Achieving public schools

Abstract

Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well as the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning. The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools.

Full text

467
ACHIEVING PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Kathleen Knight Abowitz
Department of Educational Leadership
Miami University
Abstract. Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as
government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In
this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that
schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more
local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both
the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well as the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics
that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail
to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning.
The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with
some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools.
The modifier ‘‘public’’ on the institution of public school refers in part to how
such schools should be governed. Broadly stated, ‘‘the people’’ must be authenti-
cally present in the governance of public schooling, but what this could precisely
mean is the topic of this essay. Contemporary U.S. schools typically engage their
citizens politically through the machinery of public relations, often adopting a
salesperson’s pose for managing school image in the eyes of voters and taxpayers.
In turn, when citizens are engaged with their schools, it is frequently through
the stance of customer: a person who, in exchange for tax money, deserves the
educational product for which they paid. When citizens participate politically in
school governance, it is usually through aggregate means: voting for representa-
tives who are to pass laws and make school policy in the perceived collective
interest at the federal, state, and local levels. Given the rates of voting in state
and local elections, and the proportionality of representatives to voters, citizens
remain politically distanced from the governance of their public schools. The
trends toward increased federal and state involvement in school governance have
exacerbated this distance.1
The public idea, suggestive of accountability to the demos of democratic
governance, has a dual and paradoxical meaning. The idea and name of a public
institution calls upon notions of an inclusive sphere of individuals bearing rights
and responsibilities, in which political decisions are guided by constitutional prin-
ciples. ‘‘The people,’’ in this notion of the public, have little actual political agency
in real terms, but much symbolic power through the derivation of constitutional
principles used to make school governance decisions. These principles are based in
values of individual liberty, equality of opportunity, and participatory governance.
1. Robert Franciosi writes that in the twentieth century, ‘‘education reform has consistently been
accompanied by a relentless centripetal force, as each new plan places greater power in higher authority
levels: from district to town, town to state, and state to the federal government.’’ See Robert J. Franciosi,
The Rise and Fall of American Public Schools: The Political Economy of Public Education in the
Twentieth Century (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2004), 133.
EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 4 2011
©2011 Board of Trustees University of Illinois

468 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
These values, symbolic of constitutional commitments in a nation-state, achieve
political power when used to guide policymaking at all levels, as well as leadership
and decision making in local schools. This is a typical interpretation of the label
‘‘public’’ when used to describe public schooling. It is the public with a capital P,
the most dominant meaning of the term.
Referencing a larger, symbolically inclusive Public sphere of liberal rights
and responsibilities, the constitutional principles provide an important means for
public schools to build and earn political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is a
political good currently in short supply for public schools, and one that cannot be
bought or sold through the tools of public relations. As Harry Brighouse writes,
‘‘legitimating consent must be earned, not manufactured.’’2
Yet there is a second, often forgotten but essential meaning of the public idea
as it relates to schooling. Contrasting with a large-scale Public sphere of rights-
bearing individuals, constitutional principles and broad-based policy directives in
the name of Public interests are the more organic and episodic eruptions of public
will and social movement that form in response to shared problems or problematic
situations. There is a universal Public within the context of nation-state borders,
but there are also multiple publics. This would be true in any large social entity, but
it is especially true in a society like the United States in the twenty-first century.
A society inhabited by diverse ideologies, religions, ethnicities, and nationalities,
and characterized by pernicious inequality of educational resources and outcomes,
U.S. political society noisily brims with multiple, episodic, and chaotic eruptions
of ‘‘the people’’:
The authoritative ‘‘people’’ that haunts our political discourse is indeed best thought of
neither as a formally organized corporate body nor as an atomistic collection of individuals,
but instead as an occasional mobilization through which separate individuals are temporarily
welded into a body able to exercise political authority.3
‘‘The people,’’ in the case of school politics, mobilize around particular problems
related to young people and their schools, and are best understood not simply as the
Public but as potentially multiple publics. These mobilizations, when they mature
beyond embryonic formations, can come to understand their shared educational
problems and potential solutions through political practices and shared work.
These multiple publics also need to be engaged in the governance of schools; their
energies and motivations harnessed, when possible, to build greater capacities for
teaching and learning in schools. But such harnessing is not necessarily inevitable
nor is it even considered desirable by all policymakers and school leaders. Not
2. Harry Brighouse, On Education (New York: Routledge), 126.
3. Margaret Canovan, ‘‘The People,’’ in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John S. Dryzek,
Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 356–357.
KATHLEEN KNIGHT ABOWITZ is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami
University, 304 McGuffey Hall, Oxford, Ohio 45056; e-mail <knightk2@muohio.edu>. Her scholarship
utilizes political and moral philosophy to explore questions of community, the public, and civic aspects
of K– 16 schooling.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 469
all political associations of citizens can be considered ‘‘publics,’’ as some do not
have public aims or motives, as I discuss later in the essay. But for those who
would meet such motivational criterion, there are a number of practical hurdles
to the maturation of a public association related to a school issue. Challenges to
communication and reasoned deliberation in our sound-bite, sensationalist society
abound. Moreover, publics are unequal in status and influence; public associations
also have access to widely divergent resources and capital to use in their own
development and interests. For these and other reasons, most publics, as John
Dewey noted, do not move beyond initial, embryonic formative stages.4
To achieve public schools, educational and civic leaders of all types ought to
become more adept at seeing the dual nature of the public and at harnessing the
potential of multiple publics through specific skills and habits. I argue here for
a bifocal understanding of the public idea as it relates to schooling, and assert
that educational leaders can help achieve publics for public schools — that public
schools are, in effect, more than the sum of their parts, more than merely schools
run with tax dollars and elected school boards.5
Public schools are achieved when the constitutional principles and broad policy
dictates of the capital-P Public sphere are joined with a broader understanding of
school governance, particularly at the more local levels: the development and
channeling of the political authority created by the mobilization of actual publics.
Rights-bearing individuals as well as federal-state education policy constitute
the content and norms of the universal Public, but public life is simultaneously
inhabited by radical pluralism, and schools cannot earn political legitimacy by
avoiding or managing this pluralism through a simplistic, technical following
of ‘‘public’’ rules given by the Constitution or federal mandates, nor through
playing disingenuous public relations games. Public schools are achievements,
moments when citizens focusing on the problems of school or youth can build
forms of communication, leadership, and political influence in order to enhance
the capacities of educators in public schools.6
4. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), chap. 4.
5. As Dewey wrote in 1938, ‘‘We have a great and precious heritage from the past, but to be realized, to
be translated from an idea and an emotion, this tradition has to be embodied by active effort in the social
relations which we as human beings bear to each other under present social conditions. It is because the
conditions of life change, that the problem of maintaining a democracy becomes new, and the burden
that is put upon the school, upon the educational system is not that of stating merely the ideas of the
men who made this country, their hopes and their intentions, but of teaching what a democratic society
means under existing conditions.’’ John Dewey, ‘‘Democracy and Education in the World of Today,’’ in
1938– 1939: Essays, Experience and Education, Freedom and Culture, and Theory of Valuation, vol. 13
of The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Electronic Edition, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Charlottesville,
Virginia: Intelex, 1996), 299.
6. The characterization of publics as achievements is an idea originally explicated in John Dewey’s The
Public and Its Problems, but the specific formulation of it presented here comes from Dennis Shirley:
‘‘Perhaps the ‘public realm’ is not a given, but rather a social and political achievement.’’ See Dennis
Shirley, ‘‘Community Organizing for Educational Change: Past Illusions, Future Prospects,’’ in The
Future of Educational Change: International Perspectives, ed. Ciaran Sugrue (New York: Routledge,
2008), 89.

