A Primer on Democracy, Community, and Opportunity

Why are public schools so important that we expect everyone to support them?

Americans don't ask this sort of question about other basic public services. Their value is self-evident. Fire departments prevent and extinguish fires. Police departments maintain order. Health departments control disease.

But just what is it that public schools do? Today, at a time when public education stands under-funded and challenged by critics, it may be time to ask why we need public schools -- and get down to democratic basics for the answer.

Democracy. Community. Opportunity.

Are there any three concepts more central to a society that is truly free?

Down through the years, public schools have helped democratize our nation, strengthen our communities, and widen opportunities for our people. But today, buffeted by the gusts of social change, our nation stands uncertain and unsure. Our democracy appears dormant, our communities divided, our dreams for a better tomorrow forgotten.

Some say public schools, as an organizing principle of American education, have outlived their usefulness. Their argument is simple: Treat schools like businesses. Give parents vouchers to send their children to private schools. Let profit-making corporations compete for contracts to manage public schools. Let the marketplace solve our problems.

These arguments rest, above all, on a basic -- and widespread -- cynicism about public life. Many citizens have essentially lost faith in America's democratic institutions, or believe that citizen activism can no longer influence the basic decisions that shape our lives. In such a climate, simple solutions sound appealing.

But silver bullets, most of us realize, will never fix what ails our nation. Passing the buck to private interests will not solve the problems our nation faces. But what will? It may be, as our nation's greatest philosophers have always reminded us, that there is only one solution to the problems of democracy: more democracy.

More democracy. More community. More opportunity. This is what we need. And we can make giant strides toward these noble goals -- through public education.  Why public education? We hope this essay offers some answers.

DEMOCRACY

In the United States, the land where modern democracy was born, democracy is ailing. But public education can enliven our democracy, by nurturing the skills and knowledge of democratic citizenship in classrooms and communities alike. Only in a system of public schools can all citizens exercise their right -- and responsibility -- to shape education and, in turn, the future of our society. In national and local elections today, one-half to two-thirds of all Americans eligible to vote routinely don't bother. The numbers of Americans who actively participate in public life between elections are even lower. Modern American democracy has become, in effect, a spectator sport.

This turn of events should trouble any American who values our nation's democratic heritage. Democracy -- to be viable -- demands citizen participation. Any withdrawal by Americans from the political sphere spells trouble for our democratic future. Public education is nothing less than the best antidote to political apathy and alienation, for reasons that speak to the fundamental values any democratic society must work to see thrive.

Citizens in a democracy need a common grounding in the habits, skills, and knowledge essential to democratic citizenship, a grounding that only a public system of schools can provide.

Education for democracy means more than civics courses on the three branches of government. To become effective democratic citizens, students need to master the skills and habits of democratic deliberation. They must learn to respect different points of view -- and how to understand, communicate, and resolve their disagreements with others.

Public schools -- schools that open their doors to a wide diversity of students -- offer students the opportunity to interact with others who may not share their background or their outlook. Privatized schools -- schools that pick and choose their students -- place students in an environment where they see only reflections of themselves, not different perspectives on life and living.

Public school systems can offer an ideal opportunity to practice democracy, not just preach it. Democracy confers on citizens both the right and the responsibility to engage in the shaping of society. Public school systems give citizens the opportunity to exercise these rights and responsibilities in a way that schools controlled by private interests never can.

In a public school system, power and authority are broadly dispersed. Parents, professional educators, local residents, and elected officials must all share in the decisions that dictate how learning takes place.

Public school systems in the United States are run by their communities and their chosen representatives, not managed by distant powers. As local entities, these public systems offer an outlet for grassroots political participation, a participation that sustains democratic politics.

Through school board elections and debates on everything from property taxes to academic standards, citizens learn to express themselves politically. Anyone can participate in these debates, including private school parents, and everyone has a clear and understandable stake in the outcome.

Even the new focus on federal standards, through the No Child Left Behind law, offers opportunities to participate in meaningful discussions and political action on the national level.

For Americans of all ages, in short, public school systems can be classrooms for democracy.

Only public schools can foster a deep and abiding appreciation of the public interest. The struggle to define that public interest is the spirit that animates democracy.

In contemporary American political life, many candidates and commentators behave as if there is no such thing as the public interest. Citizens, they believe, are merely consumers. At election time, they choose candidates in much the same way they choose cars or brands of laundry detergent.

Such a simple notion of citizenship -- citizen equals consumer -- doesn't ask much of the citizen at all: simply calculate your own self-interest.

This citizen-as-consumer mindset has now arrived in education. Some critics of public education argue that government should take tax dollars that currently support public schools and give them to parents, in the form of tuition vouchers. Parents could then use these vouchers to send their children to whatever schools they choose.

