches, such as open classrooms, the Montessori method, or basic skills. Most were implemented as part of desegregation plans, in the hope that special schools would retain some nonminority families in urban school districts while providing minority children with more appealing school options. By 1991, some 230 school districts, enrolling a quarter of all the country’s schoolchildren, offered magnet school programs. The number of curricular emphases grew proportionately, to include everything from aerospace technology and biotechnology to travel and tourism, ROTC, cosmetology, and animal care (Blank, Levine, and Steel 1996). Charter schools also date from this period and are a variant on the theme of school choice. Charter school legislation, beginning in the early 1990s, provided disaffected parents a way out of the public school system by allowing them to form their own publicly supported, but privately organized, alternative schools. Charter schools are granted considerable autonomy from existing school regulations in return for promises of accountability for academic results. Charter schools are allowed to vary from other public schools in philosophy, curriculum, pedagogical approaches, attention to special populations, and size (most are small, averaging only about 250 students). The charter establishing these schools is a performance contract detailing the school’s mission, program, goals, students served, methods of assessment, and ways to measure success. Most charters must be renewed after three to five years on the basis of an acceptable record of management and performance. Several types of parent groups were involved in the founding of charter schools: some were minority parents hoping to escape failing urban schools, some were white parents with similar motivations, and still others were parents seeking alternative pedagogical approaches or more personalized attention to the special needs and interests of their children. By 2004, some 3,000 charter schools had been founded in 37 states, with some states, such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, strongly incentivizing their development (Renzulli and Roscigno 2005).

Successes and Disappointments of Comprehensive School Reform The seeds of a new era of equity reform were growing in the 1980s, but the era of comprehensive school reform (CSR), as a national project, began in 1991, when wealthy businesspeople and philanthropies provided $100 million in funding for so-called break-the-mold schools organized by the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC). Government efforts to evaluate and scale up CSR received a boost during the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1998, when the federal government passed CSR development legislation and set criteria through which schools could qualify for federal funds to



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aid whole-school reform. Many of the reform efforts that began in the 1980s qualified for funds under the break-the-mold umbrella. CSR was one of the more interesting experiments in American educational history, because literally dozens of designs qualified for CSR support. During the CSR era, these designs were in operation at thousands of schools enrolling millions of students. The programs ranged from the exotic and adventurous to the scripted and tame. Among the more adventurous were academic-athletic programs involving periods in the classroom and periods in nature and programs that focused on different ways of knowing, using arts-infused curricula and teaching based on theories of multiple intelligences. Sociologists have known for some time that bursts of energy often follow the initial introduction of a change, any change. But the improvements that result from initial interventions may fade as the novelty of the intervention wears off. This phenomenon even has a name: the Hawthorne effect, after the General Electric factory in Hawthorne, Illinois, where it was first observed. Over the long term, a common set of organizational problems faced most of these break-the-mold efforts, including changes in personnel, difficulties with unions, outspoken community opposition, and student instability. The experience of NASDC itself is both illustrative and cautionary. NASDC offered nearly a dozen different whole-school redesigns in the 1990s and the early 2000s intended to fit local community needs. These whole-school redesigns were implemented at some 4,000 schools. However, evaluation results were disappointing; none of the schools achieved dramatic gains (Berends, Bodilly, and Kirby 2002). In some cases, such as in Memphis, Tennessee, the results could be considered disastrous. All 160 Memphis schools worked with NASDC designs. Johnnie Watson, who became the schools superintendent in 2000, concluded that $12 million in expenditures had produced no measurable change in student performance. The very diversity of options provided by NASDC created a poor fit with the conditions of life faced by the urban poor. As one teacher put it, “Since Memphis has such a mobile student population students fell even further behind because nothing was the same from school to school” (quoted in Mirel 2002). The withdrawal of the Memphis school district was a key factor in the demise of NASDC. Formal evaluation of CSR and other equity reforms. Some of the CSR programs were not evaluated frequently enough or well enough to satisfy hard-nosed researchers that they had consistent, positive effects on learning. For example, neither Henry Levin’s Accelerated Schools nor Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools was evaluated thoroughly enough by independent researchers to provide strong evidence of effectiveness (Borman et al. 2003). Others, such as school-based management (similar to the European reforms that sought to increase school level autonomy), showed an inconsistent pattern, depending on the quality of site plans and personnel involved. Some other CSR programs received dozens of evaluations in multiple sites and over many years. Some evaluation strategies compared results of more than one of the reform programs using the same methodology (Rowan et al. 2004). Using meta-analysis techniques, it is possible to sift and weigh these evaluations and make judgments about average effects based on analysis of those evaluations that meet scientific criteria (Borman et al. 2003).3 Through such means, we can assess which reforms showed a good record in





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high-poverty areas and which ones remain as yet unproven. The meta-analyses pointed to one clear finding: highly focused, very traditional standards-based programs that include additional personnel in the classroom and frequent assessment seem to produce good results. These findings underscore the military-like training aspects of mass schooling— and the value of extra help. Standards-based programs with a strong record. Robert Slavin’s tutor-based and reading-intensive Success for All program is one of the clearest examples of a successful CSR program (Slavin et al. 1990). Slavin’s program has been rigorously and repeatedly evaluated. The results show significantly enhanced language and reading skills in pre­ school and primary grades, reduced special education referrals, and reduced numbers of grade repeaters. These results are consistent with the work of researchers who argue that weak preparation in reading is the single most important cause of instances of poor school performance among inner-city children (Slavin, Karweit, and Madden 1989; Farkas 1993). Remediation provided after grade three is often too late. Success for All can be an expensive program (costing more than $250,000 for one-year implementation schoolwide), because it requires that additional teaching staff be brought into the classroom. However, schools have been able to use Title I funds from the federal government to implement the program (Slavin et al. 1994), as is true for other CSR designs.

 Success for All  Is it possible to give all children a strong foundation in reading, even those who are at risk of early failure? The educational reformer Robert E. Slavin has shown that it can be done. Slavin and his associates (Slavin et al. 1990) believe that students must be prevented from needing remedial attention beyond third grade. After third grade it is very difficult for children from low-income and minority families to catch up. Here is how the Success for All program works: tutors work directly with students who are having trouble keeping up with their reading groups. First graders have the highest priority. Tutors take students out of their homerooms during periods other than reading and math. In general, they stress the same skills as the student is currently learning in reading, but they also attempt to identify learning deficits and use different strategies to teach the same skills. Tutors and teachers meet regularly to coordinate their approaches to particular students. Once students begin to read primers, the program uses cooperative learning activities built around story structure, prediction of story lines, summarization, vocabulary building, decoding practice, writing, and direct instruction in reading comprehension skills. Student progress is assessed every eight weeks. Family support teams work to encourage parental involvement and help students who are not receiving adequate sleep or nutrition, need eyeglasses, are not attending school regularly, and are exhibiting serious behavior problems.



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We can be reasonably confident that Success for All works in most lowincome communities, because Slavin’s group has been careful to rigorously evaluate the program, typically using more than one measure of reading competence. Where possible, Success for All schools are matched with a control school similar in poverty level, historical achievement level, ethnicity of the student body, and other factors. The results of evaluations of the first 15 Success for All schools in seven states showed that the program improves student performance in reading and that it usually has the largest effects with the bottom 25 percent of the class. In these evaluations, significant effects were not found on every measure at every grade level, but the program showed effects in a great majority of schools and grade levels on measures of reading competence. In many cases, Success for All students read several months or even a grade level ahead of the students with whom they were matched. Indeed, in these evaluations the only school that failed to show positive effects of Success for All was a school in rural Caldwell, Idaho. According to the evaluators, this had less to do with a weakness in the Success for All program and more with the unusual strength of the control school with which it was matched (Slavin et al. 1990). Subsequent evaluations of Success for All have continued to produce positive results for reading comprehension and vocabulary (Borman et al. 2003; Slavin et al. 2009). The program’s greatest importance, according to Slavin, has been to demonstrate that substantially greater success for disadvantaged students can be routinely ensured in schools that are neither exceptional nor extraordinary—in other words, schools that were not producing great success before the program was introduced (Slavin et al. 1994: 647).

In addition to Success for All, at least one other popular CSR design, Direct Instruction, has shown consistently positive results and has been evaluated frequently enough by independent researchers using replicable designs to merit the judgment that it is typically effective (Borman et al. 2003; see also Herman et al. 1999). The program, developed by Siegfried Engelmann of the University of Oregon, is similar to Success for All in many of its main features: it is very structured and features continuous assessment of progress. The program is based on highly scripted lesson strategies and extensive writing assignments. Lessons are interactive, and presented to small groups of students. The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) arguably provides further evidence that highly disciplined, high-expectations programs can produce strong results for the urban poor. KIPP academies are charter schools, privately operated but with public financing. They began in 2004, at first as a network of middle schools for the urban poor. By 2009– 2010, KIPP was running 162 schools serving 59,500 students (Tuttle et al. 2010). Some 95 percent of KIPP students are African American or Hispanic, and virtually all come





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from low-income families. The program is based on longer school days and school years, with school running from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and including two Saturday meetings each month and three weeks of summer school in July. The disciplinary climate is highly regulated. Students, parents, and teachers are required to sign a commitment of excellence and set college graduation as their goal. About five times as many KIPP students graduate from college as would be expected simply on the basis of their economic backgrounds (Tuttle et al. 2015). Because admission to a KIPP elementary or middle school is based on a lottery, strong evaluation designs are possible that compare KIPP students to those who applied but were not selected in the lottery. KIPP students show statistically higher levels of performance in reading comprehension and mathematical computation compared to matched samples of peers who applied but were not accepted into the schools. These results—effect sizes in the range of one-quarter of a standard deviation—have been maintained even in the face of the rapid scale-up of the KIPP academies in recent years (Tuttle et al. 2015). It may be that the success of KIPP depends on factors that are beyond the control of most public schools. KIPP founders were able to raise many millions of dollars of funding through local, state, and philanthropic sources and were consequently able to select carefully from among applicants for teaching and school leadership positions. In addition, analyses indicate that students referred to KIPP schools tend to be decidedly more able and motivated than their peers and to have unusually supportive parents (Carnoy et al. 2005). The unfulfilled promise of community-based programs. Some programs based on com­ munity participation have shown good results over the short term, but they have not yet dispelled suspicions that they depend on the charisma of a singular leader to be effective and are consequently difficult to institutionalize on a long-term basis. Both the sense of promise and the nagging doubts go back to the 1960s. At that time, Principal Samuel Shepard of Saint Louis, Missouri, was the only urban school reformer who proved that he could bring children up to national grade-level performance. Shepard went house to house and had parents sign contracts to monitor their children’s schoolwork and to set aside a clean, well-lit place for their children to do homework. He also brought parents into the school to participate and help out. However, when Shepard retired, the program faltered. The James Comer program (also known as the School Development Program) is based on similar principles of community involvement, plus the formation of parent-teacher teams to build community engagement and treat behavioral issues on campus. Evaluations showed evidence from the beginning of success in the schools in which Comer himself was directly involved (Comer 1980). Subsequent evidence accumulated that the Comer program could be successfully institutionalized, even in settings where Comer himself was not continuously involved. The research, while encouraging, is not conclusive; too few good studies have been conducted by researchers independent of Comer and his associates. Comer himself observed that the program’s success depends less on mechanisms than on the energy and commitment of participants. Although parental involvement would seem to be a good reason to expect positive results from community-based programs, we know from evaluation studies that parental



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involvement alone is no panacea. Indeed, the research suggests net negative consequences when parents are heavily involved in school governance (no doubt because of the contentiousness and favoritism that can develop in such situations) (Borman et al. 2003). However, when increased parental involvement is connected to a strong academic ethos led by committed school administrators, good things can happen in high-poverty schools. Indeed, some community-based schools have consistently shown strong results. The educational researchers Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland (1993) show that Catholic schools achieve better results among the urban poor than public schools, even after the social and academic characteristics of students are statistically controlled. The better performance of Catholic schools, the researchers conclude, was the result of their ability to keep children focused on academic pursuits, their ability to create a communal environment, and their continuously disseminated inspirational values. Catholic schools have a more focused academic orientation than public schools and do not allow as much individual choice in course-taking patterns. Teachers are not notably stronger classroom instructors than their public school counterparts (Bryk and his colleagues suggest that they may in fact be less good overall), but they tend to make extra efforts to be engaged with their students and to involve parents. Absences for commitments outside school, such as athletics or other performances, are frowned on. In return, teachers and principals expect reciprocation on the part of students and parents. Many decisions are made after wide consultation and discussion rather than handed down from on high. An inspirational ideology uniting concern for every individual and for the school as a whole is at the center of this communal model: Fundamental to Catholic schools are beliefs about the dignity of each person and a shared responsibility for advancing a just and caring society. When such understandings meld to a coherent organizational structure with adequate resources, desirable academic and social consequences can result. (Bryk, Lee, and Holland 1993: 312)

Whether the Catholic school model can be exported to the public school system is debatable. Catholic schools charge tuition, and parents willing to invest in their children’s schooling are likely more committed to education than other parents. Religious homogeneity is another factor that can contribute to above-average commitment and sacrifice. These selection effects no doubt explain many of the differences Bryk and his colleagues observed between Catholic and public schools. However, the Catholic school model deserves its reputation as an inspiration for reformers, because Catholic schools have shown that they can improve learning at a relatively low price even when the school draws the great majority of its children from poor and immigrant communities. Business-education partnerships have had a mixed record of success but also gave rise to one of the more successful reform efforts, College and Career Academies. When Eugene Lang offered to partially finance the college tuition of every member of a Harlem sixth-grade class who made it to college, he found himself paying for more than 90 percent of the students in a school where a 75 percent dropout rate had been typical! (Lang also helped with counseling and motivational support for the families.) This is, needless to say, a very expensive offer. When incentives were not as strong as those promised and





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delivered by Eugene Lang, success was often not as strong either. For example, the Boston business community promised to hire thousands of high school students in summer jobs and to give preference to graduates of the city schools for permanent entry-level employment if the Boston school system improved the attendance and achievement of high school graduates and reduced the dropout rate. The business community delivered on its promises, employing thousands of local high school students. However, attendance and achievement in the schools increased only modestly (and statistically no more than the improving national trends would have predicted), and the program later faltered on disagreements about whether the business community and the schools were each living up to their end of the bargain (Rothman 1988).4 But the Philadelphia High School Academies, which began in a 1969 experiment at one high school, have shown a strong record by using the promise of full-time employment in supporting businesses as an incentive to improve attendance and school performance (Snyder and McMullan 1987). The idea has spread to 17 high schools in Philadelphia, where more than 8,000 students enroll to study one of 14 career fields. College and Career Academies, reminiscent of the German dual system (see Chapter 2), are a spin-off from the success of the Philadelphia Academies. Currently about 7,000 College and Career Academies are in operation in the United States and have been supported for many years by awards from the Department of Education. In most of the contemporary College and Career Academies, business involvement has not extended to a promise of jobs; instead, it includes in-kind support (such as donation of equipment), offers of mentorship, and guest lectures by local businesspeople. Consequently, the success of the academies may have more to do with their small size and their status as schools within schools, in which students study with the same teachers more than once and share experiences with the same set of students. The academies combine college preparatory curricula with career-related themes. Common career themes include health care, business and finance, communications media, and transportation technology (Stern, Dayton, and Raby 2010). Evaluations of the academies have been positive, showing sustained and statistically significant differences in labor market outcomes, such as employment and earnings, when academy students have been compared to matched samples (see, e.g., Maxwell and Rubin 2000) and, in one particularly convincing multiyear study, when they were compared to students in randomly assigned control groups (Kemple 2008). The research suggests that the academies are particularly beneficial for those students who are most at risk for dropping out of high school (Kemple 2008). Moreover, one Comprehensive School Reform program that has frequently received high marks in meta-analyses, High Schools that Work (see Borman et al. 2003), relies on many of the same principles as the College and Career Academies and also includes funding for personnel to provide extra help to students who need it (Bottoms and ­Presson 1995). The mixed record of market-based programs. Voucher programs, magnet schools, and charter schools all involve efforts to create more choice for families who would otherwise be assigned to their neighborhood school. They build on public skepticism about the effectiveness of public bureaucracies that are protected from market competition. This same skepticism has encouraged tens of thousands of parents to leave the public system