470 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
In this essay, I explain the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is,
that school leaders are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional
principles as well as to the often more local engagements with the multiple publics
that arise in relation to shared educational problems.7I first turn to features of
the unitary Public and the constitutional principles that help guide public school
leaders (a broad term meant here to be inclusive of formal, informal, administrative,
teacher, parent, and civic leaders associated with schools). These principles help us
understand how public schools come to enjoy political legitimacy in a democratic
state, an important and diminishing intangible good for public schools today. This
reading of the Public is largely a theoretical product of political liberalism. In the
second part of the essay, I turn to the idea of publics, or eruptions of political
identification and collective interest around shared social problems. Derived
from readings of pragmatist and poststructural political theory, this conception
presents the idea that publics emerge frequently in the political life of schools
but usually fail to realize their potential in the development of legitimacy or
in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning
in schools. The overall argument ultimately points to a practical application,
one I sketch in the third section: educational leadership of all types, and with
some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public
schools.
The Unitary Public: Principles of Governance in
a Liberal-Democratic State
Stable governments and their institutions require citizens who respect and can function
within the established political order. If government is to be stable without being repressive,
it must be legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. If it is to be seen as legitimate without
manipulating citizens to accept an unjust regime, citizens must see it as legitimate because it
meets appropriate normative criteria of legitimacy.8
Kenneth Strike’s description of the necessary conditions for stable govern-
ments points out two kinds of criteria that schools must achieve in the eyes of
citizens. The first are criteria for properly meeting basic aims and purposes, in
which institutions ‘‘should aim at the good of those they serve.’’ The second set
of criteria concerns how to meet these purposes specifically under conditions of a
liberal-democratic form of governance.9
The first set of legitimacy criteria is based in meeting the institution’s
basic goals and objectives. As defined by government legislation, discipline-based
content standards, local school boards, as well as numerous popular and scholarly
perspectives, these goals and purposes are far from stable, and they are not the
product of complete consensus but instead represent more or less the mainstream
7. Chris Higgins suggested the helpful ‘‘bifocal’’ metaphor here.
8. Kenneth A. Strike, ‘‘Liberty, Democracy, and Community: Legitimacy in Public Education,’’ in
American Educational Governance on Trial: Change and Challenges,part1ofthe102nd Yearbook of
the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. William Lowe Boyd and Debra Miretzky (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 37.
9. Ibid., 38.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 471
consensus about content expectations. These goals are broadly concerned with
literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking; with knowledge of U.S. and world
history, science, current affairs, government, geography, mathematics, economics,
technology, health/safety, and the arts. These goals also include and reflect some
generally shared public views on behavioral and moral standards for youth. The
actual curriculum and conduct standards of any school or district should be the
product of ongoing argument, reflective of a combination of educator’s judgments,
local politics, and citizens’ desires, as well as state, national, and international
trends. A school’s legitimacy can be partially judged by how well it meets these
educational standards.
The second kind of legitimacy criteria derives from the goal of political legit-
imacy. While the first criteria are appropriate for school organizations in many
different kinds of political societies — totalitarian, socialist, or communist —
a democratic society has constitutional and civic requirements that impose
additional legitimacy standards for its state-sponsored schools. Strike lists the fol-
lowing principles of political legitimacy for public schools: (1) fair participation —
citizens must be able to participate in the shared governance of the school;
(2) liberty and pluralism — public schools should respect constitutional freedoms
of religion, free association, speech, and the press, and they must respect cultural,
religious, and human diversity; (3) equal opportunity — equal protection of the
laws and a level playing field for all students and families; (4) political education —
producing good citizens who can function well in a liberal-democratic society; and
(5) professionalism — ensuring that decisions that require expertise are made by
those with appropriate expert knowledge and authority.10
When used to shape decisions and policies in public schools, these principles
help educators build political legitimacy by reflecting the important values for edu-
cation found in a constitutional and liberal-democratic political system. The U.S.
Constitution is the symbolic expression of a historical attempt to build an inclu-
sive, egalitarian political society comprised of individuals who are constructed as
rights-bearing citizens. It is a human-created, evolving document that constitutes
the political agency of the universal Public of the United States (‘‘universal’’
meaning all those adult members of the political society of the nation-state). The
principles of liberty and equal opportunity reflect ideas within the political tradi-
tion of liberalism, which prioritizes expansion of individual rights to expression
within a context of inclusive, egalitarian political membership. The principles
of fair participation in governance and political education for students reflect
the civic republican strain of democracy that shaped the Enlightenment-inspired
Constitution in accord with the value of popular sovereignty. The principle of
political education underscores this same value with the belief that citizens in
each generation must be able to understand their duties and rights, and use them
10. Ibid., 40– 41. Strike uses the term ‘‘political socialization’’ in principle 4, but I prefer ‘‘political
education’’ as it describes the more conscious development of knowledge and capacities necessary for
critical citizenship.

