It's the Governance, Stupid

Democracy. Citizenship. Patriotism. The Constitution. These are all things that we are supposed to be demonstrating and teaching to our students. That burden falls particularly heavy on social studies teachers with history and civics classes. There is always some kind of outcry in the wilderness about how illiterate students are about their rights, responsibilities, knowledge of government. Yet, what do we model in the very buildings that students inhabit for their education? Authoritarianism. Obligations. Fear. Little in the way of free speech for students (or faculty for that matter).

Legislatures have tried to craft solutions by fiat. In Colorado, US History is a required class to pass before graduation. Civics is also now required. There was an bill to force the recitation of the Pledge. Am I alone in seeing the irony in this?

School reform isn't just about getting all students to read. And what passes for reform is often anything but. Yet, for the most part, we continue with a bureaucratic factory model of school governance that enables one position, the principal, to dictate the environment and conditions of a school. It's the same problem as with monarchies, you're stuck with the one you get. Pray hard that they are a benevolent dictator.

I have been in enough buildings to see this in operation many times over. A new principal arrives and a school either flourishes or takes a dive. And the quality of education is inevitably connected. Real structural reform isn't about creating charter schools or vouchers, but about democratizing the governance of schools. A school must be a community project that does not depend on the skill and ability and personality of one person. If we can do it for charter schools, why are we so gun-shy about accomplishing it for public schools? Let's practice democracy rather than simply mouth it. Let's have students participate in the real thing, rather than demand they recite the Preamble to a Constitution we can't seem to practice in that same classroom.

There are many forms democracy and constitutionalism could take in a school or set of schools. And that is the conversation that we should be having. Let's remake schools as living, breathing democratic communities. Let's fight and bicker and compromise and have schools as the hatcheries of democracy that they should be.

Only then will public education in the US be "reformed."