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Schools are strictly connected with the stability and vitality of our democracy in the united states. The important relationship between public schooling and democracy began as a foundational idea in our fledgling republic and it grew slowly over the course of our country's history.

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Teachers have always had a huge responsibility for the next generation , To teach and nurture students so they have the opportunity to live fulfilling lives. To help them develop judgment and discernment to be engaged citizens. To fight for social justice and make our classrooms and schools safe havens for students.

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Remarks by AFT president Randi Weingarten
AFT TEACH 2019
Washington, DC
July 11, 2019

America's public school educators are change agents. You guide young people not only to build skills and knowledge, but to build relationships. You instill appreciation for diversity and respect for differences. You help our country realize its promise and help people have a better life; you are the essence of public education.

Horace Mann, John Dewey and Margaret Haley, a founding mother of the AFT, saw public schooling as central to the well-being of society and the strength of our democracy. So did Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin and Al Shanker. Al frequently invoked the AFT's founding motto: Democracy in education, and education for democracy.

Because that is what public education is at its best-a ladder of opportunity, a path out of poverty, a place to develop the muscle of civic participation, where we both embrace America's diversity and forge a common identity; indeed, the foundation of democracy.

But our country is dangerously divided. Will hope or fear prevail? Aspiration or despair? Humanity or cruelty? This is a moment of reckoning for our collective national character.

Our democracy is under assault. Donald Trump has waged a war on truth and on the press. He has trampled rights and responsibilities enshrined in the Constitution. He has scoffed at the rule of law and stoked America's divisions in order to exploit them, spurring neighbors to turn on each other; driving wedges between people who actually want the same things, like parents and educators; and inciting people to fear others for absolutely no good reason. He embraces despots while distancing our allies. He has put commerce and greed over human rights.

And his economic agenda has widened the gap between the rich and the rest of us. Today, the 400 richest Americans, less than one-fourth of 1 percent, have more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of people in our country. Claiming it's the "best economy ever" doesn't make it true. Just ask people in McDowell County, W.Va., or Lordstown, Ohio, communities that have been abandoned by industry and now further betrayed by the president who promised he would help them.

Many of you see the impact of this in your classrooms every day. The bullying and hatred that permeate society are on the rise in our schools. Economic stress has you stocking more snacks for your students and taking more money out of your own pocket for school supplies. At this moment when we need more civic participation, not less, subjects like American government and civics are squeezed out because standardized testing still compels schools to fixate on math and language arts.

This is not the first time our democracy has been at risk, but today its survival falls on us. Why? Because we are part of two institutions that are essential to the American dream-public education and the labor movement. Public schools and labor unions are direct pathways to broad-based prosperity and pluralism. They are how people can achieve a better life. And you-AFT members-are at the nexus of both.

That is why, together, we must play a vital role in moving the country toward our better angels. We must ensure that better days are ahead of us, not behind us. And I know we can.

Think about what we've already done. Remember the false narrative about public schools a decade ago-about so-called bad teachers, failing students and a system supposedly so broken that privatization and austerity were the only answers? We've busted up those myths, one by one.

For much of the last decade, it felt like we were in a knife fight, outnumbered by a bunch of billionaires and ideologues intent on reducing teachers and students to a test score, dividing parents and teachers, pauperizing our schools, and scapegoating and slandering public school teachers.

Slowly but surely, we have changed the narrative: By telling our story-about what works in our schools, and what doesn't; about the devastating toll disinvestment has taken on kids, educators and schools; about teachers' deep dedication to our students and our craft. By confronting the privatizers and the pauperizers. And by unmasking the true intentions of people like Michelle Rhee and Betsy DeVos.

Americans are committed to their public schools, which 90 percent of American children attend. Polls show that parents and the public want greater support for public schools-particularly neighborhood public schools. They want public schools strengthened when they struggle, not shuttered or supplanted by private alternatives. And the teacher strikes have been an amazing inflection point, making clear to America that teachers want what students need. We've changed the narrative; now we have to change the politics.

And that takes power-not power for its own sake, but power so we can transform our aspirations into action. So we can make every public school a place where parents want to send their kids, where teachers want to teach and where students feel safe and engaged.

Sure, teachers have always had power: The power to ignite a spark that engages a disaffected student. The power that comes from students wanting to earn your respect. The power that comes from fierce devotion to your students and your craft.

But in our disproportionately female, caring profession, we have not always been comfortable owning our power, much less building it. For example, how many of you have been in conversations questioning why the union is involved in elections?

You know who owns their power? Wall Street. The Koch brothers. Mitch McConnell.

My friends, we need to own our power. And we need to build our power so we can move our agenda-for our students and our families; for safe, welcoming and well-funded public schools; for affordable higher education; for healthcare that is a right, not a privilege; for a living wage; for a decent retirement; for a healthy climate; and a strong democracy. To get those babies and children out of detention centers and back with their families.

History is our guide. When the Dred Scott case upheld slavery, abolitionists did not capitulate: They built their power and ended slavery. When suffragists were arrested for voting and for picketing the White House, they did not meekly submit: They built their power and won the vote. And when child labor laws, a minimum wage and the eight-hour work day were struck down by the Supreme Court, the labor movement did not abjectly surrender: It built its power, and won back those rights and more.

We must build power for democracy in education, and education for democracy.

Our opponents-right-wing groups and billionaire extremists like Betsy DeVos and Sheldon Adelson-often understand our power better than we do. That's why they fight to suppress the vote, defund our schools and destabilize our unions. They're hell-bent on depriving us of power. That's what the anti-union Janus case was all about.

But a funny thing happened on their way to writing our obituary after that ruling. Janus was a blow-no doubt. The AFT lost 85,000 fee payers instantly. But Janus also inspired us to do more of what we do best as a union-to engage with members, to demonstrate the value of unionism. And it reminded us of an essential truth about unions: Together, we can achieve what would be impossible on our own.

Let's be clear, the attacks on unions didn't end with Janus. Right-wing, anti-union groups have filed 80 lawsuits against us in the year since that decision. But our members are sticking with the union. Despite everything that has been thrown at us, the AFT continues to grow-1.7 million strong.

To our enemies' vexation, we are thriving. Our allies not only took back the House of Representatives in 2018, we won support for school funding measures, from south Florida to upstate New York, and we elected pro-public-education, pro-worker governors in Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

But we cannot rest. Not simply because our opponents aren't going away, but because we are the change agents; the movement builders; the dreamers; the fighters for a better life, a better world and the soul of America.

And that's why this year the AFT has used our collective voice and harnessed our power:

For safe and welcoming environments in our schools and our communities;

To demand the investments we need in public schools and services;

For the freedom to teach, so we can meet our students' needs; and

For the freedom to live without having to work two or three jobs and without worrying about healthcare costs or crushing student debt.

Let's start with investment: The root cause of every single teacher walkout in the last two years was deep and prolonged inadequate investment in public schools, higher education and public services. Those moments of activism-of "red for ed"-must grow into a movement for sustainable funding. For public education to be the great equalizer, adequate funding must be available for all children to reach their potential. That's why the AFT has launched a nationwide campaign called Fund Our Future to combat the austerity and privatization that have created deplorable teaching and learning conditions in all too many schools. Starting this spring, thousands of members have stepped up, demonstrating and lobbying in more than 120 collective actions-and in countless individual actions. AFT local unions across the country are not just joining in; grass-roots leaders are part of the planning every step of the way.

And while we have made progress, there is much left to do. Twenty-one states still spend less on public education than they did a decade ago. Class sizes of 40 and 50 kids; schools that are freezing in the winter and sweltering in warmer months; water fountains that can't be used because they are contaminated with lead. I can go on and on.

In 38 states, teacher salaries are lower than they were before the Great Recession. How dare so-called leaders devalue and disrespect the profession that shapes the next generation of Americans? With Fund Our Future, the AFT is taking all of this on.

While the educator strikes from Los Angeles to Chicago to West Virginia have gotten much-warranted attention, change is happening across the nation. The Boston Teachers Union recently won contract language guaranteeing a nurse in every school and more mental health professionals. In Louisiana and Texas, school employees have gotten their first raises in years. And Washington, D.C., has a big role in this too. Betsy DeVos attempted to cut $9 billion from education funding this year. But the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives said no thanks and, instead, passed a funding bill that increases investment for public schools by $4.5 billion, for programs like Title I and IDEA. Mitch McConnell has stymied the bill in the Senate, so it's wonderful that so many of you lobbied for it yesterday.

The AFT is working on a number of fronts to make our schools, workplaces and communities safe, healthy and welcoming. No one should fear for their safety at school or work. But I know many of us in this room do, and so do our students. In the aftermath of the massacre in Parkland, Fla., a majority of American teens said they are worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school-and most parents share that concern.

While rarely discussed, anxiety and depression afflict so many families in America, as does the opioid crisis. Between 2009 and 2017, depression among adolescents increased by more than 60 percent. Tragically, teen suicides also soared. No family or community is immune to mental health issues, and our schools must be equipped to meet these needs.

We are also seeing a disturbing rise in hatred and bigotry in our schools. Just consider the Southern Poverty Law Center's recent survey: Two-thirds of the educators who responded witnessed hate or bias incidents in their schools in the fall of 2018.

This is why we advocate with such urgency for community schools and wraparound services. It's why we fight for a fixation on kids' well-being and against the toxic fixation on testing. It's why we fight every day for laws, policies and services that benefit kids' physical and emotional health, that create supportive environments, that keep students and educators safe and give them peace of mind.

Freedom to Teach

The teacher uprisings of the last two years have laid bare the frustration over insufficient resources, deplorable teaching and learning conditions, and inadequate pay and benefits.

