Standards

and testing are hugely important in k-12 education these days. Meanwhile,

many people who are interested in improving American democracy would like to make

it more "deliberative." In a deliberative democracy, the public would

rule on the basis of one person, one vote, but with as much informed discussion

as possible before any vote.

Educational standards can be beneficial for

deliberative democracy. They are public statements of expectations for students

and schools, issued by accountable democratic bodies, and subject to debate. Standards

can be good or bad for education (depending on what they contain), but they seem

completely compatible with public deliberation and popular sovereignty. Testing,

on the other hand, is problematic from this perspective. Tests must be designed

by small groups in private. They can’t be public documents and still function

well as assessments. The designers of tests tend to be specialists, since designing

good instruments is a difficult, technical task. Thus experts have considerable

power and are held accountable to professional or technical norms, rather than

public judgment.

The risk of tests for deliberative democracy is clearest

in the case of norm-referenced exams (such as the SAT). To design a norm-referenced

test, experts write possible test questions almost randomly and try them out on

small samples of students. For the actual test, they retain those trial questions

that statistically correlated with past questions asked on the same test (i.e.,

those questions that the high-scorers tend to answer correctly). This is a strictly

technical approach that appears to avoid any judgments about what is important

to learn. But of course such judgments are made implicitly, since any test must

assess some skills or bodies of knowledge and not others. As a result, exams like

the SAT have powerful social effects, yet the public doesn’t control, and cannot

even debate, their content.

Such tests are bad for public deliberation.

Standards are potentially good. The problem is that we often don’t know how to

enforce standards without tests, and unenforceable standards are not good

for either education or democracy.

(By the way, I have been

asked to announce: "After a mini cyber-disaster, Amitai

Etzioni Notes is back up and running.")

I spent the day at the semi-annual meeting of the Deliberative

Democracy Consortium‘s steering committee. We were brainstorming about what

would compose the infrastructure of a deliberative democracy in the United

States—everything from physical meeting spaces, to networks of trained facilitators,

to formal mechanisms for injecting the results of citizen deliberations into government

decision-making. An interesting philosophical question arose at one point. Assume

that you want a fully deliberative democracy. Which path seems better?

1. Make governmental institutions more deliberative. They alone represent everyone,

   and they are already committed to egalitarian deliberation (a form of "voice")

   as a method of decision-making. Allow the market to remain mostly non-deliberative,

   because it reflects other values (such as efficiency and freedom of "exit.")

   However, remove any arbitrary constraints that would prevent the state from regulating

   the market if that’s what people want. They may choose market solutions,

   and that’s fine. But we should consider democratic institutions to be plenipotentiary,

   and leave it up to the public to decide how to use the state.

2. Try to make

   market institutions as well as the state more deliberative. Perhaps even seek

   to reform other institutions too, such as families, religious congregations, and

   nonprofits. Do not consider the state to be sovereign or plenipotentiary. Imagine,

   instead, that power ought to be divided into several distinct sectors (state,

   market, and civil society), none of which rightly rules the others. But make all

   these sectors as deliberative and democratic as possible.

In my view,

this is really a difficult choice, and there are numerous reasons for and against

each option.

Here is an issue that arose several times at last week’s Argentine/US

conference on deliberative democracy. Citizens who are given the power

to deliberate and make formal decisions often learn about legal, political,

and economic constraints and recognize the necessity of making changes

one step at a time. They tend to drop their radical ideas and become critical

of outsiders who do not understand the process that they have mastered.

There are at least two ways to interpret this change in attitude:

First, we could say that giving citizens real power is a form of civic

education. Deliberators develop discipline and an understanding of real,

unavoidable constraints. They gain the skills, knowledge, and networks

needed to make tangible improvements in their communities. Civic

Innovation in America, by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland,

is (partly) the story of some "sixties radicals" who gained

civic skills and discipline by working within democratic institutions,

and thereby become highly effective agents of change.

Alternatively, we could say that incorporating citizens into a system

of constrained deliberation co-opts them. The process is biased in favor

of moderate, meliorist policies and cannot embrace radical proposals.

Yet there are good arguments for radical change, especially in a country

like Brazil, where the world’s most interesting experiments in deliberative

democracy take place in the context of massive inequality.