Rebalancing Quality Education in a Democratic Society

Abstract

The integrity of democracy and quality education in the United States has been jeopardized by a market-based school reform agenda. The last twenty years of federal policy and legislation has resulted in privatizing public education, vilifying the voices of teachers and narrowing the curriculum to easily quantified skills in reading and math. The curriculum taught in U.S. public schools has been reduced to corporate terms of achievement and measurement. Within this paper, I explored the question, “What does quality education look like in a democracy?” A critique of recent educational reforms in the United States and influential international benchmarks are presented, and a curricular scope for quality education is proposed incorporating the missing democratic fundamentals. This paper hopes to encourage a global dialogue among policy makers, educators and other stakeholders who value a quality public education and see it as necessary to pursue a democratic vision.