Fields, A. Belden and Feinberg, Walter. (2001). Education and Democratic Theory: Finding a Place for Community Participation in Public School Reform. Reviewed by Stacy Smith, Bates College

Fields, A. Belden and Feinberg, Walter. (2001). Education and Democratic Theory: Finding a Place for Community Participation in Public School Reform Albany: SUNY Press. 148 pp. $17.95       ISBN 0791450007 Reviewed by Stacy Smith Bates College July 12, 2001         With this project A. Belden Fields and Walter Feinberg step outside of the walls of academe and into spaces where citizens and activists struggle to define and enact ideal meanings of “public education.” Acting as educational ethnographers is not a unique endeavor, but it is a bit out of the ordinary for these two scholars: one a political scientist and the other a philosopher of education. Contacted in 1994 by a former student who is now a director of a regional teacher's union, the authors were presented with the opportunity to witness firsthand the evolution of a group called the Project for Educational Democracy (PED). This group, composed largely of union activists and teachers, sought to include community members in decision making in their school district, particularly African Americans whom they perceived to be both formally and informally marginalized.         Fields and Feinberg brought their scholarly insights to bear on this group's experiences over the course of four years. In this book they bring the Project for Educational Democracy's experiences and their surrounding insights to a wider audience, which will benefit from both the enrichment of educational and democratic theory and specific aspects of the case study that will inform other local projects of democratization in public education. The authors describe the book as a theoretical work and an ethnographic study in which they seek “to demonstrate the importance of the relationship between concrete experience and theoretical understandings. The concrete experience is that of educational activists in a community that we call Ed City [pseudonym]. The theoretical concern is the extent to which differing conceptions of democracy enable participation from members of diverse racial groups” (1). More specifically, the authors go on to explain: Our interest is … in understanding the process by which a group of people decides that the public school system must be rendered more democratic and more inclusive, how they move from an initial commitment to that aim to action directed to bring it about, and how a variety of community groups and individuals, the school board, and the school administration react to this effort. (pp. 1-2) According to this account, the impetus behind the organization of the Project for Educational Democracy in Ed City was provided primarily by union activist Jerry Mann, who identified Site-Based Decision Making (SBDM) as a governance model for a “school system where the powers of the school board were devolved to largely autonomous site-based units” (p. 5). (Note 1) It is not entirely clear whether Mann was an ideological convert to SBDM or whether this model was chosen for pragmatic reasons due to consideration of the approach in 1990 under the leadership of a past superintendent for the district. Whatever the reason, following a reportedly bitter spell of union negotiations in 1994, including a teachers' strike, the union and school board signed a contract with an attached “letter of understanding” that pertained to SBDM. The agreement authorized the formation of a committee in 1996-97 to summarize the “practice and procedures” of SBDM across the Ed City district and to develop a philosophy. The letter also stipulated that the committee was to have “full representation of faculty, staff, administration, students, parents, and community” (pp. 4-5). Fields and Feinberg report that although the letter of understanding appears to them as “little more than an expression of interest in exploring aspects of site-based decision making,” to Jerry Mann “it had all the signs of a commitment to SBDM” (p. 16). Based upon this understanding, Mann played a major role in establishing the PED and moderating its early meetings. After the group was up and running, however, he stepped back and other members assumed leadership roles (p. 13). The organization's vision of educational democracy is equated with Site-Based Decision Making, which it views as an avenue toward inclusion and participation. The PED identifies SBDM with “devolution of authority and decision making…and greater participation of parents and community as well as teachers and support staff in the governance of individual schools” (p. 12).         Over the course of the study, the PED brings together a fluctuating group of approximately twenty people including teachers, parents, students, and community members; some of these people were also union and school board members. Working under the loosely shared understanding that a District Committee would be formed to begin moving the school district toward a model of SBDM, the PED organizes community meetings in order to reach out to excluded constituencies in the district and to instigate dialogue about their experiences with the public schools. Because the PED values democratic process over specific outcomes, a clear statement of goals remains elusive. Yet, although its mission is not explicitly stated, this study finds that the PED “attempts to mobilize people into active participatory roles outside of the formal system of educational decision making so that it is more inclusive of people who have not had a say in the education of their children” (p. 2). Essentially, the organization attempts to facilitate processes whereby excluded groups, namely working class and African American community members, will be included in district and school level decision making.         