Abstract
This essay argues that addressing the “shrinkage” of education and democracy requires acting
politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency-focused concepts of democracy and
education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which advances a politics of
agency – citizen politics, different than ideological politics -- and citizens as co-creators of
political communities, we explore technocratic trends which eclipsed agency. These disempower
educators, students, and communities. Using the case study of the youth empowerment initiative
Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education program and partnerships of
Augsburg College, we conclude with an examination of how agentic practices have survived in
“shadow spaces” in schools, how such spaces might be turned into “free spaces” for democratic
change, and how teacher education needs to prepare “citizen teachers” as well as promoting
pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic
change.
1
“A liberation of powers”: Agency and Education for Democracy
Harry C Boyte and Margaret J. Finders
In Pragmatist Democracy, Christopher Ansell observes that elites seek to control
definitions of concepts, “though they must contend with audiences who have the power to
arbitrate the meaning of concepts.”1 A reading of Democracy and Education makes clear that
elites have recently been winning the battle. Concepts of both themes have shrunk.
For John Dewey, education was critical to a democratic society and democracy was
central to the educational enterprise. “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,” wrote Dewey in “Democracy in the Schools.” “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.”2
Views similar to Dewey’s, of democracy as a “way of life” with cultural, social, and
economic dimensions as well as electoral ones, animated broad democratic movements in the
20th Century. For instance Alain Locke, a philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance,
strongly influenced the black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which in turn helped
infuse movements around the world with a vision of participatory democracy. "If we are going to
have effective democracy in America, we must have the democratic spirit," said Locke. That
requires "more social and more economic democracy in order to have or keep political
democracy."3 As Vincent Harding, friend and speechwriter for Martin Luther King, put it, “The
1
Christopher K. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 33.
2
LW 11, 221-222.
3
Alain Locke, “The Presentation of the Democratic Ideal,” Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining Democracy,
Education and World Citizenship, eds. Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher World Order 38, No. 4 (2008): 23-28.
2
civil rights movement was in fact a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the
expansion of democracy in the United States…it demonstrates…the deep yearning for a
democratic experience that is far more than periodic voting.”4
The Deweyan view of democracy as a way of life also animated parts of higher education
and the professions. As Andrew Jewett has detailed in his study of discourse over democracy,
education, and science from the civil war to the cold war, Dewey helped lead a broad movement
of “scientific democrats” who saw science and its fields as sites for values and practices like
cooperative inquiry and testing ideas in practice, relevant for all members of democratic society.5
Today, in contrast, “democracy” generally means elections. “Democracy refers to a
civilian political system in which the legislative and chief executive offices are filled through
regular competitive elections with universal suffrage,” declares the U.S. AID, a view
disseminated around the world.6 Even participatory definitions commonly posit democracy in
state-centered terms. This is the view taken, for instance, by the prestigious American Political
Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Its report of
democratic activities included elections, contacting public officials, involvement with
organizations that take political stands, and other government-related practices, but neglects
mention of schools, colleges, or professions as sites for democracy.7
4
Vincent Harding Hope and History; Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (New York: Orbis Books,
1990), pp. 5-6. Boyte’s experiences as a young man in the movement regularly involved discussions about a
broadened view of democracy.
5
Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy and the American University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
6
USAID AID Strategy on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (Washington: US Government Printing,
2013), 37.
7
On the report, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” see Harry C. Boyte, “Reframing
Democracy: Governance, Civic Agency, and Politics,” Public Administration Review 65 No. 5 (2005): 536-546.
Also, on narrowing of democracy, Harry C. Boyte, “Civil Society and Public Work,” in Michael Edwards, Ed.,
Oxford Handbook of Civil Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and “Constructive Politics as Public
Work: Organizing the Literature,” Political Theory 39, No. 5 (2011): 630-660.
3
Small definitions fall flat. Mark Lilla, writing on “why the dogma of democracy doesn’t
always make the world better,” illustrates exhaustion that results. “Never since the end of World
War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so
shallow and clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies…Yet
we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in.”8
Here we argue that advancing the living practices of “democracy” and “education”
against “ominous changes” requires reclaiming an enlarged Deweyan conception of democracy
as agency and also his view of education as experiences which foster the agency of individuals
and collectivities. We begin by describing Dewey’s participatory democracy and also what we
see as limits in his view of politics. We then treat the ways in which agency has become
circumscribed by technocratic trends in educational policy and practice, while noting its survival
in “shadow spaces,” akin to what one of us (Boyte) and Sara Evans call “free spaces.”9 We
conclude by describing an effort to transform special education through the incorporation of
“Public Achievement,” an agency-focused, political approach to young people’s civic learning,
into the special-education programs of Augsburg College and partners, suggesting ways such
work creates foundations for hope and broader democratic change.
Dewey’s democracy-as-agency
Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mishe, in their seminal American Journal of Sociology
essay, “What Is Agency?”, argue that the locus of agency “lies in the contextualization of social
experience… [through which] in deliberation with others (or sometimes self-reflexively, with
Mark Lilla, “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age,” New Republic June 18 2014, at
http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/mark-lilla
9
Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America 2nd edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992).
