Professional Documents
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"A Liberation of Powers": Agency and Education For Democracy
"A Liberation of Powers": Agency and Education For Democracy
Margaret J. Finders
Education Department
Augsburg College
Abstract. In this essay Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders argue that addressing the “shrinkage” of
education and democracy requires acting politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency-focused
concepts of democracy and education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which
advances a politics of agency — a citizen politics that is different from ideological politics — and
citizens as cocreators of political communities, Boyte and Finders explore the technocratic trends that
have eclipsed agency. These disempower educators, students, and communities. Using the case study of
the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education
Program and partnerships of Augsburg College, the authors conclude with an examination of how agentic
practices have survived in “shadow spaces” in schools, how such spaces might be turned into “free
spaces” for democratic change, and how teacher education needs to prepare “citizen teachers” as well as
promoting pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic
change.
2. John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration” (1937), in John Dewey: The Later Works,
1925–1953, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 221–22.
All references to Dewey’s works will be to the multivolume series comprising The Early Works,
1882–1898, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, and The Later Works, 1925–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston
and published by Southern University Illinois Press. Volumes in this series will henceforth be cited as
EW, MW, and LW, respectively; for example, the citation “‘Democracy and Educational Administration,’
LW 11, 221–22” indicates that this work appears in Later Works from this series, volume 11, and the
discussion or quotation cited is on pages 221–22.
3. Alain Locke, “The Presentation of the Democratic Ideal,” in Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher, ed.
and intro., “Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining Democracy, Education and World Citizenship,” World
Order 38, no. 4 (2008): 23–28.
4. Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement (New York: Orbis
Books, 1990), 5–6. Boyte’s experiences as a young man in the movement regularly involved discussions
about a broadened view of democracy.
5. Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold
War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
HARRY C. BOYTE is Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy in the Sabo Center for Democracy and
Citizenship at Augsburg College and is Affiliate Faculty Member in the Humphrey School of Public
Affairs at the University of Minnesota, 130 Humphrey School, 301 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis MN
55455; e-mail <boyte001@umn.edu>. His primary areas of scholarship are democracy, political theory,
community organizing, and higher education.
6. USAID, USAID Strategy on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (Washington, DC: US
Government Printing Office, 2013), 37. USAID is the U.S. Agency for International Development,
and the organization is described on its website as “the lead U.S. Government agency that works to
end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential”; see
https://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are.
7. American Political Science Association, Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, “Amer-
ican Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality” (Washington, DC: American Political Science Associa-
tion, 2004). For an analysis of the report, see Harry C. Boyte, “Reframing Democracy: Governance, Civic
Agency, and Politics,” Public Administration Review 65, no. 5 (2005): 536–46. Also, on the narrowing
of democracy, see Harry C. Boyte, “Civil Society and Public Work,” in Oxford Handbook of Civil Soci-
ety, ed. Michael Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Harry C. Boyte, “Constructive
Politics as Public Work: Organizing the Literature,” Political Theory 39, no. 5 (2011): 630–60. Boyte’s
democracy as agency, collective powers deriving from common work, is akin to the argument by Josiah
Ober, based on etymological analysis, which challenges modern uses of “democracy” as “a voting rule
for determining the will of the majority.” Ober argues that the Greek “demokratia … more capaciously,
means ’the empowered demos … in which the demos gains a collective power to effect change in the
public realm … the collective strength and ability to act … and, indeed, to reconstitute the public
realm through action.” Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not
Majority Rule,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2009): 1 and 7.
8. Mark Lilla, “The Truth about Our Libertarian Age,” New Republic, June 18, 2014,
https://newrepublic.com/article/118043/our-libertarian-age-dogma-democracy-dogma-decline.
9. Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, 2nd
ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
130 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
Dewey’s Democracy-as-Agency
Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mishe, in their seminal American Journal
of Sociology essay “What Is Agency?,” argue that the locus of agency “lies
in the contextualization of social experience … [through which] in delibera-
tion with others (or sometimes self-reflexively, with themselves) actors gain
in the capacity to make considered decisions that may challenge received
patterns of action.” In twentieth-century social and political thought, con-
cepts of agency as individual action take “received patterns” as largely
immutable. Agency that imagines intentional change in contexts “has been
overshadowed by an emphasis upon clear and explicit rules of conduct, con-
cepts that permit relatively little scope for the exercise of situationally based
judgment.”10
Challenging such trends, in 2007 a group of political theorists named emer-
gent democratic practices as a transdisciplinary field called “civic studies” that
focuses on agency and citizens as cocreators of communities at different scales.
