In the last installment of our Education Week blog conversation on democracy and schools, Deborah Meier gave a remarkable account of school change efforts in the last two decades, "Democratic Experiments." She is worth quoting at length:

"In the early 1990s...some 100 plus K-12 schools in NYC proposed a large-scale experiment, serving about 50,000 students and representative of the city as a whole. Our aim: to demonstrate the value of greater school/community-based autonomy including show-casing alternative systems of accountability. Annenberg offered us 50 million dollars to try it out. The mayor, NYC chancellor, NYC board of education, the state superintendent of schools, and the American Federation of Teachers local chapter signed on. Two local universities agreed to study our work over five years both statistically and ethnographically. If we hadn't been stopped by a new chancellor and a new state superintendent we'd have learned a lot."

Meier also describes smaller but still significant efforts like "Boston's Pilot" schools and the "Consortium" of schools in New York City, both of which have used alternative assessments, have generally proven successful, and have been largely ignored by policy makers.

The question is how to respond.

It seems to me that the fact the chancellor and state superintendent could end of the "large scale experiment" in the early 1990s despite the broad coalition involved in planning it, shows why we need to rethink politics on a large scale.

Politics has become narrowly professionalized, detached from "civic roots" in the life of local communities. It now almost entirely revolves around politicians (and other public figures), their antics, promises, and positions. Like many other experts, they are detached, especially at state and national levels and in federal agencies. Citizens are reduced to consumer choices. This makes for dysfunctional politics and powerless and irresponsible citizens.

I had a different experience as a young man in the civil rights movement. Black beauty parlors and barber shops were places where people learned "everyday politics." As Sara Evans and I describe in our book, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, I saw how this learning could be deepened. Highlander Folk School worked with beauticians across the south to teach organizing skills.

One story with parallels from our years at the Humphrey Institute is about the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey described in his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, how his father went about making his drug store in Doland, a small town in South Dakota, a civic center of the town. His father was one of six Democrats in a town of six hundred Republicans. "In his store there was eager talk about politics, town affairs, and religion," Humphrey wrote. "I've listened to some of the great parliamentary debates of our time, but have seldom heard better discussions of basic issues than I did as a boy standing on a wooden platform behind the soda fountain."

Here and there in recent years we've seen large scale educational experiments out of community organizing like Deborah Meier and her colleagues developed in New York. For instance, the Alliance Schools in Texas, described in Dennis Shirley's Valley Interfaith and School Reform, organized by an Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate with churches, unions and others, developed large scale efforts to redesign schools. It had similarities to Meier's story - more local autonomy, parent and student voice, democratic purpose. It sought to hold politicians accountable.

But like most other community organizing initiatives, it didn't undertake organizing to make democratic change within schools or the teaching profession - or electoral politics.

If we see organizing as "citizen politics," the practices of diverse people negotiating differences, working together for some common good, and developing political skills in the process, it can be taken into professions, schools, colleges -- and also electoral politics and government.

All his life Humphrey was a "different kind of politician" as a result of his father's drug store. He was able to find common ground with Republicans. He was expansive in his vision - he gave the famous civil rights speech at the 1948 Democratic convention, birthed the Peace Corps, led the Senate fight for desegregation. He also challenged everyday citizens to get involved.

Parties, ideologies, and professional politicians all have a role but they shouldn't be at the center of the political universe. Citizens - and civic settings where people of different interests interact and learn citizen politics - need to be at the center.

It will take a Copernican Revolution in our political thinking to bring this about.

Organizing is transformational. It takes time. It involves investing in people's growth, connections with others, intellectual capacities, ability to act effectively in public -- their civic agency. At the heart of organizing is building productive relationships.

Organizing is transformational. It takes time. It involves investing in people's growth, connections with others, intellectual capacities, ability to act effectively in public -- their civic agency. At the heart of organizing is building productive relationships.

I've had the pleasure of beginning a biweekly dialogue ("Bridging Differences") at Education Week on democracy and education with Deborah Meier. Deb is a mentor and old friend, and one of the great educators of our time. She founded the famed Central Park East Schools in East Harlem (subject of several films including "Music from the Heart" with Meryl Streep), as well as the Mission Hill School in Boston. These helped to launch the national movement for small schools.

