Getting students ready for democracy.

As I write this, we are in the midst of presidential primaries across the country and the news is full of stories about people gathering in homes and grange halls in Iowa to caucus; of New Hampshire citizens voting in town halls and schools; of states preparing for Super Tuesday; and of campaign workers at phone banks, shopping centers and train stations, working for their chosen candidate.

Then there's the polling as well as the analysis of every gesture and inflection the candidates use. The debate about whether the newscasters or the candidates control the campaign, or whether it's all about fund raising, reminds us that our elections are a combination of both personal attention and mass media, of local issues and national trends.

We may gripe about the political system, and many of us will, by definition, vote for a losing candidate, but we do participate in our democracy.

AASA's Stand Up for Public Education initiative rests on three legs. The first is getting young people ready for school, through comprehensive nutrition and health programs, early childhood education and support for families. The second is getting schools ready for young people by redesigning and transforming our schools' organization, teaching and learning practices and leadership strategies to meet the needs of each student who comes to us. And the third leg is getting these students ready for democracy.

We need to think about what it means in 2004 to prepare students for democracy. Public schools have served a socializing role since their inception, offering students a series of common experiences and a common curriculum, ensuring that all graduates left school with a core of shared knowledge and experience. The flaw in that early model is that all graduates comprised a relatively small proportion of young adults. Many students left school well before graduation. Students with disabilities often were excluded from school altogether, and many black students had segregated schools or no schools available to them. These young people learned some lessons about access to public school and to democratic practices, but they were harsh lessons of exclusion and second-class citizenship.

As we have been discussing in Stand Up for Public Education, many of the education battles of the last 50 years have been battles for access to education. The shift now is from access to proficiency. Not only are all students guaranteed access to an education, but No Child Left Behind requires that every student demonstrate proficiency at a high achievement level.

This federal mandate has sparked debate among educators and non-educators about what schools can and cannot do and about how and why they need family and community support to accomplish these goals. While we may argue about many aspects of NCLB, we agree that the requirement to disaggregate data by subgroup has served a useful purpose. It has shone a light on those students who have not been well-served by our schools and forced us to re-examine our commitment and our practice.

Why is this related to educating our students for democracy? Because the next generation of citizens and workers is in our schools now. What they learn from us now about fairness, equity, inclusion and hope will affect how they act--and how they vote--in the future. We need citizens who can distinguish fact from fluff in a campaign speech. We want workers who can be part of a team that accomplishes an agreed-upon goal. Schools teach kids how to think critically about what they see on television and read in the newspaper. Diverse schools, with newly arrived students and others whose families have been here for 20 or 40 or 100 years, teach kids how to work together, how to disagree with respect and how to appreciate each other's strengths. They need those skills to be responsible and active citizens of a democracy.

Democracy depends on an educated citizenry. It's our job--and our privilege--to provide schools that not only teach about democracy but are democracies.