What is compelling about the PED's story is learning about how the group takes on these thorny and complex issues, issues that are unfortunately all too common across the U.S. Not only public school districts but many democratic political forums from local to national levels are plagued by attitudes of disengagement and practices of exclusion. The PED and this study confront these issues head-on and their lessons provide insights valuable in a number of other contexts where similar themes ring familiar: Which is preferable, centralized or decentralized decision making? Which models of governance are more inclusive? More participatory? Yield fair and equitable results? In Ed City, these questions take a particular form in light of the exploration of SBDM and the subsequent formation of the PED: …the PED fears that a centralized system isolates marginalized groups and inhibits them from gaining a voice in the schools thus serving to increase alienation and inequality within and between segments of the community. It wants to find a way to include the voice of these groups in the deliberative process, but how to identify these voices and how to include them in the process is a more complex question than it may appear on the surface. This is the question that the PED has obliged the school board and the administration to address. How can educational and political systems respond when noncorrupt representational systems result consistently in the exclusion of major segments of the community from educational decision-making bodies, and why is such a response important? (p. 14) The authors' account of the PED's role in answering these questions in Ed City highlights concepts of representation, participation, and authority. Yet, vital to the PED's vision, and this study's exploration of its practices, are also questions of inclusion and participation or, more pointedly, exclusion and disengagement. By bringing both concrete experience and democratic theory to bear on these issues, Fields and Feinberg engage in a dialectical exploration of theory and practice that is ultimately fruitful for both. The Importance of Ethnography for Democratic Theory Fields's and Feinberg's study of the Project for Educational Democracy demonstrates the importance of ethnographic research for informing the complexities of bringing democratic theory to life. As stated earlier, the authors view Education and Democratic Theory as both a theoretical work and ethnographic study in which they seek “to demonstrate the importance of the relationship between concrete experience and theoretical understandings” (p. 1). The relationship between the ideal and the concrete that they highlight is crucial to democratic theory because democracy depends on the legitimacy of shared agreements. As democratic theorist Seyla Benhabib (1996) asserted: …legitimacy in complex democratic societies must be thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern. Thus a public sphere of deliberation about matters of mutual concern is essential to the legitimacy of democratic institutions…The basis of legitimacy in democratic institutions is to be traced back to the presumption that the instances which claim obligatory power for themselves do so because their decisions represent an impartial standpoint said to be equally in the interests of all. This presumption can be fulfilled only if such decisions are in principle open to appropriate public processes of deliberation by free and equal citizens. [emphasis added] (pp. 68-69) Fields and Feinberg point out that both democratic theory and practice are flexible enough to accommodate many different types of public processes that may yield legitimate outcomes. Representative models, such as school boards, and participatory models, such as site-based management, both can be described as “democratic” in nature. This flexibility at the conceptual and practical levels provides the potential for democracy to be workable and vibrant in a variety of local socio-economic contexts, but it also complicates “lived democracy” because citizens often differ in their conceptions of what models are preferable (see especially Chapters Three and Six in this text). Yet, beyond pointing out that conceptual differences complicate projects of lived democracy, Fields and Feinberg press an assumption common to democratic theory, and illustrated in Benhabib's passage above—that fairness “in principle” is adequate for ensuring fairness “in practice.” Democratic theories, be they of a “representative” or “participatory” stripe, often tend to gloss over the complexities of implementing processes that will be perceived as legitimate by all interested parties. In most concrete political settings, the normative ideal of legitimacy through shared agreement is complicated because values and interests differ. And legitimacy and agreement are further complicated in settings, such as Ed City, where there is a history of race- and class-based exclusion, disparate power relations and consequent mistrust. In this study, the authors explore the rub between “in principle” and “in practice” in terms of the principle of fairness by asking: “…just what does it mean for a minority to be excluded or underrepresented in a system where