Meier argues that relationships which support student growth and agency -- not information delivery or testing -- need to be at the center of democratic education. Young people need space to experiment and try things out, make mistakes, and learn through experience. And this requires adults -- teachers and staff and parents -- who encourage and support such learning based on agency. Students' most important learning is "habits," like learning to think "what is the evidence?", "why does this matter?" and "what would someone with another perspective say?", not acquisition of knowledge.

Her arguments remind me of what is called "relational organizing." This idea comes originally from the civil rights movement. Ella Baker and Bob Moses, among others, distinguished between "mobilizing" and "organizing." The distinction has been developed in broad-based community organizing and spread to environmental groups and elsewhere.

Mobilizing is transactional, focused on outcomes like getting large numbers of people to vote, sign a petition, contact a legislator, go to a demonstration, etc. It bears resemblance to education which "teaches to the test."

Organizing is transformational. It takes time. It involves investing in people's growth, connections with others, intellectual capacities, ability to act effectively in public -- their civic agency. At the heart of organizing is building productive relationships.

Hahrie Han's book, How Organizations Develop Activists, compares "low-engagement" local chapters of two national organizations (a health group and an environmental group) with "high engagement" local chapters. Low-engagement chapters mobilize. High engagement chapters do some mobilizing, but they emphasize organizing, relationship-building and developing members' capacities. They are also far more effective in building power, sustaining members' engagement, and achieving results over the long term.

A distinction from the organizing world, between "public" and "private" relationships, is also extremely helpful in developing agency. Public relationships are those in schools, colleges, or workplaces. Private relationships are in families and among close friends. It's always a matter of more or less not either-or. But recognizing that in public settings the goals shouldn't be intimacy, being liked, and loyalty, but rather mutual accountability, respect, and getting things done makes a large difference.

In our own work, growing from the Center for Democracy and Citizenship for many years at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs (now merged with Sabo Center at Augsburg), we have found it possible to integrate organizing skills and concepts into educational settings.

Dennis Donovan, national organizer for the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement, has worked with faculty and students in translating organizing skills like public narratives and one on one relational meetings into school cultures, as well as the departments of nursing and education.

The one on one meeting, for instance, involves learning the "citizen professional" practice of meeting with another person to discover their self-interests -- passions and motivations. It is key to building public relationships.

Through such work, young people learn to think about their own life stories, or "public narratives," as well as others' motivations. It's worth noting that they often express huge relief when they learn to build "public" relationships since the cultural messages they've received collapse any distinction between public and private.

Alyssa Blood, who has studied special education students in Fridley Middle School (described in this Youtube video) who do Public Achievement, found that development of what she calls their "public persona" -- learning that acting "in public" shouldn't be the same as behavior "in private" among their buddies -- is transformational. It greatly increases their confidence and agency.

Other corners of Augsburg College are picking up civic skills and concepts like citizen professional. In the elected faculty senate last year at Augsburg, Bill Green, Michael Lansing, and Bob Cowgill decided to do one on one relational meetings with the other senators. "It made a huge difference to hear people's interests, their views of what the senate should be, and their thoughts on making the senate work better," said Michael Lansing, chair of the history department. "The senate became much more productive and strategic. It is meeting regularly with the administration now, helping to set the agenda of the college."

The dialogue with Meier combines with our experiences with schools and Augsburg. Such relational experiences in education hold potential to shift how people see and experience such settings from abstractions like "institutions," to living democratic communities.

They also reinforce my conviction that educational settings are a new frontier of democracy.

Organizing is transformational. It takes time. It involves investing in people's growth, connections with others, intellectual capacities, ability to act effectively in public -- their civic agency. At the heart of organizing is building productive relationships.

Organizing is transformational. It takes time. It involves investing in people's growth, connections with others, intellectual capacities, ability to act effectively in public -- their civic agency. At the heart of organizing is building productive relationships.

A thing to keep in mind during Pope Francis' visit this week: Ideas are sources of power. Definitions shape the frameworks we use to understand our experiences and the world around us. As Christopher Ansell shows in his recent book, Pragmatist Democracy, elites skillfully seek to control these definitions.

As the definition of democracy has shrunk, people have lost power. Every struggle for a more inclusive and equal society has been dramatically weakened. Coverage of the pope's visit, like coverage of the papacy since 2013, seems likely to emphasize Francis' values like compassion, inclusion, and service. But the coverage is also almost certain to slight any comments he makes on democratizing power.

