Civic Virtue and the Reform Mill
On the eve of America's independence, John Adams wrote, "Public virtue is the only foundation of republics." He also asserted that real liberty depends on "a positive passion for the public good." More than two centuries later, we are struck by the abundance of civic passion in our nation's public schools, by the centrality of civic passion to significant school improvement, and by how the school reform mill suffocates passion with short-lived, politically safe programs.
For much of the 1990s, we followed 16 schools engaged in comprehensive reform. As participants in middle-grades projects sponsored in five states by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, educators in these schools often rose to the challenge to strengthen students' intellectual accomplishments by making their schools more caring, more inclusive of children from diverse backgrounds, and more genuinely participatory.
In California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, and Vermont, we found schools that struggled to engage all of their students in rich, challenging, and socially significant intellectual workâdriven by a Jeffersonian commitment to public education as the key to democracy. Teaching children to change the world, one school faculty countered its community's serious racial discord with an ambitious, schoolwide curriculum focused on culture, difference, and friendship. Another joined low-income parents, faculty members, and students in politically powerful relationships aimed both at narrowing the black- white achievement gap and solving neighborhood infrastructure problems. One state project leader used Carnegie's prestigious name and the project's modest funding as levers to tilt more state resources toward the state's low-income children. In each of these cases and many others, reform was a mission of moral, civic, and cultural change as well as an effort...
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