OPENING TO CHAPTER TEN

sharing power & apprenticing democracy

"As the fitting apprenticeship for despotism consists in being trained to despotism, so the fitting apprenticeship for self-government consists in being trained to self-government."
-HORACE MANN

I plodded through school, striving to please my teachers but never feeling I had much to offer. Anxiety surrounding education didn't lift for me until leaving graduate school at twenty-six. Within months, anxiety was replaced by excitement as I discovered questions inside that drew me to libraries, lectures, and spirited conversations. My life became an exploration of the next question . . . and the next.

Only many years later did I begin to connect my experience to democracy. Gradually I realized that the love of learning, though coming belatedly to me, lies at the heart of a democratic culture. To be equipped to come together to address the complex problems of today's world-to be democracy makers-young people need the opportunity to learn in the classroom what I discovered only after leaving.

Zawadi Powell is one of a new generation showing us the difference it makes to learn the arts of democracy at a young age.

Over a decade ago, I spoke with Zawadi, then a high school senior at Central Park East Secondary School in Harlem.

"When I came to this school, it was hands-on, . . . more active," she told me. "Everything just made sense to me. It was fun to come here. At my old school, we just listened to the teacher talk all day. Here we work in groups. We learn through writing plays and doing projects. It's a whole different experience."

She and her classmates-mainly from lower-income African American families-shattered stereotypes and statistical trends. Zawadi graduated, just like over 90 percent of her school's incoming ninth-graders. And like 95 percent of her fellow grads, she went on to a four-year college. Compare this to just under 40 percent of all New York public high school graduates.

Zawadi attended Brown University, and since graduating, she's studied in Ghana, taught school, and helped launch two nonprofits. Soon she will begin graduate school in North Carolina, she told me when I caught up with her in 2005.

Zawadi explained to me how her high school shaped who she is today. "I can draw my own conclusions. I'm not a follower," she says, laughing. "I don't take things at face value or fit into someone else's model. I've learned to live through exploration, realizing that every experience is a lesson."

I think it's safe to say Zawadi is every educator's dream. And the high school that "just made sense" to her also has made sense to a lot of others struggling to understand how to turn around the crisis captured in the accompanying box.

Zawadi's Central Park East Secondary School was founded in 1985 in what was widely perceived as New York's least successful district, and until the last decade, it remained a lonely beacon of possibility in the world of public education. But word of its effectiveness spread so that by 2000, a whole movement of small schools had sprung up in New York and beyond. Its record so impressed Boston school authorities that they suspended some rules and regulations to allow nineteen similar pilot schools to form, spearheaded by the same education visionary, Deborah Meier, who launched Central Park East elementary and secondary schools.

When Deborah Meier bucked conventional wisdom to create the elementary school in Harlem that made possible Zawadi's positive high school experience, what exactly did she and her colleagues do differently? What approaches do the islands of success share?

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Lappé is a pioneer in democratic thought and action. Democracy's Edge exemplifies her path blazing role in keeping democracy alive in our time.
-Cornel West
Professor, Princeton University

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