Jonathan Collins, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Visiting Professor of Political Science and Education, Brown University

While democracy was central to the creation of public education, there is a broad current literature that largely questions - and heavily criticizes – the capacity for democratic decision-making within local governments, including public school districts. This recent research connects democratic shortcomings to both the institutional constraints in responding to public demands and the racial politics that accompany urbanization.  My project questions and investigates how to both conceptualize and empirically identify democratic decision-making in urban school districts.  Jonathan deploys the deliberative democracy theoretical framework from political philosophy and develop a typology of how deliberative democracy must interact with the racial politics of urban spaces in order to achieve optimal democratic deliberation.  Through collecting surveys of superintendents of school districts in Los Angeles County and opinion surveys of residents in those districts, he performs a comparative analysis of democratic practices across districts to create a democracy index scale.  He finds that districts with lower levels of racial conflict and higher levels of minority representation produce higher deliberative democracy scores. As districts’ deliberative democracy scores increase:  their superintendents’ policy priorities shift, targeted forms of district spending increases, and punitive actions in schools decrease. Individuals living districts with high deliberative democracy scores exhibit higher levels of trust in government and hold more positive evaluations of their public schools.