A Public Laboratory Dewey Barely Imagined: The Emerging Model of School Governance and Legal Reform

The American public school system is in the midst of a vast and promising reform. The core architectural principle of the emergent system is the grant by higher-level authorities – federal government, states, and school districts – to lower level ones of autonomy to pursue the broad goal of improving education. In return, the local entities – schools, districts, and states – provide the higher ones with detailed information about their goals, how they intend to pursue them, and how their performance measures against their expectations. The core substantive commitment of the emergent system is the provision to all students, and particularly to racial and other minorities whom the public schools have traditionally short-changed, of an adequate education, where the definition of adequacy is continuously revised in the light of the improving performance of the best schools. The reform seeks an education that builds on the curiosity and needs of diverse students and uses the whole school system as a vast laboratory to determine how best to achieve this end. If it succeeds, it will attain on a national scale enduringly the goals that John Dewey\u27s famous Laboratory School in Chicago was able to approximate for roughly a hundred students for a few years. The reform grows out of and contributes to a new form of collaboration among courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies on the one side and between these organs of government and new forms of public action on the other. It thus redefines the separation of powers and recasts the administrative state more generally, while opening the way to new forms of citizen participation in the orientation and operation of key public institutions. At the limit, school reform raises the prospect of a broader redefinition of our very democracy. The sad history of education in the last fifty years, and particularly the troubled efforts to improve public education in its closing decades, invites an incredulous reaction to such claims. For most of the twentieth century, administrators – local, state, then federal – tried to control classroom behavior through uniform rules and hierarchy. Teachers retained significant autonomy over their day-to-day activities, but only at the high cost of using standard textbooks and regimenting students in accordance with administrative precept. Periodic efforts to introduce what could very broadly be conceived as Deweyite reforms or otherwise to assist at-risk students left traces in individual classrooms and schools. But they changed next to nothing at the higher levels of the school administration or at the leading institutions that trained school administrators

The Federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Post-Desegregation Civil Rights Agenda

Despite many deficiencies, the No Child Left Behind Act ( NCLB or Act ) extends to the federal level and diffuses to the states an innovative system of publicly monitored decentralization of school governance known as the New Accountability. This Article argues that, given background changes in the understanding of effective classroom teaching, accountability systems of the type imposed by the NCLB can enable willing school districts to build the capacity for school-level reform upon which the ultimate improvement of public schooling depends. It claims further that activists can accelerate the reforms and ensure respect for the requirements of racial and economic fairness by using the accountability handholds the NCLB provides as tools for a new civil rights strategy. By officially documenting racially disparate impacts, and by distinguishing similarly situated schools and districts that reduce these disparities from those that do not, the Act authoritatively defines many of the worst existing disparities as avoidable and, therefore, invidious. The Act thus can trigger just the kind of locally, experientially, and consensually generated standards whose absence in the past has kept courts from carrying through with their initial commitments to desegregated, educationally effective schools. We argue that these emergent standards open new possibilities to courts adjudicating the constitutional acceptability of public schools in the light of the NCLB. Rather than following Brown v. Board of Education in attempting by themselves to set the rules for constitutionally sufficient behavior, courts can follow the innovative decisions of, for example, the Texas Supreme Court in developing a form of judicial review through which judges superintend articulation of justiciable standards by those most directly concerned with the reconstruction of classrooms, schools, and school districts. This new form of judicial review could supplant Brown as a new pattern for judicial protection of positive, social rights and for the judicial supervision of complex institutional reform that due respect for such rights may require

The Fragile Promise of Provisionality

It is a pleasure to address such well-informed, insightful and well-intentioned responses to our Article. Intellectual predispositions and differing assessments of the prospects of reform aside, it is striking that so many participants have firsthand experience of the new model school, the new politics in all their mystery, and even non-court-centric judicial review. It is clear that something is afoot, and not just in academic circles, when observers as different as Diane Ravitch, the critic of Deweyan latitudinarianism, and Gordon Whitman, the community organizer, are both surprised to discover that standardized testing can go hand in hand with individualized education in improving schools for the most vulnerable students. In the main, therefore, we are engaged in an intramural discussion about how to characterize and assess the developmental possibilities of a new species of public institution whose mere appearance confounds traditional taxonomies. Because reactions to this novelty nonetheless strongly reflect the educational, political or policy, and legal expertise of the respondents, we divide our own necessarily selective commentary accordingly. We begin, however, with a compressed restatement of our core argument, emphasizing what we take to be its most attractive institutional feature: the ability to make progress on apparently intractable problems even in the absence of anything like a fully specified concept of the eventual solution or a rich consensus on the ultimate goals of education

The Federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Post-Desegregation Civil Rights Agenda

Despite many deficiencies, the No Child Left Behind Act ( NCLB or Act ) extends to the federal level and diffuses to the states an innovative system of publicly monitored decentralization of school governance known as the New Accountability. This Article argues that, given background changes in the understanding of effective classroom teaching, accountability systems of the type imposed by the NCLB can enable willing school districts to build the capacity for school-level reform upon which the ultimate improvement of public schooling depends. It claims further that activists can accelerate the reforms and ensure respect for the requirements of racial and economic fairness by using the accountability handholds the NCLB provides as tools for a new civil rights strategy. By officially documenting racially disparate impacts, and by distinguishing similarly situated schools and districts that reduce these disparities from those that do not, the Act authoritatively defines many of the worst existing disparities as avoidable and, therefore, invidious. The Act thus can trigger just the kind of locally, experientially, and consensually generated standards whose absence in the past has kept courts from carrying through with their initial commitments to desegregated, educationally effective schools. We argue that these emergent standards open new possibilities to courts adjudicating the constitutional acceptability of public schools in the light of the NCLB. Rather than following Brown v. Board of Education in attempting by themselves to set the rules for constitutionally sufficient behavior, courts can follow the innovative decisions of, for example, the Texas Supreme Court in developing a form of judicial review through which judges superintend articulation of justiciable standards by those most directly concerned with the reconstruction of classrooms, schools, and school districts. This new form of judicial review could supplant Brown as a new pattern for judicial protection of positive, social rights and for the judicial supervision of complex institutional reform that due respect for such rights may require

Carbon-sensitive pedotransfer functions for plant available water

Currently accepted pedotransfer functions show negligible effect of management-induced changes to soil organic carbon (SOC) on plant available water holding capacity (θAWHC), while some studies show the ability to substantially increase θAWHC through management. The Soil Health Institute\u27s North America Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements measured water content at field capacity using intact soil cores across 124 long-term research sites that contained increases in SOC as a result of management treatments such as reduced tillage and cover cropping. Pedotransfer functions were created for volumetric water content at field capacity (θFC) and permanent wilting point (θPWP). New pedotransfer functions had predictions of θAWHC that were similarly accurate compared with Saxton and Rawls when tested on samples from the National Soil Characterization database. Further, the new pedotransfer functions showed substantial effects of soil calcareousness and SOC on θAWHC. For an increase in SOC of 10 g kg–1 (1%) in noncalcareous soils, an average increase in θAWHC of 3.0 mm 100 mm–1 soil (0.03 m3 m–3) on average across all soil texture classes was found. This SOC related increase in θAWHC is about double previous estimates. Calcareous soils had an increase in θAWHC of 1.2 mm 100 mm–1 soil associated with a 10 g kg–1 increase in SOC, across all soil texture classes. New equations can aid in quantifying benefits of soil management practices that increase SOC and can be used to model the effect of changes in management on drought resilience

Linking soil microbial community structure to potential carbon mineralization: A continental scale assessment of reduced tillage

Potential carbon mineralization (Cmin) is a commonly used indicator of soil health, with greater Cmin values interpreted as healthier soil. While Cmin values are typically greater in agricultural soils managed with minimal physical disturbance, the mechanisms driving the increases remain poorly understood. This study assessed bacterial and archaeal community structure and potential microbial drivers of Cmin in soils maintained under various degrees of physical disturbance. Potential carbon mineralization, 16S rRNA sequences, and soil characterization data were collected as part of the North American Project to Evaluate Soil Health Measurements (NAPESHM). Results showed that type of cropping system, intensity of physical disturbance, and soil pH influenced microbial sensitivity to physical disturbance. Furthermore, 28% of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), which were important in modeling Cmin, were enriched under soils managed with minimal physical disturbance. Sequences identified as enriched under minimal disturbance and important for modeling Cmin, were linked to organisms which could produce extracellular polymeric substances and contained metabolic strategies suited for tolerating environmental stressors. Understanding how physical disturbance shapes microbial communities across climates and inherent soil properties and drives changes in Cmin provides the context necessary to evaluate management impacts on standardized measures of soil microbial activity