8
4
themselves) actors gain in the capacity to make considered decisions that may challenge received
patterns of action…” In 20th Century social and political thought, concepts of agency as
individual action take “received patterns” as largely immutable. Agency that imagines intentional
change in contexts “has been overshadowed by an emphasis upon clear and explicit rules of
conduct, concepts that permit relatively little scope for the exercise of situationally based
judgment…”10
Challenging such trends, in 2007 a group of political theorists named emergent
democratic practices as a transdisciplinary field called “civic studies,” focused on agency and
citizens as co-creators of communities at different scales. Civic studies adds to Emirbayer and
Mishe’s definition the idea that citizens are makers of political communities, not simply
deliberators about political communities.11 Agency is understood as the capacity to act with
others in diverse and open environments to shape the world around us.12 Citizenship is “public
work,” work with public dimensions, not simply off-hours volunteerism or participation in
government-connected activities. Academics themselves are citizens. Knowledge, including
science, should aim at increasing capacities to act collectively, effectively, and ethically.13
Civic studies and the trends it conceptualizes can be seen, in part, as inspired by and
revitalizing Deweyan concerns. Though Dewey rarely used “agency” and didn’t use “civic
agency,” in fact related ideas were central to his philosophy from his earliest writings. 14 In “The
Mustafa Emibayer and Ann Mishe, “What is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103, No. 4 (1998): 9621023); quoted 994-5. Also Anthony Giddens, Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).
11
On civic studies, see the framing statement, http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/wpcontent/uploads/CivicsFramingEnglishandPolish.pdf. Also Civic Studies, eds., Peter Levine and Karol Soltan
(Washington: AAC&U, 2014).
12
Civic Studies http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/civic-studies/
13
Harry C. Boyte, “Constructive Politics”; Peter Levine, “The Case for Civic Studies,” in Civic Studies, 7.
14
On conceptual change naming prior ideas and practices, see Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson,
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
10
5
Ethics of Democracy,” Dewey argued that self-directed effort, “personality” in the phrase of his
time, is the essence of democracy. “Democracy means the personality is the first and final
reality,” Dewey wrote. “It admits that the chief stimuli and encouragement to the realization of
personality come from society; but it holds, nonetheless, to the fact that personality cannot be
procured for any one, however degraded and feeble, by anyone else, however wise and strong.”15
In Democracy and Education, Dewey argued that “Such a [democratic] society must have a type
of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and
the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.”16 He proposed
that education involves cultivating “initiative and adaptability.”17 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.”18 Finally, emphasizing the relational qualities of
development against atomizing trends in political and social thought, Dewey proposed 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.”19
Dewey’s commitment to agency led to fierce debates with fellow intellectuals.
According to a rising strand of progressive thought, changes of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century like technological developments, urbanization, and growth of science meant
that theories of citizen involvement needed radical revision. In 1909 Herbert Croly, future editor
of the New Republic, argued that a new citizenship must replace relational ties. Citizens no
15
EW 1, 244.
MW 9, 105.
17
MW 9, 93-94.
18
MW 9, 93. Jane Addams, On Education (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 98.
19
MW 9 315.
16
6
longer need “assemble after the manner of a New England town-meeting” since there existed
“abundant opportunities of communication and consultation without any meeting… [T]he active
citizenship of the country meets every morning and evening and discusses the affairs of the
nation with the newspaper as an impersonal interlocutor.”20 The debate between Walter
Lippmann, leading proponent of the “realist” position, and Dewey framed two radically different
versions of democracy.21 Lippmann’s view took many expressions. Walter Shepherd in his 1934
presidential address to the American Political Science Association called for “an aristocracy of
intellect and character.”22
Dewey addressed critics of participatory democracy by making relational civic action, not
detached thought, the foundation of education and society. As his biographer Alan Ryan detailed,
Dewey believed that the person “makes sense of the world for the sake of acting productively on
the world.”23 This focus led Dewey to a critique of academics who imagine the primacy of their
own thought.24 In response to arguments that people are in the grip of instincts, Dewey proposed
in Human Nature and Conduct that “habits,” not “instincts,” shape most human behavior and can
be intentionally developed.25 His argument that habits can be cultivated has inspired
extraordinary educational experiments such as Central Park East and Mission Hill schools,
founded by Deborah Meier.26
20
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909),139, 453.
See Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1925); John Dewey, The Public
and Its Problems (New York: Holt Publishers, 1927.
22
Shepard in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989),
285.
23
Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 127.
24
LW 4.
25
MW 14, 31-32.
26
Deborah Meier, “So What Does It Take to Build a School for Democracy?” Phi Delta Kappan 85, No. 1 (2003):
15-25.
