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“A LIBERATION OF POWERS”: AGENCY AND EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY
Harry C. Boyte
Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship Augsburg College
Margaret J. Finders
Education Department Augsburg College
Abstract. In this essay Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders argue that addressing the “shrinkage” of education and democracy requires acting politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency-focused concepts of democracy and education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which advances a politics of agency — a citizen politics that is different from ideological politics — and citizens as cocreators of political communities, Boyte and Finders explore the technocratic trends that have eclipsed agency. These disempower educators, students, and communities. Using the case study of the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education Program and partnerships of Augsburg College, the authors conclude with an examination of how agentic practices have survived in “shadow spaces” in schools, how such spaces might be turned into “free spaces” for democratic change, and how teacher education needs to prepare “citizen teachers” as well as promoting pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic change.
In Pragmatist Democracy, Christopher Ansell observes that elites seek to control definitions of concepts, “though they must contend with audiences who have the power to arbitrate the meaning of concepts.”1 A reading of Democracy and Education makes clear that elites have recently been winning the battle. Concepts of both themes have shrunk.
For John Dewey, education was critical to a democratic society and democracy was central to the educational enterprise. “It is the main business of the family and the school to influence directly the formation and growth of attitudes and dispositions, emotional, intellectual and moral,” wrote Dewey in “Democracy and Educational Administration.” “Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes … a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for … the democratic way of life.”2
1. Christopher K. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33.
2. John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration” (1937), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925 – 1953, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 221 – 22. All references to Dewey’s works will be to the multivolume series comprising The Early Works, 1882 – 1898, The Middle Works, 1899 – 1924, and The Later Works, 1925 – 1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston and published by Southern University Illinois Press. Volumes in this series will henceforth be cited as
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Views similar to Dewey’s, of democracy as a “way of life” with cultural, social, and economic dimensions as well as electoral ones, animated broad democratic movements in the twentieth century. For instance Alain Locke, a philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance, strongly influenced the black freedom move- ment of the 1950s and 1960s, which in turn helped infuse movements around the world with a vision of participatory democracy. “If we are going to have effective democracy in America, we must have the democratic spirit,” said Locke. That requires “more social and more economic democracy in order to have or keep political democracy.”3 As Vincent Harding, friend and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., put it, “The civil rights movement was in fact a powerful out- cropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy in the United States. … [I]t demonstrates … the deep yearning for a democratic experience that is far more than periodic voting.”4
The Deweyan view of democracy as a way of life also animated parts of higher education and the professions. As Andrew Jewett has detailed in his study of discourse over democracy, education, and science from the Civil War to the Cold War, Dewey helped lead a broad movement of “scientific democrats” who saw science and its fields as sites for values and practices such as cooperative inquiry and testing ideas in practice, relevant for all members of democratic society.5
Today, in contrast, “democracy” generally means elections. “Democracy refers to a civilian political system in which the legislative and chief executive offices are filled through regular competitive elections with universal suffrage,”
EW, MW, and LW, respectively; for example, the citation “‘Democracy and Educational Administration,’ LW 11, 221 – 22” indicates that this work appears in Later Works from this series, volume 11, and the discussion or quotation cited is on pages 221 – 22.
3. Alain Locke, “The Presentation of the Democratic Ideal,” in Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher, ed. and intro., “Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining Democracy, Education and World Citizenship,” World Order 38, no. 4 (2008): 23 – 28.
4. Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 5 – 6. Boyte’s experiences as a young man in the movement regularly involved discussions about a broadened view of democracy.
5. Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
HARRY C. BOYTE is Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy in the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and is Affiliate Faculty Member in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, 130 Humphrey School, 301 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis MN 55455; e-mail <[email protected]>. His primary areas of scholarship are democracy, political theory, community organizing, and higher education.
MARGARET J. FINDERS is Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Education Department at Augsburg College, Sverdrup Hall 3 F, CB 312, Minneapolis, MN 55454; e-mail <[email protected]>. Her primary areas of scholarship are sociopolitical dimensions of schooling, literacy education, equity and democratic practice in teacher education, and democratic purposes of education.
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declares USAID, a view disseminated around the world.6 Even participatory definitions commonly posit democracy in state-centered terms. This is the view taken, for instance, by the prestigious American Political Science Associ- ation Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Its report of demo- cratic activities included elections, contacting public officials, involvement with organizations that take political stands, and other government-related prac- tices, but neglects mention of schools, colleges, or professions as sites for democracy.7
Small definitions fall flat. Mark Lilla, writing on “why the dogma of democ- racy doesn’t always make the world better,” illustrates the exhaustion that results. “Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revo- lution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies. … Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in.”8
Here we argue that advancing the living practices of “democracy” and “edu- cation” against “ominous changes” requires reclaiming an enlarged Deweyan con- ception of democracy as agency and also his view of education as experiences that foster the agency of individuals and collectivities. We begin by describing Dewey’s participatory democracy and also what we see as limits in his view of politics. We then treat the ways in which agency has become circumscribed by technocratic trends in educational policy and practice, while noting its survival in “shadow spaces,” akin to what one of us (Boyte) and Sara Evans call “free spaces.”9 We
6. USAID, USAID Strategy on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2013), 37. USAID is the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the organization is described on its website as “the lead U.S. Government agency that works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential”; see https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are.
