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November 17, 1999 Democracy in Education—
It all sounds very neat and preplanned, and indeed some histories portray
the story of public education as the inevitable product of democracy and farsighted leaders. But it
was by no means inevitable that Americans would create the most extensive array of public schools
in
the world. Why should citizens who were deeply distrustful of government, sometimes afraid of it,
create government schools as essential to their model republic? Puzzles abound in the story of
democracy in education. Who was in charge? Not the federal government, which was a minor player
until recently. The Founding Fathers had a design for creating new states and financing public
schools, but the U.S. Constitution did not even mention education. A federal office of education
didn't even appear until 1867, and then was puny in size and functions. From time to time,
reformers
have proposed an activist role for the federal government, but not until 1954 did the U.S. Supreme
Court begin its momentous impact on schooling through its landmark decisions on civil rights and
civil liberties. Liberals had to wait until the 1960s to break the logjam preventing large-scale
federal aid to public schools. Today, although candidates vie to become the "education president,"
federal programs account for only about 7 percent of public school revenues (and conservatives in
Congress think even that is too much money and control). State governments have long been legally
responsible for public education within their boundaries, but their influence has been muted. Even
the most famous early state superintendents, leaders like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, had little
power beyond persuasion and faced periodic threats to abolish their offices. As late as 1890, the
average state department of education had only two employees, including the superintendent, and
very
little power to enforce laws or regulations. In the 19th century, Americans kept rewriting their
state constitutions to prevent elected and appointed state officials from doing mischief. Not until
the 20th century did state governments gain modest powers to legislate and monitor bureaucratic
standards, usually of the sort that professional educators lobbied to install. If both federal
and
state governments were minor players in controlling and financing schools until relatively recent
times, who did that work? Mostly it was officials in local districts, and this generally was what
citizens wanted. Both in the past and in the present (as Gallup polls show) Americans have trusted
local school boards to make educational decisions far more than they trusted federal or state
officials. Everyday citizens tended to agree that the best politics of education was local
politics. Although most citizens have approved of local control, in the 20th century most elite
reformers have not. These professional leaders wanted to dampen, not increase, lay participation in
democratic decisionmaking. They believed that professional experts knew what was best for children.
For that reason, they wanted to centralize and buffer educational decisionmaking rather than leave
it to local citizens. From time to time, innovators have even called for the abolition of school
districts and their elected trustees. Who needs democracy of that sort? they asked. They did not
abandon the rhetoric of democracy, but they redefined what it meant. Before analyzing these
re-visions of democratic governance, I'd like to revisit the origins and consequences of local
control in the 19th century. Choosing Democratic Governance. Without a system of local
control by elected trustees in the 19th century, this country might not have created the most
comprehensive and popular system of public education in the world. It was hardly inevitable that
government schools would trump private ones in the 19th century. A competitive, entrepreneurial
spirit among educators had created a healthy private education sector by 1850, much of this fueled
by repeated religious revivals. We might have ended up with a miscellaneous collection of public
and
private and sectarian and proprietary schools, an open marketplace of schools in which no one
variety would predominate. Instead, the public school triumphed. The U.S. Census defined a public
school as an institution managed by public authorities, with instruction by publicly selected
teachers, taking place in a public schoolhouse. By 1890, about nine in 10 students were enrolled in
such an institution. At that time, there were still differences of opinion and practice about what
constituted a "public" or "private" school, but hybrids were becoming much less frequent than a
half-century earlier. The common school had become the school common to most American
children. Why did this happen? One set of reasons has to do with demography and geography:
The population was highly scattered; one-room schools dotted the land. A single common school
serving each rural neighborhood made economic sense in an era when roads were poor and
transportation rudimentary, and when the local citizens paid for local schooling mostly out of
their
own pockets, through taxes. Because of the separation of church and state, most Protestant
denominations were willing to support a common school and to suspend their sectarian quarrels at
the
schoolhouse door. Americans disestablished the church, but partially established the public school
in its place. But who was to run these schools? In most places, the answer was neighbors elected
to do the job. Under American local control, school trustees constituted the most numerous class of
public officials in the world; in some states, there were as many as 45,000 local school trustees,
often outnumbering teachers. Decentralized governance addressed public distrust of government by
putting the school and its trustees everywhere under the eye and thumb of the citizens. This
provided democracy in education, meaning self-rule by elected representatives of the people.
