Listening as a Democratic Practice, Part I: America’s Democratic Deficit
Despite making democracy our national identity, most Americans don’t meaningfully participate in civic, economic, or social democratic practices, and it’s ruining our lives. How can a radical recommitment to educational democracy through listening as a democratic practice revitalize and strengthen our institutions and our most American ideal?
“What if we started by listening to students?”
...is how I would typically start a conversation like this. But that question can admittedly sound like a sales pitch educators have heard time and again from outsiders, consultants, and new administrators looking to launch The Next Best ThingTM that will revolutionize classroom practice.
In this space, let’s get weird with it.
“Why should we listen to anybody at all?”
As Americans, we have an intuitive understanding of power as we experience it in the context of government, the workforce, and schooling–we know who’s the boss, who won the election, and who can take points off for late work. But in this two-part piece, I hope to make the case that despite making democracy our national identity, most Americans don’t meaningfully participate in civic, economic, or social democratic practices, and it’s ruining our lives. I’ll come back next month to examine how a radical recommitment to educational democracy through listening as a democratic practice can revitalize and strengthen our institutions and our most American ideal.
Most Americans are governed by officials they did not elect and do not influence.
If you were to ask the average American what democracy meant, they'd probably respond with a single word, “voting.” But if voting were the sole condition of a healthy democracy, our condition would be critical. Typical voter turnout for national elections is below 50% and drops to 5-10% for local school board elections (Carnegie), and our highly polarized, winner-take-all, first-past-the post two-party system turns half of those participants into losers. Becoming an elected official in our representative democracy has also become a job for the affluent as time and money prevent working class people from running for and holding office. The result is that 85% of Americans say that elected officials “don’t care what people like me think” and just 4% believe the political system is working “very” or “extremely well” today (Pew Research Center 2024). Amidst increasing impediments to the ballot itself and the abdication of any check on executive power by Congress, if rhetoric coming out of the White House doesn’t serve as a warning, there may be no future role for a federal legislature at all should power be vested in a single authoritarian executive.
“Why should we listen to anybody at all?”
As Americans, we have an intuitive understanding of power as we experience it in the context of government, the workforce, and schooling–we know who’s the boss, who won the election, and who can take points off for late work. But in this two-part piece, I hope to make the case that despite making democracy our national identity, most Americans don’t meaningfully participate in civic, economic, or social democratic practices, and it’s ruining our lives. I’ll come back next month to examine how a radical recommitment to educational democracy through listening as a democratic practice can revitalize and strengthen our institutions and our most American ideal.
Most Americans are governed by officials they did not elect and do not influence. If you were to ask the average American what democracy meant, they'd probably respond with a single word, “voting.” But if voting were the sole condition of a healthy democracy, our condition would be critical. Typical voter turnout for national elections is below 50% and drops to 5-10% for local school board elections (Carnegie), and our highly polarized, winner-take-all, first-past-the post two party system turns half of those participants into losers. Becoming an elected official in our representative democracy has also become a job for the affluent as time and money prevent working class people from running for and holding office. The result is that 85% of Americans say that elected officials “don’t care what people like me think” and just 4% believe the political system is working “very” or “extremely well” (Pew Research Center 2024). Amidst increasing impediments to the ballot itself and the abdication of any check on executive power by Congress, if rhetoric coming out of the White House doesn’t serve as a warning, there may be no future role for a federal legislature at all should power be vested in a single authoritarian executive.
It’s clear that national electoral party politics cannot be our only model of healthy democratic practice. Americans spend an average of 1,750 hours per year at work, about 400 more than our German counterparts (Ward 2023). Perhaps we can look for examples of democratic practice where people spend most of their adult life?
Americans have virtually no access to workplace democracy.
In just my lifetime, rates of union membership have declined from representing 1 in 5 workers to just 1 in 10. That number is distorted further by the disproportionate union representation of public employees, where one-third are covered by a union contract, compared to fewer than 1 in 10 in the private sector. Healthcare access in America is also tied to employment like no other peer nation, who provide some form of public universal healthcare at low or no cost at point-of-service. Meanwhile, wealth inequality in America continues to worsen. The top 10% of households hold 67% of total household wealth, while the bottom 50% hold just 2.4% (St Louis Fed). All of this makes the American workforce uniquely precarious among our peers, with limited workplace protections and rights, a small social safety net, and where job loss presents an extraordinary threat to financial, mental, and physical health.
The abandonment of workplace democracy built around collective bargaining in favor of individualized human capital has only worsened economic instability, alienation, and inequality. But perhaps these trends begin even earlier, where American students spend over 8,900 hours in school over the course of their primary and secondary education, 1,300 hours more than the OECD average (OECD 2023). How do schools and teachers model American democratic practices for children and young adults?