7. American Political Science Association, Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, “Amer- ican Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality” (Washington, DC: American Political Science Associa- tion, 2004). For an analysis of the report, see Harry C. Boyte, “Reframing Democracy: Governance, Civic Agency, and Politics,” Public Administration Review 65, no. 5 (2005): 536 – 46. Also, on the narrowing of democracy, see Harry C. Boyte, “Civil Society and Public Work,” in Oxford Handbook of Civil Soci- ety, ed. Michael Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Harry C. Boyte, “Constructive Politics as Public Work: Organizing the Literature,” Political Theory 39, no. 5 (2011): 630 – 60. Boyte’s democracy as agency, collective powers deriving from common work, is akin to the argument by Josiah Ober, based on etymological analysis, which challenges modern uses of “democracy” as “a voting rule for determining the will of the majority.” Ober argues that the Greek “demokratia … more capaciously, means ’the empowered demos … in which the demos gains a collective power to effect change in the public realm … the collective strength and ability to act … and, indeed, to reconstitute the public realm through action.” Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2009): 1 and 7.
8. Mark Lilla, “The Truth about Our Libertarian Age,” New Republic, June 18, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118043/our-libertarian-age-dogma-democracy-dogma-decline.
9. Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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conclude by describing an effort to transform special education through the incor- poration of “Public Achievement,” an agency-focused, political approach to young people’s civic learning, into the special education programs of Augsburg College and partners, suggesting ways such work creates a foundation for hope and broader democratic change.
Dewey’s Democracy-as-Agency
Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mishe, in their seminal American Journal of Sociology essay “What Is Agency?,” argue that the locus of agency “lies in the contextualization of social experience … [through which] in delibera- tion with others (or sometimes self-reflexively, with themselves) actors gain in the capacity to make considered decisions that may challenge received patterns of action.” In twentieth-century social and political thought, con- cepts of agency as individual action take “received patterns” as largely immutable. Agency that imagines intentional change in contexts “has been overshadowed by an emphasis upon clear and explicit rules of conduct, con- cepts that permit relatively little scope for the exercise of situationally based judgment.”10
Challenging such trends, in 2007 a group of political theorists named emer- gent democratic practices as a transdisciplinary field called “civic studies” that focuses on agency and citizens as cocreators of communities at different scales. Civic studies adds to Emirbayer and Mishe’s definition the idea that citizens are makers of political communities, not simply deliberators about political commu- nities.11 Agency is understood as the capacity to act with others in diverse and open environments to shape the world around us.12 Citizenship is “public work,” work with public dimensions, not simply off-hours volunteerism or participation in government-connected activities. Academics themselves are citizens. Knowl- edge, including science, should aim at increasing capacities to act collectively, effectively, and ethically.13
Civic studies and the trends it conceptualizes can be seen, in part, as inspired by and revitalizing Deweyan concerns. Though Dewey rarely used the term “agency” and did not use “civic agency,” related ideas were in fact central to his
10. Mustafa Emibayer and Ann Mishe, “What Is Agency?,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 994 – 95. See also Anthony Giddens, Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).
11. On civic studies, see the framing statement, http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/ CivicsFramingEnglishandPolish.pdf. See also Peter Levine and Karol Edward Soltan, eds., Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field (Washington DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2014).
12. For a brief description of the scope and aims of civic studies, see http://activecitizen. tufts.edu/civic-studies/
13. See Boyte, “Constructive Politics as Public Work”; and Peter Levine, “The Case for Civic Studies,” in Civic Studies, ed. Levine and Soltan, 7.
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philosophy from his earliest writings.14 In “The Ethics of Democracy,” Dewey argued that self-directed effort — “personality” in the phrase of his time — is the essence of democracy. “Democracy means the personality is the first and final reality,” Dewey wrote. “It admits that the chief stimuli and encouragement to the realization of personality come from society; but it holds, nonetheless, to the fact that personality cannot be procured for any one, however degraded and feeble, by anyone else, however wise and strong.”15 In Democracy and Educa- tion Dewey argued that “Such a [democratic] society must have a type of edu- cation which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introduc- ing disorder.”16 He proposed that education involves cultivating “initiative and adaptability.”17 Following Jane Addams’s call for educators to “free the powers,” Dewey advanced the idea that democracy’s diversity of stimuli “secure a liber- ation of powers.”18 Finally, emphasizing the relational qualities of development against atomizing trends in political and social thought, Dewey proposed that “the new individualism was interpreted philosophically not as meaning development of agencies for revising and transforming previously accepted beliefs, but as an assertion that each individual’s mind was complete in isolation from everything else.”19
Dewey’s commitment to agency led to fierce debates with fellow intellectuals. According to a rising strand of progressive thought, changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century such as technological developments, urbanization, and the growth of science meant that theories of citizen involvement needed radical revision. In 1909 Herbert Croly, future editor of the New Republic, argued that a new citizenship must replace relational ties. Citizens no longer need to “assemble after the manner of a New England town-meeting” since there existed “abundant opportunities of communication and consultation without any meeting. … [T]he active citizenship of the country meets every morning and evening and discusses the affairs of the nation with the newspaper as an impersonal interlocutor.”20 The debate between Walter Lippmann, leading proponent of the “realist” position, and Dewey framed two radically different versions of democracy.21 Lippmann’s view
14. On conceptual change naming prior ideas and practices, see Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
15. John Dewey, Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), EW 1, 244.
16. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916), MW 9, 105.
