Labare~~, '[): (1997) :;Ch~pte~ i 0: s~ho~ii~~Co~s~mers and Consumi~g the Sch~ol," in
How to succeed in school, , , without really trying, Yale University Press, New Haven:
CT, pp.250-262.'................"-'--;-'~~~~~_ _ _ _ __
L / 1/)/
J
, }
L /'\/)/1 <. VIC,
jl)
.' vr" '\ L. ._.- ~ ·......;/f"
Schooling Consumefs arid Consuming the S
/11
. ;
\ .
In U.S. schools the relentless urge to get ahead has unaelrmllne(
opportunity to get an education. The preceding chapters have shown
the ways that the private pursuit of personal advantage has
structure of public schooling. Market pressures have elevated private
over the public interest in education, with the result that schooling has
serve the competitive needs of the most ambitious and culturally
educational consumers (for a leg up on the opposition) more than the
tive needs of society as a whole (for capable citizenship and competent
manship). Consumer demand for credentials - and the economic
they bring-has compelled the educational system to assume a highly
ified form. The system has become better at creating invidious
among students than at providing them with the political and social
required for a healthy society. In such a system, educational placement-
right school, the right college, the right program - is more important
educational performance, and learning to work the system well is more
tant than learning to do the curriculum well. This is a system, in short, '
puts a premium on the acquisition of educational credentials over the
of educatiOnal content.
Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School
25 I
The Nature of the Problem
Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that so many observers
that American students are remarkably disengaged from the educational
1 In a recent book Laurence Steinberg identifies student disengage-
as the central problem facing education in the United States. Drawing on
of twenty thousand high school students, he concludes: "An extremely
proportion of American high school students do not take school, or their
seriously."2 The roOt of the problem, he says, is in the kind of rewards
t ( __ ~ £.. /'J -
schools have available to them to motivate academic effort:
Most of the time, what keeps students going in school is not intrinsic moti~
vation - motivation derived from the process of learning itself - but extrinsic
motivation - motivation that comes from the real or perceived consequences'
associated with success or failure, whether these c()nsequences are immediate
(in the form of grades, the reactions of parents, or the responses of friends) or
delayed (in the form of anticipated impact in other educational settings or in
the adult world of work) ....
Over the courSe of their educational careers, students are increasingly ex-
posed to extrinsic rewards for schoolwork. 3 L
What Steinberg is saying, in effect, is that the key determinant of student
l1galgelmeJnt in schooling is the exchange value of education rather than its use-
because the primary goal of pursuing an education has become the
of educa tiona I credentials - symbolic goods, such as grades, cred-
and degrees'- rather than the acquisition of useful skills and knowledge, In
argument that is similar to the one I make in this book, Steinberg shows
students adapt themselves to this situation in a manner that is quite
in light of the incentives and disincentives built into the system, but
undermines the process of acquiring an education:
Do students believe in the benefits of schooling? Yes and no. Students believe
in the benefits associated with getting a diploma or a degree, but they are skep-
tical about the benefits associated with either learning or doing well in class. In
other words, students ... correctly believe that college graduates stand a better
chance of getting good jobs than high school graduates, who, in turn, stand a
better chance of occupational success than dropouts. At the same time, how-
ever, they do not associate later success either with doing well in school (in
terms of their grades or the evaluations of their teachers) or with learning what
schools have to teach. In students' eyes, then, what matters is only whether one
graduates - not how well one does or what one learns along the way.
If this is the prevailing belief among contemporary students -and our
study suggests that it is - it is easy to understand why so many students coast
through school without devoting much energy to their schoolwork. . . .
