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QUALIFYING MY FAITH IN THE COMMON SCHOOL IDEAL:A NORMATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR DEMOCRATIC JUSTICE

Kathleen Knight Abowitz

Department of Educational LeadershipMiami University

Abstract. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz makes the case that charter schooling can enablemultiple publics to develop and create educational visions. Charter schooling policies can enable thesepublics to pursue these visions and agendas on behalf of both public and common educational goals aswell as goals associated with particular identities and interests. This vision of a plural public sphere,with its movement away from purely state-run traditional public schools, challenges the common schoolideal that has been part of the Western nation-state narrative for several centuries. Yet the commonschool ideal need not focus on one particular kind of school structure; rather, the ideal represents a moralclaim: that schools receiving public funds should provide participatory parity to all students, achievedthrough educational structures and curriculum shaped by principles of democratic justice. Participatoryparity and its guiding normative principles, Knight Abowitz concludes, help to qualify and clarify ourfaith in the common school ideal shaped for a new era.

Qualified Faith

At the end of the last century, the innovation of charter schooling caught theattention of many educational theorists. As an educational philosopher with greatfaith in the common school ideal, I had written off most school choice movementsas privatization efforts fueled by conservative think tanks and politicians. As adaughter of the post–civil rights era American South — the first in my family toattend all twelve years of primary schooling in a desegregated public school — Iwas inherently suspicious of anyone who sought alternatives to traditional formsof public education. As a committed progressive, I distanced myself from schoolchoice movements and politicians who supported them.

But as a small-d democrat — a person who believes in the prospects and princi-ples of democratic governance — my interest in charter schooling was increasinglycaptured as debates began over whether these new kinds of schools warranted thelabel ‘‘public.’’ As we move into a new century, it has become obvious that the sta-bility of this term is increasingly in doubt. In articles and books, theorists grapplewith the public status of charters.1 Some declare charters as formally public withrespect to their funding structures, open enrollment policies, and accountabilitymeasures. ‘‘Public’’ in this formalist sense means controlled or governed by thestate and its educational governance institutions. Charter schools in some states,however, have not met most standard definitions of public in this formalist sense;some have, in the past and today, been held to lower standards of accountability

1. Christopher Lubienski, ‘‘Redefining ‘Public’ Education: Charter Schools, Common Schools, and theRhetoric of Reform,’’ Teachers College Record 103, no. 4 (2001): 634–666; Gary Miron and ChristopherNelson, What’s Public About Charter Schools? Lessons Learned About Choice and Accountability(Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press, 2002); and Terri Wilson, ‘‘Negotiating Public and Private:Philosophical Frameworks for School Choice,’’ Education Policy Research Unit (March 2008), 1–29,http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/EPSL-0803-253-EPRU.pdf.

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with regard to their management of public monies, their student performance, andtheir enrollment policies.

In most analyses, the question of whether charters could be defined as publicschools hinged on a liberal-democratic notion of a two-sphere political universe: aworld divided up into a public world of state governance and a private world of self-interest and protection from government intervention and regulation. Theoreticalresources for breaking the binary of the public/private sphere thinking can befound in work of Jurgen Habermas and one of his American critics, Nancy Fraser.2

Both theorists take seriously the important public dimensions of civil society,and Fraser in particular writes of the emancipatory power of acknowledgingand institutionalizing a multiplicity of publics rather than one universal publicideal. As Leonard Waks reminds us, John Dewey was among the first modernphilosophers to provide a view of the public sphere as pluralistic, and as TerriWilson notes, Habermas would join both Fraser and Dewey in understanding thepublic sphere as undeniably pluralistic.3

But Fraser, immersed in the problems of institutionalized oppression,discrimination, and exclusion in today’s stratified U.S. society, seeks to makethe pluralistic public sphere more explicit, to deny the possibilities of pureconsensus in unequal societies, and to use the tensions and conflicts of publiclife to build more just institutional forms. Along these lines, charter schoolsrepresent a fundamental challenge to a universal public educational sphere ofschooling where each school aims to serve the entire school-age population of acatchment area or district; they reveal (but do not typically or necessarily cause)fragmentation, tensions, and conflicts within the educational landscape. Fraser’stheory of democratic justice, given its radically pluralistic sensibilities, can beused to explore how charter schooling laws might play some role in realizingeducational justice for greater numbers of citizens. Such charter schooling policiescould enable charters to meet the definition of ‘‘public schooling’’ in two senses:

2. See Jurgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 1 of A Theory of CommunicativeAction, and Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reasoning, vol. 2 of A Theoryof Communicative Action, both trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981 and 1984,respectively); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiryinto a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989). I draw primarily from three of Fraser’s works: Nancy Fraser, JusticeInterruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘‘Postsocialist’’ Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); NancyFraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (NewYork: Verso, 2003); and Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a GlobalizingWorld (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

3. Leonard J. Waks, ‘‘Dewey’s Theory of the Democratic Public and the Public Character of CharterSchools,’’ and Terri S. Wilson, ‘‘Civic Fragmentation or Voluntary Association? Habermas, Fraser, andCharter School Segregation,’’ both in this volume.

KATHLEEN KNIGHT ABOWITZ is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at MiamiUniversity, 304 McGuffey Hall, Oxford, Ohio 45056; e-mail: <[email protected]>. Her scholarshiputilizes political and moral philosophy to explore questions of community, the public, and civic aspectsof K-16 schooling.

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an altered formalist sense, insofar as the state has a more limited but definitiveability to govern and regulate charter schooling, and a functionalist sense, whereincharters would be accountable for achieving just outcomes with regard to theeducation of their students.

Charter school laws and policies might become venues for democratic justicewhen they are guided by principles for achieving democratic justice, principlesthat I will name and defend here. This position necessarily requires me to revisitmy faith in the common school ideal, one that has served me well but that hasnot always served other citizens as faithfully. Fraser’s theory of multiple andconflicting public spheres based on existing forms of inequality and social strati-fication helps to clarify and qualify the nature of my faith in the common schoolideal in light of twenty-first century social contexts. This theory serves as a basisfor seeing the public possibilities in charter school reform, yet holds no magicalbelief that charters or choice policies are a panacea for traditional public schoolproblems. I hold no such illusions. In fact, as I will briefly discuss in this article’sconclusion,4 charter schooling is at present a long way from realizing its potentialas a structure for greater democratic justice, and charter schooling cannot andshould not completely replace traditional forms of public schooling once and forall in this society. My advocacy of charter school reform is limited and partial andis based on the idea that ‘‘the public’’ of public schooling denotes not simply thestate, but the associational life of civil society and local communities as well.