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altogether, either for private schools (Davies and Hammack 2005) or for homeschooling (Stevens 2001). Without a doubt, some schools that grew up as alternative schools in early school choice experiments, such as Principal Deborah Meier’s Central Park East schools in East Harlem, became beacons of light for reformers. The programs at Meier’s four Central Park East schools were tailored to attract students’ interests and housed in small communities of 250 students. The schools achieved strikingly strong results: 90 percent of Central Park East students went on to college from a school district in which dropout rates of more than 50 percent were common (Meier 1995: chap. 2). The research evidence, however, suggests that most voucher programs have benefited mainly the best-informed and most highly motivated families. The evidence points to a creaming-off phenomenon, in which bad schools do not improve to keep up, as the market model predicts they should, but rather stagnate or sink further as the more motivated families leave (Moore and Davenport 1990; Wells 1991). These kinds of effects have been shown in several U.S. school districts (see, e.g., Lee, Croninger, and Smith 1996; Martinez, Godin, and Kenerer 1996; Wells 1996; Witte 1996) and also in the most comprehensive study of choice in Europe, of the Scottish experience (Willms and Echols 1993). As I discuss in Chapter 3, evidence from Latin America and Sweden also suggests that the most advantaged parents gain the most from vouchers, while the poor gain little—and are likely to remain in poor-performing neighborhood schools (Carnoy 1998). Voucher programs depend on an assumption that parents will invest time and energy into learning about schools and will choose to transport their children to better schools. But costs of transportation and information are high, and poor parents typically do not have the wherewithal to bear them. The policy analysts Richard Elmore and Bruce Fuller have concluded that, in the absence of serious progress in improving classroom instruction in schools serving the urban poor, “it is unlikely that choice will do anything other than simply move high achievers around from one school to another, mistaking the effect of concentrating strong and motivated students for the effect of the choice system” (Elmore and Fuller 1996: 200). Local experiments (and experiences in other countries) suggest that, as in many markets, low-income consumers of schooling lack information, time, or other resources (such as transportation) to take advantage of opportunities to choose. Magnet school programs often result in the same reinforcement of inequalities as voucher programs. Magnets attract better-educated and more highly motivated families and therefore can lead to the concentration of less highly educated and less motivated families at the bottom schools (Archbald 2004; Blank 1989). However, some controlledchoice magnet plans create choices for parents without exacerbating racial and social class segregation. They convert all schools to magnets, provide centrally supported information and transportation to all parents, and work within the context of fixed goals of racial and socioeconomic diversity (Archbald 2004). Definitive studies have not been conducted on the effects of magnet schools on student achievement. Logically, the roughly half of magnet schools now geared to specialized subject matter (such as performing arts or animal care) seem unlikely to raise performance in subjects outside the school’s major area of emphasis. On the other hand, those geared to distinctive instructional approaches may





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have positive effects on achievement by attracting students with similar interests who are excited by subjects that interest them. It will be interesting to see if they do. Charter schools are a form of choice that allows parents a major role in creating the climate and pedagogy of new schools supported by state funds. The positive impacts on learning expected of charter schools have not thus far been proved, and the best evidence available suggests that the results of charter school experiments have often been disappointing. National studies, with controls for student background characteristics, indicate that charter school students perform somewhat worse than regular public school students on tests of math and reading (Schemo 2004; NAEP 2005; Carnoy et al. 2005; cf. Hoxby 2004a, 2004b). Charter school advocates have tried to explain the performance gap by arguing that charter schools serve more disadvantaged populations, but this argument is not true. In fact, charter schools tend to serve a slightly more advantaged population than regular schools (Carnoy et al. 2005: chap. 4). Not all of the evidence on charter schools is negative. A recent random-assignment study of charter middle schools that used lotteries for admissions found no differences overall between charter middle schools and nearby public schools and great variation in the results achieved among charter schools. However, it also found small, statistically significant improvements in math achievement for students from poor, urban environments compared to students attending traditional nearby public schools. These differences were related to smaller enrollments and ability grouping in math. Moreover, parents whose students attended charter schools tended to be more satisfied than other parents, even when the achievement scores of their children were no higher than those of local public schools (Gleason et al. 2010). Because the study focused only on schools that used lotteries for admittance, the results cannot be generalized to all charter schools (Gleason et al. 2010). Running a school is hard work, and idealism can fuel it only for so long. It may be that the wide variation in performance of charter schools has more to do with the practical difficulties of the supply side (some of which apply to all business start-ups) than with flaws in the logic of the demand side of the market model. The enthusiasm of volunteers and management board members can erode once the hard realities of running a school are faced daily over a long period. Some charter schools have consequently failed to provide a stable management environment. Many others have contracted with professional, nonprofit management and performed well. Surely few would wish to sacrifice motivated families to failing school systems. But at the same time many might legitimately worry about the further isolation of schools at the bottom if they are deprived, by school choice programs, of precisely the kinds of parents who are the most likely leaders in creating a positive learning climate and support for the teaching and administrative staff. This worry is amplified when the highly motivated families who take advantage of school choice opportunities do not gain much from their participation. Here, the studies of the Milwaukee public-private choice experiments (see Chapter 7) provide a potent reminder that the presumed logic of a market-based system of school choice may be secondary to the stability of the environment in which schools are located; they suggest that turnover in school populations is so great in poor urban areas



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that the continuity needed to sustain a learning community may be difficult to achieve in any available school. The performance of choice students varied from year to year, but they did not show better achievement overall than similar low-income students who remained in their neighborhood schools (Witte 1996: 130). Schools in communities like inner-city Milwaukee need a strong academic ethos, orderly environments, consistently high levels of parental participation in the life of the school, and academically focused principals more than they need school choice or other organizational fixes that rest on assumptions about the superiority of market incentives as a stimulus for public school improvement.

Equity Reforms in Europe and East Asia During the U.S. War on Poverty in the 1960s, the primary equity concerns in Europe and East Asia focused on providing adequate resources and qualified teachers to all schools, keeping students in school beyond the minimum school-leaving age and (in most countries) abolishing early streaming. These policy goals have largely been met, and a new set of ideas has emerged about how best to reduce the achievement gaps that divide low- and high-income students and those from immigrant and native families. Some of these ideas are intended to reform 20th-century educational legacies that hamper the opportunities of the poor. Grade repetition, a costly practice common in many Francophone countries, has little evidence to support its effectiveness and has consequently come under criticism by educational policy makers in Europe (see, e.g., OECD 2008). Vocational education is rarely criticized on distributional grounds, but it is often criticized on effectiveness grounds. For reformers, competency-based training for specific occupational functions is too narrow to allow students to adapt to changes in technology or industry structure. Advocates of a new approach favor a shift from narrow competencies to broader capabilities that allow engagement with a range of technologies and industries while providing a foundation for retraining at higher levels of education (see, e.g., Wheelahan and Moodie 2011). Studies of new approaches to vocational education, however, remain in their infancy. Some now-maturing policy ideas address the disadvantages of low-income and immigrant families more directly. I focus on three of these that have been pursued more aggressively in parts of Europe and East Asia than in the United States. They are (1) early childhood education, (2) educational priority zones, and (3) bonuses for teaching in schools with high-poverty populations. Early childhood education. Policy makers in Europe and East Asia have given more attention to providing early childhood education than have policy makers in the United States. The advent of early childhood education mirrored female labor force participation and arose organically as part of European family-friendly and social welfare policies. Among OECD countries, more than three-quarters of four-year-olds were enrolled in preschool in 2012, including nearly 90 percent of four-year-olds in EU countries (OECD 2014: 318). In 10 EU countries, including Germany, France, and England, 90 percent of three-year-olds were also enrolled (318).





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In recent years policy makers have advocated strengthening early childhood education on the basis of evidence that inequalities tend to grow when school is not compulsory— for example, during summers (Downey, von Hippel, and Broh 2004)—and neuroscience evidence on the importance of early learning for the development of neural connections (Center on the Developing Child 2007). Foucauldians may warn against the all-pervasive power of the “carceral state” and Habermasians may bemoan the “colonization of the lifeworld,” but European policy makers justify expanded state control of early childhood education as an antidote to parental neglect or parental socialization of children into values and practices that are not conducive to school success. Controlling for socioeconomic background, European researchers have found benefits of attending at least one year of preschool (OECD 2013c: table II.4.12). These results are stronger for high-quality programs that are longer in duration and have smaller pupilto-teacher ratios and higher public expenditures per student (table II.4.12; see also Hanushek and Woessmann 2011: 157–58). Per-student public expenditures on preschool are very high in most Scandinavian countries, as well as in Latvia, Luxembourg, and the Russian Federation (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011: 157–58). Other researchers have found stronger results for preschool teachers with higher levels of pay and more years of postsecondary training (Schüetz 2009). Nicole Schneeweiss (2010) observed strong results for the French maternelle system, which children enter very early, at two-and-a-half years old. The system has especially positive consequences for children from immigrant backgrounds because it brings immigrant children into French-speaking environments well before they will need to use French for academic performance. In addition to easily measured quality features, such as better training and higher salaries for preschool teachers, the quality of interaction between teachers and preschoolers presumably matters as well. Good preschool teachers are nothing like babysitters, except in being emotionally engaged and sensitive to children’s needs. We can assume that they do not attempt to regiment children. Instead, they engage children in oral interactions, and they provide explicit instruction in skills such as self-regulation and early literacy (Schütz 2009). The Perry Preschool Study, which began in 1962, has been used to promote the expansion of preschool education in the United States. That study followed 123 at-risk children from Ypsilanti, Michigan, from preschool to age 40. The children were randomly assigned to preschool or no treatment. The results for the treatment group at age 40 were impressively better than those for the control group: many more in the treatment group had finished high school, held jobs, were making at least $20,000 a year, and had avoided arrests than those in the control group. Differences of 20 to 30 percent between those assigned to treatment and control groups were typical along each of these outcomes. The Perry Preschool Study has been described by detractors as a high-cost “boutique program” affecting a small number of children (Whitehurst 2013). It is true that the costs were comparatively high: over $8,000 per student in 2001 dollars. But so too were the benefits in lower costs to victims of crimes, reduced justice system costs, increased taxes resulting from employment, reduced welfare costs, and lesser demand for special education courses (Schweinhart et al. 2005).



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Early childhood education remains a contested policy. It is difficult to square the positive findings of so many European researchers with the evidence for the null hypothesis in the recent American research based on randomized trials of a voluntary preschool program in Tennessee. Thus far, the European research has been quasi-experimental in design rather than based on randomized trials. The U.S. study found very few sustained gains; most faded by first grade, and no gains were more than very modest (Lipsey, Farran, and Hofer 2015). While American policy makers have been quick to invoke the costs of public preschool as a pertinent factor, the Europeans have tended to look for benefits independent of costs. One commonality may be the need to focus on the quality of preschool rather than simply on its existence. Even preschool’s strongest defenders in the United States emphasize that quality differences matter. Studies in Boston, for example, have found positive results for preschool education in experimental designs with expenditures of $10,000 per preschooler in 2010 dollars, a big difference compared to the then-national average of just over $4,000 in per-pupil expenditures (Kirp 2015). Educational priority zones. Some European countries have devoted additional re­ sources to schools in high-poverty neighborhoods using terms such as “educational pri­ ority zones,” “education action zones,” and “excellence in cities” programs. These can be considered European counterparts to the U.S. Title I and Head Start programs. The first two developed in the 1970s in France and Great Britain following advocacy by teachers’ unions and socialist parties for the government to address the educational disadvantages of the poor. A number of other countries, such as Belgium and Portugal, have similar programs. The programs provide extra resources to designated schools, typically those that enroll high proportions of students requiring lunch subsidies. These extra resources typically come in the form of additional hours of instruction and bonuses for teachers and other school personnel. The programs in France and Great Britain were loosely organized at first and resource allocations were politically influenced. Like Title I and Head Start, they have experienced several rounds of redesign and tightening of requirements. The zones d’éducation prioritaires (ZEPs) in France have received the most rigorous evaluation. By 1997, the ZEPs enrolled 11 percent of elementary school children and 15 percent of lower secondary school children. About one-third of enrolled children came from non-French-speaking African or Asian families. On average ZEP schools received an extra 4.4 percent in resources. Roland Bénabou, Francis Kramarz, and Corrine Prost (2009) studied more than 24,000 students who entered eighth grade in 1989. Bénabou and his colleagues used instrumental variables and other means to correct for endogeneity (the possibility that negative effects would result from the labeling of schools as in need of special resources). The results of the evaluation were disappointing. Comparing students in ZEP schools to otherwise similar students who were not enrolled in these schools, they found no discernible effect on any of the four measures they used of student academic achievement (obtaining at least one degree by the end of schooling, reaching eighth grade, reaching tenth grade, and passing the baccalauréat examination). Moreover, the average number of students decreased by 7 percent for schools designated as ZEP in 1989, indicating a desire to avoid the stigma of ZEP designation. The designation also had negative signaling effects for teachers. In spite of bonuses, the ZEP schools showed no improvement





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in the qualifications of their teaching staff, and less experienced teachers were actually recruited over time. Bénabou and his colleagues conclude that more than stigma harmed the schools. The policies were also not designed to provide mechanisms for spreading effective practices, and the schools were consequently left to their own devices about how best to improve processes and practices. Evaluations of the British equivalent of ZEPs, educational action zones, have been less rigorous but no less disappointing. According to Ivan Reid and Kevin Brain (2003), the zones were doomed at the start by conceptual flaws focusing on the generation of social capital through school networks, rather than the reduction of the achievement gap, and by the complexity of the resource allocation formulas and reporting requirements. Moreover, they emphasize, the wider British policy context favored efforts to retain a competitive educational market rather than reduce inequality, creating a tension between the objectives of the educational action zones and the objectives of the broader educational policy community. Tightly organized, repeatable practices based on improved educational intensity and regular assessment of progress are required to make improvements in the very difficult environments of schools serving disadvantaged students. Mechanisms to spread practices that work and eliminate practices that do not work are also necessary. Thus far, educational priority zones have not developed educational designs or diffusion practices that would allow them to be successful. Bonuses for teachers who teach the poor. The common pattern is for the better teachers to teach the better students. Schools with more resources will attempt to attract the best talent, and teachers naturally want to work with motivated and able students. After all, teaching is so much easier under those conditions! In England, for example, researchers estimated that only 13 percent of students in the most disadvantaged schools in the late 2000s were taught by the highest-quality teachers, compared to more than half of students in the most advantaged schools (Goodman and Turner 2013). To break this near-iron law of educational homogamy, some countries (and some U.S. states and cities) have provided incentives for teachers to teach in high-need schools. In South Korea, the government provides multiple incentives for candidates to work in such schools, including higher salaries, smaller classes, less instructional time, additional credits toward promotion to administration, and the opportunity to choose their next school to work in. Because of these incentives, low-income mathematics students are more likely than high-income students to be taught by well-qualified teachers, as measured by full certification, a major in a mathematics, and at least three years of experience (Kang and Hong 2008). Whether this structure of incentives reduces inequality in student performance is still open to question, but there are reasons to suspect that it may; the performance of South Korean students on PISA tests is not only high on average but also more concentrated around the mean than the performance of students in other countries. The responsiveness of teachers to salary incentives has been well established in studies of merit pay in India and Israel (Goodman and Turner 2013). But these studies do not tell us whether incentives are strong enough to outweigh the preference of most teachers to work with high-achieving students. In the United States, it is often true that teachers



