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SOMEONE HAS TO FAIL
THE ZERO-SUM GAME OF PUBLIC SCHOOLING
David F. Labaree
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England 2010

Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Labaree, David F., 1947–
Someone has to fail : the zero-sum game of public schooling / David F. Labaree.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-05068-6 (alk. paper)
1. Educational change—United States. 2. Public schools—United States.
3. Students with social disabilities—United States. I. Title.
LA212.L33 2010
370.973—dc22 2010012646

To David Tyack and Larry Cuban

Introduction 1
1. From Citizens to Consumers 10
2. Founding the American School System 42
3. The Progressive Effort to Reshape the System 80
4. Organizational Resistance to Reform 106
5. Classroom Resistance to Reform 134
6. Failing to Solve Social Problems 163
7. The Limits of School Learning 195
8. Living with the School Syndrome 222
Notes 259
References 269
Acknowledgments 279
Index 283
CONTENTS

We Americans have long pinned our hopes on education. It’s the
main way we try to express our ideals and solve our problems.
We want schools to provide us with good citizens and productive
workers; to give us opportunity and reduce inequality; to im-
prove our health, reduce crime, and protect the environment. So
we assign these social missions to schools, and educators gamely
agree to carry them out. When the school system inevitably fails
to produce the desired results, we ask reformers to fix it. The
result, as one pair of scholars has put it, is that school reform in
the United States is “steady work.” The system never seems to
work the way we want it to, but we never give up hope that one
day it will succeed if we just keep tinkering.1
This book is an attempt to explain how this system came about,
how it works (and doesn’t work), and why we keep investing so
heavily in it even though it continues to disappoint us. At heart,
this is a story grounded in paradox. The education enterprise is
arguably the greatest institutional success in American history. It
grew from a modest and marginal position in the eighteenth
century to the very center of American life in the twenty-first,
where it consumes a stunning share of the time and treasure of
both governments and citizens. Key to its institutional success
has been its ability to embrace and embody the social goals that
we have imposed on it. Yet in spite of recurring waves of school
INTRODUCTION

2 S O M E O N E H A S T O FA I L
reform, schooling in the United States has been unable to realize
these goals.
When people continually repeat behaviors that turn out badly
for them, we consider it a sign of mental illness. In this sense, then,
the American tendency to resort to schooling is less a strategy than
a syndrome.We have set up our school system for failure by asking
it to fix all of our most pressing social problems, which we are un-
willing to address more directly through political action rather
than educational gesture. When it fails, we fiddle with the system
and try again. Both as a society and as individuals, we continue to
vest our greatest hopes in an institution that is clearly unsuited to
realizing them.
The system’s failure is, in part, the result of a tension between
our shifting social aims for education and the system’s own or-
ganizational inertia. We created the system to solve critical social
problems in the early days of the American republic, and its suc-
cess in dealing with these problems fooled us into thinking that
as time passed we could redirect the system toward new prob-
lems. But the school system has picked up substantial momen-
tum over the years, which makes it hard for us to turn it in a new
direction.
The system’s failure, however, is largely the result of another
tension, between our social goals and our personal hopes. School
reformers have acted as the agents for society, seeking to use
schools to create capable citizens and productive workers and
to cure our social ills. Since their initial success early in the nine-
teenth century, however, these reformers have been mostly un-
able to achieve these goals through schools. In contrast to re-
formers, individual consumers of education have seen schools
less as a way to pursue grand social designs than as a way to
pursue intensely personal dreams of a good job and a good life.
As we will see, compared with school reformers, consumers have
had a much stronger impact in shaping both school and society;
but in the process they have pushed the system in contradictory
directions because they want sharply different benefits from it.

I N T R O D U C T I O N 3
Throughout the history of American education, some consumers
have demanded greater access to school in order to climb the
social ladder, while others have demanded greater advantage
from school in order to protect themselves from these same social
climbers. Obligingly, the school system has let us have it both
ways, providing access and advantage, promoting equality and
inequality.
A key to understanding the American school syndrome is to
recognize that our schools have never really been about learning.
The impact of school on society over the years has come more
from the form of the school system than from the substance of the
school curriculum. Schools have been able to create community
by bringing together a diverse array of citizens under one roof
and exposing them to a shared social and cultural experience,
but for these purposes the content of the curriculum hasn’t mat-
tered as much as its commonality. In the country’s early days,
schools helped create citizens for the republic, and more recently
they have helped assimilate immigrants. But in many ways the
school system’s greatest social impact has come from its power
to allocate social access and social advantage. And this was more
the result of which students entered school and which graduated
from it than of what they learned in between.
A LITTLE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: WAVES
OF SCHOOL REFORM IN THE UNITED STATES
The best way to understand the school syndrome is first to ex-
plore where the American school system came from and then
examine how it works. So let me give a brief outline of the major
social movements that tried to establish and reform the system.
This will serve as a map to help the reader follow the historical
discussion of schooling in the first three chapters and as back-
ground for the analysis of the present-day school system that
I develop in the rest of the book.
The first educational reform effort in the United States was
the common school movement in the early and mid-nineteenth

century. This was a strikingly successful effort by Whig reform-
ers to resolve a crisis that nearly overwhelmed the United States
during its early years. The problem was that the republic was new
and fragile, fighting to overcome a two-thousand-year history
whose clear moral was that republics don’t last. In the 1820s and
1830s, American society faced a rapidly growing market econ-
omy, which brought great wealth and opportunity but also threat-
ened two elements that were critical to keeping the republic
intact—a rough equality of conditions among citizens and a
strong culture of civic commitment. By creating a publicly funded
and controlled system of public schools that drew together every-
one in the community, the common school movement played a
critical role in the larger process of institution-building during
this period, helping to preserve the republic without putting a
damper on economic growth. The invention of the public school
system was part of a grand compromise between democratic poli-
tics and capitalist markets that has proven essential for the dura-
bility of the United States as a liberal democracy. In the process
of accomplishing this grand compromise, the common school
movement established the basic organizational structure and po-
litical rationale for the public school system, both of which have
endured to the present day.
The second major reform movement in the history of Ameri-
can education was the progressive movement, which spanned the
first half of the twentieth century. The progressive movement
in education was something of a catchall, which encompassed a
wide variety of individual elements. But the movement had a few
core orientations that justified the common label. In loose con-
junction with the larger progressive political movement, all of
the factions of educational progressivism were reacting to the
social and political crisis of the early twentieth century. This cri-
sis was less fundamental and threatening to American society than
the one that faced the Whig reformers in the common school
movement. The government was secure and the old liberal demo-
cratic bargain still held. But the problem was to find a way for

government and society to manage the new environment, which
included a new corporate economy, growing inequality, angry
labor relations, rapid growth of cities, and a huge wave of immi-
grants from southern and eastern Europe.
Educational progressives came up with two related responses.
What they had in common was a hostility toward the traditional
academic curriculum, a focus on adapting education to the devel-
opmental needs and individual abilities of students, a concern for
accommodating the influx of immigrants to the United States, and
a need to reconfigure secondary education in order to deal with
the flood of new students entering the country’s rapidly expand-
ing high schools. One strand of this movement was the child-
centered progressives, led by John Dewey and his followers. The
other was the administrative progressives, led by a large group of
professional educators. As I will show, the administrative pro-
gressives were by far the most effective group in changing the
structure of secondary education in the United States, but de-
spite their best efforts over fifty years, even they were not able to
overturn the core patterns of teaching and learning in American
classrooms.
In the last fifty years, we have seen a series of efforts to reform
American education. First was the desegregation movement in
the 1950s and 1960s, which gradually grew into a broad move-
ment for making American schools inclusive. It ended legal segre-
gation by race, and it also worked to reduce the barriers between
girls and boys and between the able and the disabled in American
schools. Second was the school standards movement, which be-
gan in the 1980s and then took on new life in 2002 with passage
of the No Child Left Behind Law. It sought to use curriculum
guidelines and high-stakes testing to raise the level of academic
achievement in schools and to reduce the differences in achieve-
ment between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Third was
the school choice movement, which began as a political force
early in the 1990s. It aimed to break the public monopoly on ed-
ucation by empowering individual consumers, and by the early

2000s, it extended its scope by arguing that inner-city residents
should have the same school options that wealthy suburbanites
had always enjoyed.
WHAT SCHOOLS CAN’T DO AND WHAT THIS
BOOK WON’T DO
The history of American school reform helps us see what has
made reform so ineffective. Reformers have continually tried to
impose social missions on schools and then failed to accomplish
them, because consumers—the families who send children to
school—have had something entirely different in mind. Con-
sumers have wanted schools to allow them to accomplish goals
that are less noble socially but more resonant personally: to get
ahead and stay ahead. The school system, I argue, emerged as
the unintended consequence of these consumer preferences, ex-
pressed through the cumulative choices made by families trying to
fortify the future of their children through the medium of school-
ing. In short, the vision of education as a private good (formed
by the self-interested actions of individual consumers) has con-
sistently won out over education as a public good (formed by the
social aims of reform movements).
My argument is that schooling in America has emerged from
this history as a bad way to fix social problems but a good way
to express (if not realize) personal dreams. The problem is that
these dreams are deeply conflicted and thus the school system is
conflicted as well. We want it to meet the ambitions of our chil-
dren and also to protect them from the ambitions of other people’s
children. So schooling lets us have it both ways. The costs, how-
ever, are high. We find ourselves in harness to the system we cre-
ated, which continually spurs us on to greater academic effort
without ever letting us reach the finish line. After all, the only
way schooling can both let my child get ahead of yours and yours
stay ahead of mine is by constantly expanding the system upward,
which allows every increase in educational access to be followed
by an increase of educational advantage. Both parties in this com-

petition find their educational costs rising without being able to
change their relative position in the race. In this way, the system
really lets us have it, both ways.
That is what this book is about, but I also want to make clear
what it is not about. This book is not a guidebook for reformers
and policymakers. I’m not trying to reform schools or set educa-
tional policy; my approach is analytical rather than prescriptive.
I have no intention of providing answers for the reader about how
to fix schools or how to fix society. Instead of reforming schools,
my aim is to explore how the school system developed and how it
works, in its own peculiar way.
I am not touting the system or trashing it; I’m simply trying to
understand it. And in the process of developing an understanding
of this convoluted, dynamic, contradictory, and expensive system,
I hope to convey a certain degree of wonder and respect for it.
I have to admire how it does what we want it to do, even as it
shrugs off what we ask it to do. In its own way the system is ex-
traordinarily successful, not just because it is so huge and con-
tinues to grow so rapidly but because it stands at the heart of the
peculiarly American approach to promoting the public welfare.
As we will see, this approach emerged early in our history. Unlike
Europeans, who in the nineteenth century chose to promote so-
cial equality by constructing an elaborate welfare system, Ameri-
cans chose to provide social opportunity by constructing an elab-
orate school system. We’re still living with the consequences of
that choice.
PLAN OF THE BOOK
Chapter 1 examines the evolving social missions for education
promoted by American school reformers, from the common
school movement in the early nineteenth century to the standards
and choice movements in the early twenty-first century. In it I show
a shift from political to economic purposes, and a parallel shift
from schooling citizens to schooling consumers. Chapter 2 ex-
plains the founding of American schooling, looking at the colonial

