Democracy in Education: Crafting Vision, Policies, and Strategies

A Statement for the John Dewey Society

by

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Harry C. Boyte, by Deborah Meier

March 2016

“It is the main business of the family and the school to influence directly the formation and growth of attitudes and dispositions, emotional, intellectual and moral. Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes…a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for…the democratic way of life.” John Dewey, Democracy in the Schools

We face an avalanche of privatization of education at every level, tied to narrowing views which

radically shrink the meaning of democracy and of education. This avalanche increasingly

renders education as a ticket for individual advancement, not public purpose. Education is more

segregated by race and class than in the time of Brown v. Board of Education. Educators feel

increasingly powerless. At the same time education is under widespread attack, with efforts to

shape both K-12 and higher education by outside interests and policy makers, both liberal and

conservative, using marketplace and technocratic rationales. State government in many states

are defunding public post-secondary education. Costs put many schools out of the reach of poor

and working classes. All this contributes to the disempowerment of educators and students.

Internal changes as well as external forces erode the agency of educators and students.

Studies such as American Academic Culture in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and

Carl Schorske have demonstrated that research cultures have become increasingly detached

from community and the public culture in many fields in recent decades. Rankings fuel what

Lani Guinier calls the “testocracy,” narrow, individualist understands of merit and achievement

and erode earlier norms of cooperative and democratic excellence in both K-12 and higher

education (The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education). Colleges today,

ranked by how many students are denied admission, often game the system by increasing

applications. Prestige goes to institutions which place students in jobs with the highest pay and

prestige, regardless of public contribution. Sustained, deep attention to skills and habits of

agentic action crucial to a democratic way of life has been sidelined.

It is worth recalling how much agency - the human capacity to act with others to shape the world

around us - was central both to the original meaning of democracy and also to the concerns of

John Dewey. As Josiah Ober, the classicist and political theorist, has shown in a detailed

etymological study of classical regime types (“The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to

Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 2008, 7), democracy for the Greeks did not mean

rule by the majority. “Rather it means, more capaciously, ‘the empowered demos … the

collective strength and ability to act...and indeed to reconstitute the public realm through action.”

Though Dewey rarely used the term “agency,” it is worth recalling the close connection between

agency, individual and civic, and his view of democracy as an empowering way of life. In

Democracy and Education, he proposed that education involves cultivating “initiative and

adaptability” (MW 9, 93-94). Following Jane Addams’ call for educators to “free the powers,”

Dewey advanced the idea that democracy’s diversity of stimuli “secure a liberation of powers”

(Jane Addams, On Education, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994, 98; Dewey, MW 9, 93)

Emphasizing the relational qualities of development against atomizing intellectual trends, he

argued that “the new individualism was interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that

each individual’s mind was complete in isolation from everything else” (MW 9, 315).

Drawing on the Deweyan tradition, many educators and scholars have begun to fight back and

also to re-articulate why the public matters in education and why education’s deepest purpose is

preparing students for a democratic society. In K-12 education, new programs help educators

to build students and their own civic agency and capacity. Deliberating in a Democracy helps

educators and students design lessons for deliberating difficult issues. The Discovering Justice

program helps elementary and middle school students explore meanings of justice and the law.

“Action Civics” movements and programs such as Public Achievement, Mikva Challenge and

The Freechild Project help young people to learn skills of effective civic action in schools and

communities, including learning and research about problems, everyday political skills, and

sustained reflection. Expeditionary Learning, The Algebra Project, and the Big Picture Company

tie learning to real world community projects and problems. The Coalition for Essential Schools

emphasizes democratic principles, as well as the “student as worker and the teacher as coach,”

shifting from education as something delivered.

At the post-secondary level, recent associations such as Campus Compact, Imagining America,

the American Democracy Project, The Democracy Challenge and AAC&U, are developing a

new emphasis on higher education’s role in democracy as well as innovative approaches to

education for student agency. The Kettering Foundation’s Campus Conversations on

Democracy brings together presidents to recover their leadership as public philosophers of

education and democracy. Two national deliberations of the National Issues Forums growing

out of the American Commonwealth Partnership in 2012, celebrating the 150 anniversary of

land grant colleges, Shaping Our Future: How Can Higher Education Help Us Create the

Society We Want?, and The Changing World of Work: What Should We Ask of Higher

Education?, have involved several thousand citizens in every region of the country. These have

surfaced deep public concerns about higher education’s future and loss of public purposes.

