Space for Democracy?: School Governance in the 21st Century

Abstract

The education of young people is a vital task in a democracy with significant implications for both for young people themselves and for the state. How authority over schooling should be shared and organized is, therefore, a vital question in a democracy. This dissertation takes on that question and ultimately defends a broadly democratic account of schooling, insisting on democratic school governance as a critical component of collective self-government. Nevertheless, this dissertation further contends that democratic theorists have paid insufficient attention to the significant democratic deficits of our contemporary institutions of local governance in light of the significant spatially embedded inequalities in the US and have, therefore, failed to develop theory that can truly be action-guiding.

My argument begins with an account of the nature of schooling and the interests relevant to thinking about how the school system should be organized. Building on work by Amy Gutmann, chapter two ultimately defends democracy in school governance grounded in the good of collective self-government. I then turn to our existing institutions of school governance and present a normative assessment of local control—the institutional rules and norms that structure governance of the state-sponsored school system today. In light of the contemporary patterns in the social geography of the US, shaped by a long history of discriminatory federal policy, I argue that local control: (1) leads to injustice in the distribution of educational goods, (2) reliably undermines the kind of democratic culture necessary for realizing meaningful deliberation among citizens, and (3) encourages privileged citizens to rely on “exit” over “voice.”

Finally, I turn to the question of what we should do now. In chapter four, I argue that efforts to reform our school governance arrangements should be guided by a contextual analysis centered on whether those reforms are likely to encourage democratic responsiveness among citizens, contending that policymakers attend to three particular areas of concern: (1) the distribution of the burdens of educational provision; (2) the salience of stigmatizing stereotypes about marginalized groups; and (3) the quality of representation at multiple levels of government. I end by applying these insights to an analysis of school reform in New Orleans. Chapter five offers some concluding thoughts and future directions for research.