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will leave the profession rather than be assigned to difficult schools (Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin 2004; Loeb and Page 2000). Paul Glewwe, Nauman Ilias, and Michael Kremer (2010) found no long-term benefits of bonuses given to teachers who worked in the least advantaged schools in Kenya. Similarly, the city of New York experimented with bonuses for teachers who raised achievement scores in disadvantaged schools. Researchers Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner (2013) found little effect of this experiment on teacher effort. Research in this area is just beginning, but the results so far suggest that the number of incentives may matter more than the existence of a bonus system per se. And it is very clear that bonuses are an equity measure only if they are restricted to high-poverty, low-performing schools. If incentives for raising scores are system-wide rather than limited solely to low-performing schools, teachers will tend to respond by departing lowperforming schools, leaving less motivated and effective teachers behind (Clotfelter et al. 2004).

conclusion The meanings of “reform” cluster around four goals, which I have labeled the four Es of education reform: improving efficiency, creating higher levels of teaching and learning excellence, enhancing the facilities and activities that contribute to student learning, and creating more equity in educational opportunities. Some historians have argued for a cyclical view of educational reform, with periods dominated by conservative concerns for efficiency and excellence alternating with periods dominated by more liberal enhancement and equity reforms. It is possible to show the broad outlines of more conservative periods in the 1890s, the 1950s, and the 1980s and more liberal periods in the 1920s and the 1960s. However, the cyclical framework is not adequate for capturing the complex dynamics of educational reform. Some reforms, such as the introduction of junior high schools, do not easily fit into either a conservative or liberal category, and most periods show a complex mix of conservative and liberal reform initiatives. Evidence on the implementation of reforms indicates that reforms are most likely to be successfully implemented when they do not significantly challenge teachers’ authority in the classroom, make school more interesting for students, have measurable results, are relatively low cost, and create a mobilized constituency that will defend the reform. Many widely heralded reforms, such as the introduction of media-based schooling, have failed to take hold because they challenged teachers’ authority and could not engage students as much as their proponents expected. In this chapter I focus on two of the four Es, excellence and equity, because these two have been the focus of reformers since the 1960s. The current era of reform, dating to the early 1980s, has been dominated by excellence concerns, or improved educational standards, and the introduction of accountability measures in the schools. These accountability efforts have led to increased high-stakes testing as a way to measure student learning outcomes. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress in 2001, mandated that all schools must make adequate yearly progress in state-developed tests of student





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proficiency. Although research evidence suggests that accountability measures can improve student learning, NCLB generated considerable confusion by allowing each of the states to determine its own standards of student proficiency independently of all other states. Not surprisingly, many states produced easy tests that allowed their schools to avoid the punitive consequences imposed by the federal government on schools that failed to show adequate yearly progress. Comparative studies indicate that centrally administered external exit examinations do produce achievement scores that are higher than average. When teachers, principals, and parents can measure the performance of students in their school against those in peer institutions, they are more likely to want to achieve better results. But accountability is only one policy intervention that makes a difference. Others include standardized curricula, higher teacher qualifications, and greater school-level autonomy over school resources and hiring. In the United States, efforts to address inequalities in educational opportunity began in the 1960s with the War on Poverty and two of its signature programs, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Head Start program. These programs have experienced numerous redesigns. Most well-designed studies credit them with, at best, modest effects on the school performance of students who have received benefits. A new generation of equity-oriented reformers came to the fore in the 1980s. ­Comprehensive school reform programs allocated federal funds to schools, mainly in high-poverty areas, that made a commitment to implementing and evaluating programs of school-wide change. Thus far, two programs that change instruction by providing more structure, more regular feedback, and additional staff in the classroom have shown consistently positive outcomes. Programs that provide material incentives for students in the form of jobs or college opportunities can also work, but these are usually prohibitively expensive programs to implement, because businesses (or individual businesspeople) must commit jobs or tuition funds as incentives. Findings on community involvement programs and school choice programs have been mixed. They rarely succeed unless attention is given to the development of a strong, consistent, and sustainable academic ethos in target schools. Early childhood education is an increasingly popular approach to equalizing opportunities. Early integration into school culture while the brain is making the largest number of neural connections has both a social and a cognitive logic. Quasi-experimental designs have shown good results for high-quality preschool programs, but the results from studies using experimental designs have been less encouraging. Many of the initial advantages of preschool appear to fade by first grade. Quality may help explain differences between European and American results. High-quality preschool programs are run by fully certified teachers, for a long duration, and with sizable per-pupil expenditures. Other efforts to reduce achievement gaps include educational priority zones and bonuses to well-qualified teachers who teach in high-need schools. Educational priority zones have thus far produced disappointing results, while the evidence on the consequences of teacher bonuses for teaching in low-income communities remains, at best, inconclusive.

coda: the possibilities of schooling

Schools of the future may very well be different in some important respects from those we see today. Computer-based adaptive learning technologies, with their interactive and multisensory potential, will likely become more central in the classroom. Still often used for drill work, new digital media should in the future help open up the world for children in ways that textbooks alone cannot do. Many more one-on-one tutorials will be possible using computer-aided instruction with feedback. In addition, we may see more specialized secondary schools focusing on particular subject clusters or pedagogical methods. Multicultural and global curricula, already a force, seem likely to become increasingly important as well. But these innovations by themselves cannot create the well-ordered, academically enriched learning communities most people want their schools to be. They are not the magic bullets that some of their advocates imagine. Other panaceas have been proposed in the past and have fallen short of expectations. There is a sticky quality to what can be done in bureaucratic, group-learning systems, especially those like public schools that attempt to transform students whose capacities and interests vary greatly. Most reform, therefore, requires slow, persistent, patient work. Technological tools cannot do the job of education alone. Young students require the emotional connection and support that only human teachers can provide. They also require the enforcement of attention that only human teachers can manage in the group context of schooling. In this book, I analyze schools as social institutions: where they came from, why different patterns of organization and practice exist around the world, and what consequences these different patterns have for societies and their individual members. In these last few pages of the book, I look at schooling in a more prescriptive way—that is, in terms of the ideals that schools at their best can represent and how they might represent those ideals more effectively than they currently do.

which educational values should we promote ? The first questions for those who dare to prescribe are: What constitutes health? How do your prescriptions foster health? One conclusion from Chapter 9 is that all the





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major values associated with school reform movements of the past represent desirable goods: • Efficiency is associated with the economical use and conservation of scarce resources. • Excellence is associated with high cultural attainment. • Enhancement is associated with fostering possibilities for children’s more complete development. • Equity is associated with realizing prevailing standards of social justice, opportunity, and fairness. And yet we often lack methods for deciding whether one good is more important than another. To promote efficiency, we might give children with different aptitudes different kinds of schooling. But this efficiency would in most cases be purchased at the expense of intergroup equity. Which value should take priority? In many instances, logical solutions cannot be defined; the values are incommensurable. Trade-offs may be possible, but how these trade-offs are made depend on how the two goods are weighted and also the thresholds below which a minimal value on the good seems unacceptable. Having studied schooling systems for many years, I believe that the best protection for a progressive, democratic society and the best hope for individuals occur when the state provides essentially the same education for all through secondary school and when educators do not trim their commitment to high standards of academic and personal excellence. John Dewey captured this conclusion well when he argued, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, this must be what we want for all children of the community” (1915: 19). The political theorist Benjamin Barber titled his book about schooling An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), and this title also captures the spirit with which I look at the possibilities of schooling. As Barber observed, the great dream of the Enlightenment was that ordinary people could gain the cultural knowledge and refined understandings that were once reserved for those with inherited wealth. This view is not associated solely with egalitarians. Even the freedom-loving liberals of the 17th and 18th centuries believed that a market society required the widespread diffusion of knowledge and good standards of personal conduct. This was the view of John Locke, for example, the most important advocate of a social order based on the maximization of individual liberties (Gray 1989). In the civic virtue tradition that so influenced the founders of the United States (Wood 1969), it was taken for granted that a long-lasting Republic required self-limiting virtues and just discriminations. Early 19th-century reformers, such as Horace Mann, remained tied to the civic virtue tradition and argued these virtues and discriminations could be produced only through publicly provided schooling that aimed to produce these qualities in all citizens (see Cremin 1957). These ideals may seem antiquated to many readers. In contemporary educational thought, the end goals of schooling have become tied more exclusively to a narrow, testbased ideal of academic achievement. I have taken tests seriously as measures of desirable levels of knowledge and skill. But tests alone do not measure everything we hope schools can accomplish, even in the cognitive domain. Beautifully written and vigorously argued



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essays, well-crafted research projects, provocative questions, penetrating insights—these too are marks of inquiring and able minds. Worse, the reasons political leaders put forward to justify pursuing higher test scores are exclusively tied to prospects for economic advancement, either at the individual or societal level. The economic rewards of academic excellence are important, but they are not the only important rewards: people who think well have the opportunity to experience a richer appreciation of the world they inhabit and a greater awareness of themselves and others. Schools can also foster excellence in character in the conduct of social relations and in engagement with community life. These too are important goals in a democratic society whose schools were founded in the civic virtue tradition. No one should wish to jettison the gains attributable to the accountability movement, but we have reached a point of imbalance in our vision of what schools should accomplish. This imbalance can be corrected only by a broader vision of how able and inquisitive minds are developed and how we can foster their capacity to work simultaneously for themselves and in concert with others. A narrowly utilitarian outlook threatens to overshadow the ideals that animated the American common school movement and its Enlightenment precursors. Although we retain faith in the power of the schools to provide training and good work habits that ultimately help in the labor market, we have already, to some degree, lost our faith in the power of the schools to lift our minds and spirits and build the foundations of a democratic community. Policy makers and educators themselves are partly to blame for these diminished aspirations. When educational leaders accepted differentiated secondary school curricula in the early 20th century in the name of social efficiency and student interest, they reduced the democratic faith in the possibilities of schooling. This is one reason why separation of students into classes by academic aptitude and interest should be delayed as long as possible; students learn that the community advances through the contributions of every person, and the collective intelligence is far more powerful than the intelligence of any single individual. The regimental aspects of schooling have from the beginning hobbled the nurturing of curiosity and the fostering of intellectual powers that should be integral to schools. Too many classrooms are dutiful but dull places, where teachers march through textbook chapters in an effort to keep up with what state educational standards require and children’s minds frantically race to shovel in facts and interpretations but remain unmoved by the pith and marrow of subject matter. These forced marches are punctuated by the few truly arousing events of the school week—those that exist largely outside the classroom in interpersonal intrigues or sporting triumphs. Some work of the classroom requires concentration and many students are uncomfortable concentrating for long. Concentration muscles must be built, more now in an age of social media. But it is also true that the concentrated work of the classroom can be punctuated effectively by activities that bring children out of their seats, spark their imaginations, and arouse their emotions.

institutions that help produce well-prepared students It is important to keep these ideals in mind and realize them wherever we can. But the more fundamental challenge is to improve skills of students, including those at the bottom





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of the distribution, so that they are prepared for economic opportunities and economic security. Communities, the state, and the business community all have important roles to play in the encouragement of schools that produce well-prepared students. The East Asian example shows that the motivational press of families for high levels of achievement can occur even without the help of generous welfare states. Conversely, the Scandinavian and Canadian examples show that welfare states can raise the bottom of the achievement distribution, contributing to the reduction of poverty and the advance of living standards. These efforts are supported by investments in schooling through high-quality teacher training and standardized, challenging curricula. They have been supported as well by a variety of tax and benefit programs for working families to help equalize learning conditions in the homes. Instead of resisting adequate wage levels, business communities in these countries have inherited and accepted relatively egalitarian wage and salary norms, where rewards still go to those who are highly productive but without the huge gaps between rich and poor that have become characteristic of American society since the 1980s. Americans can learn from these successful educational systems, even though the challenges of a multiethnic society with high rates of poverty and market-oriented business elites will inevitably impede efforts to improve the country’s underperforming schools. For many years, human capital was measured poorly by the sheer number of years of educational attainment adults had achieved. We now know that adults can obtain degrees without adding much to their stock of human capital. How students perform on sophisticated tests of reading comprehension, mathematics, and science are far more accurate measures of human capital development. By these measures, American society is not succeeding as well as it could. To improve, the United States will require a playing field that is more nearly the same for all, thanks to improved community motivational press, government-mandated supports for more equitable living conditions, and stronger norms of corporate social responsibility.

which school qualities should we prefer? The works of political theorists like Benjamin Barber, of empirical social scientists like Anthony Bryk, and of school reformers like Deborah Meier remind us that we do not need to settle for a diminished version of what schools can do. Thanks to these and other writers, we have good evidence about the school characteristics that can enhance the possibilities for children: the possibilities that they will become self-disciplined and considerate in their conduct, accomplished in their thought processes, and capable of imaginative engagement with unfamiliar ways of sensing and being. This list emphasizes the importance of good order and high standards, but it also includes qualities that build an energy in the communal life of the school. Good schools, regardless of location, share, I argue, the following qualities: • They have adequate resources. • They are of a relatively small size. • They express high academic expectations and are organized in ways that reflect those expectations.