Seeing the public possibilities in charter schooling requires a shifting ofthe liberal-democratic public/private dichotomy and an expansion of our viewsregarding what shared life in a society requires beyond traditional governmentalinstitutions. Charter schools as civil society institutions can benefit from theenergy and freedom of that ‘‘third sphere’’ of political life in the United States.At the same time, further observation of charter school development and criticaldebates with colleagues such as Wilson and Waks provide crucial guidance onthe potential positive role of the state in checking, guiding, and interconnectingthe educational energies now blooming in civil society through charter schoolexpansion. The rich terrain of U.S. civil society and associational democracy pro-vides much of the fuel that started and sustains charter school policies now inexistence in almost all states. Civil society encompasses neighborhood grassrootsgroups, organizations based on ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural identities, andlarge, national nonprofit or not-for-profit organizations. Charters are increasinglyfunded by a complicated mix of such organizations, as well as new public-privatehybrids in which for-profit,5 civic, and grassroots energies combine for educationalventures.

4. I have also addressed this issue in Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Robert Karaba, ‘‘CharterSchooling and Democratic Justice,’’ Educational Policy 24, no. 3 (2010): 534–558, http://epx.sagepub.com/content/24/3/534.full.pdf+html.

5. For-profit charters have proliferated in some states, and while they will not get any particular focushere, they stand as exceptions to my generalizations that charter schools can occupy spaces in civilsociety. No matter what their educational missions, for-profit school operators function in the private


Clearly, charter policies continue to signal something new under the sun.This ‘‘something’’ is the possibility for institutionalized third spaces betweengovernment and individual, where democratic justice might be realized throughschools, consistent with the common school ideal. These are spaces for multiplepublics to create educational visions and pursue them with and on behalf ofpublic and common educational goals as well as on behalf of those educationalgoals associated with particular identities and interests. This bifocal nature of thecharter school vision is particularly vital and necessary for those whose educationalinterests have consistently not been met in traditional public schools. But this thirdspace, where civil society meets government and particularized group and culturalinterests, raises important questions for those who, like the participants in thissymposium, search for a way to maintain some reasonable faith in the commonschool ideal. Such questions can help educational reformers construct morerobust normative frameworks by which we might judge the public potential andperformance of not only charter schools but all schools carrying the public label.

Separations

Terri Wilson shares my attachment to the common school ideal. She citesmuch empirical evidence for the claim that charters exacerbate the already trou-blesome ethnic and social class segregations that we find in our traditional publicschools. That such segregation patterns are (arguably) de facto rather than de juredoes little to placate citizens like Wilson and me, whose faith in the commonschool ideal rests upon hopes of harmony among ethnicities, classes, cultures,sexualities, abilities, and religions. My own educational story is embedded in thecommon school narrative; I am among those whose lives and identities have beentransformed in schools where racial, ethnic, and social class diversity promotedtremendous opportunities for interpersonal, social, and intellectual growth. As awhite person attending a diverse public school characterized by a range of ethnicand class identities, I understood the common school experiment to be a success.Later, as a person studying educational inequality and the history of more thanfifty years of school integration efforts in the United States, I had to qualify thatinitial understanding. The process of reexamining my own faith in the commonschool ideal resulted in a personal conclusion akin to Derrick Bell’s assessment:

It is painful for many of us, but it is time to acknowledge that racial integration as the primaryvehicle for providing effective schooling for black and Latino children has run its course.Where it is working, or has a real chance to work, it should continue, but for the millions ofblack and Latino children living in areas that are as racially isolated in fact as they once wereby law, it is time to look elsewhere.6

Bell’s own leadership on behalf of integration reform during his lifetime must makethis admission especially regretful, but his view that integration cannot be the onlypath toward effective schooling experiences for poor and marginalized families is

sector of society insofar as a primary interest of these ventures is to make a profit. Charter laws canoptimally serve aims of democratic justice when for-profit schools are disallowed.

6. Derrick Bell, ‘‘Desegregation’s Demise,’’ Education Digest 73, no. 4 (2007): 17.


increasingly shared by other citizens as well. The promises of integration are notyet fulfilled, and many families are tired of waiting for educational institutionsthat both integrate and educate all children, regardless of wealth or status. Manyin these communities justifiably feel that they have sacrificed long enough.7

Even if we agree, however, that integration policies and initiatives have notyet completely succeeded, and that as a result our real public schools are still agreat distance from the common school ideal in numerous ways, it may be thatsome theories of public life only further fragment an already divided public sphere.Wilson argues that this is the problem with using Fraser’s theory as a progressiveconceptual framework for charter schooling movements. According to Wilson,Fraser mistakenly views historical failures to achieve an inclusive, universalpublic sphere as evidence that Habermas’s universal ideal is itself misguided.His theory of communicative ethics can be seen as setting up the conditions forcitizens to create universal, inclusive spaces of deliberation and decision making.But as Wilson charges, ‘‘Fraser’s critique uses the historical fact of the bourgeoispublic sphere as an institutionalized example of the weakness of the theory ofcommunicative ethics.’’8 What Fraser does not take into account is the ways inwhich universalized public spaces — integrated public schools, let us say — allowall participants to be reshaped and reformed through the work of communicatingacross difference. My own public school experience in a desegregated schoolsystem in the American South is certainly a case in point — my views on race andracial relations are quite distinct from the views held for generations by membersof my Southern white family.

Wilson’s solution is to develop criteria by which we can evaluate the publicdimensions or qualities of charter school proposals, including the evaluation of howthese schools actually help to integrate (or further balkanize) our society. Wilson’smove to develop of a set of ‘‘public criteria’’ is an excellent one, a subject that I willreturn to later in this essay. But first we must examine that part of Wilson’s criteriathat deals directly with preventing segregation effects. Such a criterion mightregulate against segregation by including specifications regarding racial-ethniccomposition for charter schools; for example, some states require charter schoolsto manage their admissions so as to yield close correspondence between ethniccomposition in charter enrollment and that of the surrounding district. Such typesof public criterion often serve as a claim that schools not integrated along ethnicityand social class lines cannot be characterized as public or as serving public ends.

