Bringing Democracy to our K-12 Public Schools
If graded in terms of encouraging and developing a well-rounded and informed citizenry in a democratic country, the best most public schools I am familiar with would be a “D”. Put simply and bluntly, our public primary and secondary schools, our community colleges and universities are bureaucratic institutions whose main social and intellectual aim and achievement is the indoctrination of students in the prevailing corporatist-consumerist-racist-sexist social norms and whose primary institutional interest is self-preservation.
Certainly some of the worst effects of this system have been leavened by imaginative and deeply dedicated teachers who have been fighting worthwhile and, too often, losing battles to offset them. I speak from more than a little experience. A sculptor and painter, I was also a teacher in a public high school for twenty five years and then taught in a community college for twenty years more and was very active in academic affairs and teachers’ unions at both institutions. I have seen myriad proposals for reform and a number of programs (some worthwhile, many not) come and go over the years while the quality of the institutions has continued to deteriorate. But so far I have searched in vain for a proposal which sees the undemocratic, pyramidal, unequal, costly, and ultimately irresponsible public educational structures as a fundamental component of school failure. So what might a truly democratic structure for our public schools look like? In this article I’m going to focus on what it might look like at the K-12 level.
What We Have Now
At the local level there are three groups that are primarily responsible for the operation of our K-12 school systems.
School Boards
Publicly elected (or in some cases mayor-selected) school boards are empowered with the operation of our public K – 12 school systems across the country. They are usually a mirror reflection of the local power structure and its conventional, consumerist value systems. Most school board elections amount to little more than popularity contests that can provide an entrée for the ambitious to the local power elite but are more often aimed at affirming public approval of that élite. Though most candidates for board seats enthusiastically assert their support for public education in their communities, historically the boards’ main functions have been to keep local school taxes as low as possible, to assert in the name of the people the boards’ sovereignty over the schools (that is, the teachers and classified unions), and to create an ever-growing and well-paid administrative bureaucracy to enforce their decisions.
Under this system teachers are conceived of as employees in the classic capitalist sense while at the same time they are also supposed to embody the classic values of educators as enlightened exponents of humane values. These two conceptions of the teachers’ role are inherently contradictory, and this contradiction has been at the heart of many of the conflicts within school districts ever since. To be sure there are sometimes local rebellions against arbitrary and/or unpopular decisions of school boards, often spearheaded by unhappy teacher-led groups. These can lead to the election of new board members, to the removal of administrators (frequently with expensive contract payouts), and to the hiring of new administrators. The effects of these changes are mostly superficial and usually short-lived.
Teachers’ Organizations
Teachers’ organizations grew out of the teachers’ inevitable resistance to autocratic school boards that treated teachers (mostly women, in the primary schools) as virtually indentured servants with poor salaries and benefits, no job security, and no say in their working conditions. The functioning of such systems proved so unworkable that even school administrators, who still Bringing Democracy to our K-12 Public Schools | Dissident Voice:
