Democratizing Schools From the Inside Out

Broadening civic education to connect participatory student learning to the wider world

Revere High School, in a working-class Massachusetts city, educates recent immigrants who speak about 32 different languages. Eighty percent of its students come from low-income households. The school showed persistent underperformance on state academic measures for years.

Then an astute principal, Lourenco Garcia, took the reins at Revere in fall 2010 and before long had begun to turn education on its head. Working with the faculty, he implemented student-centered learning by what he described as “giving the students a voice to another level.” School leaders encouraged and supported teachers to demonstrate student proficiency via performance assessments, which extended learning beyond the classroom walls.

Revere High School became a democratically infused center of civic learning for everyone, focusing on community outcomes that speak to the ultimate form of accountability.

Applied Learning

As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has stated, “We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fall-en by the wayside.” Civic education in its broadest sense is the essential purpose of our public schools. The belief in democracy is the foundation of a society that millions of people have given their lives to create, protect and maintain. Educators honor that obligation in these perilous times by focusing on the central mission of preparing members of a democratic society.

We should be striving for the same micro-community in our schools that we wish to have as a macro-community in our society. This is accomplished by using participatory learning practices throughout the school and its community to make connections between what is taught, what students learn and how students apply their learning to the larger world. 

As Harvard researcher Nancy Hill wrote in “Good Schools Close to Home” in Harvard Ed. Magazine: “(These) are places where students are empowered to take leadership responsibility, become civically aware and engaged, and practice decision making so they are prepared to make tough decisions outside of school and into adulthood.”

In Revere, as described by Nick Chiles in writing for The Hechinger Report last October: “Students have a say in how the classroom experience is structured, as well. They sit alongside teachers on some of Revere High’s 12 school improvement teams that focus on different aspects of student-centered learning, such as how students demonstrate proficiency, or how to extend learning beyond classroom walls. The teams sign off on all major changes at the school, meaning little goes forward without teacher buy-in.”

Rather than being told that students must test to the standards imposed by teachers, different generations are learning how to work next to each other, side by side, to make their community more engaging and focused on how to improve a community jointly.

The same holds true for the remarkable achievements of students at East High School in Rochester, N.Y., which went from being one of the lowest-performing high schools to a proud and academically successful school in five years. Perhaps of most importance, the school, enrolling more than 2,000 6th through 12th graders, was able to accomplish this not through standardized, technocratic school turnaround efforts, but through town hall gatherings, family cohort groups and academic student performance tasks that “authentically engage with the community.”

Researcher Valerie Marsh and Superintendent Shaun Nelms explained in an Educational Leadership article: “One of our goals was to embed performance tasks — scholar-created products or presentations to audiences beyond school walls. While creating these performance tasks, teachers and scholars think about ways they can authentically engage with the community. For example, scholars who are part of reading and writing workshop classes present their original fiction and poetry at a local coffee house with parents, fellow scholars, teachers and community members in attendance.”

Students in the older grades also voiced a desire to take courses more culturally relevant, contemporary and engaging. These students led the lessons and activities and partnered with local resident artists to produce a school assembly that taught the origins of hip-hop, described its influence on world culture and featured original student performances. The class was so popular that it is now part of East’s regular course offerings.

Needed Shifts

Unfortunately, the cases in Revere and East Rochester are outliers. The current generation experiences education in an age of highly regulated accountability. This has left schools less responsible to their local communities and more driven by bureaucratic dictates and regulations from state and federal policies based on state standardized testing and often shifting criteria.

A teacher friend recently summed up his own despair: “Why is it so difficult for people outside the classroom to understand that we know at least as much about our students and ways to improve teaching as they do? Each new idea that comes down from on high takes away from my teaching, and I’m forced to teach in ways that I know are not in the best interest of my students.”

Researchers Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine have underscored this point in their essay in The New York Times titled “High School Doesn’t Have to Be Boring.” Many students fail to perform well in school not because they are intellectually deficient or their teachers are poorly performing, but because these students do not see the relevance of classroom learning to improve their immediate lives. For them, school learning is a bore or, as one student told us, “a hassle you put up with during the day until you can return to the real world.”

District Flexibility

What can school district leaders do to support the democratizing of schools?

Federal and state policies are in transition. In Georgia, the state department of education has granted greater freedom from regulations to school districts that wanted to become public school charter districts. In turn, waivers could be provided by the district to individual schools as well.

The Calhoun City Schools in northwest Georgia used flexibility from state regulations about seat time, scheduling for instruction, delivery of instruction and partnering with social service agencies to create a program called the Jacket Junction Mobile Learning Lab. It addresses the challenge of youngsters entering pre-K and kindergarten who lack vocabulary and readiness skills.