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• They are staffed by well-trained and highly motivated teachers. • They include strong elements of communal organization. • They mobilize the voluntary involvement of students, parents, and others in the learning and social activities of the school. The first point is the most basic, and it is often taken for granted: good schools require adequate resources. As I have shown, an attractive physical plant is not critical for, but is supportive of, high-quality learning. Well-maintained schools signal to children and their families that education is something the community values highly. Such schools may inspire children to make the commitment to learning. By contrast, dilapidated and overcrowded buildings signal that education is not a high priority. Maintaining an appropriate physical plant, especially in older cities, can be an expensive proposition. The need for adequate resources seems like a truism (and may even seem like an invitation to waste, as it has been at times in New York and other cities), but it means that taxpayers will need to continue their historically strong commitment to schooling. The market is an alternative to public support, but it is not as equitable an alternative. Second, good schools are relatively small. As the school reformer Deborah Meier writes, “Large schools neither nourish the spirit nor educate the mind. What big schools do is remind most of us that we don’t count for a lot” (1995: 107). Being known (and therefore at least potentially appreciated) is among the strongest benefits of small schools. As Meier notes, students in large high schools often find that no teacher knows them well enough to write a college reference letter that sounds authentic. But at her small secondary school in East Harlem, “the shyest and least engaged student would not have suffered the fate that the average big school student takes for granted” (112). Students in small high schools say they receive significantly more personal support than students in large schools (Kahne et al. 2008). The empirical evidence also indicates that small schools tend to pull more students into active participation in the life of the school community and thereby create a stronger sense of satisfaction and engagement (Cotton 2001; Lindsay 1982). Schools within schools, such as the college and career academies discussed in Chapter 9, have the potential to break down large organizations in ways that are beneficial to students who would otherwise be in danger of dropping out (Stern, Dayton, and Raby 2010).1 Small schools also foster the natural interpenetration of adult and student cultures rather than a strict separation between the two. Regular interaction with adults outside the classroom is important for the kinds of conversions that schools hope to make: In part, after all, we teachers are trying to convert our children to a set of adult intellectual standards and appreciations—our love affair with literature and history, science and math, logic and reason, accuracy and precision. . . . This in turn requires joint membership in an attractive community representing such values as well as a myriad of interactions across generations. . . . [Small schools] offer a chance, not a guarantee, that children will glimpse possibilities that make them want to be grown-ups. (Meier 1995: 113)

Small classes are a different matter, and here the evidence is not as convincing. Many studies find few benefits, as I show in Chapter 9. However, it is likely, if not yet fully proved,





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that small classes benefit minority students, in particular, because of the more intimate setting and more focused attention that is possible in smaller classes (Finn et al. 2001; Nye, Hedges, and Konstantopolous 2000). Schools in poor neighborhoods are now playing roles that are more than simply educational. They provide parental counseling, babysitting services, an oasis out of harm’s way, and in some places a one-stop social services agency (Graham 1993). The difficult circumstances of these communities have led some reformers to believe that schools need, above all, to offer encouragement and support rather than challenging academic standards. This is a prescription for stasis or decline. Schools have the opportunity to help children develop their minds and their spirits and transmit socially useful skills and personally useful habits of behavior. But schools can do this only if they create commitments to the learning community rather than primarily to the support system of the school. Good schools keep their priorities straight by expressing high expectations and a real passion about learning. Good academic standards in turn cannot be built on weak foundations. Children cannot learn unless their basic language skills are adequate. When school districts have extra resources, the research suggests these should go into providing classroom aides in the early primary grades to make sure that all children are at or above grade level in reading. Effective schools are, moreover, intellectually challenging places. Teachers are well trained both in their subject matter and in the art and science of good teaching (Darling-Hammond 2000; Wayne and Youngs 2003). The academic focus of the school is communicated through the structure of expectations and the consistency with which these expectations are held. Teachers spend their time in class on task and assign engaging homework. Basic rules of conduct are consistently enforced. Student-centered education may work well in some affluent communities, but mastery of the fundamentals must come first in lower-income communities where students’ basic literacy and numeracy skills are often missing. As in Abraham Maslow’s (1954) hierarchy of needs schema, the priorities of good schools depend on the learning needs and capacities of the students who enroll in them. Until the basics are mastered, more advanced lessons can only bewilder. This means that a focus on traditional forms of teaching through small, bite-sized introduction of new materials, repetition of key lessons to build understanding, and very regular assessment are suitable approaches for students who come into school with gaps in their basic skills. Beyond the basics, different schools provide a different mix of cognitive demands, depending on students’ development, moving up from a focus on recalling and understanding learning materials to applying, analyzing, and evaluating them (see Anderson and Krathwohl 2001). Classrooms would be very boring places for able students if they focused solely on recall and basic understanding. Good standards do not mean that teachers spend less time thinking about how to make their lessons engaging. Lessons need to be meaningful and memorable. Good teaching is a creative joining of opposites: passion and rationality, imagination and instrumentality, objectivity and compassion. Children learn by separating things into analytical bits and joining things together into integrative wholes, by thinking and speaking, by memorization and play. Teaching is an art of activating interest and preserving important tensions as



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much as it is a science of conveying information and understandings. Because good teaching is difficult work, good schools provide ways for teachers to talk to one another about their craft, and they allow effective independent-minded teachers to go their own way.

mobilizing commitments Some of the most important qualities of good schools cannot be mandated; they have to grow. Communal organization is one of the most important of the organic qualities of good schools. Communal organization means high levels of interaction guided by common values and many opportunities to share in governance. Communal organization cannot be achieved without either highly involved families (the typical case in affluent suburbs) or leadership that builds consensus and trust and actively reaches out to families (the more common case in poor urban settings). In many schools, communal organization also requires consistent representation of an inspirational ideology that gives meaning to the life of the school community. Anthony Bryk and his colleagues (Bryk, Lee, and Holland 1993) provide a vivid depiction of how important such an inspirational ideology is in the life of urban Catholic schools. Other integrative ideologies can more appropriately reflect the values of other communities, but all integrative ideologies find a way to celebrate the importance of each individual life and link these individual lives to a meaningful, larger purpose. Good schools find ways, finally, to mobilize commitments. For this purpose, perhaps the most important quality of all is simply the well-focused effort of those who care about learning to act on their commitments. More than two decades ago, the educational historian Patricia A. Graham wrote a book about school reform titled S.O.S. (1992). The familiar abbreviation stood for a less familiar idea: sustain our schools. In Graham’s view, communities, families, government, higher education, and business do not need to save the public schools so much as to sustain them: “Most of all, the schools need people who will be knowledgeable about their fields, skilled in their pedagogy, passionate in their concern for their students, and committed to educating all our children well” (Graham 1992: 170). Teachers and principals search for the right metaphors to convey these understandings. One teacher likens the process of sustaining learning to planting seeds. “Some [seeds] fall on inhospitable ground and don’t grow, some of them aren’t going to be watered or taken care of, but some of them grow and produce other seeds and pretty soon you have a forest.” Another suggests that the reason for her school’s success is that the principal is “out there in his hip boots helping with the cement work” (quoted in Gooden 1996: 74, 79). In life, there are virtuous as well as vicious cycles. Wise and persistent involvement in the life of schools by parents, volunteers, and other community members can stimulate virtuous cycles. Even a little effort can be reciprocated, and even a little reciprocated effort is an important base on which to build.

Reference Matter

notes

chapter 1 1.  Among the numerous critiques of schooling from the 1960s, see, for example, Goodman 1960, Neill 1960, Holt 1964, and Kozol 1968. Criticism of schools as places of fear and boredom resonates with the larger social critique of European Romanticism and originates particularly in the writings of the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1762] 1911). 2.  In the discussion that follows, students who have studied sociology will see the influence of some important sociologists of the past. The discussion of the macro-historical level of analysis is inspired by the work of the great German sociologist Max Weber ([1921] 1978), as well as the neo-Weberians Randall Collins (1975, 1988) and Michael Mann (1986). The discussion of the institutional level has its roots in the work of two midcentury American sociologists, Robert K. Merton ([1949] 1968: chaps. 2 and 10–11) and Philip Selznick (1949, 1957), and one contemporary sociologist, John W. Meyer (Meyer and Rowan 1978). The discussion of the micro-interaction level is influenced by the socially structured interactionism of Willard Waller (1932) and Erving Goffman (1959, 1974), the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer (1969), and the dramatism of literary theorist and social critic Kenneth Burke (1969).

chapter 2 1.  The countries of Europe with high debt and high youth unemployment resemble other European systems in structure but not in the outcomes they produce. Until the 1990s, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and the poorer regions of Italy and Spain lagged greatly in school development despite strong rhetorical commitments to high-quality public education. Modernizing leaders in these states were not able to decisively gain the upper hand over the landed nobility, the tradition-minded church, and communal resistance to educational expenditures (Soysal and Strong 1989). The problems of Italian schooling were for many years compounded by a higher education system poorly adjusted to labor market conditions (Barbagli 1982). Compulsory schooling laws were passed, but enrollments remained low. Ireland has made great progress since the 1990s, but in the other countries,



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educational attainments remain somewhat lower than elsewhere in Europe (OECD 2014: 42). Dropout rates before completion of secondary schooling are high in recent cohorts, except in Spain (54), and government expenditures on schooling are comparatively low (204). Many of the countries of the former Soviet bloc show a similar profile, as do the least developed OECD member states, Turkey and Mexico. 2.  At the elementary school level, industrial societies also differ in one other important way: by how much of education is under public as opposed to private control. In the Netherlands, for instance, private schooling has developed in defense of linguistic and religious differences. In countries such as Spain and France, where the Roman Catholic Church once controlled education, Catholic private education very frequently remains a popular alternative to public schooling. In Japan, private schools mainly provide opportunities for students who are struggling in the public sector. Only in England and parts of the United States are parts of the private sector primarily associated with the desire of professional and managerial elites to avoid the public sector. The private sector rarely counts for more than 10 percent of total primary or secondary enrollments. (See Table 1.2.) 3.  The right of school districts in the same state to spend different amounts on children was affirmed by American courts beginning with Serrano v. Priest (1971). The settlement of Williams v. State of California (2000) in 2004, however, obligated the state to pursue limited remedies to redress substandard school resources and facilities and has led to discussions in other states about similar remedies. See California Department of Education 2004 and Grubb, Goe, and Heurta 2004. 4.  Other efforts to construct typologies of educational systems include, notably, Allmendinger 1989, Cummings 2003, Hopper 1968, Kerckhoff 1974, and Kerr 1979. 5.  The number of universities in the two countries is more similar than these figures suggest. Of the 325 institutions of higher education in Germany, 112 are universities. Of the approximately 2,400 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, just 156 are research universities. The great majority of U.S. colleges are small comprehensive colleges, liberal arts colleges, or specialized institutions, such as theological seminaries or art institutes. 6.  It would be wrong to overstate the differences between Japanese students and Amer­ ican students. According to reports beginning a decade ago, Japanese secondary school students now spend more time watching television than studying, and they also spend sig­ nificant time, just like American students, shopping and hanging out with friends at the mall (White 1993). They are far from around-the-clock grinds. Moreover, Japanese univer­ sities are renowned for their lax standards; they are often described as approximating a  four-year vacation between the rigors of secondary schooling and the rigors of the business world (Rohlen 1983). The oft-noted propensity of Japanese teenagers to commit suicide because of the pressures of testing also appears to be dated (Zeng and LeTendre 1998).

chapter 3 1.  The World Bank is not omnipotent. Even in countries with significant debt obligations, alternative educational policies may retain popularity for historical or partisan political reasons. For example, the ideas of the radical educational reformer Paolo Freire have remained popular in his home country of Brazil, even at the highest levels of the



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educational ministry. Freire’s influence led, first, to a massive literacy program in the 1960s (interestingly, under a military government) and, later, to many efforts to increase teachers’ professional autonomy and community involvement and to keep populist political ideas alive in the schools, including ideas about the “oppressive structure” of global capitalism (Bartlett 2003: 189; Teodoro 2003).

chapter 4 1.  Herbert Kliebard (1986, 1992), the American historian of curriculum, emphasized essentially the same social interests as Raymond Williams but used different terms to characterize them. I have adopted Williams’s terminology. 2.  In 1893, a famous statement by the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten called for a common secondary school curriculum for all students regardless of their origins or likely destinations (NEA 1893). Resistance to a common curriculum melted away by 1910, as secondary school attendance continued to double each decade and new, less literate populations of students began to enter secondary schools. In 1906, the Douglas Commission helped legitimate public vocational education by arguing that children who leave school at the completion of seventh grade would find further training of a practical character attractive if it prepared them for industries (Douglas Commission 1906: 73). In 1918, a statement of “cardinal principles” by the National Education Association argued that the specializing, or vocational, function of the secondary school was essential because “only through attention to the needs of various groups of individuals as shown by aptitudes, abilities, and aspirations can the secondary school secure from each pupil his best efforts” (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education 1918: 22). 3.  The Meyer and Benavot team collected this information by examining a wide range of official policy statements, collected by UN agencies among others, and also more specific historical studies. The data have to be approached with some caution. Not all continents are proportionately represented in each time period. Several countries in which mass education is poorly institutionalized are missing altogether. Most important, official proclamations about what is supposed to happen in school and actual practices in school may differ substantially in many countries (Meyer, Kamens, and Benavot 1992: chap. 3). This slippage no doubt reduces the accuracy of the findings. It is well known, as shown in Chapter 3, that rural schools in poor countries do not strictly follow government-sanctioned plans. Lessons may make up but a small part of the school day, in the midst of taking care of the classroom and the school grounds, playing, and getting settled for work (Hornberger 1987). On-the-ground studies of anthropologists generally reveal gaps between official rhetoric and actual practice (see, e.g., the field reports in Anderson-Levitt 2003). Official policies affect the actual practices of schooling only where a relatively high level of consensus or tight administrative controls exist (Stevenson and Baker 1991). 4.  Clearly, something has changed in the culture to produce the higher IQ scores found by Flynn. But what is it? Some have argued that visual and computer gaming culture, with its ultrafast pace and nonlinear narrative structure, has encouraged more complex cognitive development (Steven Johnson 2005). Others argue that higher-quality schooling has also contributed to the Flynn effect (Blair et al. 2005).



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Yet something is odd about this. In their everyday experience, teachers encounter many students who do not read much, do not engage deeply with print materials, and do not think abstractly with ease. It may be that the qualities of mind encouraged by visual media and nonlinear narratives contrast with qualities of mind encouraged by print media and linear exposition. Both could lead to intelligence but to different types of intelligence. Neil Postman, a proponent of print and the “culture of exposition,” argues, Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography . . . : a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation on reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. . . . [By contrast] the idea [in visual media] “is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. [Viewers] are required . . . to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.” (Postman 1985: 63, 105)

Perhaps the cultural changes brought on by new media have encouraged mental quickness and short-term memory, while capacities for sustained deep thinking, critical comparison of arguments, and high-level abstraction remain as uncommon as ever. 5.  On standardized tests, the top 1 percent is often used as an indicator of exceptional academic talent, but even this level of distinction is relative. National Merit Scholarships in the United States, for example, are awarded to the top one-quarter of 1 percent of test takers. 6.  Some people like to look back on golden ages in which the great majority of people showed an active interest in the life of the mind. For the most part, golden ages turn out, on closer inspection, to be less appealing than they seem. If we look at the education of the entire population in the 1950s—one popular golden age—the results are not particularly encouraging. The schools were more highly tracked than they are today, and minorities, in particular, suffered from very poor educational opportunities (see, e.g., Bracey 1991).

chapter 5 1.  Compared to such moral staples of the classroom as honesty, patriotism, and industry, the more strictly intellectual ethos of contemplation, reflection, judgment, and aesthetic appreciation is rare. To the extent that it has been important, it developed mainly among upper-class groups in upper secondary and higher education. The acceptance and especially the persistence of this more intellectualist ethos depends on previous socialization and on continuing reinforcement (Feldman and Newcomb 1969). 2.  Indeed, one of the important categorical understandings students learn in school translates quite directly into adult life: the status categories of schooling itself. Children learn that dropouts, high school graduates, community college graduates, and college graduates have distinct statuses in society (Kamens 1981). 3.  In a line of argument that built on Cold War sentiments, some sociologists commended the pluralism of the American high school as complementing the pluralism of American life and explicitly contrasted this pluralism with the potential authoritarianism of a single-status hierarchy based on academics. This argument suggested that the more



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ways there were to succeed in school, the more likely a majority of students would end up as confident and well-adjusted adults. Sometimes the images of youth culture were more positive still. During the later 1950s and 1960s, some sociologists provided admiring portraits of the independent, life-embracing, and uncompromising spirit of youth culture. These sociologists interpreted youth culture as a source of socially revitalizing opposition to the life-denying pieties of adult authorities (see, e.g., Freidenberg 1959; Goodman 1960; Flacks 1971).