 252 Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School
Within a belief system in which all that counts is graduation - in
ing good grades is seen as equivalent to earning mediocre ones, or
in which learning something from school is seen as unimportant-
choose the path of least resistance:'
Up to this point, Steinberg'S argument is parallel to my own. The
sions he draws from this analysis, however, are quite different. As a
----c''''-----'-'
gist, he ultimately chooses to portray student disengagement from
al1 attitude problem, and the solutions he proposes are aimed at "'U'''llEi'U~;}
attitude. His basic strategy for reform is to raise the cost of academic
Students have been able to coast along at school without exerting
effort to learn because a failure to learn brings few significant cOlns~~quleni
with a minimum amount of work and a modest amount of learning, they
still pass their courses and graduate. But we can raise the cost of
failure at home, he says, by encouraging parents to become more engaged
their children's schooling and to put increased pressure on students to
their schoolwork seriously: We can also raise the cost of academic failure in
workplace, he argues by establishing high academic standards for
tion and graduation, enforcing them with a system of examinations, and
ing them economic teeth by means of standardized transcripts that
can use to select the most academically accomplished applicants for jobs..
As a sociologist, however, I have taken a different approach in
explain the dysfu~tional characteristics of schooling identified bY'-'l<;;luu."",
have focused less on the attitudes and behaviors of the actors who
U.S. education than on the systemic factors that have shaped these a
and behaviors. From the latter perspective, J have argued that many of
. central problems facing education in the United States - student ,",1""11~;<1&'
ment, for one, but also such issues as social inefficiency and persistent
inequality - are in considerable part the result of market pressures on
educational system. Each chapter of this book is a study in educational
sumerism and credentialism, which shows how the market perspective
come to dominate our view of education. By redefining education as a
modity whose acquisition can help individuals get ahead of the pack,
pressures have led to the reconstruction of the educational system in the ser-
vice of a private pursuit of individual advantage. This reconstruction around .
the goal of social mobility is far from complete, and it has been hotly rnrlTP.:rp"
over the years by supporters of competing educational goals, who argue for an.'
educational system that serves to promote social efficiency and/or democratic
equality. But as I have tried to show, in one ~ontext after another the influence
! ofthfs private perspective on U.S. education has been profound.
What we have seen is a portrait of a public educational system that increas- .
Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School 253
has been put in the service of private purposes. This analysis suggests that
problem with education in the United States is not unmotivated
uncaring parents, and undemanding sta,ndards (as Steinberg would
it) but something more fundamental- our unwillingness as a society to
the public interest in education against the encroachments of individual
who seek to exploit the system for private benefit. The market forces
so powerfully shape the nation's economic and social life-encouraging
rInQl'l'lQlclal pursuit of competitive advantage - have been working to turn
too, into a form of private property, thereby making credentials the
rather than the byproduct of educational achievement.
a result, the problems of personal attitude and motivation that so con-
Steinberg are best understood in light of the incentives facing actors
, an increasingly market-centered educational system. By working the
in order to gain the greatest individual benefit for the smallest invest-
of time and effort, students are only behaving like savvy consumers, who
want to obtain the most valuable commodity at the cheapest price.
core problem is not with student attitudes, which under the circumstances·
quite understandable, but with the market-based incentives that shape
attitudes within U.S. education. What is irrational is not the behavior of
' ,u....,uv"<u consumers but the emerging structure of the educational system.
is, in fact, nothing rational about such a system - which promotes per-
advantage at public expense; which goes out of its way to create and
educational distinctions that undercut real educational accomplish-
and which produces more graduates than employers need or taxpayers
afford.
The Historical Roots of the Problem
A central theme of this book has been to explain how it is that education
the United States came to assume its current form as a system that is both
sensitive to consumer demand and highly focused on the acquisition of
credentials. A useful way to explore this theme in greater depth is
examine a case study of one of the most dramatic and consequential events
the history of schooling in this country: the extraordinarily rapid expansion
higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This
also provides a chance to consider more systematically the validity of
"'L"'U"'l~"<1'W)JlU as a theory of educational development.
