This Is Not News

Item 10: Reformers must contribute to the base of social knowledge.

One of the advantages of a democratic culture is that the exchange of ideas and knowledge helps every citizen to grow and advance toward his or her goals. Democratic reformers should be particularly aware of this. In the course of their work, they will have to learn things about the population of the communities that they serve and the effectiveness of particular methods of reform. This knowledge should not be retained for purely internal purposes, but shared with a wider audience to extend the reach of the reformers. Activists or researchers in other areas may want to make use of the reformers’ findings so that their own activities will be more effective.

If the super-ambitious parts of the model have been achieved, and a reform movement school is working with its surrounding community to understand and solve problems, then the school will have also made a lot of progress toward implementing this element as well. As students learn about their neighborhoods and communities, and publish what they have learned for an authentic audience, they will be helping to create a record of their communities that other people can access. That is an important contribution to a society that aims to use empirical evidence to make better decisions.

The reform movement school has a chance to achieve this goal in a more conspicuous way by virtue of its unique nature within the field of education. Through its very existence, the reform movement school acts as an experiment or trial for Deweyan/progressive/democratic education. The school should embrace this fact and work to make its work as transparent and accountable as possible. I am not talking about the kind of “data-driven” evidence that is in vogue right now; I am not suggesting that the reform movement school should be broadcasting its standardized test scores as a referendum on its success.

If, instead, we agree that in order to assess an individual student’s success, we must be able to look at a varied body of work that demonstrates the way that a student engages the world and solves problems that are meaningful to him or her, then the reform movement school should make a point of demonstrating its students’ success to the world. As students create portfolios of meaningful work over their school careers, that work should be published and shared. Student-created blogs, wikis, videos, games, programs, and more should be a source of knowledge, inspiration, and evidence for all. If the school has successfully created a real community, then many students should be willing to reflect on their experiences in the years after they graduate and explain how they feel that their education did – and did not – prepare them for a life of meaningful work as democratic citizens. Some of this information can be quantified through surveys and demographic studies, but much of it will be qualitative. That does not make it any less valid as evidence.

Furthermore, the staff of the reform movement school should view their education mission as going beyond their specific school. They will be developing and testing tools and methods every day. They should share this knowledge with other educators. If, in fact, the methods of the reform movement school are successful, other people will want to adopt them. The staff of the school should see it as part of their mission to make this happen. In this way, the reform movement school will adopt some of the “research” mantle that is traditionally assumed by colleges and universities and the academic research process. Today we can see an alternative infrastructure take shape for collaborating, sharing results, and getting feedback. Within schools and districts, some teachers take on responsibility for planning professional development sessions for their colleagues. Twitter, education blogs, and other social media help teachers form personal learning networks that share ideas. Formal and informal conferences like TED, Edcamps, and EduCon offer opportunities for face to face interaction. The reform movement school should be consciously designed to plug into these networks and use them to fulfill the school’s mission.

Item 9: Reformers must contribute to the artistic and cultural community.

This item in the model reflected Dewey’s ongoing interest in aesthetic theory and the arts’ role in a thriving democratic culture. In my dissertation I spent a lot of time laying out Dewey’s notion that art is something that humans deliberately create in order to create an opportunity for the audience (including the creator) to have AN experience. AN experience is different from everyday experience, which often floats past us to the point that we don’t really remember it. When we have AN experience, our attention is fully absorbed in the moment; our emotions and intellect are engaged; we see or understand something we did not see or understand before; we perceive new opportunities for action. According to Dewey, art is humanity’s ongoing attempt to harness and increase these opportunities for growth. Artistic expression is a powerful method for exchanging ideas, motivating action, and inspiring reflection. Reformers should absolutely make a conscious effort to harness that power in their efforts to improve society.

For a reform movement school, this conscious effort to include an artistic dimension to the school’s work should begin with the curriculum and planning. Many educators talk about the importance of giving students authentic work to do, and one thing that can help drive this is to design the school experience so that students are producing work for a wider audience than their teacher and immediate classmates. Technology has placed some incredible content-creation and publishing tools at our disposal. We can use those to increase the reach of of our students.

