Introduction
Baltimore, Maryland—to take a typical example—spends almost $2 billion a year on its public schools. For this investment, only 71 percent of its students graduate on time. A mere 16 percent of those graduates complete college in six years, and graduates of its vocational programs earn a median $13,000 a year (they aren’t successful plumbers and carpenters; they are part-time cashiers, security guards, and drivers).
Similar statistics can be found everywhere in the country where poverty is concentrated: urban and rural, black, white, Latinx, Native American, and Asian. We don’t need test scores to tell us that the current structure of education, the way it is constituted, fails to secure the blessings of liberty for our posterity.
The causes of this problem have been analyzed in many places. This essay describes a workable strategy—both radical and patient—for addressing it: a new founding of public education. The approach derives from the teaching of the late Robert Moses, key leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi theater of the civil rights movement and founder of the Algebra Project, a political initiative that uses math education as an organizing tool. Dr. Moses’s work was central to the drafting of the Voting Rights Act which “gave teeth” to the Constitution’s 15th Amendment. He later spent decades working on education as the “subtext of the right to vote” and advocated for a constitutional amendment that would name education as a federal right, envisioning more decades of work that would eventually give teeth to that amendment.
My approach in this essay derives from Dr. Moses’s teaching but takes a different tack. An intermediate step before a constitutional amendment might be to organize around a free-standing “Constitution for Public Education.” With his mentors Ella Baker and Amzie Moore, Dr. Moses in 1964 helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as a parallel institution that successfully fractured the iceberg of political white supremacy. Similarly, a Constitution for Public Education could be drafted in our era and used immediately as an organizing tool to enact a set of principles for democratic, as opposed to caste-based, education. The success of such a project would hinge on the nature of the images in which it is conceived. The U.S. Constitution was conceived in the image of “no kings.” The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was conceived in the image of black people from all economic classes doing politics as first-class citizens, from sharecroppers to the college educated. The essay that follows suggests an image for conceiving a new founding of public education.
Preamble to a New Constitution of Education
“Every middle school student will have the expectation that when they are in high school, they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with their peers, younger children, or adults in their community. ¨
I propose this sentence as the preamble to a new ¨Constitution for Public Education.” A preamble should include the principles, in a concentrated form, that will be enacted through the body of the constitution itself. Though we might not yet be ready to write the full constitution, this essay elaborates the principles collected in our apparently simple sentence, so that a public conversation on how to enact those principles can begin.
Some readers will object already that the sentence is too practical or limited, because preambles should be more noble and ambitious, but in times when everyone claims the title of “We the People” for their own party, a practical preamble might unify us more. To be clear: the proposal is not to create an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The proposal is rather to create a new foundation for public education based on principles that the great majority of the nation’s people already share.
Not what adults do, but what young people do
The most important principle contained in our preamble is that it says nothing directly about what adults should expect or do, but focuses entirely on something young people must expect and do. The reason for beginning with the middle schoolers’ expectations will be discussed below. The center of the sentence is the action of young people of high school age: they “share knowledge and skills”—teach, coach, facilitate, lead, and organize. The preamble to our new constitution for public education says nothing yet about how they acquire the knowledge and skills that they share. We do not automatically invoke a role for adults: it is entirely possible that the high school student, who is also a teacher, learned something useful from another young person. This is, of course, what young people do all over the world every day: learn from each other—dances, songs, language, games, styles, codes, places to find things, people to trust or shun, and on and on.
We will come to the crucial role of adults and elders later, which is a principle also implicit in this preamble, but constitutions are written when there is a problem to be solved; they are never written when things are going smoothly. They propound wishes and ideals. But notice: you don’t wish for something you already have, and an ideal is something difficult to attain. We are wishing for young people to be right at the center of their own education. The failed plan of education that our schools currently attempt to enact certainly does not place young people at the center. They are currently at the bottom—beneath standards and mandates and school boards and principals and teachers and grades.
Notice, too, our new constitution of education puts at the center not what the young people know, but what they do with what they know. Many things could be said about this distinction, but for the moment we stress the transparency of action as opposed to the very private experience of knowledge. Many confusions in schools arise from the structures purportedly used to “assess learning.” Here, in this statement of principles, we restrict “assessment,” in a sense, to what is public and visible. A student who effectively teaches something, knows that thing. You watch what they do, and to that extent you know what they have learned.
