SYNOPSIS: The author presents the project of a small community based and democratically organized charter school. There is a short historical perspective of the schools’ seemingly impervious barrier to systemic change. It describes, in general terms, the conditions necessary to overcome the logic of domination as stated by Giroux and McLaren. The article closes by describing in some detail La Escuela Freire in terms of rationale, goals, design principles, and characteristics of organizational culture.

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There are charters and
then, there are charters

American Charter schools are nonsectarian public schools of choice that operate with freedom from many of the regulations that apply to traditional public schools. The "charter" establishing each such school is a performance contract detailing the school's mission, program, goals, students served, methods of assessment, and ways to measure success. The length of time for which charters are granted varies, but most are granted for 3-5 years. At the end of the term, the entity granting the charter may renew the school's contract. Charter schools are accountable to their sponsor-- usually a state or local school board-- to produce positive academic results and adhere to the charter contract. The basic concept of charter schools is that they exercise increased autonomy in return for this accountability. They are accountable for both academic results and fiscal practices to several groups: the sponsor that grants them, the parents who choose them, and the public that funds them.2

La Escuela Freire (LEF) is a proposed, community based, democratically organized, small secondary 9-12 charter school of 400 students to be housed in downtown Santa Ana, California. Drawing primarily from the educational work of the Brazilian Paulo Freire, LEF focuses on the human potential of all participants (students, parents, teachers, staff) in terms of their academic, intellectual, ethical, aesthetic and personal development. After providing a short historical perspective of schooling’s seemingly imperviousness to systemic change, particularly democratic change, the paper then describes, in general terms, the conditions necessary to overcome resistance to democratic change. The paper then closes by describing in some detail La Escuela Freire in terms of ideology/rationale, goals, design principles, and organizational culture characterized by concepts of Just Community, Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Congruence, and Democratic Dialogue.

Santa Ana, California is today best known for its large and diverse Hispanic population, now comprising about 80% of what was once a virtually all-white city. It has the largest Spanish-speaking population per capita for a city its size in the United States. Of the 400 proposed students, some 75% will drawn from Santa Ana thus guaranteeing a population representative of the city’s demographics.

The name of the school honors the educational work of the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. While recognizing that classification is always subject to argument, of educational philosophers and theorists of the 20th century, the first half belongs to American John Dewey, with the second clearly going to Freire. To support my contention, a brief biographic sketch of Freire seems appropriate.

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was born September 19th, 1921 in Recife, Brazil. His initial work focused on the development of an educational practice whereby the marginalized poor learned to read and write in order for them to vote in presidential elections. Rejecting traditional text based reading methods and creating small group or “cultural circles” the lived experiences of the poor became the “text”. In this manner, literacy and knowledge become an act of creation rather than something thrown at the students. In 1962, he embarked on a campaign to teach literacy to poor workers in Brazil, enabling them to vote and thus participate not only in the policies that affected their lives but also to challenge the oppressive conditions in which they found themselves. Through a participatory process characterized by small group dialogical “cultural circles”, that linked literacy with the political, formerly adult illiterate learned to read and write quickly. For example, 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. Subsequently, the Brazilian government began a national program for 2,000,000 illiterates.

However under the military coup of 1964, the program was cancelled and Paulo, after being accused as an international subversive and a “traitor to both Christ and the Brazilian people” he was imprisoned for 70 days. Upon release, he left the country for a 15-year exile only to return in 1980. His internationally acclaimed book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated into at least 18 languages, has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. Additionally, he authored two-dozen books either individually or as he often said “in dialogue” with others. He conducted seminars, workshops, and lectured internationally in North, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. His legacy includes numerous worldwide Paulo Freire Institutes/Centers in Austria, Canada, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Spain, and the USA (University of California Los Angeles) and Chapman University, Orange, California.). He holds 16 international honorary doctorate degrees (Chapman University in 1998) as well as the Belgium King Baudouin Award ($190,000) for his adult literacy work. He died of heart failure at home in São Paulo, May 2nd, 1997.

Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux (1994) flesh out the basic essence of Freire’s ideological work:

Freire's presence on the world stage as a "man of his time” has provided the conditions for countless individuals, regardless of race, gender, class, and cast to break free from their historically contingent and entrenched vocabularies to face up to their fa1libility and strength as agents of possibility. As the standard-bearer of what has become known as critical pedagogy, Freire continues to identify and challenge not only those pedagogical mechanisms central to the phenomenon of oppression but also those relations within wider social, cultural and institutional contexts that confront individuals with the logic of domination... (p.xiii)

As related to education, they continue:

Equally edifying is Freire’s conceptual understanding of how the power of institutionalized schooling finds its correlative in particular regimes of knowledge that stress technocratic reasoning and an introduction to a model of citizenship based on individualist and consumerist ethics. (p.xv)

Historical Perspective

Some 20 years prior to Giroux and McLaren’s 1994 remarks, I concluded (Wilson 1974/75)3 that the school's direct impact upon the democratic formation of its charges was, in general, far from adequate and in specific instances negative. I wrote that while many conditions might be cited as to the causes of this finding, a major contributor, to a large extent, was the schools’ failure to break out of a culture of psychological reductionism. The marking of the student and increasingly the parents as the variables within a narrow analysis of existing school authority structures and classroom patterning drives out attention paid to the total educational environment. I cited Levin (1960) who wrote:

... the school as a total environment provides little opportunity for the young to learn or practice social responsibility, moral judgement, or any cognitive skills requiring the exercise of critical independent judgement ...(and)...so long as schools continue to function primarily as custodial institutions it is hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the success of any program of social or moral education within the school. ( p.89).

Some 23 years later we have Sara Lightfoot Lawrence (1983) reporting her findings from her observation of Highland Park, one of the sites from her in depth study of six American high schools. She writes:

The general turn toward conservatism in American society is expressed in the building of more extreme hierarchies, a preoccupation with grades, and vigorous competition among students ... (wherein) ... students do not perceive school as a place where they can feel a part of a closely knit and accepting community. In fact, in school it is more likely that they will experience a heightened sense of exclusion and separation.

On August 16, 2009, an online list serve of the progressive education organization Rethinking Schools carried this following exchange in part:

First post: “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and civil rights leader Al Sharpton will join Education Secretary Arne Duncan on a tour of four cities to highlight the Obama administration's efforts to reform public education, spur innovation and discuss challenges facing America's school systems. The tour, an outgrowth of their meeting with President Obama last spring, will include school visits, stakeholder meetings and media briefings. The goal of the tour is to stimulate discussion and community engagement around issues of education reform. Secretary Duncan described Gingrich and Sharpton as "Two of the most candid people I have ever known. They are willing to challenge conventional thinking and I can absolutely promise some provocative conversations on education reform.’”

Reply post: “Actually this is not surprising. The Obama/Duncan education agenda is focused on market mechanisms: closing public schools and expanding charter schools and choice, teacher merit pay and more flexibility to bypass union agreements… In my view, we need to be talking about reinventing democratic public education to incorporate the real concerns, desires, perspectives of those communities that have been failed by public schools. … We are in a serious situation. That is why we need a new education program/framing that is shaped by a broad constituency of parents, community members, youth, and educators.”

Thus the struggle continues for the formation of critical democratic schooling. As I argued in 1974/75 and in 2004, democratic formation involves much more than mere manipulation of teaching method and content. What is necessary is an emphasis upon the culture of educational experiences in which the entire environment, the weltanschauung, the democratic core becomes the means by which development is affected. Within this context, what if students could be freed from the existing restrictions, what if they had extensive time to engage in making major decisions about themselves and their own educational process? What indeed if there could be:

...room for the private vision, for the playful, even passionate, reordering of felt reality. There are images of reality that lie outside the domain of analytical thought. To put them to the tests of logical or empirical proof is to threaten that fragile sense of the uniquely valid in one's own perceptions that is so essential to selfhood ...In short, (the)...classroom should be at once a laboratory, a studio, and a forum, a place where the rationale and the romantic can exist side by side as equally valid categories of understanding, where the two cultures of science and art find common ground.(Whitmore, 1970, p.283).