21
7
While Dewey’s focus on agency, relationships, and habits have powerful relevance, his
lapse was failure to develop a strategy for political action within society. Biographers intimate
this lapse. “Dewey never actually developed, let alone implemented, a comprehensive strategy
capable of realizing his general theory in real world practice,” write Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy,
and John Puckett in their lively “Deweyan manifesto,” Dewey’s Dream.27 Yet we argue that his
lack of political strategy can be traced to a lapse that his critics reproduce, the way he defined
politics narrowly as an activity confined to the government system and seen in ideological terms.
Dewey’s definitional mistake can be found in “School as Social Centre.” There, as
elsewhere, he argued that “politics” is absent in “community.” This move eclipsed not only
schools and other civic environments as political sites but also neglected any concept of politics
which revolves around citizens. “I mean by ‘society’ the less definite and freer play of the forces
of the community which goes on in the daily intercourse and contact of men in an endless variety
of ways that have nothing to do with politics or government,” Dewey said. He proposed that
citizenship needed to be defined more broadly, “to mean all the relationships of all sorts that are
involved in membership in a community.” 28 His works on “politics” itself as a force for change,
such as “Needed a New Politics,” neglected the idea of politics different than ideology.29
Depoliticizing citizenship, those who follow in the Deweyan tradition, including Benson,
Harkavy, and Puckett, have had an idealized view inattentive to the agonistic dynamics of
Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in the Age of
Educational Reform (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), xiii.
28
MW 2, 81-82; for a later version of the same view, LW 11, 217-218. For “citizen politics” different than ideology,
see Harry C. Boyte, “A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the Meaning of Citizenship in the 21 st Century,”
The Good Society 12, No. 2 (2003): 1-15; Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the
Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962).
29
“Needed a New Politics,” LW 11.
27
8
diverse interests involved in public life. 30 Thus Dewey’s Dream substitutes the impulse toward
communication and the ideal of overcoming conflicts for politics, in the older understanding of
the concept. The authors invoke “harmonious living,” “organic communities,” and “utopian
democracies” as descriptors of Dewey’s goals, which they share.
In contrast, citizen politics, in the sense of politics descending from Aristotle and
resurfacing now, is the method that humans, acting in civic and horizontal ways attentive to the
well-being of communities, have developed to negotiate different, often conflicting interests and
views in order to get things done and create a life in common. At times diverse interests can be
integrated through citizen politics but the aim is not to do away with conflict—politics is a neverending “rough and tumble” activity. Often politics surfaces previously submerged clashes of
interest. Rarely does it achieve consensus. Citizen politics aims rather to avoid violence, contain
conflicts, generate work on common challenges, and achieve beneficial public outcomes.
A rough and tumble citizen politics has revived in what is called broad-based community
organizing, which often addresses question of school reform to make schools more favorable for
the flourishing of poor, working class, and minority children.31 Yet such organizing usually
neglects the politics of knowledge and thus the technocracy which has affected sweeping
changes in professions and education.
For a critique of apolitical progressive approaches, see Aaron Schutz, “Power and Trust in the Public Realm: John
Dewey, Saul Alinsky, and the Limits of Progressive Democratic Education,” Educational Theory 6, No. 4 (2011):
491-512.
31
On community organizing, Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York, Free Press,
1990); Richard Wood, Faith In Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy; on organizing and school reform see
Dennis Shirley, Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2002); Marion Orr and John Rogers, Eds., Public Engagement for Public Education: Joining Forces to
Revitalize Democracy and Equalize Education (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Mark R. Warren,
Karen Mapp, and the School Reform Project, A Match in Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for
School Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
30
9
Addressing knowledge politics is necessary for democratic change in education. Thus, in
a review of recent books on community organizing and school reform, Luke Bretherton, a
leading theorist and analyst of community organizing, points to the politics of knowledge as a
crucial, usually unnoted factor:
“What comes across time and again is the hostility ‘non-experts’ provoke… [P]ublic
engagement with education challenges and demands a move beyond technocratic, top
down, one-size-fits all, centralized and procedural reform initiatives to draw on a wider
variety of experience, knowledge, and a diversity of solutions.’32
Though technocracy is a barrier confronting community organizing, with a few exceptions (such
as Bretherton) organizers and theorists of organizing fail to name the power problem or develop
strategies for addressing it. Consequently conflicts between community organizations and
teachers are commonplace. Dennis Shirley’s treatment of the Alliance Schools in Texas, one of
the largest community organizing efforts in school reform, makes clear that such organizing left
teachers’ understanding of their own work largely unaddressed.33
Technocratic power is also invisible in much civic engagement outside of community
organizing, reflecting a communitarian blind spot about politics outside of government. Indeed,
in recent years higher education leaders who call for re-engagement with the world reproduce
apolitical, expert-knows-best approaches without any hint of self-consciousness. Donna Shalala,
then-Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, in a famous speech called for renewal of the
fabled Wisconsin Idea in 1989, titled “Mandate for a New Century.” But she transformed the
32
Luke Bretherton, Review of Public Engagement in Public Education, and Match on Dry Grass in Perspectives on
Politics 11, No. 3 (2013), 958.