This communication can and should go both ways. If the school and its surrounding community are already working to establish close relationships based on other elements of the model, it stands to reason that the school and surrounding community would also want to share their artistic creations. Perhaps established artists could come to the school and do workshops for the students. Perhaps beginning artists could attend sessions in the after school periods. Perhaps connections could be established on social networks, and students, staff, and neighbors could share and comment on each other’s work. In this way, the tools that schools try to teach students to help them understand and appreciate art can be applied to the artistic experiences that students live inside and outside of the school.

The two key elements to remember for this element are: 1) students (and teachers) should be creating and sharing works that have artistic purpose, and 2) the school should have some avenues established for exchanging works and commentary with members of the community outside of the school.

Item 8: Reformers must target the economic structure of society.

John Dewey was a major critic of the American economic system. He believed that it had a negative effect on many children’s educations, because schools spent their effort to produce efficient workers for the industrial economy rather than effective citizens for a democratic society. Once those students reached adulthood, they were too busy scrambling to earn enough money to survive to devote the time and energy necessary to be involved participants in civic life. I agree with those criticisms, and so I felt that the model should explicitly address them with this item.

As we look at the way economics affect education today, I think it is apparent that economics get in the way of schools’ fulfilling their mission in a democratic society. Private corporations make fortunes providing services and materials to schools while the tax base that is supposed to support many schools is weakened. Families who can afford to do so send their children to private schools that do not face the same burdens and obstacles that public schools do. Public school districts with strong resources and reputations attract families who can afford to pay the home prices and property taxes that provide those resources. It is not surprising then that, even as education is viewed as a means of escaping poverty or improving one’s economic situation, recent studies suggest that equality of opportunity is decreasing in the United States.

This is something that a reform movement school should take on, but to do is fraught with potential problems. The teachers, administrators, and other staff at the school are not just potential reformers; they are stakeholders whose personal economic well-being is at stake. This can give them incentive to work to improve the system, but it also gives the public a reason to doubt their motives or to view their work as a taxpayers-versus-teachers situation, which is not beneficial for anyone. Sometimes there can not help but be a conflict of interest. A teachers union, for example, might have as one of its central goals the protection of its members, but a school community may feel that a specific teacher has been so ineffective that he or she should leave the school. The staff of a reform movement school must be vigilant in self-enforcing its norms and culture in order to minimize the problems that these conflicts might cause. The union could work with administrators and the public to create a set of strong expectations and a fair procedure for evaluating whether a teacher has met those expectations, and then work to ensure that the teacher charged with being ineffective has a fair hearing.

Challenging the existing economic system will also be one of the bigger conflicts that can be created by the emphasis on highlighting incompatible beliefs in order to challenge the status quo. Supporters of the current economic system would accuse a reform movement school of being overly political or teaching a radical agenda to students. And those opponents would be right that the school is being political and radical; the only difference in opinion is whether that is an acceptable thing for a school to be. As I’ve said before, once you start to teach something, you are teaching a point of view. So there will be conflict, and the reform movement school will have to assess which battles it should fight, which it must avoid, and which situations call for flying under the radar.

An example of the first category would be economic issues that directly and clearly affect schools and the quality of the education that students receive, such as unequal funding of schools, or the degree to which companies are profiting from the increased emphasis on standardized testing. In such cases it is important that the school organize the effort in the right way. If the school creates space for students to take leadership of investigating these issues and calling for solutions, then the obvious personal stakes become more of a virtue and less of a problem. If the reform movement school is able to fulfill the other aspects of its mission, then no one should be able to argue for students taking initiative and acting as engaged citizens to increase their own opportunities. If the students look like they are not engaged or responsible, then the optics would be very different. So an assignment to “Describe and evaluate the current methods for funding education” would work well to address this item. An assignment to “Write your congressman and tell him that he should vote for this particular spending bill” would not.

