Democracy and National Education Standards

This article intervenes in the debate about whether democracies should adopt national education standards. For many democrats, national education standards may promote economic growth, social justice, and a common set of interests. In this article, I reconstruct John Dewey’s warning against oligarch...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 79; no. 1; pp. 33 - 44
Main Author Tampio, Nicholas
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Chicago on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association 01.01.2017
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Autonomy
Democracy
Economic development
Economic elites
Economic growth
Equity
Schools
Social justice
Sovereignty
Standardization
standards
education
Common Core
democracy
Dewey
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Summary:This article intervenes in the debate about whether democracies should adopt national education standards. For many democrats, national education standards may promote economic growth, social justice, and a common set of interests. In this article, I reconstruct John Dewey’s warning against oligarchs using standardization to control the schools as well as his argument that democracy requires student, teacher, and community autonomy. The article argues that the Common Core State Standards Initiative has been a top-down policy that aims to prepare children for the economy rather than democracy, and for the foreseeable future, economic elites will tend to dominate efforts to create national education standards. In the conclusion, I make a pragmatic argument for local education control and address objections such as that democracies need national educational standards to ensure racial equity.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/687206