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2. The Age (Melbourne, Australia), 30 Apr. 1994, pt. 2, p. 4. See also Schneider, William, “The Suburban Century Begins,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1992, 33–44; and Phillips, Kevin, Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity (New York, 1993), 141; MacPherson, Crawford Brough, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, Eng., 1962); Locke, John, The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government , ed. Laslett, Peter (New York, 1965), 328–29.Google Scholar

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8. As Robert Goldman and Ann Tickamyer note in a recent review of status attainment research, “The origins of status attainment forms of stratification are rooted in the advent of market relations. Competitive market society presupposed a model of social relations that made the allocation of status and power subject to determination by market forces within which free and rationally calculating individuals sought competitively to maximize their own prestige, wealth, and power at the expense of others. Socially organized around market practices, the allocation of status becomes” a function of “individual market capacity.” In effect, the market revolution created an opportunity structure and “system of stratification structured according to the logic of the commodity form and instrumental rationality.” Goldman and Tickamyer then go on to argue, in effect, that the neo-classical human capital model of status attainment fails to recognize the embeddedness of social mobility processes in the social economy. The neo-classical model, they note, “treats stratification as a series of individuated choices taking place on an open market. … This principle of market homogeneity translates into the central theoretical and methodological dictate of the status attainment model: the separation of status and mobility from specific structural and relational contexts. Status attainment is a model of abstract stratification, which like the 19th-century liberal-utilitarian model of abstract labor ignores the fundamental social relationship in capitalist society—wage labor.” Goldman, Robert and Tickamyer, Ann, “Status Attainment and the Commodity Form: Stratification in Historical Perspective,” American Sociological Review 49 (Apr. 1984): 196–209, 198. But see also Rodgers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1978); and Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

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22. I appreciate that this argument does not fully address many of the knotty theoretical issues surrounding the nature and origins of class inequality. However, the purpose of this paper is to explain the expansion of educational credentialing by focusing on the logic of social action in the credentials market, not to take on the sociology of class and stratification.Google Scholar

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24. Parkin defines “exclusionary closure” as “the attempt by one group to secure for itself a privileged position at the expense of some other group.” Its appeal, as Parkin points out, does not rest merely on its capacity to protect “the learned professions from the hazards of the marketplace” but also on its ability to do so in an ideologically appealing way. Whereas “exclusionary closure” in lineage societies rested on ascriptive social descent, bourgeois forms of exclusion like professionalization rest on educational credentials that in principle satisfy the formally universalistic criteria of bourgeois ideology. Parkin, , Marxism and Class Theory, 45, 47, 54, 56.Google Scholar

25. Parkin, , Marxism and Class Theory, 60; Ehrenreich, , Fear of Falling, 82.Google Scholar

26. For a telling example of the social logic of tracking, see Washington Post, 16 Sep. 1990. Economists tend to see such behaviors as an innocent form of preference aggregation expressed in “voting with your feet” activity—a so-called “Tiebout effect”—by utility maximizing parents seeking to find educational services that are consistent with their educational preferences and their “resource endowments.” They also claim that such behavior moves the market in educational services toward a spatial form of the neo-classical Holy Grail—a Pareto optimal equilibrium of preferences and budgets. The relationship between the housing market, educational opportunity, and the social demography of schooling is well captured in Gary Orfield's investigation of the opportunity structure in Atlanta during the Reagan-Bush era. See Orfield, Gary, The Closing Door: Conservative Policy and Black Opportunity (Chicago, 1991), 69–70.Google Scholar

27. The share of national income received by the middle class has shrunk dramatically. Indeed, the size of the middle class itself has shrunk over the course of the past two decades. For details, see Washington Post, 20 Feb. and 17 Jan. 1992; Phillips, Kevin, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York, 1990), 8, 17; idem, Boiling Point; Washington Post, 3 Feb. and 1 June 1993; Bell, Daniel, “On Meritocracy and Equality,” Public Interest 29 (1972): 34.Google Scholar

28. “The high school,” one critic wrote in June 1840, “with its professorships, its extravagant salaries, and its other privileges and immunities, which now absorb so much of the school tax … ought to be abolished” and its funds committed to the provision of a general education to the children of the rich and the poor that “will fit them for any situation in our republic … and render it impossible that they ever should be ruled by any demagogue.” Public Ledger, 30 Apr., 13 May, and 5 June 1840; United States Gazette, 23 June 1842; Dunlap, Thomas, “Introductory Address of the Commencement of Central High School, February 12, 1851” (Philadelphia, 1851), 61.Google Scholar

29. Hogan, David John, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Philadelphia, 1985); idem, Merit, Markets, Morals, and Citizens: An Organizational History of Public Education in Philadelphia, 1818–1880 (forthcoming); Labaree, , The Making of an American High School. Google Scholar

30. Washington Post, 21 Jan. 1992.Google Scholar

31. Kozol, Jonathan, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York, 1991), chs. 4 and 6; New York Times, 30 May and 16 Feb. 1993; Education Week, 2 June, 12, 19, 26 May, 28 Apr., and 31 Mar. 1993; Goertz, Margaret E., “Education Politics for the New Century: Introduction and Overview,” in Education Politics for the New Century: The Twentieth Anniversary Yearbook of the Politics of Education Society , ed. Mitchell, Douglas E. and Goertz, Margaret E. (New York, 1990); New York Times, 27 Aug. 1992; Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 Jan. 1992 and 27 Feb. 1993; Courier-Post, 3 Jan. 1993; Education Week, 9 June and 15 Apr. 1993.Google Scholar

32. This by no means suggests that more centralized systems—for example, those developed in the United Kingdom, Australia, or France—have proven especially capable of resisting market pressures. In fact, they have been quite susceptible to corporatist pressures and to the more ideological of their leading national politicians. Rather, a decentralized system of school governance renders educational politics in the United States especially susceptible to popular credentialing anxieties and competitive strategies. Fuhrman, Susan H. and Elmore, Richard F., “Understanding Local Control in the Wake of State Educational Reform,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 12 (Spring 1990): 82–96; Wirt, Frederick M. and Kirst, Michael W., The Politics of Education: Schools in Conflict (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Kirst, Michael W., “Who Should Control the Schools? Reassessing Current Policies,” in Schooling for Tomorrow: Directing Reforms to Issues That Count , ed. Sergiovanni, Thomas J. and Moore, John H. (Boston, 1989); James, Thomas, “State Authority and the Politics of Educational Change,” in Review of Research in Education , ed. Grant, Gerald (Washington D.C., 1991); Cohen, M., “Key Issues Confronting State Policymakers,” in Restructuring Schools: The Next Generation of Educational Reform , ed. Elmore, Richard F. and Associates, (San Francisco, 1990); Murphy, Joseph, “The Educational Reform Movement of the 1980s: A Comprehensive Analysis,” in The Educational Reform Movement of the 1980s , ed. Murphy, Joseph (Berkeley, Calif., 1990).Google Scholar

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37. This is a somewhat different notion of “market failure” than is normally used in economic theory where it is used to designate a condition in which a market fails to attain Pareto optimality as the result of the presence of “externalities” or “public goods” in the market.Google Scholar

38. For glimpses of this tradition, see Hamilton, Alexander, Jay, John, and Madison, James, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, ed. Earle, Edward Mead (New York, n.d.); Gunn, John Alexander Wilson, “Interest Will Not Lie: A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim,” Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (Oct.–Dec. 1968): 557; Stourzh, Gerald, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Calif., 1970); Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977).Google Scholar

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