chapter 6 1.  The coming of the credential society was foreseen in the early part of the last century by Max Weber: “When we hear from all sides the demand for an introduction of regular curricula and special examinations, the reason behind it is, of course, not a suddenly awakened ‘thirst for education’ but the desire for [the] monopolization of [positions] by the owners of educational certificates” (1946a: 241). 2.  Although higher educational credentials have become increasingly prevalent, we should recognize that they are not important in all spheres of the job structure. Many people without impressive educational qualifications continue to start successful small businesses (Steinmetz and Wright 1989). Many other businesses are handed down within families (Robinson 1984; Robinson and Garnier 1985). Among small-business owners and farmers, schooling consequently plays a less important role than among other whitecollar workers as an investment in the future (Ishida, Muller, and Ridge 1995). Similarly, access to jobs in quite a few skilled trades (e.g., plumber or electrician) is regulated more by family and ethnic networks than by formal educational training structures (see, e.g., Bailey and Waldinger 1991). 3.  One commonly used technique is to compute the percentage change in children’s expected earnings for every percentage change in parental earnings. These measures require logarithmic transformations of both fathers’ (or families’) and children’s incomes (or double-log transformations) to normalize what would otherwise be highly left-skewed distributions. Because of this, they are referred to as “elasticities” rather than as regression coefficients. In the 1980s, the first studies using this method showed elasticities in the range of 0.15 to 0.20, supporting the conclusion that earnings were not strongly transmitted across generations (Becker and Tomes 1986; Behrman and Taubman 1985). Subsequent studies showed higher income elasticities, in the range of 0.4 to 0.5 (Mazumber 2005; Solon 2002), suggesting that the intergenerational inheritance of income opportunities was increasing. 4.  I am grateful to Michael Hout for permission to use his General Social Survey tables for the earlier cohort and to Kristopher Proctor for generating the tables for the second cohort. The IQ measure here is based on word recognition. There may be an effect of college graduation itself on word recognition, leading to greater similarity among college graduates of different backgrounds than would be true if the ability measure preceded rather than followed college attendance. 5.  In status attainment studies, statistical controls are used to hold constant all differences among variables in the model (i.e., all measured differences among people) except



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the one under consideration. In thinking about these models people sometimes wonder what kind of person comes from a high-status family and has high cognitive ability and good grades in school but low aspirations. But correlations in the population are not so high as to prevent the construction of meaningful partial correlation coefficients. This does not mean that the assumptions and procedures used in this research are completely defensible. A serious problem does sometimes exist with the regression assumption that the variables included in a model are uncorrelated with variables omitted. 6.  It is not possible to completely isolate measured intelligence from social background. Even if we accept IQ scores as good measures of intelligence—something that many leading scientists no longer do (see, e.g., Sternberg 1988; Fischer et al. 1996: chaps. 2 and 3)—we find that IQ scores are highly conditioned by the social environment. Families can transmit good nutrition, intellectual stimulation, confidence in test-taking situations, and high levels of comfort with dominant linguistic and cultural codes, or they can transmit the opposite qualities. All these qualities can and do influence results on tests of intelligence and academic aptitude (Sternberg and Grigorenko 1999). 7.  I am grateful to Professor Florencia Torche for providing the correlation matrix for young men surveyed in NLSY79 and followed up in 1996–2002 at midcareer. These correlation coefficients are not directly comparable because the NLSY data include young men who were ages 14–22 when they were originally surveyed in 1979 and had not yet entered the labor market, whereas OCG I includes a wide range of men ages 25–64 surveyed in 1962 after most had entered the labor market. In addition, OCG I is a retrospective survey, while NLSY79 follows young men into the labor market; they are analyzed here in midcareer. For OCG, income is reported for one year only; for NLSY, it is averaged over several of the follow-up studies, from 1996 to 2002. 8.  The work of Breen and his colleagues (2009) and other scholars has called into question previous findings that class differences in transition rates to higher levels of schooling remained highly stable over time, in spite of rapid rises in the average level of schooling (Blossfeld and Shavit 1993). The difference in findings likely reflects the small samples used by earlier researchers, leading to wider confidence intervals, as well as inconsistencies in measurement in the earlier-reported country studies.

chapter 7 1.  As specialists in the constitutive influence of social relations, sociologists tend to be skeptical of explanations that focus too much on genetic endowments. But in reality, genetic advantages and disadvantages do figure into the likelihood that people will succeed or fail in school. If we focus only on families in which children’s emerging interests are actively supported, we can clearly see that some children have aptitudes for art and computers, others for languages and wordplay. Children know what gives them pleasure, and by comparing themselves to other children and by hearing the feedback of adults, they soon learn to invest energy and passion in the activities for which they have an aptitude. Researchers continue to disagree about how much intelligence is genetically determined, how much is socially conditioned, and how much is based on interactions between the two. Recent studies of twins raised separately have led to a greater emphasis on genetic factors (Bouchard et al. 1990).



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2.  Are some societies more prone to racial and ethnic bias than others? Racism is evidently a product of Europe (van den Berghe 1970), but it is certainly not limited to Europe or North America. Historical circumstances seem to matter more than any sociological or political variables. Certainly, both democracies and socialist states have been marked by harsh treatment of minorities, even by instances of genocide. The brutal treatment of Native Americans by the European settlers in the United States is well known. Socialist regimes sometimes encouraged ethnic hostilities by recruiting elites from one or two dominant ethnic groups, such as the Montenegrins and Croats in the former Yugoslavia and the Russians and Georgians in the former Soviet Union (Echols 1981). The argument that European societies are particularly biased does not hold much water, because extreme forms of ethnic hatred are common also among Africans and Asians. Until recently, only Europeans have had the technological and political capacity for genocide. However, it seems likely that outbreaks of hatred for out-groups are part of the human condition. It is often stimulated by economic competition or cultural resentments and exploited by politicians for personal or partisan gain. 3.  Charles (2011) argues that if educators in developed countries want more women in science, they should present science as feminine, using, for example, feminine relationship themes and examples familiar to women in textbooks and decorating labs with softer colors and female-friendly posters rather than permitting dark and dank environments festooned with posters of men exploring space or brandishing weapons. 4.  Ability grouping is not the only way to achieve efficient learning in primary schools. Studies of cooperative learning programs, where faster learners help to teach slower learners, suggest that these kinds of programs, if they are carefully designed, can benefit both groups. They can give faster learners a chance to learn the arts of explanation, and they can give slower learners exposure to more able and motivated children (E. Cohen 1984; Slavin 1994; Slavin and Oickle 1981). 5.  Even when track choices are left entirely up to parents and students themselves, children from lower-status backgrounds may track themselves in ways that influence their long-term life chances. In many cases, decisions are made on the basis of practicality consciousness, a way of thinking strongly conditioned by class circumstances. Children from lower-status groups may feel the need to obtain job-related training, because they do not see any real likelihood of attending college. But self-tracking has the same effects as decisions made by school administrators: reduced opportunities distributed unequally by socioeconomic and racial-ethnic status. 6.  Later selection is not, however, invariably connected to greater chances for lowerstatus children. A. H. Halsey, Anthony F. Heath, and John M. Ridge (1980) showed that the abolition of the 11-plus examination and the trend toward later selection in Great Britain had little impact on the relative educational chances of working-class youths. Instead, class differences in educational attainment remained remarkably stable across men born before and after the major changes in the British system. Those working-class children who entered schooling after the abolition of 11-plus examination and the tripartite system of secondary education fared no better than those who entered before the 11-plus examination and the tripartite system were abolished. The unusually strong class divisions in English society, discussed in Chapter 2, may be largely responsible for this



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result. These divisions have created a strong tendency for working-class children to flee schooling as soon as they reach the minimum school-leaving age. Elsewhere, elimination of early branching has tended to improve the opportunities of working-class youths. 7.  The motivational climate in community colleges has been changing in recent years, however. This is largely because of the growing number of low- and middle-income students who cannot afford to begin college at four-year institutions. Many start at community college and save to graduate from a four-year college. Because the community colleges now enroll more of the kinds of students who would at one time have started at four-year colleges, transfer rates have been rising. As many as 35 to 40 percent of community college students transfer to four-year colleges today, compared to 20 to 25 percent in the 1990s (Dougherty and Kienzl 2006; Kane and Rouse 1999). Even so, the chances of completing a four-year degree remain higher for otherwise similar students who start at four-year colleges. 8.  When credentials are very highly valued on the market (e.g., in the case of medical degrees today), competition for them is also intense. Competition in the context of limited supply raises the expected standards of performance, in most cases, and may further increase the economic value associated with those who ultimately succeed in gaining the credential. This mechanism is one reason college majors have such different values in the labor market.

chapter 8 1.  On the basis of these descriptions from the irascible Twain (see Chapter 1), the contemplative Rodriguez, and the vibrant Alcott, one suspects that the characters who leave strong marks on young minds are tuned to a similar enough emotional key to break through the reserves of pride and uncertainty that are such great supports to living and such great barriers to learning. 2.  These conclusions tell us what kinds of teacher traits will work best with average students in mixed-ability classrooms. To some degree, different kinds of teaching techniques may work best with some kinds of personalities than others. For example, more aloof and autocratic teachers do well with students who are responsive to authority, but they do very poorly with rebellious students. For a discussion of some of these complexities, see Boocock 1972: 129–49. 3.  It would be wrong to think of the analytical style as invariably superior to the relational style. There is such a thing as too much analysis and not enough feel for a context. Asa Hilliard (1976) discusses how a person with an exclusively analytical style would function on a task more suited to a relational style: if asked to learn a dance, the analytical learner is very likely to draw feet on the floor and break the dance down into steps to learn it piecemeal. For the relational learner, on the other hand, details are likely to be blurred, standards faintly adhered to, or the dance itself may be modified with no real concern for right or wrong so much as fit or harmony (1976: 42). 4.  Stevenson and Stigler (1992) point out that the characterizations we sometimes hear of Asian students as docile and deferential do not explain the differences they found. Indeed, the Asian students they studied were lively, engaged, and questioning—not the



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passive vessels of stereotype. What differed was the organization and culture of classroom life, not the personalities of the children. 5.  Some early studies of teacher effectiveness attempted to correlate student achievement with particular teacher behaviors: how often teachers smiled or snapped their fingers or stomped their feet. Not surprisingly, these studies were completely unsuccessful (see Boocock 1972: 129–30).

chapter 9 1.  Conservative groups and white suburban parents launched a surprising backlash to the common core in the mid-2010s. This backlash was promoted as a reaction to overreach by forces opposed to local control of schools, but U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speculated that the opposition of white suburbanites might have revolved more around fears that their children would not measure up against the more rigorous standards (McKenna 2015). Critics on the right were later joined by a smattering of influential liberals who complained that the common core would push minority communities further behind and that online testing requirements would serve as a boon to the educational technology industry rather than to American students (see, e.g., Ravitch 2013). 2.  When making assessments of educational policies, it is essential to control for student input characteristics and particularly for students’ socioeconomic status. In many OECD policy studies, scholars use the number of books in the home (measured by number of shelves of books) as the most powerful indicator of school-related socioeconomic status. This is a reasonable choice, because it is a relatively direct measure of parents’ engagement with literate culture. Although the size of the association of socioeconomic background with academic achievement does vary quite a bit across countries, in every case the association is statistically significantly at the p < .01 level. In England and Scotland, for example, movement from the lowest to the highest number of book shelves in the home has been associated with more than a standard deviation difference in test performance on two of the international test data sets, or more than three times what is learned by an average student over the course of a school year (Schüetz, Ursprung, and Woessmann 2008: table 3). 3.  Some comprehensive school reform programs were evaluated by the designers themselves or those with whom they were closely associated. Such procedures typically produce inflated results compared to external evaluations. Only a few relied on randomized assignment to treatment and nontreatment groups. Most focused instead on simple pre- and posttest designs, or slightly better, comparison in pre- and posttests for matched schools, one with the reform program and one without. Occasionally, the demographic characteristics of students in the matched schools were not reported. To calculate the size of treatment effects, researchers have had to impute standard deviations when they were not reported by evaluators (see Borman et al. 2003). 4.  The majority of businesses were involved with schools at only a superficial level. Often consultants came in for a short time, the company donated equipment, and executives delivered motivational talks. Facing the daunting problems of poverty and alienation in inner-city schools, these partnerships often failed to make much difference, and many



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businesses involved in partnerships quietly broke off ties after trials of a year or two (Anyon 1997; L. Deng 1991).

coda 1.  Not everyone agrees that small schools are better for students. Toni Terling Watt notes that the critical-mass possibilities of larger high schools provide more support and identity validation for students who do not fit in with the dominant group (2003: 363).

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index

ability grouping, 257–259, 359n4 academic focus and school success, 8, 21, 144– 145, 229, 263, 265, 274, 293, 303, 334, 349 Accelerated Schools, 327, 330 accountability movement (U.S.), 116, 183, 316, 318, 320, 322, 346. See also No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (U.S.); school reform adaptive strategies of groups, 266–268 adolescent society, 137–138, 178–184; and alienation reduction, 183–184; counterschool cultures, 49, 181–183; sources of status in, 12, 15, 179–181; variations in influence of, 180–181 advanced placement (AP) courses (U.S.), 134, 144, 155, 258, 271 Afghanistan, 76–77, 91, 250 age differentiation and schooling, 16, 36, 312 Age of Enlightenment, 115–118, 345–346 Alba, Richard, 216 Alcott, Louisa May, 270, 360n1 Alexander the Great, 113 Alon, Sigal, 268 Americanization, 38, 188 Amin, Idi, 87 ancient China, schooling in, 17, 58, 112, 120 ancient Greece, schooling in, 17, 111 ancient Rome, schooling in, 112–114 Anderson, C. Arnold, 99 Andover (American private preparatory school), 236

Arab states: illiteracy rates in, 250; and schooling, 75, 82, 129 Argentina, 84, 85, 95, 100 Argentina, schooling system in, 75, 82, 129; and economic development, 100; higher education, 85; military rulers and, 84–85; school enrollment, 85; school privatization policies, 95 Arnold, Matthew, 110 Arum, Richard, 264 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 88 Asian students, study behaviors of, 247, 293, 360–361 as-Saba dynasty (Kuwait), 82 Assal, Adel, 77 assimilation, variable rates of, 242–246 at-risk students, 183, 312, 333, 339 Australia, 5, 7, 32, 62, 65, 110, 129, 141, 142 Australia, schooling system in: academic curricula, 65; educational expenditures, 5, 7; instructional time, 129; private higher education, 7; public spending for support of schooling, 5, 7; student performance, 141–142 Austria, schooling system in, 7, 57; as modeled on German system, 67, 249, 261; student performance, 143 autonomy and socialization in schools, 150, 172 Azikwe, 73



418

index

Baker, David P., 255 Bangladesh, 71, 74, 75, 249–250 Barber, Benjamin R., 345, 347 Barnard, Henry, 37 Becker, Gary S., 194 Belgium, 249, 340 Bénabou, Roland, 340 Benavot, Aaron, 131, 132, 355n3 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 73 Bennett, William J., 153 Berliner, David C., 139–140 Bernasconi, Andres, 86 Bernstein, Basil, 233, 283 Biddle, Bruce J., 139–140 bilingualism, vii, 242, 243, 313, 315 Bills, David B., 195 Bloch, Marc, 77 Blumer, Herbert, 353n2 Bologna Agreement (EU), 45, 68–69 Boston Compact, 328 Botswana, schooling system in, 79, 103, 306; limited use of testing, 306; and Western model, 79 Bound, John, 222 Bourdieu, Pierre, 198–199, 208, 234, 304–305 Bourguiba, Habib, 73 Bowles, Samuel, 16–17, 198 Bowman, Mary Jean, 99 Brain, Kevin, 341 Brazil, schooling system in: higher education, 84–85, 207; inequality in, 202, 245; and military rulers, 84–85; minorities in, 245; and opposition to World Bank, 354–355n1; primary school enrollment, 95, 104 Breen, Richard, 211–212, 358n8 Brezhnev, Leonid, 55 Brint, Steven, 166–167, 169, 171–172, 192 Bryk, Anthony S., 334, 347, 350 Burke, Kenneth, 353n2 Burkina Faso, 76, 142 business-education partnerships, 327, 334–335 Calvinism and schooling, 114 Cambodia, 71, 76, 98, 102 Cambridge University (England), 51, 52