approach to education, the emergence of the social crisis of the
early nineteenth century, and the invention of the common school
system in response to this crisis. Chapter 3 looks at the reshaping
of the school system in the progressive era, triggered by the social
crisis at the start of the twentieth century, when both reformers
and consumers saw schools, especially high schools, as the answer.
I conclude that the common school movement imposed an indeli-
ble stamp on the form, function, and rationale of the American
school system, but by the progressive era consumers were calling
the shots. By the 1920s all of the central elements of the American
system of schooling were locked in place.These were best exempli-
fied by the central educational invention of the period, the tracked
comprehensive high school, which opened its doors to all but also
carefully monitored the exits.
At this point in the book I turn from a historical account of
school reform to a structural analysis of why progressivism and
subsequent reforms were so ineffective in reforming schools, es-
pecially in changing the core of teaching and learning in class-
rooms. Chapter 4 focuses on one factor that has made reform dif-
ficult: the organization of the school system. It turns out that the
loose coupling of the various segments of the school system and
the weak control over instruction by school administrators have
buffered the classroom from reform efforts. Chapter 5 focuses on
another factor, the structure of teaching as a professional practice,
which has meant that teachers need to develop a personal style of
instruction that can motivate the learning of unwilling students in
the self-contained classroom. This in turn has made teachers un-
derstandably reluctant to alter their practice in response to de-
mands from reformers.
In the last part of the book I link the historical argument from
the first three chapters (the various efforts of school reformers to
solve social problems) with the structural argument in chapters 4
and 5 (the organizational arrangements and teaching practices that
have impeded these efforts). In Chapter 6, I explore the reasons for
the feeble ability of school reform to have a major impact on the

key social problems that reformers have stressed: to promote citi-
zenship, social equality, social mobility, and economic productiv-
ity. This discussion continues in Chapter 7, where I examine in
detail the most prominent American rationale for schooling and
school reform in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: to in-
crease the productive skills of the workforce and promote eco-
nomic growth. In the end, I argue, schools have turned out to be a
weak and inefficient economic investment, and the most useful
learning that students acquire in schools comes from doing school
rather than learning the curriculum. In Chapter 8 I pull these
pieces together, looking at why the school syndrome has persisted
in the United States, why the American school system has been so
resistant to reformers, and why consumers have trounced reform-
ers in the effort to shape school and society. In the end, the system
does what we want as consumers, even if it doesn’t do what we
ask as reformers, and that is a mixed blessing. As a result, we find
ourselves trapped on an educational treadmill of our own making,
running hard just to stay in place.

For better and for worse, the American system of education is truly
a marvel. Compared with other countries, public education in the
United States has been extraordinarily accessible. It emerged early,
expanded quickly, and then rapidly extended access to high school
and college. In the process, the United States claimed the distinc-
tion of having the first educational system in the world to attain
something approaching universal elementary schooling, universal
high school attendance, and mass higher education.
But the picture of American education is not all rosy. For one
thing, to call it a system at all is something of a contradiction in
terms, because it also has the distinction of being radically de-
centralized, with some 14,000 school districts responsible for set-
ting policy and running schools. And that’s before we take into
account the large and complex array of public and private col-
leges in the United States. Even though the educational role of
the federal government has been growing in the last several de-
cades, it is still hard to find any structure of education in the
world that is more independent of national control. In addition,
to applaud the American system of schooling for its great acces-
sibility is to recognize only half the story, since the system bal-
ances radical equality of access with radical inequality of out-
comes. Students have an easy time gaining entry to education in
FROM CITIZENS
TO CONSUMERS 1

F R O M C I T I Z E N S T O C O N S U M E R S 11
the United States, but—depending on what school they attend,
what program they take, and what degree they earn—they have
strikingly different educational experiences and gain strikingly dif-
ferent social benefits from their schooling. One other character-
istic of the American educational system further dims its luster,
and that is the chronically mediocre academic performance of its
students. In world comparisons over the last few decades, Ameri-
can elementary and secondary students have consistently scored
at a level that is below average.
In short, the American system of education is highly accessi-
ble, radically unequal, organizationally fragmented, and instruc-
tionally mediocre. In combination, these characteristics have pro-
vided a strong and continuing incentive for school reformers to try
to change the system, by launching reform movements that would
seek to broaden access, reduce inequality, transform governance,
and improve learning. But at the same time that these traits have
spurred reform efforts, they have also kept reformers from accom-
plishing their aims.
For example, every effort to expand access for new students
at a given level of the system has tended to provoke counter-efforts
to preserve the educational advantage of the old students. When
high school enrollment began to expand sharply at the start of the
twentieth century, the response was to establish curriculum track-
ing in the high school (with the new students ending up in the
lower tracks and the old students in the upper tracks) and to spur
the old students to extend their education to the college level. But
such efforts by some to preserve educational advantage by extend-
ing it to the next-higher level have in turn provoked counter-
measures by others to expand access at that level. So by the mid-
twentieth century, growing demand for college access brought a
flood of new students to higher education. But this just continued
the cycle of action and reaction, since the new students largely
enrolled in new institutions that were set up to handle the influx—
regional state universities and community colleges—while the old

students enrolled at the established higher status institutions and
then started attending graduate school in large numbers.
Another impediment to reform is the local autonomy of dis-
tricts, schools, and classrooms in the American educational sys-
tem, which has made it hard for reform initiatives to reach the
heart of the system where teaching and learning take place, and
particularly hard to implement reforms that improve classroom
learning. Aggravating this tendency has been one additional char-
acteristic of the system, which is that most educational consum-
ers have shown preference for a school system that provides an
edge in the competition for jobs more than for one that enriches
academic achievement. We have continually demonstrated inter-
est more in getting a diploma than getting an education.
Undaunted by all these impediments, educational reformers
have continually tried to change the school system in order to
bring it in line with emerging social goals. In this chapter, I look at
the goals that reform movements have projected onto the Ameri-
can school system over the years. Here I’m focusing not on the
impact of reform but on its rhetoric. As found in major reform
documents, the shifting language of reform shows how the mis-
sion of the school system evolved over time, as reformers repeat-
edly tried to push the system to embrace new goals and refine old
ones in an effort to deal with an expanding array of social chal-
lenges. After defining the trajectory of reformer wishes for the
schools in this chapter, I then look at the depth of reform out-
comes for the schools. In chapters 2 and 3 I show how the com-
mon school movement created the American school system in the
nineteenth century and how the progressive movement sought to
transform it at the start of the twentieth century. Then, in suc-
ceeding chapters, I examine why the impact of reform move-
ments has only rarely extended beyond the level of rhetoric. But
for now my focus is on the way ideas about schools developed
across an array of major reform movements in the history of
American education.

SHIFTING THE FOCUS OF SCHOOLING FROM CITIZENS
TO CONSUMERS
This is a story about the evolving language of educational re-
form in the United States. It starts in the early nineteenth century
with a republican vision of education for civic virtue and ends in
the early twenty-first century with a consumerist vision of edu-
cation for equal opportunity. The story is about how we got from
there to here, drawing on major reform texts that span this pe-
riod. It is also a story about how we developed the ideas about
education that laid the groundwork for the American school
syndrome.
This rhetorical change consisted of two main shifts, each of
which occurred at two levels. First, the overall balance in the pur-
poses of schooling shifted from a political rationale (shoring up
the new republic) to a market rationale (promoting social effi-
ciency and social mobility).And the political rationale itself evolved
from a substantive vision of education for civic virtue to a proce-
dural vision of education for equal opportunity. Second, in a
closely related change, the reform rhetoric shifted from viewing
education as a public good to viewing it as a private good. And
the understanding of education as a public good itself evolved
from a politically grounded definition (education for republican
community) to a market-grounded definition (education for hu-
man capital).
I explore these changes through an examination of a series of
reform documents that represent the major reform movements in
the history of American education.These include: Horace Mann’s
Fifth and Twelfth Annual Reports as Secretary of the Massachu-
setts Board of Public Education (1841 and 1848), reflecting the
common school movement; the Report of the Committee of Ten
on Secondary School Studies, appointed by the National Educa-
tion Association (1893), a document that served as a foil for the
progressive movement; The Cardinal Principles of Secondary
Education, a report of the National Education Association’s (NEA)

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education
(1918), which laid out the agenda for the dominant strand of the
progressive movement; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (1954), the core text of the
desegregation movement; A Nation at Risk, report of the Na-
tional Commission on Excellence in Education (1983), which
kicked off the standards movement; the No Child Left Behind
Act (2002), which made the movement federal law; and two
major books from the school choice movement.1
The evolution of educational rhetoric in the United States fits
within a larger, cross-national pattern in the evolving republican
conversation about schooling. Republican ideas played a foun-
dational role in the formation of public education in a number
of countries during the long nineteenth century, and stretching
from the American Revolution to the Great Depression.Although
this role varied from one context to another, the republican vi-
sion in general called for a system of education that would shape
the kind of self-regulating and civic-minded citizen that was
needed to sustain a viable republican community. That system
was the modern public school. At the heart of its mission was the
delicate and critical task of balancing two elements at the core of
republican thinking—the autonomous individual and the com-
mon good. The primary contribution of the school was its ability
to instill a vision of the republic within future citizens in a way
that promoted individual choice while inducing them to pursue
the public interest of their own free will. This effort posed twin
dangers: too much emphasis on individual interests could turn
republican community into a pluralist society defined by the com-
petition of private interests; but too much emphasis on community
could turn the republic into an authoritarian society that sacrificed
individual freedom to collective interests. A liberal republican soci-
ety requires an educational system that can instill a commitment to
both individual liberty and civic virtue.
As I show below, over time the rhetoric of education in the
United States shifted from a political vision of a civic-minded

citizen to a market vision of a self-interested consumer. But the
idea of republican community did not disappear from the educa-
tional mission. Instead the political goal of education shifted from
producing civic virtue in the service of the republic to producing
human capital and individual opportunity. The end result, how-
ever, was to redirect the republican vision of education sharply in
the direction of private interests and individual opportunities.
COMPETING SOCIAL GOALS FOR SCHOOLING
A major factor in the transformation of reform rhetoric was the
market. While a number of reform efforts—the common school
movement, the progressive movement, the civil rights movement,
the standards movement, and the school choice movement—
occupied center stage in the drama of school reform, the market
initially exerted its impact from a position off stage. Over time,
however, the market gradually muscled its way into the educa-
tional spotlight, shaping both the structure of the school system
(by emphasizing inequality and discounting learning) and, more
recently, the rhetoric of school reform (by emphasizing job skills
and individual opportunity). In the current period, when the mar-
ket vision has come to drive the educational agenda, the political
vision of education’s social role remains prominent as an actor
in the reform drama, frequently called upon by reformers of all
stripes. (I examine here the way the standards and choice move-
ments both belatedly adopted political rhetoric after originally
trying to do without it.) But the definition of this political vision
has become more abstract, its deployment more adaptable, and
its impact more diffuse than in the early nineteenth century, when
a well-defined set of republican ideals drove the creation of the
American system of common schools.
The American language of educational goals arises from the
core tensions within a liberal democracy.2
One of those tensions
is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands
of capitalist markets. A related issue is the requirement that so-
ciety be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously

guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own inter-
ests. In the American setting, these tensions have played out
through the politics of education in the form of a struggle among
three major social goals for the educational system. One goal is
democratic equality, which sees education as a mechanism for
producing capable citizens. Another is social efficiency, which
sees education as a mechanism for developing productive work-
ers. A third is social mobility, which sees education as a way for
individuals to reinforce or improve their social position.
Democratic equality represents the political side of our liberal
democratic values, focusing on the role of education in building
a nation, forming a republican community, and providing citizens
with the wide range of capabilities they need to make decisions
in a democracy. The other two goals represent the market side
of liberal democracy. Social efficiency captures the perspective of
employers and taxpayers, who are concerned about the role of
education in producing the job skills required by the modern econ-
omy (human capital) and seen as essential for economic growth
and general prosperity. From this angle the issue is for education to
provide for the full range of productive skills and forms of knowl-
edge required in the complex job structure of modern capitalism.
Social mobility captures the perspective of educational consumers
and prospective employees, who are concerned about the role of
educational credentials in signaling to the market which individu-
als have the productive skills that qualify them for the jobs with
the most power, money, and prestige.
The collectivist side of liberal democracy is expressed by a
combination of democratic equality and social efficiency. Both
aim to have education provide broad social benefits, and both see
education as a public good. Investing in the political capital of citi-
zens and the human capital of workers benefits everyone in soci-
ety, including those families that do not have children in school. In
contrast, the social mobility goal represents the individualist side
of liberal democracy. From this perspective, education is a private

good that benefits only the student who receives educational ser-
vices and owns the resulting diplomas, and its primary function
is to provide educational consumers with an edge in the compe-
tition for good jobs.
With this mix of goals imposed on it, education in a liberal
democracy has come to be an institution at odds with itself. After
all, it is being asked simultaneously to serve politics and markets,
promote equality and inequality, construct itself and, as a public
and private good, serve collective interests and individual inter-
ests. Politically, its structure should be flat, its curriculum com-
mon, and enrollment universal; economically, its structure should
be hierarchical, its curriculum tracked, and enrollment marked by
high rates of attrition. From the perspective of democratic equal-
ity and social efficiency, its aim is socialization, to provide knowl-
edge that is useful for citizens and workers; from the perspective
of social mobility, its aim is selection, to provide credentials that
allow access to good jobs, independent of any learning that might
have occurred along the way.
These educational goals represent the contradictions embed-
ded in any liberal democracy, contradictions that cannot be re-
solved without removing either the society’s liberalism or its de-
mocracy. Therefore, when we project our liberal democratic goals
onto schools, we want schools to take each of these goals seri-
ously but not to push any one of them too far, since to do so
would put other, equally valued goals in jeopardy. We ask it to
promote social equality, but we want it to do so in a way that
doesn’t threaten individual liberty or private interests. We ask it
to promote individual opportunity, but we want it to do so in a
way that doesn’t threaten the integrity of the nation or the effi-
ciency of the economy. As a result, the educational system is an
abject failure in achieving any one of its primary social goals. It is
also a failure in solving the social problems assigned to it, since
these problems cannot be solved in a way that simultaneously
satisfies all three goals. The apparently dysfunctional outcomes

of the school system, therefore, are not necessarily the result of
bad planning, bad administration, or bad teaching; they are an
expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind.
THE COMMON SCHOOL MOVEMENT: SCHOOLS
FOR THE REPUBLIC
As secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Public Education in
the 1840s, Horace Mann became the most effective champion of
the American common school movement, which established the
American public school system in the years before the Civil War.
As we will see in the following chapter, its primary accomplish-
ment was not in increasing literacy, which was already wide-
spread in the United States, but in drawing public support for a
publicly funded and publicly controlled system of schooling that
served all the members of the community.
Mann’s Twelfth Annual Report, published in 1848, provides
the most comprehensive summary of the argument for the com-
mon schools. In it he made clear that the primary rationale for this
institution was political: to create citizens with the knowledge,
skills, and public spirit required to maintain a republic and to
protect it from the sources of faction, class, and self-interest that
pose the primary threat to its existence. After exploring the dan-
gers that the rapidly expanding market economy posed to the
fabric of republican community by introducing class conflict, he
proclaimed:
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the
great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the
social machinery. . . . The spread of education, by enlarging the culti-
vated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social
feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and
complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate facti-
tious distinctions in society.3
A few pages later, he summed up his argument with the famous
statement, “It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is

a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the re-
public that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, self-
ishness, and passion.”4
In his view, then, schools were given the
centrally important political task of making citizens for a repub-
lic. All other functions were subordinate to this one.
In the political rhetoric of the common school movement, we
can also see some other themes with a more economic flavor that
will become the centerpiece of later reform movements. One is
the importance of education in reducing social differences by
enhancing social opportunities for all, as shown in the passage
above. Another is the value of education as an investment in hu-
man capital. Mann devoted part of his Fifth Annual Report (is-
sued in 1841) to the latter issue, where he drew on his survey of
manufacturers to demonstrate that, “If it can be proved that the
aggregate wealth of a town will be increased just in proportion to
the increase of its appropriations for schools, the opponents of
such a measure will be silenced. The tax for this purpose, which
they now look upon as a burden, they will then regard as a profit-
able investment.”5
Yet his defense of the human capital rationale for schooling
is backhanded at best. He was a little embarrassed to be talking
about the crass economic returns on education, as he explained
in his introduction to this discussion: “This view, so far from be-
ing the highest which can be taken of the beneficent influences
of education, may, perhaps, be justly regarded as the lowest. But
it is a palpable view.”6
Thus economic arguments are useful in
drawing needed support to the common schools, but they play
merely a supporting role in the “higher and nobler” mission of
supporting republican community. Only in the twentieth century
would such economic arguments take center stage.
EMERGING CONSUMERISM: SCHOOLS
FOR SOCIAL MOBILITY
If Horace Mann and the other leaders of the common school move-
ment were reluctant to portray education as a way to promote

worldly gain, the students and parents who pursued education
were less so. Compelled by the need to survive and the ambition
to thrive in a market economy, citizens quickly began to think
of education as something more than a politically desirable way
to preserve the republic; they also saw it as a way to get ahead in
society. As we will see in the next chapter, reading, writing, and
the manipulation of numbers were essential for anyone who
wanted to function effectively in the commercial life of the colo-
nial and early national periods of American history. Individuals
did not need republican theory or compulsory schooling laws to
make them pick up these skills, which is one reason why literacy
was a precursor rather than an outcome of the common school
movement in the United States.
But this compelling rationale for education—schooling for
social mobility—was not something that appeared prominently
in the rhetoric of school reform until well into the twentieth cen-
tury. One reason for this silence was that the idea of education as
a way to get ahead was a matter of common sense in a society
that was founded in market relations. It was not the subject of
reform rhetoric because this idea was already widely accepted.
Another reason was that people felt a bit embarrassed about voic-
ing such a self-interested motive for education in the face of the
selfless religious and political rationales for education that domi-
nated public discussion in the American colonies and the early
United States. But the absence of such talk did not belie the reality
that commercial motives for schooling were strong.
This relative silence about an important factor shaping educa-
tion resonates with an important paradox in the history of school
reform identified by David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in their book
Tinkering toward Utopia.7
Reform rhetoric swirls around the sur-
face of schools, making a lot of noise but not necessarily penetrat-
ing below the surface; while evolutionary forces of structural
change may be proceeding powerfully but slowly outside of view,
making substantial changes over time without ever necessarily be-
ing verbalized or becoming part of a reform agenda.

The story I am telling in this chapter is about the interaction
between these two levels—the changing rhetoric of educational
reform in the United States over the past two hundred years and
its relationship with the quiet but increasingly potent impact of
market forces on American schools. I suggest that the rhetorical
shifts in subsequent school reform movements were attempts to
reach an accommodation between economy and society through
the institution of education, which turned increasingly critical as
education itself became more economically useful to both employ-
ers and employees in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In The Making of an American High School,8
I explored the
way in which educational consumerism emerged as an unintended
consequence of the invention of the public high school in the
nineteenth century. Central High School was founded in Phila-
delphia in 1838 for the most whiggish of reasons. Its founders
liked to call it “the school of the republic,” and they saw it as an
effective way to encourage middle-class families to send their
children to the new common schools, thus making these schools
a true embodiment of republican community. But in order to
make the high school sufficiently attractive to draw (male) stu-
dents from the best private schools, they inadvertently created a
highly marketable commodity—with a marble facade, the latest
scientific equipment, and a faculty of distinguished professors—
which became the object of intense competition among educa-
tional consumers.
The new high school introduced a form of educational dis-
tinction that was highly visible (Central was the only school of
its kind in a large city), culturally legitimate (it was open to any-
one who could meet its academic standards), and scarce (it of-
fered a degree to only one in a hundred of the students entering
the school system). These characteristics made a Central diploma
quite valuable as a way for students to distinguish themselves
from peers, even though at the time the job market was not exert-
ing demand for the skills acquired in a secondary education. But
by the 1890s, when growing clerical and managerial jobs created

a market for high school graduates, the enormous political de-
mand for access forced the school system to expand from two
high schools (Central and its female counterpart) to a whole sys-
tem of community high schools throughout the city. The new-
comers ended up in the lower tracks of the newly expanded high
school while the students from the high school’s older, middle-
class constituency ended up in the upper tracks, which helped
accommodate both access and advantage in the same school. The
resulting institution—the tracked comprehensive high school—
served as the model for secondary education for the next one
hundred years.
COMMITTEE OF TEN: COMMONALITY
WITHOUT CITIZENSHIP
In 1893, at the same time that consumer pressure was starting to
transform secondary education in Philadelphia and elsewhere,
a committee proposed to the National Educational Association
(NEA) a new structure for the high school curriculum. The Com-
mittee of Ten on Secondary School Studies was made up of six
professors, three high school principals, and the U.S. Commis-
sioner of Education; Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard,
served as chair. The committee’s report is interesting less for its
impact, which was minimal, than for its iconic status in later edu-
cational debates. It occupied a transitional position, as the final
attenuated expression of the common school movement, poised to
be swept away by the emerging progressive movement. The pro-
gressives dismissed the report with scorn, calling it the last gasp
of a discredited vision of traditional academic schooling pushed
on the schools by a group of self-interested college professors.
Contemporary critics of progressivism—like Diane Ravitch,
David Angus, and Jeffrey Mirel9
—see the report as the road not
taken, which would have saved us from the ravages of progres-
sive reform and which in some ways was resurrected and re-
affirmed by the standards movement in the late twentieth century.