Civic studies adds to Emirbayer and Mishe’s definition the idea that citizens are
makers of political communities, not simply deliberators about political commu-
nities.11 Agency is understood as the capacity to act with others in diverse and
open environments to shape the world around us.12 Citizenship is “public work,”
work with public dimensions, not simply off-hours volunteerism or participation
in government-connected activities. Academics themselves are citizens. Knowl-
edge, including science, should aim at increasing capacities to act collectively,
effectively, and ethically.13
Civic studies and the trends it conceptualizes can be seen, in part, as inspired
by and revitalizing Deweyan concerns. Though Dewey rarely used the term
“agency” and did not use “civic agency,” related ideas were in fact central to his
10. Mustafa Emibayer and Ann Mishe, “What Is Agency?,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4
(1998): 994–95. See also Anthony Giddens, Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).
12. For a brief description of the scope and aims of civic studies, see http://activecitizen.
tufts.edu/civic-studies/
13. See Boyte, “Constructive Politics as Public Work”; and Peter Levine, “The Case for Civic Studies,”
in Civic Studies, ed. Levine and Soltan, 7.
Boyte and Finders “A Liberation of Powers” 131
14. On conceptual change naming prior ideas and practices, see Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L.
Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
15. John Dewey, Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), EW 1, 244.
18. Jane Addams, On Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 98; and Dewey, Democracy
and Education, 93.
20. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 139 and 453.
21. See Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Transaction, 1925); and John Dewey, The
Public and Its Problems (1927), LW 2.
132 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
took many expressions. Walter Shepard in his 1934 presidential address to the
American Political Science Association called for “an aristocracy of intellect and
character.”22
Dewey addressed critics of participatory democracy by making relational
civic action, not detached thought, the foundation of education and society.
As his biographer Alan Ryan detailed, Dewey believed that the person “makes
sense of the world for the sake of acting productively on the world.”23 This
focus led Dewey to a critique of academics who imagine the primacy of their
own thought.24 In response to arguments that people are in the grip of instincts,
Dewey proposed in Human Nature and Conduct that “habits,” not “instincts,”
shape most human behavior and can be intentionally developed.25 His argu-
ment that habits can be cultivated has inspired extraordinary educational
experiments such as Central Park East and Mission Hill schools, founded by
Deborah Meier.26
While Dewey’s focus on agency, relationships, and habits has a powerful
relevance, his lapse was the failure to develop a strategy for political action within
society. Biographers intimate this lapse. “Dewey never actually developed, let
alone implemented, a comprehensive strategy capable of realizing his general
theory in real-world practice,” write Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett in
their lively “Deweyan manifesto,” Dewey’s Dream.27 Yet we argue that his lack
of political strategy can be traced to a lapse that his critics reproduce: the way he
defined politics narrowly as an activity confined to the government system and
seen in ideological terms.
Dewey’s definitional mistake can be found in “School as Social Centre.” There,
as elsewhere, he argued that “politics” is absent in “community.” This move
eclipsed not only schools and other civic environments as political sites but also
neglected any concept of politics that revolves around citizens. “I mean by ‘society’
the less definite and freer play of the forces of the community which goes on
in the daily intercourse and contact of men in an endless variety of ways that
have nothing to do with politics or government,” Dewey said. He proposed that
citizenship needed to be defined more broadly “to mean all the relationships of all
22. Shepard, quoted in Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989), 285.
23. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995),
127.
24. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929), LW
4.
25. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (1922), MW 14, 31–32.
26. Deborah Meier, “So What Does It Take to Build a School for Democracy?,” Phi Delta Kappan 85, no.
1 (2003): 15–25.
27. Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in the
Age of Educational Reform (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), xiii.
Boyte and Finders “A Liberation of Powers” 133
28. John Dewey, “The School as Social Centre” (1902), MW 2, 81–82; for a later version of the same view,
see John Dewey, “Democracy and Educational Administration,” 217–18. For discussion of how “citizen
politics” differs from ideology, see Harry C. Boyte, “A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the
Meaning of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century,” The Good Society 12, no. 2 (2003): 1–15; Luke
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962).
30. For a critique of apolitical progressive approaches, see Aaron Schutz, “Power and Trust in the Public
Realm: John Dewey, Saul Alinsky, and the Limits of Progressive Democratic Education,” Educational
Theory 61, no. 4 (2011): 491–512.