But you know the other cause of this frustration: deprofessionalization that strips us of the freedom to teach; the denial of teachers' expertise, experience, judgment and voice. We enter the profession excited, optimistic and determined to make a difference in our students' lives. But, too often, that optimism wanes under the stress and disrespect we soon experience.

It's being told to teach lockstep to a pacing calendar, even if students need more time on a particular topic. It's getting in trouble for allowing students to continue a debate over two days instead of one. It's drowning in a sea of paperwork-or feeling more like a test-prep manager than a teacher. And, too often, it's not being heard, or even asked, about decisions that affect our classrooms. This is not only demoralizing. It denies us the freedom to teach-not the freedom to do whatever we want, but to do what we know is right based our knowledge, preparation and experience. This defies common sense, it undermines our profession, and it hurts our students.

The freedom to teach stands on three foundations: a culture of collaboration in schools and districts (and time to deliver on it); the recognition that teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions; and ensuring that teachers have voice and agency befitting our profession.

AFT affiliates are using the tools of advocacy, legislation and negotiation to make the freedom to teach real: like negotiating anti-retaliation language, which the United Federation of Teachers just did in its last contract to ensure teachers are not afraid of broaching hard subjects or taking other risks to meet our students' needs. It's professional development days designed and delivered by our members in places like Meriden, Conn., and Pinellas County, Fla., and in Cincinnati, where the district relies on the union to deliver high-quality orientation for new teachers. It's in places like Cleveland, where the new teacher evaluation system is more about teacher and student development and less about test scores, and where the union and district are collaborating to reduce unnecessary and unhelpful testing. In the ABC school district in California, they've not only improved teacher retention and student learning through their highly regarded labor-management collaboration, they've developed an institute that this year has helped 20 other California school systems do the same.

This can happen at the state level as well. Like in New Mexico, with the Grow Your Own Teachers Act that provides school paraprofessionals a $6,000 scholarship per semester while keeping their jobs as they study to become teachers. The result will be a more diverse teaching force with deep community connections.

I know, some of you are saying: But really, how can I do it? The truth is, you already do. For starters, you differentiate instruction to meet your students' needs. But you shouldn't have to hope no one catches you doing what you know is best for your students. The freedom to teach should be part of the culture of teaching.

And the AFT is here to support you. Share My Lesson, the AFT's free online platform, has resources you can download and communities you can join. And the AFT Collective Bargaining Center is producing a guide this fall with the best-in-class contract language from AFT affiliates. We're putting the force of collective bargaining behind the "freedom to teach."

I have talked today about things worth fighting for and things that keep me up at night, like Katie's experience with Navient. I know that many of you feel the anxiety of student debt firsthand, every day and with every loan payment.

The AFT's student debt work falls under three categories. The first is navigating a broken system. The AFT started our student debt clinics several years ago, which have helped thousands of members manage their student loan debt, often greatly reducing their monthly payments. And just as some locals, like the UFT, have built on our original concept, we are adding a new AFT benefit-access to a new app to help our members handle their student loan debt and enroll in income-driven repayment and public service loan forgiveness. It's called Summer, and it will be free for AFT members.

But we have to do more than help you navigate a broken system. Americans hold $1.6 trillion in student debt, affecting 45 million people. The average student loan for a master's degree in education jumped 87 percent between 2002 and 2016. The bipartisan Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which Congress passed in 2007, was intended to help. But, as Katie's experience shows, it's not working. So we are supporting plans that both simplify and provide much more loan forgiveness, like those advanced by Sens. Warren, Sanders, Kaine and Gillibrand.

And third, we have to demand accountability for loan servicers like Navient, which have misled and exploited tens of thousands of borrowers. And we have to hold the DeVos Education Department to account for making it virtually impossible for people to secure public service loan forgiveness. That is why last fall we filed a suit against Navient for its deceptive practices. And today we are filing suit against Betsy DeVos for her role in sabotaging the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The suit is simply called Weingarten v. DeVos, and eight AFT members, the AFT and I are the plaintiffs. I am glad that I have the standing to demand justice for every one of our members who has been hurt by Betsy DeVos' malfeasance.

This is all union work-caring, fighting, showing up.

The freedom to teach gives us voice in our work. Feeling safe in school and being free of crushing student debt give us freedom from anxiety. But there is no freedom more important than having a democracy, and a voice in it.

Civics and Democracy

Teachers have always had a huge responsibility for the next generation: To teach and nurture students so they have the opportunity to live fulfilling lives. To help them develop judgment and discernment to be engaged citizens. To fight for social justice and make our classrooms and schools safe havens for students.

Today our role is even bigger. America's teachers are called to be defenders of decency and guardians of democracy, because the very foundations of America are being undermined every day.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French observer of American democracy, wrote: "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

While our democracy has never been perfect, today its very existence is threatened.

Our national government has become a platform for the promotion of hatred and prejudice, a pulpit for authoritarianism, and a megaphone for shouting down the democratic ideals that have motivated what is best in America. And our classrooms and schools are not immune from the toxic political and social climate enabled by the president and his accomplices.

Our freedoms are under attack by a president who threatens to imprison his political opponents, who openly wishes he could "get rid" of journalists, who props up white nationalism and who cozies up to dictators while shunning our allies.

Our elections are undermined by widespread voter suppression, by extreme partisan gerrymandering that was just upheld by the Supreme Court, and by open invitations to foreign interference-with President Trump even joking about it with Vladimir Putin last month.

Our very moral character as a nation is tested when government leaders see immigrants and asylum-seekers not as "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free," but as invaders so threatening and worthless that the government's inhumane treatment of them-denying even children adequate food, sleep and hygiene-is somehow deserved.

In a civil society, there is no "both sides" on matters of human dignity, equal rights, tolerance of diversity, civility and truth, or the rule of law. These are not options against which other beliefs can be regarded as equally worthy. But today these values need defending, and that is why we must be guardians of our democratic principles.

I am asking you to be clear-eyed about the perilous time we are in, to think deeply and seriously about what you can do to take a stand, and about the implications of doing nothing. We may have chuckled when President Trump revealed that he thinks Frederick Douglass is still alive and that American patriots stormed airports during the Revolutionary War. But we can't lose sight of Trump's unconscionable cruelty or forget that his erratic behavior is intended to create chaos and confusion. And we can't assume that things won't get worse.

Most of us didn't become educators because we wanted to be political activists. But as educators with a conscience, we can do nothing else. To paraphrase the Jewish scholar Hillel, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

So while I would never ask you to take on all these issues or to go it alone, the fight to safeguard American democracy begins in our classrooms and our schools. And TEACH is chock-full of how-to sessions.

In some ways, our journey to exercise the freedom to teach is a model for what our students need to be engaged and empowered citizens-voice, latitude and the ability to think for oneself.

Think about it: When classrooms are freed from the tyranny of testing and test prep, we have time for project-based learning-so students can analyze problems in their communities, figure out potential solutions and advocate for change. When lock-step pacing calendars no longer rule, we can have extended classroom discussions and debates. We can model democratic deliberation where disagreements are over ideas, not people, and dissenting views are respectfully heard, not shouted down; where opinions need to be supported with logical arguments and evidence, and not simply asserted; where discourse is to persuade, not to name-call or bully.

When our students experience the power of democratic citizenship in their education, they will not surrender it but will exercise it and demand the fullest of democracy for all Americans. Democracy in education has always been the foundation for providing education for democracy.

When students understand that our democracy rests upon free and fair elections, then they see that their first and most important right and duty as a citizen is to vote and to defend the right of all Americans to vote. That's why it's so important that students who are eligible to vote have every opportunity to register and cast their ballots. When the rule of law, a free press, and checks and balances become more than words on a page, students start feeling their own power to petition their government and to be heard. Help them develop the confidence to make their voices heard, the courage to challenge injustice, the knowledge of their rights-and the rights of others.

And it's not just our students. Too many Americans sat on the sidelines in the last presidential election. Too many people sit out every election. Michelle Obama's When We All Vote initiative aims to increase participation in elections and to close the race and age voting gap, and the AFT is an active partner.

Finally, we need to be all-in in 2020, which is why, first and foremost, the AFT's presidential endorsement process is about engagement-the most member engagement ever. We must practice what we preach about empowerment and civic participation.

The goal of our endorsement process is to determine the candidate (or candidates) who shares our values and can get elected-and for our members to feel ownership of it. Because the stakes are higher than ever, and no one can sit on the sidelines in 2020. Already, seven presidential candidates have participated in town halls with our members. You can check out the videos on AFTvotes.org. More are in the works.

We used to be grateful if there was even one question about education in presidential debates. Now, your colleagues are asking tough questions of the candidates directly. And they're getting thoughtful responses.

You know how I said we've helped change the narrative about public schools? There's no better proof of that than the robust plans so many presidential candidates are putting forth on public education.

Bernie Sanders would enact universal pre-K and make tuition free at public colleges. Tim Ryan has laid out a detailed agenda around social and emotional learning. Kamala Harris has plans to raise teacher salaries and put college within reach. Amy Klobuchar calls for increased investments in school infrastructure and help for working families with after-school programs. Elizabeth Warren pledges to select a teacher as her Secretary of Education and take on student debt and child care. Joe Biden calls for tripling Title I funding, investing in community schools, and doubling the number of school psychologists, counselors and nurses. Beto O'Rourke would forgive 100 percent of student loan debt for public school teachers. And those are just the candidates we've had town halls with so far.