17. Ibid., 93 – 94.
18. Jane Addams, On Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 98; and Dewey, Democracy and Education, 93.
19. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 315.
20. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 139 and 453.
21. See Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Transaction, 1925); and John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927), LW 2.
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took many expressions. Walter Shepard in his 1934 presidential address to the American Political Science Association called for “an aristocracy of intellect and character.”22
Dewey addressed critics of participatory democracy by making relational civic action, not detached thought, the foundation of education and society. As his biographer Alan Ryan detailed, Dewey believed that the person “makes sense of the world for the sake of acting productively on the world.”23 This focus led Dewey to a critique of academics who imagine the primacy of their own thought.24 In response to arguments that people are in the grip of instincts, Dewey proposed in Human Nature and Conduct that “habits,” not “instincts,” shape most human behavior and can be intentionally developed.25 His argu- ment that habits can be cultivated has inspired extraordinary educational experiments such as Central Park East and Mission Hill schools, founded by Deborah Meier.26
While Dewey’s focus on agency, relationships, and habits has a powerful relevance, his lapse was the failure to develop a strategy for political action within society. Biographers intimate this lapse. “Dewey never actually developed, let alone implemented, a comprehensive strategy capable of realizing his general theory in real-world practice,” write Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett in their lively “Deweyan manifesto,” Dewey’s Dream.27 Yet we argue that his lack of political strategy can be traced to a lapse that his critics reproduce: the way he defined politics narrowly as an activity confined to the government system and seen in ideological terms.
Dewey’s definitional mistake can be found in “School as Social Centre.” There, as elsewhere, he argued that “politics” is absent in “community.” This move eclipsed not only schools and other civic environments as political sites but also neglected any concept of politics that revolves around citizens. “I mean by ‘society’ the less definite and freer play of the forces of the community which goes on in the daily intercourse and contact of men in an endless variety of ways that have nothing to do with politics or government,” Dewey said. He proposed that citizenship needed to be defined more broadly “to mean all the relationships of all
22. Shepard, quoted in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 285.
23. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 127.
24. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929), LW 4.
25. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (1922), MW 14, 31 – 32.
26. Deborah Meier, “So What Does It Take to Build a School for Democracy?,” Phi Delta Kappan 85, no. 1 (2003): 15 – 25.
27. Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in the Age of Educational Reform (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), xiii.
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sorts that are involved in membership in a community.”28 His works on “politics” itself as a force for change, such as “Needed — A New Politics,” neglected the idea of politics as something different from ideology.29
In depoliticizing citizenship, those who follow in the Deweyan tradition, including Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett, have developed an idealized view that is inattentive to the agonistic dynamics of diverse interests involved in public life.30 Thus Dewey’s Dream substitutes the impulse toward communication and the ideal of overcoming conflicts for politics, in the older understanding of the concept. The authors invoke “harmonious living,” “organic communities,” and “utopian democracies” as descriptors of Dewey’s goals, which they share.
In contrast, citizen politics, in the sense of politics descending from Aristotle and resurfacing now, is the method that humans, acting in civic and horizontal ways attentive to the well-being of communities, have developed to negotiate different, often conflicting interests and views in order to get things done and create a life in common. At times diverse interests can be integrated through citizen politics but the aim is not to do away with conflict — politics is a never-ending “rough and tumble” activity. Often politics surfaces previously submerged clashes of interest. Rarely does it achieve consensus. Citizen politics aims rather to avoid violence, contain conflicts, generate work on common challenges, and achieve beneficial public outcomes.
A rough and tumble citizen politics has revived in what is called broad-based community organizing, which often addresses the question of reforming schools to make them more favorable for the flourishing of poor, working class, and minority children.31 Yet such organizing usually neglects the politics of knowledge
28. John Dewey, “The School as Social Centre” (1902), MW 2, 81 – 82; for a later version of the same view, see John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” 217 – 18. For discussion of how “citizen politics” differs from ideology, see Harry C. Boyte, “A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the Meaning of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century,” The Good Society 12, no. 2 (2003): 1 – 15; Luke Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
29. John Dewey, “Needed — A New Politics” (1935), LW 11, 274 – 81.
30. For a critique of apolitical progressive approaches, see Aaron Schutz, “Power and Trust in the Public Realm: John Dewey, Saul Alinsky, and the Limits of Progressive Democratic Education,” Educational Theory 61, no. 4 (2011): 491 – 512.
31. On community organizing, see Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York: Free Press, 1990); Richard Wood, Faith In Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy. On organizing and school reform, see Dennis Shirley, Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for Power in South Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Marion Orr and John Rogers, eds., Public Engagement for Public Education: Joining Forces to Revitalize Democracy and Equalize Education (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Mark R. Warren, Karen Mapp, and the School Reform Project, A Match in Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
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and thus the technocracy that has affected sweeping changes in professions and education.