While I agree with Wilson that integration of racial-ethnic groups andsocial classes is an important educational goal, such blunt quota measuresmay undermine the capacities of educational publics to organically develop

7. Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Allen writes that sacrifice is an inextricable part ofdemocratic citizenship, but that democratic sacrifice must be equally shared among all members, andbe characterized by reciprocity.

8. Wilson, ‘‘Civic Fragmentation or Voluntary Association?’’ 656.


unique visions and innovative curricula that promote their aims. To evaluatethe degree to which the schools of these publics are functionally public, we mustuse a distinct assessment. Educational publics will have both intrapublic andinterpublic purposes. The intrapublic purposes have to do with the building ofalternative discourses and forms of solidarity that enable young people to grow anddevelop within smaller school communities brought together by a common visionand ideal. That common vision might be comprised, for example, of a commonAfrican American or Muslim American experience, a shared commitment toenvironmental science and ecological activism, or a shared commitment to aninternational curriculum and cosmopolitan ethic. Having a particularist elementof focus or emphasis in a school curriculum serves intrapublic purposes, and doesnot itself diminish the potential of interpublic aims being met. While charterscannot and should not admit students based on their race-ethnicity, those withmission-centered purposes can better achieve their goals when genuine interestrather than false quotas shapes enrollments.

What is hard for small-d democrats such as Wilson and I to confront is thatwhile integration is indelibly a part of the common school ideal, the offenses of defacto segregation do not represent the moral equivalent of the larger harms enduredby generations of U.S. citizens whose schools have failed to provide them withan equalized education. Harry Brighouse writes that for those embracing the com-mon school, or what he refers to as the ‘‘comprehensive’’ ideal, mixing childrenof diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds is valuable, for various reasons,including promoting equality and promoting a more cohesive social fabric.9 Yetwhile there is nothing wrong with the common school or comprehensive ideal,Brighouse argues, it should be regarded as secondary to larger normative educa-tional criteria.10 These criteria have to do with the larger goals of education, andfor Brighouse, these primary goals include developing students as autonomous,self-governing thinkers and as participants in the economy, in civic affairs, andin social life. These goals are supported, according to Brighouse, by a distributiveprinciple that states that educational resources must be distributed so as to benefitthose who are currently least advantaged.11 Such a principle, when part of a publiccriteria for schools, could impede the reoccurrence of the ‘‘separate but unequal’’legacies of our past.

Fraser’s theory of the public sphere would structure a similar response, I think,to those who regard charter schooling as a balkanizing force. Brighouse’s largerpoint is that while de facto segregated schools are not desirable for the purposesof helping to create a more cohesive social fabric, what is ultimately at stakeis whether or if this segregation has any significant educational consequences

9. Harry Brighouse, ‘‘Educational Justice and Socio-Economic Segregation in Schools,’’ Journal ofPhilosophy of Education 41, no. 4 (2007): 579.

10. Ibid., 580.

11. Ibid., 577. Brighouse fully develops these goals and this egalitarian distributive principle in his bookOn Education (New York: Routledge, 2006).


that impede the ability of the school to meet the normative goals of education.Brighouse envisions a number of hypothetical scenarios in which segregation ofdifferent groups in schools could indeed harm the opportunities of some childrento receive an equal education, but the harm in these cases is the failure to educaterather than the failure to integrate. While integration of these schools might solvethese educational failures, there is no guarantee that this would be the case.Integration, while desirable, is a secondary educational good; the realization of anequal education is primary.

With that said, it is in the state’s interest to encourage integrated schoolenvironments. Governmental institutions should promote a future society wherediverse individuals can coexist peacefully and cooperate as citizens, neighbors, andworkers. Thus, public criteria by which we might judge charter school proposalsor charter school performance, based in evidence of their success at promotinglearning across cultural, class, ethnic, and religious differences, are indeed defen-sible and desirable. While a criterion that actually limited charter enrollments tothe racial-ethnic compositions of their surrounding districts would be one way ofmeeting this goal, there are other, perhaps more imaginative ways that states couldhelp promote and provide for this kind of learning. Like Wilson, I want charterschool policies to promote engagement across social classes, races, ethnicities, andreligious identities. But I am concerned that in our rush to numerically integratelearning environments, and out of our intent to avoid creating enclosed, priva-tized spheres of isolation, we push out innovation and mission-driven educationalinstitutions that come out of civil society associations and movements. Are thereother solutions?

Connections

How might we reconstruct the common school ideal while still encourag-ing charter schools, institutions sometimes decidedly uncommon in scope andmission, to form using public tax dollars? The common school ideal thus fardiscussed rests upon two normative assumptions: that schools provide ways ofhelping students experience and learn from the varieties of cultural differencescontained within our larger society, and that schools provide an equalized educa-tional experience across differences of wealth and status. Charter schools, whilenot common schools, can achieve both of these goals if the laws governing themare conceptualized using structural and curricular imagination, and if these lawsare developed using a robust normative conception of justice.12

Leonard Waks constructs an inspiring vision of the ‘‘networked commonschool’’ as one such imaginative structure, working to realize a broadly Deweyanvision of concentric and multiple public spheres within contemporary contexts.Using Dewey’s democratic theory, he defines the political layers of democraticsociety: individuals, associations, publics, civil society, and the state. Each layer

12. For more on the requirements of democratic justice and charter schooling, see Knight Abowitz andKaraba, ‘‘Charter Schooling and Democratic Justice.’’


is important and each has distinct functions. Waks makes the important clarifi-cation that the larger public of publics is partner to, but not synonymous with,government institutions:

The idea of a ‘‘democratic public’’ on Dewey’s account may then be taken in several senses,including (a) one among many distinct publics whose inner workings and external exchangesare democratic; (b) the association of all such publics, expressing public voice and achievingpublic influence in public affairs; or (c) the association of all associations in a nominallydemocratic society, democratic and nondemocratic alike.13

Waks distinguishes between the democratic state and its publics. Further, heargues that the problems of the state’s educational institutions are deeply rootedand do not often inspire the kind of innovative thinking needed today to fullyremedy educational injustices faced by populations marginalized by poverty andsocial status. The problems of residential segregation, poverty, and discriminationare institutionalized. Overcoming these conditions requires synergistic actionamong state and civil society actors:

The state system, in education and other areas of public concern, thus devolves into habitualbehavior and bureaucracy. It requires pressures from publics, organized and active in civilsociety, to transform existing situations. These publics, however, need to achieve sufficientrecognition if they are to accrue the power necessary to influence public action. For this tooccur the publics have to, first, identify themselves in the minds of their members and thegeneral public, and, second, enter into mutually reinforcing alliances to forge powerful socialmovements.14

Waks’s analysis points to the kinds of connections that must accompany effortsto charter new schools. These connections must be built and sustained amongand between educational publics, and between these publics and the state. Bothtypes of connections ensure that educational publics in the form of charter schoolsrealize their interpublic and intrapublic purposes.