Ten years ago, Time magazine emblazoned its cover with the image of a school superintendent sweeping out so-called "bad teachers." Today, presidential candidates are one-upping each other with their support of teachers and public schools. We have changed the narrative about public education and, in so doing, have helped preserve it. Now we have to safeguard democracy.

But it will take all of us taking a stand and doing our part. Get involved through your local union. Get active in local and national politics. Vote-and vote people into office who share our priorities and can make the changes we seek.

I look at the state of our country and I end with the question I started with: Can we change it? Whatever your priorities-climate change, healthcare, living wages, retirement security, support for public schools and our students, immigration, higher education, the fight for justice and for our democracy-let's find a candidate who shares our values and who can win, and then let's do everything in our power to make that happen.

It won't be easy. Remember what Frederick Douglass said: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

My friends, we cannot be silent. Our moment to save democracy is here and now.

When this moment in history is written, let it be said that America's teachers rose to the challenge. That hope won against fear, aspiration over frustration, and humanity over cruelty. That we defeated demagoguery and preserved our democracy.

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Democracy in education, education for democracy

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Remarks by AFT president Randi WeingartenAFT TEACH 2019Washington, DCJuly 11, 2019America's public school educators are change agents. You guide young people not only to build skills and knowledge, but to build relationships. You instill appreciation for diversity and respect for differences.

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One study found that college-educated Democrats were more likely to hold false information about their political enemies than those without four-year degrees. More education generally makes people more Democratic, but not more democratic.

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If you're an American schoolchild, you've probably spent much of your recent life alone at home in the mesmerizing glow of a screen, twitching between Google Classroom and innumerable online distractions. Perhaps you've been lucky enough to spend most days in an actual classroom with two-thirds of your face wrapped up, trying to make yourself heard and hear others, taking 30 seconds to shove your lunch down. Your schedule is often unpredictable; some days there's no one to teach you at all. During the pandemic, you've lost at least three months of instruction-or nearly twice that, if your family is poor-as well as the steady company of people your own age. The grown-ups around you fret incessantly about your "mental-health issues" and "social-emotional learning," which only makes your anxiety and depression worse.

You're also the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults' latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head. Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage. If you live in Virginia, your governor has set up a hotline where they can rat out your teachers to the government. If you live in Florida, your governor wants your parents to sue your school if it ever makes you feel "discomfort" about who you are. Adults keep telling you the pandemic will never end, your education is being destroyed by ideologues, digital technology is poisoning your soul, democracy is collapsing, and the planet is dying-but they're counting on you to fix everything when you grow up.

It isn't clear how the American public-school system will survive the COVID years. Teachers, whose relative pay and status have been in decline for decades, are fleeing the field. In 2021, buckling under the stresses of the pandemic, nearly 1 million people quit jobs in public education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. The shortage is so dire that New Mexico has resorted to encouraging members of the National Guard to volunteer as substitute teachers.

Students are leaving as well. Since 2020, nearly 1.5 million children have been removed from public schools to attend private or charter schools or be homeschooled. Families are deserting the public system out of frustration with unending closures and quarantines, stubborn teachers' unions, inadequate resources, and the low standards exposed by remote learning. It's not just rich families, either, David Steiner, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, told me. "COVID has encouraged poor parents to question the quality of public education. We are seeing diminished numbers of children in our public schools, particularly our urban public schools." In New York, more than 80,000 children have disappeared from city schools; in Los Angeles, more than 26,000; in Chicago, more than 24,000.
Read: What if America didn't have public schools?
These kids, and the investments that come with them, may never return -the beginning of a cycle of attrition that could continue long after the pandemic ends and leave public schools even more underfunded and dilapidated than before. "It's an open question whether the public-school system will recover," Steiner said. "That is a real concern for democratic education."
A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.
The high-profile failings of public schools during the pandemic have become a political problem for Democrats, because of their association with unions, prolonged closures, and the pedagogy of social justice, which can become a form of indoctrination. The party that stands for strong government services in the name of egalitarian principles supported the closing of schools far longer than either the science or the welfare of children justified, and it has been woefully slow to acknowledge how much this damaged the life chances of some of America's most disadvantaged students. The San Francisco school board became the caricature of this folly last year when it spent months debating name changes to Roosevelt Middle School, Abraham Lincoln High School, and other schools with supposedly offensive names, while their classrooms remained closed to the city's children. Republicans have only just begun to exploit the fallout.
George Packer: Can civics save America?
But I'm not interested in joining or refereeing this partisan scrum. Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues. Public schools still serve about 90 percent of children across red and blue America. Since the common-school movement in the early 19th century, the public school has had an exalted purpose in this country. It's our core civic institution-not just because, ideally, it brings children of all backgrounds together in a classroom, but because it prepares them for the demands and privileges of democratic citizenship. Or at least, it needs to.

What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public's faith in an essential institution. "The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens," Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. "Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We've become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We've completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making."
From the December 2020 issue: Erika Christakis on how school wasn't so great before COVID either
School can't just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people's children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn't get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it's To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.

If the answer were simply to push more and more kids into college, the United States would be entering its democratic prime. In 1960, when Richard Nixon chose not to contest an extremely narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, and Nixon partisans didn't storm the Capitol looking to hang the speaker of the House, 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees. By the time of last year's insurrection, that proportion had surpassed one-third. Law degrees from Harvard and Yale didn't keep Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley from trying to tear up the Constitution. Americans with college degrees are likelier to vote and otherwise participate in civic life than those without; they're also likelier to spend hours throwing clever online darts. One study found that college-educated Democrats were more likely to hold false views about their political enemies than those without four-year degrees. More education generally makes people more Democratic, but not more democratic.
We owe our beleaguered children, the victims of our inadequacy, a chance to be better than we are.
So the question isn't just how much education, but what kind. Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves? Possibly, but I doubt it's ever been more necessary. The COVID era, with Donald Trump out of office but still in power and with battles over mask mandates and critical race theory convulsing Twitter and school-board meetings, shows how badly Americans are able to think about our collective problems-let alone read, listen, empathize, debate, reconsider, and persuade in the search for solutions. If these habits have something to do with education-and every kindergarten teacher knows that children can be taught to compromise-then democratic citizenship can, at least in part, be learned. We owe our beleaguered children, the victims of our inadequacy, a chance to be better than we are.

We can start by giving them a way to survive the curriculum wars without being captured by one side or the other. The orthodoxies currently fighting for our children's souls turn the teaching of U.S. history into a static and morally simple quest for some American essence. They proceed from celebration or indictment toward a final judgment-innocent or guilty-and bury either oppression or progress in a subordinate clause. The most depressing thing about this gloomy pedagogy of ideologies in service to fragile psyches is how much knowledge it takes away from students who already have so little. The history warriors build their metaphysics of national good or evil on a foundation of ignorance. In a 2019 survey, only 40 percent of Americans were able to pass the test that all applicants for U.S. citizenship must take, which asks questions like "Who did the United States fight in World War II?" and "We elect a President for how many years?" The only state in which a majority passed was Vermont.

A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims-to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars. In "The Propaganda of History," the last chapter of his great study of Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: "Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?"
From the October 2018 issue: Americans aren't practicing democracy anymore
The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context. The Stanford History Education Group, a research organization, has developed a curriculum called "Reading Like a Historian," which assembles material from various chapters of American history and poses a thematic question for students to answer. For example, to answer the question of what John Brown was trying to do when he raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, they read several accounts, including one by Brown's son, an excerpt from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and a speech and letter from Brown himself.

The goal isn't just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents. This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn't easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support. "We have a desperate shortage of teachers," David Steiner of Johns Hopkins said, just as we're making teaching more difficult by "politicizing education." It's easy and satisfying for adults to instruct children that America is an exceptional experiment in freedom, or a benighted system of oppressions. It's harder, but infinitely more useful, to free them to think about history for themselves.

To do that, we'll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans. If remote learning taught parents anything, it was that staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers. One day, and I hope soon, the masters of social media will stand before Congress with their hands raised in the manner of the Big Tobacco bosses, and try to deny what they've long known about the damage their products can inflict on human minds, especially young minds. After these hearings lead to belated regulation of web advertising and toxic algorithms, we'll look back on the amount of time we let our children spend online with the same horror that we now feel about earlier generations of adults who hooked their kids on smoking.

Of course, students can't quit cold turkey. "It's not a choice between tech or no tech," Bill Tally, a researcher with the Education Development Center, told me. "The question is what tech infrastructure best enables the things we care about," such as deep engagement with instructional materials, teachers, and other students. But kids need help mastering what now masters them. Releasing them to do "research" in the vast ocean of the internet without maps and compasses, as often happens, guarantees that they will drown before they arrive anywhere. A nonprofit called the News Literacy Project helps teachers guide students in assessing the credibility of news articles and social-media posts. Like learning to read as historians, learning to sift through the tidal flood of memes for useful, reliable information can emancipate children who have been heedlessly hooked on screens by the adults in their lives.

Finally, let's give children a chance to read books-good books. It's a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they've resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms. The phrase English Language Arts already sounds at best indifferent to books. The ELA portion of high-stakes testing hacks up literature into what Steiner calls "bleeding chunks of texts"-isolated passages used to assess comprehension. This approach treats reading as just another skill, like long division or woodworking. When students do read whole books, they're rarely part of the state assessments. "What's the incentive for teaching The Bluest Eye deeply and seriously?" Steiner asked.

The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers. We sell them insultingly short in thinking that they won't read unless the subject is themselves. Mirrors are ultimately isolating; young readers also need windows, even if the view is unfamiliar, even if it's disturbing. The ability to enter a world that's far away in time or place; to grapple with characters whose stories might initially seem to have nothing to do with your life; to gradually sense that their emotions, troubles, revelations are also yours-this connection through language to universal human experience and thought is the reward of great literature, a source of empathy and wisdom.

