Re/turning to the Roots of Progressive Education - Classrooms as Sites of Social Change

• In Event: Between Constraints and Possibilities: Narratives of Agency and Hope in Surveilled Educational Spaces

Abstract

The small schools movement gained momentum in the 1990s, sustained by progressive ideals promoting democracy, access, equity, and social justice. Advocates argued that smaller schools fostered greater intimacy, experimentation, collective responsibility, and transparency when teachers and communities worked collaboratively toward children's education (Meier, 1995). Although well-intentioned—recognizing that all children deserved schools embodying an ethic of care, imagination, and possibility within a community of invested adults—it soon attracted philanthropic and corporate entities seeking to privatize, market, and scale educational reform (Buras, 2011; Rooks & Ravitch 2017), mobilizing the modern charter school. Rather than strengthening public education, resources became reallocated, segregation became more pronounced, and reformers “[fought] for autonomy, but not equity or democracy" (Meier cited in Fabricant & Fine, 2011, p. 2).
This paper is not about the charter system itself, nor does it advocate for or against charter schools. Rather, it focuses on classrooms and teachers within charter networks whose stories are often overlooked amid sweeping critiques and wholesale dismissal of these institutions. While institutions remain imperfect regardless of the ideals they claim to uphold, there is danger in disregarding entirely the individuals who collectively work to advance democracy and equity. While institutions consist of both constructive and problematic actors, there are valuable lessons to be learned from committed educators across public, private, and charter settings.
Informed by perspectives that position teachers as public intellectuals (Freire, 1996; Giroux, 2010; Greene, 2000), this paper draws from ethnographic data—interviews, artifacts, fieldnotes, and researcher notebooks—collected across one year in two kindergarten classrooms at charter schools in New York City. Through this lens, I examine how teachers and children construct educational spaces that are both socially produced and embodied (Massey, 2003) through the interplay of everyday practices, discourses, and materials. How are these educators and students enacting ethics of care, creativity, and criticality amid popular discourses that limit agency, inflame political rhetoric on public education, and exacerbate ongoing critiques of charter schools? Through ethnographic studies of two settings (one serving a largely Latinx population of new immigrants; another serving a mixed race/mixed income community), this paper affirms that individuals mobilize social change, with particular attention on the daily experience constituting classroom life.
Public schools have never fully realized democratic ideals nor served as the equalizers we envision them to be—expecting any single institution to shoulder this responsibility is misguided. Missing from critiques of K-12 schooling, higher education, and government entities are narratives of the micropolitics—for example, glimpses into thoughtful teachers navigating demands on their work and autonomy, explorations of young children developing social, emotional, and intellectual capacities within both restrictive and flexible spaces, and documentation of educators engaging in collaborative inquiry to reimagine curriculum. Rather than debating the merits of charter schools, this paper advocates for shifting focus away from sweeping social critique, scalability imperatives, and arbitrary success metrics toward recognizing the what actually happens under constraints. These practitioners, whose work demands greater visibility in educational research and practice, offer insights that cross institutional boundaries and point toward more authentic forms of educational change.

Author

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University