(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
In their article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka rightly decried “education’s slow but steady drift from its democratic function,” and presciently called for “a bolder, broader purpose for public schools in our changing multiracial democracy.” As the former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Department of Education, I agree, and I view the current unraveling even of aspirational American democracy as a distressing outgrowth of our failure to teach the many millions of students in both public and private schools the tools necessary to sustain it. But we have the capacity to recover. We have guideposts for how to do it, and I join McGuire and Wilka in urging our nation’s educators, parents, and policy makers to pick them up and follow.
In fact, the work I do in the democracy center I now lead, the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, focuses on just those aims. Responding to this dangerous time of national regression and civics crisis, the Edley Center promotes democracy education, civic participation, and equal treatment under law. We publish reports and host convenings to equip democracy defenders with the knowledge and tools needed to support American democracy. In so doing, we aim to shore up the healthy information environment, civic engagement training, and public trust on which a healthy democracy depends.
The conversation McGuire and Wilka started in their article calls on educators, education policymakers, and leaders to imagine a practice of educating as if our democracy depends on it. An extension of that work is preparing young people to grapple with facts when the facts are contested and giving students the tools they need to see and understand today’s social and economic challenges. We must understand and cultivate the enabling conditions associated with the democratic purposes of education. And we must appreciate the equalizing role the states and the federal government should be playing in helping public schools pursue their civic mission.
Practicing Democracy in Our Schools
The schools we provide to the students we cherish must be places that welcome them, nurture them, and teach them both facts and how to understand and act on facts. As education leaders, parents, and adults in this country, we must understand and act on the principle that effective education is equal in its opportunity. Its success rests not only on grade-level performance achieved but on nurturing the capacity to discern, test, and debate as independent and successful thinkers.
Within and across schools, this work includes treating every lesson in every class as a lesson in democratic participation. Concretely, that means: Science teachers who teach scientific inquiry must be conscious, while teaching the periodic table of elements, that they are also teaching students how to challenge, test, and dispute; to be open to proof and to findings that are counterintuitive; and to act on evidence-based conclusions – all of which are essential skills for democratic participation.
Likewise, language arts teachers who teach students their letters and literacy in languages other than English can direct their students to debate current events in a language that is not their home language, forcing students to engage in issues they care about with the mastery of language that is foreign to them. Similarly, teachers of younger children are teaching democratic engagement skills when they teach their students to keep their hands to themselves, to wait their turn in line, and to push other students on the swings while awaiting their own turn for a ride. In learning those lessons, young children are learning how to participate in community and that communities thrive when we respect, include, and support each other.
Today’s federal rhetoric claims to return education to the states. Yet the federal government is now more directive than ever regarding what can be taught, thought, and understood in schools.
Doing that work right must mean that we do not leave its satisfaction to the vagaries of individual teachers’ creativity and instead treat it as curricular necessity and a component of educational leadership. It requires that we attend to the key enabling conditions. Our leadership and teacher training programs as well as state curriculum policies need to incorporate democratic purpose as an explicit goal. And our schools need to provide the necessary resources for learning—decent school facilities, trained teachers in every classroom who lead with high expectations for every one of their students, and instructional materials students can access at school and at home, as well as rigorous courses available in sequence for every student’s access to them—on an equal basis across all our schools. Otherwise, we train students in under-resourced schools away from civic engagement. As Professor Michelle Fine explained in an expert report for a school equality suit that I among others litigated 20 years ago: “The likelihood of democratic engagement by these youths and young adults is fundamentally threatened by their experiences in these schools.” I have been grateful, in my work at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy, to speak with educators around the country about education practices for democratic engagement, affirming what governing law actually is, and practicing with them what it takes to educate with democratic purpose.
Misguided Federal Education Policy
I am both dismayed by and mindful of the distance between what the governing law actually requires and what the rhetoric, policy aims, and enforcement practices are today at the federal level. Today’s federal rhetoric claims to return education to the states. Yet the federal government is now more directive than ever regarding what can be taught, thought, and understood in schools. They threaten to withhold funds from schools for engaging in racially inclusive actions that no court has actually outlawed while simultaneously reinterpreting federal sex discrimination requirements in ways that would cause compliant school communities actually to violate binding federal court precedent. These efforts serve to confuse and misdirect educators, parents, and families nationwide, claiming that practices that are perfectly lawful, effective, and good policy somehow violate the law.
These among other federal misdirections cry out for an educated populace who can discern fact from fiction and who are equipped to use the tools of democracy to uphold our constitution and laws.
To be clear, our national failure to educate with democracy in mind is not what caused us to live now in the fastest democratic decline of any democracy on earth to date. This historical moment has many progenitors. Nonetheless, now and in any time, a well-educated public who know and have practice using democratic tools will be better equipped to ensure that the government is responsive to the people and functions as our nation’s laws command.
We also have recent as well as longstanding evidence of the consequences when we fail to heed the democratic purpose of education. In the early weeks and months following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, we witnessed an astonishing proliferation of reported hate incidents in schools, including an instructor reportedly separating students by national origin and denigrating them for the countries they come from, community members assaulting students because they are perceived to be from a specific region of the world, and students barring other students from accessing parts of campuses because of their identities.