472 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
to enact liberal-democratic ideals in every age. The principle of professionalism
balances the authority of citizens over schooling with the expertise wielded by
educators, whose understanding of subject matter, human growth and develop-
ment, and pedagogy should provide their views with a special status in the making
of educational policy and decisions.
These principles help educational leaders make policy and decisions at all
levels, and they are particularly important to help guide leaders in districts and
school buildings.11 Yet these principles are inadequate, in and of themselves, for
educational leaders seeking to understand their roles and duties within the political
and ethical terrain of public school governance. These principles, symbolizing the
unitary Public and the legal rights of individual citizens, fail to fully acknowledge
what is required for popular sovereignty. They account for citizens as bearers of
individual rights, but they fail to fully account for publics as pluralistic, shifting
mobilizations of political will formation and agency. The unitary Public — based
in the loose consensus of constitutional norms and values from which Strike’s five
principles are derived — exists alongside the political field of multiple, conflicting,
and evolving public formations:
Democratic politics does not consist in the moment when a fully constituted people exercises
its rule. The moment of rule is indissociable from the very struggle about the definition of
the people, about the constitution of its identity ... through multiple and competing forms of
identifications.12
Publics and School Governance
The vision of school politics and governance derived from the constitutional,
liberal-democratic version of political theory cannot contain the rich and difficult
pluralism of contemporary political life, nor can it fully accommodate the
constitutional promise of popular sovereignty. As radical pluralists emphasize,
pluralism is not a mistake, nor a sickness of a declining nation-state. The
circus that is public life is a condition of liberal-democratic nation-states
that, despite moderations in volume, tone, and diversity of acts, is a sign of
political life. ‘‘In a democratic polity, conflicts and confrontations, far from
being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by
pluralism.’’13
Democracy, in this sense, is a paradoxical narrative for school governance.
Governing schools according to liberal-democratic ideals requires understanding
and navigating this paradox with a complex set of habits and skills. It means
negotiating decision making bifocally: with a constitutionally constructed set of
principles, marking symbolic agreement among individuals and their government-
run schools, alongside ubiquitous political contests and engagements that call
11. Kenneth A. Strike provides a detailed argument for this position in his book Ethical Leadership
in Schools: Creating Community in an Environment of Accountability (Thousand Oaks, California:
Corwin, 2007).
12. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), 56 (emphasis in original).
13. Ibid., 34. The discussion of democracy as paradox that follows is derived from a reading of this text.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 473
into question the who, what, how, and why of the situational application of these
principles for schools and districts. The liberal-democratic constitutional princi-
ples guide and are guided by the political contentions — their relevant ordering,
the actual content of their abstract formulations, and their real-world applica-
tion within the diverse educational places and regions within the nation-state
itself.
The difficult and sometimes contentious terrain of school politics requires the
radical pluralist vision so that crucial details and identities can be expressed,
challenged, and defined in relation to specific contexts and on-the-ground
conditions in schools and localities. In these expressions and definitions, popular
sovereignty is exercised and helps to inform the broad direction and content of
public schooling. This vision also moves beyond an easy reliance on individual
citizens as the sole political agents, allowing for political formations and social
movements that are spaces of expression, contestation, and will formation between
and among individuals. These formations are publics, and part of the role of
educational leadership, in both schools and the localities that surround them, is
to help facilitate their growth and political agency. In what follows, I describe
key aspects of these organic publics: how they come into existence and evolve,
as well as their agonistic and conflictual qualities. Following these descriptions, I
then discuss a few necessary habits and skills helpful to educational leaders (again,
broadly conceived) in achieving publics for public schools.
Problems Call Publics into Existence
An Ohio school district recently faced a controversy over the movie American
Beauty.14 Clips of this film were shown in 11th and 12th grade English classes
as part of a unit on the American Dream. One group of parents became agitated
upon discovering this, believing that schools are not the place to air the sexual
and violent themes of films such as this one. Parents and community members
sympathetic with this view petitioned the school board, calling for a ban on all
R-rated movies in district classrooms. In reaction, other parents and teachers
responded with petitions supporting the current way controversial materials
are internally vetted within departments and through building principals. Many
teachers believed that they had justifiable pedagogical reasons for using such
movies. The well-respected English teacher who had used American Beauty clips
had, since developing this unit a few years before the controversy erupted, sent
home information and permission slips prior to teaching it each year. Yet in 2009,
this usual notification did not suffice or appease, and a group of parents began to
organize and attempt to exert influence against the use of controversial materials
such as this. As Walter Parker points out, ‘‘public schools have become the place to
14. American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes and written by Allen Ball (Universal City, California:
Dreamworks, 1999). The Web site Common Sense Media, rates this film as ‘‘on the fence’’ for ages
17– 18 for reasons of ‘‘graphic, bloody violence (including child abuse), extremely raw language, nudity,
sex (including teen sex), and drug use that is very positively portrayed.’’ See ‘‘What Parents Need to
Know,’’ Common Sense Media, http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/American-Beauty.
html.

474 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
engage in cultural warfare. They are the primary sites of struggle over the political
and cultural shaping of the next generation.’’15
According to Dewey, ‘‘The public consists of all those who are affected by
the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed
necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.’’16 This definition
of the term ‘‘public’’ from his book The Public and Its Problems remains useful, as
we can see through this contemporary example. The use of controversial materials
in classrooms resulted in a series of transactions that immediately began to shape
the problem, the players involved, and the wider responses of district officials.17
Shocked parents called other parents, school board members were informally
contacted, and more formal petitioning of the school board to rein in teachers’
freedom to select instructional materials was initiated. A more formal policy,
wherein teachers had to get permission from the school board or from a special
Instructional Materials Approval subcommittee was quickly drawn up and under
discussion in the district. These actions would have far-reaching consequences
affecting many people and groups in this district, and thus a nascent public was
created in the early weeks of the controversy. Those involved were made a public
not by their agreement (the district had precious little of that) but by their shared
experience of undergoing the consequences of a problem.
It is one thing for a public to begin to form in relation to schooling or
educational problems. It is another, altogether more beneficial but difficult matter
for a public to achieve some forms of maturity, such as creating common ground
and political agency through habits of communication, leadership development,
building power, and cocreation of solutions and accountability provisions for
carrying them out. The public created around the American Beauty controversy
never reached this kind of maturity. A glimpse into the forum held to hear from
citizens about the controversy sheds light on some reasons why.18 At the start of
the forum, the school board chairperson faced the full room of citizens, students,
teachers, and administrators, and asked them all to organize themselves into two
groups: people wanting to speak for the proposed ban on R-rated movies, and
people wanting to speak against it. The chair worked hard to give each side a fair
hearing, making sure that an equal number of ‘‘for’’ and ‘‘against’’ views were
aired, and providing the same number of allotted minutes at the microphone to
15. Walter C. Parker, ‘‘Constructing Public Schooling Today: Derision, Multiculturalism, Nationalism,’’
in this issue, p. 422.
16. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 15 – 16.
17. Transactional understandings of communication view that process as more than a causal exchange
of information between two or more people or groups, more than the stimulus and response reactions
between oppressed and oppressor. For Dewey, the idea of transaction signals how communicative actions
change all actors undergoing a communicative experience, despite the fact that communication is never
‘‘pure’’ but constantly moving through and in subjective interpretations and cultural contexts. For more
on Dewey’s transactionalism, see Kathleen Knight Abowitz, ‘‘A Pragmatist Revisioning of Resistance
Theory,’’ American Educational Research Journal 37, no. 4 (2000): 877– 907.
18. I attended this forum; this account is based on my own observations of the meeting.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 475
anyone who wanted to speak. The room was physically arranged in order for each
person speaking to be heard by the board; persons testifying had to go up to the
front of the auditorium and speak into the microphone, positioned so that the
speaker would be facing the board, with their back to the audience.
It was clear that the board wanted each individual to have the right to be heard,
and sought fair participation in governance, which they interpreted as providing
‘‘both sides’’ the right to come forward and speak to them publicly in the allotted
time. They wanted to weigh principles of teacher professionalism along with those
of fair participation in governance, and called upon the teacher using American
Beauty to offer her rationale for using the film. But there was no ‘‘common good’’
readily available; moreover, the forum’s purpose and facilitation was not designed
to construct one. The forum was designed to hear from the preconstructed sides
or factions of the issue, carefully containing and managing the conflict so that the
board could make their decision.
‘‘Publics are called into being by issues’’19 — the issue, in this case, was crit-
ical focus on teachers’ use of controversial materials in the classroom. The public
in this case was constituted by the shared but diverse consequences collectively
endured by teachers, administrators, students, and citizens in a particular school
district. Yet those involved with this problem failed to develop into a mature
public, a public capable of investigating, effectively communicating, and applying
political power to government institutions. ‘‘A public can form only if people are
aware of the many ways that they are affected by events and how their actions
affect one another in ongoing, important, and intricate ways.’’20 Such awareness
develops through productive communication, ongoing investigation into the prob-
lems at hand, and wide dissemination of that information. What happens within
a public formation, Dewey argued, should be the development of good habits of
reflection, communication, and deliberation.21
Processes centered on sharing diverse perspectives in an effort to create
some common ground were almost entirely absent in the film controversy. This
group of parents, teachers, students, and community members thus constituted
an ineffective public, largely unsettled in the weak consensus that constituted
the school board’s ultimate decision to form a board-appointed parent and
administrator committee to preapprove all teacher requests to use R-rated films.
Board members and school administrators relied on the aggregative model of
democracy to navigate the controversy, focusing tightly on strategies that would
allow them to weigh teacher professionalism and pedagogical expertise against the
views of diverse individual citizens.
19. See Noortje Marres, ‘‘Issues Spark a Public Into Being: A Key But Often Forgotten Point in the
Lippmann-Dewey Debate,’’ in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and
Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005), 216.
20. Elizabeth Meadows and Katherine Blatchford, ‘‘Achieving Widespread Democratic Education in the
United States: Dewey’s Ideas Reconsidered,’’ Education and Culture 25, no. 1 (2009): 40.
21. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 208.

