As Carl Glickman sees it, too many educators involved in educational reform today focus more on the labels attached to those efforts than on the goals that drive change. Many educators, Glickman argued, "tend to be more comfortable with buzzwords" than with a deep examination of current practice. "I'm not overly concerned about whether we implement site-based management, but I am deeply concerned about informed, participatory decision making," Glickman told his General Session audience. " I'm not overly concerned with constructivism, whole language, or cooperative learning, but I am deeply concerned about active, participatory, and connected learning."
Glickman has long been involved in helping educators create learning environments that are more participatory. He has spearheaded many university-public school collaborations that focused on school renewal through democratic governance, and his latest book, Education as Democracy: The Promise of American Public Schools, to be published this fall, focuses on that theme. "The primary goal of public schools is to prepare students to be proactive citizens in a democracy," he asserted. "Academic, vocational, aesthetic, and social pursuits are all subgoals of this primary function." And, he added, "It's only when this primary goal is taken seriously that students excel in the subgoals."
Glickman reminded his audience that the notion of democratic schools is not revolutionary or particularly innovative. "These ideas are not new; they're a deepening of old ideas about education." Indeed, said Glickman, encouraging students to question and regard "truth" with healthy skepticism was a tactic employed by the world's greatest teachers, including Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth.
Still, despite the prevalence of this centuries-old belief that schooling should be democratic, most public schools in the United States are anything but democratic. "The belief that we should foster the participation of all as equals, through the general dissemination of knowledge and through welcoming contrary perspectives," isn't part of the fabric of most schools, Glickman noted. "We hear from the few and the most vocal, we hear from those with the greatest influence, control, status, and money; we do not hear from all." What these exclusionary practices tell students, he argued, is that "the school, as a community of people, is incapable of governing itself wisely."
Glickman urged educators to create environments where democracy permeates "curriculum, instruction, and organization." The end result, he asserted, is improved student achievement. He pointed to a 1995 study that revealed that "school programs which encouraged active learning' and schools where this type of instruction is widespread" had significantly higher student gains on all measures of achievement in mathematics, reading, social studies, and science as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Educators in undemocratic schools, Glickman said, "bear the burden of proving how methods of authoritarianism, obedience, and passivity can create educated, informed, and wise democratic citizens."
Undemocratic schools, Glickman maintained, ultimately will fail because of the fundamental value that undergirds public education: "That all students are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are an education that will afford them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." When public schools default on that promise, Glickman concluded, it's the right of the people to "alter or abolish" those schools.