The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently predicted that the novels of the next 10 to 15 years "will be awful ... Art has to be able to go to a place that's messy, a place that's uncomfortable," she said. "Literature is the last thing that we can depend on to tell us the truth about who we are." The connection between reading and democratic citizenship might not be direct, but it's real.
From the October 2019 issue: George Packer on when the culture war comes for the kids
The pandemic should have forced us to reassess what really matters in public school; instead, it's a crisis that we've just about wasted. The classroom has become a half-abandoned battlefield, where grown-ups who claim to be protecting students from the virus, from books, from ideologies and counter-ideologies end up using children to protect themselves and their own entrenched camps. American democracy can't afford another generation of adults who don't know how to talk and listen and think. We owe our COVID-scarred children the means to free themselves from the failures of the past and the present.
This article appears in the April 2022 print edition with the headline "School Shouldn't Be a Battlefield." When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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last chapter of his great study of reconstruction

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If you're an American schoolchild, you've probably spent much of your recent life alone at home in the mesmerizing glow of a screen, twitching between Google Classroom and innumerable online distractions. Perhaps you've been lucky enough to spend most days in an actual classroom with two-thirds of your face wrapped up, trying to make yourself heard and hear others, taking 30 seconds to shove your lunch down.

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Americans at the time considered public schools vital for preparing new citizens for participation in a democracy. Moreover, at a time of rising immigration, they were seen as necessary to bring together an increasingly diverse society. Our public schools are the most democratic institutions that this peculiarly democratic country affords , proclaimed E. Hodges, superintendent of schools in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1854. Schools should treat all children equally, but instilling them with the knowledge necessary for citizenship.

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When Public Schools Were Considered Vital to Democracy

Americans used to think free public education was a cornerstone of a democratic republic. What happened?

"A republic, if you can keep it." Those were the words Benjamin Franklin supposedly used when he emerged from the Constitutional Convention and was asked what kind of government the Framers were proposing.

For America's founders, public education was essential to keeping the republic. Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that of all the arguments for education, "none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty." He proposed an ambitious public education program for Virginia, but his plans never reached fruition during his lifetime.

Other states were more successful, however. By the 1820s and 1830s, a growing number of Americans were arguing that schools must be free, supported by taxes, and made available to all children. By the Civil War, most white children in the North attended public tax-supported schools, and the numbers were rising in the South as well. But those ideals had limits: racial segregation in the North meant that fewer African Americans had the same access and, it goes without saying, enslaved people were denied access altogether.

Americans at the time considered public schools vital for preparing new citizens for participation in a democracy. Moreover, at a time of rising immigration, they were seen as necessary to bring together an increasingly diverse society. "Our public schools are the most democratic institutions that this peculiarly democratic country affords," proclaimed E. Hodges, superintendent of schools in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1854. Schools should treat all children equally, educating them not just in the "rudiments," but instilling them with the knowledge necessary for citizenship. In a society divided by religion, ethnicity, party, and wealth, public schools would "harmonize the various discordant elements that are found in society," because students would "sympathize with and for the other." In public schools, diverse people would come to think of each other as fellow Americans.

To their advocates, public schools served public functions. They would prepare citizens and, by bringing together all kinds of Americans, they would help forge a national community.

It was not just immigration but growing economic inequality that concerned advocates of public schools. John Pierce, the new state of Michigan's superintendent of public instruction, celebrated public schools where "all classes are blended together; the rich mingle with the poor, and are educated in company . . . and mutual attachments are formed."

Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and the so-called "founding father" of American public education, considered bringing together rich and poor to be one of the most important functions of public schools. If rich parents "turn away from the Common Schools" and choose to send their kids to "the private school or the academy" (the chartered schools of their era), then the poor would end up with a second-class education. To ensure that students, and their parents, intermingle, "there should be a free school, sufficiently safe, and sufficiently good, for all the children within its territory."

But in the past several decades, Americans have begun to question these ideals. Confidence in public education has dropped off a cliff since the 1970s, with only one-third of Americans saying they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the nation's public schools, compared with two-thirds during the 1970s. At the same time, support for alternatives like charter schools and private school vouchers has risen.

To their advocates, public schools served public functions. They would prepare citizens and, by bringing together all kinds of Americans, they would help forge a national community. Today, however, we seem less certain of that project. For many American leaders, schools serve economic rather than civic purposes. In the words of the Common Core State Standards, graduates of public schools must exhibit "college and career readiness," a less lofty ambition than the prior stated hopes for public schools. In contrast, during an earlier effort to create national standards during the first Bush administration, the National Education Goals Panel argued that higher academic achievement would prepare students for "citizenship, further learning, and productive employment." It argued that readiness for the job market was only one outcome of a good education, and it came after education's impact on citizenship and human beings.

If our leaders today emphasize economics, other Americans question the public schools' historic role of forging a common nation out of a diverse population.

On the left, some advocates of multiculturalism worry about efforts to foster a common culture. They instead urge schools to offer culturally-specific programs to minorities. On the right, many evangelicals and members of other religions have argued that secular public schools threaten their children's faith, so they advocate using public funds for private and religious schools. Supporting these families, our current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has devoted much of her public career to enabling parents to choose schools that reflect their own values instead of bringing all Americans together into public schools.

But what about common American values? Can we, as citizens, even agree on what those values are? Should schools bring diverse people together to foster a shared civic culture and to promote American ideals? And do we want to move beyond the language of college and career readiness to emphasize once again the ideals of citizenship? If so, how do we do so in a diverse society?

None of these questions are new. They were the kinds of questions that Americans confronted after the Revolution when they built our first public schools. But these questions have, if anything, become even more pressing for us today.

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When Public Schools Were Considered Vital to Democracy

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Americans used to think free public education was a cornerstone of a democratic republic. What happened? "A republic, if you can keep it." Those were the words Benjamin Franklin supposedly used when he emerged from the Constitutional Convention and was asked what kind of government the Framers were proposing.

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In order to sustain our system of government, Americans must be educated on their roles in our democracy and their responsibility to make decisions that determine the future of our nation.

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Ensuring a well-informed citizenry is an essential purpose of our public education system. In schools across our nation, students learn civics and government and the concepts and principles that underpin our democracy. In order to sustain our system of government, Americans must be educated on their roles in our democracy and their responsibility to make decisions that determine the future of our nation. As future voters, our children must be made aware of the importance of their roles as citizens.

In the weeks following the 2020 Presidential election, our country has experienced one of the greatest political controversies of the present century. The controversy highlighted two aspects of our democracy, the right to vote and the freedom of speech to protest. What was not demonstrated was the acceptance of the decision of the majority and threats to what Americans have always taken for granted, the peaceful transfer of power. Despite all the disagreement and even insurrection, the results have remained the same.  The country selected a new President and Vice President, and they have taken office.

As we slowly recover from a year ravaged with COVID and political controversy, we believe the 2020 Presidential Election and its aftermath should have heightened our belief in the founding tenets of our nation. It has been demonstrated that our votes matter tremendously. It has also been shown that it is imperative, as we move forward, that we continue to support our public schools as they provide a foundation for understanding the principles of our democratic republic. When properly educated, citizens are better equipped to make sound decisions relating to our system of government and our way of life. Our Constitution and our nation's founding principles must continue to serve as the foundation and guiding force of our republic or we will find ourselves ever prey to demagoguery and chaos.

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Why Public Education is Essential to Our Democracy | Parents for Public Schools, Inc.

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Ensuring a well-informed citizenry is an essential purpose of our public education system. In schools across our nation, students learn civics and government and the concepts and principles that underpin our democracy. In order to sustain our system of government, Americans must be educated on their roles in our democracy and their responsibility to make decisions that determine the future of our nation.

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Citizens could certainly participate in democracy without public education. But public schools in the United States remain the foundation of the education of all but perhaps 13% of the population, who attend private school or are home-schooled. And study after study has shown that the more education people have, the more they vote, and the more they participate in a nation’s political life.

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From the beginning of the American republic, some Founding Fathers pushed for the establishment of an institution they thought crucial to the success of democracy: public education.

Self-government would require informed citizens, they felt. Important decisions would be in the hands of farmers and tradesmen, not courts and kings.

That meant the nation's youth - the citizens of tomorrow - needed to learn the history and operation of republics. They needed practice disagreeing, debating, and then moving forward together, whether their views won or lost.

Why We Wrote This

Do Americans agree anymore that public education is fundamental to democracy? Part 1 in a series.

The "prospect of [a] permanent union" depended on education in the science of government, said George Washington. "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people," said John Adams. "Above all things ... the education of the common people [should] be attended to," said Thomas Jefferson.

Do today's Americans agree on the importance of common schoolhouses? Do they hold anymore that public education is fundamental to U.S. democracy?

Many say they do. Polls show a majority of citizens generally give high marks to their local public schools and teachers. The vast majority of American children attend public schools for primary and secondary education.

But the pandemic years have been tough on public schools. Remote learning and physical isolation have taken a toll on test scores and driven many students out of the system altogether. The inequality in outcomes between rich and poor school districts has gotten worse.

Meanwhile, the nation's political culture wars have elbowed their way into the classroom, as parents and administrators argue over issues dealing with gender, race, and basic U.S. history. The sort of civics education that directly teaches democratic principles and practice is getting squeezed out as curricula focus on preparing students for jobs and college.

The nation's public schools are at a "turning point," says Carl Hermanns, clinical associate professor at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, and co-editor of the book "Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy."