Education as Public Action
But the emphasis on action is related to assessment only incidentally. The key principle is that action is necessarily public and in the open. You cannot share knowledge or skills with someone entirely in private: at least one learner must be present with you. At the foundation of our constitution is the idea that public education is a social enactment, whether your role is teacher, learner, parent, or citizen.
Despite the terrible confusions of the education wars today, the outrage over what is taught or not taught, what books are read or not read, who is included or excluded, who is made to feel shame, the role of families and of our apparently divergent values, this principle—that education is a social enactment—is common to all sides. It is why we care so deeply about what children experience in schools. Beyond curriculum and standards, we want the social context of learning to conform to our values because we understand that schools are places where children are socialized. They are socialized in families, communities, churches, synagogues, mosques, summer camps, and sports leagues, too. But a system of public education is a commitment to social enactments—it is not only about intellectual activity, so-called “content,” but is also about ways of relating, about what people are doing with each other, and so about what we hope or fear our children will do, too.
The Economic Role of Young People in the 21st Century
This central strategy of young people sharing knowledge and skills for a significant wage is appealing to virtually all families across social, ethnic, and economic spectrums. Encouraging young people to act in ways that are at once economic, educational, and publicly engaged opens a theater of action that cuts across ideology and so satisfies one of the key requirements for public education: the great majority of parents and young people can get behind it.
This picture of high school students sharing knowledge and skills with peers and younger children is attractive because all families are concerned about the narrowing of socially or economically useful roles for adolescents. Economic changes that have taken place over two hundred years have forced young people into an impossible kind of stasis. When most people lived on farms, children had economically productive roles from very young ages. As economic activity shifted to cities, both younger and older adolescents found employment in commercial and bureaucratic settings. Industrialization opened up employment for adolescents in factories and mines, shipyards and railroads. Much of this employment, of course, was cruel and exploitive, and throughout the process of urbanization and industrialization there was widespread anxiety about the trouble “idle” youth could cause. Universal public education, especially universal public secondary education (which only became a reality in the 1960s), was largely rationalized not to prepare youth for employment, but to protect society from the dangers of young people, now gathered together in cities, with too little to do.
But the situation is much worse today. Apart from a few retail industries which have yet to be fully automated, most young people have no role in a knowledge-based economy until they complete not only high school and college, but also additional years of graduate or technical training or some vague amount of “work experience.” Adolescence has effectively been extended economically and socially up to age 25 or beyond. The consequence of this for low-and middle-income families is a historically novel economic problem. In earlier periods, as recently as the 1960s and 70s, older adolescents could viably earn their own living. That possibility is rare today except for some illegal forms of employment; and the need to attend school and college for purposes of future employment competes for time with the need to earn survival wages immediately.
The emotional and intellectual consequence of this extended adolescence in high schools is a startling disaffection and alienation, not for all students of course, but for the great majority. Many young people see their economic role simply as consumers, and though they may pick up a sequence of minimum wage, essentially menial jobs as adolescents, they find themselves having to continue in that kind of employment into their twenties, at a loss for how to step into true adult roles.
Of course, this is painting with a broad brush, and middle- or upper-class families are able to subsidize the extended adolescence of their own children through college and beyond in ways that are sometimes not unbearable for the children. But the problem of finding an economically independent adult role persists for those families, too. Automation and the development of artificial intelligence will continue to force young people towards social limbo, and many adolescents in the least affluent families already find themselves trapped in a hopeless cycle of economic precarity with no end in sight. Our new constitution of public education therefore centers on productive roles for adolescents in a knowledge economy, roles that do not have to wait until the conclusion of formal education.
The Capacities of Young People
This brings us to another principle: a young person does not have to know everything about a topic or field of interest to be able to participate in sharing their knowledge. In Baltimore, young people on a small scale are currently paid to do all of the following: lead math games focused on prime factorization, instruct youth videography crews, conduct oral histories, direct plays, analyze air and water quality to inform their community associations, teach art and music in summer camps and after school, coach and judge debate, and more. Organizations like the Algebra Project, The Young People’s Project, Wide Angle Youth Media, and others have successfully paid millions of dollars in wages to thousands of young people over decades.
