Democracy, Education, and Governance

The restructuring of school governance, especially in urban school districts, is fundamental in current educational reform. This book provides a model of school governance based upon participatory democracy, derived from the "developmental" tradition in political theory. The result is a system of governance that is fundamentally integrated, in that it is simultaneously participative, communicative, associative, and nonviolent, as well as sensitive to the need for collective, democratic deliberation concerning community-wide interests. This model is critically compared to the bureaucratic model of school governance and current school-based management plans.