Addressing knowledge politics is necessary for democratic change in educa- tion. Thus, in a review of recent books on community organizing and school reform, Luke Bretherton, a leading theorist and analyst of community organizing, points to the politics of knowledge as a crucial, usually unnoted factor: “What comes across time and again is the hostility ‘non-experts’ provoke. … [P]ublic engagement with education challenges and demands a move beyond technocratic, top down, one-size-fits all, centralized, and procedural reform initiatives to draw on a wider variety of experience, knowledge, and a diversity of solutions.”32 Though technocracy is a barrier confronting community organizing, with a few exceptions (such as Bretherton) organizers and theorists of organizing fail to name the power problem or to develop strategies for addressing it. Consequently, conflicts between community organizations and teachers are commonplace. Dennis Shirley’s treat- ment of the Alliance Schools in Texas, one of the largest community organizing efforts in school reform, makes clear that such organizing left teachers’ understand- ing of their own work largely unaddressed.33
Technocratic power is also invisible in much civic engagement outside of com- munity organizing, reflecting a communitarian blind spot about politics outside of government. Indeed, in recent years higher education leaders who call for reengage- ment with the world reproduce apolitical, expert-knows-best approaches without any hint of self-consciousness. In 1989, for example, Donna Shalala, then chancel- lor of the University of Wisconsin, called for renewal of the fabled Wisconsin Idea in a famous speech titled “Mandate for a New Century.” But she transformed the Wisconsin Idea, always contested but a concept that once often involved academics as citizen professionals working with other citizens, into the idea that the best and the brightest should fix the nation’s people and problems. As she said, “The ideal [is] a disinterested technocratic elite … society’s best and brightest in service to its most needy [dedicated to] delivering the miracles of social science [on society’s problems] just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past.”34
Shalala’s call for academic research engaged with human concerns reinforced the tendency of academics to see lay citizens from the outside, as passive objects to be fixed and informed. A particular paradigm of the citizen and power undergirds such a conception of science: the general population, no longer viewed as civic producers, are reconceived as clients and consumers serviced by experts, while citizenship is narrowed to practices such as voting, volunteering, or petitioning the
32. Luke Bretherton, “Review of Public Engagement in Public Education, and A Match on Dry Grass,” in Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 3 (2013): 958.
33. Shirley, Valley Interfaith and School Reform, 55. On the neglect of “knowledge power,” see Harry C. Boyte, “Populism — Bringing Culture Back,” The Good Society 11, no. 2 (2012): 300 – 19.
34. Donna Shalala, “Mandate for a New Century: Reshaping the Research University’s Role in Social Policy” (David Dodds Henry Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois at Chicago, October 31, 1989); http://www.uic.edu/depts/oaa/ddh/ddhlectures/Lec11.pdf.
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government for redress. Professional education played a key role in this process. The practices and identities of “citizen teacher” or “citizen clergy” that had once lent governance dynamics larger public and democratic meanings and rooted professions in local civic cultures largely disappeared. Training in professions such as teaching and the ministry lost connections to the real life, history, and cultures of actual places, in ways paralleling the disappearance of politics from public affairs.35
Yet attention to the spread of technocracy is now appearing.36 Jewett describes a sea change in science that affected all of professional life in the latter decades of the twentieth century, turning perspectives like that of Lippmann into conven- tional wisdom. “The scientists who powerfully shaped the national discourse on science in the middle years of the twentieth century drew a sharp line between sci- ence and society,” says Jewett. “They portrayed science as utterly deaf to human concerns and sought to insulate the research process [as] … a space untouchable by both the state and the horizontal communication between citizens.”37
Pope Francis details in Laudato Si’ the ways in which public action across the sweep of modern societies substitutes informational cultures for relational cultures. “The basic problem … is the way that humanity has taken up … an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.”38 The result is a shift from “civic professionalism” to “disciplinary professionalism.”39 These conceptual dynamics play themselves out in policy and practice.
Shrinking Agency
Nowhere is this shrinkage more evident than in the policies and practices of schooling. Kevin Kumashiro notes that in the twenty-first century, education is reductive on all counts: the curriculum is reduced to bits of information and skills, teachers are reduced to certifiers of this acquisition, and education is
35. Barbara Nelson, “Education for the Public Interest” (address to the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration, October 17, 2002, Los Angeles, California).
36. See Matthew Hartley, John Saltmarsh, and Patti Clayton, “Is the Civic Engagement Movement Changing Higher Education?,” British Journal of Educational Studies 58, no. 4 (2011): 391 – 406.
37. Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University, 310.
38. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis: On Care for Our Common Home (Rome: Vatican Press, 2015), 78 – 79. On the “Theology of the People” movement that shaped Jorge Bergoglio, see Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); for the relationship of Pope Francis to education, citizen politics, and democracy, see Harry C. Boyte, “Climate Change and Democracy,” in Climate Change across the Curriculum, ed. Eric Fretz (New York: Lexington Books, 2015).
39. The shift from “civic” to “disciplinary” professional is described in Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
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reduced to a form of transmission.40 This technocratic shrinkage comes from both liberals and conservatives. In 2001 President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which mandated that all children in grades 3 through 8 would be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Although NCLB covers numerous federal education programs, policymakers, legislators, and popular media focused the most attention on the law’s requirements for testing, accountability, and school improvement. This external control model of evaluating schools and teachers based for the most part on standardized test scores carries currency across political lines. In the 1990s Bill Clinton, known as the “education president” before Bush, pushed to reinvigorate schools by launching an era of education reform based on setting high standards from the outside, with little teacher involvement. Following Bush, in 2009 President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan instituted the Race to the Top program, tying educational funding to evaluations of teachers based on multiple external measures of educator effectiveness. A nine-year study by the National Research Council concluded that the emphasis on testing yielded little learning progress but caused significant harm.41 While studies of the standardized testing regime have noted its failure to improve the American educational system, policymakers and legislators remain convinced that the best way for schools to improve is to administer more standardized tests. Few policymakers observe that such testing is an emblematic case of technocratic experts seeking to engineer outcomes and practices in ways that displace the agency of the educators, students, and communities that know their children best.
