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

• Author: Mathews, Jay

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...