For our purposes, I will focus on what is usually seen as the
main issue in a very long report, the committee’s insistence that
the high school curriculum should be quite similar in length and
content for all students, whether or not they were heading to col-
lege. There is much about this argument that is resonant with the
common school reformers, but the rhetorical representation of the
argument is markedly different. The report stated that “every sub-
ject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught
in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long
as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the
pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease.”10
This proposal would have resonated with Horace Mann and
the other members of the common school movement, since it
would preserve the republican practice of education as an expe-
rience shared by the whole community. Schooling should supply
citizens with a common set of abilities they need to engage in
political life, and it should offset the differentiating tendencies in
the market economy with an emphasis on building republican
community. Both argue for a common curriculum. But as we have
seen, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the market was driving the
high school curriculum in the other direction, differentiating cur-
riculum choices and school experiences according to a student’s
class background and future prospects. In many ways this report
can be read—as Ravitch, Angus, and Mirel do—as a cry for pre-
serving a common education at just the point that the institution
was moving sharply toward class-based tracking.
But what a muted cry it was. Gone is the grandiloquent lan-
guage of Horace Mann, the appeals to the high-level political val-
ues, the passionate vision of education as the savior of society. In
a report of nearly 19,000 words, there is not a single use of terms
like “citizen,”“republic,” or “democracy.” Replacing republican
rhetoric is the cautious, circumscribed, bureaucratic language of
a committee of professional educators. In the fifty years since
Horace Mann wrote, the common school system he promoted

had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It had become the
standard model for American education, defining what future
generations would come to see as the “grammar of schooling.”11
It had expanded from elementary to grammar to high school. And
it had generated a professional corps of teachers and administra-
tors and college professors who saw their work as a professional
practice rather than a political vocation.
And so the committee used a coolly professional rhetoric, nar-
rowly confined to the issues at hand, sticking strictly to the busi-
ness of schooling. This made the report appropriate to its audi-
ence of educators in the NEA, but it left the committee’s proposals
without a solid political grounding in the surrounding society. If it
is not for the benefit of building republican community, then why
should high schools have a core curriculum? The report does not
really answer this question, except for a feeble wave in the direc-
tion of efficiency: “The principle laid down by the Conferences
will, if logically carried out, make a great simplification in sec-
ondary school programmes.”12
In the absence of solid grounding,
the committee allowed the progressives to attribute its recom-
mendations to a conservative desire to preserve traditional school
subjects and to impose the requirements of an antiquated college
curriculum on the modern high school.
ADMINISTRATIVE PROGRESSIVISM: SCHOOLS
FOR SOCIAL EFFICIENCY
The progressive education movement burst on the scene in the
United States at the start of the twentieth century. It was a com-
plex movement with a wide range of actors and tendencies em-
bedded within it, but two main strands in particular stand out.
Child-centered progressives (such as John Dewey and William
Kilpatrick) focused on teaching and learning in classrooms, ad-
vocating child-centered pedagogy, discovery learning, and stu-
dent engagement. Administrative progressives (such as Edward
Thorndike, Ellwood Cubberley, and David Snedden) focused on

the structure of school governance and curriculum, advocating
a mission of social efficiency for schools, which meant prepar-
ing students for their future social roles. I focus on administra-
tive progressivism here for the simple reason that they won and
the pedagogues lost in the competition over exerting an impact
on American schools.13
In 1918, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education (chaired by Clarence Kingsley) issued a report to the
NEA titled Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which
spelled out the administrative progressive position on education
more clearly and consequentially than any other single document.
The report announces at the very beginning that secondary schools
need to change in response to changes in society, which “call for a
degree of intelligence and efficiency on the part of every citizen that
can not be secured through elementary education alone, or even
through secondary education unless the scope of that education is
broadened.”14
According to the authors, schools exist to help indi-
viduals adapt to the needs of society; as society becomes more
complex, schools must transform themselves accordingly; and in
this way they will help citizens develop the socially needed quali-
ties of “intelligence and efficiency.”
This focus on social efficiency, however, didn’t deter the au-
thors from drawing on political rhetoric to support their posi-
tion. In fact, perhaps reacting to the Committee of Ten, or learn-
ing from its failure to have a lasting impact on schooling, the
authors framed this report in explicitly political terms. In a 12,000-
word report, they used the terms “democracy” or “democratic” no
fewer than 40 times, an average of 1.5 usages per page; the terms
“citizen” or “citizenship” appear 16 times. (The words “republic”
and “republican” are nowhere to be found.)
What do they mean by democratic education? At one point,
in bold-faced type, they state that“education in a democracy, both
within and without the school, should develop in each individual
the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he

will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and
society toward ever nobler ends.”15
So democracy is about orga-
nizing individuals for the benefit of society, and education is about
readying individuals to assume their proper place in that society.
This is as crisp a definition as you can find for socially efficient
education.
The commission follows up on this statement of principles to
spell out the implications for the high school curriculum: “This
commission, therefore, regards the following as the main objec-
tives of education: 1. Health. 2. Command of fundamental pro-
cesses. 3. Worthy home membership. 4. Vocation. 5. Citizenship.
6. Worthy use of leisure. 7. Ethical character.”16
What a striking
array of goals for education this is. In comparison with Horace
Mann’s grand vision of schooling for the republic, we have a list
of useful functions that schools can serve for society, only one of
which focuses on citizenship. Furthermore, this list confines the
rich array of liberal arts subjects, which constituted the entire
curriculum proposed by the Committee of Ten, to a single cate-
gory; the authors give it the dumbed-down and dismissive title,
“command of fundamental processes”; and they assign it a par-
allel position with such mundane educational objectives as
“worthy home membership” and “worthy use of leisure.”
Later in the report, the commission spelled out an important
implication of their vision of secondary education. Not only
must the curriculum be expanded radically beyond the academic
confines of the Committee of Ten’s vision, but it must also be
sharply differentiated if it is going to meet the needs of a differ-
entiated job structure:
The work of the senior high school should be organized into dif-
ferentiated curriculums. . . . The basis of differentiation should
be, in the broad sense of the term, vocational, thus justifying the
names commonly given, such as agricultural, business, clerical, in-
dustrial, fine-arts, and household-arts curriculums. Provision should
be made also for those having distinctively academic interests and
needs.17

The commissioners are explaining that their call for a socially
efficient education in practice means vocationalism, with the vo-
cational skills required by the job market driving the curriculum
and slicing it into segments based on the specific jobs toward
which students are heading. Any leftover space in the curriculum
could then be used for “those having distinctively academic inter-
ests and needs.”
This report, the keystone of the administrative progressive
movement, represents two major transformations in the rhetoric
of the common school movement. First, whereas Mann’s reports
used economic arguments to support a primarily political purpose
for schooling (preparing citizens with civic virtue), the Commis-
sion’s report turned this upside down, using political arguments
about the requirements of democracy to support a vision of school-
ing that was primarily economic (preparing efficient workers). The
politics of the Cardinal Principles thus provides a thin democratic
veneer on a structure of socially efficient education, dressing up
what would otherwise be a starkly utilitarian vision.
Second, in Cardinal Principles the administrative progressives
preserved the common school movement’s understanding of
education as a public good. There is no talk in the report about
education as a kind of personal property, which offers selective
benefits to the credential holder; instead, the emphasis is relent-
lessly on the collective benefits of education to society. What is
new, however, is this: Whereas the common school men defined
education as a public good in political terms, the progressives
defined it a public good in economic terms. Yes, education serves
the interests of society as a whole, said these progressives; but it
does so not by producing civic virtue but by producing human
capital.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: SCHOOLS
FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
If the administrative progressive movement marginalized the
political argument for education, using it as window-dressing for

a vision of education as a way to create productive workers,
the civil rights movement brought politics back to the center of
the debate about schools. In the 1954 decision of the U.S. Su-
preme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,18
Chief
Justice Earl Warren, speaking for a unanimous Court, made a
forceful political argument for the need to desegregate Ameri-
can schools. The question he was addressing was whether to
overturn the Court’s doctrine of “separate but equal,” estab-
lished in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1894, as a violation of the clause
in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (passed at
the end of the Civil War) that guaranteed all citizens the “equal
protection of the laws.” In past cases, the Court was able to
duck the question by ordering school systems to equalize the
funding of black and white schools. But in this case, “the Negro
and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being
equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications
and salaries of teachers, and other ‘tangible’ factors,” which
forced the Court to address the central issue: “We come then to
the question presented: Does segregation of children in public
schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical fa-
cilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the
children of the minority group of equal educational opportuni-
ties? We believe that it does.”
The Court’s reasoning moved through two main steps in reach-
ing this conclusion. First, Warren argued that the social meaning
of education had changed dramatically in the ninety years since
the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the years after the
Civil War, “The curriculum was usually rudimentary; ungraded
schools were common in rural areas; the school term was but three
months a year in many states, and compulsory school attendance
was virtually unknown.” As a result, education was not seen as an
essential right of any citizen; but that had now changed.
Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state
and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and

the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recog-
nition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It
is required in the performance of our most basic public responsi-
bilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of
good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening
the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional
training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environ-
ment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be
expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an edu-
cation. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to
provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal
terms.
This led to the second part of the argument. If education “is
a right which must be made available to all on equal terms,”
then the question was whether segregated education could be
seen as providing truly equal educational opportunity for black
and white students. Here Warren drew on social science research
to argue that “To separate [black students] from others of simi-
lar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates
a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that
may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be
undone.” He continued by quoting from a finding by a lower
court in the case: “Segregation with the sanction of law, there-
fore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental de-
velopment of negro children and to deprive them of some of
the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school
system.”
In combination, these two arguments—education is an essen-
tial right and segregated education is inherently harmful—led
Warren to his conclusion: “We conclude that, in the field of pub-
lic education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.
Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore,
we hold that the plaintiffs . . . are, by reason of the segregation
complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws
guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The argument in this decision was at heart political, asserting
that education is a constitutional right of every citizen that must
be granted to everyone on equal terms. In this sense, it was a strik-
ing change from the Cardinal Principles report, which used the
words“democracy”and“citizenship”to support an argument that
was at heart economic. But note that the political vision in Brown
is quite different from the political vision put forward by Mann.
For the common school movement, schools were critically im-
portant in the effort to build a republic; their purpose was politi-
cal. But for the desegregation movement, schools were critically
important as a mechanism of social opportunity. Their purpose
was to promote social mobility. Politics was just the means by
which one could demand access to this attractive educational
commodity. In this sense, then, Brown depicted education as a
private good, whose benefits go to the degree holder and not to
society as a whole. The Court’s argument was not that granting
access to equal education for blacks would enhance society, both
black and white; instead, it argued that blacks were suffering from
segregation and would benefit from desegregation. Quality educa-
tion was an important form of property that they had been de-
nied, and the remedy was to give them access to it.
Note the language of the decision: “In these days, it is doubt-
ful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life
if he is denied the opportunity of an education.” Schools enable
individuals to succeed in life, and politically we cannot deny
them this opportunity. This is an argument that shows how much
schools had come of age more than one hundred years after
Horace Mann. Once created to support the republic, in a time
when schools were marginal to the practical business of making a
living, they had become central to every citizen’s ability to get a
good job and get ahead socially. In the process, however, the po-
litical vision of education has changed from a substantive focus
on producing the citizens needed to sustain the republic to a
procedural focus on providing social opportunities. The idea of

