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This review has been accessed  times since July 13, 2001
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
Email: ssmith2@bates.edu
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).
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