Communities were able to retain collective decisions about schooling—who would teach, how much
schools would cost, and what kind of instruction to offer. If district voters disagreed with school
trustees, they could elect others. The one-room school was not only a place for children to learn
the three R's. The process of making collective decisions face to face reflected the belief that
governance should be close to hand and transparent. When citizens decided issues this way, they
could show youth how self-rule operated in education and thus contribute to the civic education of
the next generation. Education in democracy was partly a matter of book learning; a similar
pedagogy
of republicanism and political ideology permeated textbooks in American history, for example. But
education in democracy also took place in the public life that swirled about the common school and
taught the young how self-rule worked (or did not). In state constitutions, in Fourth of July
speeches, and in the rhetoric of political conventions, Americans reiterated a conviction that
representative government required educated citizens. It was part of a national ideology, but in
education governance, the action took place mostly at the local level. School trustees had to
settle
matters both mundane and eternal, both Bible reading and leaky roofs. In the 19th century, local
majority rule decided many issues that later would be adjudicated by the courts or set by state
legislatures (say, about Bible reading or the use of foreign languages). There was little chance
that state statutes would be enforced if local citizens disagreed. "Laws on education particularly
require neighborly harmony for effectiveness," wrote an observer in 1897. "The coerced minority
today is liable to become the tyrannic majority tomorrow." Questioning Lay Control.
Local control by elected school committees set a democratic stamp on public education, but
policy elites at the turn of the 20th century complained that the rural school trustees gave local
citizens just what they wanted: schooling that was cheap, that reflected local notions of morality
and useful learning, and that gave employment to local teachers who fit in well with the community.
Leaders like Stanford University professor Ellwood P. Cubberley denounced local control by district
trustees as "democracy gone to seed." How could penny-pinching and provincial rural trustees
prepare
youth for modern society? he asked. The easiest way to curb the influence of school trustees in
these rural communities was to abolish as many districts as possible—or, euphemistically, to
consolidate them. This idea was very popular among educational leaders, who wanted more
professional
autonomy and desired to give children an education that fit their "scientific" modern standards.
But
consolidation was very unpopular in communities about to lose their one-room schools and local
control. In the 20th century, about nine in 10 one-room schools were eliminated along with their
district boards. Elite reformers also believed that in urban districts too many of the wrong
people ran things, pointing especially to corrupt machine politicians and immigrants who wanted the
schools to respect their cultures and to hire their daughters. How could urban schools become
efficient and professional with all these foxes in the chicken coops? Besides, the central urban
school committees were far too large and delegated decisions to subcommittees of trustees rather
than to the experts. Worse, many cities still retained ward boards that were relics of the old
decentralized district system. Depoliticization in city systems meant radically reducing the size
of city school boards. The administrative reformers were remarkably successful in eliminating ward
school boards in large cities and in cutting the size of school boards in large cities. The average
number of school board members dropped from 21 to seven in the three decades from 1890 to 1920.