Now more than two decades into the era of high-stakes testing and national curricula mandates, we are immersed in a new morass of teacher assessments and accountability. On the surface, it seems simply cantankerous to argue against raising student achievement standards and increasing teacher effectiveness. It seems to us, however, that the rhetoric of assessment and accountability has created what Kenneth Burke calls “terministic screens.” Language, according to Burke, works like variously colored photographic lenses that filter atten- tion toward and away from particular versions of reality. Burke argues that “Language reflects, selects, and deflects as a way of shaping the symbol sys- tems that allow us to cope with the world.”42 People create terministic screens consciously and unconsciously, as they perceive the world. These terministic screens, we argue, hide Dewey’s view that education should provide experi- ences that build habits of mind rather than isolated, fixed skills. As Patrick Shannon has observed, Dewey held that habits are and must be flexible so
40. Kevin K. Kumashiro, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2015), xxi.
41. Michael Hout and Stuart W. Elliott, eds., Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education (Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2011), http://www.nap.edu/read/12521/chapter/1.
42. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 5.
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that they can accommodate conscious reconstruction of experience for human betterment.43
It is worth looking at the most cited and circulated educational terministic screens and articulating their implied, but by no means uncontroversial, meanings:
• Standards: We need to hold high standards so students will perform better.
• Accountability: We must hold teachers accountable for raising student test scores.
• Teacher effectiveness: We will measure teacher effectiveness based on students’ test scores.
• Achievement gap: Students’ test-score data reveals that white students build more and better skills than students of color.
Such commonsensical screens shape educational policies without interrogation, preventing deeper conversations. If we look at the values and beliefs embedded within them, a different version of reality emerges. These screens deflect attention away from broader societal issues that impact student learning.
Standards: The assumptions screened by this term are that there are uni- versally appropriate measures of competence, that these have been identified by experts, and that we simply need to ensure that more students are measured more extensively in these realms at an earlier stage in their lives. According to Diane Ravitch, while the Common Core State Standards are touted as voluntary and are “state standards,” they are in fact tied to federal funding, which means that they are for the most part the standards by which schools will be measured.44 States are not eligible for Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they adopted the Common Core Standards. Stan Karp notes that substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core’s tendency to push the introduction of difficult academic skills to lower grades.45 The Alliance for Childhood argues against the appropriateness of the early childhood standards among other issues.46
Accountability: The assumption here is that we can hold teachers, schools, and districts responsible for student success on the basis of individual performance measures. Such an accountability system often comes with a system of high-stakes
43. Patrick Shannon, The Struggle to Continue: Progressive Reading Instruction in the United States (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990), 63.
44. Diane Ravitch, “Why I Cannot Support the Common Core Standards,” Diane Ravitch’s blog, Febru- ary 26, 2013, http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/.
45. Stan Karp, “The Problem with the Common Core,” Rethinking Schools 28, no. 2 (2013 – 2014).
46. Alliance for Childhood, “Alliance Warning: Core Standards May Lead to a Plague of Kindergarten Tests,” June 8, 2010, http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Core _Standards_06_08.pdf.
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rewards and punishments for school districts and teachers. Currently, the com- petitive metrics and the dominant conceptual framework of accountability stress individual and competitive excellence of knowledge acquisition and preparation for narrowly acquisitive and individual achievement – oriented skills rather than agentic and democratic practices.
Teacher effectiveness: The assumption screened is that lack of student learn- ing is solely the result of poor teaching. This denies larger societal issues that affect learning, including poverty, homelessness, and cultural biases. By measur- ing teacher effectiveness through student test scores, these screens inaccurately conceptualize teacher quality as detached from larger systems.
Achievement gap: The assumption screened is that student test scores — which under the current regime record massive disparities between white students, on the one hand, and black, Latino/a, and recent immigrant students, on the other — not only indicate what students are learning, but usefully measure what they should be learning. Gloria Ladson-Billings has argued that the achievement gap looks only at disparities in standardized test scores that, as described above, are extremely problematic in themselves. According to Ladson-Billings, we need to look at the “education debt,” which is comprised of historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components, components not addressed in much of the current public conversation.47 Others shift the focus by naming this gap an “access gap,” or an “opportunity gap.” Is such a gap actually getting worse as the screens would have us believe? The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the largest continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas, has monitored student progress in reading and mathematics for nationally representative samples of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds since the early 1970s. Results from the 2012 assessments show the following:
• Compared to the first assessment in 1971 for reading and in 1973 for mathematics, scores were higher in 2012 for 9- and 13-year-olds and not significantly different for 17-year-olds.
• In both reading and mathematics at all three ages, black students have made larger gains since the early 1970s than white students.
• Hispanic students have made larger gains since the 1970s than white students in reading at all three ages and in mathematics at ages 13 and 17.48
47. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achieve- ment in U.S. Schools,” Educational Researcher 35, no. 7 (2006): 3 – 12.
48. National Assessment of Educational Progress, “NAEP 2012: Trends in Academic Progress” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2012), http://nces.ed.gov/nations reportcard/subject/publications/main2012/pdf/2013456.pdf. For a summary of some of the key findings, see “Top Stories in NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessments 2012,” The Nation’s Report Card, http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/.