In Degrees of Control, David Brown tackles an important question that
long puzzled scholars who wanted to understand the central role that
.on plays in American society: why did the United States experience
extraordinary growth, compared with other Western countries, in higher
 2. 5 4 Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School
education at such an early point in time? Whereas in most societies
education has long been seen as a privilege that is granted to a relatively
proportion of the population, in this country it has increasingly come to .
seen as a right of the ordinary citizen. And this rapid increase in accessibility
not only a recent phenomenon. As Brown notes, between 1870 and 1930
proportion of college-age persons who attended institutions of higher
tion rose from 1.7 percent to 13.0 percent. s This change occurred long
the proliferation of regional state universities and community colleges made
possible at the end of the twentieth century for the majority of youth in
United States to enroll in some form of higher education.
The range of possible answers to this question is considerable, and
alternative reflects its own distinctive image of the nature of U.S. political
social life. For example, perhaps the rapid growth in the opportunity
higher education was an expression of egalitarian politics and a
of the American Dream; perhaps it was a political diversion, providing
logical cover for persistent inequality; or perhaps it was merely an ac(:lQ(~nt,
an unintended consequence of a struggle for something altogether UU.'\"H_'U.
Brown explains the spectacular growth and peculiar structure of U.S.
education in light of the role of college credentials in American life.
!~' ~1 N~:'J~(. fU~:~:~~i::lt~:~~:n:;:u::dt~::::O!~;:nv~~g:~~~::; :~:~::.a
.---~ demand for advanced technical skills (human capital), which only a
\ expansion of higher education could fill. But Brown notes that during
expansion most students pursued programs not in vocational-technical
ula but in liberal arts, which meant that the forms of knowledge they were
acquiring were remote from the economically productive skills supposedly
demanded by employers. Social repro~~~!ion!~~gry treats the university as a
mechanism that emerged to protectthe privilege of the upper middle class·
behind a wall of cultural capital, during a time (with the decline of proprietor-
ship) when it became increasingly difficult for economic capital alone to
vide such protection. But while this theory points to a central outcome of
college expansion, it fails to explain the historical contingencies and agencies:
that actually produced this outcome. In fact, both of these theories are essen-
tially functionalist in approach, portraying higher education as arising
matically to fill a social need - within the economy, in the first case, and
the class system, in the second.
CredentiaHst theory, however, helps explain the socially reproductive effect,
of ~;{panding higher education without denying agency. It conceives of higher- .
education diplomas as a kind of cultural currency that becomes attractive to
status groups seeking an advantage in the competition for social positions, and;
Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School 255
therefore it sees the expansion of higher education as a response to consumer
demand rather than functional necessity. Upper classes tend to benefit dispro-
portionately from this educational development, not because of an institu-
tional correspondence principle that preordains such an outcome but because
they are socially and culturally better equipped to gain access to and succeed
within the educational market.
This credentialist theory of educational growth is the one that Brown finds
most compelling as the basis for his own interpretation. When he plunges into
a dose examination of U.S. higher education, however, he finds that the stan-
dard formulation of this theory-as spelled out by Randall Collins-often
does not match the historical evidence. 6 Collins does not examine the nature
of labor market recruitment, which is critical for credentialist theory because
the pursuit of college credentials makes sense only ifemployers are rewarding
degree holders with desirable jobs. Like Collins, Brown shows that between
1800 and 1880 the number of colleges in the United States grew dramatically,
but Brown observes that enrollments at individual colleges were quite modest.
He argues that this binge of institution creation was driven by a combina-
tion of religious and market forces but not (contrar:r to Collins) by the pursuit
of credentials. There simply is no good evidence that a college degree was
much in demand by employers during this period. Instead, a great deal of the
growth in the number of colleges was the result of the desire by religious and
ethnic groups to create their own settings for producing clergy and transmit-
ting culture. Brown argues that an additional spur to this growth came from
markedly less elevated sources -local boosterism and land speculation - as
development-oriented towns sought to establish colleges as a mechanism for \
attracting land buyers and new residents.