476 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
The public that formed around the R-rated film controversy failed to mature;
citizens never achieved ways to successfully communicate and engage the complex
issues and conflicts through a range of political means and practices. This public
failed to develop sufficiently rich and varied forms of communication to express
distinct positions as well as construct shared meanings regarding what kinds of
materials might be appropriately used with students. It failed to build networks
of influence across diverse groups, factions, and institutions that hold power and
resources in the district. Processes of aggregative democracy were exclusively
relied upon and in this case helped to ‘‘settle’’ the issue for some citizens. But
these aggregative processes also served to deepen the divisions and conflicts over
public schools in the district, rather than helping to create more shared educational
perspectives and visions.
As Dewey wrote, ‘‘a public articulated and operating through representative
officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is
none without the public.’’22 The publics responsible for shaping and guiding the
work of the state, when it comes to contemporary schooling, often seem to be
either missing or so weak as to be effectively rendered silent. This is particularly
true in light of the increasing prominence of federal and state authority over
school curriculum and policy. A public is a group undergoing the consequences
of a shared circumstance. But a public acquires the ability to have political
voice and influence when its diverse members become more conscious of shared
circumstances and purposes. Given our love affair with private fulfillments, our
relative disengagement from active forms of public life, and the structure of our
political systems and centrally controlled public schools, publics for schools today
often remain at the embryonic stages and thus politically impotent. Yet this
situation is not irrevocable.
School administrators frequently attempt to ‘‘manage’’ citizen engagement
and contestation in ways that nip a nascent public in the bud. The terrain of public
school governance is highly pluralistic in terms of the identities citizens bring to
any particular problem in public life. These highly pluralistic, inchoate publics
often contain numerous conflicts and differences of thinking about school aims
and resource allocation. These social formations contain much passion and often
rancor; school leaders may understandably fear this passion.
It is useful, however, to frame this passion and pluralism with an eye to its
great political potential. Chantal Mouffe calls public life today a space of ‘‘agonistic
democracy.’’23 ‘‘Agonistic’’ means argumentative and strained. This strain is not a
modern invention but inherent in what Mouffe calls ‘‘the paradox of liberal democ-
racy,’’ a situation that cannot be fixed. The paradox of liberal democracy consists
in the tensions between liberal and democratic traditions; the former focusing on
liberty of the individual, the latter focusing on achieving equality and popular
sovereignty. Public schools confront such tensions regularly. Engaging in public
22. Ibid., 67.
23. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 2.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 477
life today means engaging this paradox, and negotiating its terms in the context of
specific situations and problems, and in situations that are often antagonistic:
A goal as well as a task for democratic politics is, therefore, to transform antagonistic conflicts
into what Mouffe calls agonistic ones. The latter means to convert conflicts that are threaten-
ing to dissolve the basis for political association into conflicts in which the legitimacy of the
other’s position is acknowledged. To acknowledge and respect the other’s right to be a legit-
imate opponent not only makes it possible to channel the conflict politically but also is itself
a pre-requisite for such channeling. This means that democratic institutions are democratic
to the degree they are able to promote legitimate opposition through political means.24
‘‘Antagonism,’’ in other words, ‘‘may be ineradicable but it is not irreducible.’’25
What is at stake in political struggles such as the one seen in the American
Beauty controversy is the political ‘‘‘we’ — the hegemonic struggle to articulate ‘a
common political identity of persons.’’’26 Agonistic citizens have learned, through
specific political practices, how to be ‘‘friendly enemies’’ able to forge conflictual
consensus.27
This type of political work cannot be tackled through the machinery of public
relations, nor by political means based solely in the constitutional principles of
liberal-democratic society and aggregative democratic governance. It requires a
particular set of habits and skills that help to build mature publics capable of
productively engaging with school boards, administrators, educators, and fellow
citizens. I use the remainder of this article to explain and elaborate on these habits.
The Work of Achieving Publics
Habits are developed dispositions for established forms of action and thought;
‘‘a habit is a form of executive skill, an efficiency in doing,’’ as Dewey noted.28
Alison Kedlac argues that habits are
acquisitions that require the use of reason and active preference; in a basic sense, habits are
skills. Once we think of habits as skills, rather than as mechanical and thoughtless modes of
action, it is possible to view the acquisition of habits as a matter of ‘‘thought, invention, and
initiative in applying capacities to new aims.’’29
Habits or skills (I use these terms interchangeably) of public development are
necessary for democratic governance. Some of these habits stand in stark oppo-
sition to the typical types of managerial and administrative habits characteristic
of public schooling today. I argue here that habits of communication, leadership
development, and building power are necessary for achieving publics for public
24. Sharon Todd and Carl Anders S ¨
afstr ¨
om, ‘‘Democracy, Education and Conflict: Rethinking Respect
and the Place of the Ethical,’’ Journal of Educational Controversy 3, no. 1 (2008), http://www.wce.wwu.
edu/ Resources/CEP/eJournal/v003n001/a012.shtml.
25. Chantal Mouffe, ‘‘Liberal Socialism and Pluralism: Which Citizenship?’’ in Principled Positions,ed.
Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), 82.
26. Ibid.
27. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 13.
28. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1916), 46.
29. Alison Kadlec, Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007),
72. The embedded quote is from Dewey, Democracy and Education, 52 –53.