Charters cannot be considered public entities if students are cloistered withinnarrow and enclosed spheres of particularized knowledge and skills, as can happenin many kinds of schools, traditional public, private, and charter alike. Stu-dents at a school focusing on Hispanic American history, identity, and languagesmust understand through their curriculum that they are part of a larger cultural,economic, ecological, and political social world. They must learn to take theiridentities and knowledge into large public spheres in order to represent theirinterests and deliberate with diverse others. They must be guided by curriculumstandards that emphasize the importance of cultural diversity and pluralism in thelarger society. They must be encouraged, through the school curriculum as well asstate-facilitated partnerships and networks, to make meaningful connections withother schools, civic groups, and agencies — both those within the United Statesand, as is increasingly possible through technological innovation, beyond U.S.borders. All these learning goals are part of a school that is functionally public,whose purposes are inclusive of preparing students to be vital actors in the public

13. Waks, ‘‘Dewey’s Theory of the Democratic Public,’’ 672.

14. Ibid., 674.


sphere. Through such networks, substantive encounters might be facilitated andmeaningfully connected to the curriculum. This is what Waks’s networked com-mon school idea is about, and this idea signals one form of a common school idealboth within traditional public schools and among charter school systems. Turningto technology and community partnerships for creative solutions represents a steptoward enabling the interpublic functions of charter schools. States should be help-ing to facilitate such innovation and connection through incentives, resources,and support networks. Thus, the common school ideal becomes qualified throughWaks’s proposals: the common school can consist of diverse students learningtogether in shared school structures or buildings, but it might also consist indiverse students learning together in virtual spaces, community spaces, and otherplaces beyond the confines of one’s own school building.

As Waks implies, states should take a leadership role in exploring thesenew potential meanings of the common school ideal. Yet, following Wilson, statesshould be more than facilitators of innovation; they must use their unique positionas the representative of the collective public sphere of a society to ensure that thenormative principles of the common school ideal are met. For charter schooling tobe conceptualized on something more than a free-market notion of civil society,it needs the regulatory arm of the state to ensure that the normative conditions ofthe democratic public sphere are realized in all schools receiving funding throughtax revenues. These normative conditions form the underlying assumptions of thecommon school ideal, and they are central to the pursuit of democratic justice.

Justice

The common school ideal, after about two hundred years of dominance in theglobal context of Western nation-states, is changing. In nineteenth-century U.S.,British, and French societies, for example, the common school dream — whilecertainly the object of much debate and controversy — began to be powerfullyhitched to the ideal of democracy. The rise of nationalism during the nineteenthcentury followed the transition from the village common school to the estab-lishment and expansion of the public school system that was solidly in place bythe mid-twentieth century. It was only through persistent struggle that disen-franchised populations within these nations finally began to achieve their ownspace within these so-called common schools in the twentieth century. Long aftermany states had legally imposed public schooling systems, these same states weredenying some members of the public full participation in the nominally publicschools. We can say, therefore, that the common school ideal has always beenin process, incomplete, and imperfect; that it continues to provoke debate, if notoutright skepticism, should not be surprising.

The common school ideal that ascended from the eighteenth through the twen-tieth centuries was never a simple or purely moral endeavor, since many partiespushing common schools had narrowly self-interested motivations: assimilatingimmigrants into a Protestant Christian culture and religion, preparing young peo-ple to be docile, submissive workers in factories, or sanitizing and controlling poorimmigrants deemed morally and socially dangerous. These reasons for common


schooling were certainly influential, but as Richard Pring argues, a strong moralthread runs through this narrative as well: ‘‘The fight for the common school wasessentially a moral one in terms of achieving greater social justice and equality,respect for persons and preparation for citizenship within a democratic order.’’15

The common school ideal represents these moral aspirations, even as the commonschool structures that our societies have thus far built do not always live up to thisideal (given the inevitable multiple political, economic, and social interests thatshape them). Trying to qualify our faith in the common school ideal requires fac-ing up to this pervasive gap — between ideal and structures — without giving upthe many successes the comprehensive common school has achieved as a public-building institution during the course of the history of the democratic nation-state.

At the end of the twentieth century, we began to see the nation-state’s emi-nence decline, and a parallel challenge to the idea of the common school ideal.While both trends have been fostered by national and international neoliberalpolicies, there are multiple forces pushing these challenges to the common schoolideal. We have witnessed the growing power of transnational alliances such asthe European Union and multinational corporations. We in the United States areliving within a historical context of unprecedented waves of immigration as wellas in a time of great global migration. In addition, there is growing recognition ofthe ways in which nation-states are joined together in shared fates of ecologicalinterdependency as the effects of climate change have demonstrated the need forglobal responses and solutions. Like the nation-state around which its purpose wasso centered, the common school system faces great challenges within this new eraas its central points of coherence seem to fray. School choice schemes of variouskinds — public school choice, charters, and vouchers — all show that the com-mon school structure is no longer the only way to think about the shared socialproject of schooling. The state no longer is the sole and unquestioned ‘‘leader’’ inshaping the direction and form of schooling; the strong state of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries no longer holds.

But in this new era where nationalism’s influence may be weakening, andthe state’s power is more limited, what of the common school ideal, that moralaspiration to greater social justice, equality, and multicultural citizenship? Insteadof confusing the common school ideal with any one structural design, or conceivingit as inextricably attached to the nationalist agenda that gave birth to it, we mightqualify and reexamine our faith in the common school by examining the moralprinciples underlying the ideal itself. Through identifying and exploring thesemoral principles, we position ourselves to adapt the common school ideal to meetthe new challenges before us.

Noting that common schooling is the project of achieving equality and multi-cultural citizenship, Pring sets us on the road to this examination by evoking theterm ‘‘social justice’’ as its moral aim, understood broadly in this usage as parity of

15. Richard Pring, ‘‘The Common School,’’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 41, no. 4 (2007): 504.


educational opportunities and outcomes for all students in a society.16 The promi-nence of social justice in the common school ideal, and in any larger normativeeducational criteria set forth for a democratic society, is regularly asserted inWestern democratic theory and institutions. Moreover, in contemporary Westernsocieties, social justice is both a widely popularized term in educational writingsas well as a subject of political contestation.17 Yet the term ‘‘social justice’’ is toovague for my purposes here; it does not place sufficient focus on the specific moraland political means and ends of the justice ideal.