anyone who chooses to run gets on the ballot, where everyone is allowed to vote, and where those who receive the majority of the votes are elected to office?” (p. 49). The very manner in which their question is framed illustrates a prevalent tension in contemporary democratic theory and practice in the U.S. between constituencies who defend political outcomes based on the fairness of the procedures versus those who condemn and/or distrust the system because the outcomes appear unfair. The former operate according to the presumption that fair principles undergird formal democratic procedures. And they are puzzled by claims from the latter that the political system isn't working for them. In other words, if the rules are meant to be neutral, and if they are implemented in a manner that does not appear explicitly biased, then what is the problem if individuals from dominant/majority groups are those who participate most heavily and, in part as a consequence, their interests are best served by political processes? This is a more crass way of posing the question that the authors explored in the Ed City school district. What they illustrate with their case study is the plethora of ways in which the presumed neutrality of formal procedures often masks other processes at work; it is those frequently subtle or hidden experiences and their implications for inclusive and participatory democratic governance that this study brings to light.         A brief summary of some of the experiences of Ed City community members described in this study will illustrate the importance of ethnography for democratic theory. After describing the context for SBDM in their school district and the formation of the PED, the authors spend an entire chapter recounting the historical context of “Race and School in Ed City” (Chapter Four). They recount a number of ways that racialized exclusion has taken place in Ed City's school system and explore how this historical context shapes present forms of participation or non- participation in school governance. Their account of race and school in Ed City highlights the importance to democratic institutions of “remembering” their past, particularly surrounding race relations, as well as the role that educational ethnographers can play in abetting this effort to remember. According to the authors, the phrase the “Ed City Way” describes a “loose and informal system of access that members of the school board [who are predominantly white and middle class] believe is typical of Ed City schools” (p. 53). They proceed to explain: “The Ed City Way, though, is not how many African American parents experience the school. … Many things, some large some small … are all interpreted by African Americans as part of a history of exclusion and are largely ignored by whites who maintain that theirs is an impulse of inclusion” (pp. 53-54). The perception of many African American community members that theirs is a history of exclusion from the school system's governance is based on a number of factors, some part of the formal record and recognized by all parties and others more subtle. Some of the key experiences alluded to here include: African Americans experiencing difficulty having items included on the school board's agenda; lack of inclusion in official reports of roles played by African American parents in desegregation efforts, difficulty getting African American representation on the school board (Note 2); perceptions that affluent whites do most of the talking and that when African Americans do speak they aren't really “heard” by the white board members; and the sense that “real debate” takes place prior to school board meetings, in order to present a united front to the public at the formal meeting, and that African American board members are excluded from these conversations (see Chapters Four and Five). Although they differ in nature and scope, most of these events are subject to interpretive lenses that differ along racial lines and result in a lack of trust and a sense of illegitimacy in terms of how African American community members perceive school governance. Fields's and Feinberg's account of race and school in Ed City reveals specific ways in which the racialized, and often discriminatory, aspects of historical and contemporary experiences disallow the public processes of open and free deliberation that are necessary for democracy to function. Each event may have a reasonable explanation by itself but together these and other events over the years contribute to a sense of exclusion and feelings of alienation and with the interpretive pattern set, each new event is experienced and interpreted differently by the different groups. Thus, for example, when their calls for the hiring or retention of minority staff fail, the African American parents see another example of rejection and racism, while the school board and superintendent's office are frustrated because, as they see it, their good faith efforts seem to go unrecognized, or because “people just don't understand the budgetary constraints under which we are working.” …We believe that these historical events and others like them serve as a benchmark for the African American community reinforcing from one generation to the next a sense that the schools do not belong to them in the way they believe that they belong to white people. Often when African Americans look at the schools, they see them as controlling and manipulating institutions. And, because these events are largely lost to the schools' official memory, a memory that believes the Ed City Way holds equally for all, there is little opportunity to discuss the events that helped to cause it. In the end the muting of the experience of members of the African American community creates a wall of silence that both communities need to penetrate but that, often, neither can. [emphases added] (p. 54) The wall of silence described here, which results from drastically different interpretations of events and perceptions of whether the system as a whole is inclusive or exclusive, threatens a key lynchpin of democracy: trust that fair processes will yield legitimate results. As the authors point out when describing a protest by a group of approximately one hundred, primarily African American community members in response to the firing of an African American principal and teacher: Experiences like these created an atmosphere that made it virtually impossible for many in the African American community to accept the legitimacy of the decisions of the school board. Citing policies on confidentiality in personnel matters, the board felt it could not share its grounds with the public. The marchers felt that this supported their conviction that the decision was illegitimate…the reservoir of trust was too shallow to allow an uncontested decision on a matter of such symbolic importance. [emphases added] (pp. 60-61) Thus, by providing a detailed account of historical and contemporary contexts of race relations in Ed City this study illustrates the important role that ethnography can play for democratic theory. To the extent that concrete experiences erode the conditions necessary for trust and legitimacy, those committed to democratic ideals must also be committed to paying close attention to practices, and attendant perceptions, that undermine those ideals. The case of Ed City suggests a dual role for ethnographic research in terms of facilitating processes that are in line with democratic ideals. In this case, Fields's and Feinberg's account of the PED and its relationships with the school board and the District Committee formed to explore SBDM penetrates the “wall of silence” that they report in two ways: by remembering the story and by telling the story in a way that could be heard by a variety of stakeholders. Both of these roles of ethnographic research—remembering and storytelling—are consonant with the aims of the PED and demonstrate ways for educational researchers and theorists to give back to research participants who allow their lived experience to serve as the “data” that inform generalizable findings and theory building. Educational ethnography as a form of remembering highlights the importance of institutional memory for equitable and fair decision making processes. The authors of this study argue that one reform impulse behind the PED “is a historical argument about how the past continues to influence or to be repeated in the present” (p. 51). According to this argument, “[a] habit of forgetting … leaves mostly white political and educational leadership with a history that is cut off from that of the African American community. … More specifically, this view observes that a subtle, two-layer system of racial forgetting perpetuates America's reluctance to enact a thoroughgoing system of racial equality” (p. 50). The imperative to institutionalize remembrance, particularly because the habit of forgetting is so hard for dominant groups to break, suggests a role for ethnographic researchers as archivists. In this manner, researchers as archivists enact a principle of reciprocity with the groups that they are studying while simultaneously supporting the democratic principle that public processes are open to all. (Note 3) Educational ethnography as a form of storytelling highlights the importance of representing a wide variety of perspectives in order to realize the normative ideal of impartiality necessary for democratic legitimacy. This study of the PED revealed that stories not only differ according to interpretive lenses, but that a wall of silence between groups made it difficult for different perspectives to be shared across group boundaries. One goal of the PED was to create processes that would both facilitate communication and widen individual's interpretive lenses. One PED member explained: “I think we're looking for a model of communication whereby anybody can come to a school board member and can sit there on an equal basis and feel comfortable addressing them. I think there's a lot of people in this community who couldn't speak and make their ideas clear to school board members, and the school board member couldn't hear what they mean to say because they come from such different worlds” [emphasis added] (p. 81). Thus, researchers as storytellers bear the responsibility to tell their stories as fully as possible by adequately representing a multiplicity of perspectives, in order that various actors from many different worlds can hear what others mean to say. In sum, the “thick description” of ethnography brings a textured sense of how interpretive lenses are shaped, in Ed City's case in large part by racialized identities, and how various participants “see” the world differently. The ethnographic narrative provides a forum for these various stories to be told, and in doing so, bridges democratic theory and practice by providing a way for community members' stories to become shared stories. By this is I do not mean that the ethnographic narrative provides a singular or unitary story of localized, concrete experiences. Rather, ethnography intended to inform democratic theory must strive to represent complex and even conflicting stories in a manner that might be heard by participants and outsiders with many different identities, values, and interests. To the extent that ethnographic research can make complex stories the shared stories of a democratic community, it can serve to support the conditions necessary for public processes of deliberation between free and equal participants. Challenges of Blending Ethnography and Democratic Theory Recall that the authors of this text describe it as a theoretical work and ethnographic study in which they seek “to demonstrate the importance of the relationship between concrete experience and theoretical understandings” (p. 1). This is no easy undertaking, particularly given that the body of democratic theory is so broad and that political philosophy and empirical research are not often coupled. Achieving a fruitful balance between theoretical exploration and empirical investigation in the social sciences is always a delicate affair. Questions inevitably arise as to which is primary: the theory or the data? Will a particular theoretical framework be employed to assess the concrete experience or will the concrete experience serve to generate new conceptual categories in the form of “grounded theory”? Whatever balance a researcher strikes between theory and practice, tradeoffs will result. This is no perfect mixture. Research that emphasizes theory sacrifices some of the richness of possibility latent in the data; research that emphasizes the concrete gives up some of the conceptual depth and clarity of understanding that might be provided by theoretical insights. One drawback to this text is that it gives short shrift to engaging these inevitable difficulties directly. While the relationship between concrete experience and theoretical understandings is an incredibly provocative point of engagement between educational practice and democratic theory, it is fraught with methodological tensions. This text never explicitly addresses these challenges. There is virtually no discussion of research design or methods, beyond a brief discussion of the ambiguity between roles of “researchers” versus “consultants” and mention that observation and interviews were used. In terms of theoretical understanding, the authors choose to approach “democratic theory” as a singular entity, without acknowledging that there are many different strands of democratic theory or explaining why they choose to employ some theoretical concepts rather than others.         This lack of methodological clarity has implications for each aspect of their goal: informing concrete experience and theoretical understanding. In terms of both how the concrete experience of the PED is represented through the ethnographic narrative and how theoretical understandings key to democratic theory are explored and enriched, the analytic categories employed are not always adequately explained. Such struggles of representation are common in qualitative research, and are especially acute when attempts to link empirical findings with a particular body of theory constrain what story can be told and how to tell it. Yet, the thematic categories play such a pivotal role in the organizational structure of this narrative that lack of clear evidence or reasoning behind their use detracts from the power of the analysis. An example will illustrate. Beginning with their chapter on “Race and School in Ed City” the authors note they “translate” the PED's concern with exclusion into a concern for “underrepresented minorities.” There are a few troubling aspects about this act of authorial translation. First, the move seems to be theoretically driven in a way that is not always consonant with the empirical data that are presented in the text. Second, the emphasis on “underrepresentation” serves to downplay racism in a way that exclusion, and some comments by PED members, do not. For instance, the authors never refer to “racism” as part of their interpretive analysis, despite evidence of racial discrimination that they report and one informant's use the term “racist.” Third, the way that the challenges faced by “underrepresented minorities” in majoritarian systems are framed primarily in terms of the “conservative” concern with neutrality overlooks more complex attention to issues of minority representation offered by other democratic theorists, such as Lani Guinier and Amy Gutmann. (Note 4) There are other parallel examples where the choice of theoretical categories is unclear and creates a sense of a conceptual gap that alternative strands of democratic theory might have filled. For example, when exploring tensions between pluralism and the common good, the authors attend to Rousseau's concept of the “General Will” rather than to contemporary democratic theorists who explore the role of alternative forums and multifarious processes in relation to political will formation? (Note 5) Moreover, the theoretical categories that frame the chapter outline—democratic discourse, race and school, bureaucratic and dialogical authority, and cooperation and co-optation—play such a key role in organizing the narrative structure that the story of the PED itself is muted. I am left with a number of lingering questions about the group's activities, members' perceptions of their vision and their achievements, and their status as an organization at the time that the research ended. I am also left wishing that I knew more about the themes that the PED and these authors expressed interest in, namely inclusion