Americans do not make democratic decisions at or about school. (And no, “school choice” schemes are not a vehicle for democracy, although they’ve proven to be excellent at funneling public money to wealthy families and exacerbating school segregation.) While public schools may have publicly elected boards, school organizational charts frequently reflect the hierarchies and power dynamics of their private corporate counterparts: a largely male group of administrators and directors determine policy, hiring and firing, and curriculum decisions for a district. They're answered to by school principals who manage a largely female workforce of deprofessionalized at-will teachers, who similarly leverage classroom management strategies in their labor with students.
In the classroom, the language of workplace hierarchies and efficiencies proliferates: teachers are encouraged to teach from bell to bell, teachers are held accountable to student outcomes to ensure that no instructional minutes have been wasted, the rate at which students learn is itself determined by a pacing guide developed elsewhere with little teacher or student input, and students are instructed to do their work for teachers or risk falling behind (behind what?).
Marking additional blows to schooling as democratic practice, several states have lined up to pass deeply unpopular laws limiting collective bargaining rights of teachers and their unions while at the same time calling for statewide book bans in schools and libraries, prohibiting the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” about race and gender, and banning “DEI” initiatives at public universities. The Texas legislature even banned a kind of participatory civics education that required high school students to contact elected officials (Uguen-Csenge 2023). Many of these bills do not originate from state lawmakers or their constituents, instead they are copy-pasted from model legislation templates written and shared by reactionary groups like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC Exposed 2024).
American decisions about higher education are also predominantly driven by economic precarity: “How much will it cost to attend? How can I get out as quickly as possible? And how much money can I make in my first year after graduation?” American college students who enter caring professions can expect to make minimum payments for at least a decade as they attempt to navigate loan forgiveness programs, and those who do engage in democratic practice on campus are surveilled, brutalized, and punished. At the end of it all, the average American student debtor contributes their $38,000 in student loans to our $1.7 trillion total, nearly the GDP of Australia.
It's obviously not the case that every connection to the economic language of markets and capital is cause for concern in a capitalist economy, but when workforce development and college and career readiness become the organizing force of schooling and education – when we see the negative consequences for individual and collective health, stability, and liberty – and when these ideas pervade government, work, and school we are right to not only be suspicious but critical of aligning the ends and means of education with economics; as the state of Ohio did in 2023 when it made that alignment explicit and permanent by renaming their Department of Education the Department of Education and the Workforce.
The result of this national twenty-year project in deprofessionalizing the teacher workforce, focusing student outcomes and school quality almost exclusively on standardized test scores in math and reading, diminishing public investment in public K-12 and higher education, while aligning schooling with workforce development has been a higher pay penalty for teachers compared to their similarly educated peers, largely flat or declining standardized test scores, and a National State of Emergency for children’s mental health (American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 2021).
That’s a lot of bad news, but what’s the alternative? The answer to all of this is not the abandonment of democracy for autocracy and oligarchy. It’s to double-down on American democracy as our best idea and suffuse democratic practice throughout our civic, economic, social, and educational institutions.
It turns out Americans ourselves remain an undefeated source of the best, and often the worst, ideas shaping American ideals. As the great American pragmatist, John Dewey, argued in Democracy and Education: “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (1916).
In the second part of this piece, I’ll outline how living Dewey’s distinctly American vision for participatory democracy as a mode of associated living would transform–through listening as a democratic practice–the structures, practices, and experience of schooling.
Let’s restore humanity to education, together.
Nick Covington is an Iowa dad, former high school social studies teacher, and co-founder of Human Restoration Project!
Thanks Nick for your contribution to Provocations!
References:
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. (2021). Declaration of a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. https://www.aacap.org/App_Themes/AACAP/Docs/press/Declaration_National_Crisis_Oct-2021.pdf
ALEC Exposed. (2024). 2024 ALEC bills. https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/2024_ALEC_Bills
Carnegie Corporation of New York. (n.d.). Visualizing voter turnout in local and school board elections. https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/visualizing-voter-turnout-local-school-board-elections/
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm (Original work published 1916)
OECD. (2023). Education at a glance 2023: OECD indicators. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2023_e13bef63-en.html
Pew Research Center. (2024, April 30). More than 80% of Americans believe elected officials don’t care what people like them think. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/30/more-than-80-of-americans-believe-elected-officials-dont-care-what-people-like-them-think/
St. Louis Fed. (n.d.). The state of U.S. household wealth. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publications/the-state-of-us-household-wealth
Uguen-Csenge, E. (2023, May 1). Texas guts “woke civics”. Now kids can’t engage in a key democratic process. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/01/texas-civics-students-democratic-participation
Ward, M. (2023, October 12). *Work-life balance? Americans work far more hours than Europe, China*. Money. https://money.com/americans-work-hours-vs-europe-china/
This article is a part of Provocations, a new magazine BY Paradigm Breakers FOR Paradigm Breakers!
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