In the rest of this article, I sketch the aims and principles associated withwhat I call democratic justice, while leaving the full exploration and defense ofthese principles for later and longer forums. ‘‘Democratic justice’’ more preciselysignals both the ends and the means by which justice is achieved in democraticsocieties. Justice in educational institutions is not a matter of ‘‘monological’’work by justice theorists (or by strong, charismatic leaders); it is ‘‘dialogical’’work, whose specifics are determined by citizens themselves in real institutionalsettings, guided by constitutional and other standards of democratic governance.18

Particularly in the case of the U.S. schooling system with its long (though recentlysuspended) history of strong local governance, the democratic means of attainingjust schooling structures are as important as the ends we seek.

Standards of democratic justice are at the center of any broad educative cri-terion for shaping the ways that taxpayer-funded schools meet the moral andpolitical aims of the common school ideal. Principles of democratic justice shouldalso be at the center of empirical judgments regarding how well charter schools areserving children and families, particularly those who have suffered in inadequateand underperforming schools. These principles can help us identify the moralcenter of the common school ideal, thus orienting our quest to judge charterschooling proposals or performances as properly public — that is, as meeting thenormative criteria set out for all public schools.

To achieve democratic justice in our current era (for this is a his-toricized yet normative view19), we need to attend to four principles that

16. Ibid.

17. In 2006, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in 2006 came under firefrom the National Association of Scholars for using the disposition of ‘‘social justice’’ to judge teachercandidates’ readiness for teaching. See Elia Powers, ‘‘A Spirited Disposition Debate,’’ Inside HigherEducation (June 6, 2006), http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/06/disposition. The popularityof the idea of social justice in educational writings has been in evidence for more than a decade. See,for example, Bill Atweh, Action Research in Practice: Partnerships for Social Justice in Education (NewYork: Routledge, 1998); Linda Darling-Hammond, Jennifer French, and Silvia Poloma Garcia-Lopez,eds., Learning to Teach for Social Justice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002); and Nicholas M.Michelli and David Lee Keiser, eds., Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice (New York:Routledge/Falmer, 2005).

18. See Fraser’s discussion of this point in Scales of Justice, 28. See also Ian Shapiro’s emphasis on thispoint in his book Democratic Justice (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999).

19. Fraser rightly notes that these principles and normative framework are not blueprints. We are notphilosopher-kings laying out the institutional designs or policy proposals that will meet these moral


serve an overall normative core of participatory parity. Initial developmentof these principles — redistribution, recognition, representation, and transmis-sion20 — begins with Fraser’s work to conjoin the divergent justice theories incontemporary social and political theory. It is in that same spirit that I discuss thefour principles underlying democratic justice aims for publicly funded schools. Inthe twentieth century, justice theorizing has moved from a focus on redistribu-tion (from the Marxist and political liberal perspectives) to recognition (from thepostmodern and poststructural concerns with identity politics). Justice theorizinghas been curtailed by the dualistic nature of these debates, and Fraser argues forbringing these justice perspectives together in service to the overriding aim of par-ticipatory parity.21 Following this logic as well as more recent justice scholarship,redistribution and recognition are joined by representation and transmission in thisarticulation of democratic justice. Fraser has identified representation as a thirdprinciple of democratic justice out of a concern about the ways in which full partic-ipation in institutions is impeded in real politics.22 The principle of transmissionis derived from intergenerational justice writings and the considerations of futuregenerations that schooling for democratic justice must include. In the remainder ofthis essay, I briefly sketch the normative core and central principles of democraticjustice for K–12 schooling, and suggest some particular implications they have forcharter schools as potential sites for achieving this qualified common school ideal.

Parity of Participation

Parity of participation is the normative core of democratic justice: ‘‘justicerequires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact

standards for all times and places. Rather, I offer a theoretical standpoint and principles of democraticjustice that I believe best fit today’s social conditions and injustices, ‘‘seeking to foster citizen deliberationabout how best to implement the requirements of justice.’’ Such a stance acknowledges pluralism aswell as democratic legitimacy. The philosopher’s role is not, in this view, to ‘‘effectively usurp . . . therole of the citizenry’’; rather, it requires us to ‘‘discern the point at which theoretical argumentationrightly ends and dialogical judgment [of citizens] should begin’’ (Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution orRecognition, 71).

20. My writings on the principles of democratic justice for schooling have evolved over time.Following Fraser in Justice Interruptus, I originally outlined two necessary principles: representationand recognition (see Kathleen Knight Abowitz, ‘‘Charter Schooling and Social Justice,’’ EducationalTheory 51, no. 2 [2001]: 151–170). In subsequent writings I added transmission as a principle ofintergenerational justice that must supplement Fraser’s democratic theory of justice (Kathleen KnightAbowitz, ‘‘Intergenerational Justice and School Choice,’’ in School Choice Policies and Outcomes:Empirical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Walter Feinberg and Christopher Lubienski [Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2008], 79–97). I have, in one instance, articulated the transmissionprinciple as part of recognition (see Knight Abowitz and Karaba, ‘‘Charter Schooling and DemocraticJustice’’). The current writing on this subject, inclusive of representation following Fraser’s theory ofdemocratic justice, has evolved to include political inclusiveness as a core principle of democraticdialogue and governance (see Fraser’s Scales of Justice). I thus see fit to expand my own framing ofdemocratic justice to four distinct principles, as I will defend here and in future scholarly treatments ofthis topic.

21. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition, 31.

22. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 16.


with one another as peers.’’23 Participatory parity requires that students graduatefrom K–12 schooling as persons prepared to participate meaningfully in civic,social, and economic realms of life, with the cognitive abilities to engage inworthwhile practices and critical thinking.24

Participatory parity represents the focal point of our reconstructed commonschooling ideal, for this standard implies the moral and political ideal to whichall publicly funded schooling should aspire. Such a moral and political goal canshape the creation of a wide range of educational environments — many of whichcan and should be racially or ethnically integrated in various ways, but some ofwhich may not be — to educate for broad, shared goals. The normative core ofparticipatory parity is achieved through structuring school policy and curriculumin concert with the moral and political principles of recognition, redistribution,representation, and transmission.

