BURTON, MI – Amy Bloom has always believed that educating people about democracy and getting them to take part in it was the most important work she could do. How serious was she about that?
Serious enough to quit her job teaching civics years ago, so she could learn the things she needed to teach democracy better.
“When I first started teaching high school, I decided I needed to get some political and legal experience,” she told me. So she volunteered to work as a bartender at a fundraiser for the late U.S Senator Carl Levin so she could meet him. “Senator, I’m going to work for you in your Washington office,” she said.
“You are?” he said, startled. She was bright, cheerful and knew how to be persuasive. Soon she was working for the senator by day, answering phones and dealing with constituent concerns, and going to law school. She loved the intellectual side of the law, and solving problems when she worked as a clerk for a federal judge.
“But then I got into the practice of law and hated it!” she laughed. She returned to education, focusing on improving social studies programs, and now, she’s doing something she loves, and which she thinks has state or even nationwide potential:
Teaching high school students to find out for themselves what the Constitution and democracy in America should really mean, and to care. She designed a year-long course called “We the People, the Constitution, and You,” the course is open to sophomores, juniors and seniors, and has so far been, as the students see it, a tremendous success.
The idea is not to cram their heads full of facts, but to get them to learn the essence of how democracy should work by making decisions themselves about things that will affect them.
“I’ve been watching what has been going on in society,” and came to the conclusion that education has gotten off kilter, because “everything is about individual achievement and not about learning the skills to do things collectively that you cannot do by yourself.”
The education establishment is, indeed, often bogged in bureaucracy. For many years, Bloom was the social studies consultant for Michigan’s affluent Oakland County. The administrators were so out of touch that “they passed 96 civics standards (teachers) were supposed to teach in a single semester!”
That was clearly impossible, not to mention tedious. Bloom became board chair of Wayne State University’s Center for the Study of Citizenship, then later their research scholar in residence, a position she still holds.
What she cared about is a concept she calls deliberative democracy, and finding a way to communicate that to students. “Deliberative democracy answers the fundamental civic question, ’what should we do, given the situation? It engages people in moral thinking, and shows them how someone can see something so differently from someone else.”
“If you get people past their screaming, they can see how each side’s concerns are usually born out of their hopes and fears.” She went to the Kettering Foundation to be trained in deliberative democracy. Among other things, she learned that “when you make decisions with a diverse group of people, you get the best thinking.”
Two years ago, she got the chance to put her ideas in practice when she began teaching high school part time at the Bentley Community School District near Flint, and could offer her ‘We the People’ course, in addition to two psychology classes.
Most of her students in the Bentley district are white, but come from anything but affluent or educated backgrounds. Few go to college, and of those who do, more than 90 percent fail to finish.
She wanted to empower them. So she has been showing them what civics means in practice; having her students help design the course and having the class vote on how to share power in running the classroom. This past year, thanks to a grant she secured from the Kresge Foundation, her students designed an entire citizenship conference at Wayne State University law school in Detroit, and involved three other high schools.
“The kids led the whole thing,” she said, beaming. Many of them became aware of a world they had never known, or imagined they could be part of, which was her goal. They became engaged in civic debate, and truly motivated, some for the first time ever.
What she doesn’t know how to do is get other teachers and other schools to try her concept. She hasn’t been able to get any media interest, and she and those working with her haven’t been able to figure out how to raise money to keep it growing.
“We are good at doing, just not at promoting,” she said. Ms. Bloom is almost 60; her husband, David, is a pediatric radiologist. At some point, they will retire, and she worries that will be the end of her program. “Educating for democracy, teaching students how to learn from others and adapt to their environment is so essential.”
So is getting them to care. Somehow, you have to hope that for the future of the nation, her program, and others like it, flourish.
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