An example of the second would be engaging with the electoral system in a one-sided way based on a candidate’s economic positions. It’s one thing to investigate the positions of candidates or hold mock debates, but formal endorsements by the school as an organization would be a bad idea. Even social pressure exerted by authority figures is a bad idea. Protest actions against perceived specific individuals, organizations, and corporations should also be avoided as an organized school activity. A reform movement school might favor patent or copyright laws based on the free exchange of ideas and a cultural marketplace that protects the work and well-being of artists. But it is probably a bad idea to organize a School Piracy Day as an act of civil disobedience.

These examples edge toward caricature, but that is because there are relatively few situations in which a reform movement school should not engage at all. There are many ways that a school can work to understand, critique, and improve the economic structure of society without engaging in a public campaign that attracts a lot of negative attention. Here it is worth turning the attention back to the classroom and the activities connected to it. If students learn how the economy works, and begin to identify ways that it can be improved, then that is a contribution that will pay dividends for years and decades to come. I’ve talked before about the class in social justice I took in high school. Just having that knowledge when I was a teenager has helped me understand the news a lot better in the two decades since. If a reform movement school does its work well, it should be able to say the same for hundreds of students.

Item 6. Reformers must use technology to build community ties.

When I reread this part of the model, I laughed and very nearly said, “OK, let’s just move on the next item.” I developed the model between 2002 and 2006, when blogs were the hot new trend in online communities and online social networks were in their birth and infancy stages. Today I am sending links to these essays to dozens of educators around the country through Twitter. Educators and students are definitely using technology to create communities.

However, while I don’t want to belabor the point, it is worth taking a moment to think about how a hypothetical reform movement school would use technology, including social networks, to build community ties. Part of the mission of the school is to be active in the surrounding community and try to create conditions for a more democratic society. So for this part of the model, it is not enough that students and administrators be connected with each other online. They need to use those technological connections in a constructive way to increase their own knowledge and then share that knowledge with others.

There are plenty of examples of this already in place in schools around the country. Students in Philadelphia have used social networks to plan protests regarding the austerity budget that the district passed earlier this year. Reporters use Twitter to share information about school board meetings and solicit stories from students and educators. Schools can take the idea of a school newspaper and publish it online so that everyone can see it. In the process, the reporters for such an online publication could broaden their scope beyond the school to the community in which the school resides.

As significant as the educational technology community is, not every student or educator takes advantage of these tools. So the reform movement school must look for people who are already somewhat plugged in and others who are willing to and interested in becoming part of these technology-facilitated communities. It will also need to set up some system and guidelines so that the use of technology to observe what is going in the world and share what is going on at the school is a regular part of the school’s identity.

This will have the additional benefit of helping students build their “digital citizenship” skills. Even though many students are using technology to build and maintain social connections, they are not always conscious of how they are doing so, or of how corporations and other forces shape their use of such technologies. If the reform movement school helps its students to understand these forces, the students can then spread that understanding through their own networks.

Item 5: The reform movement itself must be democratic.

This element warns against adopting top-down structures where a reform movement relies on the work and motivation of a large group of activists/participants but decision-making power rests in a central leadership group or charismatic leader. Such centralized structures open any group committed to improving democracy to charges of hypocrisy. They also force those involved with the movement to confront the sort of contradiction that make it difficult for someone to continue on their current course. That can be a good thing when you want people to change, but if you want people to keep working as part of the organization that they have been, that sort of contradiction is counterproductive. Using democratic structures also allows the reformers to model what they advocate and demonstrate its effectiveness.

As such, this is a very important part of the model, but for a school it has to have some qualifications. Implied in a society’s need for schools to prepare its next generation to be citizens is the notion that, without formal schooling, many (if not most) children will not grow up with the knowledge and skills required to be effective citizens. If they could do it on their own, we would not go through the trouble of creating schools, and we could let everyone be self-directed citizens in their own self-selected learning communities. I’m not saying that anyone is actually arguing that we do not need schools, so I do not want to seem like I am ridiculing anyone here. I am just trying to establish as a starting point that students, in their lives as students, are still immature as citizens and need assistance preparing for the responsibilities that come with democratic citizenship.