While there are no standardized ways of helping all students to meetthis overall educational purpose, there are certainly standards inherent in thedisciplinary perspectives used in preparing students to participate as equals in civic,social, and economic spheres as critical thinkers. These content and professionalstandards can be used to shape the curriculum in all schools considered publicand funded by taxpayers, but need not standardize the curriculum in any publicschools, charter or otherwise. In particular, charter schools unable to flexibly adapttheir local missions and purposes to these overall standards, within constitutionalparameters, are hampered from creating learning communities in their schoolsthat reflect their public’s educational focus.

Parity of participation is not just achieved through formal and informal cur-riculum in schools. Part of the common school ideal is a broadly participatoryone; schools should be reflective of various larger publics and local communities.The common school ideal views the public’s schools as formative; public schoolsshould be public-building institutions. Schools that can engender the constructiveparticipation of parents and community citizens will likely be more able to achievetheir missions through both enhanced legitimacy as well as educational capacity.25

Charter policies are part of this common school ideal in that they can promotesuch participation among parents, community members, and civil society insti-tutions — what David Mathews calls ‘‘the coproduction of education’’ wherein


24. This is not, admittedly, a full exegesis of what the normative core of participatory parity meansfor the overall purposes of K–12 education in U.S. society. Here, I pull together ideas from twophilosophers who have recently made convincing arguments related to the role of schools in ademocratic society: Brighouse, On Education, and Kenneth A. Strike, Ethical Leadership in Schools:Creating Community in an Environment of Accountability (Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin,2007).

25. Strike, in Ethical Leadership in Schools, notes that while schools are accountable to legislativeauthorities, the authority of democratic localism is important and should be cultivated by school leaders(105). Such cultivation has clear educational benefits for students.


public schools are sites of citizen-to-citizen engagement.26 Participatory parity ofboth families as well as students (future citizens) can be achieved through stateeducation policies that promote the formation of educational publics to pursue andensure educational justice at the level of the child and school. As constructed fromthe pragmatist tradition, democratic justice theory requires a jettisoning of therigid forms of the liberal-democratic public/private binary that for many seems toforce a choice between no state and omnipotent markets, or a powerful state withno flexibility or local differentiation available.27 Educational publics can be strongpublics — spaces between government and civil society that operate as quasi-direct sites of democracy — empowered to operate schools accountable to largerpublics, including state governments.28 Such strong publics must be structuredand governed by the justice principles that are central to the normative core ofparticipatory parity: recognition, redistribution, representation, and transmission.

Recognition

The achievement of parity of participation for all citizens requires the recog-nition of a child’s individuality and identities. Schools should ‘‘deinstitutionalizepatterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and . . . replace themwith patterns that foster it.’’29 Recognition implies reciprocal relations, whereinsubjects see and acknowledge other human beings as both equal to and distinctfrom themselves. In schooling, recognition demands that we examine how curricu-lum (formal and informal) and school structures symbolically and culturally valuecertain kinds of knowledges and practices that exclude, oppress, or render invisiblethe identities of some families. The principle of recognition requires that we viewschooling as a process that must respect all students through communication andteaching practices that are inclusive and do not malign or disparage certain groupseither through distortions or unreasonable exclusions. While this does not requirethat any school include in their formal curriculum all the various groups, cultures,and identities that might make up a particular community, it does obligate aschool to pursue formal and informal curriculum as well as teaching practices thatsignal an inclusive and diverse school community. This is as true for a charter

26. David Mathews, ‘‘The Public and the Public Schools: The Coproduction of Education,’’ Phi DeltaKappan 89, no. 8 (2008): 560. Mathews does not take a position on charter schooling in this article butrefers more broadly to the vital importance of public engagement with public schools.

27. Stacy Smith argues that the ‘‘failure to recognize the multifarious vertical and horizontal waysthat power operates across the public/private binary poses the potentially negative consequence for theantichoice Left that it will overlook the possibility that the market might serve as a mechanism forachieving democratic ends such as equality and community.’’ Smith continues, ‘‘The question thenbecomes, how can market allocation be governed democratically, and with democratic outcomes?’’ SeeSmith, ‘‘School Choice Through a Foucauldian Lens,’’ in The Emancipatory Promise of Charter Schools:Toward a Progressive Politics of School Choice, ed. Eric Rofes and Lisa M. Stulberg (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 2004), 234–235.

28. For a discussion of educational publics based on Fraser’s notion of ‘‘strong publics,’’ see KnightAbowitz, ‘‘Charter Schooling and Social Justice.’’



school focused on a Hispanic American identity, language, and culture as it is fora comprehensive, traditional public high school.

Public choice policies such as charter schooling allow, in theory, for a broadarray of identities and cultural communities to realize their educational visions andachieve participatory parity for their children. Charter school policies can promotenew schools that seek to recognize unique and valuable identities, respectingboth their historical legacies and their collective futures. The STAR school, anelementary school in Arizona serving students who live in the southwest cornerof the Navaho Nation and the surrounding rural area, is one such place.30 Nativeand other rural families have built a curriculum lodged in Native knowledgeand values, but that also engages local communities through its emphasis onservice and citizenship.31 Recognition of difference need not balkanize or segregatestudents from their broader communities, and charter schooling can offer waysto recognize difference without essentializing it (though this is not always oreasily done). Parity of participation can be enhanced through meaningful schoolcurriculum and structures designed to link place, identity, and self to the largercontexts of community, nation(s), and world.

Redistribution

Parity of participation cannot be achieved without material resources. In asociety characterized by large gaps between rich and poor, the principle of redis-tribution is central to achieving democratic justice.32 The public school systemitself is the result of having successfully convinced a majority of citizens that theyshould be taxed for the educational benefit of all the children in their community.While the redistribution principle has been at the core of justice theorizing in West-ern democracies for some time, the actual governmental practice of redistributionhas been in decline in a neoliberal era favoring free-market policies.33 Fraser callsthis ‘‘the problem of displacement,’’ in which there is a ‘‘shift from redistributionto recognition . . . occurring despite (or because of) economic globalization.’’ Asshe explains,

status conflicts have achieved paradigmatic status at precisely the moment when anaggressively expanding neoliberal capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality.In this context, they are serving less to supplement, complicate, and enrich redistributionstruggles than to marginalize, eclipse, and displace them.34

We can also see this displacement in charter school laws and funding. In manystates, charter school reform has been marked by the lack of flow of capital to

30. The STAR School, http://www.starschool.org/.

31. Mark Sorensen, ‘‘STAR: Service to All Relations,’’ in Place-Based Education in the Global Age, ed.David A. Gruenewald and Gregory A. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2008), 49–64.