These proposals to privatize America’s public school system via vouchers treat parents as consumers of a product and education as a private decision by individual consumers. These proposals tend to deny the public interest in education. They assume that only individual parents have an abiding interest in education.

Citizens who are not parents have no place in this equation. Common deliberations about the education our society needs disappear. The idea that citizens -- all citizens -- have an important, mutual interest in educating future citizens is lost. In a privatized system, there is no common good, only the private good of individuals maximizing their own personal or family well-being.

If we want to build a democracy where citizens have the capacity to look beyond narrow self-interest, we need to build a system of education that nurtures respect for the public interest. Only a public system of schooling can move us toward this goal.

COMMUNITY

American communities are experiencing ever-growing ethnic, religious, and racial tensions. Through public education, we can bring communities together. Public schools build community identity and integrate students from diverse backgrounds. Public schools teach students the mutual respect and understanding they need to work together as adults in a complex, pluralistic society.

In America today, we witnessed a vast retreat of American citizens from community. Ethnic tensions, economic stratification, and political alienation are all pushing Americans away from each other into increasingly personal and private enclaves. More and more Americans rarely cross the walls that divide their private worlds.

Public education can counter the isolation so prevalent in modern American life, the diminution of tolerance and civility, the daily withdrawals from public space. Public education can be the glue that holds communities together. Public education can integrate students from diverse social, cultural, and economic backgrounds.

Is America's multi-faceted diversity a source of strength and innovation, or a weight we must painfully bear? Can we as a nation make our diversity a foundation for progress and renewal, or are we doomed to be broken by it, "balkanized" into feuding factions?

These are the questions we need to address. The answers vary. Some advocates for privatizing American education claim that our nation would be well-served by a system of schooling that encourages and subsidizes the creation of many different schools, each catering to a different student clientele.

But a society that offers schools organized by ethnicity or religion or political preference is not a democratically diverse society. It is a separatist society. And in that separatism the only "community" values that grow are the values of us-versus-them.  We have only to look at the religious schools of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to see where this road ultimately leads.

Only a public system of schooling can adequately prepare diverse students to live and work together. Only by integrating different groups into a common educational setting can communities ensure the understanding and mutual respect that oils the wheels of our diverse social machinery.

Today, more than ever before, our schools need to be microcosms of our communities, because our communities are more diverse than ever before. We can choose to unite our diverse strands, through public education, or we can abandon the effort. There is no other choice.

Public schools help construct community.

Public schools give people in a community a sense of identity and ownership. A community feels pride when the public school’s football team does well, or a student wins an academic competition, or a local teacher receives an award, or a school-business partnership succeeds.

The democratic decision making of public school governance can also foster community. Democracy enriches community. People who participate in the governing of a place feel a deeper sense of belonging to that place.

The local business leader, the police captain, the head of a health clinic, the grocery store manager, the telephone operator, the truck driver -- all come to see public schools as their own, because they help decide how public schools are run. The more connected citizens feel to their schools, the more connected they can come to feel to each other.

Proposals that would disconnect citizens from the governance of their schools -- the various efforts now underway, for instance, to let private companies manage individual public schools or even entire public school systems -- would inevitably undermine the sense of belonging that links citizens to schools and schools to communities.  Schools, after all, can hardly belong to citizens who have little say on what happens inside them.

To build stronger and healthier communities, public schools need to become even more central and connected to their communities, not less. Public schools need to become more accessible centers for life-long learning, sources of knowledge for citizens young and old. The three R's, of course, but much, much more. Job information. Parenting classes. Pre-retirement planning.

Publicly accountable public schools -- schools that welcome community participation -- can help revitalize our most precious public spaces, our communities.

Only public schools can create truly vital communities of learners. The best schools are learning communities, places where students and teachers share insights -- and value education as a cooperative search for knowledge. We can no more learn alone, the philosophers tell us, than we can live alone.

Public schools have endeavored to create effective learning communities. And from that effort has come the understanding that learning communities must extend beyond schoolhouse walls.

Today, more and more public schools are actively involving their community neighbors in education. From these communities, local residents are sharing their skills and wisdom in the schools -- and bringing home, in turn, perspectives they may never have considered about their own years in school.

Public schools have only begun to mine the learning treasures buried deep within their larger communities.  Public education is a cooperative venture jointly undertaken by citizens from every walk of life. Citizens will always be ready to give of themselves to public schools as long as public schools belong to them.

Take away from America's schools that joint sense of ownership and this cooperative spirit would disappear.  We need to extend our communities of learners, not freeze them within the confines of schoolhouse walls. We need public schools.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

In an America where equal opportunity is a difficult promise to keep, public schools remain our nation's best hope for keeping the American dream alive. The marketplace alone, left to its own devices, has seldom offered the least fortunate Americans the support they need to ensure their children a better future. Only in a system of schooling that recognizes the public interest in education can we overcome the inequities that deny so many students the quality education they need and deserve.