Deweyan concerns with agency also form one inspiration for the new transdisciplinary field

called “civic studies,” founded by a group of seven engaged political theorists. The group,

including Elinor Ostrom, past present of the American Political Science Association and 2009

Nobel Prize winner, and future APSA president Jane Mansbridge, is organized as a framework

for civic engagement focused on themes of agency and citizens as co-creators of communities

at different scales. Tufts University hosts the website and an annual international institute. The

Civic Studies journal is The Good Society.

All these are foundations to build on. Yet the dynamic trends of privatization and technocracy

continue to gather momentum on campuses, in curriculum and in educational policy. How can

we reimagine a public educational ecosystem with revitalized democratic aims, and effectively

work to enact it in practice, policy, and law?

We are convinced that this is the time to work with others in organizing a democracy movement

of K-16 educators and students and our allies, reimagining education as crucial to a democratic

way of life for ourselves and for future generations, advancing policies that support democracy

education, and creating strategies to build broad publics. Here are several potential elements:

• Strategy, grounded in local, grassroots effort, needs to include state and national prongs of action, across educational sectors and in diverse coalitions of community and civic organizations. Many tools will be necessary for this work, including public deliberation, organizing, experimentation, research, and a robust strategy of what can be called “cultural organizing, stimulating wide public discussion in many media settings.
• Deliberations and organizing efforts need to be informed by research and scholarship that is transdisciplinary not simply interdisciplinary. This means recognizing that while academic scholars are creating new knowledge of great value we also need new patterns of collaborative knowledge-creation and infrastructures and reward systems which support them, recognizing the multiple kinds of knowledge needed for effective political democratic change.
• At local and regional levels, we need new strategies for deliberation and organizing action for change that builds new, deeper, more reciprocal relationships with scholars and schools, students, parents and families, civic groups and local governments, asking “why” and “so what” questions with new forcefulness.
• At the state level where much education policy is established, we need to “bring the public in,” creating citizen-based deliberations about the purposes of education at every level. Representatives and participants from schools, teachers unions, families, businesses, religious and civic groups, and community organizations as well as local governments will need to be involved.
• We also need ways to bring findings of public deliberations to new levels of public visibility through new media tools and through partnerships with sympathetic journalists and opinion-makers in the mainstream media. This will be essential to effect a significant shift from the narrow test-based accountability that lawmakers and others have devised in the last two decades.
• At the federal level, we need a variety of strategies to engage a new administration with the Deweyan vision of democracy as a way of life and education as its midwife.

A democratic education vision for K-16 publicly supported education in the U.S. and for policies

that strengthen the democratic purposes of private and liberal arts education will require

leadership in all sectors, from all corners of educational practice, policy, and research. How to

develop such leadership will require discussion and thought about what is the appropriate

organizing form and structure for such work. But the need seems unmistakable.

In our history, democracy had overtones of immensity. "A word the real gist of which still sleeps,

quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in

Democratic Vistas.

It is time to awaken the possibilities of the word.

Money, Education and Democratic Voice

I read two articles today that stood in such stark contrast that I had to share them.  Both describe their efforts as “grassroots.” The first was an article in the N.Y. Times entitled, “Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates,” by Sam Dillon (NY Times, May 20, 2011). The article talks about the staggering amount of money that is going into education by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to the tax forms filed for 2009 alone, the Bill Gates's foundation spent $373 million on education efforts of which $78 million was dedicated to its new form of education advocacy. According to Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program, the foundation plans to spend $3.5 billion more in education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy, over the next five or six years. Attached to the article are “Annotated Excerpts of the Gates Foundation 990 Form 2009,” a tax form required for nonprofits that runs for 263 pages and includes more than 3,000 items and 360 education grants.


The approach marks a new strategy for the foundation that previously used its philanthropy to creating small schools . The new strategy is described in the article as much more ambitious. It is an attempt to work more systemically by reforming the nation’s educational policies. To achieve this end, the foundation “is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.” But it is also “creating new advocacy groups.” Some of the examples the article reveals include:

The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations…..

Last year, Mr. Gates spent $2 million on a “social action” campaign focused on the film “Waiting for ‘Superman".....

There are the more traditional and publicly celebrated programmatic initiatives, like financing charter school operators and early-college high schools. Then there are the less well-known advocacy grants to civil rights groups like the Education Equality Project and Education Trust that try to influence policy, to research institutes that study the policies’ effectiveness, and to Education Week and public radio and television stations that cover education policies.…..