33
Shirley, Valley Interfaith, p. 55. On the neglect of “knowledge power” see Harry C. Boyte, “Populism -- Bringing
Culture Back In,” The Good Society 11, No. 2 (2012): 300-319.
10
Wisconsin Idea, always contested but a concept which once often involved academics as citizen
professionals working with other citizens, into the idea that the best and the brightest should fix
the nation’s people and problems. As she said, “The ideal [is] a disinterested technocratic elite…
society’s best and brightest in service to its most needy [dedicated to] delivering the miracles of
social science [on society’s problems] just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past.”34
Shalala’s call for academic research engaged with human concerns reinforced the
tendency of academics to see lay citizens from the outside, as passive objects to be fixed and
informed. A particular paradigm of the citizen and power undergirds such a conception of
science: the general population, no longer viewed as civic producers, are reconceived as clients
and consumers serviced by experts, while citizenship is narrowed to practices like voting,
volunteering, or petitioning government for redress. Professional education played a key role in
this process. The practices and identities of citizen teacher or citizen clergy which had once lent
governance dynamics larger public and democratic meanings and rooted professions in local
civic cultures largely disappeared. Training in professions such as teaching and ministry lost
connections to the real life, history, and cultures of actual places, in ways paralleling the
disappearance of politics from public affairs.35
Yet attention to the spread of technocracy is now appearing. 36Jewett describes a sea
change in science which affected all of professional life in the latter decades of the 20th century,
turning perspectives like those of Lippmann into conventional wisdom. “The scientists who
powerfully shaped the national discourse on science in the middle years of the twentieth century
drew a sharp line between science and society,” says Jewett. “They portrayed science as utterly
Donna Shalala, “Mandate for a New Century” http://www.uic.edu/depts/oaa/ddh/ddhlectures/Lec11.pdf
Barbara Nelson, “Education for the Public Interest,” Address to NASPAA, October 17, 2002, Los Angeles.
36
See Matthew Hartley, John Saltmarsh, Patti Clayton, “Is the Civic Engagement Movement Changing Higher
Education?” British Journal of Educational Studies 58, No. 4 (2011): 391-406.
34
35
11
deaf to human concerns and sought to insulate the research process [as]…a space untouchable by
both the state and the horizontal communication between citizens.” 37
Pope Francis details in Laudato Si’ the ways public action across the sweep of modern
societies substitute informational cultures for relational cultures. “The basic problem…is the way
that humanity has taken up…an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the
concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and
gains control over an external object.”38 The result is a shift from “civic professionalism” to
“disciplinary professionalism.”39 These conceptual dynamics play themselves out in policy and
practice.
Shrinking Agency
Nowhere is this shrinkage more evident than in the policies and practices of schooling.
Kumashiro notes that in the 21 century, education is reductive on all counts; the curriculum is
reduced to bits of information and skills, teachers are reduced to certifiers of this acquisition, and
education is reduced to a form of transmission. 40 This technocratic shrinkage comes from both
liberals and conservatives. In 2001 Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which
mandated that all children in grades 3–8 would be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
Although NCLB covers numerous federal education programs, policy makers, legislators, and
Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (Vatican: Holy See, 2015), 78-79. On the “Theology of the People” movement
which shaped Jorge Bergoglio, Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); for the
relationship of Pope Francis to education, citizen politics and democracy, see Harry C. Boyte, “Climate Change and
Democracy,” in Eric Fretz, Ed., Climate Change across the Curriculum (New York: Lexington Books, 2015).
39
The shift from “civic” to “disciplinary” professional is described in Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life:
Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins
University Press, 1993).
40
Kevin K. Kumashiro, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (New York:
Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2015) XX1.
38
12
popular media focused the most attention on the law’s requirements for testing, accountability,
and school improvement. This external control model of evaluating schools and teachers based
for the most part on standardized test scores carries currency across political lines. Bill Clinton,
known as the “education president” before Bush, pushed to reinvigorate schools by launching an
era of education reform based on setting high standards from the outside, with little teacher
involvement. Following Bush, in 2009 President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne
Duncan instituted the “Race to the Top” program, tying educational funding to evaluations of
teachers based on multiple external measures of educator effectiveness. A nine-year study by the
National Research Council concluded that the emphasis on testing yielded little learning progress
but caused significant harm. 41 While studies of the standardized-testing regime have noted its
failure to improve the American educational system, policymakers and legislators remain
convinced that the best way for schools to improve is to administer more standardized tests. Few
policy-makers observe that such testing is an emblematic case of technocratic experts seeking to
engineer outcomes and practices in ways that displace the agency of the educators, students, and
communities that know their children best.
Now more than two decades into the era of high-stakes testing and national curricula
mandates, we are immersed in a new morass of teacher assessments and accountability. On the
surface, it seems simply cantankerous to argue against raising student achievement standards and
increasing teacher effectiveness. It seems to us, however, that the rhetoric of assessment and
accountability has created what Kenneth Burke calls “terministic screens.” Language, according
to Burke, works like variously colored photographic lenses that filter attention toward and away
National Research Council (Michael Hout and Stuat W. Elliott, Eds), “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability
in Education.” Board on Testing and Assessment. Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, 2015.
http://www.nap.edu/read/12521/chapter/1#x.
41
13
from particular versions of reality. Burke argues that “Language reflects, selects, and deflects as
a way of shaping the symbol systems that allow us to cope with the world.” 42 People create
terministic screens consciously and unconsciously, as they perceive the world. These terministic
screens, we argue, hide Dewey’s view that education should provide experiences that build
habits of mind rather than isolated, fixed skills. As Patrick Shannon has observed, Dewey held
that habits are and must be flexible so that that they can accommodate conscious reconstruction
of experience for human betterment. 43
It is worth looking at the most cited and circulated educational terministic screens and
articulating their implied, but by no means uncontroversial, meanings:
Standards: We need to hold high standards so students will perform better;
Accountability: We must hold teachers accountable for raising student test scores;
Teacher effectiveness: We will measure teacher effectiveness based on students’ test scores.
Achievement gap: Students’ test-score data reveals that white students build more and better
skills than students of color.
Such commonsensical screens shape educational policies without interrogation,
preventing deeper conversations. If we look at the values and beliefs embedded within them, a
different version of reality emerges. These screens deflect attention away from broader societal
issues that impact student learning.
42
Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on life, Literature and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 1966), 5.
43
Patrick Shannon, The Struggle to Continue: Progressive Reading Instruction in the United States (Portsmouth,
New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1990), 63.
14
Standards: The assumptions screened by this term are that there are universally
appropriate measures of competence; that they have been identified by experts; and that we
simply need to ensure that more students are measured more highly in these realms at an earlier
stage in their lives. According to Ravitch, while the Common Core State standards are touted as
voluntary and are “state standards,” they are in fact tied to federal funding, which means they are
for the most part the standards by which schools will be measured. 44 States are not eligible for
Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they adopted the Common Core standards. Karp
notes that substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core's tendency to push
difficult academic skills to lower grades.45 The Alliance for Childhood argues against the
appropriateness of the early childhood standards among other issues. 46
Teacher effectiveness: The assumption screened is that lack of student learning is the sole
result of poor teaching. This denies larger societal issues including poverty, homelessness, and
cultural biases. By measuring teacher effectiveness through student test scores, these screens
inaccurately conceptualize teacher quality as detached from larger systems.
Achievement gap: The assumption screened is that student test scores—which under the
current regime record massive disparities between white students on the one hand and black,
Latino/a, and recent immigrant students on the other—not only indicate what students are
learning, but usefully measure what they should be learning. Gloria Ladson-Billings has argued
that the achievement gap looks only at disparities in standardized test scores that, as described
above, are extremely problematic in themselves. According to Ladson-Billings we need to look
Diane Ravitch. “ Why I Cannot Support the Common Cord Standards,” Diane Ravitch’s blog. (2013.)
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/
45
Stan Karp, “The problem with the Common Core,” Rethinking Schools, 28 (Winter 2013-2014).
46
Alliance for Childhood. “Alliance Warning: Core Standards May Lead to a Plague of Kindergarten Tests.” June 8,
2010. http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Core_Standards_06_08.pdf
44
15
at the “education debt,” which is comprised of historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral
components, components silenced by much of the current public conversation. 47 Others shift the
focus by naming this gap an “access gap,” or an “opportunity gap.” Is such a gap actually
getting worse as the screens would have us believe? The National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP), the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what
America's students know and can do in various subject areas, have monitored student progress in
reading and mathematics for nationally representative samples of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds since
the early 1970s. Results from the 2012 assessments show the following:

Compared to the first assessment in 1971 for reading and in 1973 for
mathematics, scores were higher in 2012 for 9- and 13-year-olds and not
significantly different for 17-year-olds.

In both reading and mathematics at all three ages, Black students made larger
gains from the early 1970s than White students.

Hispanic students made larger gains from the 1970s than White students in
reading at all three ages and in mathematics at ages 13 and 17.48
Likewise, while the screens hold that the U.S. is falling further and further behind
internationally, the TIMMs data document a different version of reality. The Trends in
International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011 is the fifth administration of this
international comparative study since 1995 when first administered. In 2011, the average
Gloria Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S.
Schools, Educational Researcher 35, No. 7 (2006): 3-12.
48
The National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessments. The National Report
Card . Web. 5 Sept. 2015. ‹ http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/ ›.