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Likewise, while the screens hold that the United States is falling fur- ther and further behind internationally, the TIMMs data document a differ- ent version of reality. The 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Sci- ence Study (TIMSS) is the fifth administration of this international compara- tive study since it was first administered in 1995. In 2011, the average math- ematics score of U.S. fourth-graders (541) was higher than the international TIMSS scale average, higher than the average score of Finland fourth-graders, and higher, on average, than the scores of students in forty-two other education systems.49
These terministic screens hide the severance of agency from school perfor- mance. They reinforce a detached view of learning, in which schools cannot be democratic sites for learning and communities are not partners in cocreation of knowledge. Teachers working with children see behind these screens but pop- ular media and policymakers reinforce this selective view. The No Child Left Behind Act has led to a testing frenzy, not a teaching goal. The use of testing data as rationales for punishment rather than as diagnostic tools is dismantling the teaching profession and demoralizing teachers. The National Education Associ- ation’s 2014 nationwide survey of teachers, as Tim Walker notes, indicates the magnitude of the problem: nearly half of the teachers surveyed reported that they have considered leaving the profession because of high-stakes testing.50 This shift to a technocratic, top-down, centralized reform in education is reducing teachers to technicians. The challenge lies in educating the teaching profession, the public, and policymakers about the importance of making connections to the real life, his- tory, and cultures of actual places. The terministic screens, in contrast, focus on decontextualized disciplinary scores and prevent teachers and policymakers from aligning their work with civic professionalism.
The push to prepare “highly qualified teachers” has resulted in tighter regula- tions for teacher education programs as well, so teacher educators scurry to meet the regulations and mandated reporting. Who are effective teachers? We cannot let these terministic screens hide the fact that currently an economic framework guides the decisions. When what gets measured does not match what counts, rote memorization and computer-evaluated pedagogies replace both project-based edu- cation of the sort championed by Dewey and generations of educators, as well as the sense that schools are “part of” communities. Today we do not evaluate teacher effectiveness based on how well students act as problem solvers and prob- lem posers, or on how well students understand themselves and act as citizens in a democracy, as advocates and architects and builders of their community. Schools and teacher education programs have been forced to reduce intellectual work to
49. For summary data on this study, see the National Center for Educational Statistics, “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study,” http://nces.ed.gov/timss/results11_math11.asp.
50. Tim Walker, “NEA Survey: Nearly Half of Teachers Consider Leaving Profession Due to Standardized Testing,” neaToday, November 2, 2014, http://neatoday.org/2014/11/02/nea- survey-nearly-half-of-teachers-consider-leaving-profession-due-to-standardized-testing-2/.
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content knowledge that either has no application or is treated as a resource for citizens to use in their work. Just as P – 12 schools have encountered a narrow- ing conception of their roles and responsibilities, teacher educators too face the same sort of narrowing and the same high-stakes testing requirements to ensure that their graduates will be “highly effective” according to the current concep- tion of the purposes of public education. Most teacher educators see the need for a continuous quest for social justice in public education. In his reflection on the future of college- and university-based teacher education, Kenneth Zeichner wrote, “The goal of greater social justice is a fundamental part of the work of teacher education in democratic societies and we should never compromise on the opportunity to make progress toward its realization”51 Yet, in 2006, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), now renamed the Coun- cil for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), dropped “social justice” from its standards. NCATE uses standards to guide its decisions about whether or not to accredit teacher education programs, but its standards fail to address the critical issues in American education. In an analysis of the NCATE standards, Dale Johnson and his coauthors argue that there is no standard that addresses helping future teachers understand the societal factors that shape our nation’s schools, with their implications for the resegregation of schools, the unequal funding of public schools, the reduction in school funding in many locales, poverty, and so on.52
We argue that this deletion of “social justice” from the standards discourages future teachers from examining and critiquing the current education climate and, most importantly, from acting as agents for change. Dropping “social justice” means dropping the foundations of democracy. Yet the prevailing terministic screens deflect our attention away from this. Dewey explained that education can take place only through experience, but that not all experience is educative.53
Current pedagogies and policies in so many public schools are not educative. These patterns affect educators in a variety of ways, often preventing teachers and teacher educators from doing significant work in “educating for democracy,” as considerably more time is allocated to testing than teaching. For example, as chair of a Department of Education, Finders must complete four mandated state and federal reports annually. A current bill moving through the Minnesota state legislature regarding teacher education programs, if passed, would require more collecting of data and more reporting. Likewise, on September 16, 2015, the U.S. Department of Education transmitted a draft version of its final ruling (which is not publicly available) for additional regulations on teacher preparation programs. We are not suggesting that accountability measures are not important for school
51. Kenneth Zeichner, “Reflections of a University-Based Teacher Educator on the Future of College- and University-Based Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 57, no. 3 (2006): 339.
52. Dale Johnson, Bonnie Johnson, Stephen Farenga, and Daniel Ness, Trivializing Teacher Education: The Accreditation Squeeze (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 89.
53. Dewey, Democracy and Education.
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improvement; instead, we are examining how the terministic screens have led to a nonproductive testing frenzy.
Such screens conceal the economic forces at play in the current education landscape. Shannon details the economic forces working against the Deweyan model of education, observing that “Dewey lamented that most social decisions were made according to profit motives. He found that the crux of the disorientation of the working urban population was due to the fact that the potential universal benefits of machine production were negated because it was ‘harnessed to the dollar.’”54 In addition, today corporations that are profiting from the testing market have a powerful impact on schools, making the profession even more powerless.
