(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
On March 30, 2026, Sonja Santelises and Mike Matsuda joined Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka, the authors of “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” for a discussion about leading school districts toward a more democratic purpose. Sonja serves as the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools in Baltimore, Md., a post she has held since 2016. Mike recently retired as the Superintendent of Anaheim Union High School in Anaheim, Calif., a district that he led for 11 years. Both Sonja and Mike are nationally esteemed education system leaders, with unique perspectives on how to bridge the school system of the future with the realities of the schools we have today.
* * *
Kent McGuire: At times, I think our discourse about education resembles how we talk about the economy when we are in a depression. Instead of a sagging Dow Jones Industrial Average, we focus on key indicators like absenteeism, student mental health, student engagement, and persistently low student achievement. Meanwhile, the expansion of education savings accounts and tax credits, and the emergence of AI raise questions about the viability of our public schools. Matt and I have argued that the health of our democracy is linked to the health of our education system. We’d love each of you to speak to how education and democracy are or should be linked, and the implications for what happens in our schools.
Mike Matsuda: I’m going to start with a T-shirt I wear: “Democracy is a verb.” It’s used by the George W. Bush Foundation and by Mikva—on the right and on the left, people are saying democracy is a verb, just like love is a verb. Unfortunately, over the decades, what we’ve put to the side is the role of schools as models of democracy—places where students can have a sense of voice and belonging, where they can have a stake in the system and even disagree on issues without hatred. It’s called civil discourse. Everybody’s talking about belonging and voice, but not intentionally connecting it to democracy. It’s more than just a civics class. It's an opportunity for kids to begin the process of inquiry through solving problems relevant to them. We need to position democracy as an action verb, and schools can facilitate student voice, belonging, and action by shifting the curriculum and learning experiences during the school day and beyond.
Sonja Santelises: Thank you, Mike, I agree with this idea of democracy as a verb. What I’ve been experiencing is that schools have neglected the fundamental knowledge and understanding of the principles of democracy, which we are seeing in the inability of larger segments of the public to engage in messy but fruitful and goal-oriented ways. It has led, in a lot of cases, to generations of people who do not know how to handle conflict productively.
We've had explosions around democracy throughout history, and we’ve not spent enough time giving students the time and space to explore what democracy means. We either do it in the dry, “fill out the history worksheet of the four principles,” or we have what I began to see in Baltimore about 10 years ago, with young people acting on democracy without a fundamental understanding of what being in this democracy of the United States actually means.
I believe schools have oriented young people to almost a democratic cosplay: we know how to make signs; we know to protest what we don’t like. But it is very different from the problem-solving that previous generations were prepared to undertake. Too many young people are chanting for the overthrow of democracy and the inefficiency of democracy, and they’ve never engaged in any other form of government. They’ve never engaged in the challenges of what democracy meant in ancient Greece or what it meant in the Jim Crow South from 1910 to 1930. So the rigor of what we expect for this generation, particularly generations of first-gen college-goers, multilingual students, and students of color, for me is watered down.
That’s why I call it cosplay: they flood a boardroom, they go and testify, and part of the pressure testing we had to do in Baltimore was recognizing that because these were children of color, we were saying “it’s just good for you to get your voice out there.” But at this point in my career, I actually have a little trigger when people say “student voice.” In so many cases, student voice means students going unprepared into public space to represent their ideas without being ready to experience the rigor of pushback on those ideas, which for me is fundamental in a democracy. It’s part of what we’re seeing play out in the public sphere—people don’t know how to disagree anymore.
Matt Wilka: How do you think about the public vs. private good of education, individual vs. collective, especially when you’re talking to parents who want what’s best for their kids, or when you’re talking to community members outside the school walls?
Mike Matsuda: I’m sure you are familiar with the Japanese term of “ikigai,” of your purpose, right? That’s what we need to get back to, those four components: finding joy, finding what you’re good at, finding what’s going to make the world better, and finding what you can make money from. That third one—making the world better—is what we’re missing. Of course, parents want their individual kids to do well, but they also want their kids to do well in a collective society. We are missing a fundamental principle of democracy, The Preamble to the Constitution begins with ‘We’ not ‘I’. We need to instill a we into our schools so kids can grow into empathetic adults.
Instructionally, if teachers start looking at the classroom as a microcosm of society, a lot of problem-solving can happen. Right now, AI is the big thing, and teachers are developing lessons connecting AI to energy consumption—where's that energy going to come from? You can’t solve that from one country’s perspective alone. We can’t solve issues like climate change thinking only about the “I.” But it depends on how the North Star of the district is framed. The ikigai and collective responsibility need to be baked in; we need a North Star for schools that starts with the collective good.
I’ve had this discussion with folks trying to do national reform who have fabulous ideas. The problem is the equity question.