47
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mathematics score of U.S. 4th-graders (541) was higher than the international TIMSS scale
average, higher than Finland and higher, on average, than 42 education systems.49
These terministic screens hide the severance of agency from school performance. They
re-enforce a detached view of learning, in which schools cannot be democratic sites for learning
and communities are not partners in co-creation of knowledge. Teachers working with children
see behind these screens but popular media and policy makers reinforce this selective view. The
No Child Left Behind Act has led to a testing frenzy not a teaching goal. The use of testing data
as punishment rather than as diagnostic tools is dismantling the teaching profession and
demoralizing teachers. Walker reports on the National Education Association 2014 national
survey of teachers in the profession, noting that nearly half consider leaving because of high
stakes testing.50 This shift to a technocratic, top down, centralized reform in education is
reducing teachers to technicians. The challenge is educating the teaching profession, the public
and the policy makers to make the connections to the real life, history, and cultures of actual
places. The terministic screens focus on decontextualized disciplinary scores and prevent
teachers and policy makers from aligning their work to civic professionalism.
The push to prepare “highly qualified teachers” has resulted in tighter regulations for
teacher education programs as well, so teacher educators scurry to meet the regulations and
mandated reporting. Who are effective teachers? We cannot let these terministic screens hide the
fact that currently an economic framework guides the decisions. When what gets measured does
not match what counts, rote memorization and computer evaluated pedagogies replace project-
49
The National Center for Educational Statistics. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Web. 5
Sept. 2015. ‹ http://nces.ed.gov/timss/results11_math11.asp›.
50
Walker, Tim. “NEA Survey: Nearly Half Of Teachers Consider Leaving Profession Due to Standardized
Testing.” November 2,2014. http://neatoday.org/2014/11/02/nea-survey-nearly-half-of-teachers-consider-leavingprofession-due-to-standardized-testing-2/.
17
based education of the sort championed by Dewey and generations of educators, as well a sense
that schools are “part of” communities. Today we do not evaluate teacher effectiveness in how
well students act as problem solvers and problem posers, or how well students understand
themselves and act as citizens in a democracy, as advocates and architects and builders of their
community. Schools and teacher education programs have been forced to reduce intellectual
work to content knowledge without application or as a resource to the work of a citizen. Like P12 schools facing the narrowed focus on their roles and responsibilities, teacher educators too
face the same narrowing and the same high stakes testing requirements so that their graduates
will be “highly effective” for this current conception of the purposes of public education. Most
teacher educators see the need for a continuous quest for social justice in public education. In his
reflection on the future of college and university-based teacher education, Zeichner wrote, “The
goal of greater social justice is a fundamental part of the work of teacher education in democratic
societies and we should never compromise on the opportunity to make progress toward its
realization” 51 Yet, in 2006, The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education
(NCATE), now Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) dropped “social
justice” from its standards. NCATE uses standards to guide its decisions about whether or not to
accredit teacher education programs, but its standards fail to address the critical issues in
American education. Johnson and others, in an analysis of the NCATE standards, argue that no
NCATE standards address helping future teachers understand the societal factors that shape our
Kenneth Zeichner, “Reflections of a University-based Teacher Educator on the Future of College- and Universitybased Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education, 53 (2006), 336-340, quoted 339.
51
18
nation’s schools, with implications of the re-segregation of schools, the unequal funding of
public schools, the reduction in school funding in many locales, poverty etc. 52
We argue that this deletion of “social justice” from the standards discourages future
teachers from examining and critiquing the current education climate and, most importantly,
from acting as agents for change. Dropping “social justice” means dropping foundations of
democracy. Yet the prevailing terministic screens deflect our attention away from this.
John Dewey explained that education can take place only through experience, but that not all
experience is educative.53 Current pedagogies and policies in so many public schools are not
educative. These patterns affect educators in a variety of ways, with much preventing teachers
and teacher educators from doing significant work in “educating for democracy” with
significantly more time allocated to testing than teaching. For example, as chair of a Department
of Education, Finders has four mandated annual state and federal reports. A current bill moving
through the MN legislature regarding teacher education programs, if passed, would require more
collecting of data and more reporting. Likewise, on September 16, 2015, the U.S. Department of
Education transmitted its draft of its final rule (which is not publicly available) for more teacher
preparation program regulations. We are not suggesting that accountability measures are not
important for school improvement, we are examining how the terministic screens have led to a
nonproductive testing frenzy.
Such screens sever the economic forces at play in the current education landscape.
Shannon details the economic forces working against the Deweyian model of education.
Shannon writes, “Moreover, Dewey lamented that most social decisions were made according to
52
Dale Johnson, Bonnie Johnson, Stephen Farenga and Daniel Ness, Trivializing Teacher Education: The
Accreditation Squeeze (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2005), 89.
53
MW 9.
19
profit motives. He found that the crux of the disorientation of the working urban population was
due to the fact that the potential universal benefits of machine production were negated because
it was ‘harnessed to the dollar’.” 54 The powerful impact on schools from corporations who are
profiting from the testing market makes the profession even more powerless.
It is easy to rage against the tightening of policies that regulate schools and teacher
preparation program, to feel hopeless and simply give up and give in to the policies and practices
that regulate democracy out of schools. In such a time and context, it is also crucial to look for
the spaces where organizing might occur to transform schools into humane, agentic places for
learners of all backgrounds, especially those marginalized by race, class, culture, and purported
deficits in language, academic or social skills.