478 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
schooling. These are habits or skills that are the broad work of educational leader-
ship, as carried out by school personnel, board members, and leaders in multiple
civic realms of a district or region.
Habits of Communication
Many school administrators and staff approach communication with citizens
on a very carefully orchestrated and narrowly framed basis. Surveys are used to
gather specific input from parents. ‘‘Customer hotlines’’ are places where parents
or citizens can call up with complaints, praise, or suggestions. At any school
board meeting, a citizen can come to address the board in the preliminary 5 or
10 minutes at the beginning of the meeting, and most meetings are open to the
public. In general, habits of communication between formal school leaders and
the citizens they represent are narrow, tightly framed, and fall along the lines of
aggregative democracy patterns — where democracy is a process of aggregating the
individual opinions that comprise the mass electorate.
Yet aggregate democratic forms of governance cannot adequately capture
or channel the pluralist public, and one popular alternative offered today
is deliberative democratic processes, more explicitly participatory forms of
governance. Deliberation about matters relating to shared life and governance
happens in many informal ways and places in our society; for example, people
discussed the American Beauty controversy at the local store, church, gym, bar,
and through media networks. Formal public deliberations, however, are facilitated
forums designed to help citizens talk to one another about shared problems in
an attempt to find common ground and solutions. Much of our public work
involves informal deliberation of all kinds, where people exchange views through
conversation or argument. But deliberating in formal, organized settings with
trained moderators tries to foster more than the exchange of opinions: it aims to
hammer out mutually agreeable solutions. The deliberative model of democracy,
as it is described by its advocates, aims to ‘‘structure processes of collective
deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals.’’30
Deliberation as a habit of administrators, board members, and other school leaders
is a key skill for achieving public schools. Yet too often deliberation is seen
simplistically: as a process of reaching a pure consensus through rational exchanges
between diverse individuals. I wish to suggest a more organic and pragmatist view
of deliberation as necessary for habits of communication that can help achieve
publics for schools.
Deliberation is a type of communication strategy that is essential for public
achievement in school governance and politics, but the formations of deliberative
democracy typically offered in political theory rely too heavily on assumptions of
the powers of rational argumentation and the mythology of pure consensus.
Deliberation, in the views of many advocates, shifts the nature of political
30. Seyla Benhabib, ‘‘Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,’’ in Democracy and
Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 69.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 479
activities as compiled, aggregated individual interests to a common good achieved
through peaceful but rigorous argumentation:
The public deliberation that leads to the formation of a general will has the form of a debate in
which competing particular interests are given equal consideration. It requires of participants
that they engage in ‘‘ideal role-taking’’ to try to understand the situations and perspectives of
others and give them equal weight to their own.31
J¨
urgen Habermas sought to revitalize the notion of the public sphere in the
deliberative view of politics, where citizens achieve the common good through
rational argument, developing a shared political will that should guide the actions
of government-run institutions.
In the American Beauty incident, a respected teacher was called out on using
segments of a controversial film in her teaching, and a nascent public started to
develop in response. The school board valiantly tried to manage the controversy
according to constitutional principles (that is, according to the unitary, capital-P
Public ideal), creating shared governance whereby diverse citizens could air their
already established views on the subject, and where teachers and administrators
could share their professional expertise in realms of pedagogy. The board’s aim
was to make a good decision by aggregating the voters’ views, seeking an outcome
everyone could tolerate — a particularly important goal in a state where voters
decide upon school tax levies at the ballot box. But what if these administrators
had not focused exclusively on the aims of aggregate democracy and had instead
considered deliberative democratic processes as part of a broader solution? What
if the forum was more of an exercise, or one of a set of exercises, in deliberation?
What if citizens on all sides of the issue had been invited to think together, trying
to understand the problem from multiple perspectives, and work on mutually
agreeable solutions?
While nascent publics can and do emerge in political life, deliberative
habits of communication — those that engage citizens in deliberation over ‘‘hot
issues’’ — can help call a public into existence and facilitate its development.
Deliberations can occur in many places, and a growing number of organizations in
public sector and public schooling reform efforts advocate greater use of formal and
informal deliberations in school-based decisions and controversies.32 Deliberation
assumes that democracy is not solely a process of aggregating opinions, but of
helping citizens struggle to find some common ground about their shared problems.
Deliberative habits and forums are needed not only within seemingly like-minded
groups but more particularly across distinct groups within a district or a school.33
31. Thomas McCarthy, ‘‘Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics,’’ in Habermas and
the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 54.
32. See, for example, Suzanne Ashby, Cris Garza, and Maggie Rivas, ‘‘Public Deliberation: A Tool for
Connecting School Reform and Diversity,’’ in Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (Austin,
Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1999).
33. For a discussion of bonding and bridging communication among social groups, see Sabina
Panth, ‘‘Bonding vs. Bridging,’’ People, Spaces, Deliberation (June 3, 2010), http://blogs.worldbank.org/
publicsphere/node/5456.

480 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
Deliberative habits can be facilitated and developed, yet the habit of delib-
eration is not about a purely rational exchange of viewpoints. Deliberations that
create common ground are not easy to construct, and efforts to create deliberative
settings that are ‘‘highly dispassionate cognitive processes,’’ devoid of emotion
and irrationality, are fruitless.34 Particularly in this society of radical pluralism
and high levels of inequality, deliberations facilitated merely by way of allowing
peaceful, rigorous argumentation — where emotions, passions, and bodies are pur-
posefully excluded, where only carefully timed speeches and argument are allowed
as legitimate modes of participation — are inadequate. As Richard Bernstein notes
in his characterization of Deweyan democracy,
Dewey was never happy with the way in which philosophers and political theorists charac-
terized reason — especially when they sharply distinguished reason from emotion, desire, and
passion. He preferred to speak about intelligence and intelligent action. Intelligence is not
the name of a special faculty. Rather, it designates a cluster of habits and dispositions that
includes attentiveness to details, imagination, and passionate commitment. What is most
essential for Dewey is the embodiment of intelligence in everyday practices.35
Publics must communicate, but they do not productively do so within narrowly
conceived boundaries of rationality.36 Deliberative habits and skills are most
effective when they recognize and integrate embodied and symbolic forms of com-
munication into deliberative practice and forums. Part of the role of educational
leaders, broadly defined, is to demonstrate and facilitate the conditions for these
habits when it comes to engaging citizens in their schools.
Habits of Leadership and Leadership Development
In schools, the term ‘‘leader’’ almost always refers to someone in charge,
a person who has a formal appointment or title that enables that person to
use his or her formal authority to make things happen. ‘‘Leadership’’ is thus a
positional practice and a privileged occupation, held by a relative few — usually by
administrative staff (even though, ironically, the practice of leadership can be seen
in virtually every classroom). But broader views of leadership, and more inclusive
practices of informal leadership, are required for the work of achieving publics.
Formal leaders of schools can usually only respond to the will of local people; they
cannot by themselves organize or initiate public formations, and they cannot alone
build the organizational structures that help publics communicate and formulate
their aims. Our current habits of leadership and leadership development can,
unfortunately, restrict our abilities to achieve publics for public schools.
34. The quote is from Daniel Yankelovich, ‘‘How to Achieve Sounder Public Judgment,’’ in Toward
Wiser Public Judgment, ed. Daniel Yankelovich and Will Friedman (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2010), 26. Yankelovich writes, ‘‘Hundreds of studies of public opinion have convinced
me that the public’s learning curve is not a dispassionately rational process. Instead, it is charged with
all manner of emotion and irrationality’’ (p. 26). See also Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a revealing study of two deliberative experiments in
school reform work, see Julie A. Marsh, Democratic Dilemmas: Joint Work, Education Politics, and
Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
35. Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 85.
36. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 481
To show the significance of new habits of leadership, let us again imagine a
different scenario surrounding the American Beauty controversy. Let us suppose
that a group of parents, after airing their views at the open forum, believed they
could not find a reasonable hearing of their views and were still dissatisfied with
the district’s current policy. Let us further suppose that these parents engaged
in additional activism along the lines of community organizing. That is, rather
than protesting the policy only as individuals, they formed alliances and a formal
organization that served as the vehicle for their aims and goals. Publics can erupt in
many ways, and many today do so with the facilitation of community organizing
traditions and strategies. Looking at these traditions of public formation shows us
a great deal about how publics are achieved through multiple forms of leadership
development and practice.
Since the early 1990s, there has been an increase in the use of school-related
community organizing in American towns and cities to bring about school reform,
and in particular to ‘‘disrupt long-standing power relationships that produce failing
schools in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and communities of color.’’37
Perhaps the most studied and well documented of these organizing efforts is that
of Austin Interfaith, an outgrowth of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in
Texas. IAF engages local institutions, primarily faith congregations, to advocate
social change. ‘‘IAF works with poor, working-class, and often less-educated people,
channeling anger about inequality into an agenda for political action.’’38 In Austin,
Texas, IAF helped to form Austin Interfaith, an alliance of congregations working
on behalf of children and families in poor neighborhoods in the city’s east side.
These congregations, in turn, created a now growing network of Alliance Schools,
devoted to reform. Through ‘‘accountability sessions, parent and community
engagement in schools, and careful work to build trust with educators,’’
citizens and organizers helped to improve these schools. ‘‘In these schools,
Austin Interfaith organizers provided leadership training to parents, teachers, and
administrators and supported them in implementing reforms to improve student
learning.’’39
Leadership — on the part of organizers, citizen leaders, school administrators,
and teachers — built the organization and strategies to help Austin schools in
largely African American and Hispanic neighborhoods improve. While widely
thought of as an innate capacity related to personal charisma or positional author-
ity, leadership is best conceived not as a position or an innate power but as
an activity. As Ronald Heifetz writes, ‘‘rather than define leadership either as a
position of authority in a social structure or as a personal set of characteristics,
37. Kavitha Mediratta, Seema Shah, and Sara McAlister, Building Partnerships to Reinvent School
Culture: Austin Interfaith (Providence, Rhode Island: Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown
University, 2009), 3, http://www.annenberginstitute.org/WeDo/Mott_Austin.php.
38. Norman J. Glickman and Corianne P. Scally, ‘‘Can Community and Education Organizing Improve
Inner-City Schools?’’ Journal of Urban Affairs 30, no. 5 (2008): 565.
39. Mediratta, Shah, and McAlister, Building Partnerships to Reinvent School Culture,1.

