Democracy and National Education Standards

Abstract

This article intervenes in the debate about whether democracies should adopt national education standards. For many democrats, national education standards may promote economic growth, social justice, and a common set of interests. In this article, I reconstruct John Dewey’s warning against oligarchs using standardization to control the schools as well as his argument that democracy requires student, teacher, and community autonomy. The article argues that the Common Core State Standards Initiative has been a top-down policy that aims to prepare children for the economy rather than democracy, and for the foreseeable future, economic elites will tend to dominate efforts to create national education standards. In the conclusion, I make a pragmatic argument for local education control and address objections such as that democracies need national educational standards to ensure racial equity.