Brown's version of credentialist theory identifies a few central factors that
are required in order to facilitate a credential-driven expansion of higher edu-
cation, and by 1880 several of these were already in place. One such factor is
substantial wealth. Higher education is expensive, and expanding it for rea-
sons of individual status attainment rather than societal necessity is a wasteful
use of a nation's resources that is feasible only for a very wealthy country. The
United States was already a very wealthy country in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. A second factor is a broad institutional base. At this point, the United
States had the largest number of colleges per million residents in the country's
history, before or since. Because most colleges had small enrollments, there
was great potential for growth within an already existing institutional frame-
work. This potential was reinforced by a third factor, decentralized control.
Colleges were governed by local boards rather than central state authorities
and depended for funding on student tuition more than state appropriations.
256 Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School
This encouraged entrepreneurial behavior by college leaders, especially
intensively competitive market enviromnent they faced.
But three other factors that are essential for rapid credential-based
in higher education were still missing in 1880. First, colleges were not
be able to attract large numbers of new students-who were after all
to be motivated solely by the love of learning - unless they could offer
students both a pleasant social experience and a practical educational
ence, neither of which was the norm at colleges for most of the U""~",,~'~)
century. Second, colleges could not function as credentialing institutions
they had a monopoly over a particular form of credentials. but in 1880
were still competing directly with high schools for the same students.
their credentials were not going to have any value on the market unless
ployers began to demonstrate a distinct preference for hiring college
ates, and such a preference was still not obvious at this stage.
According to Brown, a major shift in each of these factors occurred in
1880s. The trigger for this change was a significant oversupply of'
relative to existing demand. In this Iife-or-death situation, colleges
sought to increase the pool of potential students. It is no coincidence that
period marked the rapid diffusion of efforts to improve the quality of
life on campuses (from the promotion of athletics to the proliferation of
nities) and also the shift toward a curriculum with a stronger claim of
ticality (emphasizing modern languages and science over Latin and Greek).
the same time, colleges sought to guarantee a flow of students from
institutions, which required them to establish a hierarchical relation with
schools. The end of the century was the period in which colleges began
ing completion of a high school course as a prerequisite for college dUlllll~'''lU'll.
instead of the traditional entrance examination. This system provided
schools with a stable outlet for its graduates and colleges with a pn~a14:ta\)le
flow of reasonably well-prepared students. None of this would have
possible, however, if the college degree had not acquired a significant
change value in the labor market. Without this, there would have been
social reasons for attending college, and high schools would have had
incentive to submit to college mandates.
The issue of employer preference has posed a significant, perhaps
problem for credentialist theory, which has asked the reader to accept
apparently contradictory assertions about credentials. First, the theory
that a college degree has exchange value but not necessarily use-value; that is,
it is attractive to the consumer because it can be cashed in on a good job more·
or less independently of any learning that was acquired along the way. Second,·
this exchange ~alue depends on the willingness of employers to hire applicants
Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School 2- 5 7
based on credentials alone, without direct knowledge of what these applicants
know or what they can do. But this raises a serious question about the ra-
tionality of the employer in this process. After all, why would an employer,
who presumably cares about the productivity of future employees, hire people
based solely on a college's certification of competence in the absence of any
evidence of that competence?
Brown notes that work became gradually more rationalized in the late nine-
teenth century, and thus large-scale bureaucracies were developed to adminis-
ter this work within both private corporations and public agencies. One result
was the creation of a rapidly growing occupational sector for managerial
employees who could function effectively within such a rationalized organiza-
tional structure. College graduates seemed to fit the bill for this kind of work.
They emerged from the top level of the newly developed hierarchy of educa-
tional institutions and therefore seemed like naturai candidates for manage-
ment work in the upper levels of the new administrative hierarchy, which was
based not on proprietorship or political office but on apparent skill. And what
kinds of skills were called for ip this line of work? What the new managerial
employees needed was not so much the technical skills posited by human
capital theory, he argues, but a general capacity to work effectively in a verbally
and cognitively structured organizational environment, as well as a capacity to
feel comfortable about assuming positions of authority over other people.