education as opportunity was already visible in Mann, but it was
subordinated to the political project; here educational opportu-
nity has become the project, and politics has become the way to
assert your right to it.
THE STANDARDS MOVEMENT 1.0: SOCIAL EFFICIENCY
AND COMMONALITY
In 1983, the National Commission for Excellence in Education
produced a report titled A Nation at Risk, which helped turn the
emerging standards effort into a national reform movement. It is
useful to think of this movement in relation to its predecessors,
both in the way it drew from them and the way it reacted against
them. From the Committee of Ten the standards movement drew
the idea of a core academic curriculum for all students, which in
turn stood as a harsh rebuke to the diffuse, differentiated, and
nonacademic curriculum posed by Cardinal Principles; yet A
Nation at Risk also shows a clear affinity with Cardinal Princi-
ples by defining the primary purpose of education as social effi-
ciency. At the same time, the standards movement’s emphasis
on academic content and learning outcomes served as a counter
to the civil rights movement, which focused primarily on access
to educational opportunity rather than on the substance of learn-
ing; and its stress on education as a public good contrasted with
Brown’s emphasis on education as a form of individual benefit.
The report got off to a fast start, issuing a dire warning about
how bad things were and how important it was to reform the
educational system.
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in com-
merce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being over-
taken by competitors throughout the world. . . . We report to the
American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our
schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed
to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational
foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide

of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a
people.19
This passage set the tone for the rest of the report. It asserted a
vision of education as an intensely public good: All Americans
benefit from its successes, and all are threatened by its failures.
The nation is at risk. This was in striking contrast with the vision
of education in the Brown decision, which depicted education as
a private good, one that was critically important to the possibility
of social success for every individual. In that view, it was black
educational consumers who were at risk from segregation, not the
nation.
But the report represented education as a particular type of
public good, which benefited American society by giving it the
human capital it needed in order to be economically competitive
with other nations.
We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated
competitors. We compete with them for international standing and
markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our labora-
tories and neighborhood workshops. America’s position in the world
may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally
well-trained men and women. It is no longer.20
The risk to the nation posed here was primarily economic, and
the main role that education could play in alleviating this risk was
to develop a more efficient mechanism for turning students into
productive workers. In parallel with the argument in Cardinal
Principles, A Nation at Risk asserted that the issue of wealth
production—which Horace Mann saw as one of the “inferior mo-
tives” for supporting public education—was the most important
motive in seeking higher educational standards.
The report’s first three recommendations spelled out the core
substance of the changes at the top of the priority list for the
standards movement. Under the heading “Content,” the commis-
sion recommended “that State and local high school graduation

requirements be strengthened and that, at a minimum, all stu-
dents seeking a diploma be required to lay the foundations in the
Five New Basics,” which included three to four years of English,
math, science, and social studies, plus some work in computer
science.21
Under the heading “Standards and Expectations,” the
commission recommended “more rigorous and measurable stan-
dards, and higher expectations, for academic performance and
student content.” In particular, this meant that “Standardized tests
of achievement (not to be confused with aptitude tests) should be
administered at major transition points from one level of schooling
to another and particularly from high school to college or work.”22
Under the heading “Time,” the commission recommended “that
significantly more time be devoted to learning the New Basics.
This will require more effective use of the existing school day, a
longer school day, or a lengthened school year.”23
In stressing the need to refocus attention on a core academic
curriculum for all students, A Nation at Risk stood as a rebuke
to the differentiated and vocationalized curriculum of the Cardi-
nal Principles and a bow in the direction of the Committee of
Ten, but it embraced the Principles’ vision of education for so-
cial efficiency. It used a modest form of political rhetoric to sup-
port the standards effort (using some version of “citizen” eigh-
teen times and “democracy” two times in a nearly 18,000-word
report, and including one quote from Jefferson), but the empha-
sis here was on education as a way to produce the human capital
rather than Brown’s emphasis on education as a way to promote
individual opportunity. And by focusing on student learning rather
than student access, it also represented a turn away from the equal
opportunity concerns of the Brown decision.
SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENT 1.0: CONSUMERISM
AND SOCIAL EFFICIENCY
The school choice movement had its roots in Milton Friedman,
who devoted a chapter to the subject in his 1962 book, Capitalism

and Freedom. But the movement really took off as a significant
reform effort in the 1990s, and a major text that shaped the policy
discourse of these movement was a book by John Chubb and Terry
Moe—Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools—which was pub-
lished by the Brookings Institution in 1990. The argument they
raised in favor of school choice consisted of two key elements.
First, they used the scholarly literature on school effectiveness to
argue that schools are most effective at promoting student learn-
ing if they have the greatest degree of autonomy in administration,
teaching, and curriculum. Second, they argued that democratic
governance of school systems necessarily leads to bureaucratic
control of schools, which radically limits autonomy; whereas
market-based governance, based on empowering educational con-
sumers instead of empowering the state, leads to more school au-
tonomy. As a result, they concluded, we need to shift from demo-
cratic to market control of schooling in order to make schools
more educationally effective.
Like the standards movement, the choice movement inverted
the rhetorical priorities of the common school movement, put-
ting markets before politics. But the approach was more radi-
cally pro-market than the one proposed in A Nation at Risk,
because Chubb and Moe argued that democratic politics was in
fact the reason that schools performed badly, and the remedy was
to remove schools from democratic control and hand them over
to educational consumers: “Our guiding principle in the design
of a choice system is this: public authority must be put to use in
creating a system that is almost entirely beyond the reach of pub-
lic authority.”24
Markets, they argued, are simply more efficient
at promoting the school autonomy needed for effective teaching
and learning: “In a market setting, then, there are strong forces at
work—arising from the technical, administrative, and consumer-
satisfaction requirements of organizational success—that pro-
mote school autonomy.” By contrast, “In the public sector, the
institutional forces work in the opposite direction. The raison

d’être of democratic control is to impose higher order values on
schools, and thus limit their autonomy.”25
The authors welcomed the fact that, by shifting control from a
democratic polity to the educational consumer, the proposed
school choice system would change education from a public good
to a private good.
Under a system of democratic control, the public schools are gov-
erned by an enormous, far-flung constituency in which the interests
of parents and students carry no special status or weight. When mar-
kets prevail, parents and students are thrust onto center stage, along
with the owners and staff of schools; most of the rest of society plays
a distinctly secondary role, limited for the most part to setting the
framework within which educational choices get made.26
In this way, then, the rhetoric of the school choice movement
at the close of the twentieth century represented the opposite
end of the scale from the rhetoric of the common school move-
ment that set in motion the American public school system in the
middle of the nineteenth century. In educational reform rhetoric,
we have moved all the way from a political rationale for educa-
tion to a market rationale, and from seeing education as a public
good to seeing it as a private good. Instead of extolling the ben-
efits of having a common school system promote a single, virtu-
ous republican community, reformers were extolling the benefits
of having an atomized school system serve the differential needs
of a vast array of disparate consumer subcultures.
STANDARDS 2.0: BROADENING THE BASE WITH
A POLITICAL APPEAL TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
The start of the twenty-first century saw an interesting shift in
the rhetoric of the standards movement and the choice move-
ment, as both incorporated the language of equal opportunity
from the civil rights movement. Whether these changes repre-
sented a change of heart or merely change of strategy is beyond

the scope of my discussion here. My focus in this chapter is on
the changing rhetoric of reform, and in both cases the change
helped broaden the appeal of the reform effort by expanding the
reasons for joining the movement. In their original form, both
movements ran into significant limitations in their ability to
draw support, and both turned to a very effective political argu-
ment from the civil rights movement to add passion and breadth
to their mode of appeal.
A Nation at Risk made a strong case for supporting educa-
tional standards and accountability on the grounds of social
efficiency. Although this approach was necessary and effective in
encouraging governors and legislators to pass enabling legisla-
tion at the state level (by asserting that schooling is a sound public
investment), it was not sufficient to gain the support of Congress
and the general public for a national standards initiative. Talking
about education as an investment in human capital made the re-
form sound sensible and prudent as a matter of social policy, but
it was difficult to get people excited about this effort. Not for
nothing is economics known as the dismal science, and the eco-
nomic rationale for education was not very inspiring at the grass-
roots level.
In addition, by assigning schools the task of increasing the
stock of human capital, the standards movement was treating
schooling as a public good, and like any other public good, this
left education with what economists call a free-rider problem.
Since we all gain benefits from a public good (like public safety
or clean air) whether or not we directly contribute to it, it is diffi-
cult to maintain such goods on a voluntary basis. Individuals may
choose to invest in a variety of other projects that bring them a
direct personal return as long as they can get a free ride on the col-
lective benefits of schooling.
One way to gain support for a public good is through a uni-
versal mandate such as taxation; another is to appeal for support
on idealistic grounds. For educational reformers a political ap-
peal can help turn free riders into active supporters, but A Nation

at Risk made a political appeal in a manner that was limited and
not terribly effective. Its main approach was to depict the conse-
quences of educational failure as a threat to the viability of the
United States as a nation in global competition; thus the apoca-
lyptic language in the report’s opening passages. However, the
threats posed by “the rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our
very future as a Nation and a people” would have felt rather re-
mote to the average citizen and congressperson. Both the first
President Bush and President Clinton used this strategy in trying
to launch a national standards policy, and both failed. However,
in January 2002, the second President Bush signed into law a
wide-reaching piece of standards legislation passed with broad
bipartisan support.
The title of this law explains the rhetorical shift involved in
gaining approval for it: The No Child Left Behind Act.27
Listen
to the language in the opening section of this act, which consti-
tutes the most powerful accomplishment of the school stan-
dards movement: “The purpose of this title is to ensure that all
children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain
a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency
on challenging State academic achievement standards and state
academic assessments.” This end would be accomplished by
aligning education “with challenging State academic standards,”
“meeting the educational needs of low-achieving children in our
Nation’s highest-poverty schools,”“closing the achievement gap
between high- and low-performing children,” “holding schools
accountable for improving the academic achievement of all stu-
dents,” “targeting . . . schools where needs are greatest,” and
“using State assessment systems designed to ensure that students
are meeting challenging State academic achievement and content
standards.”
What we find here is a marriage of the standards movement
and the civil rights movement. From the former comes the focus
on rigorous academic subjects, core curriculum for all students,
and testing and accountability; from the latter comes the urgent

