Labaree, David F. (2004). The Trouble with Ed Schools. Reviewed by Katie Byrnes, University of Colorado at Boulder

Labaree, David F. (2004). The Trouble with Ed Schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pp. 207 $35     ISBN 0-300-10350-6 Reviewed by Katie Byrnes University of Colorado at Boulder June 15, 2005 Schools of Education in the United States often receive blame for many of the problems plaguing public education. Not only are ed schools blamed by the public and policy makers, but they are also ignored in discussions of key issues in education such as school choice, standards, or even teacher education. The assumption is that education schools poorly prepare teachers, offer research lacking validity and reliability, and inadequately train educational researchers to investigate educational theory and practice. As a professor of education at Stanford University, David Labaree distances himself from his profession and offers readers a critical as well as a supportive explanation for the “trouble with ed schools”. Labaree’s analysis will appeal to professionals in higher education in general and schools of education in particular. Labaree explains the inferior status and the social role of the education school through an interpretive lens that utilizes a historical sociological perspective. Labaree maintains, “A position of principled ambivalence about the cumulative qualities of the education school – admiring its quixotic persistence in pursuing worth pedagogical and intellectual aims that have been studiously avoided by the rest of higher education, while at the same time decrying its mediocrity, its romantic rhetoric, and its abject compliance with the demeaning and frequently dysfunctional role assigned to it” (p. 9). He is like a parent of an adolescent who admires the youthful energy and enthusiasm, but knows wisdom and common sense are only in the developing stages. The initial chapters take the reader into the history of schools of education and how they arrived late to the university game, how they are intimately tied to women and the working class, and how their specialized knowledge of teaching is considered easy or inherent in one’s personality and therefore not worthy of academic study and pursuit. These factors combine to create the inferior status of the education school. Labaree paints an intriguing picture of how market pressures and consumerism really are to blame for the inferior status of schools of education both in the past as well as the present. By meeting these economic demands, education schools relinquished the two requirements for high status: monopoly and selectivity. “By becoming socially useful, it lost social respect” (p. 25). The need/demand for exchange value and credentials by the public and students has overwhelmed the need/demand to learn or to be able to use knowledge. Education schools responded through a typically supply and demand model by supplying credentials for the masses as efficiently and cost effectively as possible and lost their monopoly and selectivity in the preparation of teachers. In addition to the preparation of teachers education schools serve the roles of doing educational research and preparing educational researchers. Chapters three, four, and five sympathetically explore the problems educational schools face in their three main areas of expertise. An enormous issue faced by schools of education is that, “Teaching is an enormously difficult job that looks easy” (p. 39). The problems of teaching Labaree investigates to support the difficulty and complexity of teaching include: client cooperation, compulsory clientele, emotional relationships with students, structural isolation, and chronic uncertainty. Teaching is also one of the few professions where it is a hallmark of expertise to give away one’s knowledge unlike any other profession where one leases his or her knowledge or expertise to deal with a particular problem facing a client. Labaree eloquently explains how the problems of teaching influence teacher education programs to “provide ordinary college students with the imponderable so they can teacher the irrepressible in a manner that pleases the irreconcilable, and all without knowing clearly either the purposes or the consequences of their actions” (p. 56). This complexity of teaching coupled with the perception that teaching comes naturally to people creates tensions for teacher educators in preparing future teachers with a knowledge- and research-base that may contradict their many years of the apprenticeship of observation. Conducting research on a complex phenomena like teaching and learning is immediately devalued with the university setting because the research inherently falls into soft, applied knowledge that contains use value rather than hard, pure knowledge with exchange value, which traditionally is more revered in the academe. Labaree insightfully offers both positive and negative consequences resulting from the nature of educational research. Negative consequences include low status within the university, weak authority within education and educational policymaking, pressure for hard science and for pure research institutions, as well as a sense that the field is never getting anywhere. The positive consequences include the value in useful knowledge, freedom from consumer pressures, disciplinary boundaries, and hierarchical constraints, as well as an ability to speak to a general audience. While Labaree is attempting to “maintain a position of principled ambivalence” (p. 9), within his analysis, the negative consequences carry more weight and are more persuasive than the positive consequences. In addition to the issues of preparing teachers and producing educational research, education professors also face the challenge of transitioning typically K-12 teachers into the world of educational research in an institutional setting holding a perspective of teaching and learning that is very different and often foreign from their background and training as teachers. The problem of bridging the gap can be addressed in multiple ways. All of the bridges create interesting identities for researchers: researchers who have lost their identity as teachers, researchers who are really teachers and not researchers, and researchers who have blended their identity as researchers and teachers. The final chapters of the book examine the status of professors of education, the progressive movement’s intimate tie to schools of education, and the inability of education schools to do much good or much harm to public education in this country because of their inferior status. Labaree references several texts that implicate education schools as well as education professors but explains how many of these studies offer a one-sided view of the situation. He addresses how much the status game plays into the perception of education professors and education schools. Labaree argues that the status of education schools has been intimately tied to the rhetoric of pedagogical progressives. These progressives offer a theoretical conception of education at odds with the administrative progressivism rampant in K-12 schools. He presents an argument that education schools and progressive theory go hand-in-hand because of mutual need. Progressive theory lost control of American schools and education schools lost respect in American higher education. Professors of education in the 1920’s were faced with a profession consisting of three undesirable roles: 1. collecting facts about teaching and learning rather than serving as a conscience or reflective researcher of the educational system, 2. training teachers for a system as it existed rather than as it could exist, and 3. researching within specialized areas with no vision for a unifying purpose or mission. Progressive theory was the vision of education professors of education could cling to as a means of initiating educational change away from the utilitarian, behaviorist vision of the administrative progressives to a child-centered, intrinsically motivating, democratic community of learners. Labaree makes clear that he does not favor blind allegiance to progressive theory and that if it were actually implemented in the schools would disastrously harm teaching and learning, but he cautions that this will never happen because of the lowly status of the education school. “Ed schools are indeed weak institutions” (p. 172). He presents the admirable work being done in schools of education and he also critiques the same work for being inefficient and counterproductive. He utilizes many conservative critiques from scholars outside of education such as E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch as a comparison to the optimistically positive accounts offered by scholars within education. For example, he references Hirsch to argue against the benefits of the progressive vision. “If we were to follow the lead of the progressives and try to implement the progressive vision in the full and unhybridized form that pervades the rhetoric of educational schools, we might well bring about some of the damage to education that Hirsch and others warn us about” (p. 174). This kind of attack on progressive theory should stimulate some discussion about the purposes, goals, and theories espoused within schools of education. Labaree presents readers with an engaging narrative that explores the institutional and societal dynamics that have and continue to influence the inferior status and effectiveness of the education school to prepare teachers, do educational research, and prepare educational researchers. Any professor of education will find The Trouble with Ed Schools stimulating and an opportunity for reflection on his or her professional purposes and practices. Labaree is asking readers to consider whether ed schools should be viewed as victims or as ineffective, inefficient enterprises deserving their inferior status. He presents an argument that in the end, status matters. Status both limits and opens opportunities to schools of education. Let us hope that Labaree’s The Trouble with Ed Schools may stimulate positive changes and possibly create new troubles with ed schools. About the Reviewer Katie Byrnes is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her doctoral work emphasizes Research on Teaching and Teacher Education in the Instruction and Curriculum program. Her research interests include preservice teacher education, curriculum theory and design, and contemplative education. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.