482 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
we may find it a great deal more useful to define leadership as an activity.’’40
Many successful organizing efforts point to the role of leadership and its ongoing
development as an important area of focus and key to their successes. Achieving
publics for public schools requires leadership habits and skills spread across school
organizations and across multiple civic sectors.
The development of citizen leaders in education organizing is characterized
by, at minimum, the acquisition of three types of knowledge. The first is an
understanding of the wider social conditions and political contexts as well as
the larger systemic issues of the problems at hand. The second concerns the
appropriate interpersonal and political skills needed to move a group forward. The
third is knowledge of how to wield democratic authority and judgment that is
inclusive and accountable to the broader group, and ultimately to the wider Public.
Effective leadership in democratic organizations requires the ability to help
others come to political judgment, that is, to weigh alternatives and decide on a
course of action together.41 To help others come to judgment about a group’s goals
and strategies, citizens working in leadership must achieve a deeper understanding
of the context of schooling. They must particularly become more knowledgeable
about the political, economic, and pedagogical factors that shape how schools
function. This is especially important for leadership development within public
formation for low-income neighborhoods. Many in these communities do not
know how to access reliable information about their school’s or district’s resources,
procedures, or outcomes, despite the efforts of some school administrators who
may have good intentions in opening their schools up to all sorts of families.
Citizens, often with the help of organizers, engage in inquiry about schooling,
enabling them to build the power of knowledge about their schools, as well as
enhancing their analytical abilities.42
Leadership development often combines knowledge of educational issues and
systems with the technical skills of public work:
To develop knowledge and skills, parent leaders participate in trainings, mentoring sessions,
small group meetings, and public actions. From these experiences parents and community
members expand their understanding of educational matters. They learn how the school sys-
tem works, including issues related to curriculum and budget. They acquire an understanding
of school data and how to use it to leverage change. Moreover, parents and communities
become skilled at public speaking, researching issues, leading meetings, and negotiating with
public officials.43
40. Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1994), 20 (emphasis in original).
41. Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 212.
42. An excellent example of this kind of learning is described in Jeannie Oakes and John Rogers, Learning
Power: Organizing for Education and Justice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).
43. M. Elena Lopez, Transforming Schools Through Community Organizing: A Research Review
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Family Involvement Network of Educators, Harvard Family Research
Project, 2003), 3.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 483
Leadership not only helps organizing groups come to judgment about goals and
strategies through enhanced knowledge about schooling, but it helps guide the
group’s ‘‘collective efforts in the political arena.’’44 Guiding these efforts also
requires the technical skills and capacities of political work: ‘‘leading meetings,
interviewing public officials, representing the community at public events and
with the media, and negotiating with those in power.’’45
Leading responsibly in more organic and participatory forms of democratic
governance is not synonymous with eliminating the authority or power of leaders.
While egalitarian processes of leadership can be very successful, some observers of
community organizing remind us that patterns of authority are useful in organizing
work:
Most advocates of participatory democracy have become uncomfortable with discussions
of authority. But utopian preferences for pure egalitarian relationships are unrealistic for
developing effective power for communities. Social relations that are characterized entirely by
hierarchy, of course, are oppressive and lend little to democratic action. Yet most communities
contain some pattern of authority. Political leadership in collective processes, in fact, requires
the development of authority. The question is whether authority is legitimate, inclusive, and
accountable to the broader community.46
Publics develop and mature through leadership, and through the broad develop-
ment of democratic authority and skills not only among formal, positional school
leaders but among potential leaders drawn from the teachers, parents, citizens, and
civic groups in a locality. Rather than a special club of formal leaders, ‘‘leadership’’
here is constituted by a practice that is cultivated among multiple constituencies
for the purposes of educational problem solving. This leadership helps broaden the
scope of public work and ensures that public aims and concerns more accurately
reflect the wishes of the diverse populace. Habits of both leadership and leader-
ship development are critical in helping publics grow and mature as vehicles for
participatory democratic governance of public schools. Education organizers have,
in particular, become well versed in such skills, understanding that ‘‘leadership
is not by nature a form of individual aggrandizement, but rather a means of con-
tinuing to expand the number of their fellow-leaders in the interest of collective
power.’’47
Habits of Building Public Influence
Building influence and power is a part of public formation and development,
because a public forms to construct a response related to a shared problem; in
44. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling, 212.
45. Eva Gold and Elaine Simon, Successful Community Organizing for School Reform (Chicago: Cross
City Campaign for Urban School Reform, 2002), 13, http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2003/goldsimon/
goldsimon.htm.
46. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling, 35. See also Aaron Schutz’s discussion of leadership trends in organizing
as they relate to social class in ‘‘Social Class and Social Action: The Middle-Class Bias of Democratic
Theory in Education,’’ Teachers College Record 110, no. 2 (2008): 405–442.
47. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling, 214.