What if the entire environment altered and the student/teacher authority relationship became transformed? What if the entire process changed in accord with the situation Maslow (1956) discussed in which teachers and students:

... behaved in a very unneurotic way simply by inte­rpreting the whole situation differently, i.e., as a pleasant collaboration rather than a clash of wills, and omnipotent; the absence of student threatening authoritarianism; the refusal to regard the students as competing with each other or with the teacher; the refusal to assume the 'professor' stereotype; and the insistence on remaining as realistically human, as say, a plumber or a carpenter; all of these created classroom atmosphere in which suspicion ,wariness, defensiveness, hostility, and anxiety disappeared. (pp.190 -191).

What if we took to heart Lightfoot’s previous cited call for a strong ideological vision and the dangers of missing ideological roots in concern with Alexander Sidorkin’s (1999) discussion of civility? For him, one component of civility, defined as institutional dialogue, is “... an ideology, or a concept of the good life. Civility involves a moral self-assessment of a community with such a concept.” (p.127). Ideology then becomes the ... “first discourse of school organization ... it is a monological text of organization that is absolutely needed for any conversation to begin.”(p. 128).

Keeping in mind the above historical account with its notions of overcoming oppressive educational conditions, ideological necessity, civility, and conceptions of good schools and good life, LEF is designed to continue the historical struggle to counter the continuing press for narrow, limited, constrictive, market oriented, de-humanizing teaching and learning in which students are identified as potential consumers rather than citizens actively engaged in public democracy. The following narrative offers La Escuela’s expression of ideology stated as rationale and the content to actualize its good school purpose.

Rationale/Ideology

LEF concentrates on the development of a democratic and just education characterized by the values of intelligence, knowledge, freedom, equality, and fairness all actualized through the principles of literacy, dialogue, problem-based learning, and active participation in civic and cultural life. Every human regardless of current condition is educable and capable of critical thought to contribute to the health of democratic community life.

These understandings provide the fundamental rationale for the school. Yet, no school should attempt to pattern itself after any single theoretical position. Other LEF critical inspirations draw from thinking and practices of other emancipating educators including but not limited to John Dewey, Lawrence Kohlberg, Nell Noddings, Maxine Greene, Elizabeth Leone Simpson, Chris Argyris, Alexander Sidorkin, and James MacGregor Burns. Dewey insisted that the virtues of living in democratic society are learned only through reflected experiences and that nurture of those virtues must be integral to the school curriculum. For him, the word democracy and ethics were virtually synonyms. Additionally, Dewey was profoundly interested in the relationship between the arts/aesthetics and everyday life. For him, the experience of the arts was essential for “the final measure of the quality of that culture is the arts which flourish.”

Kohlberg’s theorized and demonstrated that cognitive developmental moral reasoning could anchor the creation of secondary school “just communities”. Noddings advanced the movement for democratic education by providing the missing feminine perspective of care and compassion. Greene centers on the expansion of human imagination through the aesthetic, the arts, and other academic subjects while Simpson provides criteria to answer the question “what constitutes the democratic person?” Argyris, usually not considered as a critical educator, nonetheless provides significant insight to ethical congruence in organizational life while Sidorkin deepens our knowledge of dialogue and dialogical relationships. By combining these foundational ideas with Burns’ call for a transforming moral leadership that raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspirations of all members of the LEF community as both leaders and “followers”, LEF joins the historic struggle for an education for critical democracy.

Goals

• Provide a democratic education focused on the intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, emotional, and imaginative development of students within the context of community development.
• Foster within students leadership capabilities characterized by habits of the mind (thinking), habits of the heart (feeling) and habits of the hands (doing).
• Inspire and nurture leadership committed to a vibrant civic community life that focuses on peace, justice, fairness, and challenges all forms of inequity.
• Insure that all students pass the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE) and meet the entrance requirements for the University of California and the California State University systems. (Obligatory for any proposed California charter school in that is serious about being established.)

Five Design Principles:

• Democratic Formation: Recognizing that the best way to teach democracy is by being democratic, students, faculty, will be involved in school governance.
• Community Based Education: The boundary between the school and the community blurs. The larger community becomes the essential civic engagement component of the curriculum. As students progress, they will spend increasingly longer periods of time in the community rather than at the school site.
• Academic Seriousness: The culture of the school is one of academic seriousness characterized by un-anxious expectations that explicitly value the qualities of trust-in-advance, openness, respect, interdependence, and ethical concern.
• Personalization: A student ratio of twenty students to each teacher guarantees that students and teachers will know each other well.
• Continuous Progression:Advancement is level and competency based. When all levels are completed, students are ready for graduation whether the journey has taken three, four or possibly more years.