Shadow places and free spaces
In educational literature the concept of “shadow spaces” apart from the glare of
mainstream policy has emerged to highlight spaces where educators have room to “experiment,
imitate, learn, communicate, and reflect on their actions.”55 Civic engagement work began from
the Humphrey Institute in 1987 with the premise that what Evans and Boyte call free spaces were
important to identify and expand for civic engagement. Free spaces are akin to shadow spaces in
that they are sites where people have an important measure of room for self-organizing initiative,
free from dominant cultural, social, and economic powers. The concept of free spaces also
highlights the political qualities of such spaces, citizen politics that can be intentionally
developed. Thus free spaces are grounds for broader democratic change. The working premise
54
Shannon, Struggle to Continue, 61.
On shadow spaces, David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa, “Development Education and Education for Sustainable
Development,” Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review Issue 12 (Spring 2011): 15-31.
55
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was that organizing efforts in free spaces could produce lessons for reversing technocratic
creep,56 In the process, partners found that “shadow places” can become free spaces.
Public Achievement: empowered youth and citizen teachers
Boyte, with others, began Public Achievement (PA) in 1991 to teach young people the
citizen politics and larger view of democracy which he had experienced as a college student in
the civil rights movement. In Public Achievement, teams of young people work on issues of their
choice in real world settings, schools or communities. They meet through the year, coached by
adults, often college students, who help them develop achievable goals, learn to navigate their
local environment, and learn everyday political skills and concepts. Public Achievement, based
on core concepts of citizen politics, public work, and free spaces, illustrates civic studies in
practice. In the language of social change literature, it takes an “organizing” approach, investing
in relationship-building and people’s public growth, rather than the “mobilizing” approach
common in social change efforts.57
St. Bernard’s Elementary School, a low-income and working class Catholic school in the
North End area of St. Paul, was an incubator as Public Achievement became the centerpiece of
the school’s culture through leadership of then-principal Dennis Donovan. He insisted that young
people learn everyday political skills and also that teachers and others in the school become
citizen workers with agency. Since its founding, Public Achievement has spread to several
Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; Francesca Polletta, “‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action,” Theory and Society 28
(1999): 1-38.
57
The contrast is described in Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); for a detailed analysis of the
differences which result see Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership
in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also Harry C. Boyte, “A Tale of Two Playgrounds:
Young People and Politics,” September 1, 2001, American Political Science Association, San Francisco.
56
21
hundred communities and schools in the United States and as well as to Poland, Northern
Ireland, South Africa, Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, Japan and elsewhere.
The Center for Democracy and Citizenship moved to Augsburg College in 2009 with the
belief that a liberal arts college like Augsburg, with a citizenship mission and spirit of an “urban
settlement,” has freedom to innovate missing in research universities with meritocratic cultures.58
Donovan, who became national organizer for Public Achievement in 1997, worked with the
Special Education pre-service program to experiment with Public Achievement as an answer to
the critique of special education from within the field.
Students in special education are identified with a disability under one of 13 categories
deemed to interfere with educational experiences of themselves and others. Those placed in
special education often suffer lifetimes of trouble with mental illness, unemployment and
incarceration – one study suggests that as many as 70 percent of special education students will
go to jail at some point in their lives.59 It is a logical conclusion of educational technocracy.
Susan O’Connor, director of special education, wanted to try something different.
“Special Education generally still uses a medical model, based on how to fix kids,” she said.60
The field has produced an internal critique, disabilities studies, which questions such a medical
approach based on positivist science. As Jan Valle and David Connor summarize the argument
“Critical special educators…foreground issues such as special education’s insular,
reductionist approach to research; an overreliance on the remediation of deficits;
58
See Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2015).
59
Robert Reid, Jorge Gonzalez, Phillip Nordness, Alexandra Trout, and Michael H. Epstein, “A meta-analysis of the
academic status of students with emotional/behavioral disturbance,” The Journal of Special Education, 38, No. 3
(2004): 130-143.
60
O’Connor in Harry Boyte with Jen Nelson, “Educating for Citizen Careers,” Democracy’s Education, 24.
22
sustained use of intelligence testing; commonplace segregation based on disability and/or
race; the professionalization of school failure; and the continued medicalization of
disabled people.”61
Donovan, O’Connor, and Donna Patterson, another faculty member, partnered with Michael
Ricci and Alissa Blood, graduates of the Special Education program to design an alternative
class in the Fridley Middle School using a Public Achievement-style approach. Over three years
the results were dramatic. ”Problem” students, mostly low-income and minority, who in many
schools would be confined to their classes, became public leaders on issues like school bullying,
health lifestyles, campaigning against animal cruelty, and creating a support network for
terminally ill children. They built relationships and received recognition in the school and in the
larger Fridley community. Their Public Achievement work brought them into contact with
school administrators, community leaders, elected officials, and media outlets like the local
paper and Minnesota Public Radio.