call to reduce social inequality by increasing educational oppor-
tunity. The opening sentence captures both elements succinctly.
CHOICE 2.0: A PARALLEL APPEAL
TO EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
The school choice movement had a rhetorical problem that
was similar in some ways and different in other ways from the
one facing the standards movement, but the message of equal
opportunity worked just as well for choice reformers as it did
for standards reformers. What was similar about the choice
problem was the difficulty in selling choice as an exercise in
efficiency. Chubb and Moe stressed that market-based schools
are more effective than politics-based schools, but effectiveness
alone is not the kind of issue that mobilizes citizens to support
a major change in the way schools are structured. That is par-
ticularly the case for the choice movement, since the proposed
transformation was such a radical departure from the time-
honored pattern of school governance established in the com-
mon school era. Standards reformers were tinkering with cur-
riculum and tests; choice reformers were attacking the democratic
control of schools. It is hard to win a political fight in the United
States if you cede the pro-democracy position to your oppo-
nents. Compounding the problem was the possibility that market-
based schooling would intensify social inequality by allowing
schools to segregate themselves along lines of class and race in
response to consumer preferences. If the possible benefits were
defined only as greater school effectiveness and the possible costs
were defined as a retreat from democracy and equality, then the
battle for school choice looked hopeless. A series of ballot fail-
ures in proposals for school vouchers seemed to confirm this
judgment.
In the late 1990s, however, the politics of school choice became
more complex with the introduction of a new approach to the
choice movement’s rhetorical repertoire. There is no canonical

source to draw from in exploring this change; instead, it was a
rhetorical shift that spread widely throughout the movement. As
one possible example among many, I use a book by Julian Betts
and Tom Loveless, Getting Choice Right, published in 2005 by
Brookings, which also published the book by Chubb and Moe.
The essence of the shift in emphasis from the earlier book was
captured in the new book’s subtitle: “Ensuring Equity and Effi-
ciency in Educational Policy.”Adding equity changed the valence
of the choice argument. Instead of being seen as a threat to social
equality, choice now could be presented as a way to spread so-
cial opportunity to the disadvantaged.
At the start of their book, Betts and Loveless agree with the
judgment that “school choice in the United States is here to stay
and likely to grow.”28
The only issue is how to implement it
effectively.
Indeed, the question of school choice is not an “if” or a “when.” We
have always had school choice in the United States, through the right
of parents to send their child to a private school and through the
ability of parents to pick a public school for their child by choosing
where to live. Clearly, affluent parents have typically been the main
beneficiaries of these forms of school choice.
In recent decades new forms of school choice have arisen that
have fundamentally changed the education landscape. In many cases
these new mechanisms have provided less affluent families with their
first taste of school choice.29
This shift toward a rhetoric of equal opportunity dramatically
changed the way the choice argument was received, and also it
transformed the political complexion of the effort. Once favored
primarily by libertarians, economists, and free-market Republi-
cans, it was now able to pick up support from a variety of sec-
tors. One major supporter was Howard Fuller, a black commu-
nity leader and former Milwaukee school superintendent, who
headed the pro-choice organization Black Alliance for Educa-
tional Options (BAEO). He argued that

We must give low-income and working-class parents the power to
choose schools—public or private, nonsectarian or religious—where
their children will succeed. And we must give all schools the incen-
tives to work to meet children’s needs. Consider the power of choice
in the hands of families who have little or no power because they
control no resources. Consider how the absence of choice will con-
tinue to consign their children to schools that the affluent parents
who oppose choice would never tolerate for their own children.30
With the new political turn, even Marxist economists Samuel
Bowles and Herbert Gintis came to argue that school choice
could enhance social equity.31
Adding equal opportunity to the
argument helped broaden the appeal of both the standards and
choice movements.
CONCLUSION
This has been a story about the changing rhetoric of American
school reform. We have seen a transition from a political vision
to a market vision of schooling; from a focus on schooling as a
way to create citizens for an emerging republic to a focus on
schooling as a way to allow citizens to get ahead in a market
society. During this century and a half, however, we have not
seen the political argument for schooling disappear. Instead, we
have seen it become transformed from the argument that school-
ing promotes civic virtue among citizens to the argument that
schooling promotes social mobility among consumers. In the lat-
ter form, the political vision of schooling has retained a strong
rhetorical presence in the language of school reform.
Yet the persistence of a political argument for schooling has
come at a cost. Gone is the notion that schools exist to promote
civic virtue for the preservation of republican community; in its
place is the notion that schools exist to give all consumers access
to a valuable form of educational property. This is a political vi-
sion of a very different sort, which transforms education from a
public good to a private good, and from a source of political

community to a source of individual opportunity. As we will see
in later chapters, by undermining education as a public good and
empowering educational consumers, this evolved vision of the
American school system provides the rationale for the current
school syndrome.

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"I should like him to be a great gardener some day," said Walters;
"and still more, I should like him to be a good man, with the fear of
God ever before him."
"I trust he will be both, my friend," said Sir John. "How are his
parents going on?"
"Worse than ever," said Walters. "The mother is in such a wretched
state of health from drinking that she is not likely to be long alive,
and the father is seldom sober. I went lately to tell them I had heard
from their boy, but they seemed very indifferent to what he was
doing, and scarcely asked any questions about him. They will
probably soon both be in the Union."
"Then it is clear it is no use bringing up their son to London to see
them," said Sir John, "as I would have done had they been
respectable. He is better to be quite separated from them under the
circumstances."
"Far better, Sir John. Roan's Court is no place for him now. The
sooner he forgets the very existence of what goes on there the
better. I should like to see my lad again some day, please God, but
it's not likely, for I'm getting nigh to seventy, and though I'm hale
and hearty as ever now, yet at my age I mustn't expect many more
years. God bless you, Sir John, for being such a friend to him; he's
got strangely about my heart, and I shall pray for him whilst I live."
CHAPTER V.
THE VISITOR AT THE LODGE.

That spring, like other springs, passed away. The London season
was longer than usual, for Parliament had weighty and important
matters to discuss, and families longing to be in the country were
obliged to remain in hot, dusty London till August. Amongst the
number of these was that of Sir John Tralaway, who was an active
member of the House of Commons. But at length the House broke
up, and without loss of time the great world fled from the heated
atmosphere to go and enjoy either the mountain breezes of
Switzerland or the refreshing shades of English country houses.
Sir John's domestics went off as usual a day or two before the rest
of the family, to make all ready for their arrival. No one was better
pleased than Dick that the season was over. He liked to see the
ladies walking or riding about the grounds, and to have their kind
smile and almost daily greeting. Also he loved to have the
encouraging word which was sure to be given by Sir John when he
had questioned Naylor and the schoolmaster about him, and heard a
good report.
On the day when the servants were to arrive, Mrs Naylor told Dick
that she had a friend coming to visit them, and she should be glad if
he would give up his room for the time. She proposed making him
up a bed in her boys' room, at which arrangement the two
youngsters expressed their warm approbation, for Dick was as great
a favourite with them as ever. When evening came he took care to
be in the way to open the gate, and so be the first to give a
welcome.
The carriage came and turned in, but instead of driving on, it
stopped at the lodge. The door behind was opened, and the
footman assisted out an old gentleman, who wore a great-coat,
notwithstanding its being a warm evening, and a well-brushed
beaver hat. Mrs Naylor hastened out to receive him, but before she
could speak Dick had flown into Walters' arms.

It had been kind Sir John's contrivance to give him a surprise. He
had asked the Naylors to receive him as their guest, and when he
found their willingness to do so, he proposed to him to go down into
the country with his servants, and spend several weeks under the
same roof as Dick.

[Illustration: THE MEETING OF MR WALTERS AND DICK.]
He knew the pleasure it would give to both to be together again.
He had desired that Dick should not be told who was Mrs Naylor's
expected guest.
Dick was more altered than Walters. He had grown taller and
stouter, and his cheeks were rounder and more rosy than they had
been when he lived in Roan's Court.
"Now come in, Mr Walters," said Mrs Naylor, when the first surprise
and greeting was over. "Come in, we'll do our best to make you
comfortable, and I'm sure I hope you'll spend a pleasant time here.
It shan't be our fault if you don't. As for Dick, I expect he won't
sleep a wink to-night for joy."
It was a pleasant reception, and when the old man went to bed in
Dick's little chamber, he kneeled and thanked God for this new and
unexpected mercy that had been vouchsafed him. As for Dick, far
from fulfilling Mrs Naylor's prognostication that he would not sleep a
wink, he was in so profound a slumber, at the hour when the other
two lads awoke in the morning, that they had a delightful excuse for
jumping on his bed and playing off a variety of tricks in order, as
they said, to "arouse him thoroughly."
Very pleased and proud was Dick to take his old friend over the
gardens and numerous glass-houses, containing such fruits and
flowers as he had never seen even in former days, when he had
visited with his master at gentlemen's houses. Dick had an entire
holiday given him the day after Walters' arrival, both from school
and from gardening, and Mr Naylor told him to take his friend where
he liked. Such a permission made him feel of almost as much
importance as if he were master of the estate himself. He found it
difficult to limit his own pace to that of Walters', so eager was he to

go from one place to another, always assuring him the next thing he
had to show was far better than any he had yet seen. Walters'
admiration quite satisfied him, for it was unbounded.
CHAPTER VI.
SIR JOHN'S PROPOSAL.
A month passed, and still old Walters was a visitor at the lodge. Still
he might be seen sitting on fine days under a wide-spreading oak-
tree in the park, sometimes leaning forward with his chin resting on
his stick, at others reading his large Bible as it lay upon his knees.
Not unfrequently Sir John might be observed sitting by his side, for
he delighted in his remarks, so full of simple piety and humility, and
consequently of instruction to himself. The high-born baronet was
not above being edified by the conversation of the aged pilgrim,
whose mind seemed ripening fast for the world which could not be
far distant from him. But Walters began to speak in earnest of
returning to London. His feelings were sensitive and delicate, and
though urged to remain longer, he would not take advantage of the
kindness that proposed it. He said he had been permitted to spend a
month of happiness amidst God's beautiful country works with his
dear boy Dick, but now the time was come for him to return to his
room and his old ways in London.
"And perhaps you feel more at home there than in any other
place," said Sir John one morning, when he had been talking to him
on his favourite bench under the oak-tree. "You have lived there so
many years that this country life may seem irksome to you after the
long habit of the other."