484 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
many cases part or all of this response relates to school governance and the
policies it creates. A nascent public must build influence in governance in order
to shape the solutions that are constructed. Power is defined here simply as
the ability to authentically participate and exercise influence in decision-making
processes.48
Publics are often comprised of individuals who, as solitary citizens, have been
able to exercise little influence in school decision making; these are associations
of people who see real problems and gaps in the ways that their schools work,
often for their own children as well as others. Without practices that enable these
groups to have a legitimate and respected voice in decision making about their
own schools, these groups cannot build political will and agency, and they remain
politically weak.
Formal school leaders fear the power of publics, however, and this often
leads them to squelch their emergence. In many cases formal school leaders
are concerned about the challenge to their own authority and vision, but they
also legitimately fear that the agenda of any one public may not reflect the
interests of the Public write large. This points to an important question that
emerges when (unelected) publics are seen as associations that can build and
wield power in school governance. Are education organizing groups the kinds of
‘‘special interests’’ that seek power simply in order to promote their own political
agendas?
It is the case that associations form around school problems and issues that
are indeed only designed to achieve a group’s own narrow interests, without
regard for larger Public constitutional principles. The bifocal view of public
life can help educational leaders discern how various groups’ interests intersect
with the larger Public interests. Without a doubt, organizing groups and public
formations can assert interests that do not meet the criteria of Public-with-a-
capital-P interests. A group seeking to teach the Bible as the literal word of God
in public schools would have a hard time convincing Muslim, atheist, and Hindu
citizens and associations that such a goal represents a shared and public interest.
Interests or agendas asserted as Public interests must be debated and judged by
leaders and citizens, according to the merits of each particular agenda. These
interests must be politically legitimate for public schools in a constitutional
democracy. Democratic faith in ‘‘the people’’ needs to be balanced with a respect
for the unitary, symbolic Public of the constitutional principles — ‘‘the people’’
are not purely virtuous, nor is their idea of ‘‘public interest’’ always aligned
with a larger Public interest. Yet what is in the overarching interests of the
48. Participation in school decision-making processes is authentic if it ‘‘includes relevant stakeholders
and creates relatively safe, structured spaces for multiple voices to be heard.’’ Authentic participation
in school governance should result in the ‘‘constitution of a democratic citizenry and redistributive
justice for disenfranchised groups or, in educational terms, more equal levels of student achievement and
improved social and academic outcomes for all students.’’ See Gary L. Anderson, ‘‘Toward Authentic
Participation: Deconstructing the Discourses of Participatory Reforms in Education,’’ American
Educational Research Journal 35, no. 4 (1998): 575.

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 485
public writ large can never be resolved ahead of time, before views are aired,
deliberated, questioned, and evaluated by citizens, school boards, and school
leaders.49
What is in the Public interest, then? This is a tricky question, yet in real-world
school politics it is too often simplistically equated with the interests of the most
powerful citizens. Consider the newly emerging publics forming in response to
the shared problems of educational inequality. Citizens seeking greater equity
in the processes, facilities, and outcomes of their children’s schools are building
associations and organizations to reach their goals. On the broad level, such a
set of interests is clearly Public and widely shared in terms of the constitutional
interest in equality, though it can be tremendously difficult to convince some
families of this fact as the micro-politics of school governance play out. Gaps in
graduation rates, college matriculation, and academic achievement persist along
racial, ethnic, and social class lines, and such unequal conditions and outcomes
are antithetical to the primary democratic principle of equal opportunity. Such
gaps erode the political legitimacy of public schools, and institutional legitimacy
is an enabling factor for the success of all public schools. Attacking these gaps
is clearly part of the work of nascent and well-developed publics around the
nation, whose influence helps focus attention on these gaps and hold officials
accountable for remedying them. However, the work to increase local resources
for poor and working-class students meets frequent and powerful resistance
from more privileged citizens in a school or district.50 Despite the efforts in
some districts to introduce more participatory forms of decision making that
are inclusive of all kinds of families, some parents and citizens exercise more
influence than others in school governance. Inclusive and fair participation in
shared governance is one of the principles of democratic legitimacy for public
schools in a constitutional democratic state. Yet even in school districts where
participatory reforms have been introduced, the interests of the poor and working
class tend to be neglected. ‘‘Ostensibly, participation in decision making is
intended to provide more opportunities for disenfranchised groups to have a greater
voice in organizational life, but too often the opposite occurs.’’51 It therefore
stands to reason that attention to practices of building power and influence
are part of the work of public facilitation and development, particularly given
49. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘‘Postsocialist’’ Condition (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 87.
50. See, for example, Beatrice S. Fennimore, ‘‘Brown and the Failure of Civic Responsibility,’’ Teachers
College Record 107, no. 9 (2005): 1905–1932. This point is also well made by David Labaree: ‘‘Families
have been willing to acknowledge that the system should provide educational access for other people’s
children, but only as long as it also has provided educational advantage for their own.’’ See David F.
Labaree, ‘‘Consuming the Public School,’’ in this issue, p. 381.
51. Anderson, ‘‘Toward Authentic Participation,’’ 580. For more analysis of inauthentic participation and
community engagement practices in urban schools, see Aaron Schutz, ‘‘Home Is a Prison in the Global
City: The Tragic Failure of School-Based Community Engagement Strategies,’’ Review of Educational
Research 76, no. 4 (2006): 691– 743.

486 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
the critical educational challenges affecting disenfranchised neighborhoods and
communities.
Publics build power by acquiring influence. Skills of producing political influ-
ence can vary in tone and aim from confrontational to collaborative. On the
confrontational end of the continuum, publics can conduct mass actions and
demonstrations that garner sustained media attention, subjecting schools or dis-
tricts to enormous public pressure to include their voices in school decision
making. Such actions can generate ‘‘fear and respect’’ on the part of school and
city officials so that these groups will be included in future decision-making pro-
cesses.52 The IAF in Texas regularly uses parent assemblies, for example, as part of
a plan to move conversations with superintendents, principals, and school board
members into public settings, where empowered leaders give prepared speeches
and pose incisive questions to school officials, in the eye of media. ‘‘Large pub-
lic assemblies,’’ for the IAF, ‘‘are key venues in which communities can begin
the process of assertive self-governance and the nurturance of a proactive civic
culture.’’53 Other publics use more combative types of action such as walkouts,
strikes, and protests.54 Confrontational practices make use of the idea of the
adversary as a motivating force for political action. Combative practices such as
sit-ins or marches try to create a temporary ‘‘us versus them’’ mentality, but
‘‘enemies in this model are not static entities or individuals, then, but instead
fluid and strategic achievements that allow a community to act as a coherent
collective.’’55
Contrasting with confrontational practices of building power are more collab-
orative forms. It is worth noting here that publics originating through community
organizing practices are too often charged with being overly confrontational. ‘‘Pop-
ular writings on community organizing sometimes overemphasize the combative
nature of these groups,’’ writes Aaron Schutz, who participates in and studies
education organizing efforts in Milwaukee. He points out that ‘‘organizing groups
nearly always begin their efforts in a new campaign with attempts at dialogue with
those in authority. Only when they have been rebuffed do these groups begin to
pursue more militant strategies.’’56 Many of the most successful organizing efforts
have achieved positive working collaborations with school districts and leaders,
shifting antagonistic terrain to agonistic space. These groups have successfully
52. Schutz, ‘‘Home Is a Prison in the Global City,’’ 717.
53. Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform, 69.
54. See, for example, those described in National Center for Schools and Communities, From
Schoolhouse to Statehouse: Community Organizing for Public School Reform (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity, 2002), 19, http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=
ED467358.
55. Aaron Schutz, ‘‘Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism,’’ Educational
Researcher 33, no. 1 (2004): 20.
56. Schutz, ‘‘Home Is a Prison in the Global City,’’ 718. The research done on education organizing as
reported in From Schoolhouse to Statehouse also echoes this finding (see p. 19).