These were things that the emerging American college could and did pro-
vide. The increasingly corporate social structure of student life on college
campuses provided good socialization for bureaucratic work, and the process
of gaining access to and graduation from college provided students with an
institutionalized confirmation of their social superiority and qualifications for
leadership. Note that these capacities were substantive consequences of hav-
ing attended college, but they were not learned as part of the college's formal
curriculum. That is, the characteristics that qualified college graduates for
future bureaucratic employment were a side effect of their pursuit of a college
education. In this sense, then, the college credential had a substantive meaning
for employers that justified them in using it as a criterion for employment,
less for the human capital that college provided than for the social capital
that college conferred on graduates. Therefore this credential, Brown argues,
served an important role in the labor market by reducing the uncertainty that
plagued the process of bureaucratic hiring. After ail, how else was an employer
to gain some assurance that a candidate could do this kind of work? A college
degree offered a claim to competence, which had enough substance behind it
to be credible even if this substance was largely unrelated to the content of the
college curriculum.
 258 Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School
By the I890S all the pieces were in place for a rapid expansion of
enrollments, strongly driven by credentialist pressures. Employers had
to give preference to college graduates when hiring for management pos
As a result, middle-class families had an increasing incentive to provide
children with privileged access to an advantaged social position by
them to college. Forthe students themselves, this extrinsic reward for
ing college was reinforced by the intrinsic benefits accruing from an n"'-~~"~"
social life on campus. All of this created a strong demand for .:oAI>J,UIIUIlJ
college enrollments, and the preexisting institutional conditions in higher
cation made it possible for colleges to respond aggressively to this delmand.
thousand independent institutions of higher education, accustomed to
entrepreneurial roles in a competitive educational market, were eager to
italize on the surge of interest in attending college and to adapt themselves
the preferences of these new tuition-paying consumers. The result was a
erful and unrelenting surge of expansion in college enrollments that co:ntlllUC:d'
for the next century. As we have seen, this same pattern of co:nSllmler-{:1n1{en.
credential-seeking expansion also characterized the history of the high
normal school, and junior college.
The Consequences
The urge to get ahead has transformed the basic function of U.S.
cation from public service to private service, and this transformation
brought significant consequences for the people who attend, work in, pay
and in various ways depend on American schools.
One major problem is that focusing on selling credentials to consumers'
astonishingly inefficient. Education is the largest single public inVe!.tmlent
made by most modern societies, and this investment is justified on the ~lIJUIIU:;
that it provides a critically important contribution to the collective
The public value of education is usually calculated as some combination
two types of benefits, the preparation of capable citizens (the political hA •• Ahr\
and the training of productive workers (the economic benefit). However
argument I have advanced in this book suggests that these public benefits
not necessarily being met and that the primary beneficiaries are in fact
individuals. From this perspective, higher education (and the educational
tern more generally) exists largely as a mechanism for providing ~rI . . ,..rl."
with a cultural commodity that will give them a competitive advantage in
pursuit of social position. In short; education becomes little but a vast
. subsidy for private ambition.
The practical effect of this subsidy is the production of a glut of
Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School 259
The difficulty posed by this outcome is not that the population becomes over-
educated (such a state is difficultto imagine) but that it becomes overcreden-
tialed, as people pursue diplomas less for the knowledge they are thereby
acquiring than for the access that the diplomas themselves will provide. The
result is a spiral of credential inflation, for as each level of education in turn
gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to
keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of
the pack. In such a system nobody wins. Consumers have to spend increasing
amounts of time and money to gain additional credentials because the swelling
number of credential holders keeps lowering the value of credentials at any
given level. Taxpayers find an increasing share of scarce fiscal resources going
to support an educational chase with little public benefit. Employers keep rais-
ing the entry-level education requirements for particular jobs (as the average
education level of applicants rises), but they still find that they have to provide
extensive training before employees can carry out their work productively. At
all levels, this is an enormously wasteful system, one that is increasingly drain-
ing for rich countries like the United States and positively impoverishing for
less developed countries that imitate the U.S. educational model.