Its latest annual report…. highlights its role — often overlooked — in the development and promotion of the common core academic standards that some 45 states have adopted in recent months. ….The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which developed the standards, and Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization coordinating the writing of tests aligned with the standards, have each received millions of dollars.....

In 2009, a Gates-financed group, the New Teacher Project, issued an influential report detailing how existing evaluation systems tended to give high ratings to nearly all teachers. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cited it repeatedly and wrote rules into the federal Race to the Top grant competition encouraging states to overhaul those systems. Then a string of Gates-backed nonprofit groups worked to promote legislation across the country: at least 20 states, including New York, are now designing new evaluation……

Two other Gates-financed groups, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus, have helped amplify the voices of newer teachers as an alternative to the official views of the unions. Last summer, members of several such groups had a meeting at the foundation’s offices in Washington....

The Times article actually starts with a story of some out spoken local teachers who testified before the Indiana State Legislature and who had written policy briefs and op-ed pieces about layoffs based on seniority. Said one state legislator, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” Indeed, they may very well have been genuine, as the article points out, but ”they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” ….. a group that is later revealed in the article to have received awards totaling $4 million dollars.

And that brings us to the crux of the Times article. Writes reporter Sam Dillon:

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.

Perhaps, the concern was best put by Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was quoted as saying: “It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education.”


The other article I read at the same time this week was sent out on a grassroots listserv called the Education Liberation Network. The group also has a website called the Education for Liberation Network. In the post, the author, Tara Mack, announces an event that is to take place in two months in Providence, RI, where hundreds of educators, activists and students will come together for a grassroots gathering called, “Free Minds, Free People.” The organizers want to make the event a catalyst for continued action rather than a solitary event.

They write on their listserv:

The Education for Liberation Network has an important contribution to make to that effort. One of the ways we aim to capitalize on that energy is to begin developing regional networks that will strengthen the connection between local work and national movement building. We want to bring the network closer to you.

They then make a plea for donations to carry out this work:

To start that work we need to have the resources in place before the conference. That's why we are coming to you now. Grassroots work takes grassroots investment. Today we are kicking off our One Great Reason campaign, a week-long drive …. that will help us keep the momentum of Free Minds, Free People going by moving straight from the conference into the development of our regional networks.

Each of us has a reason for being part of this community, a reason why this work matters to you. Each day this week a member of the Education for Liberation Network will share via this listserv his/her reason for being part of our community. If their stories resonate with you, I hope you will take moment to contribute to our efforts to strengthen and expand.

The amount that this grassroots network of educators is attempting to raise this week -- $1000.


With such disparities in money and access to media and seats of power, how does a society engage in a true democratic dialogue. How is a public being created for public education? Here are two very different efforts that lie at the heart of the contradictions in democratic power and voice.

Cross-posted on the Journal of Educational Controversy Blog

Grassroots "Save Our Schools" March on Washington and Call to Action on July 28-31

I recently learned about a grassroots march that is going to take place in Washington DC on July 30th. It is a movement of parents, teachers, students, community activists, and “everyday working people” that has been endorsed by educational voices like Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Joel Spring, Rethinking Schools' editors, David Berliner, among many others. Diane Ravitch will be one of the speakers at the DC rally. Prior to the march and rally in the park, participants will be able to participate in a number of seminars, workshops and advocacy meetings hosted by American University.


Here is their call to action:

Where are the Voices from the Grass Roots?

(Cross-posted from the Journal of Educational Controversy blog)

In reading much that is printed in the mainstream media like today's editorial in the New York Times - "Accountability in Public Education," one constantly hears accounts and perspectives from the voices of those who are in power. Where are the voices from the grass roots about their concerns, frustrations, hopes, and challenges to what passes as educational reform in this country. I recently came across a website and a listserv that provides readers with this alternative perspective. For readers interested in educating themselves on other perspectives, check out the following website and join the listserv of the Education for Liberation Network.

Website: http://www.edliberation.org/

To join the listserv: go to www.edliberation.org/join-us

Description and Purpose: The Education for Liberation Network is a national coalition of teachers, community activists, youth, researchers and parents who believe a good education should teach people - particularly low-income youth and youth of color - to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.

Teachers may also be interested in their recent publication of a new kind of plan book that is called: Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2009-2010. You can find it at: http://www.justiceplanbook.com/. I am told that the first printing is already sold out, but more are being printed.