Their status quo has been upended. They can seize the opportunity to improve and reinvent themselves. Or it is possible that the public education system may not survive in its present form.

"If it atomizes and ... public schools as we know them don't exist anymore, what will happen is an open question," says Professor Hermanns.

"One of the two foundational elements"

Citizens could certainly participate in democracy without public education. But public schools in the United States remain the foundation of the education of all but perhaps 13% of the population, who attend private school or are home-schooled. And study after study has shown that the more education people have, the more they vote, and the more they participate in a nation's political life.

There are some indications that year by year, education simply increases the general feeling that voting is a social and civic norm, the right thing to do.

"American public education is one of the two foundational elements of our democracy. The other is the ballot itself," says Derek W. Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and author of "Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy."

At the time of the American Revolution, elites remained nervous about opening up participation in choosing leaders to the common people, fearful that their participation would lead to mob rule and the rise of hucksters.

To many of the founders, schooling was the answer. Intelligent exercise of the franchise would hold democracy together.

"They believed that there was a common good, and that they'd find the common good together, through education," says Professor Black.

That doesn't mean public education was widespread in America from 1787 on. Despite the visions of Adams, Jefferson, and others, education in the early years of the nation was mostly limited to well-off white men - as was voting.

There are a lot of startup costs in the establishment of a school system, and many attempts to expand schooling foundered on the expense. In 1817, Jefferson proposed in his home state of Virginia to establish taxpayer-supported schools in every 5 or so square miles, teaching classical, European, and American history, as well as reading and arithmetic.

Jefferson's effort did not pass. It took centuries for the vision of widespread public schools to be fully realized. Like voting rights, school rights grew step by step. At first limited to well-off white men, they expanded into lower incomes, other races, and women - sometimes sliding back, but by the civil rights era of the 1960s promised to all.

"You've got to have everybody educated from all walks of life in order for this [democracy] to work," says William Mathis, senior policy adviser at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado.

Shift from civics to job preparation

Civics education was an integral part of most public school curricula in the middle to later years of the 20th century. Teachers had the time and flexibility to dwell on more than just the basics of U.S. history and the structure of democratic government.

Yet the teaching of those subjects has "eroded" over the last 50 years, says the 2021 report from Educating for American Democracy (EAD), a diverse group of educators and scholars, partially funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, that is worried about this decline.

Across that same five-decade time period, partisan and philosophical polarization in the U.S. has increased, says the group. Social media and partisan news outlets have pumped dangerous amounts of political misinformation into the nation's discourse. The public in essence may have lost the thread, with the majority functionally illiterate about our constitutional principles, according to the EAD report.

To this point, a 2017 survey by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found that only about 25% of Americans could correctly name all three branches of the U.S. government. One-third couldn't name any branch of the government at all. Four years later, the Annenberg survey found that the number of Americans who could name all three branches had risen to 56%, and that 20% couldn't name any branch at all.

"The relative neglect of civic education in the past half-century is one important cause of our civic and political dysfunction," concludes the EAD report.

Why the slide in civics? Education experts say U.S. schools have been reoriented to focus on getting students ready to participate in the economy.

Thus, the rise of STEM - science, technology, engineering, and math - education. The Sputnik panic of 1957, when the nation was gripped by fear it was falling behind the Soviet Union in technical skills, has never completely abated. Studies still bemoan how U.S. children lag in math and science. Parents see STEM programs as gateways for better opportunity for their kids.

There is greater focus today on getting secondary students ready for college. Test-based educational reform has narrowed the focus of schools to narrower lesson plans focused on math and reading, lest their scores slide.

Amid all these pressures social studies, history, and other humanities topics have all become lower priorities. Government studies has often been de-emphasized.

"We have to remind ourselves over and over again that the whole point of compulsory free public education was to make citizens, was to produce people capable of self-government, and I think we forgot that because we talk [a lot about] the other two C's ... career and college," says Eric Liu, executive director of the Citizenship and American Identity Program at the Aspen Institute, and CEO and co-founder of Citizen University.

"Coming together in a shared space"

But public schools don't just teach democratic habits through instruction, say their proponents. By their very design, American school systems are intended to model democracy, throwing together children from many walks of life in a single place for a common endeavor. They are supposed to learn people's differences and other points of view.

"It's a place where people from different backgrounds - and I mean everything from race and gender to religion and economics and general ideologies and different values - where people are all coming together in a shared space ... to see and value what it means to be an American," says Sarah Stitzlein, professor of education at the University of Cincinnati and co-editor of the journal Democracy & Education.

But this communal aspect of public schools has faced challenges in recent years. To begin with, the pandemic too often physically isolated students, keeping them from the interactions that help them learn about each other. It drove down the overall number of students as well. About 1.3 million students have left public school systems since the pandemic began in 2020, according to one national survey. All but a handful of states have experienced enrollment declines over that period.

In addition, the culture wars have come for the schools, with state legislators and governors moving to control what can and can't be taught about America's racial history and sexism. Since January of last year, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other action that would circumscribe teaching on these sensitive subjects, according to a database maintained by Education Week. Seventeen of these states have imposed their bans.

This all takes place in the context of continued pressure from advocates of sweeping change in the way the nation educates its children to de-emphasize traditional public schools and greatly expand the use of charter and private schools.

Such radical decentralization would greatly affect the democracy-building mission of the public schools, say experts who support the traditional system. Among other things, it might expose students to less social and cultural diversity.

"I think the idea of 'go find a better school that better matches your views to tone down the culture war' is a huge danger to our society and to democracy," says Dr. Hermanns.

But public schools really aren't civic melting pots, say some right-leaning education analysts. They tend to be monolithic, segregated racially and socially, because they reflect the demographics of American communities.

And public schools are not alone in their ability to teach fundamentals of democratic involvement, says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and co-editor of "How To Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools."

There's evidence that private schools and charters "take their civic responsibility just as seriously as traditional public schools," he says.

Needed: a shared conversation

More time devoted to teaching civics, social studies, and U.S. and world history. More emphasis on structured discussions and debate.

Those are the basic moves that scholars of democracy and education support to help strengthen schools' role in developing citizens.

As to what specifically should be taught, there is far less consensus.

The bipartisan EAD effort does not lay out a specific curriculum. Instead it identifies categories that students should explore in discussions, from America's role in the world in its history, to the nation's social and institutional transformation over time, and the basics of civic participation.

"Fraught though the terrain is, America urgently needs a shared, national conversation about what is most important to teach in American history and civics, how to teach it, and above all, why," says the EAD report.

One tool that might help students build their civic capacity is a sustained practice with meaningful disagreement in the classroom, says Ashley Berner, an associate professor and director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

Discussing controversial subjects is a learned skill, says Professor Berner. Teachers can foster an open climate for civil disagreement that does not threaten students' identity.

"Civic tolerance is a learned behavior. We do not come by it naturally," she says.

Professor Berner also favors pluralist educational systems, in which government funds a wide variety of schools, including religious schools, but maintains control over teaching standards, curriculum, and assessments.

Such systems "are common in democracies around the world," she says.

In the United States, education is not a federal right. Such a right is enshrined in all 50 state constitutions, but not in the U.S. Constitution.

The nation should consider establishing such a right through the courts, Congress, or a constitutional amendment, says Kimberly Robinson, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and editor of "A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy."

America really has two educational systems, says Professor Robinson: one for upper- and middle-class students that works well, and one for low-income, rural, and many Black and Hispanic students that works much less well.

A federal right could provide leverage and attention to begin to counter that disparity.

"It's important," says Professor Robinson, "because the more educated a child is, the more likely they are to vote when they become an adult, and they are more likely to be engaged civically not just in elections, but in community service and other avenues and opportunities that help make our communities and our democracy stronger."
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include the most recent survey findings from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. This story is the first in a four-part series: Part 2: How should schools teach children what it means to be an American? Part 3: How has parental participation in public schools shaped U.S. education? Part 4: Are we better off as a nation investing in a system where talented students can soar, or one in which everyone is educated equally? Can't we have both?

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Public education, democracy, and the future of America

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From the beginning of the American republic, some Founding Fathers pushed for the establishment of an institution they thought crucial to the success of democracy: public education. Self-government would require informed citizens, they felt. Important decisions would be in the hands of farmers and tradesmen, not courts and kings.

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The second part discusses the tilt toward market values and away from democratic norms in recent years in both the courses we teach children directly and the way we model (or do not model) democratic practices in schooling. The third part outlines the considerable costs of failing to emphasize democratic values and embrace democratic practices. And the last part makes public policy recommendations for restoring the right balance in our schools at the state, local and federal levels.

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What You Should Know

Only one-third of Americans can name all three branches of the federal government, according to a recent University of Pennsylvania report.

Support for democratic values is on the decline among Americans, which paved the way for a president who ran on a platform disavowing widely accepted constitutional norms to be elected.

To refocus civic education on democratic ideals in American public schools, changes should be made to both the explicit and implicit curriculum. Beyond learning about the nation's Founders and the Constitution, our schools should model democratic values for students by encouraging community members to actively engage in education decisions and inviting teachers to participate in a democratic workplace.

Throughout U.S. history, Americans have pivoted between whether the central priority of public education should be to create skilled workers for the economy, or to educate young people for responsible citizenship. Both goals are important, of course, but with the recent rise of a global economy, the emphasis has shifted away from preparing citizens and toward serving the needs of the marketplace.

On one level, this change of priorities is understandable. As we celebrated two hundred years of a continuous, improving democracy, the need for schools to emphasize the civic portion of public education began to feel less urgent to many leaders and educators. In a globalized economy, competition from foreign nations such as China appeared a more imminent threat than domestic challenges undermining our democratic values.