32. Brian Barry provides an excellent defense of this position in Why Social Justice Matters (New York:Polity Press, 2005).

33. See David Hursh, ‘‘Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies,’’American Educational Research Journal 44, no. 3 (2007): 493–518.



founding charters, particularly those charters started by neighborhood and grass-roots organizations. We can also see the problem of displacement in some states,such as Michigan and Ohio, which have allowed charter schooling to becomedominated by for-profit ventures. Charter schooling laws dominated by ‘‘free-market thinking’’ disfavor the kinds of redistribution measures that are necessaryto achieving the common school ideal in schools considered to be public.35 Whilecharter schooling provides avenues for recognition — a Latino family might with-draw their children from a neighborhood public school in order to attend a charterwith a dual-language, Spanish-English curriculum — charter school policies usu-ally sidestep the redistributive side of educational justice.36 Although charterschool policy allows for choice, the enactment of the choice may not come tofruition because of the lack of means. Specifically, redistributive strategies thatenable marginalized neighborhoods and families to empower their educationalvisions are often displaced by weakly recognitive strategies that are importantbut not sufficient to overcome the vast inequalities separating rich and poor com-munities in our society. Funding for charter schools is still, in most places, cutout of traditional public school budgets rather than being based in new fundingsources; thus, the way in which we currently redistribute educational dollarsto fund charter schools ultimately undercuts democratic justice for all studentsin publicly funded schools. This works against the achievement of democraticjustice, as inevitably some marginalized and underachieving groups are enrolledin all types of schools, particularly traditional public schools. While the federalstimulus package of 2008 gave charter schooling a financial boost, this does notchange the long-term financing strategies built into state charter laws.

Representation

The principle of representation concerns issues of membership, inclusion, andprocedure in the formal political realms of institutions. ‘‘Establishing criteria ofsocial belonging, and thus determining who counts as a member, the politicaldimension of justice specifies the reach’’ of recognition and redistribution. Repre-sentation requires that we pay attention to such questions as ‘‘Do the boundariesof the political community wrongly exclude some who are actually entitled torepresentation? Do the community’s decision rules accord equal voice in publicdeliberations and fair representation in public decision-making to all members?’’37

School boards represent the formal governance body with authority over public

35. For more on this line of thinking, see Knight Abowitz and Karaba, ‘‘Charter Schooling and DemocraticJustice.’’

36. As Amy Stuart Wells writes, ‘‘those seeking more local and/or community control of schools havefound it in charter school reform but at a price to those who lack the local resources to supplementthe meager public funding. In other words, the devolution aspect of charter school reform works betterfor some than others. It works very well for those with the private wealth to shape the laissez-fairepolicy to their advantage.’’ See Amy Stuart Wells, ‘‘Why Public Policy Fails to Live Up to the Potentialof Charter School Reform: An Introduction,’’ in Where Charter School Policy Fails: The Problems ofAccountability and Equity, ed. Amy Stuart Wells (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 11.

37. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 18.


schools. In the more than 14,000 school districts in the United States, schoolboards govern schools and represent the most powerful formal vehicle for citizenself-governance in schooling. School boards make facilities, budget, curricular,and personnel decisions. The structure and governance of school boards, giventhe strong degree of localism in U.S. schooling, varies by state and region. In linewith democratic justice, the school board exists to ensure that the communitiesof the school district are represented in the governance, policies, and curriculumcontent of the schools their taxes help support. School boards make many for-mal decisions, but their representation function goes beyond up and down votes.School boards are part of the leadership team in school districts that should behelping all citizens to have a voice in the deliberation over educational decisionsin the district, particularly those whose status or standing in the communitydoes not guarantee that their voice will be heard in school forums or meetings.38

This includes students, whose role in school governance can raise the level ofparticipatory parity that they will enjoy as citizens after they graduate.39

Charter schools are not required to be under the jurisdiction of any schoolboard or official representative governing body, save the founding charter of theparticular school and any governance structure it requires. Representation ofvarious community constituencies, parent groups, or marginalized students inthe governance of charters is not formally provided for in state laws. Somewhatironically, the charter school movement has in part been motivated by the poorrepresentation that some families and groups felt they had in traditional publicschool deliberations and decision making, where programs or placement decisionsdid not seem to serve their kids particularly well. Some charter schools have beenborn of the frustrations felt by families and groups who have continuously feltmarginalized and without a legitimate voice in traditional public schools. Yetwithout formal and informal means of representation of their views built intocharter governance, these charters may do no better at making a place for parentaland community voice than many traditional public schools. While teachers andadministrators should be the ‘‘first among equals’’ in deliberations and decisionmaking, representation of various school constituencies, particularly among thosegroups whose voices are seldom heard, is a priority for democratic justice inschooling to be realized. Charter schools that enable inclusive representation ofviews by all teachers, students, parents, and community members will enabledemocratic justice to be practiced in such schools.

Transmission

Democratic justice is a moral and political framework for the constructionof schooling that prepares children to enjoy participatory parity as future adults.While we cannot accurately predict all the conditions of the societies our children

38. See Abe Feuerstein, ‘‘Elections, Voting, and Democracy in Local School District Governance,’’Educational Policy 16, no. 1 (2002): 15–36.

39. Diana Hess, ‘‘Democratic Education to Reduce the Divide,’’ Social Education 72, no. 7 (2008):373–376.


will inhabit as adults, it is clear that ecological challenges, crises, and limitationswill be part of the political, social, and economic realities of their existence.Justice for today’s students requires that this condition be taken into account. Tounderstand what this aspect of justice brings to an educational framework, we canturn briefly to writings on intergenerational justice.40

Intergenerational justice, an idea basic to some indigenous cultures, representsa moral appeal to the rights of future citizens and our obligations to them asfuture inhabitants of our society. As a moral and political ideal, intergenerationaljustice takes seriously the responsibility to offer future generations a wide rangeof choices and freedoms, realizing that to do so requires protecting their vitalinterests through our own actions today in ‘‘managing the relationship betweenecological, social, and economic considerations.’’41 As Brian Barry argues, thismeans

taking seriously the idea that conditions must be such as to sustain a range of possibleconceptions of the good life. In the nature of the case, we cannot imagine in any detail whatmay be thought of as a good life in the future. But we can be quite confident that it will notinclude the violation of what I have called vital interest: adequate nutrition, clean drinkingwater, clothing and housing, health care and education, for example. We can, in addition, atthe very least leave open to people in the future the possibility of living in a world in whichnature is not utterly subordinated to the pursuit of consumer satisfaction.42

Ultimately, intergenerational justice supports democratic justice with whatWouter Achterberg calls the transmission principle, which requires that ‘‘weshould not hand the world that we have used and exploited on to our successors ina substantially worse shape than we ‘received’ it.’’43 Transmission combines withredistribution, recognition, and representation to form a framework of democraticjustice for schooling that is useful for shaping how educational institutions help allstudents — rich and poor, mainstream and marginalized, and present and futuregenerations — attain an equitable, respectful, and sustainable society.

