Democratic Participation

There are two conceptual problems when trying to talk about “school reform.” The first is that those who are already involved in the debate are fighting for specific policies that they want to see implemented now, while lacking any historical or philosophical understanding of American public schooling; in other words, no understanding of how we got here and, therefore, little or no informing background concerning what public schooling ought to be and why.

The second is that the debate is being waged by a relatively small group of people, while the great majority of the population is entirely disengaged from it. It is an extreme example of “inside baseball,” even though the questions and the potential answers affect everyone in the polis, and in serious ways.

These two conceptual problems create a practical problem. Because the debate is focused entirely on the operational, any attempt to place the debate in a larger historical and philosophical context will inevitably be seen as pedantic, inapplicable, and boring.

This has created a classic vicious circle: The people who will be most affected by any such policy decisions don’t want to hear about it thereby allowing the handful of people who do care about it to fight it out without awareness or participation from the larger public. This makes it an excellent metaphor for all the political questions of our time and well our politicians know it. While some pundits decry the lack of honest and intellectual public grappling with important issues, successful politicians and their handlers know that it is much safer to speak banalities and pre-approved catch-phrases, which the larger public is apparently happy to let them do.

It would be helpful to understand that this democratic process --- that is, a political process which engages all citizens so that it can in fact be “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” --- is at the heart of the creation of schools paid for by public funds and then requiring all students to attend them for as long as possible in the context of over 300 million persons. It would not be an exaggeration to say that choosing to do such a thing was and is the greatest experiment in democracy ever attempted.

Although we now take the ubiquitous public school for granted, it was not always thus. During the Colonial Period and well into the 19^th Century, virtually all schools were funded by private money, by tuition. It wasn’t until the 1830’s and 1840’s that states took the extraordinary step of imposing a new tax to support schools for all students. To show what a remarkable step this was, consider the fact that Thomas Jefferson went to the Virginia House of Burgesses three separate times to request funding for a free grades 1-3 education for all students. All three times, his proposal was rejected.

Why, then, did state legislators, then as now leery of imposing taxes, choose to fund schools with public money? The answer is simple and straightforward and easy to understand: By the 1830’s, the United States had committed to a democratic republic form of government, one in which they knew that the suffrage would be extended more and more, and they knew that if citizens were going to be granted liberty, they would have to be taught how to use that liberty well. While they still could take for granted the influence of home and church, the way that the State would form citizens by imbuing them with the right principles and the right practices, would be at school. To put it another way, religious sectarianism and ethnic solidarity were fine in the home and in the neighborhood, but the way young people would all become Americans was in what Horace Mann called “the common school.”

Over time, more and more young people went to school and spent longer and longer there. It happened slowly, but it happened steadily, until by the 1950’s it was taken for granted that (virtually) everyone would graduate from high school. We take this for granted (to the point where those who ‘drop out’ of high school are a scandal) but historically this was not just unprecedented, it was remarkably odd. That everyone should read and virtually everyone should vote was unimaginable through most of human history.

That schooling in the United States has become more and more democratic --- that is, more and  more inclusive --- is a straightforward story, based on a kind of faith that more schooling makes for more personal and social success.

Where the story has not been straightforward but, rather, full of contradiction and conflict, has been in our definition of the deep purposes of publicly-funded schools.

From the time of the Colonial one-room school house until the end of World War I in 1918, there was a remarkable consistency in the publicly understood purposes of schooling. To review the history of this period of some 300 years is to reveal what seem like big changes, but the common element, despite huge changes in circumstance, was the belief that public schools were meant to form students as American citizens. But, as with so many things, that was no longer the case after 1918. From that time to the present, there have been deep and powerful conflicts within the American public over the role and purpose of public schools. Rather than a commitment to a fairly consistent set of principles, the period since the end of World War I has seen dramatic shifts in our thinking about the purposes of public schooling: progressives vs traditionalists; essentialists vs those who believed in a child-centered curriculum; scientific curriculum-making vs social meliorism; life-adjustment vs back-to-basics.

This is a frustrating story, at least for those of us who believe it’s possible to settle on a set of right purposes and figure out how best to achieve them. But here is the comforting or confounding thing about this story (depending on how you look at it): Our commitment to democracy has led to our inability or unwillingness to commit to a form of schooling specifically aimed at preparing young people to be thoughtful, active, and principled citizens of a mass and pluralistic democracy. 

Within the great democratic conversation, there is so much disagreement that we have not --- for good or ill --- been able to come to a consensus about what the deep purposes of school should be. As a result, our default setting is to think of schools as places that are relatively safe, where a reasonable number of academic and other activities are available, and where young people can be free to “develop” without attempts by teachers, administrators, or the State to “form” them.

Currently, the battle over the purpose of public schooling is dominated by the conflict between what we can imprecisely call the “standards” people and those who represent the “ante-standards” people. These are shoddy descriptors that would rightly offend both sides, but some kind of shorthand is needed.

After the institutional self-immolation of the ‘60’s and ’70’s, there was first a public outcry against what was happening in public schools, and then the Federal pamphlet “A Nation at Risk,” and then the governors of the several states committing to a re-definition of public school curriculum, and then to each state creating a set of academic content standards.

Logically, having standards in any field of human endeavor implies having an assessment to find out if those standards have been met, so there had to be some form of testing and given the many millions of students, that testing would have to be standardized. With the involvement of the Federal government in the “No Child Left Behind” act, given the immense amounts of money that almost every school district depended on, standardized testing became the tail that would wag the dog.

The not necessarily wise but logical development of this process has brought us to “Race to the Top” and the  Core Content Standards, both of which have provoked a reaction, mostly by teachers but apparently by more and more parents. Anger over the dominance of standardized testing, a frustration which has been growing greater and greater over the last dozen or so years, has led some teachers and others outside the system to contend that students, parents, and teachers should “opt out,” which would amount to a kind of passive resistance movement.

Anger over the Core Content Standards is a whole other kettle of fish, but is related because of its connection to and its dependence on the standardized testing industry.

I think it is essentially important to see the current conflict in two larger contexts. The first is that it is just the current manifestation of the on-going and ever more complicated debate since 1919 over what the purpose of public schools is and how that purpose should be pursued.

The second is that everyone involved on both sides of this conflict is convinced that they are right and the other guys are wrong. This is at the very heart of the great democratic conversation and so is entirely understandable. Both sides are involved in an incredibly varied, rich, frustrating, and engaging democratic process, and the stakes seem incredibly high.

Bu like all the battles fought before it in this on-going war, this will be resolved, one way or another and life will go on.

There have been so many ebbs and flows, triumphs and failures, in this process since 1919, that I’m less worried about the specifics of the current iteration and much more worried about the apathetic self-removal of the larger public from the conversation.

We live in a time where self-interest and self-importance predominate. If I don’t have children in public school, I don’t care. Even if I do have children in public school, I care only about them and their experience.

But this conflict requires that eventually the public come to a meaningful conclusion about the deep purposes of the most “public” institution in the United States.

We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific, and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic democracy.