The Role of Public Education in Supporting American Democracy

Since the founding of public education in the United States, public schools have been charged not only with giving future workers skills for the private marketplace, but also with preparing students to be citizens in a democracy.

The centrality of public education to American democracy was not just the quaint belief of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century leaders. In 1916, John Dewey's Democracy and Education explained that "a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated." In 1938, when dangerous demagogues were erecting totalitarian regimes in many parts of the world, Franklin D. Roosevelt noted: "Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." He continued: "It has been well said that no system of government gives so much to the individual or exacts so much as a democracy. Upon our educational system must largely depend the perpetuity of those institutions upon which our freedom and our security rest. To prepare each citizen to choose wisely and to enable him to choose freely are paramount functions of the schools in a democracy." And in a 1952 Supreme Court case, Justice Felix Frankfurter, noting the central role of public schools in our system of self-governance, said teachers should be regarded "as the priests of our democracy."All nations, the late historian Paul Gagnon noted, provide an excellent education to "those who are expected to run the country" and the quality of that education "cannot be far from what everyone in a democracy needs to know."

Americanization means becoming a part of the polity-becoming one of us.

There are two primary ways to encourage children to discover the genius of democracy: by telling them explicitly, and by showing them implicitly. A curriculum of rigorous courses in history, literature, and civics can cultivate knowledge of democratic practices and a belief in democratic values. The classes should tell America's stories-warts and all-and include the ways in which groups have used democratic means to improve the country. Children should also be taught what it is like to live in nondemocratic countries in order to appreciate what they might otherwise take for granted. But that is not enough.

Are the voices of parents and community members heard as a part of decision-making, or are they shut out by state takeovers and billionaire philanthropists who bankroll reform efforts? Are teachers, parents, and students involved in determining how schools are run, or do principals get the only voice? Do students have access to economically and racially integrated schools where they are treated equally, or are they segregated into separate and unequal schools or tracks within schools? These are all critical questions, because no matter what the explicit curriculum says about democracy, as Rochester union leader Adam Urbanski has noted, "You cannot teach what you do not model."

Shifting Emphasis Away from Democracy to Marketplace Skills

In recent decades, as the nature of the American economy changed to require greater knowledge and skills from workers, and as democratic capitalism spread after the collapse of the Soviet Union, educators shifted their emphasis strongly toward the role of schools in promoting private skills rather than civic education. This shift occurred both in the explicit curriculum of schools and the "hidden curriculum" that schools impart through example. Fixing the civics curriculum is relatively straightforward. But getting the hidden curriculum right will require extensive efforts over time.

Refocusing the Explicit Curriculum

Education reformers from both major political parties reduced the grand two-fold purposes of American public education to a narrower focus on workplace skills. As part of this effort, reformers have tended to emphasize the economic value of education to individual students using a particular focus on reading and math test scores as the salient metric of success. Students, the mantra pronounced, must be "career and college ready."

President Barack Obama highlighted the idea that "A world-class education is the single most important factor in determining not just whether our kids can compete for the best jobs but whether America can out-compete countries around the world. America's business leaders understand that when it comes to education, we need to up our game. That's why we're working together to put an outstanding education within reach for every child." (Emphasis added.) The language of education leaders became infused with the dialect of the marketplace, and the need to garner a "return on investment." In a telling sign, in 2013, the governing board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) dropped fourth- and twelfth-grade civics and American history as a tested subject when it needed to save money.

An Ominous Shift in the Implicit Curriculum

As civics instruction was curtailed, some education reformers went further in their push toward market-based policy, saying that there was too much democracy in the public education system itself. Many reformers took their cue from scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe, whose book, Politics, Markets and America's Schools, argued that "direct democratic control" over public education appears to be "incompatible with effective schooling." This motif was made manifest in four emerging trends: state takeovers of urban districts; efforts to reduce workplace democracy in schools; diminishment of school integration as a valued goal; and adoption of a new marketplace theory of charter schools. Critics noted that these efforts to reduce democratic control of schools not only sent an unfortunate signal to students about democratic norms; they also frequently failed to improve educational outcomes.
State Takeovers
This transformation would be accomplished not by reducing poverty or school segregation-strong predictors of academic achievement-but by a series of top-down reforms: closing failing schools, expanding charter schools, and weakening teacher tenure. These reforms were adopted with little input from public school teachers, with whom Christie regularly feuded, or from the community. Christie, who noted "I got maybe six votes in Newark," felt free to ignore local opinion. Christopher Cerf, Christie's education commissioner, told a group of philanthropists, "We still control all the levers." At a fundraising party, Zuckerberg was asked who the new superintendent in Newark would be; Zuckerberg replied, "Anyone we want."

Outside technocrats, wrote journalist Sarah Carr in the Washington Post, were given "nearly dictatorial power" in Newark. Cerf consistently overrode the votes of a democratically elected advisory board, leading Shavar Jeffries, a civil rights attorney who was a strong supporter of reform, to warn, "Education reform comes across as colonial to people who've been here for decades."
Reducing Workplace Democracy
Another common motif among education reformers is that democratically elected teacher union leaders are seen not as vehicles for workplace democracy, but rather as stubborn impediments to doing right by school children. No one has embodied this philosophy more clearly than Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools from 2007 to 2010, who went on to found Students First, an organization meant to counter the influence of teachers unions.

Rhee argued that public schools in Washington, D.C. were in such bad shape that extraordinary measures were required. She even proposed the idea of getting a congressional declaration of emergency, so that she would not have to bargain with the elected representatives of teachers at all. "Cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-building," she argued, "are way overrated." Rhee held veteran teachers in disdain, and famously posed on the cover of Time magazine with a broom in her hands. As chancellor, she once told a film crew, "I'm going to fire somebody in a little while. Do you want to see that?" Her widespread dismissal of teachers was found to violate due process rights. In 2011, an arbitrator reinstated seventy-five educators fired by Rhee in 2008, after determining that she had neither explained why they were being terminated nor given them a chance to respond to charges. Not only were her methods found to be autocratic; critics noted that they, and those of her anointed successor, Kaya Henderson, did not promote equal opportunity. "Despite all the promises made by Rhee and Henderson," journalist John Merrow wrote in 2015, "the 'achievement gap' between well-to-do kids and poor kids has widened."
Reduced National Commitment to School Integration
The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education held that separate schools for black and white are inherently unequal; and subsequent research also suggested that separate schools for rich and poor are a recipe for inequality. The Brown decision explicitly underlined "the importance of education to our democratic society," noting that schooling "is the very foundation of good citizenship." Integrated schools underline the democratic message of equality, while segregated schools can teach the opposite: that some citizens are more deserving than others.

Integrated schools underline the democratic message of equality, while segregated schools can teach the opposite: that some citizens are more deserving than others.

But education reformers have often walked away from the democratic lessons of Brown. Intimidated by the political challenges to racial and socioeconomic integration, they argue that we should instead devote our efforts to improving high-poverty schools as best we can. Indeed, some charter schools boast of the fact that they are segregated and have "the highest octane mix of poor and minority kids," notes the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess, "even though just about every observer thinks that" integrated schools are "good for kids, communities, and the country."
The Market-Based Rather than Democracy-Based Model of Charter Schools
Across a variety of policy areas, then, the education reform community helped to radically shift the focus of public education. Being career and college ready became much more important than training students to become citizens. It seemed safe to focus on producing skilled workers for a market economy because America's highly successful experiment in self-governance appeared stable and firmly ensconced.

Cost to Ignoring Democracy's Role

Today, however, we are seeing the costs of an unbalanced approach to public education that focuses on markets far more than democracy: dangerously low levels of civic knowledge, and a reduced faith in democratic values among Americans. These developments are particularly troublesome because they have occurred alongside two larger societal trends that undermine our democracy: a decline in labor unions, and increased political polarization by residential areas, all of which we explore below.

Low Levels of Civics Knowledge

Adherence to Democratic Values

Decline in Unions as Schools of Democracy

Political Polarization through Residential Segregation

Finally, the crisis in civic education in our public schools comes at a time of increasing political polarization-including by residential areas-that makes it harder for democracy to operate well. Part of the democratic process is the education of citizens-by neighbors and news sources-that will help them consider a wide range of views and make up their minds about candidates and policy issues. But that continuing lifelong education through dialogue in a democracy no longer works the way it used to in the United States.

But that continuing lifelong education through dialogue in a democracy no longer works the way it used to in the United States.

We also are increasingly engaging with news sources and social media that confirm our preexisting hunches, creating political echo chambers that inhibit critical thinking. According to the Pew Research Center, consistently liberal voters are most likely to block, un-follow, or defriend someone on social media because they disagreed with that person's political stance. Meanwhile, consistent conservatives do the same and tend to receive their news from one conservative source, FOX News. In this way, political polarization is helping compound the ineffectiveness of schools in making us good citizens.

Case Study: Donald Trump's Presidential Candidacy-A Twenty-First-Century Sputnik Moment

These anti-democratic developments came to a head in the 2016 election and the disturbing rise of an authoritarian presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who ran on a platform that consistently rejected mainstream liberal democratic norms that historically have been embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike and nevertheless managed to win the presidency. The rise of a candidate who questioned several elements of constitutional democracy-including freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the peaceful transition of power following elections-should serve as a Sputnik moment for civics education and the need to model democratic values in how our schools are run. Just as Soviet technological advances triggered investment in science education in the 1950s, the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill an appreciation for liberal democratic values.
Attack on Widely Accepted Constitutional Norms
Against a backdrop in which the American public school system has deemphasized democratic citizenship, and in which Americans have demonstrated less commitment to democratic institutions, Trump called for a series of attacks on liberal democratic values. While candidates have often been chided by the opposing party for rejecting constitutional norms, Trump's candidacy was different in kind. Fellow Republicans repeatedly had to distance themselves from their own standard-bearer for rejecting essential democratic norms.