Canada, schooling system in, vii, 4, 5, 7, 43, 65, 141, 142, 143, 147, 216–217; academic curricula, 65, 148; decentralization and, 43; educational expenditures, 4, 5, 7; ethnic mobility through schooling, 216–217; stu­ dent achievement on international tests, 141, 142, 143, 147; teacher professionalism, 288; teacher salaries, 277; and welfare state, 347 Capella, Martianus, 114 Carnegie, Andrew, 189 Carnoy, Martin, 95, 142, 145 Castro, Fidel, 82, 83 Catholic Church and schooling in Europe, 23, 118, 245, 354n2 Catholic schools, vii, 256, 261, 317, 334, 350 Central Europe, 32, 129, 152. See also specific countries Central High School (Philadelphia), 157 Central Park East schools (New York City), 336 Chad, 75–76 Charles, Maria, 252, 359n3 Charter Oath of 1872 (Japan), 56 charter schools, 256, 313, 329, 335, 337 Chaudhury, Nazmul, 95 Chávez, Hugo, 86, 87 cheating in schools, 152, 167, 168, 175, 321 Chevènement, Jean-Pierre, 52 child development philosophy, 119, 148, 275, 289, 313 Chile: book ownership in, 75; inequality in, 202 Chile, schooling system in: and economic development, 97, 100, 104; higher education, 85–86; instructional time, 129; and military rulers, 84–85; public spending on, 7; school privatization policies, 95 China: Cultural Revolution in, 207; as industrializing country, 73, 91; literacy campaign in, 83. See also China, schooling system in China, schooling system in: ancient curriculum, 17; ancient examination system, 58; and economic development, 75, 91, 96, 101; gaokoa examination, 28; gender gaps in, 250; ideal teacher, 302–303; instructional culture, 292–294; and Mao Tse-tung, 82; and market-based reforms, 102; miniban

(people’s schools), 80; rural and urban differences in, 83; teacher status, 277; time use in, 293; vocational education, 89. See also China Christian academies, 24 Christianity and survival of liberal learning, 114 Chubb, John E., 328 Cicero, 114 civics, as a school subject, 131 Clark, Joe, 317 Clark, Roger, 250 class affirmative action (Soviet Union), 55, 213 classroom life: and bureaucratic production, 285–286, 307; and craft production, 285– 286, 307; and cultural ideals for teachers, 302–304; ecological features of, 291–292; and effective teachers, 28, 29, 30, 259, 296, 298–299; and importance of consensus, 294–295; importance of order in, 294–295, 308; and instructional culture, 292–294; interaction patterns in, 294–295, 302–304; and “mixed rapport,” 294; social organization of, 292, 298–299, 300, 307; and unconscious teacher bias, 126, 232, 296; and understanding and misunderstanding, 29, 295–296 classroom order, 294–295, 308 classroom socialization, 166–176; embedded practices, 166–167, 168, 184; versus family socialization, 169–170; and moral instruction, 118, 153, 156, 166, 167, 171–175, 184; and school rules, 167–168; techniques of, 159, 161, 165–169; zones of, 167 class size, 20, 90, 256–257, 293 Clinton, George, 37 Coalition of Essential Schools (U.S.), 327, 330 cognitive ability, 6, 137, 282, 357–358n5; deter­ minants of, 227–228, 355–356n4, 358n6; increasing equality in, 222; and school success, 203–205, 206 cognitive styles, 283–284 Cohen, David K., 121, 160 Cold War, 84, 87, 117, 121, 127, 160, 356–357n3 Coleman, James S., 179–180, 255, 317 Coleman Report (U.S.), 255 College and Career Academies (U.S.), 334–335

index

419

college wage premium, 195 Collins, Randall, 17–19, 196, 353n2 Colombia, schooling system in: rural and urban differences in, 76; school privatization policies, 95; and war, 77 Comer, James P., 327, 333 common core standards (U.S.), 361n1 common school movement (U.S.), 37, 314, 336 communal pattern of socialization in schools, 153–155, 184 communal organization of schools, 327, 333, 334 community colleges (U.S.), 45, 47, 48, 50, 67, 222–223, 261, 263–264, 313, 360n7. See also postsecondary education, definition of; short-cycle higher education comparative analysis: advantages of, vii, ix, 19–20; and study of post–World War II change, 65–66, 68 compartmentalization and socialization messages, 181–182 compensatory education, 325–326. See also Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (U.S.) comprehensive school reform (CSR) (U.S.), 329–338, 361n3 compulsory attendance laws, 6, 16, 18, 22, 32– 33, 36–37, 38, 353–354n1 computers in classrooms, 310–311 Conant, James B., 197, 198 conformity, school messages about, 151–154; behavioral, 151–152; cultural, 152; moral, 154 Connolly, Cyril, 303 Connor, Walter B., 238 consumerism and schooling, 159–162 Contreras, Mary F., 166, 169, 171–172 Cookson, Peter W., Jr., 165, 236 core states in dependency theory, 97 creaming-off phenomenon, 336 credentialism, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197, 200, 224 credential society, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197, 200, 224; beneficiaries of, 191, 208, 237; critics of, 195–196; entrepreneurial economy as alternative to, 189, 190, 215; and meritocracy, 196–199; screening and signaling in, 193, 195; and social reproduction, 196–199



420

index

Cuba, schooling system in: literacy campaign, 83; and mass-mobilizing leaders, 82, 83; student achievement levels, 93, 145 Cuban, Larry, 287, 314, 326 Cubberley, Ellwood P., 159, 312 cultural pluralism, 124–127, 148, 245–246. See also multicultural curricula Cultural Revolution (China), 83, 207 cultural transmission through schooling: importance of, 107–110; study of, 107 curricular change, history of, 110–111, 115–137 curricular tracks, 23, 59, 61, 69, 133–137, 148– 149, 260, 264–265, 268, 269; academic, 69, 133–135, 148–149, classical, 134; humani­ ties, 134; mathematics/science, 134; prepara­tory, 260, 268; vocational, 56, 59, 61, 63, 121, 135–137, 264–265, 269, 311, 313. See also cur­ riculum; vocational education and training (VET) curriculum, 8–9, 45, 79, 106, 107, 108–110, 111–115, 119–121, 131–133, 134, 136, 355n1; basic skills, 117; classical, 134; comprehensive, 45, 120, 133; correspondence theories of, 155; electives, 131, 132, 133, 136; hidden, 167, 168–169; life-adjustment, 117, 121; logic of, 8–9; modern, 117, 120; modular, 89; multicultural, 123–128; sources of, 111–115; standardized organization of, 114. See also curricular tracks Czech Republic, schooling system in: educational expenditures, 5, 7; minorities and, 244; student achievement on international tests, 144; teacher salaries, 277–278 dame schools (colonial U.S.), 37 Darling-Hammond, Linda, 275 Darwin, Charles, 124, 228 debt relief and economic progress in developing world, 94 de Gaulle, Charles, 52 delinquency and schools, 15, 182 democratic uplift premise in educational development, 35, 36, 38–39, 40, 54, 75 Deng Xiapoing, 102 Denmark, schooling system in: educational expenditures, 5, 7; educational mobility,

62; history of mass schooling, 35, 37, 115; preschool, 43; teacher salaries, 278 dependency theory, 96, 97–98; flaws in, 98; and world systems theory, 97 Desai, Uday, 74–75 de-tracking, 257–258, 265 developing countries, 71, 72, 75, 91–92; authoritarian leaders in, 80, 84–85; book ownership in, 75; different trajectories of, 91–92; educational expenditures in, 4, 84; and Human Development Index, 91–92; and indebtedness, 90; mass-mobilizing leaders in, 80, 82, 104; and modernization, 72; and physical insecurity, 72, 74, 76–77; and pov­ erty, 76, 94; and student performance on international tests, 75, 99, 100, 146; teachers in, 279, 306; and traditionalism, 72, 74, 75–76; and women, 75. See also developing countries, schooling systems in; low-income countries, state of schooling in developing countries, schooling systems in: administrative organization, 78–79; and colonial legacy, 72–73; compulsory attendance, 79, 89; curriculum, 129–131; dropout rates, 76, 93; enrollments, 94; formal testing, 306; limited learning, 93, 94–95; privatization, 95–96; school conditions, 74; school day length, 79, 89; school year length, 79; teaching styles, 306; and World Bank, 89–91 developmental psychology, 116, 119, 297, 312, 313. See also child development philosophy Dewey, John, 297, 314, 345 Direct Instruction program (U.S.), 332 Douglas Commission (U.S.), 355n2 Dreeben, Robert, 298–299 dropouts, 48, 49, 253, 281, 335, 348, 356n2 dual system (Germany), 34, 44, 46–47, 60–61, 66–67, 68, 122, 137, 183, 264 DuBois, W. E. B., 240 Durkheim, Émile, 150, 172 early childhood education, 338–340. See also preschool East Asian societies: adolescents and work in, 281–282; class size in, 20, 293–294; consum­ erist culture in, 354n6; demanding curric­­

ular materials in, 135, 149; economic devel­ opment and schooling in, 102–104; ideal teacher in, 302–303; infrequency of ability grouping in, 258; instructional cultures in, 292–294, 303, 307; Japanese influence on schooling systems, 67; moral instruction in, 172–173; student academic engagement in, 280; and student achievement on international tests, 142, 147. See also specific countries École Normale Supérieure (France), 164 economic development, role of schooling in, 96–104, 105; dependency theories, 97–98; human capital theories, 98–99; state-led development theories, 100–104 Ecuador, absence rate of teachers in, 95 Edmonds, Ron, 317, 318 education: definition of, 1; and philosophy, 1–2; versus schooling 1 educational advantages and social class, 15–17, 198–199, 210–214, 231–240 educational credentials, as reliability signals, 193, 195; social stratification and, 191–196. See also credentialism; credential society educational exchange, 182, 185 educational expansion and opportunity consciousness, 63–64, 69, 187–191, 224 educational ideals: broadening, 112, 113, 117; conflicting, 115–117; creative, 161, 162; democratic, 120, 197, 312; generalist, 304; specialist, 115–116, 304; typology of, 115; utilitarian, 116, 120, 123, 148 educational inequalities, main factors affecting, 230 educational life expectancy, 43 educational priority zones, 313, 338, 340–341 educational reform motives: efficiency, 311– 313; enhancement, 313–314; equity, 312– 313; excellence, 311–312 effective pedagogy, basic rules of, 296–297 Egypt, schooling system in, 80 Eliot, George, 174 elite preparation premise in European educational development, 35–36, 37–38 elite schools, socialization in, 154, 162–163, 165–166 Elmore, Richard F., 336

index

4 21

Engelmann, Siegfried, 332 England, schooling system in, 49–52; A-level examinations, 60; college graduation rate, 51; educational reform, 50–52; elite university graduates versus nonelite, 51–52, 304; further education (FE) colleges, 50, 66, 136, 216; higher education, 51–52; history of mass schooling, 36, 41; ideal teacher in elite schools, 303–304; immigrants and schooling, 67, 216; and intergenerational mobility, 62, 212; polytechnics, 51, 68; post–World War II change in, 49–52; preschool, 338; public schools, 354n2; reform of education, 41; and social class advantages, 49, 67, 361n2; teacher salaries, 278; teachers in disadvantaged schools, 341; upper secondary schools, 49, 51, 59; and vocational qualifications, 50–51; youth credits, 66 entrepreneurial economy, as alternative to credential economy, 188–190, 357n2 Escalante, Jaime, 271 Ethiopia, 77, 84 ethnic inequalities and opportunities in schooling, 214–219, 232, 240–248 Eton College (English public school), 173, 232 European Union (EU), 43, 45, 67, 68, 113, 251, 322 “exam hell” (East Asia), 20, 58–59 examination systems: advanced placement tests (U.S.), 133–134, 155, 258, 271; alteration of pass rates, 41, 49, 51, 122; in England, 41; external exit examinations, 331; in France, 52–53; in Germany, 44; international, 99, 142–145; in Japan, 58–59; National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 138, 139, 141, 247; and No Child Left Behind Act, 247–248, 319, 320; SAT (U.S.), 139–140; in Scotland, 60; as social selection mechanism, 204, 222, 225, 239, 244, 245, 250, 255, 260. See also specific countries export-oriented development, 103 family, influences on educational attainment of: class outlooks toward school, 234–235; community and family stability, 239–240, 298; in East Asian countries, 57, 102, 282;



422

index

family, influences on educational attainment of (continued) economic standing, 162–163, 199, 209, 224–226, 298–299; language barriers, 198; in least developed countries, 75–76, 93, 96; social status, 199, 203–204, 206, 207–209, 210, 224–226; subordinate groups, 229 Farrar, Eleanor, 160 Farrell, Edwin, 77 Ferry, Jules, 38 fighting and school performance, 145 Finland, schooling system in: student achievement on international tests, 142, 143, 147; teacher preparation, 276; teacher salaries, 277–278 Finn, Chester E., Jr., 138 Flynn, James, 137, 355–356n4 Foner, Nancy, 216 France, schooling system in, 49, 52–54, 59; academic lycées, 52–53; baccalauréat examination, 52–53; cours complémentaires, 52; educational expenditures, 5, 7; educational reform, 49, 52–53; elite university graduates versus nonelite, 265; equity in spending, 52; grandes écoles, 53–54, 164, 265, 304; ideal teacher in elite schools, 303–305; immigrants in, 66, 182, 217; and intergenerational mobility, 62, 212; links to elite positions, 53–54, 63; lycées professionnels, 52, 122; mass schooling, 38; national curricula, 26, 52, 134–135; post–World War II change in, 52; public school enrollment, 7; required courses in upper secondary schools, 135; slow growth of demand for sec­ondary schooling, 38; and social reproduc­ tion theory, 198–199, 207; teacher salaries, 277–278; teacher social standing, 277; vo­cational enrollments, 62, 67, 69, 137 Frank, David John, 122, 123 Frederick II (Prussia), 115 Frederick IV (Denmark), 36 Friere, Paolo, 354–355n1 Fuller, Bruce, 336 Gabler, Jay, 122, 123 Gamoran, Adam, 298 Gandhi, Mahatma (Mohandas K.), 82

Gardner, David, 317 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 124, 126, 128 gender inequality, 248–254; adaptive strategies of women, 252–253; declining as factor in educational attainment, 199, 231–232, 251; in developing world, 249–250; discrimination in wages, 253; and human capital, 253–254; patriarchy, 248–250; and school achievement, 231, 251, 281; in school classrooms, 177, 252–253; on school playgrounds, 170, 177–178; and science and mathematics fields, 252–253; social correlates of, 250–251; and work world, 251–253 gender-progressive societies, 249–250 General National Vocational Qualifications (England), 50–51 General Social Survey (GSS), 204 Germany, schooling system in, 34, 44–45, 46–47, 59, 60; Abitur examination, 44–45; centers of excellence, 45; decentralized administration of, 275; dual system of apprenticeship training, 46–47, 60–61, 66, 68, 122; educational expenditures, 5, 7; Fachhochschulen, 45, 50, 68; Gesamtschule, 44, 45; Gymnasium, 44, 164; Hauptschule, 44, 216; higher education, 45, 354n5; and intergenerational mobility, 61–62, 212; minorities and, 44, 242, 244; origins of research universities, 113; public school enrollment, 7; Realschule, 44, 45; teacher salaries, 277–278; teacher social standing, 278; teacher training, 275, 276; tracking in, 44–45; transition to higher levels of education, 211; university versus nonuniversity educated, 63 Ghana, schooling system in, 80, 93, 95 Gibson, Margaret A., 243 Gintis, Herbert, 16–17, 198 Glazer, Nathan, 125 Goffman, Erving, 165, 353n2 Goh Chok Tong, 162 Goodlad, John I., 9–10 Graham, Patricia A., 350 Greece, schooling system in, 142, 143, 278, 353–354n1; in ancient times, 17, 111 Greenfield, Susan, 282 Groton (American private preparatory school), 236