Sonja Santelises: What is essential for the future is building back this notion of the common good. What are the things we all agree on first? Because we’re not going to agree on everything. For diverse families, not everybody’s benchmark is whether their child goes to the University of Maryland. For some, it’s whether they’re able to get a job to sustain a family in an industry that’s not going away.
Part of the role of the superintendent—or whatever educational leader form we’ll have in 10 or 15 years—is to take all those individual wants and shape the messaging and picture so everyone can see themselves in it. I don’t think the common good is always evident in the day-to-day work that occurs. It’s great from a podium in front of a thousand people, but on the everyday, helping to build pictures and examples of how both individual and collective can live side by side is important.
The challenge is equity. Because of history, there’s always suspicion that difference means “less than”—because that’s how it’s played out in the past. There’s always this specter of: Is it equal for all kids? Are there some pathways that will leave certain students out? Leaders have been most successful, in my experience, when they can cast a vision where people see themselves as part of that vision. If I don’t see myself as part of that vision, I’m not going to trust you to take my individual needs into account. I think pre-K through sixth grade, it’s actually easier to do this than we think. The challenging area has always been grades seven through 12, because that's when the dividing lines become evident. That’s where the specters of past inequities make people distrustful.
I’ve had this discussion with folks trying to do national reform who have fabulous ideas. The problem is the equity question. We have to validate that what is different still leads to meaningful outcomes. We have kids in 11th grade who want to be entrepreneurs, who will be ready to open their own construction companies in two years. Forcing them to take AP Physics—I’m not sure it’s a good use of their time. If you talk about things like getting rid of the Carnegie Unit, I’m cool with that. But if you don’t have the guarantee that the new commodity of exchange is still going to signal to people that this other new experience is valid—that it contributes to the good of the community—that’s where it starts to break down.
Particularly in the communities that I come from and that I serve, there is a distrust. People view it as: we cook up all these fabulous new approaches at places like Harvard, then it all falls apart, and it’s their children who end up with the negative consequences. Take an experiential course at Phillips Exeter [an exclusive New England boarding school]—you can go live on a farm and develop sustainable food options. Experiential learning, a class without tests, without grades, it’s an amazing course. But if I give that course in Baltimore without the political signaling that Exeter has, it’s going to carry very different weight. And that’s the political reality that I keep pressing on these reform people, the project-based people—yes, I want that too, but we don’t have a great track record in education of doing it well.
Matt Wilka: Sonja, you’re referencing a package of ideas that have a lot of traction these days—an education system where education happens in the community, on the job, and on higher ed campuses. Where learning is assessed differently, accredited differently, where who delivers it changes, and where the skills prioritized are durable skills, 21st-century skills. That all sounds great on paper, but we also have the system, with its history and politics, that exists today. Given the equity questions that you rightly referenced, what seem like the actual entry points, or paths to walk down, to make progress toward that idealized future?
Sonja Santelises: I think the career piece is one of the best ways. If we, as the designers of career pathways, can own part of where people end up when they come through those pathways, that’s a space where we have agreement. This idea of being an apprentice in a variety of spheres, not just in what we would traditionally call trades—what we have seen is that when young people experience more rapid cycles of applying their learning in real spaces, it creates a level of engagement that current systems are too often not flexible enough to provide.
Those kids I referenced earlier who were going and testifying but we hadn’t prepared well—well, it would have made my father, who was a Morehouse debater, turn in his grave. When we actually had people who knew how to prepare kids for that stage, not with a patronizing “oh, this is cute that the little Black child from Freddie Gray’s neighborhood is coming to speak to us,” but with real rigor—because that’s not how Morehouse does it. Morehouse does it so you really are ready. When we got teachers who would do that, those students got standing ovations in the legislature. Their writing was going to major publications across the state of Maryland because it was solid, because they had spent time on it.
Apprenticeship means academic apprenticeship for kids who want that, as much as it is an apprenticeship for the young man starting his own construction company. Apprenticeship is a big enough space where we can start moving some of the outdated infrastructure—the time-bound, place-bound learning—but still keep the floor underneath of standards. Because I’m tired of people cheering kids who are three years behind grade level coming up with a poster and calling that new ways of learning.
Mike Matsuda: For entry points, I would agree with career pathways, but we should be wary of leaving out what the kid really wants to do. Career pathways might be anchored in public school versions of micro-schools and smaller learning communities as described by the Learning Policy Institute.
Kent McGuire: Given your experience, if you had to put your finger on a couple of things you’d love to see change, what would those be?
Mike Matsuda: When I talk with business leaders about the coming disruption around jobs and AI, there’s tremendous shifting under the surface—very jagged, with some fields completely wiped out. This generation will have to invent new careers. We’re talking in years, not decades. We should be thinking outside the box at this critical juncture looking at redesigning entire systems and not just tinkering at the edges. California is at the forefront leading secondary school system change through its redesign initiative coupled with a four billion dollar investment in community schools.