A second major problem is that credentialism undercuts learning. In both
college and high school, students are all too well aware that their mission is to
do whatever it takes to acquire a diploma, which they can cash in on what
really matters-a good job. This assumption has the effect of reifying the
formal markers of academic progress - grades, credits, and degrees - and en-
couraging students to focus their attention on accumulating these badges of
merit for the exchange value they offer. That strategy means directing atten-
tion away from the substance of education, reducing student motivation to
learn the knowledge and skills that constitute the core of the educational
curriculum. Under such conditions, it is quite rational, even if educationally
destructive, for students to seek to acquire their badges of merit at a minimum
academic cost, to gain the highest grade with the minimum amount of learn-
ing. This perspective is almost perfectly captured by a common student ques-
tion, one that sends chills down the back of the learning-centered teacher but
that makes perfect sense for the credential-oriented student: "Is this going to
be on the test?"? We have credential ism to thank for the aversion to learning
that, to a great extent, lies at the heart of our educational system. This aversion
is further exacerbated by the problem of credential inflation, which continu-
ally undercuts the exchange value of a given level of credentials and therefore
reinforces the consumer's sense that these credentials are not worth a substan-
tial investment of time and effort.
A third problem posed by consumer-driven credentiallsm is the way it
260 Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School
reinforces social inequality under the guise of expanding educational oppor-.
tunity. The opportunity is real enough, as far as it goes, for the connection1
between social class and education is neither as direct nor as automatic as:
social reproduction theory suggests. Market forces mediate between the class ..
position of students and their access to and success within the educational
system. That is, there is a general competition for admission to institutions of
higher education and for levels of achievement within these institutions. Class'
advantage is no guarantee of success in this competition because such factors
as individual ability, motivation, and luck all playa part in determining the.'
result. Market forces also mediate between educational attainment (the ac-
quisition of credentials) and social attainment (the acquisition of a social
position). Some college degrees are worth more in the credentials market than
others, and they provide privileged access to higher-level positions indepen-
dent of the class origins of the credential holder.
In both of these market competitions, however, one for acquiring the cre-
dential and the other for cashing it in, higher class position provides a signifi-
cant competitive edge. The economic, cultural, and social capital that comes
with higher class standing gives the bearer an advantage in getting into college,
in doing well at college, and in translating college credentials into desirable
social outcomes. The market-based competition that characterizes the acquisi-
tion and disposition of educational credentials gives the process a meritocratic·
set of possibilities, but the influence of class on this competition gives it a
socially reproductive set of probabilities as well. The danger is that, as a result,
a credential-driven system of education can provide meritocratic cover for
socially reproductive outcomes. In the single-minded pursuit of educational
credentials, both student consumers and the society that supports them can
lose sight of an all-too-predictable pattern of outcomes that is masked by the
headlong rush for the academic gold.
The Downside of Upward Mobility
In spite of all the evidence and analysis that fills the pages of this book,
however, my argument may appear puzzlingly wrong-headed to many read-
ers. After all, here I am attacking the American system of education for what is
generally recognized as its most praiseworthy attribute - its emphasis on pro-
viding all members of society with open access to educational opportunities.
Whereas other school systems around the world give greater emphasis to
social efficiency (providing workers with the necessary job skills) and/or dem-
ocratic equality (providing citizens with the necessary social and political
skills), the U.S. system stresses social mobility. In practice, this means a system
Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School 261
that is organized primarily around the goal of providing individuals with the
educational chance to get ahead socially.
Americans and non-Americans alike see great benefit arising from such a
system. Unlike a system devoted to social efficiency concerns, the U.S. system
seeks to maximize student options and minimize the educational barriers to
the exercise of these options. And unlike a system devoted to democratic
equality concerns, the U.S. system seeks to maximize the variety of possible
educational experiences and outcomes. The result is a structure of education
that is widely admired and frequently imitated.