To ensure all Americans the promise of equal opportunity, schools must offer all students a quality education.  Many school districts can and do offer their students the finest in learning opportunity. In these communities, students and staff have access to the newest technologies and learning tools in classrooms that are safe and secure. In other communities, sadly, students read outdated textbooks in crumbling, overcrowded classrooms.

Years ago, the discrepancies were much, much wider. In generations past, the opportunity to learn was reserved for only some of our nation's young people. In fact, as late as 1950, nearly two-thirds of America's adults hadn’t even completed high school.

We, as a nation, made a commitment to change that reality. By expanding our system of public education, we demonstrated to the world that it is indeed possible to open school doors to all people.

Now we face a still more challenging task: making sure that all American children receive an education that prepares them for success in an increasingly complex and difficult world. We can meet this challenge the same way we met the educational challenges of the past -- through expanding the opportunities only public education can provide.
 

Only in a system of education that recognizes the public interest in education can we overcome the inequities that deny so many students quality education.

Just over five decades ago, the nation confronted the mythology of "separate but equal" and outlawed segregation. The most dangerous threat to equal opportunity today -- the widespread reality of "separate and unequal" -- constitutes a crisis of perhaps even greater proportions.

By relying so heavily on local property taxes as a chief revenue source for education -- nearly half the budgets in most school districts -- our system has wrought an underclass of schools and shattered hopes of equal opportunity for millions of students. In our separate and unequal system, only school districts with a healthy property tax base enjoy the resources they need to offer students quality schools.

For those of us who seek to guarantee all children a quality education, the task is clear. We must convince our fellow citizens, through democratic give and take, to remedy current school funding inequities and guarantee all schools adequate resources.

To the extent that our fellow citizens see the quality of schooling as a matter of common concern, we will succeed.  To the extent that Americans come to see education as a private decision, not a matter of community concern, we will fail -- and our democratic future will be endangered.  We need to work to broaden the constituency of public schools -- and not send the message that only parents should care.

The educational services that children with special needs need most are the services only public schools are likely to provide.

Picture this: a classroom full of two dozen, well-scrubbed, healthy, confident, eager youngsters.  Now picture the reality of 1990s America: students who are hungry and abused, students who come to school knowing only a few words of English, students with disabilities that make the simplest daily chores a challenge.

For students like these, a classroom with blackboard, chalk, and an enthusiastic teacher is not enough. These students need classrooms with specially trained teachers and aides. They need links to support services in their communities. They need extensive one-on-one attention. They are, in short, expensive to educate.

Public schools today are working to meet that expense -- because public schools are accountable to the entire public. They exist to educate all children, not just the easy to educate.

In a system of publicly controlled schools, the advocates for children with special needs can -- and do -- organize to gain the educational services these children need. In a system of publicly controlled schools, their involvement can -- and does -- make a difference.

In 1979, for example, over half the children who had difficulty speaking English were working below grade level. But the advocates for these children worked hard to create the special programs essential to learning success.  The programs worked. Public schools improved the education they offered students who had difficulty speaking English. By 1989, these students were no more likely to be working below grade level than English-only students.

Private schools have historically tended to shy away from students who present a significant educational challenge. Private schools pick and choose the healthy and the eager. They leave the challenges to public education, which is why we as a society -- if we value education for all young people -- have just one clear choice: keep our public schools strong.

TOWARD TOMORROW

More than two hundred years ago, the founders of our nation unveiled to the world a new democratic vision. Our new nation proclaimed that all men were created equal and due certain inalienable rights.

Realizing this new democratic vision, our most thoughtful founders understood, would demand an unparalleled commitment to education. Said Thomas Jefferson plainly: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

• We Americans have spent the last two centuries working to realize our nation's original vision. 
• We have extended the voting franchise from white men of property to all citizens.
• We have codified, defended, and extended a daringly ambitious list of basic human rights.
• And we have invented the world's first system of universal, free public education, perhaps our most valuable contribution of all.

Americans have fought, with courage and conviction, to perfect this system of public education, often against great obstacles. At one time, we need to remember, the laws of our land actually made it a crime to teach some people -- enslaved people -- how to read and write.

We have come a long way. We now recognize the necessity of educating each and every child. But we have not yet met that responsibility.

Our nation's struggle to perfect public education -- and through it, our American democracy itself -- must continue. We must not rest until every child truly enjoys the opportunity to learn, the opportunity to contribute. If we sustain our commitment to public education, that day will surely come.