These Goals and Design Principles will be realized through the infusion of a number of democratically saturated traditions. Central are Just Community, Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Congruence, and Democratic Dialogue with each providing a rich intellectual heritage for the school.
In a Just Community (Oser, Althof, and Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2008), all participants (teachers, students, staff members and often parent representatives) meet periodically to discuss and determine democratic processes to engage problems and issues within the school. Based on the original work of Lawrence Kohlberg, Just Community moved beyond an emphasis on individual moral development to consideration of the entire school environment as the object of analysis. Starting in a limited number of American high schools in 1974, the movement spread to Germany and Switzerland in the mid 1980s. An initial focus on the necessary skills required for the development of the on site democratic community was subsequently expanded to include broader citizenship education considerations.

Oser et al raise three questions about the efficacy of JC: (I) Does democracy education change children and adolescents or do students in these programs change their schools, or is there a dynamic interaction over time? (2) How can democracy be ‘learned'? How can the concept of democracy be most thoroughly learned and how can democratic problem-solving skills best be acquired? (3) How can we optimize the chances that the knowledge and skills learned will motivate future active citizenship? (p. 395). These questions guide the formation of LEF Just Community.
The second tradition arises from the corpus of Freire’s Critical Pedagogy work. He saw education as the struggle against oppression and for liberation. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) he writes:

“ the struggle begins with men/women’s recognition that they have been destroyed. Propaganda, management, manipulation-all arms of domination-cannot be the instruments of their rehumanization. The only effective instrument is a humanizing pedagogy in which the revolutionary leadership establishes a permanent relationship of dialogue with the oppressed.”(pp.68-69).

O’cadiz, Wong, and Torres (1998), provide both essential theoretical grounding and practical application guidance from schools in São Paulo, Brazil. The question here thus becomes: is it possible to actualize such a revolutionary notion in an American charter? What would such a school look and feel like in Santa Ana, California.

The third heritage belongs to Chris Argyris (1990). He postulates that two kinds of theories, espoused and in-use, guide behavior. Espoused theories are reasons or principles individuals use to explain their action in specific situations. In-use theories are those actually used in the action yet espoused theories often, (more precisely, usually) do not match individual theories-in-use. Our actions lack congruence; often there is a pervasive inconsistency between what we say we do and what we actually do. This observation, in and of itself, is not particularly new. What Argyris has discovered is that while people do not act in accordance with their espoused theories, they do behave in congruence with their theories-in-use. Individuals remain mostly unaware of the lack of consistency between their espoused theory and behavior as well as blind to the congruence between behavior and theories-in-use. Argyris (1982), argues that the guiding theory-in-use for the vast majority of people, termed Model I, has four governing variables: 1) Achieve your purpose as you define it, 2) Win, do not lose, 3) Suppress negative feelings, and 4) Emphasize rationality. (p.86). Model I behavior, guided by these variables, is designed to control the environment and situations, control the task, and protect others from being hurt, all unilaterally, that is, without investigating whether others believe they need or desire protection. The result is defensive and closed interpersonal relationships, reduced valid feedback, and limited free choice. The alternative to such construction is an open communication system in which the participants continually re-examine the governing variables of their system. Argyris calls this a Model II environment whereby one seeks to discuss the un-discussable, make explicit the implicit, and question premises. From Schön (1983), the variables within a Model II environment include:

Give and get valid information.

Seek out and provide others with directly observable data and correct reports, so that valid contributions can be made.

Create the conditions for free and informed choice.

Try to create, for oneself and for others, awareness of the values at stake in decision…

Increase the likelihood of internal commitment of decisions made.

Try to create conditions, for ones self and for others in which the individual is committed to an action because it is intrinsically satisfying, not, as in the case of Model I, because it is accomplished by external rewards or punishments. (p. 231).

The issue then becomes, will the theoretical espoused orientation of La Escuela Freire match its actual behavior and if so, how would the disinterested observer come to know this?