31. On community organizing, see Harry C. Boyte, CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New
York: Free Press, 1990); Richard Wood, Faith In Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing
in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy. On
organizing and school reform, see Dennis Shirley, Valley Interfaith and School Reform: Organizing for
Power in South Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Marion Orr and John Rogers, eds., Public
Engagement for Public Education: Joining Forces to Revitalize Democracy and Equalize Education (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Mark R. Warren, Karen Mapp, and the School Reform
Project, A Match in Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
134 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
and thus the technocracy that has affected sweeping changes in professions and
education.
Addressing knowledge politics is necessary for democratic change in educa-
tion. Thus, in a review of recent books on community organizing and school
reform, Luke Bretherton, a leading theorist and analyst of community organizing,
points to the politics of knowledge as a crucial, usually unnoted factor: “What
comes across time and again is the hostility ‘non-experts’ provoke. … [P]ublic
engagement with education challenges and demands a move beyond technocratic,
top down, one-size-fits all, centralized, and procedural reform initiatives to draw on
a wider variety of experience, knowledge, and a diversity of solutions.”32 Though
technocracy is a barrier confronting community organizing, with a few exceptions
(such as Bretherton) organizers and theorists of organizing fail to name the power
problem or to develop strategies for addressing it. Consequently, conflicts between
community organizations and teachers are commonplace. Dennis Shirley’s treat-
ment of the Alliance Schools in Texas, one of the largest community organizing
efforts in school reform, makes clear that such organizing left teachers’ understand-
ing of their own work largely unaddressed.33
Technocratic power is also invisible in much civic engagement outside of com-
munity organizing, reflecting a communitarian blind spot about politics outside of
government. Indeed, in recent years higher education leaders who call for reengage-
ment with the world reproduce apolitical, expert-knows-best approaches without
any hint of self-consciousness. In 1989, for example, Donna Shalala, then chancel-
lor of the University of Wisconsin, called for renewal of the fabled Wisconsin Idea
in a famous speech titled “Mandate for a New Century.” But she transformed the
Wisconsin Idea, always contested but a concept that once often involved academics
as citizen professionals working with other citizens, into the idea that the best and
the brightest should fix the nation’s people and problems. As she said, “The ideal
[is] a disinterested technocratic elite … society’s best and brightest in service to
its most needy [dedicated to] delivering the miracles of social science [on society’s
problems] just as doctors cured juvenile rickets in the past.”34
Shalala’s call for academic research engaged with human concerns reinforced
the tendency of academics to see lay citizens from the outside, as passive objects to
be fixed and informed. A particular paradigm of the citizen and power undergirds
such a conception of science: the general population, no longer viewed as civic
producers, are reconceived as clients and consumers serviced by experts, while
citizenship is narrowed to practices such as voting, volunteering, or petitioning the
32. Luke Bretherton, “Review of Public Engagement in Public Education, and A Match on Dry Grass,”
in Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 3 (2013): 958.
33. Shirley, Valley Interfaith and School Reform, 55. On the neglect of “knowledge power,” see Harry
C. Boyte, “Populism — Bringing Culture Back,” The Good Society 11, no. 2 (2012): 300–19.
34. Donna Shalala, “Mandate for a New Century: Reshaping the Research University’s Role in Social
Policy” (David Dodds Henry Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois at Chicago, October 31,
1989); http://www.uic.edu/depts/oaa/ddh/ddhlectures/Lec11.pdf.
Boyte and Finders “A Liberation of Powers” 135
government for redress. Professional education played a key role in this process.
The practices and identities of “citizen teacher” or “citizen clergy” that had
once lent governance dynamics larger public and democratic meanings and rooted
professions in local civic cultures largely disappeared. Training in professions such
as teaching and the ministry lost connections to the real life, history, and cultures
of actual places, in ways paralleling the disappearance of politics from public
affairs.35
Yet attention to the spread of technocracy is now appearing.36 Jewett describes
a sea change in science that affected all of professional life in the latter decades
of the twentieth century, turning perspectives like that of Lippmann into conven-
tional wisdom. “The scientists who powerfully shaped the national discourse on
science in the middle years of the twentieth century drew a sharp line between sci-
ence and society,” says Jewett. “They portrayed science as utterly deaf to human
concerns and sought to insulate the research process [as] … a space untouchable
by both the state and the horizontal communication between citizens.”37
Pope Francis details in Laudato Si’ the ways in which public action across
the sweep of modern societies substitutes informational cultures for relational
cultures. “The basic problem … is the way that humanity has taken up …
an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of
a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches
and gains control over an external object.”38 The result is a shift from “civic
professionalism” to “disciplinary professionalism.”39 These conceptual dynamics
play themselves out in policy and practice.