...with Donald Trump, "we have reached the culmination of the founders' fears: Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government."

Freedom of the Press. The free press is essential for holding government officials accountable, which is why the U.S. Supreme Court more than a half century ago suggested special protection from libel suits brought by public figures. During the campaign, however, Trump promised to "open up" the nation's libel laws. He revoked the press credentials of critical reporters from newspapers such as the Washington Post and Politico, "an almost unheard-of practice for a modern presidential candidate."

Rule of Law. While President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were criticized for engaging in water-boarding of terrorism suspects, Trump suggested he would do "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." Trump also called for murdering family members of terrorists, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. When Trump was asked by a Fox News host what would happen if the military refused to follow orders to torture, Trump responded, "They're not going to refuse me." Such "impatience with constraints placed on democratic governments," Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute notes, is the hallmark of "authoritarianism."

Celebrating the Violence of the Mob. Authoritarians often rely on violence to intimidate. During the campaign, when Trump was asked what would happen if he were denied the Republican nomination, he responded, "I think you'd have riots." When protesters interrupted his rallies, Trump mused, "In the old days, protesters would be "carried out in a stretcher." Journalist Andrew Sullivan observes, "No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way." For Trump, violence is linked to the promise of strength, says Brookings Institution scholar Robert Kagan. "What [Trump] offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, have produced national weakness and incompetence."

Threatening Not To Respect Election Results. Before the ultimate outcome of the election was known, during the third presidential debate with Clinton, Trump astounded observers by refusing to say he would respect the results of the election, a hallmark of American democracy for centuries. Trump would not commit to this principle despite the plea of the moderator, Chris Wallace of FOX News, who noted, "But sir, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner." John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, noted that while he did not like losing the election, he had "a duty to concede." He said, "A concessions isn't just an exercise in graciousness. It is an act of respect for the will of the American people."

A Preference for Authoritarians. During the campaign, Trump famously and repeatedly showered admiration on Vladimir Putin, at one point saying the Russian dictator was "a leader far more than our leader." Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov responded, "Vladimir Putin is a strong leader in the same way that arsenic is a strong drink." He continued: "Praising a brutal K.G.B. dictator, especially as preferable to a democratically elected U.S. president, whether you like Obama or hate him, is despicable and dangerous." Trump also expressed admiration for Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and the Chinese leaders behind the Tiananmen Square massacre. "There is no precedent for what Trump is saying," notes former Mitt Romney advisor Max Boot. "George McGovern was not running around saying 'what a wonderful guy Ho Chi Minh is!'" Trump is not a totalitarian, Eric Chenoweth, an expert on democracy notes, because he does not have a fixed ideology. But he does seem to identify with authoritarians, who gain "political power with a clear aim to dominate and control the state."
Pronounced Success with Less-Educated Voters

At one point during the primaries, Trump himself memorably observed that he loved "the poorly educated," who supported him so strongly.

Policy Recommendations for Putting Democracy Back into Public Education

On the heels of a presidential election in which an authoritarian candidate captured the country's highest office-with especially strong support from less-educated voters-we are faced with an urgent question: Moving forward, how can public schools do a better job of educating students to be responsible citizens who sustain America's experiment with constitutional government for future generations? Put differently, how can we put democracy back into education?

Below we outline several ideas for state, local, and federal policy makers. The first set of ideas has to do with directly improving the civics curriculum that students are taught; the second set of proposals has to do with improving the "hidden curriculum"-the messages sent to students about democracy by the critical choices we make about how we value and treat parents, community members, teachers, and students in our education system.

State and Local Recommendations
Prioritizing Civics Education

1. A robust history/social studies curriculum, starting in the elementary years and continuing through every year of schooling;

2. A full and honest teaching of the American story;

3. An unvarnished account of what life has been and is like in nondemocratic societies; and

4. A cultivation of the virtues essential to a healthy democracy.

The second prong-telling the American story in an honest way-also helps prepare democratic citizens. This historical accounting should include the warts-slavery, the Dred Scott decision, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, lynching, the persecution of gays, among others-but also discuss the movements to abolish slavery, to gain women's suffrage, to establish worker safety, and to promote civil rights. The Shanker Institute notes,

In the past, textbooks have failed at this balance: in the early years, providing a whitewashed celebration of America; and in recent years, suggesting America's sins are its essence, the Shanker Institute notes, leaving students concluding that the world is a hopeless place. A new balance must be struck.
Modeling Democracy through School Governance and the Allocation of Opportunity
Modeling democratic practices is as critical as explicitly teaching them in the curriculum. To reinforce the message of the civics book, students should able to see firsthand that parents and community members and teachers have a role in democratic decision-making in schools; and that students are given genuinely equal opportunity.
Giving Parents and Community Members Voice in School Governance
Do students see that parents and community members have input on key issues such as where new schools are built, or does a remote state actor or outside consultant make these decisions unilaterally? Below are three examples of inclusion.

The D.C. Compact. In the years before Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee implemented her motto that "collaboration is overrated," district schools took a more democratic approach. As explained below (see Washington, D.C. case study), in 2004, Clifford Janey created the D.C. Education Compact (DCED), made up of government leaders, community activists, foundation officials, business leaders, teachers, unions, and teachers and concerned citizens to be part of a dialogue for improving education and informing the district's strategic plan. The group was given major responsibility for adopting in D.C. a version of the highly rated Massachusetts standards and accountability system. Michelle Rhee subsequently disbanded the DCED.

Newark Public Engagement Strategy. In Newark, New Jersey, where residents felt disenfranchised by a state takeover of the district schools in 1995, Superintendent Janey sought to build community trust through an extensive public engagement strategy. (See Newark case study). Although the district had an elected school board that exercised only advisory power, Janey honored the group by meeting with them to discuss key decisions. His successor, Cami Anderson, by contrast, stopped attending advisory board meetings in the final year of her tenure as superintendent.

St. Paul's Inclusive Bargaining. Parents often feel excluded from important decisions made in collective bargaining agreements between teachers and management, and in preparation for the 2011 negotiation, the St. Paul, Minnesota teachers union sought to remedy that concern. The union met with parents to find out what sort of provisions they would like to see in the union-district contract and incorporated community goals into the bargaining process. In the negotiations, teachers sought smaller class sizes, less standardized testing, and the hiring of librarians, nurses, social workers, and counselors to better serve students. Although management initially rebuffed these concerns, calling them a matter of management prerogative, community support of a threatened teachers strike allowed the community and educators to prevail on the key issues at stake.

Allowing Teachers to Participate in Workplace Democracy
Do students see that teachers are part of democratic decision-making or is power concentrated in a single person-the principal? Are democratically elected teacher union leaders key players, or are they publicly denigrated? What do students observe?

Inclusion of Employees and Unions in Decision-Making in Newark. Some leaders routinely vilify teacher unions and seek to bypass them. By contrast, in Newark, Clifford Janey treated the union as a valued partner and every employee-whether a principal, teacher, or custodian-was invited to make suggestions and toward a comprehensive strategic plan for the schools (see Newark case study).

Peer Review in Toledo, Ohio and Rochester, New York. Another powerful way to model democracy for students-and improve educational outcomes-is through peer assistance and review programs for teachers. Teacher union leader Albert Shanker acknowledged that "some teachers are excellent, some are very good, some are good, and some are terrible." But how can schools weed bad teachers out of the profession without giving undue power to principals who often have very little knowledge of a teacher's particular field and might play personal favorites? In places such as Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, New York (see Rochester case study), expert teachers from outside a school work with struggling teachers in the same fields, seeking to provide assistance where possible, but ultimately recommending termination of employment in certain circumstances.

Teacher-Run Schools in Newark, New Jersey and Elsewhere. In Newark, New Jersey, Henderson, Minnesota, and elsewhere, teachers extend the democratic principle of peer review in the area of dismissals to virtually every realm of school affairs: teachers make decisions about hiring, curriculum, scheduling, and many other facets of schooling that are left to principals in most schools. Under his tenure in Newark, for example, Clifford Janey arranged for a contract waiver for teachers to start the Brick Avon Academy, a teacher-led traditional public school in which rank and file staff members elect fellow teachers to make decisions about curriculum, budget, hiring, and other school governance issues. (See Newark case study.) The school, which draws on Newark's poorest community, saw steep test score increases in subsequent years. At teacher cooperatives such as Minnesota New Country School in Henderson, Minnesota, and Avalon School in St. Paul, teachers are given unparalleled say in running their schools. "Twenty-four brains are undoubtedly more powerful and smarter than one," said one teacher at Avalon. The schools perform well academically, and the emphasis on democracy and collaboration filters through to students.
Providing Students Equitable Access to Educational Opportunity
Do students see that classmates of all races and economic backgrounds have access to the best schools and the most academically advanced tracks or do race and class appear to be highly predictive determinants of opportunity? Does the assignment of students to schools and academic tracks send the message that in a democracy, people of all backgrounds are equally valued, or that some are more worthy than others?

School Integration in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Rochester, New York; and Elsewhere. The socioeconomic and racial integration of schools is important to the health of a democracy for three distinct reasons: (1) integrated schools underline the democratic message that in America, we are all political equals; (2) integrated schools promote tolerance and acceptance and make demagogic appeals that scapegoat minorities less likely to be effective; and (3) the opportunity to attend integrated schools raises educational attainment, which, in turn, is directly correlated with democratic participation rates.