Guinea, 72, 76 Guizot, François, 52 habitus, social class, and social class fractions, 234–237 Hacker, Andrew, 284 Haiti, 74, 84, 93 Hall, G. Stanley, 116, 119, 313 Halsey, A. H., 359–360n6 Hamilton, David, 114 Hammertown boys study, 182–183 Han dynasty (China), 112 Hanushek, Eric A., 95, 99, 146, 194, 255, 306, 323, 324 Harbison, Frederick, 83–84, 98 Harnqvist, Kjell, 262 Hawthorne effect, 330 Head Start, 325–326 Heath, Anthony F., 359–360n6 Hellenism, 113–114 Herrnstein, Richard, 221–222 Heyneman, Stephen P., 207, 255 high-performing Asian economies (HPAEs), 100–103 Hilliard, Asa G., 360n3 Hoggart, Richard, 234 Holland, Peter, 334 Holt, John, 9, 10 Homer, 110, 111, 165 home schooling, 24 Hong Kong, schooling system in, 21, 58–59, 102, 143, 172, 303; and economic development, 32, 92, 101–102; examination system, 58–59; moral instruction, 172; student achievement on international tests, 21, 143; teaching and learning, 303, universal primary schooling, 102 Hornberger, Nancy H., 76, 155–156 Hout, Michael, 220 Huberman, Michael, 300 human capital, 96–99, 124, 204, 205, 224 Human Development Index (HDI), 91 humanism, 110, 120 Hungary, schooling system in, 5, 7, 129, 206–207, 258, ability grouping, 258; educational expenditures, 5, 7; encouragement of lower-income students, 206–207;

index

423

public school enrollment, 7; in Soviet Bloc, 213; teacher salaries, 278 Husén, Torsten, 262–263 immigration, 61, 116, 216, 230, 241, 246, 247 India, schooling system in, 74–75, 93, 94, 95, 96, 159, 207; actual school time, 94; affirmative action policies of, vii, 217–218; average years of education, 96; focus on higher edu­ cation, 96; limited learning, 94; and massmobilizing leaders, 82; overeducation in, 80, 96; privatization, 96, 207; rural poverty and, 74–75, 159; school violence, 159, teacher absenteeism, 95; teacher salaries, 341; teaching practices, 93, 95 Indonesia, 219, 250 Indonesia, schooling system in: decentraliza­ tion of schools, 91; and economic develop­ ment, 76, 101, 104; primary school enroll­ ments, 102; teacher absences, 95; teacher salaries, 278 industrialized world, 32; post–World War II change in schooling, 39–42; school enrollments in, 6; schooling improvements through­ out, 226; variations of school structure in, 34–35, 43–58. See also specific countries Inkeles, Alex, 78, 79 innovation, country rankings in, 224 instructional cultures, 292–294 instructional technologies, 310–311, 315 intelligence: and college completion, 204–205, 208–209; as genetically determined versus socially conditioned, 358n1; high education credentials versus high intelligence, 224; historical increase in, 137, 355–356n4; and immigrants, 245, 246; and social class, 234, 358n6; and speech, 233; and teacher effectiveness, 275; and testing, 228 Iran, 82, 87, 91 Ireland, schooling system in, 353–354n1; ability grouping, 258; educational mobility, 62, 211–212; teacher salaries, 278 Islam: and multiculturalism, 128, 217; and schooling, 82, 87, 130–131; and women’s educational achievement, 250 Israel, schooling system in: educational expenditures, 6, 7; minorities in, 20, 241,



424

index

Israel, schooling system in (continued) 244–245; student achievement on international tests, 142; student engagement, 280; students’ work outside school, 281–282; teacher salaries, 278, 341; teaching styles, 173 Italy, schooling system in: educational expenditures, 4, 5; and intergenerational mobility, 62; performance of, 57, 142, 353–354n1; preschool, 21; public spending on education, 5, 7; student after-class work hours, 282; teacher salaries, 278; transition rates to higher levels of schooling, 211–212; vocational enrollments, 65; and women’s achievement, 252 Ivy League (U.S.), 39, 54, 193, 265 Jackson, Philip W., 168, 273 Jacobsen, Lenore, 301 Japan, schooling system in, 24, 34–35, 56–58, 59, 67; academic streams, 65, 69, 117; and adolescent society, 180, 354n6; and bullying, vii; centralized administration and educational change, 40–41, 43, 254; class size, 293–294; class time organization, 293–294; collectivity orientation, 168, 173, collegial culture of teaching, 287, 291; consequences of examination system, 57–58, 63; educational expenditures, 7; elite universities, 56, 265; elite university graduates versus nonelite, 63, 265; and family support for achievement, 57, 63; gender inequality in, 57, 67, 249, 254; grouping patterns, 293–294; higher education graduation rate, 56; higher education links to elite positions, 61, 190; ideal teacher, 303–304; industrialization and, 35, 41; influence of, in region, 67; instructional culture, 292–294; and intergenerational mobility, 62; links to employers, 56, 264; and “lost decade,” 100, 146; and Meiji Restoration, 41; minorities in, 244; national curricula, 134–135; opportunity to learn, 140; and peer groups, 57, 162, 168, 173, 180, 354n6; privatization, 6, 287, 324, 354n2; public school enrollment, 7; socialization messages in, 57; social reproduction in, 213; student achievement on international

tests, 57, 140, 142–143; teacher salaries, 277, 278; teacher social standing, 277; teacher training, 275; teaching methods, 29, 278, 279, 292–294; time use in, 153–154; upper secondary level, 59; vocational streams, 56–57, 136, 264 Japanese economy, 100, 101, 102, 127, 139 Jefferson, Thomas, 118 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 73 Johnson, Lyndon B., 325–326 Jonsson, Jan O., 214 juku (Japan), 35 Kamens, David, 119 Kazin, Alfred, 245 Keita, Modibo, 73 Kennedy, Paul, 91 Kenya, schooling system in: bribe-taking by school authorities, 96; harambee schools, 80, 81–82; limited learning in rural schools, 94; precolonial, 73; primary school enrollment, 104; real expenditures per pupil, 102; school resources, 95; teacher bonuses, 292 Kenyatta, Jomo, 81, 82 Kevles, Daniel J., 71 Khan, Shamus, 237 Khrushchev, Nikita, 55 Kliebard, Herbert M., 355n1 Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) academies (U.S.), 256, 332–333 Kramarz, Francis, 340 Kuwait: dynastic family in, 82; and gender equality in education, 250; high human development in, 92 Kyoto University (Japan), 56 Labaree, David F., 267 Lancaster, Joseph, 156 Lancasterian schools, 156–157 Lang, Eugene, 327–328, 334, 335 Laos, 102 Lareau, Annette, 233 Latin American societies: and Córdoba movement, 85–86; and diversification of development trajectories, 75, 91, 100; and dynastic families, 82–83; gender progressivity in,

249–250; income inequality in, 101, 202; instructional time in, 129, 131; military rule in, 83–84, 87; racial inequality in, 245; and student achievement on international tests, 145; voucher policies in, 304. See also specific countries Lave, Jean, 141 leading crowds and socialization, 12, 179–180, 181 learned professions, as influence on schooling, 23, 112, 114, 120 learning styles theories, 280, 282–284; analyt­ ical style, 283–284; cognitive processing theories, 282; criticism of theories, 282; cul­ tural theories, 282; relational style, 283–284 Lebanon, 77, 93, 158 Lee, Jennifer, 247 Lee, Valerie E., 334 Leftwich, Adrian, 103 Lerner, Daniel, 73 Levin, Henry, 327, 330 Levine, Arthur, 274 Levine, David I., 211 Lewis, Catherine, 173 liberal education, 111. 112–114, 115, 117 Libya, 76, 87 Lieberman, Ann, 13 Lieberson, Stanley, 242 Lincoln, Abraham, 172, 188 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 200 literacy campaigns, 83, 104 literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa, 74 Locke, John, 345 Lockheed, Marlaine, 279 London School of Economics (England), 73 Lortie, Daniel, 288–291 Los Angeles Unified School District, 311 Lovenheim, Michael, 222 low-income countries, state of schooling in, 102, 144. See also developing countries Loxley, William A., 207, 255 MacLeod, Jay, 183 macro-historical analysis of schooling, 22–24, 353n1 (chap. 1) magnet schools, 31, 313, 329, 336–337

index

425

Malawi, actual school time in, 93 Malaysia, 101, 103; affirmative action policies of, 217–219 Mali, human development progress of, 91; literacy rates, 76 Mann, Horace, 37, 38, 150, 345 Mann, Michael, 353n2 Mare, Robert, 211 mass-mobilizing leaders in developing world, 80, 83, 84, 87 mathematics: and accountability legislation, 318, 321; and economic development, 277, 347; and gender, 216; international test performance in, 139–142, 143, 145, 147, 149, 216, 251–252, 257, 277, 301, 303; as school subject, 110, 112, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134; teaching of, 301, 303 Matthews, Michael T., 166, 169, 171–172 McGuffey Readers, 158 Mehta, Jal, 275 Meier, Deborah, 336, 347, 348 meritocracy: in elite preparatory schools, 237; empirical conclusions on, 210, 211, 227, 267; theories of, 197–198, 202, 221, 222 Merton, Robert K., 353n2 meso-institutional analysis of schooling, 22, 24–27 Mexico, schooling system in: and Córdoba movement, 85; dropout rates, 353–354n1; educational expenditures, 5, 7; real expenditures per pupil, 102, 353–354n1; rural education, 76; teacher salaries, 277; violence and, 76–77 Meyer, John W., 15, 79, 131, 148, 353n2, 355n3 Mibut, Andrea, 128 micro-interactional analysis of schooling, 22, 27–29 military bases, schools on, 256 military rule and schooling, 83, 84, 104 Miller, Lynne, 13 Milwaukee public-private school choice experiments, 234, 337–338 Mincer, Jacob, 194 minorities: caste-like, 243–245; model, 247; sources of variation in mobility of, 246–248



426

index

mobility, measurement of, 199–202, 357n3 modernization, 66, 72, 80, 84, 98 Moe, Terry M., 328 Mohammed V (Morocco), 73 moral instruction in schools, 118, 130–131, 132, 153, 156, 158, 166, 167, 171–175; crossnational variations in, 173, 174; limited success of, 175–176; and moral complexity, 174; organizational biases and, 175–176, 185; religious, 130–131; teachers as exemplars, 174–175 Morrill Act (U.S.), 39 motivation in schools: centrality of, 231, 238; and charter schools, 329; community colleges and, 360n7; community influence on, 349; through emergent community life, 13; management of, 10–11, 256; through multiple status hierarchies, 12; parental influence on, 57, 225, 231–232, 282, 349; through rituals, 11–12; through standardized membership categories, 12–13; of teachers, 291; through time and space organization, 11; and tracking, 258–259, 260–261, 262, 264, 265, 268, 269 Mozambique, 77, 83 multicultural curricula, 117, 123–128, 248, 314; cultural expansion variant of, 125–126; culturally relativistic variant of, 126; curricular change and, 125; debate about, 123–124; ethnocentric variant of, 126; forces encouraging, 127–128; forces opposed to, 127; origins in social movements, 16, 18 multiple intelligences, theory of, 330 Murray, Charles, 221, 222 Myanmar, 71, 102 Napoleon, 52, 67, 118, 164 Nasser, Gamal, 73, 82 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (U.S.), 138–141 National Commission on Excellence in Education (U.S.), 300, 317 National Education Association (U.S.): Committee of Ten report, 355n2; “cardinal principles” of, 355n2

National Longitudinal Study of Youth (U.S.), 209 National University of Cordoba, 85 nation building: Protestant-entrepreneurial, 5, 156, 158; as purpose of schooling, vii–viii, 6, 81, 191 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 73 Neoliberalism, 85–86 Nepal, teaching in, 279, 306 Netherlands, innovation in, 224 Netherlands, schooling system in, 261; and financing, 6, 354n2; increasing equality in educational attainment, 211, 212, 213; and intergenerational mobility, 62; language instruction, 21; private schools, 354n2; religious divisions and, 6; student achievement on international tests, 142; teacher salaries, 278 New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), 329–330 New Zealand, schooling system in, 65; expenditures on, 4; income gaps by schooling level, 187; minorities in, 219, 244; reading instruction, 21; teacher salaries, 277, 278 Nicaragua, literacy campaign in, 83 Niger: book ownership in, 75; literacy in, 76; secondary enrollment rates in, 93 Nigeria, limited use of testing in, 306 Nkrumah, Kwame, 73 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (U.S.), 318–321; criticisms of, 319–321; successes of, 319 Nyerere, Julius, 73 Oakes, Jeannie, 260, 264 Occupational Change in a Generation (OCG I) Survey, 209 occupational mobility, 200–201, 202, 207–208 opportunity consciousness, 63–64, 224, 258 opportunity to learn, 139 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 61, 251 Orwell, George, 270–271 Oxford University (England), 49, 51, 52, 286– 287

Pakistan, economic progress in, 91 Pakistan, schooling system in: gender inequalities in, 249–250; limited learning, 94; real expenditures per pupil, 102 Paraguay, child labor in, 76 Park Chung-hee, 103 Parsons, Talcott, 14, 177 patriarchy, 249 pedagogical theory, traditional versus progressive, 297–300 peer authority: in English public schools, 173; influence of, on adolescent students, 178– 181; in Japanese schools, 173 periphery states in dependency theory, 97 Perry Preschool Study, 339 Persell, Caroline H., 236–237 Peru, 84 Peru, schooling system in: actual school time, 93; limited learning, 94–95; primary school enrollment, 104; and socialization patterns in rural areas, 155–156 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 116, 156, 173 Pfau, Richard F., 306 Philadelphia High School Academies, 335 Philippines, schooling system in: enrollment rates, 104; limited use of testing, 306 philosophy of education, 1–2 playground, school: 8, 25, 151, 176–178; and informal social life, 176–178; socialization messages of, 176–178; structural features of, compared to classrooms, 176 Poland, schooling system in: instructional time, 129; and intergenerational mobility, 62, 212; and mobility of working-class students, 206–207; teacher salaries, 278 Polikoff, Morgan, 302 Porter, Andrew, 302 Portugal, schooling system in: educational priority zones, 340; student achievement on international tests, 142–143; teacher salaries, 278 Postman, Neil, 355–356n4 postsecondary education, definition of, 44 Powell, Arthur G., 160 preparatory schools in New England, 163, 236

index

427

preschool, 33, 43, 338–340, 343 private schools, 47, 89, 95–96, 122, 140, 162– 163, 165, 207, 261, 265, 268, 272, 317, 324; Catholic, 256, 317, 334, 361; elite, 236–237; in Japan, 354n2; and voucher programs, 328, 335–336 privatization, 95–96, 328 professional learning communities (PLCs), 291 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 141, 277, 323, 341 Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), 141 progressive education, 38, 314 Progressive Era (U.S.), 16, 121, 159, 312 progressive reform, 309 Prost, Corrine, 340 Protestant Reformation and schooling, 23, 114 Prussia, mass primary schooling in, 36, 37, 118 race/ethnicity and schooling, 199, 240–241; code switching, 233; comparative studies of, 216–217; cultures of respectability and reputation, 243, 251; highly subordinated minorities, 20, 232, 243–244, 268; interaction in classroom, 171, 296; majority group, 241; in Malaysia, 217–219; minority group, 241; and mobility opportunities, 214–219; and nondominant cultural capital, 178; standardized test scores and, 247–248; and tracking, 260, 261; and variation in assimilation of groups, 242, 246–248 racism, 72–73, 359n2 Ravitch, Diane, 138, 328 redbrick universities (England), 52 Reid, Ivan, 341 Rice, Joseph M., 157, 160 Ridge, John M., 359–360n6 Rist, Ray C., 170, 296 Rivera, Lauren, 193 Rodriguez, Richard, 234–235, 270, 360n1 Rohlen, Thomas P., 58 Rosenthal, Robert, 301 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71, 353n1 Rowan, Brian, 15