Shrinking Agency
Nowhere is this shrinkage more evident than in the policies and practices
of schooling. Kevin Kumashiro notes that in the twenty-first century, education
is reductive on all counts: the curriculum is reduced to bits of information and
skills, teachers are reduced to certifiers of this acquisition, and education is
35. Barbara Nelson, “Education for the Public Interest” (address to the Network of Schools of Public
Policy, Affairs, and Administration, October 17, 2002, Los Angeles, California).
36. See Matthew Hartley, John Saltmarsh, and Patti Clayton, “Is the Civic Engagement Movement
Changing Higher Education?,” British Journal of Educational Studies 58, no. 4 (2011): 391–406.
38. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis: On Care for Our Common
Home (Rome: Vatican Press, 2015), 78–79. On the “Theology of the People” movement that shaped
Jorge Bergoglio, see Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); for the
relationship of Pope Francis to education, citizen politics, and democracy, see Harry C. Boyte, “Climate
Change and Democracy,” in Climate Change across the Curriculum, ed. Eric Fretz (New York: Lexington
Books, 2015).
39. The shift from “civic” to “disciplinary” professional is described in Thomas Bender, Intellect and
Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
136 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
40. Kevin K. Kumashiro, Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice (New
York: Routledge, 2015), xxi.
41. Michael Hout and Stuart W. Elliott, eds., Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education
(Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2011), http://www.nap.edu/read/12521/chapter/1.
42. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1966), 5.
Boyte and Finders “A Liberation of Powers” 137
43. Patrick Shannon, The Struggle to Continue: Progressive Reading Instruction in the United States
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990), 63.
44. Diane Ravitch, “Why I Cannot Support the Common Core Standards,” Diane Ravitch’s blog, Febru-
ary 26, 2013, http://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/why-i-cannot-support-the-common-core-standards/.
45. Stan Karp, “The Problem with the Common Core,” Rethinking Schools 28, no. 2 (2013–2014).
46. Alliance for Childhood, “Alliance Warning: Core Standards May Lead to a Plague of Kindergarten
Tests,” June 8, 2010, http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Core
_Standards_06_08.pdf.
138 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
rewards and punishments for school districts and teachers. Currently, the com-
petitive metrics and the dominant conceptual framework of accountability stress
individual and competitive excellence of knowledge acquisition and preparation
for narrowly acquisitive and individual achievement–oriented skills rather than
agentic and democratic practices.
Teacher effectiveness: The assumption screened is that lack of student learn-
ing is solely the result of poor teaching. This denies larger societal issues that
affect learning, including poverty, homelessness, and cultural biases. By measur-
ing teacher effectiveness through student test scores, these screens inaccurately
conceptualize teacher quality as detached from larger systems.
Achievement gap: The assumption screened is that student test scores —
which under the current regime record massive disparities between white students,
on the one hand, and black, Latino/a, and recent immigrant students, on the
other — not only indicate what students are learning, but usefully measure what
they should be learning. Gloria Ladson-Billings has argued that the achievement
gap looks only at disparities in standardized test scores that, as described above,
are extremely problematic in themselves. According to Ladson-Billings, we need
to look at the “education debt,” which is comprised of historical, economic,
sociopolitical, and moral components, components not addressed in much of the
current public conversation.47 Others shift the focus by naming this gap an “access
gap,” or an “opportunity gap.” Is such a gap actually getting worse as the screens
would have us believe? The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP),
the largest continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in
various subject areas, has monitored student progress in reading and mathematics
for nationally representative samples of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds since the early
1970s. Results from the 2012 assessments show the following:
• Compared to the first assessment in 1971 for reading and in 1973 for
mathematics, scores were higher in 2012 for 9- and 13-year-olds and not
significantly different for 17-year-olds.
• In both reading and mathematics at all three ages, black students have
made larger gains since the early 1970s than white students.
• Hispanic students have made larger gains since the 1970s than white
students in reading at all three ages and in mathematics at ages 13 and
17.48
47. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achieve-
ment in U.S. Schools,” Educational Researcher 35, no. 7 (2006): 3–12.