The theme of civic power weaves through Francis' career. Long before he became pope, Jorge Bergoglio was developing such views. He ministered to the Iron Guard, a workers group for social justice. He worked in the slums of Buenos Aires. He fought skillfully against the repression of Argentinian dictators and strong men.

Francis was also influenced by the populist "theology of the people," emphasizing the wisdom of popular religious and cultural resources, as Jim Yardley reported in his New York Times article, "A Humble Pope, Challenging the World." In the face of vast economic inequality, Bergoglio came to see the danger of concentrations of power. "The pope is concerned that the plutocracy is destroying democracy," explained Sẚnchez Sonondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

He expressed these views in a speech in Bolivia, July 9, 2015: "The future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the great powers and the elites. It is fundamentally in the hands of peoples and in their ability to organize." In Laudato Si', the climate encyclical, the message is similar. "Public pressure has to be exerted in order to bring about decisive political action," he said. "Society through non-governmental organizations and intermediate groups must put pressure on governments...Unless citizens control political power -- national, regional, and municipal -- it will not be possible to control damage to the environment."

As Peter Levine pointed out on his civic engagement blog comparing coverage of Pope Francis with Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign, "The press completely ignores these leaders' talk of civic engagement. That theme was never covered in the 2008 presidential campaign, and no one mentions it when they cover the Pope."

Today democracy is narrowed to mean elections. As the US Agency for International Development site defines it, "Democracy refers to a civilian political system in which the legislative and chief executive offices are filled through regular competitive elections with universal suffrage." Recent academic literature shows the shrinkage, evident in the work of even as fine a scholar of democracy as Robert Putnam.

Putnam's first well-known book in 1993, Making Democracy Work, argued that successful government depends on public-spirited citizens and vital civic life. His new book, Our Kids, on inequalities, similarly marshaling enormous research, nonetheless shrinks democracy, which he defines "equal voice in government" as "the essence of democracy," without reference to civic culture.

For all their differences, both Republicans and Democrats in this year's election define democracy as elections. "We know what democracy is supposed to be about," said Bernie Sanders in his announcement speech. "It is one person, one vote, with every citizen having an equal say."

This week is an opportunity to connect Pope Francis to the concept of democracy as a "way of life," once widespread in America. The concept lived in the public work of settlers and immigrants who built schools, towns, local governments and local economies, what the historian Robert Wiebe called "portable democracy" in his book, Self-Rule.

It infused the land grant colleges of the 19th and 20th centuries, historically black colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges, which called themselves "democracy colleges."

The idea of democracy as a way of life also inspired the great democratic movements of our history including the black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s which shaped me as a college student.
The late Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King's friend who drafted his famous 1967 speech against the Vietnam War, described the larger conception of democracy in his book Hope and History.

Harding challenged the radical shrinking of the movement's meaning. "'Civil rights movement' is too narrow a description," Harding said. "In fact [the movement] was a powerful outcropping of the continuing struggle for the expansion of democracy...in which African-Americans have always been integrally engaged [and] in which we provided major leadership from the mid-1950s at least to the 1970s." The struggle for democracy "demonstrates the ways of human solidarity in the face of oppression, the common hope which empowers people everywhere, the deep yearning for a democratic experience that is far more than voting."

Harding also argued that democracy is not simply for the dispossessed. The democratic movement "searches for the best possibilities--rather than the worst tendencies - within us all."

Laudato Si' helps to illuminate the dynamics which have so eroded everyday "democratic experience," the replacement of civic and relational cultures with what he calls the "technocratic paradigm" across the sweep of modern societies. Schools, local businesses, colleges, clinics, nonprofits, even religious congregations have often turned into places where experts deliver services for clients and customers, losing their quality of free civic space. It is going to take a long march through settings of daily life to regrow civic muscle.

But as Ansell also observes, elite control over definitions "must contend with audiences who have power to arbitrate the use and meaning of concepts." If we pay attention to the pope's power messages as well as his value messages, it will help us launch this march, reawakening the larger meanings of democracy.

This week is an opportunity to connect Pope Francis to the concept of democracy as a "way of life," once widespread in America. The concept lived in the public work of settlers and immigrants who built schools, towns, local governments and local economies, what the historian Robert Wiebe called "portable democracy."

This week is an opportunity to connect Pope Francis to the concept of democracy as a "way of life," once widespread in America. The concept lived in the public work of settlers and immigrants who built schools, towns, local governments and local economies, what the historian Robert Wiebe called "portable democracy."