428

index

rudimentary learning, 36, 111, 118, 119, 148, 186 Russell Group (UK), 51–52 Russian Federation: intergenerational mobility in, 62; preschool expenditures in, 339; and student achievement on international tests, 143 Sahlberg, Pasi, 276 Saint Mark’s (American private preparatory school), 236 Saint Paul’s (American private preparatory school), 236 Saudi Arabia, 82, 92 Scandinavian societies, schooling systems in: change in examination pass rates, 41; curriculum, 134; dual system, 47; educational expenditures, 4; equality of educational opportunity, 202, 213–214, 224–225, 347; infrequency of ability grouping, 258; preference for public provision, 7; preschool, 339; socialization patterns in, 152; vocational schools, 41. See also specific countries Schneeweis, Nicole, 339 school-based management, 322, 330 school choice programs, 328, 329, 336, 337–338. See also charter schools; privatization; vouchers, educational school decentralization policies in developing world, 68, 91, 322–323 school enrollments: developing societies and, 91–93; industrialized societies and, 39–42 schooling: and economic development, 33, 65, 79, 89, 96–104, 105; versus education, 1; expenditures for, 4–7; future possibilities of, 344–350; and inequalities, 227–269; and loyalty to the state, 5, 36; macro-level purposes of, vii, 22, 25, 31; rising demand for, 39–42; societal importance of, 3–7; sociological theories of, 13–19; structural variation of, in industrialized world, 45–60; thinking sociologically about, 7–13; underside of, 9–10; Western model of, 78, 79, 113. See also schools; social class and schooling; social mobility and schooling schooling, sociological analysis of: macrohistorical, 22–24, 353n2; meso-institutional,

22, 24–27, 353n2; micro-interactional, 22, 27–29, 353n2. See also schooling: sociological theories of schooling systems: in developing world, 71– 105; in industrialized world, 32–70. See also specific countries school knowledge: as embodied in primary school curricula, 79, 116, 118, 119, 129–132; as embodied in secondary school curricula, 117, 119, 120, 121, 132–137; importance of, 107–110; modern global structures of, 128–137; sources of change in, 115–123; success of transmission of, 141–145. See also curriculum school organization: centralized administration, 19, 323; decentralized administration, 19, 43, 68, 91, 323; logic of, 8–9; and management of motivation, 10, 11, 256; and tracking structures, 230, 257–265; underside of, 9–10; Western model of, 78, 79, 113 school playgrounds, as socializing environments, 176–178 school reform, 309–343; community involvement–based, 327–328, 335–337; cyclical theories of, 314–315, 316; efficiency-based, 311, 312, 313, 342, 345; enhancement-based, 313, 314, 342, 345; equity-based, 323–341, 342, 345; excellence-based, 316–324, 345; and organizational restructuring, 328–329; theories of, 314–316; typology of, 311–314. See also accountability movement (U.S.); comprehensive school reform (CSR) (U.S.) schools: and adolescent society, 137, 138, 178–184; as alternatives to national church, 5; and classroom boundaries, 8–9; and cultural transmission, 106–149; in developing world, 71–105; effective, 317, 318, 346; in industrialized world, 32–70; mass terminal institutions, 120; mass transfer institutions, 121; numbers of people working in, 4; organizational characteristics of, 8–13; as performance-based bureaucracies, 8–9, 161; public expenditures for, 4–7; resources of, 254–256, 354n3; rules of, 167–169; size of, 347; and socialization, 150–185. See also schooling

Schugurensky, Daniel, 86 science: international test results in, 21, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 149; as school subject, 34, 118–119, 134, 135 scientific management and schools, 159 scripted learning, 273, 321 secondary school curriculum, 117, 121, 133–137, 355n2; academic streams, 133–135; vocational streams, 135–137. See also schooling self-discipline: Durkheim on, 151–152; and socialization in schools, 43, 106, 159; and success in schools, 205, 347 self-fulfilling prophecy and teacher expectations, 264, 301 Selznick, Philip, 353n2 semiperiphery states in dependency theory, 97, 98 Seneca, 114 Serrano v. Priest, 354n3 Shakespeare, William, 110, 165, 194 Shavit, Yossi, 264 Shepard, Samuel, 333 Shils, Edward A., 75 shopping mall high schools, 161, 169 short-cycle higher education, 53, 59. See also community colleges (U.S.) Sikkink, David, 128 Singapore, schooling system in: and economic development, 101; moral instruction, 172; policy to increase creativity in, 163, 314; student achievement on international tests, 21, 143; teacher professionalism, 287 Sizer, Theodore R., 327, 330 Slavin, Robert E., 284, 327, 331–332 Slovak Republic: intergenerational mobility in, 62; teacher salaries in, 278 Slovenia: and student achievement on international tests, 143, teacher salaries in, 278 social class and schooling, 203–205, 211–214, 231–240; class outlook differences, 234–237; educational advantages of class, 203–205, 211–214; and elite schools, 179–180, 236–237; habitus, 234–237; restricted and elaborated speech codes, 233–234; worldwide influence of class on educational attainment, 238

index

429

social inequality and schools: family structure and, 204–205, 239–240; gender and, 233, 248–254; race/ethnicity and, 233, 240–248; social class and, 232–240 socialization: as behavioral conformity, 151– 153; and citizenship, 172; in classrooms, 166– 176; as cultural conformity, 152–153; dimensions of, 167; elite schools and, 179–180, 236–237; and hidden curriculum, 167, 168– 169; and moral instruction, 171–175; outside classrooms, 176–178; and respect for diver­ sity, 172; and school rules, 167–169; sources of peer popularity, 12, 181; and student selfesteem, 172, 184–185. See also socialization environments socialization environments: bureau-corporate/ mass-consumption pattern, 153–154, 155, 159–162; elite pattern, 179–180, 236–237; families compared to schools, 170; industrial pattern, 156–159; school playgrounds, 176–178; village/communal pattern, 153, 154, 155, 156, 166, 184. See also socialization social mobility and schooling, 186–226 social power theories of schooling, 15–19 social reproduction theories, 198–199 social selection: as purpose of schooling, 33, 107; and significance of schooling, 33; success in identifying top students, 18, 196–197, 204, 209, 222, 228–229, 230, 358n6 socioeconomic status (SES), 231–234, 361n2 Somalia, 76, 77 Sorbonne (France), 73 Sorokin, Pitirim, 33 South Korea: and authoritarian governments, 84, 87, 103; and economic development, 92, 101 South Korea, schooling system in: academic curricula, 65; early achievement of universal primary schooling, 102; and economic development, 92, 101; educational expenditures, 4, 5, 7; incentives to teach in low-income communities, 341; and intergenerational mobility, 62; private household expenditures on, 6, 7, 287, 324; student achievement on international tests, 21, 142, 143, 341; teacher salaries, 277, 278; teacher status, 276–277; teaching styles, 273



430

index

Soviet Union (former), schooling system in, 54–55; class advantages in educational attainment, 213, 238; and class affirmative action eras, 54–55; educational credentials, 55; and mass mobilization, 35; moral instruction, 55, 173; and party membership, 213; tracking in, 55; treatment of minorities in, 359n2 Spain, schooling system in: Catholic schools, 354n2; and intergenerational mobility, 62; public expenditures on schooling, 5, 7, 353–354n1; student achievement on international tests, 143; student out-of-class work hours, 281–282; teacher salaries, 278 speech codes, restricted and elaborated, 233– 234 Sputnik, 160, 314 Stalin, Joseph, 55 state-led development theories, 96, 97, 100–104 status-attainment research, 202–209. See also social selection status cues, 296 St. Cyprian’s (English public school), 270–271 Stedman, Lawrence, 140 Stevenson, Harold W., 292, 293, 303, 360– 361n4 Stigler, Joseph W., 292, 293, 303, 360–361n4 Stinchcombe, Arthur, 285 Strayer, George D., 159, 312 structural-functional theories of schooling, 14–15 students: academic performance of, 57–58, 141–144, 228, 256–257, 319–320, 337; American assessments of learning, 247–248, 319–320, 337; disengaged, 280–282; employ­ ment during adolescence, 281–282; engaged, 280, 281–282, 300; extracurricular activities of, 12, 34, 35, 160, 165, 286–287, 312; and international assessments of learning, 141– 144, 256–257; and management of motivation, 10–13; nonintellectual interests of, 137– 138; and problem behaviors, 182, 183–184; status structure among, 179, 180, 181, 237, 238 study gangs, 247 sub-Saharan Africa: AIDS epidemic and schools in, 77, 279; continuing social and

economic problems in, 73–74, 75; and debt relief, 94; and gender inequality, 250; and literacy, 74; primary school completion in, 93; teacher qualifications in, 279; and World Bank, 94. See also specific countries Success for All program (U.S.), 331–332 Sudan, 76, 77, 241 Sukarno, 73 summer learning, 229, 298 Sun Yat-sen, 73 Svensson, Nils-Eric, 263 Sweden, schooling system in: and adolescent society, 180; centralized administration, 26–27, 43, 254; educational equity by social class, 201, 211, 212; expenditures on, 5, 7; higher education, 63; income inequality in, 187; intergenerational mobility and, 62, 213–214; and post–World War II change, 38, 262–263; reform of, 38, 262–263; teacher salaries, 278; teacher training, 276; vocational streams, 48, 136; vouchers, 236 Switzerland, schooling system in: early branching, 263; and gender, 249; higher education, 200; mathematics teaching, 21; students and out-of-class paid employment, 281–282; teacher salaries, 277, 278 systems logic and structural change in schooling, 64 Taiwan, 101, 102; and student achievement on international tests, 21, 140, 143 Tang dynasty (China), 58 Tanzania, schooling system in, 76, 83 teachers: attitudes and beliefs of, 288–291; and collegial culture, 291, 302–303; in developing world, 279; effective, 296–300; expectations of, for students, 300–301; as moral exemplars, 67, 174–175; numbers of, in United States, 4; nurturing behaviors of, 176, 273, 299; people orientations of, 272–273; reforms that challenge authority of, 342; salaries of, 277–278; social circumstances of, 276–279; as socializing agents, 166–172, 173–175; training of, 274–276. See also specific countries; teaching teaching: in bureaucratic setting, 285–287; classroom discussions, 295, 297, 298, 299;

encouragement of students, 176, 273, 299; historical changes in, 287–288; interruptions and, 289; and isolation from colleagues, 289–290, 291; large groups with mixed abilities, 288–289; lecturing, 287–288, 298, 300, 306; monitoring of student performance, 295, 297–298; multiple goals of, 288; progressive pedagogy, 297–300; socioemotional leadership, 297; task leadership, 297–298; traditional pedagogy, 297–300; uncertainty of success in, 288–290. See also teachers technocratic planning, educational, 87–88 testing, high-stakes, 319, 342 textbooks, 43, 169, 173, 255, 287, 292, 323, 359n3; and alignment with official policies, 132; in developing world, 74, 77, 89–90, 94, 306; versus digital media, 344; in early America, 118; family purchases of, in Japan, 57; and meaningful abstraction, 284, and multiculturalism, 125 Thailand, 97, 98, 101, 103 Thatcher, Margaret, 50 tier structures, 257; early-branching systems, 261–263; elite preparatory schools, 236–237; net effects of, 264–265; private versus public schools, 263; two-year versus four-year colleges, 263–264. See also track structures time: in school, 3–4; on task, 298, 299 Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (U.S.), 325, 326, 343 Torres, Carlos, 86 Torche, Florencia, 213 Touré, Sékou, 72, 73 tracks and tiers, definition of, 257 track structures, 59; class and racial inequalities in track assignments, 176, 187, 261; course levels, 261, 265; in France, 61; in Ger­ many, 216, 262, 264; in Japan, 56; justifica­ tions for, 257–259; low-status students and, 229; net effects of, 263; school organization of, 254; in the United States, 63, 121; voca­ tional tracks, 63, 260, 264, 265, 268, 304, 313. See also tier structures traditionalism in developing world, 75–76 trainability, educational credentials as signals of, 193, 195, 224 “treaties” and student workload, 28–29, 160

index

4 31

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 141 Trow, Martin, 120, 121 Tse-tung, Mao, 82 Turner, Sarah E., 222 Twain, Mark, 2–3, 360n1 Tyack, David B., 118, 312, 314, 316, 326 Uganda, teacher absences in, 95 Ukraine, book ownership in, 75 United Arab Emirates, 92, 250 United Kingdom. See England, schooling system in United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 252 United States, schooling system in: and adolescent society, 137–138, 178–184; college graduation rates, 48, 59, 61, 188, 220–221, 247–248; colonial, 37, 39; common school movement, 37, 314, 336; compulsory schooling laws, 37; curriculum, 37, 47, 48, 116, 118–119, 121, 122, 123–128; debate over declining standards, 139–140, 316–318; decentralized administration and financing of, 19, 27, 43; declining educational opportunity in, 219–224; decreasing gap between majority and minority students, 138, 220–221; democratic uplift premise, 38–39, 40; educational attainment, 61, 221; educational expansion, 39, 40; educational expenditures, 5, 7; educational reform, 316–321, 325–338; entrepreneurial influence on, 5, 39, 116; era of equalized opportunity, 219–220; financial aid in higher education, 189, 220, 223–224; higher education, 39, 48–49; and immigration, 121, 127, 214–215; and intergenerational mobility, 61, 62; minority attainments in, 138, 220–221; occupational mobility and, 200–202; and opportunity consciousness, 63–64, 188–190; Protestant influence on, 5, 38, 39, 70, 156, 158; public school enrollment, 7; secondary level, 46–47; social class influences on transitions to higher levels, 212–213; student achievement on international tests, 142, 143, 247–248; teacher salaries, 277, 278; teacher social standing, 276; teacher training,



4 32

index

United States, schooling system in (continued) 273–275; treatment of minorities in urban schools, 171, 239, 276 universities, medieval, 112–114 University of California (U.S.), 220 University of London (England), 51 University of Tokyo (Japan), 56 University of Warwick (England), 52 U Nu, 73 Uruguay, 84, 85; schooling system and eco­ nomic development in, 93, 100 utilitarian ideology and schooling, 115, 116, 123, 148, 346 value-added models (VAMs), 301–302 Varro, 114 Veblen, Thorstein, 286 Venezuela, higher education in, 86, 87 Vietnam, 102, 161, 206 vocational education and training (VET), 89 vocational qualifications, 50, 51, 63, 69, 122, 135, 148 vouchers, educational, 95–96 Wacquant, Loic, 305 Waller, Willard, 353n2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 97

Warner, W. Lloyd, 196–197 War on Poverty (U.S.), 325–326, 338, 343 Watt, Toni Terling, 362n1 Weber, Max, 17, 19, 30, 353n2 Weberian theory of schooling, 17–19 Webster, Noah, 118 Western cultural model of modernity, 78, 79, 113 White, Merry I., 162 Williams, Raymond, 115, 355n1 Williams v. State of California, 354n3 Willis, Paul, 49–50, 182–183 Woessmann, Ludger, 194, 306, 323, 324 World Bank, 88–91, 104, 129, 219, 253, 322, 354–355n1 Wylie, Laurence, 154 Young, Michael, 197 Yugoslavia (former), treatment of minorities in, 359n2 Zaire, schooling system in, 80 Zetterberg, Hans, 200–201 Zhou, Min, 247 Zimbabwe, 84, 103 zones d’éducation prioritaires (ZEPs) (France), 340–341