Likewise, while the screens hold that the United States is falling fur-
ther and further behind internationally, the TIMMs data document a differ-
ent version of reality. The 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Sci-
ence Study (TIMSS) is the fifth administration of this international compara-
tive study since it was first administered in 1995. In 2011, the average math-
ematics score of U.S. fourth-graders (541) was higher than the international
TIMSS scale average, higher than the average score of Finland fourth-graders,
and higher, on average, than the scores of students in forty-two other education
systems.49
These terministic screens hide the severance of agency from school perfor-
mance. They reinforce a detached view of learning, in which schools cannot be
democratic sites for learning and communities are not partners in cocreation of
knowledge. Teachers working with children see behind these screens but pop-
ular media and policymakers reinforce this selective view. The No Child Left
Behind Act has led to a testing frenzy, not a teaching goal. The use of testing data
as rationales for punishment rather than as diagnostic tools is dismantling the
teaching profession and demoralizing teachers. The National Education Associ-
ation’s 2014 nationwide survey of teachers, as Tim Walker notes, indicates the
magnitude of the problem: nearly half of the teachers surveyed reported that they
have considered leaving the profession because of high-stakes testing.50 This shift
to a technocratic, top-down, centralized reform in education is reducing teachers
to technicians. The challenge lies in educating the teaching profession, the public,
and policymakers about the importance of making connections to the real life, his-
tory, and cultures of actual places. The terministic screens, in contrast, focus on
decontextualized disciplinary scores and prevent teachers and policymakers from
aligning their work with civic professionalism.
The push to prepare “highly qualified teachers” has resulted in tighter regula-
tions for teacher education programs as well, so teacher educators scurry to meet
the regulations and mandated reporting. Who are effective teachers? We cannot
let these terministic screens hide the fact that currently an economic framework
guides the decisions. When what gets measured does not match what counts, rote
memorization and computer-evaluated pedagogies replace both project-based edu-
cation of the sort championed by Dewey and generations of educators, as well
as the sense that schools are “part of” communities. Today we do not evaluate
teacher effectiveness based on how well students act as problem solvers and prob-
lem posers, or on how well students understand themselves and act as citizens in a
democracy, as advocates and architects and builders of their community. Schools
and teacher education programs have been forced to reduce intellectual work to
49. For summary data on this study, see the National Center for Educational Statistics, “Trends in
International Mathematics and Science Study,” http://nces.ed.gov/timss/results11_math11.asp.
50. Tim Walker, “NEA Survey: Nearly Half of Teachers Consider Leaving Profession Due
to Standardized Testing,” neaToday, November 2, 2014, http://neatoday.org/2014/11/02/nea-
survey-nearly-half-of-teachers-consider-leaving-profession-due-to-standardized-testing-2/.
140 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
51. Kenneth Zeichner, “Reflections of a University-Based Teacher Educator on the Future of College-
and University-Based Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 57, no. 3 (2006): 339.
52. Dale Johnson, Bonnie Johnson, Stephen Farenga, and Daniel Ness, Trivializing Teacher Education:
The Accreditation Squeeze (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 89.
improvement; instead, we are examining how the terministic screens have led to
a nonproductive testing frenzy.
Such screens conceal the economic forces at play in the current education
landscape. Shannon details the economic forces working against the Deweyan
model of education, observing that “Dewey lamented that most social decisions
were made according to profit motives. He found that the crux of the disorientation
of the working urban population was due to the fact that the potential universal
benefits of machine production were negated because it was ‘harnessed to the
dollar.’”54 In addition, today corporations that are profiting from the testing market
have a powerful impact on schools, making the profession even more powerless.
It is easy to rage against the tightening of policies that regulate schools and
teacher preparation programs, to feel hopeless and simply give up and give in to the
policies and practices that regulate democracy out of the schools. In such a time
and context, it is also crucial to look for the spaces where organizing might occur
to transform schools into humane, agentic places for learners of all backgrounds,
especially those marginalized by race, class, culture, and purported deficits in
language, academic, or social skills.
55. On shadow spaces, see David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa, “Development Education and Education
for Sustainable Development,” Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review 12 (Spring 2011):
15–31.
56. See Evans and Boyte, Free Spaces; and Francesca Polletta, “‘Free Spaces’ in Collective Action,” Theory
and Society 28, no. 1 (1999): 1–38.