It is easy to rage against the tightening of policies that regulate schools and teacher preparation programs, to feel hopeless and simply give up and give in to the policies and practices that regulate democracy out of the schools. In such a time and context, it is also crucial to look for the spaces where organizing might occur to transform schools into humane, agentic places for learners of all backgrounds, especially those marginalized by race, class, culture, and purported deficits in language, academic, or social skills.
Shadow Spaces and Free Spaces In educational literature the concept of “shadow spaces” has emerged to
highlight spaces that stand apart from the glare of mainstream policy, spaces where educators have room to “experiment, imitate, learn, communicate, and reflect on their actions.”55 Participatory action research on civic engagement that was initiated at the Humphrey Institute in 1987 started from the premise that what Evans and Boyte call free spaces are important to the development of civic engagement and should therefore be identified and expanded. Free spaces are akin to shadow spaces in that they are sites where people have an important measure of room for self-organizing initiative, free from dominant cultural, social, and economic powers. The concept of free spaces also highlights the political qualities of such spaces, allowing for the intentional development of a citizen politics. Thus free spaces provide the foundation for broader democratic change. The working premise was that organizing efforts in free spaces could produce lessons for reversing technocratic creep.56 In the process, partners found that “shadow spaces” can become free spaces.
Public Achievement: Empowered Youth and Citizen Teachers
In 1991, Boyte, with others, began Public Achievement to teach young peo- ple the citizen politics and larger view of democracy that he had experienced
54. Shannon, The Struggle to Continue, 61.
55. On shadow spaces, see David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa, “Development Education and Education for Sustainable Development,” Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review 12 (Spring 2011): 15 – 31.
56. See Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; and Francesca Polletta, “‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action,” Theory and Society 28, no. 1 (1999): 1 – 38.
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as a college student through participating in the civil rights movement. In Pub- lic Achievement, teams of young people work on issues of their choice in real-world settings, whether schools or communities. They meet throughout the year, coached by adults — often college students — who help them develop achiev- able goals, learn to navigate their local environment, and learn everyday politi- cal skills and concepts. Public Achievement, based on core concepts of citizen politics, public work, and free spaces, illustrates civic studies in practice. In the language of social change literature, it takes an “organizing” approach, investing in relationship-building and people’s public growth, rather than the “mobilizing” approach common in social change efforts.57
St. Bernard’s Elementary School, a low-income and working-class Catholic school in the North End area of St. Paul, Minnesota, was an incubator for Public Achievement. Under the leadership of Dennis Donovan, principal at St. Bernard’s in the 1990s, the initiative became the centerpiece of the school’s culture. Dono- van insisted that young people learn everyday political skills and also that teachers and others in the school become citizen workers with agency. Since its founding, Public Achievement has spread to several hundred communities and schools in the United States and as well as to Poland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, Japan, and elsewhere.
The Center for Democracy and Citizenship moved to Augsburg College in 2009 with the belief that a liberal arts college such as Augsburg, with its citizenship mis- sion and spirit of an “urban settlement,” has the freedom to innovate that is miss- ing at research universities with meritocratic cultures.58 Donovan, who became the national organizer for Public Achievement in 1997, worked with Augsburg’s preservice program in Special Education to experiment with Public Achievement as an answer to the critique of special education from within the field.
Students in special education are identified with a disability under one of thir- teen categories deemed to interfere with the educational experience of themselves and others. Those placed in special education often suffer a lifetime of trouble with mental illness, unemployment, and incarceration; one study suggests that as many as 70 percent of special education students will go to jail at some point in their lives.59 It is a logical conclusion of educational technocracy.
57. The contrast between organizing and mobilizing approaches is described in Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For a detailed analysis of the differences that result from these two approaches, see Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Harry C. Boyte, “A Tale of Two Playgrounds: Young People and Politics” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, September 1, 2001).
58. See Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
59. Robert Reid, Jorge Gonzalez, Phillip Nordness, Alexandra Trout, and Michael H. Epstein, “A Meta-Analysis of the Academic Status of Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disturbance,” Journal of Special Education 38, no. 3 (2004): 130 – 43.
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Susan O’Connor, director of the Special Education Program at Augsburg, wanted to try something different. “Special Education generally still uses a medi- cal model, based on how to fix kids,” she said.60 The field has produced an internal critique, disabilities studies, that calls such a medical approach based on posi- tivist science into question. As Jan Valle and David Connor summarize the argu- ment, “Critical special educators … foreground issues such as special education’s insular, reductionist approach to research; an overreliance on the remediation of deficits; sustained use of intelligence testing; commonplace segregation based on disability and/or race; the professionalization of school failure; and the continued medicalization of disabled people.”61 Donovan, O’Connor, and Donna Patterson, another Augsburg faculty member, partnered with Michael Ricci and Alissa Blood, graduates of the college’s Special Education Program, to design an alternative class in the Fridley Middle School using a Public Achievement – style approach. Over three years the results were dramatic. “Problem” students, mostly low-income and minority, who in many schools would be confined to their classes, became pub- lic leaders on issues like school bullying, healthy lifestyles, campaigning against animal cruelty, and creating a support network for terminally ill children. They built relationships and received recognition in the school and in the larger Frid- ley community. Their Public Achievement work brought them into contact with school administrators, community leaders, elected officials, and media outlets such as the local newspaper and Minnesota Public Radio.