This is not a rationale for the school to adopt or maintain a top-down structure or try to remove all aspects of democratic life just because students are not prepared for the full responsibility. That would be just as absurd as having no structure at all. One of the central ideas of Dewey’s democratic theory of education is that people learn by confronting and solving problems that are relevant to the goals and lives they have built for themselves. A school can not claim that it is preparing students to be citizens in a democracy and then never give them a chance to confront and work through the problems that citizens encounter in a democracy.

So what we have is a need to find a balance point, where students can meaningfully engage in the work of democratic citizenship while still having some guidance and safeguards to help them through obstacles that their relative inexperience create. Students need to be given a real voice in the creation of the school culture and program. At the beginning this may even include the design of the student institutions that will help organize that student voice. Will there be an elected student government? How should it be constructed? What eligibility requirements should there be for someone to serve? How will the representatives ensure that the voices of the students are being heard? Should there be advisory groups of students recruited by teachers and administrators?

Once the institutions for students to give their input have been created, those institutions have to have some kind of legitimate authority within the school community. While it might be appropriate for a staff council or a parents group to have some kind of veto, if that veto is always or often used students will begin to see their institutions of democratic participation as a sham, and refuse to participate. On the other hand, if the students see that their work is respected and helps form the basis of the school’s everyday expectations and norms, they are far more likely to accept and adopt those norms. The limits of the oversight veto power should be established through a combination of the formal rules of the school’s institutions and the informal norms of its culture and everyday practice. The exact nature of that mix will need to be determined by each school community, but it should be a through and detailed enough process that there are rarely surprises when the veto has to be used. Even if they disagree or are disappointed by the particular use of the veto, most students should be able to understand why it was used and whether there are any ways to overcome the problems that led to its use in the first place.

The students’ voice should also be considered in things like the subject matter and methods for its study. There are obviously requirements that need to be considered – whether those are based on state or local standards, or the expectations of higher learning institutions and employers, or the judgment of the knowledgeable educators who form the staff of the school. But within those requirements there should be space for a honest discussion. The problems is that as soon as you have more than two students in a room, you have at least two different visions of the best way to proceed. I have had my students “focus group” the content and methods we are going to use in a class, and facilitating such a discussion can be truly exhausting for a teacher. Indeed, the teacher might end the discussion having no more idea of what “the students” as a collective group want than when the process began. But if these exercises occur frequently, in a series of classes and contexts, the quality of the feedback should improve., and the teacher will get better at facilitating the process. In this way, it is not only the students who are learning to be more effective democratic citizens.

I have focused here on how the students’ voices can be legitimately respected in a democratic school culture, but that commitment should definitely extend throughout the school’s structure. Just as students can work with their teachers to help direct the course of individual classes and the school at large, the teachers and staff should be able to work with their administrators to shape the school’s culture, institutions, and mission. I do not want to imply that this is easy, but if a school is working to help the students develop an authentic voice, it should be possible to develop parallel structures for the staff.

If schools can really demonstrate the power of democratic citizenship, then they really can transform society and help a democracy realize its promise. We are not there yet, but the potential is there. I’m going to close out this post with a footnote I wrote in my thesis about one discussion in Dewey’s Democracy and Education:

Dewey criticizes “the educational practices which train the many for pursuits involving mere skill in production, and the few for a knowledge that is an ornament and a cultural embellishment,” and argues for an “educational transformation” that will prepare citizens for “a truly democratic society, a society in which all share in useful service and all enjoy a worthy leisure.” This transformation has been hinted at already. “The increased political and economic emancipation of the ‘masses’ has shown itself in education’” through the development of a public school system so that learning is no longer a “monopoly of the few.” But education has not yet given citizens the useful, practical education that prepares them for life in a democracy – “the revolution is still incomplete.” But Dewey is quite clear that he believes the revolution has the potential to succeed.