Labaree on the Three Competing Goals of US Public Education

The Labaree article “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals.” (American Educational Research Journal 34 (1) (March 20): 39 –81. doi:10.3102/00028312034001039.) presents us with quite a powerful and insightful ways of understanding the forces that shape public education as well as the ongoing reforms to public education. The tripartite goals of democratic equality (equal access, preparing citizens), social efficiency (preparing a workforce) and social mobility (using education to capture private gains) seems a very useful tool to consider the goals of various reforms. 

However, when Labaree himself tries to use this tool to classify recent education reform policy, the results can be somewhat confusing and even seem muddled. For example, he argues that the coalition of democratic equality and social mobility define the "core consensus of aggressive educational politics in this country for the last century and a half" (61), but earlier in the article he was citing the importance of the social efficiency goals as witnessed in A Nation at Risk and similar ongoing reports, coalitions and policy that continue to argue that the United States education system if failing in critical ways to train the workforce needed for social efficiency (the recent focus on STEM education and groups like Change the Equation would serve as recent examples of how this efficiency goal remains strong). However, this also seems to be the point: that this social equivocation about educational goals results in "muddled" systems that constantly undermine themselves (70-71).

The part I had the most difficulty with was the sections on credentialing. I have to confess that I have not studied this area nor reviewed the research. However, my "lived" experience suggests to me that while credentials are important, they are mostly important as a barrier to entry than as a determinant of position after entry. My experience in the US labor market is that it values capabilities, skills and outcomes far more than credentials (example: of all the dozens of colleagues I work with on a regular basis, I could not cite either the educational institutions or credentials of a single person, with one exception, a person I have worked with for 5 years). This is not a distinction (determinant vs barrier to entry) that Labaree makes, but again, as I have noted, I have no particular theoretical or other background in this area.