For her master’s thesis on Public Achievement at Fridley, Blood conducted face-to-face conversations with five participants, made detailed observations of young people’s behavior, and recorded activities on videotape. She found that par- ticipating in Public Achievement had a substantial impact on students’ self-image, sense of empowerment, and behavior. “They believed that they were more capable than they had ever thought they were in the past,” Blood writes. “The students believed that they could be positive citizens and that the people who believed differently about them were wrong — a very powerful belief for any student in middle school.”62
Developing civic agency depends on adopting pedagogies and teacher identities that are very different from the one-way approaches currently dominant in schools. Ricci and Blood developed a pedagogy based on their conviction that an approach that respects students’ agency, creating opportunities for them to help design their own learning, was worth a try. “My role is not to fix things for the kids but to say, ‘This is your class, your mission. How are you going to do the
60. O’Connor, quoted in Harry C. Boyte, “Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work,” in Democracy’s Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities, ed. Harry C. Boyte (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), 24.
61. Jan W. Valle and David J. Connor, Rethinking Disability: A Disability Studies Approach to Inclusive Practices (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), xii.
62. Alissa Blood, Experiences of Students with Special Needs in Public Achievement (master’s thesis, Augsburg College, 2013), 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, and 22.
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work?’ Our main task is to remind them, to guide them, not to tell them what to do,” explains Ricci. Teachers became partners with their students. They change from “teaching to the test” to working alongside young people as they develop agency. The curriculum builds citizenship skills, habits, and identities such as negotiation, compromise, initiative, planning, organizing, and public speaking. It develops what Blood calls “a public professional persona.” Ricci and Blood believe that these tools will serve the students all their lives.63 Building on their experiences, the Special Education Program at Augsburg now has all teacher candidates coaching in Public Achievement sites, and the experiences of these teacher candidates, in turn, suggest changes that might improve teacher education.
Returning Agency to Democracy and Education
The definition of “highly effective teachers,” in the regime of high-stakes testing, is drawn from a narrow set of data used for decisions on school ranking, funding, teacher qualification, promotion, retention, and pay. In some states, teachers are required to sign contractual agreements that they will not diminish the importance of the tests. In almost all cases, teacher education has come to focus on the individual success of students, most often emphasizing their successful performance in high-stakes testing.
Yet there are signs of a return to Democracy and Education’s view of collec- tive, agentic democracy. For instance, in No Citizen Left Behind, drawing on her own teaching experiences as well as the work of political philosophers including Dewey, Meira Levinson challenges individualized agency and the current focus on preparing students for success within the “testocracy.” She argues instead for a revitalized understanding of “power [as] relational and contextual” and “empow- erment [as] a collective condition, not just an individual possession or state.”64
Levinson includes vivid examples of political skills such as “codeswitching.” In using this tool, students learn “that in every community there is a language and culture of power” and students can “represent and express themselves in ways that members of the majority group … will naturally understand and respect”; such an approach stands in stark contrast to “teaching [minority] kids that they do things wrong.”65
Our experiences and theory, and the developing field of citizen professional theory and practice more generally,66 include such skills. In this framework teach- ers and teacher educators who wish to contribute to democratizing change need
63. Ricci and Blood, quoted in Boyte, “Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work,” 25 and 26.
64. Meira Levinson, No Citizen Left Behind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12.
65. Ibid., 87 – 88.
66. See Albert W. Dzur, Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruc- tion of Professional Ethics (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); William J. Doherty, Tai J. Mendenhall, and Jerica M. Berge, “The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health Care Project,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 36, no. 4 (2010): 389 – 402; and the ongoing biweekly blog conversation at Education Week, “Bridging Differences,” with Deborah Meier and Harry
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to incorporate democratic theory as well as practices such as “codeswitching,” “power-mapping,” “citizen politics,” “public narrative,” and one-on-one relational meetings. Augsburg College’s Education Department is taking up such concepts and practices.67
In this context, “highly effective teachers” are those who support the develop- ment of agency within learners and themselves, those who deliberate about issues, those who strategically direct their thoughts and actions in light of goals, and those who act as cocreators. For such a democratic reframing of teacher education and teaching to take hold will require wide change. A focus on the liberation of pow- ers shifts teachers and teacher educators from technicians to citizen teachers and citizen faculty who foster people’s agency.
Putting citizens, not politicians, at the center of politics involves a Copernican-style revolution.68 A conceptual revolution of this magnitude is essential, however, if we are to realize the aspirations of Dewey — and ourselves — to create the educational system we need, and to build a democratic way of life.
Boyte, which explores lessons from democracy education and organizing for democratic change (see http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/).
67. At Augsburg College, the entire Department of Teacher Education has undertaken an extensive process of faculty development to become more familiar with civic studies theory and practice.
68. A strand of political theory, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Sheldon Wolin, has recognized the difference between citizen politics and electoral politics, but it has conceived electoral politics as the arena of “noble deeds” and “public spirited” actions. See Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6. This argument inverts the pattern we see today. On the need for a Copernican Revolution in politics, see Harry C. Boyte, “Reconstructing Democracy: The Citizen Politics of Public Work” (Visiting Scholars Lecture, presented at the Havens Center, University of Wisconsin – Madison, April 11, 2001); Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy; and Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
WE THANK Trygve Throntveit, Leonard Waks, Terri Wilson, David Waddington, and Marie Strőm for feedback.