"Nay," replied he, "London will seem very lonely after such a month
as I have spent here in my boy's company, with everybody showing
me such kindness. And I shall miss the trees and the flowers, and
the songs of the birds. No, Sir John, I could find it in my heart to
wish I could end my days in the country, but God has willed it
otherwise, and given me a home I do not deserve, although it is
amongst the crowd and bustle and noise. Besides, why did I say I
should be lonely? Shall I not have Him"—and he uncovered his head,
as was his wont, at the great name—"who died for me, and loves
me, and will never leave me nor forsake me?"
Sir John was silent for a few moments; then he spoke to him on a
subject he had been turning over in his mind for some days. "You
are right, my worthy friend," he said; "no place can be lonely to you,
and God will assuredly watch over you to the end. But suppose He
were to point out that His way of doing so, as far as this world is
concerned, would be to give you a home in the country, where you
would be cared for in health and in sickness, and where the
remainder of your years would pass in quietness and repose, would
you not be willing to follow His leading?"
"Assuredly, assuredly," replied Walters, not in the least seeing the
drift of his remark. "But as such has not been His will, I thank Him
gratefully for my little room in town."
"Now listen to me, my friend," said the baronet. "It seems to me
that just as it was put into my heart to take Dick from the scenes of
sin and temptation he was exposed to in Roan's Court, so now it is
given me to have the privilege of making your last years far more
comfortable than they would be in your lodging in town. The
proposal I wish to make to you is this: I have a cottage in the village
which I have given for her life to an attached faithful old servant,
who lives there with her niece. It is larger than she requires, and she
says she could quite well spare the little parlour and the bedroom
over it, and that she would be very glad to have you as a lodger, and
she and her niece would do their best to make you comfortable. I

will take all the arrangements for you on myself, so you will only
have to return to London to pack up your things and bid your
present landlady good-bye, and then come back again to your new
country home, where you may see Dick every day."
Walters was silent. He could not speak. He took in all Sir John's
plan for him, and the lonely old man's heart leaped at the thought of
living near the child of his love. At length he rose, and with a voice
quivering with emotion, said—
"I thank you, I do indeed thank you, Sir John. It seems too much,
too much happiness for such an one as I am. But my whole life has
been filled with mercies, and this may be going to be the crowning
one. May I think over it? I am too old to be able all at once to
decide. When I have been alone awhile I can better answer you."
"Take as long as you like to think it over," replied Sir John—"there
is no hurry whatever." Then kindly shaking hands with him, he went
away, for he saw that Walters was a good deal overcome. Yet he
knew that though he left him, he would not be alone, but that he
would seek the counsel and direction of Him whom he had for so
long made his dearest Friend.
CHAPTER VII.
RETURNING GOOD FOR EVIL.
Walters soon made up his mind, and with much thankfulness
accepted Sir John's offer of a home in Denham. That gentleman took
him to see the cottage in which he proposed he should occupy two
rooms, and introduced him to good Mrs Benson, who, with her
niece, promised to do all they could for his comfort. He could only

exclaim every now and then, "Too good, too good for me! Who
would have thought of such a home as this coming to me in my old
age?"
He went back to London, packed up his few goods and chattels,
and bid good-bye to his friends in Covent Garden. He was well
known there, and all were sorry to part with him, but glad to hear of
his good fortune. His landlady regretted losing her quiet lodger,
whose regular payments and steady habits she knew how to value.
It was with quite a heavy heart she saw him into the cab that was to
take him to the station. She did the last good office she could for
him by putting into his hand a paper parcel containing some
sandwiches, that he might not be hungry on the journey.
Dick's delight when he found his dear old friend was going to move
to Denham may be easily imagined. He only regretted that he had to
go back to London at all.
Mrs Benson was quite ready for him when he arrived one evening
in the middle of October. Dick went to meet him at the station in the
conveyance sent by Sir John to take him to the cottage, and was
glad to be the one to lead him into the comfortable little sitting-
room, where a bright fire was burning and tea laid out on the round
table. Mrs Benson followed, looking and saying kind things, and her
niece bustled about to make the tea and toast the bread. It rather
distressed him to be waited on thus; he had always been
accustomed to do these things for himself; but he comforted his
mind by saying that they must not think he should give them such
trouble in future.
In a very short time he was quite settled, and seeing that he would
really prefer it, Mrs Benson allowed him to wait a good deal on
himself, and to do in every respect as he had been accustomed. The
neighbours soon learned to like the gentle, kind old man who was
ever ready to perform any little service for them in his power, such

as going on an errand, sitting with a sick child, or reading to an
invalid of riper years.
George Bentham's character did not improve as he got older. He
was so unsatisfactory in many ways that Mr Naylor would have
dismissed him altogether, had it not been for Sir John's kind desire
to keep him on, for he knew the wages he gave were higher than he
would obtain elsewhere. Neither he nor Naylor were aware of the
dislike he had from the first taken to Dick, who never named the
annoyances he had to bear from him to any one except Walters.
"I have never done anything to him," he said one day; "yet he is
always trying to spite me in every way he can. I really will begin and
give it him back again. I know twenty ways in which I can do him a
bad turn."
"Stop, stop, my boy," said Walters, "I don't like to hear you speak
so. That would be spite for spite. The dear Master did not act so
when they tried all they could to vex Him. Yet He never did wrong in
any way. You, on the contrary, are constantly standing in need of
forgiveness from God. So you must learn to forgive even as you
would be forgiven."
"I will try," said Dick, feeling rather ashamed of his speech.
"Do, my lad; but you won't be able to do it in your own strength,
for it goes contrary to human nature. You must pray—nothing like
prayer—and so you will find. And then, Dick, there's another thing to
remember. Look here"—and Walters turned over the leaves of the
Bible that was never far from his hand—"see this verse which the
Master spoke for the good of boys as much as for older people, 'Do
good to them that hate you.' You see you must not be content with
only forgiving."
"But what can I do for George?" asked Dick. "I never go near him if
I can help—there isn't any good I can do him in any way."

"Yes, lad, you can say a prayer for him now and then; and if ever
you see he needs a bit of help at any time, be you the one to offer
it, and you'll get a blessing, take my word for it."
They were sitting by the fireside in Walters' little parlour. Dick had
been to take his Latin lesson. As Mrs Benson's cottage lay on his way
home, he had turned in to see Walters. He was about to bid good-
bye to him after these last words, but the old man stopped him and
said—
"Wait a bit, and I'll tell you something that will show you how bad a
thing is spite or revenge. Maybe it will prevent you ever feeling the
desire to vex a person back because they vex you. It's a sad story,
but you shall hear it, though the very telling of it gives me a pain all
these long years after.
"When I was a young man I was very fond of horses, and liked to
be about them. My father wanted me to become a schoolmaster in a
village, because I'd had a better education than most boys of my
sort; but nothing would serve me but to go about the stables. So my
father spoke to our squire about it, and he said I should go under
his coachman, and so I did; and I got to understand horses, and
could ride and drive them—according to my own thinking—as well as
the coachman himself, when suddenly my master died and the
establishment was all broken up. I returned home to wait till I could
find another situation. Just at this time a young man about my own
age, named James Bennett, came home out of place likewise. He
had been, like myself, in a gentleman's stables, and had only left his
place because the family had gone abroad. He and I had lived near
each other as boys, and had had many a game together, but we had
not met for three or four years, as he had been away in quite
another part of England. We used to see one another pretty often,
as we had neither of us much to do then but to idle about.
"It so happened that just at this time a Mr Anderson, living about
two miles off, wanted a groom quite unexpectedly, and a friend of

mine called and advised me to lose no time in applying for the
situation, as a new servant must be had instantly. James Bennett
happened to be in our cottage when I was told this, but he left it
almost instantly. I lost no time, but went upstairs and put on my
best clothes; and then I set out, to walk to Newton Hall, where Mr
Anderson lived. I was anxious for the place, for I knew it was a good
one; and as it had only become vacant a few hours, I felt I had a
real good chance of getting it. When I arrived there I was shown in
to Mr Anderson, who said I was a likely enough fellow, but that he
had just seen another young man whom he had promised to take if
his character satisfied him. 'You know him probably,' he said, 'for he
comes from your village; his name is James Bennett.'
"I started with surprise and indignation. In an instant I saw just
how it was. James had heard what my friend had said about Mr
Anderson's situation being vacant, and advising me to lose no time
in applying. He had quietly sneaked of and got before me; for, as I
afterwards found, he had had a lift in a gig, whilst I walked all the
way, so he had considerably the start of me.
"I left the house full of angry feelings, and despising James from
the bottom of my heart for his meanness; and I took care to tell him
so. He could not defend himself, though he tried to make out it was
all fair play, and a case of first go, first served.
"He got the place and went to it directly, on good wages. I, on the
other hand, could not hear of one anywhere. I used to see James
ride by, exercising his new master's horse, and my thoughts were
very bitter.
"Mr Anderson had a daughter who was very delicate, and was
ordered horse exercise. Her father had bought her a beautiful
creature which had Arab blood in its veins—that means that it was
high bred and full of spirit. Now Miss Anderson had not yet been
allowed to mount him because he had such a bad trick of shying
when he came to any water. There was a certain pool which lay by

the roadside between our village and Mr Anderson's house, which he
would never pass without a great fuss. The former groom and Mr
Anderson had tried in vain to cure him of the trick. James said he
thought he should be able to do it, and he was proud to try.
"So he took him in hand. Every day he practised the animal. He
tamed him at last so that he scarcely moved an ear when he saw the
pond. I heard that after one day's more practice he meant to
pronounce him quite cured. Now all this time I was feeling angry,
and longing to spite him for the trick he had played me. I grudged
him the fame of having cured the horse of shying, for I knew I could
have done it as well, and I was always thinking about the way he
had stolen the place from me.
"Well, Dick, Satan saw now that was a fine time for him, and he
made the most of it. He put into my heart to do a mean trick by
which I thought to pay James back something of what I owed him.
"I bought some crackers and put them in my pocket, and I walked
to the place where the pond lay, a little before the time when I knew
James would come with the horse. My idea was to conceal myself
behind the thick hedge, and pull a cracker just at the moment the
horse was passing the pond. I thought so to startle him that it would
make him worse than ever about shying in future, and then all
James's trouble would be thrown away, and he would not have the
credit of curing him of the bad habit.
"I crept behind the hedge and was completely hidden. After a time
I heard horse's hoofs, and saw James come up. He walked by the
pond, slowly at first, then he went quicker, and next he trotted. The
pretty creature was quite quiet. Then he went to a little distance,
and put him into a canter. Now was my time; I pulled my cracker
just as he got to the pond. The horse sprang up into the air, bolted
forward, and the next instant was running away fast and fleet as the
very wind. I heard the hoofs going at a mad pace, and I knew his
rider had lost all control over him. Not for one moment had I

intended to drive the horse wild like that. The most I had thought of
was to cause him to prance and kick, and begin his old trick of not
passing the pond. I felt no anxiety lest any real harm would come of
it. I knew James was a good rider, and supposed he would give the
horse his head for awhile and then pull him in. So I walked home,
thinking I had paid Master James off in some degree at all events.
"We were just finishing dinner when a neighbour looked in, and
asked if we had heard what had happened. He said that James
Bennett had been riding Mr Anderson's horse, and that it had run
away with him and thrown him violently against a milestone; that he
was taken up quite senseless, and it was feared there was
concussion of the brain! He had been carried to a farmhouse close
by, which there was little chance of his leaving alive. It was dreadful
hearing for me. I felt as if I should have committed murder, if he
died! Not that I had wished really to harm him bodily in any way. I
could comfort myself a little with that thought, but I had intended to
do him a mischief of another kind; and now the ugliness of the sin of
revenge rose up before me in its true colours, and I hated myself.
"I kept my own secret. I argued that it could make matters neither
better nor worse to tell what had made the horse run off. But I was
very wretched. I walked to the farm towards evening to inquire after
him. They said he was still insensible, and the doctor could give little
hope. His parents were there, and Mr Anderson drove up as I was
going away, having brought a second doctor with him. It was a
comfort to know that he would be well cared for. The next day he
had come to himself when I went to inquire, but there was no more
hope than before. He lay in a very precarious state for a week, and
then there was a change for the better. A few days more and the
doctor said he would live, but that it would be many months
probably before he would be well enough to go into service again.
Mr Anderson was very kind, and promised to continue his wages to
enable him to live at home till he was quite well. But he could not
keep his place open for him, so he offered it to me.