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 487
tapped into the kinds of power that can be built through human relationship.
Ernesto Cort´
es, IAF organizer, distinguishes between unilateral power and rela-
tional power. While the former is typically coercive and domineering, ‘‘the IAF
teaches people to develop the power that is embedded in relationships, involving
not only the capacity to act, but the reciprocal capacity to be acted upon.’’57
Education organizers have used strategies for both relational and unilateral power,
but their goals are usually collaborative in some way. ‘‘These groups are will-
ing to confront powerful institutions, but only when recalcitrant elites refuse to
negotiate. They approach schools as partners, but this does not mean ignoring
tensions and conflicts.’’58 Though IAF was founded by Saul Alinsky, well-known
for his confrontational tactics, the Alliance School organizing work represents the
evolution that some community organizing efforts have undergone in the recent
decades. Alliance Schools are schools that have chosen to enter into an agreement
with Austin Interfaith, an IAF affiliate. Teachers and administrators elect to enter
into a relation with Austin Interfaith in order to become an Alliance School, but
from there, no prescription exists for the work to be done. IAF organizers organize
parents as well as teachers, principals, staff, and students to address a range of
school issues. ‘‘In this approach, public schools are not the object or target of
outside community organizing; rather, organizing occurs in the school with all of
its stakeholders.’’59 More collaborative forms, as Mark Warren notes, have more
frequently been successful in ‘‘creating the civic capacity to build and sustain
school reform. Taking a more relational understanding of power, parents and
educators can look to their shared interest in advancing the education and well-
being of children in order to help them work through inevitable differences and
conflicts.’’60
Practices of building power are, in effect, efforts that build relations and
relational networks among publics, officials, and other local organizations, often
including national organizations and networks. These relationships are not with-
out conflict, agonisms, and difficult confrontation; thus we should not understand
the term ‘‘relational’’ to be a description of easy collegiality or immediate under-
standing among groups whose differences can be quite substantial. Trying to
establish a public’s presence and authority in decision-making processes is often
an unwelcome intrusion on the part of school administrators and boards. In
addition, building collaboration across groups and constituencies is challenging.
Developing relations among groups who may have very distinct ethnic, racial,
social-class, or linguistic identities requires time, patience, and a sensitivity to
57. Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform, 85.
58. Mark R. Warren, ‘‘Communities and Schools: A New View of Urban Education Reform,’’ Harvard
Educational Review 75, no. 2 (2005): 5.
59. Ibid., 20.
60. Mark R. Warren, Soo Hong, Carolyn Leung Rubin, and Phitsamay Sychitkokhong Uy, ‘‘Beyond
the Bake Sale: A Community Based Relational Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools,’’ Teachers
College Record 111, no. 9 (2009): 2213.

488 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 61 Number 42011
the obvious and not-so-obvious ways in which the powerful can co-opt and
silence the voices of the disenfranchised. Developing relational networks among
all these groups and interests is enabled when school administrators, board
members, and educators do not see the development of powerful publics as
threatening or counterproductive to school governance, but as unique opportuni-
ties for building the civic capacity necessary for better quality schooling for all
students.
Implications and Conclusions
In this article, the bifocal nature of ‘‘the public’’ of public schooling has
been sketched; I have put into focus the dual and complex nature of taxpayer-
funded school governance. The public moniker refers both to the universal,
constitutionally based Public sphere and the more organic and episodic publics
emerging from shared problems. The individual is simultaneously a rights-bearing
citizen and a part of a public; he or she is an eruption of political voice, a political
identity, and potential power to participate in and influence decisions related to
schools. The ‘‘public’’ of public schooling, therefore, is a paradox and must be
actively negotiated by school leaders as such.
The good news is that there is no magic to this negotiation. It requires
an understanding of the paradox of public life, as well as a developed sense
of the particular habits and skills necessary for making nascent, emergent
publics into collaborative school partners. Perhaps most difficult for many school
administrators, it requires a willingness to infuse one’s leadership and educational
work with the kinds of habits and skills required to engage in public work with
other citizens, especially those outside the schoolhouse.
The challenges to this work, however, are significant in today’s political cli-
mate. Among them is the current context of school governance, where much
control over education is currently situated in state and federal governing bodies.
Engaging with the public requires that federal and state control be in healthy
balance with forms of local governance that are meaningful. Another challenge is
that this work requires a number of facilitating partners: civic associations, com-
munity organizing groups, deliberative democracy organizations, and others must
play a role in the public work described here. School administrators, school board
members, and teachers have neither the time nor the training to handle this work
alone, and it requires the energy and multiple perspectives that ‘‘the people’’ can
provide.
Yet such resources are more available and growing stronger in number and
power today. In a series of 2005 blog posts, philosopher and civic education
researcher Peter Levine discusses the social movement for civic renewal in the
United States. He listed major elements in that movement, including deliber-
ative democracy work, community wealth generation, democratic community
organizing work, civic education, service-learning initiatives, community youth
development work, work to defend and expand the commons, the development of
new forms of public media, the development of social software, and the civically

Knight Abowitz Achieving Public Schools 489
engaged university.61 These resources represent an array of new knowledge, energy,
and networks that school leaders of all kinds can tap into in order to help achieve
publics for their schools. Civic renewal creates important new resources for public
schools, building forms of ‘‘wiggle room’’ and agency in times when structures like
No Child Left Behind, school vouchers, and privatization cause many to abandon
hope of public schools governed in the public’s interest.62
61. Peter Levine, ‘‘The Civic Renewal Movement,’’ Peter Levine: A Blog for Civic Renewal (June 20,
2005), http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/000631.html. See also Peter Levine, ‘‘The Public and Our
Problems,’’ National Civic Review 100, no. 1 (2011): 42 – 50.
62. The reference to ‘‘wiggle room’’ here is taken from Parker, ‘‘Constructing Public Schooling Today,’’
in this issue. Wiggle room is the ‘‘space to act within and around constraints’’ (p. 414).
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Chris Higgins for his helpful criticism of previous drafts.

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