How successfully has our common school ideal included the principle of trans-mission? Only recently has there been much substantive discussion regarding therole of this principle in structuring educational policies and curriculum in theUnited States; state educational institutions have largely been slow to respond tothe growing understanding of the ecological threats of climate change, for example.In the realm of charter schooling, there has been virtually no discussion regardingthe criterion associated with intergenerational justice, and if sustainability aims

40. This section draws from my arguments in Knight Abowitz, ‘‘Intergenerational Justice and SchoolChoice.’’

41. Mike Mills, ‘‘The Duties of Being and Association,’’ in Sustaining Liberal Democracy: EcologicalChallenges and Opportunities, ed. John Barry and Marcel Wissenburg (London: Palgrave, 2001), 164.

42. Brian Barry, ‘‘Sustainability and Intergenerational Justice,’’ in Environmental Ethics: An Anthology,ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III (New York: Blackwell, 2003), 493.

43. Richard Routley and Val Routley 1982, ‘‘Nuclear Power — Some Ethical and Social Dimensions,’’123, quoted in Wouter Achterberg, ‘‘Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Environmental Crisis?Sustainability, Liberal Neutrality, and Overlapping Consensus,’’ in The Politics of Nature: Explorationsin Green Political Theory, ed. Andrew Dobson and Paul Lucardie (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96–97.


have been served by charter school policies, it has been an unintended consequencerather than a central goal. A handful of charter schools around the nation that havea life science or environmental emphasis have likely received more students ortuition dollars from various choice schemes, but these are peripheral consequencesrather than targeted and focused efforts.

Evaluating schools using criteria based in the transmission principle wouldinvolve judging how adequately their institutional structures, processes, and cur-ricula prepare students to understand and participate in a society faced withbalancing ecological, social, and economic concerns. While a multitude of school-ing models and curricula could potentially prepare students with the knowledge,values, and skills to exist in such a society, some elements of a criteria wouldinclude to what degree schools (1) attend to basic environmental standards in theirstructural maintenance; (2) deliver educational programs that include a soundgrounding in the life sciences; (3) include experiential curricular components setin local ecosystems; and (4) include adequate means for preparing students forcritical thinking and public deliberation about shared ecological concerns andissues in the context of our modern democracy.

Implications and Conclusions

Qualifying our faith in common schooling calls us to recognize the moraland political aims embedded within the ideal, pulling apart the common schoolstructures (comprehensive high schools and neighborhood/community primaryschools) from the overarching aim and central principles of democratic justice ineducation. As I have delineated, the overall aim of publicly funded schools thatserve both intrapublic and interpublic purposes for educational publics should be toprepare students for participatory parity as adults. This parity requires that school-ing policies, structures, and curricula be shaped in light of four moral and politicalprinciples of justice: recognition, redistribution, representation, and transmission.

These principles can give substance to a set of criteria that governmentsmight develop to judge the public potential of charter school proposals, a processWilson rightly argues is needed. Such criteria might be used to judge all publiclyfunded schools, regardless of their particular form. Charter schools are not com-mon schools, but through governments that can strike the right balance betweenregulation, support, and flexibility in working with civil society associations, theycan be public schools. Developing criteria for assessing the public function of theseschools can help us regulate and guide educational institutions that receive statesupport.

While states must take a clear role in attending to the educational aim ofparticipatory parity and the principles that are required to achieve it, the states’role cannot and should not be merely regulatory. As Waks suggests, there areinteresting and fruitful collaborations and innovations in the works to connectcurrently segregated neighborhood and charter schools; such innovations mightbe nurtured and developed with assistance from state educational agencies. Suchcollaboration and incentives across institutional lines (from state to civic realms,for example) can only happen when traditional public schools do not see charter


schools as ‘‘competition,’’ which will require different funding structures in manyplaces. Still, the larger point is that states should see their role as more thanregulation; the state can both regulate and facilitate the interconnections betweendifferent educational publics, different public schools, and civil society institutionsworking on behalf of schooling reform.

Yet there is no getting around the fact that the conception of democraticjustice I have sketched here will require more regulation of charter schools thanis currently provided for (or may be popular) in the charter school laws in manystates. The common school ideal is not realized in practice in most charter schoolstoday (nor, for that matter, in too many traditional public schools). Becausecharter school laws have often been most strongly shaped by neoliberal thinktanks and political coalitions,44 they often have been passed in state legislatureswithout accountability measures adequate for meeting the public educationalaims associated with the view of educational justice sketched here. Principles ofredistribution, representation, and transmission have in particular been ignored asimportant for charter schooling education and governance. Holding schools andlaw-making bodies accountable for the aims and principles of participatory parity,and the supple but firm kinds of regulation they will require states to perform, willtake considerable political will and activism on the part of citizens. No amountof philosophizing will push legislators and state boards of education to embracethe principles and the required governing mechanisms to guarantee educationaljustice for all citizens. While philosophy can help to clarify the moral and politicalarguments, diverse citizens must deliberate the meanings of these principles andconvince their representatives — local, state, and national — to embrace a notionof public schooling and school choice that is imbued with a public spirit and a clearsense of what it means to educate a whole person, and all children, for participatoryparity as adults. Such deliberations and activism show that our common schoolideals are still alive and well. While the forms that these schools can take are evermore diverse, this ideal that has so long been at democracy’s core can be sustainedand enriched if there are active publics to take it up, in distinct but principledforms.

44. Wells, ‘‘Why Public Policy Fails to Live Up to the Potential of Charter School Reform.’’ For furtherdiscussion of this, see Knight Abowitz and Karaba, ‘‘Charter Schooling and Democratic Justice.’’

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