For her master’s thesis on Public Achievement at Fridley, Blood conducted face to face
conversations with five participants, made detailed observations of young people’s behavior, and
recorded activities on video tape. She found substantial impact on student self-image, sense of
empowerment, and behavior. “They believed that they were more capable then they had ever
thought they were in the past,” Blood writes. “The students believed that they could be positive
citizens and that the people who believed differently about them were wrong -- a very powerful
belief for any student in middle school.” 62
61
Jan W. Valle and David J. Connor, Rethinking Disability: A Disability Studies Approach to Inclusive Practices
(New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), xii.
62
Alyssa Blood-Knafla, Experiences of Students with Special Needs in Public Achievement (Master’s Thesis,
Augsburg College, 2013), 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22.
23
Developing civic agency depends on pedagogies and teacher identities very different than
one-way approaches. Michael Ricci and Blood, graduates of the Augsburg Special Education
program, developed a pedagogy based on their conviction that an approach that respects
students’ agency, creating opportunities for them to help design their own learning, was worth a
try. “My role is not to fix things for the kids but to say, ‘this is your class, your mission. How are
you going to do the work?’ Our main task is to remind them, to guide them, not to tell them what
to do,” explains Ricci. Teachers became partners with their students. They change from
“teaching to the test” to working alongside young people as they develop agency. The
curriculum builds citizenship skills, habits, and identities such as negotiation, compromise,
initiative, planning, organizing, and public speaking. It develops what Blood calls “a public
professional persona.” Ricci and Blood believe that these will serve the students all their lives.63
Building on their experiences, Special Education at Augsburg now has all teacher candidates
coaching in PA sites, in ways that also suggest changes to teacher education.
Returning agency to democracy and education
“Highly effective teachers,” in the regime of high-stakes testing, builds from a narrow set
of data used for decisions on school ranking, funding, teacher qualification, promotion, retention,
and pay. In some states, teachers are required to sign contractual agreements that they are not to
diminish the importance of the tests. In almost all cases, teacher education has come to focus on
individual success of students, most often an emphasis on succeeding in high stakes testing.
Yet there signs of a return to Democracy and Education’s view of collective, agentic
democracy. For instance, in No Citizen Left Behind, drawing on her own teaching experiences as
well as work of political philosophers including Dewey, Meira Levinson challenges
63
Ricci and Blood, quoted Boyte with Nelson, “Educating for Citizen Careers.”
24
individualized agency, preparing students for success within the “testocracy.” She argues instead
for a revitalized understanding of “power [as] relational and contextual” and “empowerment [as]
a collective condition, not just an individual possession or state.”64 She includes vivid examples
of political skills such as “codeswitching.” This means students learning “that in every
community there is a language and culture of power” and students can “represent and express
themselves in ways that members of the majority group…will naturally understand and
respect…instead of teaching [minority] kids that they do things wrong.”65
Our experiences and theory, developing citizen professional theory and practice, 66
include such skills. In this framework teachers and teacher educators who wish to contribute to
democratizing change need to incorporate democratic theory as well as practices such as
“codeswitching,” “power-mapping,” “citizen politics,” “public narrative,” and one-on-one
relational meetings. Augsburg College’s Education Department is taking up such concepts and
practices. 67
In this context, “highly effective teachers” are those who support development of agency
within learners and themselves, deliberate, strategically direct thoughts and actions in light of
goals, and act as co-creators. For such democratic reframing of teacher education and teaching to
take hold will require wide change. A focus on a liberation of powers shifts teachers and teacher
educators from technicians to citizen teachers and citizen faculty who foster people’s agency.
64
Meira Levinson, No Citizen Left Behind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12.
Ibid., 87-88.
66
See Albert W. Dzur, Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional
Ethics (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); William J. Doherty, Tai J. Mendenhall, and
Jerica M. Berge, “The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project,” Journal of Marital & Family
Therapy 36, No. 4 (2010): 389-402; and the ongoing biweekly blog conversation at Education Week, “Bridging
Differences,” with Deborah Meier and Harry Boyte, which explores lessons from democracy education and
organizing for democra change http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
67
At Augsburg College, the entire department of teacher education has undertaken an extensive process of faculty
development to become more familiar with civic studies theory and practice.
65
25
It also involves a Copernican revolution to put citizens, not politicians, at the center of
politics.68 Such a conceptual revolution is essential to realize the aspirations of John Dewey, to
create the educational system we need, and build a democratic way of life.
We thank Trygve Throntveit, Lenard Waks, Terri Wilson, David Waddington and Marie Strȍm
for feedback.
68
A strand of political theory, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Sheldon Wolin, has recognized the difference between
citizen politics and electoral politics, but has also conceived electoral politics as the arena of “noble deeds” and
“public spirited” actions. See Sheldon Wolin Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and
Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6. This argument inverts the pattern. On the need for
a Copernican Revolution in politics, see Harry C. Boyte, “Reconstructing Democracy: The Citizen Politics of Public
Work,” Havens Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 11, 2001; Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting
Democracy; and Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
26