Today, one hundred school districts and charter schools consciously consider socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment, up from two in 1996. In 2001, for example, Cambridge, Massachusetts adopted a plan to produce economic diversity through school choice. The schools have also proven remarkably integrated by race. Graduation rates in Cambridge for low-income, African American, and Latino students are as much as 20 percentage points higher than in nearby Boston (see Figure 3). A similar choice program for socioeconomic diversity has been adopted in Rochester, New York, among other districts (see Rochester case study).

Addressing Within-School Integration in Rochester, New York. In many communities, school building are integrated by race, socioeconomic status, and special education status, but individual classrooms are not, a phenomenon which often denies opportunity to disadvantaged students and runs counter to the democratic message that public schools are designed to impart. In the early 1980s, for example, most students with disabilities in Rochester, New York schools were taught in separate classroom, triggering a complaint to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and, ultimately, a consent decree. In 1997, the inclusion rates were still below 20 percent, and superintendent Janey set a goal of 70 percent inclusion. Between 1999 and 2002, the inclusion of students with disabilities into regular learning environments rose from 32.8 percent to 71.4 percent, and performance of students with disabilities in fourth grade English Language Arts exams exceeded similar students statewide. Strong efforts were also made to make sure that special education and minority students had access to rigorous AP and International Baccalaureate classes (see Rochester case study).

Giving Students a Chance to Practice Democracy in Newark, New Jersey; the State of Maryland; and Elsewhere. Students throughout the country are taught democracy and civic engagement by running for office in student government, writing for school newspapers, and engaging in volunteer activities to strengthen the community. In the state of Maryland, for example, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend spearheaded the first effort nationally to require all students to engage in community service as a requirement for high school graduation.

In Newark, New Jersey, many people had for years held low expectations for disadvantaged students, but under Superintendent Janey, the district placed a major emphasis on speech and debate and service learning. The school district converted an old high school sheet metal shop into a distinguished courtroom with mahogany furniture and hosted mock trials so students could learn the judicial process. Debate was expanded to every high school in the district. Students, who were stereotyped as gang members, volunteered in local hospitals in a service program that was nationally recognized (see Newark case study).
Creating Charter Schools that Model Democracy
Finally, there are a small but growing number of charter schools that are fulfilling Albert Shanker's original vision as vehicles for promoting democratic values by giving teachers voice and integrating students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. My colleague Halley Potter and I profile several of these schools in our book, A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education.

The Federal Role in Supporting Democratic Values
Include Direct Measures of Civic Readiness in Federal Accountability
If we believe the role of public schools in sustaining our democracy is important, then civic literacy should be given equal weight to that provided to math, reading, and science test scores in education accountability schemes. No Child Left Behind defined success very narrowly, but the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allows states to broaden the concept of what makes a school a success, an important step in the right direction (see below).

When the underlying federal law-the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)-is next reauthorized, Congress could elevate the importance of civics education. In the meantime, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) should restore civics education testing for the fourth and twelfth grades. It is critical to know, as soon as reasonably possible: Do students have civics knowledge? In the long term, it would also be good to begin tracking a more robust set of outcomes: Do graduates of a school vote, volunteer, and get involved in democratic activities, such as public service and political campaigns? A democracy cannot thrive without active citizens, so just as there is a push to link schools to wage outcomes, so too, we should find creative ways to track post-high school civic participation.
Give Credit for Modeling Democracy under ESSA's Framework Supporting Charter Schools that Model Democratic Practices

Do students observe a democratic structure in which their teachers, parents, and broader members of the community have a say in how the school is run? Do students enjoy a racially and economically integrated environment?

Conclusion

Public education in the United States has always been justified in large measure for its role in supporting America's grand experiment in self-governance. In recent years, we have let that goal slip as economic concerns have all but subsumed the democratic purposes of public education. The 2016 presidential election should serve as a powerful impetus for action. New policies and investments are needed to ensure that our nation, which has been a shining example of democratic values for the world, can continue to play that role for generations to come.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This report, published on November 10, 2016, was slightly modified on November 30, 2016 with an addition to the Rochester case study reflecting increased proportions of special education students included in regular classes there during the 1998-1999 and 2001-2002 school years.

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Putting Democracy Back into Public Education

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What You Should Know Only one-third of Americans can name all three branches of the federal government, according to a recent University of Pennsylvania report. Support for democratic values is on the decline among Americans, which paved the way for a president who ran on a platform disavowing widely accepted constitutional norms to be elected.

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In the nation’s early years, one of the first steps in dealing with these dynamics was to shift education responsibility from the individual to government. This was no small task. At the time, education was almost entirely a private and religious affair. But if it was going to be a natural extension of this new republican form of government, public education had to become a duty that the government owed its citizens. Adams was explicit: the education of every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest had to be the care of the public and maintained at the public expense. Its importance required that no expense would be too extravagant.

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Even before the United States had a Constitution, its founders were advocating for the creation of public education systems. The United States was an experiment in democracy unlike anything the world had ever seen, turning away from government dominated by elites and hoping that the common man could rule himself. If this experiment had any chance of standing the test of time, the nation needed far more schools to prepare everyday citizens for self-government. As James Madison, the father of our Constitution, remarked: “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.” Thomas Jefferson similarly argued that governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed,” but that it is education that makes that consent possible. President Washington, in his last annual message to Congress, added that expanding education was essential to the perpetuation of nation’s common values and the chance of a “permanent Union.”

While the country’s public education system is firmly established now, the underlying challenges of maintaining it and achieving its goals are resurfacing today. Those challenges range from the government’s responsibility for operating and funding public schools—particularly a challenge during the pandemic—to the need for those schools to unite culturally disparate and politically polarized communities.

In the nation’s early years, one of the first steps in dealing with these dynamics was to shift education responsibility from the individual to government. This was no small task. At the time, education was almost entirely a private and religious affair. But if it was going to be a natural extension of this new republican form of government, public education had to become a duty that government owed its citizens. Adams was explicit: the education of “every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest” had “to be the care of the public” and “maintained at the public expense.” Its importance required that “no expense . . . would be too extravagant.”

Shortly after the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson tried to build a public education system in his home state. In the “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” he warned against the “tyranny” of government that would follow unless “the people at large” were “educated at the common expence of all.” His bill dictated the various intricacies of constructing and financing a statewide system of education out of whole cloth. Many today interpret the bill’s failure as a direct rejection of public schools, but they ignore context. Virginia suffered under the financial and violent effects of the ongoing and uncertain Revolutionary War. In this context, Jefferson was encouraged despite the bill’s failure: “I never saw [a bill] received with more enthusiasm than that was . . . by the House of Delegates, who ordered it printed. And it seemed afterwards, that nothing but the extreme distress of our resources prevented its being carried into execution, even during the war.”

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Working a few years later, John Adams achieved one of the most significant accomplishments in educational history: he wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and placed education at the center of the state’s understanding of government. The Constitution declared that “wisdom and knowledge . . . diffused generally among the body of the people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties. . . . [Thus,] it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the . . . public schools.”

Jefferson’s and Adams’ work and later advocacy significantly impacted the future of education elsewhere. Several states modeled their constitutions on Massachusetts, and Congress incorporated important aspects of their thinking into the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. Those Ordinances divided up the territories and set their paths toward statehood. Congress placed public education at the literal center of these plans. The 1785 Ordinance specified how every square inch of land would be divided into counties and towns. Every new town had to set aside one-ninth of its land and one-third of its natural resources for the financial support of public education. And every town had to reserve one of its center lots for the operation of a public school. Then, alongside a number of individual rights that later made their way into the Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that as a necessity of “good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

The Ordinances are part of the straight lines moving forward and back in time—back to Jefferson’s and Adams’ education ideas and work, forward to Congress’ demands for affirmative education guarantees following the Civil War, and onward to a time when every state in the nation would guarantee education through its constitution. Just as Jefferson’s Virginia bill called for six-mile square townships with a central block reserved for the schools, a decade later the Northwest Ordinance basically did the same. Just as Adams’s 1780 Massachusetts Constitution declared education a necessity “for the preservation of . . . rights and liberties,” so, too, did the Northwest Ordinance declare education to be “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.”

The Ordinances’ lofty language and provision of land, however, alone were not enough to cause a nationwide system of education to spring forth. Land in an undeveloped frontier was not that valuable. It sadly never generated enough resources to support a system of schools in places where no formal government, no tax base and no system of doing things existed.

What the territories really needed was money. The United States did not have any money, so it just gave what it had—land. But it was the nation’s willingness to give what it had, to demand very specific commitments in return, and to articulate education as the foundation of government, not the short-term efficacy of the plan, that makes the Northwest Ordinances so important.

America’s education story is ultimately a story of the tension between the idea that the nation’s democracy rests on the foundation of education and the inability to ever fully deliver on that commitment. Education, like democracy, has long been a work in progress. But that progress has come by remaining fixed on our fundamental ideas, not questioning them because of our own failures to reach them—and certainly not replacing them with something else. And as we ponder our own distinct, yet similar, challenges in providing education to all and uniting a polarized nation, we would be well served to ask whether we will resolve them by moving further away from or closer to our public education commitments.

Adapted with permission from Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek W. Black, available now from PublicAffairs.

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America's Founders Recognized the Need for Public Education. Democracy Requires Maintaining That Commitment

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America's education story is ultimately a story of the tension between the idea that the nation's democracy rests on the foundation of education and the inability to ever fully deliver on that commitment