The secret of the consumer appeal and organizational success of the Ameri-
can educational model lies in its responsiveness to the market. In contrast with
most systems of education around the world, control of the U.S. system is
radically decentralized. Governance of educational institutions at all levels
tends to be local, rather than concentrated in the hands of an educational
ministry, and finances depend heavily on student enrollment (either directly,
through tuition dollars, or indirectly through per capita appropriations). Such
a system is remarkably flexible, adapting quickly to local market conditions
and changes in consumer demand, and it is also remarkably differentiated, as
particular institutions and individual school systems come to occupy spe-
. cialized niches in the highly competitive educational arena. Constructed from
the ground up rather than the top down and responding to consumer pressure
rather than central planning, this system comes to offer the broadest range of
educational programs in the most structurally diverse array of institutional
settings that are made accessible to the most heterogeneous collection of stu-
dents.In short, the system maximizes individual choice, structural variety, and
public access.
In these ways-choice, variety, and access-the U.S. model of education is
understandably the pride of most Americans and the envy of many foreign
observers. My aim in this book is not to denigrate the accomplishments of this,
model; as I pointed out in Chapter I, a number of the most progressive charac-
teristics of American education have their roots in the social mobility perspec-
tive, especially in the areas where it has overlapped with the democratic equal-
ity perspective. Instead, the aim is to point out the unintended consequences of
this consumer-based model, consequences that have been devastating for both
school and society.
My point is simply this: by constructing a system of education so heavily
around the goal of promoting individual social mobility, we have placed pub-
lic education in service to private interests. The result, as we have seen, is to
undercut other goals for education that serve the interests of the public as a
whole, such as the production of competent citizens and productive workers.
262 Schooling Consumers, Consuming the School

Social mobility, I conclude, needs to be balanced by democratic equality

social efficiency, or else we will continue to reproduce an educational
that is mired in consumerism and credentialism. Too often this system, in
eagerness to provide individual consumers with the credentials they
undercuts learning, overproduces credentials, and reinforces social
Ironically, an educational system dedicated to promoting upward
frequently interferes not only with getting an education but also with
ahead. The system, it seems, is all too effective at allowing individuals to gain
social advantage by climbing the educational ladder, and the result is a
ture of selection and attrition that promotes opportunity for some by n ..... ~",rll_ Notes
ing disadvantage for others.

1. Public Schools for Private Advantage

This chapter was previously published as "Public Goods, Private Goods: The American
Struggle over Educational Goals" in American Educational Research Journal 34 (Spring
1997). An earlier version was presented at the 1996 meeting ofthe American Educational
Research Association in New York; I am grateful to John Rury for his thoughtful and
detailed comm,ents as a critic at that meeting and to Kathleen Murphey and Norton
Grubb for thd~ helpful comments in response to that session. I am also grateful to three
anonymous reviewers who provided me with extraordinarily constructive and empa-
thetic guidance in making revisions. In addition, I want to thank David Cohen and Cleo
Cherryholmes for their comments on a very early version of this essay. Finally, I am
indebted to my students in the College of Education at Michigan State University, with
whom I have talked about these issues for years.
I. Berliner and Biddle (I99S) have written a cogent defense of public schools against a
number of accusations, drawing on a wide array of evidence to support this defense. In a
similar vein, Gerald Bracey (1995) publishes annual reports in which he exposes the
misinformation that underlies much of public education's bad press.
2. A classic effort to summarize what research says about U.S. education is the ~ok­
let What Works: Research about Teaching and Learning, published by the U.S. Depart-
ment of Education in 1986.
3· See Curti (1959).
4· A large number of scholars have seen this tension as central in understanding the
history of U.S. education. For example, see Hogan (1985), Katznelson and Weir (19 8 5),