142 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
57. The contrast between organizing and mobilizing approaches is described in Charles Payne, I’ve
Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995). For a detailed analysis of the differences that result from these two
approaches, see Hahrie Han, How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership
in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Harry C. Boyte, “A Tale of
Two Playgrounds: Young People and Politics” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, September 1, 2001).
58. See Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
59. Robert Reid, Jorge Gonzalez, Phillip Nordness, Alexandra Trout, and Michael H. Epstein, “A
Meta-Analysis of the Academic Status of Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disturbance,” Journal
of Special Education 38, no. 3 (2004): 130–43.
Boyte and Finders “A Liberation of Powers” 143
60. O’Connor, quoted in Harry C. Boyte, “Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work,” in Democracy’s
Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities, ed. Harry C. Boyte
(Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), 24.
61. Jan W. Valle and David J. Connor, Rethinking Disability: A Disability Studies Approach to Inclusive
Practices (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), xii.
62. Alissa Blood, Experiences of Students with Special Needs in Public Achievement (master’s thesis,
Augsburg College, 2013), 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, and 22.
144 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 66 Number 1–2 2016
work?’ Our main task is to remind them, to guide them, not to tell them
what to do,” explains Ricci. Teachers became partners with their students. They
change from “teaching to the test” to working alongside young people as they
develop agency. The curriculum builds citizenship skills, habits, and identities
such as negotiation, compromise, initiative, planning, organizing, and public
speaking. It develops what Blood calls “a public professional persona.” Ricci and
Blood believe that these tools will serve the students all their lives.63 Building
on their experiences, the Special Education Program at Augsburg now has all
teacher candidates coaching in Public Achievement sites, and the experiences of
these teacher candidates, in turn, suggest changes that might improve teacher
education.
Returning Agency to Democracy and Education
The definition of “highly effective teachers,” in the regime of high-stakes
testing, is drawn from a narrow set of data used for decisions on school ranking,
funding, teacher qualification, promotion, retention, and pay. In some states,
teachers are required to sign contractual agreements that they will not diminish
the importance of the tests. In almost all cases, teacher education has come to focus
on the individual success of students, most often emphasizing their successful
performance in high-stakes testing.
Yet there are signs of a return to Democracy and Education’s view of collec-
tive, agentic democracy. For instance, in No Citizen Left Behind, drawing on her
own teaching experiences as well as the work of political philosophers including
Dewey, Meira Levinson challenges individualized agency and the current focus
on preparing students for success within the “testocracy.” She argues instead for a
revitalized understanding of “power [as] relational and contextual” and “empow-
erment [as] a collective condition, not just an individual possession or state.”64
Levinson includes vivid examples of political skills such as “codeswitching.” In
using this tool, students learn “that in every community there is a language and
culture of power” and students can “represent and express themselves in ways
that members of the majority group … will naturally understand and respect”;
such an approach stands in stark contrast to “teaching [minority] kids that they
do things wrong.”65
Our experiences and theory, and the developing field of citizen professional
theory and practice more generally,66 include such skills. In this framework teach-
ers and teacher educators who wish to contribute to democratizing change need
63. Ricci and Blood, quoted in Boyte, “Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work,” 25 and 26.
64. Meira Levinson, No Citizen Left Behind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12.
66. See Albert W. Dzur, Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruc-
tion of Professional Ethics (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); William J.
Doherty, Tai J. Mendenhall, and Jerica M. Berge, “The Families and Democracy and Citizen Health
Care Project,” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 36, no. 4 (2010): 389–402; and the ongoing
biweekly blog conversation at Education Week, “Bridging Differences,” with Deborah Meier and Harry
Boyte and Finders “A Liberation of Powers” 145
Boyte, which explores lessons from democracy education and organizing for democratic change (see
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/).
67. At Augsburg College, the entire Department of Teacher Education has undertaken an extensive
process of faculty development to become more familiar with civic studies theory and practice.
68. A strand of political theory, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Sheldon Wolin, has recognized the
difference between citizen politics and electoral politics, but it has conceived electoral politics as the
arena of “noble deeds” and “public spirited” actions. See Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two
Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001), 6. This argument inverts the pattern we see today. On the need for a Copernican Revolution in
politics, see Harry C. Boyte, “Reconstructing Democracy: The Citizen Politics of Public Work” (Visiting
Scholars Lecture, presented at the Havens Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison, April 11, 2001);
Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy; and Romand Coles, Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological
Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
WE THANK Trygve Throntveit, Leonard Waks, Terri Wilson, David Waddington, and Marie Strőm for
feedback.