and participation. For instance, given the stark examples of exclusion and mistrust that these authors described, why are African Americans in Ed City as engaged as they are rather than wholly alienated from the system (e.g., staging a protest in 1995, not an era know for political activism)? The authors claim that “Ed City seems to have a strong dose of [political will], of which the PED is but one element” (p. 68). This leaves me curious as to the sources of this political will. What keeps people engaged? What engages some individuals but disengages others? This is not to say that the interplay between theory and practice that the authors offer through their account of the PED is not interesting and useful, as I've elaborated in detail above. Rather, some of the narrative is not as tightly woven as it might be and the connections to theory that are elaborated are not always fully accounted for. Because they do not clearly explain their methods and reasoning, the possibility that the reader will perceive their account as “ideological” versus “impartial” is heightened. The authors are well aware that it is difficult to avoid this trap. In the context of discussing forms of “co-optation” that face political groups that must decide whether to work outside of or inside the system, the authors describe: Networks of people are imbedded in ideological frameworks in which people respond in similar manners to certain problems. This means that there is a tendency to define problems in certain standardized ways as well as to develop solutions that are constrained in certain ways. (pp. 117-118) Like all people described in this passage, the authors reveal their own ideological biases when they sometimes appear to stretch the data to make them fit traditional categories in democratic and educational theory—such as “underrepresented minority”—rather than stretching the categories themselves to make them fit the lived experience reflected in the data. In this study, the traditional theoretical category of democratic representation needs to be extended to consider the subtle ways in which legitimate forms of representation and participation are complicated, and even threatened. Nevertheless, the important point here is that fully realizing these traps, the authors had the courage to embark on the study and to share their interpretations of the Project for Educational Democracy with a wider audience. Their narrative expands the perspectives on public education reform available to members of Ed City, and to other communities across the country, and seeks to do so in a way that approximates the ideal of impartiality, and thus can be heard by all. Although the authors' treatment of the relationship between the PED's experiences and democratic principles is inevitably constrained by some tradeoffs inherent in the balancing act that researchers must perform, their account is tremendously valuable because it provokes the reader to engage important and complex issues at the intersection of public education and democratic theory. Notes In this study Site-Based Decision Making is also referred to as “Shared Decision Making” but is distinguished from “Site-Based Management.” Only one African American representative has served on the Ed City school board during any given term. The first African American member was a female in 1968 who served until 1980. Then, an African American male served from 1985-1993. Three African Americans ran for the board between 1993 and 1998; all were defeated (83-85). Fields and Feinberg suggest that they played the roles of “researchers as archivists” when they explain that “because we systematically took notes and made tapes of meetings and paid careful attention to them, we sometimes served the PED as a source of historical information on their own discussions and decisions… we did the same for the district-wide committee as well” (8). See, in particular, Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1994) and Amy Gutmann's section entitled “Why Not Aim for Proportional Representation by Race?” in K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). I refer here particularly to the work of deliberative theorists who are interested in discourse ethics such as Nancy Fraser's exploration of the role of “counterpublics” and Iris Marion Young's attention to alternative forms of public speech. See, for example, Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Reference Benhabib, Seyla. (1996). The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference. In Seyla Benhabib (Ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (pp. 3-18). Princeton: Princeton University Press. About the Reviewer Stacy Smith Assistant Professor of Education Bates College, Lewiston, ME 04240 Stacy Smith is an Assistant Professor of Education at Bates College, a small liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. Her teaching and research interests include issues of cultural pluralism as they impact educational equity, the school choice movement, democratic education, and political philosophy. She has taught students at the junior high and secondary school levels as well as undergraduates at Cornell and Harvard Universities. She graduated from William Smith College, and went on to receive an M.P.S. in African- American Studies and a Ph.D. in Foundations of Education from Cornell University. She recently published a book that also combines educational ethnography and democratic theory entitled The Democratic Potential of Charter Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).