These political moves, accomplished largely by statutes and charters obtained from state
legislatures, concentrated power in the hands of the professional elite and their business and
professional allies in school reform. The solution to both rural and urban educational ills was
to
take the schools out of "politics," that is, to free them from the vagaries of elective office and
the political representation of different social groups. Thus reformers like Cubberley wanted to
abolish local trustees where possible, eliminate elected county superintendents, appoint rather
than
elect state superintendents, and everywhere to base decisionmaking on expertise rather than on
political processes. Public participation in decisionmaking was quite unnecessary in such a
sanitized system, other than the school board's approving the actions of the superintendent. Many
members of the policy elite in education believed that "democracy" should mean equality of
opportunity as defined by the professional educator. The school, in Cubberley's view, was an
"instrument of democracy" run by apolitical experts, with authority "in the hands of those who will
really represent the interests of the children." Such leaders would be able to educate all children
according to their abilities and destiny in life. The people owned the schools, but experts ran
them, just as a corporate chief executive managed his firm. That was the new version of democracy
in
governance: a socially and economically efficient system that adapted schooling to different kinds
of students, thereby guaranteeing equality of opportunity. In the first half of the 20th century,
who wanted or needed democracy in education? It depended on whom you asked. Rural citizens, whose
children still constituted two-thirds of students in public schools in 1915, thought democracy
should mean self-rule, and they fought consolidation. Administrative reformers like Cubberley had
another view of the future: The public school was essential to the health of democracy, but expert
administration should, over time, replace the messiness of school politics and render it a memory
of
the bad old days. No amount of wishful thinking can transform the politics of education into
objective administration, for schooling is and always has been intrinsically political. The
question
is not whether politics, but whose politics. Nonetheless, the administrative
reformers
in education at the beginning of this century were so successful in carrying out their blueprint
for
reform of governance that political scientists in the 1950s described public education as a "closed
system" in which familiar actors like city and state superintendents and their lay boards worked
within a zone of political consent that made decisionmaking predictable and consensual. Ellwood
Cubberley would have felt at home. Indeed, the policy preferences of the administrative reformers
of 1910 became the conventional wisdom of educators for a half-century. Big districts and big
schools, they said, were better than small ones. A centralized and specialized administrative
structure was more efficient and accountable than a decentralized and simple one. Differentiation
of
the curriculum into several tracks and hundreds of electives generated greater equality of
opportunity for the students of varied ability and for the different races and
genders. Today, reformers challenge all of these conventional beliefs. They argue that small
schools are better, that big districts should be decentralized, that all students should be helped
to meet the same high academic standards, that academic segregation of students into tracks limits
their learning, and that schools can benefit from strong involvement of parents in educational
reform. The administrative reformers of 1910 believed that if schools did a good job and tended
to
their public relations, citizens would be satisfied and would not need to politicize issues. For a
time, that strategy seemed to work, at least so long as the voices of outsiders were not heard. But
in the last half-century, the history of school governance is in large part the story of efforts to
breach the buffers erected around schools during the first half of the 20th century. Groups that
were excluded or unfairly treated—for example, African-Americans, Latinos, the handicapped,
women—have organized in social movements and have sought access and influence in public education.
Besides employing traditional democratic beliefs and political strategies, these new voices have
also expanded notions of democracy; they speak, for example, of cultural democracy, of equal
respect
and equal rights for all cultural groups. The politics of education has never been more fluid and
complicated than in recent years. As in earlier periods of contentiousness, some activists have
sought escape from democracy (roughly equated with politics). This time, however, they do not seek
to replace politics with expert administration. Indeed, they think public education already too
bureaucratic, too constrained by regulations inflicted by special-interest groups. The solution,
they say, is to replace politics with markets. Treating schooling as a consumer good and giving
parents vouchers for the education of their children solves the problem of decisionmaking: Parents
choose the schools that will be best for their children. The collective choices produced by
democratic institutions produced bureaucracy and gridlock. The invisible hand of the market will
lead the individual to the best personal choice. The market in education will satisfy and liberate
families through competition. But wait. Is education primarily a consumer good or a common good?
If Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, or John Dewey were now to enter policy discussions on public
education, he might well ask if Americans have lost their way. Democracy is about making wise
collective choices. Democracy in education and education in democracy are not quaint legacies
from a distant and happier time. They have never been more essential to wise self-rule than they
are
today. David Tyack is the Vida Jacks professor of education and history in the school of education at Stanford University. His books include The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education and, with Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform.  Read "A Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education," put forth by Thomas Jefferson on Oct. 24, 1817.
© 1999 Editorial Projects in Education |
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