In the spring of 2014, Chicago educators met to reflect on the opportunities and challenges for progressive, democratic education in Chicago-area schools. This article weaves together the writings of teachers and principals from over 15 public schools and a couple of private and parochial schools who are thinking about their own experiences in…

In this commentary, Andy Kaplan discusses with Lois Weiner, Diane Ravitch's latest book "The Reign of Error," which combines scholarly argument and scrupulous research in defense of democratic education. Weiner notes, the book will prove an important resource in the ongoing struggle for the survival of public schooling. Weiner adds,…

True education is the presentation of the conditions necessary for the evolution of personality into freedom. Democracy is the only form of government under which the methods of freedom can be fostered. The great central principle of democracy is mutual responsibility. Democracy in its essence gives to each individual the liberty of becoming free;…

The article examines the enactment of culturally relevant progressivism on the part of the principal of the Social Justice School, a small urban public high school explicitly committed to democratic education. Drawing upon extensive interviews and field observations conducted over the course of an academic year by a teacher-researcher within the…

Education, once known as the "great equalizer," is now being called to task for its tendency to disenfranchise and to legitimate inequality due to its obedience to the tenets of capitalism. Two of the nation's greatest educational thinkers, George S. Counts and Boyd H. Bode provided "instructions" for parents and teachers…

This dialogue is an edited version of a dialogue between William C. Ayers and William H. Schubert at the November 10-12, 2011, meeting of the Progressive Education Network hosted by the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Illinois. It was the opening keynote session on the evening of November 10. Ayers interviewed Schubert, who acted as John…

In this essay, a high school senior reflects on her educational experience as a journey beginning with her difficult decision to stay at Francis W. Parker School for high school and ending with her current search for a college where she can continue to explore the nature of education. Her narrative focuses on her experience in an elective course…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

As zero tolerance policies and retributive disciplinary codes proliferate among public schools throughout the country, this essay reflects upon one school's nontraditional model of school "discipline" as an alternative to such punitive policies. In particular, this essay explores the fairness committee at Humanities Preparatory Academy in New York…

In this essay, a high school principal reflects on the time a student took him to the Fairness Committee, a democratic structure for behavioral interventions. By mobilizing this process, the student affirmed his commitment to the school's core values, as well as his commitment to his own education. School structures for the development of…

This article shows the process through which one teacher and a group of eleventh-graders worked to create spaces for democratic education in a hierarchically organized New York City public school that is heralded as a model of success under current reform initiatives. In response to student resistance to a required unit on Tim O'Brien's novel, The…

American public school education was founded, in large measure, on the ideals of Horace Mann's leadership of Massachusetts schools in the 1800s. Later in that same century, private schools began to emerge and serve those disaffected with Mann's "common schools," and tension between publicly funded and privately paid education arose. This perhaps…

While attending the Klingenstein Center's Heads of Schools Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, fellows studied Horace Mann's nineteenth-century vision for a "common school" that would unite all citizens; they considered whether this model is still best suited to serve a democratic society and questioned how current "school choice"…

This article offers yet another look at the challenge of teaching, in this case through the eyes of writers like John Passmore, Michael Novak, and Emmanuel Levinas. It is an attempt to combine the fundamental qualities of good teaching as set forth by Passmore, with the notion of "caritas", literally meaning willing the good of the other, and the…

The famous photo of Hazel Bryan jeering at Elizabeth Eckford as a mob helped drive Elizabeth from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 4, 1957, compels meditation on the nature of democratic politics. This scene is commemorative of the Little Rock events where school segregation was rampant. The author believes that the photo…