How to Succeed in School without Really Trying: The Credentials Race in American Education. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1997 by Jay Mathews

Credentials are everything to Hernandez. She is particularly impatient with admissions officers who do not pay proper respect to applicants from the best prep schools or those with parents who run their own companies. To be honest, she is right in tune with us alumni interviewers who enjoy assessing and influencing academic success -- a form of resume worship that David F. Labaree addresses in his book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.

Labaree does a chemical analysis of the fuel that drives American high schools, particularly the Ivy-envy that leads bright young people to forgo the pleasures of a Sunday afternoon for an hour's chat in my living room. He describes three goals of public education: democratic equality (knowing enough to vote), social efficiency (knowing enough to get a job) and social mobility (knowing enough to get a really good job). He thinks the system puts too much emphasis on this last ingredient:

From the perspective of social mobility ... the value

of education is not intrinsic but extrinsic. The

primary aim is to exchange one's education for

something more substantial -- namely a job, which will

provide the holder with a comfortable standard of

living, financial security, social power, and cultural

prestige.... This emerging independence of

educational exchange value from its connection to usable

knowledge is the most persuasive explanation for

many of the most highly visible characteristics of

contemporary educational life -- such as

overcredentialing chronic overproduction of advanced

degrees relative to the occupational need for

advanced skills) and credential inflation (the rising

level of educational attainment required for jobs

whose skill requirements are largely unchanged).

Sadly, the analysis fails to provide any clue as to how to make schools better. If you cannot motivate high school students with the prospect of good jobs or prestigious titles or at least envious looks from old schoolyard adversaries, what can you use? The implication of Labaree's book is that teachers should celebrate the romance of freedom and the need for all to appreciate the fabric of democracy. It might be amusing to watch a Fairfax County high school history teacher of my acquaintance, afflicted with a class composed almost entirely of hormone-addled boys, explain to his students that if they did not do their homework they would lose a civilizing sense of their place in a democratic society.

There are ways to tie productive learning tighter to worthy credentials. Scrapping the SAT I would be a good start. It seems silly to rely so much on a test of vocabulary and arithmetic, mostly learned before students reach high school, as a measure of readiness for college. Growing numbers of American high schools are introducing and expanding Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs. These are not yet seen as an alternative to the SAT I, but allied with the SAT II they could be. They are tests that measure real, high-level learning, and Hernandez is right when she says that colleges are paying more attention to them.

Such welcome developments can still be distorted by us sorters. Last year I lost control of myself when one Harvard applicant, a pleasant youngster with a splendid business career ahead of him, told me he had not taken any Advanced Placement courses despite the fact that his high school had one of the strongest AP programs in the country. I told him I was very sorry to hear that. I said I thought he had been poorly advised. I said I could not see how anyone could expect admission to Harvard, or any of the other Ivies to which he had applied, without risking at least one demonstrably challenging high school course.

There was nothing he could say. I was the unchallengeable arbiter of who got into Harvard and who did not. I held the key to the gate. When I realized what I had done, I apologized and tried to reassure him that he still had many good choices ahead of him. I arranged for him to see another, hopefully less biased, interviewer

But it has been difficult for me to forget my unbidden resentment that someone would dare to try to get by me without the proper pass. I hope I have matured since, but I cannot be sure.