Democratic Dialogue is the fourth tradition. It moves us beyond what Freire classified as common conversation as “you talk, I talk” as often quite enjoyable, but hardly able to change the world. For Freire (2000) dialogue, as a human phenomenon, consists of two dimensions, reflection and action “... in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed – even in part – the other immediately suffers.”(p.87). Both are necessary (praxis) to name and transform the world.

Darder (1998) further informs us that:

In dialogue, people engage in a conceptual analysis of what is and a creative synthesis of what might be possible. Both dialogue and problem-posing assume that it is through the experience of such dialogical praxis that knowledge production occurs that eventually results in the formation of critical literacy and consciousness, self-empowerment, and self-and social-transformation ... (thus)... unlike discussion, problem-posing dialogue requires people to intentionally and continually look for the contradictions between their own and other people's perceptions and interpretations of their daily experiences, as well as the contradictions between the privileged perceptions and interpretations placed upon their experiences by the dominant culture’s conceptual world view. (p. 7).

Dialogue in this sense has a distinct purpose that of social transformation. For Alex Sidorkin (1999), Buber and Bakhtin conceive of dialogue as having no ultimate end beyond itself wherein “dialogue is not simply a conversation, a way of communication, and a means toward some other goals. Dialogue becomes the goal itself, the central purpose of human life.” (p. 12). Sidorkin further offers two human relationship concerns of dialogue: (1) It is not defined by separateness, but by connectedness with others and (2) it is a universal phenomenon, accessible to everyone equally, and readily available to every culture and every language. Moving beyond Freire, Bakhtin expands the word “word” in terms of relationship wherein “... every meaning is co-authored; every word uttered by an individual belongs in part to someone else.” (Sidorkin, p.13). While Dewey (1916, p.9) does not use the word dialogue, he does write of communication as “ ... a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition of both parties who partake in it.” The sharing of experience, in this case, the writing of encounters with Paulo becomes consummatory when characterized by unity and integration.

Hildebrand (2008, p. 159) states it thus, “…it must be granted the conditions that make possible a back-and- forth of doing and understanding. Such a rhythm can shape an overall experience with its thematizing, emotional quality”. The word dialogue, with its four interpretations, cannot at the same time be expressed as a singularity to “fit” into a presubscribed category such as a charter school. Rather our intent is to have school dialogues constituted by a bit of conversation, a healthy dose of Paulo’s praxis, and rich flavoring of Bakhin/Buber’s ends-in-its self-orientation within an atmosphere of aesthetic, consummatory experience. The question obviously becomes: Will La Escuela Freire be able to meet its raisons d'être in a beautiful way?

Recalling the previous comments referring to the importance of congruence as one marker of democratic, to what degree does the school’s espoused theory match its theory in use? Does the school, in other words, walk its talk? For La Escuela Freire a potential and perhaps major contradiction exists between academic demands (usually stated as academic rigor, meeting university requirements, closing the achievement gap, all under the dictates of mandatory high stakes testing) and the goal of democratic, political, ethical student development.

Amy Gutmann notes in the conclusion to Democratic Education, practices and policies that improve the academic performance of students sometimes prove inimical to their moral development. She questions whether choosing to emphasize the academic performance of students while ignoring their “political education" in the principles and practices of democracy is morally defensible. In the end, she suggests that that it is not that "the cultivation of virtues, knowledge, and skills necessary for political participation has moral primacy over other purposes of public education in a democratic society” (p. 286). Thus, whereas it is fine to urge greater scholastic accomplishment, it should not come at the expense of education in the principles and practices of democracy.

As La Escuela Freire unfolds, with some, but hopefully not too much humility, it will meet its moral obligation to help complete the critical democratic spirit and promise of the American revolution.

References

Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Argyris, C, Putnam, R. and Smith, D. (1985). Action science. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

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Darder, A. (1998). Teaching as an act of love: reflections on Paulo Freire and his contributions to our lives and our work. Reclaiming Our Voices: An Occasional Paper Series for Entering the 21st Century. (Jean Frederickson, series editor). California Association for Bilingual Education

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Wilson, T. (1974/75). An alternative community based secondary school education program and student political development. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California.

Wilson, T. (2004). Community matters. In S. SooHoo (Ed.). Essays in urban education: Critical consciousnesness, collaboration, and the self. (pp. 87-113). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

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