This principle has ramifications for how we think about school schedules and structures of learning. Once we understand young people as teachers at the center of education, we can discover better ways to use time and space. For example, elementary and middle school teachers are overwhelmed; but high school-age co-teachers could help address their inability to give individual attention to all their students. If we adjust the typical school schedule, three or four high school students could work daily for a wage in every elementary school classroom reading one-to-one, helping with writing or math, or taking an upset child for a walk. The high schoolers who teach in an elementary school in the morning can later take part in a peer-facilitated seminar on history or a conversation group in Spanish, where they become the learners. They can play in a sports league refereed and coached by paid peers, or do chemistry experiments or carpentry in a lab or shop run by peers. This kind of learning could obviously extend from morning till evening if we allow enough flexibility in scheduling for young people to staff, as well as to be taught, in multiple settings. And, of course, such a structure frees up opportunities for highly skilled adult teachers to focus on interesting problems like developing curriculum, helping students or peer teacher-learner pairs overcome difficulties, learning new technologies, and so on.
Education as Imitation of Roles
High school students in elementary and middle school classrooms, coaching sports, or teaching arts and music are useful for more than the immediate instruction. Smaller children don’t only learn from teenagers, they want to be teenagers; they imagine themselves becoming older. We have been wasting a huge resource by letting young children think all they have to emulate is their older brothers’ and sisters’, cousins’ and neighbors’ style, instead of helping them understand that they can also emulate their older peers’ substance. In fact, the most stylish things are substantial; not only a look, but also a talent, and not only a talent, but also some economic reward from sharing one’s talent is extremely attractive, especially to young adolescents.
This is why the preamble begins with middle schoolers’ expectations. A principle of continuity and progression must be at the heart of every viable educational culture. Our current education system generally teaches us to expect that children will put time and effort into challenging work only because of an external incentive structure. They must be bribed or threatened with grades, with promotion or retention, with graduation or failure or they won’t apply themselves seriously to their work. But this obsession with incentive structures is unnatural and contrary to many basic experiences of learning. It cannot be the foundation of a healthy culture, because incentive structures are not the sort of things that get passed down from one generation to the next. What gets passed from generation to generation are roles, ways of acting, patterns of relationship.
Children spend hours, days, months perfecting a dance step, a basketball dribble, or a style of drawing with no grade to motivate them at all. These activities, even if performed alone, are not performed in a vacuum. They match the cultural ways of the people around them—match and extend them, often imitating older peers while adding, perhaps, an individual style. A young child expects that their dancing, athletic ability, or artistry will mature, and that others may later look up to them for some talent or skill they have developed. We are promoting the idea that in a healthy culture the same expectation could be systematically fostered about the acquisition of knowledge.
A healthy structure of motivation requires forms of relationship that allow people to grow in conformity to roles they already see around them. And those roles must be rich enough, plentiful enough, accessible enough that young people can decide to risk something by becoming more than what they already are. One mentor or role model is not enough: there must be a generation of mentors, older peers, to give evidence that a structure of growth into admirable ways of living is viable and sustainable.
That extensive structure of motivation is implied in the middle schoolers’ expectations. This word “expectation” has been twisted by the current system of education, and we should return it to its older meaning of looking forward to something, being excited, hoping and striving, like a mother who is expecting, or a child anticipating a birthday or an adventure. Adults and supervisors talk about having “high expectations” for children or employees, and report cards announce whether a child has “met” or “not met” expectations; but this use of the word conjures pictures of stern authority, a demanding set of consequences without which children or workers will sink into mediocrity. Adult “expectations” have none of the eager anticipation that our preamble invokes because the preamble highlights the middle school child’s awareness of opportunity, not the adult’s power to judge.
Lifting up children’s expectations is very different from what some people describe as “unstructured” because it is wholly realistic in context. That is, children growing up in a context where their older peers are productively employed in knowledge-work will naturally expect that they, too, will grow into similar roles as they mature. It isn’t a question of adult teachers following the middle schoolers’ feelings or whims; we are saying that middle schoolers’ feelings will conform to the examples of their older peers, as in fact middle schoolers’ feelings always conform to the example of their older peers.
