Abstract: Teaching in a democracy is challenging and filled with dilemmas that have no easy answers. For example, how do educators meet their responsibilities of teaching civic norms and dispositions while remaining nonpartisan? Democratic Discord in Schools features eight normative cases of complex dilemmas drawn from real events designed to help educators practice the type of collaborative problem solving and civil discourse needed to meet these challenges of democratic education. Each of the cases also features a set of six commentaries written by a diverse array of scholars, educators, policy makers, students, and activists with a range of political views to spark reflection and conversation.
Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Democratic Discord in Schools provides the tools that allow educators and others to practice the deliberative skills they need in order to find reasonable solutions to common ethical dilemmas in politically fraught times.
Abstract: In the United States, constitutional and statutory law reinforce the right of all children to receive an education, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. In a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and law enforcement, however, partnerships among school districts, local law enforcement, and the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security subject undocumented and unaccompanied minor students to indefensible levels of risk for detention and deportation. We identify three stances that U.S. schools may take in the face of a potential "school-to-deportation pipeline.” Schools that engage in 'intentional collaboration' actively increase detention and deportation by referring students to immigration officials for criminal, noncriminal, and even non-disciplinary activity. Schools that engage in 'predictable complicity' may not intend to subject their undocumented and unaccompanied minor students to detention or deportation, but still put students at risk by involving police in school policies. We argue that U.S. schools should instead engage in 'proactive protection' of immigrant students and families, including actively resisting federal policies when necessary.
Abstract: Educators and policy makers confront challenging questions of ethics, justice, and equity on a regular basis. Should teachers retain a struggling student if it means she will most certainly drop out? Should an assignment plan favor middle-class families if it means strengthening the school system for all? These everyday dilemmas are both utterly ordinary and immensely challenging, yet there are few opportunities and resources to help educators think through the ethical issues at stake.
Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics introduces a new interdisciplinary approach to achieving practical wisdom in education, one that honors the complexities inherent in educational decision making and encourages open discussion of the values and principles we should collectively be trying to realize in educational policy and practice.
At the heart of the book are six richly described, realistic accounts of ethical dilemmas that have arisen in education in recent years, paired with responses written by noted philosophers, empirical researchers, policy makers, and practitioners, including Pedro Noguera, Howard Gardner, Mary Pattillo, Andres A. Alonso, Jaime Ahlberg, Toby N. Romer, and Michael J. Petrilli.
Abstract: In this article, Meira Levinson presents a case study of school personnel who must decide whether to expel a fourteen-year-old student for bringing marijuana onto campus. She uses the case to explore a class of ethical dilemmas in which educators are obligated to take action that fulfills the demands of justice but under conditions in which no just action is possible because of contextual and school-based injustices. She argues that under such circumstances, educators suffer moral injury, the trauma of perpetrating significant moral wrong against others despite one's wholehearted desire and responsibility to do otherwise. Educators often try to avoid moral injury by engaging in loyal subversion, using their voice to protest systemic injustices, or exiting the school setting altogether. No approach, however, enables educators adequately to fulfill their obligation to enact justice and hence to escape moral injury. Society hence owes educators moral repair--most importantly, by restructuring educational and other social systems so as to mitigate injustice. Levinson concludes that case studies of dilemmas of educational justice, like the case study with which she begins the article, may enable philosophers, educators, and members of the general public to engage in collective, phronetic reflection. This process may further reduce moral injury and enhance educators' capacities to enact justice in schools.
Abstract: How can access to public elementary schools of variable quality be justly distributed within a school district? Two reasonable criteria are: (a) that children should have equal opportunity to attend high-quality schools, and (b) school assignment policies should foster an overall increase in the number of high-quality schools. This article analyzes Boston Public Schools' new school assignment plan in light of these criteria. It shows that Boston Public Schools' plan violates equal opportunity by giving middle-class families privileged access to existing high-quality schools. Boston Public Schools arguably panders to more-advantaged families, however, in order to pull them into the system and deploy their economic, political, and social capital to increase the total number of high-quality schools. Is this ethically defensible? To answer this question, we need to develop an ethical theory of pandering: of privileging the interests and preferences of already unjustly privileged actors because the consequences tend to benefit everyone. Such a theory will need to be ethically pluralistic and weighted along a contextually sensitive continuum, rather than rendered in all-or-nothing terms.
Abstract: The article offers the author's insight on the solution to address the civic empowerment gap in education. She states that every individual should commit for the improvement of urban schools and minimize the drop-out rate of students. She says that civic education should be applied in elementary schools and to be a regular part of the K-12 education. She adds that minimizing the civic empowerment gap leads to a strong democracy.
Abstract: While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Meira Levinson realized that students’ individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their profound marginalization within American society. This is because of a civic empowerment gap that is as shameful and antidemocratic as the academic achievement gap targeted by No Child Left Behind. No Citizen Left Behind argues that students must be taught how to upend and reshape power relationships directly, through political and civic action. Drawing on political theory, empirical research, and her own on-the-ground experience, Levinson shows how de facto segregated urban schools can and must be at the center of this struggle.
Recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking the curriculum. Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education. Schools should teach collective action, openly discuss the racialized dimensions of citizenship, and provoke students by engaging their passions against contemporary injustices. Students must also have frequent opportunities to take civic and political action, including within the school itself. To build a truly egalitarian society, we must reject myths of civic sameness and empower all young people to raise their diverse voices. Levinson’s account challenges not just educators but all who care about justice, diversity, or democracy.
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Abstract: Political power and ethnoracial, cultural, and/or religious identities often interact such that clear patterns of political empowerment and exclusion emerge along demographic lines. One could try to eliminate the interaction itself, either by eliminating minority race identity within mainstream politics via assimilation, or by eliminating mainstream politics from the activities of minority raced individuals via separation. I propose that public schools pursue neither of these approaches. Rather, schools should teach a kind of Du Boisian “double consciousness” to all children, majority and minority alike, in order to promote the coexistence of individuals’ ethnoracial and civic identities via multiple perspective taking and power analysis. By learning to recognize the particularity of their own perspectives and access to power, including the ways in which their ethnoracial and cultural identities help shape those perspectives and powers, young people will be better equipped to recognize and fight against ethnocultural bias in the civic sphere.
Abstract: This article examines issues concerning multicultural education. It argues that multicultural education has no independent identity or value beyond the various goals, practices, or content to which others attach it. The article describes the different uses and meanings of multicultural education as articulated by political and educational philosophers, educational theorists, and educational practitioners. It highlights some potential tensions among the aims, practices, and content of multicultural education and reflects on multicultural education's potential practical importance despite its conceptual incoherence.
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Abstract: Common schooling and multicultural education intuitively seem to be mutually reinforcing and possibly even mutually necessary: each is motivated by and/or serves the aims of promoting social justice and equality, common civic membership, and mutual respect and understanding, among other goals. An examination of the practical relationship between the two, however, reveals that neither one is a necessary or sufficient condition for achieving the other; in fact, each may in fairly common circumstances make the other harder to achieve. In other words, there is no direct instrumental relationship between multicultural education and common schools. Nor is there a clear expressive relationship between the two. Although common schools may serve as explicit, public symbols of our multicultural civic commitment to diversity, mutual respect and egalitarian inclusiveness, many demographically common schools neglect or even betray multicultural ideals, while many restricted entry and even segregated schools may express these ideals better than most comprehensive and integrated schools. Hence, while multicultural education and common schooling do intuitively stand for similar, mutually reinforcing ideals, in practice they may be linked more closely in the confusions and dilemmas of implementation they both raise than in their mutual realisation.