Teaching Democracy: What Schools Need to Do

Mr. Kahne and Mr. Westheimer studied 10 educational programs whose objective -- to develop democratic citizens -- is largely ignored by school reform policy. Schools can fulfill this mission, they discovered, through specific strategies that promote civic commitments, capacities, and connections. WHICH OF THE following headlines never appeared in a daily newspaper? a. Capital City Students Show No Gain in Reading, Math -- Governor Threatens Takeover b. Middletown Schools to Be Taken Over by State for Failure to Develop Democratic Citizens If you answered b, you not only answered correctly, your response also reflected an important challenge facing our democracy today. While we say that we value a democratic society, the very institutions expected to prepare democratic citizens -- our schools -- have moved far from this central mission. There is now frequent talk of state takeovers of schools that fail to raise test scores in math or reading, but it is unimaginable that any school would face such an action because it failed to prepare its graduates for democratic citizenship. The headlines we read are about test scores, basic skills, and the role schools play in preparing students for jobs in the Information Age. The vast bulk of school resources are going to literacy, mathematics, science, and vocational education. In 2003, for example, federal expenditures by the Department of Education on civic education totaled less than half of one percent of the overall department budget.1 And when it comes to assessment, civic goals get very little attention. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act mandates yearly testing in math, reading, and, beginning in 2005, science. Social studies and civic education, the areas of the curriculum most tied to the democratic mission of schools, share no such requirements. Similarly, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is often referred to as the Nation's Report Card, measures performance in math and reading annually -- but administers a civics assessment only about once every 10 years. Clearly, math, reading, and science are important, but, from the standpoint of supporting a democratic society, academic subject matter, when disconnected from its social relevance, is insufficient. The same can be said of colleges and universities. Their commitments to democratic priorities are more rhetorical than substantive. We are concerned here with what is not being discussed in the newspapers. We are concerned that the great school debates of our time give short shrift to a fundamental principle that, for more than two centuries, informed efforts to advance the notion of public schooling. This article addresses an important gap in our education agenda: preparing students to be effective democratic citizens. For the past three years, we studied 10 educational programs, funded by the Surdna Foundation, that were unusual in that they put the challenge of educating for democratic citizenship at the center of their efforts.2 We studied 10th-graders evaluating a juvenile detention center, ninth-graders studying the feasibility of curbside recycling, and 11th-graders reporting to the public on the availability of affordable housing in their community. We examined programs that exposed university students to community development projects in Silicon Valley, brought theology majors to a reservation to study the history of Native American experience, and led students interested in social movements on an intensive journey through historical sites of the civil rights movement. We visited an adult education program with a 70-year history of working for social and economic change through education and democratic action. All in all, we interviewed dozens of instructors and students, administered more than 500 surveys, observed pedagogical practices, and examined portfolios of student work. These programs share an emphasis on helping students to identify and act on issues of importance to themselves and to society. …