The Roles of Adults
Next, the preamble implies principles for adults’ roles in enacting this new constitution for public education. For there to be well-paid jobs in knowledge-work, we must put public money into youth employment year-round. Currently, we put vast amounts of money into policing, incarceration, and military weaponry. Take Baltimore as an example: The city’s police budget is almost $600 million annually. A $10,000 job for every one of the 20,000 current Baltimore high school students would cost $200 million. An argument could clearly be made for gradually shifting one-third of the police budget towards systematic youth employment in knowledge-work. In addition, Maryland spends roughly $300 million a year on incarcerating and supervising adjudicated youth, not to mention the nearly $2 billion spent on the city school system, some portion of which could certainly go towards paid peer teaching. There will be an adult infrastructure, too, that must be funded to support young people’s organized teaching, and we must commit ourselves to creating and paying for that infrastructure. We must extend the adult work already begun in many places to offer pedagogies, curriculum, schedules, materials, and settings that support young people interacting with each other in these daring new ways. But some portion of that $2 billion a year, for example, could reasonably be used to reorient the teachers, support staff, and administrators who already work in the school system. Adults must learn to be open to young people’s expectations and relationships as the center of a new constitution for public education. If we do not play our part, the young people will not be able to play theirs. But their part is at the foundation because they are the ones growing up. We make and protect room for them to explore the creation of their own culture of learning.
Youth Employment as Preparation for a New Economy
The last principle to elaborate is the idea of a job. Our public schools currently presume a structure of employment that is founded on private enterprise creating jobs. Nothing in our projected constitution forbids this private structure of job creation. But just as we understand public high schools as preparation for adult life, we could also think about public youth employment as preparation for adult employment. Patterns of adult employment in the information economy have changed and will change even more drastically in the future. Both the structure of education and of youth employment should adapt in anticipation of the next economy, rather than belatedly chasing the last one.
Apprenticeships are a practice designed to link novices to current developments in an industry, and are a common and popular concept across ideologies. Our preamble extends the idea of apprenticeships in several important ways. First, everyone should expect that they will have an “apprenticeship” in knowledge work. We might think of all 14-year-olds, for example, as apprentices to 17-, 18-, or 22-year-olds for several hours a day. Second, there must be significant pay—not inadequate “stipends”—for high school students to address their material need and to emphasize the real, productive contribution they are making to their community (in current dollars, $10,000-$12,000 a year meets that goal). And third, a systematic structure of youth employment will stimulate youth-to-youth economic interactions in ways that are different from typical apprenticeships. For example, the Baltimore Algebra Project contracted with Wide Angle Youth Media to make a video about their math work, which they then used to attract capital. And some of the youth videographers then sought help with their math from the Algebra Project’s young math teachers. We could envision a whole economy of youth enterprises, underwritten by public capital, but able to extend their interactions into a cooperative community exchange.
Conclusion
The principles described above are contained implicitly in our preamble. The fleshed-out constitution for public education must describe first, what rights and obligations young people have, next, what rights and obligations older people have, and then mechanisms for negotiating among the contradictions and competing priorities that any such structure will necessarily expose. There are questions of local variation and federal uniformity as with the U.S. Constitution. There are questions about finance. And even a written down constitution for public education will be just the beginning, not the end, of all kinds of wrangling.
But the function of any constitution as a systematic calculus of wishes and ideals is to map out a structure of motivation that explains what we are trying to do. Our preamble begins this process: “Every middle school student will have the expectation that when they are in high school, they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with peers, younger children, or adults in their community.” Motivation in this preamble is seen as emerging from young people’s confidence that they can grow into roles where their knowledge is valued and where their actions contribute to the public good and to the continuity of a culture of social cooperation into the next generation.
Granted, the strategy proposed here will be seen as both expensive and tangent to most current struggles over education policy. Nevertheless, a broad consensus already exists about the principles:
1. Education should focus on what children need, not what adults need.
2. Young people learn eagerly from other young people.
3. Adolescents need meaningful things to do, and children are most eager to do things in social contexts with other people of their own age and also with people older than they are who are interested in helping them grow to adulthood.
4. The economic burden on poor and middle-income families is too great, and if young people can contribute to family income without harming their own education, they should.
5. It makes more sense to reduce crime and addiction by spending money at the front end on productive roles for young people than on the back end of policing, incarceration, and drug treatment.
6. We are unlikely as a country to quickly resolve our differences of educational philosophy, but we already largely agree that all young people can contribute something to their communities, and that paying them to contribute meaningfully would be a good idea if we can afford it.
If some of us begin to apply this consensus and enact our principles in specific jurisdictions and communities, the benefits will quickly be seen. The failed plan of education currently at work does not need to be attacked head on, at least not immediately. Instead, powerful new relationships and capacities will emerge from young people finding themselves at the center of their own teaching and learning. Cohorts of adolescents growing up through such structures will soon be adults themselves, able to articulate the rights and obligations of both young people and older people under a new constitution of public education. Let us begin now to discuss what a new founding of public education would mean for our communities and for our country.