"I positively declined to accept it, much to Mr Anderson's surprise. I
felt that I could not endure to reap any benefit from my wrong-
doing. My conscience had been tormenting me ever since the
accident, and I made up my mind that I would never take a situation
as groom again, for the very sight of a horse made me
uncomfortable. In a short time, thanks to my late mistress's
recommendation, I obtained a place as personal servant to a
gentleman who was going on the Continent for a couple of years.
Now it seems natural that new countries and new ways should put
what had just passed out of my head; but they didn't, though I
certainly did enjoy travelling about very much. We went to France
and Germany, stopping for a time at all the principal cities, and then
we went to Italy and spent some time in Rome. But notwithstanding
the novelty of all around me I was not altogether happy. I believe I
was beginning to feel what a sinful heart I had then, and I often
longed to open my mind to some one, but there was nobody I knew
to whom I liked to speak. However, God had His own designs for
me, as you will hear.
"My master visited Venice on our return home, and from there he
took an excursion through some mountains called 'The Dolomites.'
One day, as we were crossing a narrow plank thrown across a steep
gorge, my foot slipped and I fell down a very considerable distance
on to a hard rock, and it is wonderful that I was not killed on the
spot. I was taken up senseless by some peasants who were
fortunately near, and carried into a hut, where my master joined me,
and he and they did all in their power to restore consciousness. I
recovered my senses after awhile, but I had to lie in that hut for
upwards of ten days, and during that time I looked back on my past
life and saw how sinful I had been, and I trembled when I thought
how death and I had been face to face when I fell into the gorge.
My revengeful conduct towards James Bennett stared me in the face
in such black colours as it had never done before. 'What would have
become of me had I been killed?' was my constant thought.

"When I returned to England I went to live with a clergyman, who
was a good and holy man, to whom, after awhile, I ventured to
open my mind. He taught me what my Saviour had done for me by
His death, and how I might look for pardon through His merits, and
grace and help for the future. I have told you all this, Dick, that you
may beware of ever wishing to give what is called 'tit for tat.' Now
go home, and whenever you say your prayers ask God to keep you
from all malice and bitterness."
This advice of Walters came at a very opportune time, for not long
after Dick had occasion to bring it to mind.
It was George Bentham's duty to shut up the greenhouse windows
at a certain hour in the afternoon, and Mr Naylor was extremely
particular on this point. He had neglected it once or twice, and had
been severely reprimanded but when a third time Mr Naylor found
the windows open late, he took the duty away from him entirely, and
gave it to Dick in his presence, remarking that he felt sure he might
trust him. George said nothing at the time, but his jealousy
increased. He went away revolving in his mind how he could lower
Dick in Mr Naylor's opinion, and a way soon suggested itself.
Dick was surprised one evening after he had carefully closed the
windows in the afternoon at the proper time, by Mr Naylor reproving
him sharply when he came in to tea for having left one of them
open.
"Indeed, sir, I shut them all," said Dick.
"You mean you meant to do so, but were careless and forgot the
end one," said Mr Naylor. "Now don't get into the way of making
excuses; better own your fault at once, and say you will be more
careful in future; then I shall have hope that it will not happen
again."
Dick said no more. He was puzzled, for he felt almost sure he had
shut that end window. Yet how could it have got open again? No one

ever went near the greenhouses in the afternoon after they were
shut. He always turned the key on the outside when he went out,
though he left it in the door by order, because Mr Naylor went his
rounds towards evening, and then took the keys home with him. At
length he was obliged to come to the conclusion that he must have
overlooked that window without being aware of it.
About a week afterwards a frost set in, and though it was sunny
and fine for some hours, the air grew cold directly the sun began to
decline, and Dick received orders to close the windows earlier than
customary, and he did so.
The head gardener went the rounds as usual that afternoon before
going home to tea. The cold was severe, and his vigilance for his
plants was consequently greater than ever.
As he came to the door of the greenhouse he thought he heard a
slight noise within, and looked carefully about on opening the door,
but could see nothing to have caused it, so thought it must have
been fancy. When he examined the windows he found one of them
wide open.
"Again!" he said to himself. "So that boy is as bad as the other, and
must be trusted no more." He shut it, and a second time fancied he
heard a noise, and listened, but all was still. When he went home he
spoke more angrily to Dick than he had ever done before, and
desired him not to enter the greenhouses again, since he found he
could not be trusted. "Had I not gone in there," he said, "and seen
that the window was left wide open, some of the choicest of the
plants must have been frostbitten."
"But indeed, indeed, I shut them every one, sir," exclaimed Dick.
"Some one must have gone in after me, and opened that window.
Oh! it was too bad; it must have been done from spite."
"I can scarcely believe that," said the gardener. "Excuses of that
sort won't help you."

"It is not an excuse, sir. Do believe me, for indeed I shut all the
windows carefully."
"Maybe the lad is right," said Mrs Naylor, who was fond of Dick,
and had always found him truthful. "Perhaps some one has a grudge
against him, and took that way of doing him a mischief."
"Have you any reason to suppose you have an enemy?" inquired
Mr Naylor.
"Yes, I have, sir," replied Dick.
"Who is it?"
Dick did not reply; he was not sure whether he ought to name him.
But Johnnie Naylor, who with his brother was present, exclaimed—
"George Bentham is his enemy, I think, for he said the other day
he hated Dick, because he was put over him about the windows just
because he was a favourite."
A new idea appeared to strike Mr Naylor. He seemed in deep
thought for a moment. He was thinking of the noise he fancied he
had heard. Then taking down a lantern and lighting the lamp within,
he strode off without a word, and took his way to the greenhouse.
Unlocking the door, he entered, and closed it after him. Again there
was a slight noise. This time he was sure that something alive was
there besides himself, and he began to search.

[Illustration: "HE RAISED HIS LANTERN AND LOOKED BEHIND A
TIER OF SHELVES."]
The house was a good-sized one, and he examined every corner,
but in vain. Then he raised his lantern and looked behind a tier of
shelves which stood out a little way from the wall.
A dark figure was there crouching down. It was George Bentham,
who, with a face white as ashes, came forth at Mr Naylor's
command.
"What are you doing here, sir?" he asked, in a voice of thunder.
"I got locked in, sir."
"And what brought you here at all?"
The ready lie that he would fain have had rise to his lips, failed him
from actual terror, and he was silent.
"I will tell you why you are here," said the gardener. "You came to
open that window in order to get an innocent companion into
trouble, and to have it supposed that he was careless and had
neglected his duty, and it is the second time you have done the base
deed. You are a coward of the worst kind, and you shall come with
me instantly to Sir John himself, and hear his opinion of your
conduct."
Then George found his voice, and implored Mr Naylor to punish
him in any way rather than take him before Sir John, but in vain. He
marched him off without another word, and made him walk before
him to the house, where he requested to see the baronet.
Very shocked and indignant was Sir John at what he heard about
the wretched boy before him, who did not attempt to deny that he

had hoped to bring Dick into disgrace, and so had slipped into the
greenhouse to open the window, but had not time to escape before
Mr Naylor came and locked him in. He had no way of getting out
without breaking the windows, owing to their peculiar method of
opening. He acknowledged that Dick had never done him any harm,
and could only say in reply to the questions put to him, that "he had
never liked him."
Sir John dismissed him from his service on the spot, and told him
his opinion of his conduct in terms which remained in his memory
for many a day.
Dick was very glad when Mr Naylor told him the mystery about the
open window had been cleared up; but to his credit be it spoken, he
was really grieved to hear that George was to work no more in the
gardens. He longed to plead for him, but knew it would be useless,
as Sir John and Mr Naylor were so seriously displeased. But when a
little time had passed by, and George was still without regular
employment, hanging about the village, often reminded by jeers and
taunts of his mean conduct, Dick felt more and more sorry for him,
and at length he ventured to ask Mr Naylor if he would say a good
word for him to Sir John.
"And so you want him to be taken on again, do you?" was the
reply. "That's queer, now."
But queer as he thought it, Naylor could appreciate Dick's forgiving
spirit, and admired it sufficiently to induce him to ask Sir John if the
boy might have another trial, and he obtained his consent. He took
care to tell George who it was had pleaded for his return. The boy
had avoided Dick since his disgrace, but this generous conduct quite
overcame him. Though foreign to his own nature to act thus, he was
touched and grateful, and actually thanked Dick, and told him he
was sorry he had behaved so shabbily to him. From that day the two
lads were good friends. George never again annoyed Dick.

We must pass over the next few years of Dick's history more
rapidly. He did not disappoint the expectations of those who had
done so much for him. He improved rapidly, and developed so strong
a taste for landscape gardening that Sir John and Mr Naylor advised
him to lay himself out chiefly for that branch of the profession, and
every aid was given him to do so. Sir John thought that his steady
character, united to considerable natural talent, well deserved
encouragement. The result was, that when he grew to manhood he
introduced him to the notice of several families of distinction, and he
soon began to get a name and to acquire a considerable income.
Walters lived to see him married and prosperous, and ever true to
the principles he had instilled into him as a child.
At a good old age dear old John Walters passed away to his rest.
His death was calm and happy as his life had been. His remains lie in
the little churchyard at Denham, a plain white stone marking the
spot. Many still remember and speak of him with affection. Amongst
the number is Sir John, now himself grown old. Sometimes he has
been heard to exclaim, as he pauses an instant before the grave—
"Let my last end be like his!"
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