Moreover, we know there is a growing crisis with college graduates having been severely impacted in the job market, mostly by the effects of AI. According to leaders in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the young people who are best positioned for jobs are the ones who can manage AI agents for solving problems. Who in the secondary school space is doing that? And that’s just one of the shifts. Schools need to position students to solve problems they care about and can learn to monetize for good. Kids need the ability to iterate with AI agents, becoming co-facilitators of learning with the teachers and AI, and that needs to be captured and assessed. We’re trying to thread the needle of human development and whole child development with applications that lead to the betterment of society.
We’re in an urgent crisis with democracy, with whether this generation of kids feels they can trust us. Why should they trust us? Sonja talked about trust and how it’s deteriorating, and whether these new ideas are going to have any credence with the most marginalized students and families. There’s a lot on the line, and we have to think big about a North Star for education. For years, presidents of both political parties have not thought beyond education as the basics. No one national leader or party has given us an aspirational vision of education in America, in terms of helping to lead us forward.
We’re trying to thread the needle of human development and whole child development with applications that lead to the betterment of society.
Sonja Santelises: I appreciate that focus, Mike, on starting with changing what’s happening in schools. When we talk about variability in outcomes, the variability within schools is greater than the variability between schools—that points to Richard Elmore’s instructional core of learner, teacher, content. That’s the nut we’re trying to change. Which means we have to think very differently about teaching, and I don’t just mean pedagogically. We are experiencing a mass shift that is the elephant in the room but we don’t talk about; nobody wants to go into teaching. The pandemic accelerated a challenge that already existed. Teachers experienced whiplash—celebrated as heroes, then vilified. We have not really changed how teachers learn to meet the needs of multiple students.
Connected to that: who is a teacher? We have narrow definitions about who can teach and what you teach, and it’s very outdated and it’s partly driving the teacher shortage. During the pandemic, we looked to our paraprofessionals in Baltimore—they live here, they know you, they’re Auntie May down the street—and because of their proximity to kids, they understood a lot more of the environment that kids were coming from. They actually produced better traditional outcomes in early literacy than some folks with master’s degrees.
When it comes to apprenticeship, the people helping apprentice young people are in many ways more qualified, particularly in the world Mike was describing. I don’t want somebody with a master’s degree in charge of making sure our young people know how to use AI. We need to revamp where we view expertise sitting, and for what end. That’s got to change because we’re not going to have enough people under the traditional definitions to equip young people for the world that we’ve been discussing. We still have third-grade teachers still trying to get basic understanding of math, let alone leverage AI in a major project.
Mike Matsuda: I would say ‘yes, and…’ to Sonja: We do need to double down on apprenticeships, but we also need to double down on entrepreneurship that benefits the we and not just the I. If AI is the complete disruptor, what does that mean for us as K-12 leaders, in terms of that disruption? I would say we need to land back on innovation and creativity and entrepreneurship, so that kids can be able to reinvent their futures. And, as we describe in our new book, The Future of Public Education, teachers must experience the same kind of learning arc anchored in apprenticeships and entrepreneurship as they work in teams that include allied professionals from the community.
Matt Wilka: As a final question, keeping in mind this frame of a future-ready but democratic public system, what’s something that, as a superintendent, you wish you could do but is hard to pull off?
Sonja Santelises: I don’t think it should be so hard to do what the research tells us works best. It’s incredibly frustrating, the time and energy that has to be spent on kids’ reading, on quality early learning from birth to five. We don’t need an AI agent to tell us that piece—we know how to do that! Back to grades pre-K through six, where we’ve got a lot of consensus, it should not be that hard to get those systems right.
The fact that it’s hard takes energy away from doing the other things we’ve been talking about, and that’s frustrating. There are some things that should not be hard. It should not be hard to make sure adolescents have physical activity with sports. It should not be hard to prioritize the development of artistic expression. Those are things we already know. I want my mind space released to then be able to engage with the harder, more open questions that we’ve discussed. That’s what I would say.
Mike Matsuda: I want to go to Jefferson and this concept of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Life: if you look at blue zones and longevity, that’s really what we need to build—systems and regions where you can live to be 100 years old. There’s a lot that goes into that. Liberty: they’re talking about freedom of thinking, and that’s where you get religious freedom, freedom from oppressive governments that want to control how you think. And then the pursuit of happiness—this collective joy, the happiness of the collective good. Those three concepts of the founders, connecting them to democracy, connecting them to the purpose of schools and the future of this country—there’s a lot to work on there.
Kent McGuire: What I put together from both of you is that we know what we need to do in the early years, pre-K to five or six, and now we should just do it with real vigor. And the redesign issues, challenges, and opportunities for much more innovation are really a secondary school issue, where young people have to be prepared and have to use their minds well—and AI becomes a tool. That’s where there’s such opportunity for real change. Thank you.
Read more stories by Sonja Santelises & Mike Matsuda.