The learning lab is a renovated school bus retrofitted into an early learning classroom. Staffed by high school students, plus counselors, social workers and early-grades teachers, the lab travels to housing authority properties to provide individual and small-group interaction with children ages 6 months to 4 years of age.

The initiative has prepared young children for pre-K and kindergarten, allowed high school students to gain valuable experiences and course credit in setting up classroom centers, planning lessons and seeing the challenges that young children bring to early grades. Additionally, caretakers of the preschool students are taught parenting skills.

Decentralizing Steps

Policies inviting individual schools to move beyond existing district regulations ought to require the schools to include:

• a schoolwide promise about what students will learn;


• a commitment to democratically share governance by all stakeholders; and


• a problem-solving process involving the entire school community to study and craft a uniquely powerful and purposeful education environment.

These schools must stay within the givens of constitutional law, equity, multicultural sensitivity, attention to research, achievement of learning goals and public disclosure of results, and they are encouraged to be as creative and imaginative as possible.

The role of the district becomes one of supporting schools by decentralizing resources, linking schools, providing technical and human assistance and keeping access open to schools that are not yet ready to commit to school renewal. As such, the district invites willing schools to move beyond existing regulations while keeping regulations in place for schools not yet ready to initiate their own changes.

Clarifying Control

The key to the implementation of democratizing a school is to have a clear agreement on what controls are retained by district leadership and what local school leadership has authority to decide for itself. The following are categories of school-based decisions moving from minimal to core and comprehensive.

• Zero-impact decisions are typically given to all schools. One does not need specialized preparation in education to spend time figuring out what should go into the vending machines in the teachers’ lounge or how the bus duty roster should be handled. These matters do need to be dealt with, but they are managerial in nature and should not detract from leadership decisions about education.


• Minimal-impact decisions are issues that pertain to student learning but are of short duration and have less direct influence. Examples include how to plan parent open houses, what to do during the in-service days built into the school year, what textbooks and software to order in the next adoption cycle, how to appropriate limited discretionary funds or how to better coordinate disciplinary practices for inappropriate student behavior. These decisions usually do not change the fundamental teaching and learning practices in classrooms and across the school.


• Core-impact decisions are those bearing long-term ramifications that define the uniqueness of a school, including curriculum, staff development, peer coaching, instructional programs, assessing and reporting student learning and the entire instructional budget (materials, time and personnel). These decisions align the school with its educational values and are connected to beliefs about the role of democratic principles in educational organizations.


• Comprehensive-impact decisions involve broader issues than teaching and learning, what is commonly known as site-based management. Authority over the entire school budget, the hiring and employment of staff and personnel evaluations are decentralized and given to individual schools, which have total control over their resources, which in turn empowers schools to determine how and in what ways they can best serve their community, parents and students.

Site-Level Actions

What can school-based administrators do to initiate democratization?

For local schools ready for democratic self-renewal but caught in a web of top-down regulations, we suggest the following actions:

• Study existing external regulations of the district and state and determine which are actually helpful or at least not obstructions. Consider what the school could still do even if the regulations did not change. For example, if the student testing program cannot be changed, what other student assessments or activities for graduation could still be performed in a way that would help achieve the primary school goal? Don’t let existing limitations be a reason for not taking at least some self-initiated steps.


• Identify regulations that truly are immediate barriers, such as state or district requirements for use of curriculum, teaching texts and software, time designated for each subject area, hiring of personnel or use of professional development days.


• Initiate your own requests for waivers if an invitational policy for seeking waivers from district or state regulations does not exist. Target the precise regulations that are barriers and prepare a short letter of inquiry, a report or a presentation to the appropriate authority, such as the school board. A school should do its homework in making a request by clearly stating the goal, the intended results, the desired operations (after a review of literature and research) and the needed waiver. The request should have endorsements indicating wide school community support.


• Relieve some pressure on teachers, if standardized testing requirements can’t be modified, by urging them to pilot forms of student assessment that bring about greater student engagement.

The Right Goal

What makes a school powerful and purposeful is clarity of the goal for democratization. Emily Gasoi, a teacher who moved from a traditional public school marked by isolation and conformity to co-found the Mission Hill Elementary School in Roxbury, Mass., described the transformation she experienced in a book co-authored with Deborah Meier: “We strove to cultivate ... ‘hungry students’ — those who are genuinely interested in making sense of the world … not afraid to tinker, to question, to wrestle with open-ended questions, to get wrong answers and to make mistakes. These were the skills that we, as teachers, modeling democratic values, felt we needed."