At their core, hate incidents in schools impart lessons in devaluation and exclusion that are antithetical to a healthy democracy. The ugly reports that captured national attention and outrage following October 7, 2023 underscore a crying need for democracy training in school: training in how to disagree without denigrating persons because of who they are, training in how to learn from opposing viewpoints and effectively argue against them, and training in how to question received wisdom while learning canons.
Civil Rights and Education for Democracy
I was the chief civil rights enforcer in the nation’s schools during both the second term of the Obama administration and the Biden administration. Before and after the Hamas attack against Israel, I witnessed, and confirmed through case investigation, to my horror, the degree to which P-12 schools as well as colleges and universities across the country failed to fulfill their statutory obligation to ensure that hostile environments, limiting or denying students’ equal access to education, did not and do not proliferate. These failures violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Our legal response at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) included work to educate the public, including educators in schools. We devoted more resources than any other time in history to eradicate discrimination of this type, opening and resolving more cases for investigation on this topic than in any prior administration, securing resolution agreements during the Biden administration from five times as many schools and school districts than OCR secured during the prior administration, issuing more policy resources addressing this topic than in any prior administration, and providing technical assistance training to school communities throughout the country to explain applicable civil rights laws and our complaint and investigation process.
A more distant, and similarly pernicious, example confirms why civil rights protection and enforcement are important links for education and democracy. For five years, from 1959 to 1964, one of the school districts that had been the subject of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation closed every single public school in the district rather than fulfill courts’ mandates to integrate its public schools to satisfy the Constitution. This district, Prince Edward County in Farmville, Virginia, chose not to operate any public schools at all and instead opened putatively private academies for white students, leaving some nearly 2,000 Black children without schooling. On the first day of school in September 1959, “14 buses helped ferry 1,475 white students to the private academy, while 1,700 black children stood and watched.” Families pursued litigation to correct the unconstitutional condition of education in their community, the United States Department of Justice intervened to support these families’ pursuit of education justice, and still the Black children of Farmville, Virginia lost education while time passed without schooling. Finally, the newly inaugurated Kennedy administration instigated and supported the creation of the Prince Edward County Free School Association, supported through private funds nationwide, to offer integrated schooling to the students of Farmville.
Farmville is simultaneously a lesson about the arc of justice turning toward righteousness through collective will and a remarkably ugly lesson in what is lost while communities wait for the justice arc to bend. At bottom, though, the Prince Edward experience teaches that education away from democracy can be overcome, with improved school conditions for the students and a national community willing to pitch in—with school children’s allowance pennies, with teachers’ and administrators’ talent and skill, with attorneys’ and politicians’ leadership, and with families’ willingness to take risks for their children’s future—to deliver meaningful educational opportunity.
Particularly in this time, when we dangerously lean toward inequality and subjugation in schools, with federal leadership turning away from democracy and toward autocracy, we need to rally a national consensus around our core aspirations for education. Instead of presidential executive orders directing what skewed version of history can be taught in schools or weaponizing our civil rights laws or devaluing science, this nation’s education community must work together to generate and sustain free inquiry, community engagement, and sound and thorough knowledge foundations. Just as the nation rallied to open and support schools for Prince Edward, Virginia’s students to learn and thrive together and to recover from years of educational loss and the stigma of separation by race; just as the freedom schools movement built an education foundation for students who had been deprived of opportunity; the nation now needs to build a movement for thorough, robust, free public education for all of our students, one that supports and challenges learners, whoever they are, and encourages their full participation in their communities.
Final Thoughts
This country has long recognized, including in the constitution of every state in the union, the value of education to sustaining democracy. The United States Supreme Court in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision adverted to “the importance of education to our democratic society” when it ruled that racially segregated education by law is unconstitutional. And of course our history long reinforces that education teaches lessons in worth, community engagement, and who counts in our democracy. For the health of our democracy, the school lessons we commit ourselves to now must include the practice of democratic engagement together with the knowledge and skills foundations we expect our nation’s learners to come to know. Failing to keep sight of this core purpose of education will translate into formally educated graduates who lack the skill and practice of democratic engagement, leaving them unable to uphold the guardrails that sustain democracy.
Preparing young people to participate and govern means moving beyond entrusting civic learning to a single course in high school or an elective on campus. Yes, young people should still learn how a bill becomes a law, but they will also need schools and communities that inculcate their agency and voice, curricula that promote inquiry into problems relevant to their lives, and educators who are trained to nurture civic skills and dispositions.
Picking up on McGuire and Wilka’s charge, I urge a simple but crucial shift in our theory and practice of schooling, to drive the democracy sustaining purpose of education. Our schools of education must—as the University of California at Berkeley School of Education, for example, does—be explicit with students and faculty that they educate as if democracy depends on it. And our classrooms, at every level of education, must operate with that same principle, aiming to teach subject-specific lessons while also teaching young people how to think, how to engage, and how to participate in communities, because these also are core purposes of education.
Read more stories by Catherine E. Lhamon.