“Democratic education sounds great, but it would never work” is a sentiment I've heard in almost every conversation I've had about the topic. Indeed, the greatest obstacle to empowering students is a kind of pessimistic pragmatism that seems to permeate our debates on education. But democratic schools are not just a hypothetical concept found in books—they have been tried and tested, and many have scored straight A's.

In an attempt to dispel this pessimism, Michael W. Apple and James A. Beane collected success stories in their book Democratic Schools. The book illustrates some of the diversity of schools that label themselves as democratic, and the self-admitted strengths and weaknesses of their varying approaches. But as I was reading, I noticed that some of the schools fell short—not in results necessarily, but in method. Let's investigate and compare the pedagogy of two examples in the book (specifically their 2007 reissue) to better understand what it means for a school to be democratic in the real world.

Although founder and teacher Bob Peterson's reflection on La Escuela Fratney is placed first in Democratic Schools, the Milwaukee elementary school does not live up to the ideal of democratic education. It may be a democracy, but certainly not one of the students. La Escuela Fratney was created out of a grassroots movement spearheaded by a group of parents and teachers to create “an educational program that capitalized on the unique features of the neighborhood,” notably that it's racially diverse and working-class (Peterson 33). The logical extension of this idea is to have the school be governed by the community, and so the group fought for the school to be run by “a site-based council of parents and teachers” (Peterson 34). This notably excludes the students themselves from the conception of the community. So even though La Escuela Fratney's governance is a positive development from the antidemocratic status quo, the school remains antidemocratic for the students.

To give credit where credit is due, the school does a lot of things right. For one, the teachers and parents established the school as a two-way bilingual program, meaning that native English and Spanish speakers are put together in the same classes. As Kenji Hakuta comments on in his article “Educating Language Minority Students and Affirming Their Equal Rights,” the school's investment in bilingualism both benefits their language development and fosters a multicultural environment that is relevant to and reflective of the communities students come from. This multiculturalism that is present in Fratney is the realization of Gloria Ladson-Billings's conception of culturally relevant pedagogy. Many of the teachers and parents running La Escuela Fratney recognize that teaching is political, and in the lineage of bell hooks, they engage with critical pedagogy to inspire critiques of society and foster antiracism in their students.

The school also aims to form social responsibility in students, not only through lessons but also through fostering a Deweyian “embryonic society” (Dewey 15) via cross-age tutoring. Additionally, even though the curriculum is formed by the parents and teachers, its structure as a series of themes and subthemes allows students a level of freedom in their projects. The school also engages heavily with experience-based learning; Peterson writes, “We believe children learn to listen, speak, read, and write by listening, speaking, reading, and writing” (Peterson 41). However, their experience-based learning is limited; the students' activities appear to be largely structured and planned, straying away from John Dewey's principle of directing student impulse (Dewey 41).

It's unclear whether the teachers or parents of La Escuela Fratney have considered extending their democratic principles to students. Perhaps their ideas of democracy are in a different paradigm altogether from democratic education scholars, and so they can't see how their struggle for bringing the outside community into schools is related to the struggle for democratic classrooms. They might think it's too risky to let students have a larger role in the curriculum, and it wouldn't teach them what they need to learn—especially for a lower-income district that needs to do well on standardized tests. The students from Brian D. Schultz's 2003–2004 class might have a different opinion.

In the second essay in Democratic Schools, Schultz describes how his fifth-grade students structured their curriculum around campaigning for a new school. Situated in the decaying Cabrini-Green project in Chicago, Byrd Community Academy was, in the words of one of the students, “a dump!” (Schultz 69). For the unforeseeable future, students had to sit in classrooms with no heat and windows marked by bullet holes; use bathrooms without soap or paper towels, and with bugs in the sinks; and eat in hallways because there was no lunchroom. Schultz originally posed to the students the question of what issues were affecting them in order to guide their next project. Campaigning for a new school was a larger project than he had anticipated they'd pick, but the students were truly passionate in trying to fix this wrong, because it directly impacted them and their community. In response, Schultz took a risk and adapted his plans in an effort to engage his students.

With Schultz's guidance, the students developed a game plan. Aligning with their individual interests, students would research the earlier promises of a new building; write letters to the state legislature; talk to the Chicago Defender, a paper that served the Chicago African American community; conduct interviews; take photographs; make a website; and produce a documentary. Schultz noted that the variety of these approaches marked a departure from previous class discussions, where the students rarely considered that there might be more than one answer to a problem. As Dewey observed in his book The School and Society, revelations like this are unique to the real-world application of knowledge and skills, because it forces students to reckon with real, non-simplified problems. This project had become the curriculum, echoing the Reggio Emilia approach and its tenet of emergent curricula.

I can already hear you asking about the students' standardized test scores. Even if we keep in mind that, as Jennifer L. Jennings and Jonathan Marc Bearak point out, standardized tests measure how well students can take the test more so than how well they understand the concepts, standardized tests are critical for funding, especially in low-income areas like Cabrini-Green after No Child Left Behind. Well, despite receiving practically no traditional test preparation, the class's test scores actually increased over the previous year (Schultz 78). In addition to the vast set of skills the class developed throughout the year, their success may have been partially due to students actually wanting to go to school; the class's attendance rate was a staggering 98 percent (Schultz 78). As Schultz had hoped, the students' passion turned into engagement, and even though they didn't get a new school, the experience was transformative in their education. Such a learning opportunity couldn't have occurred without a teacher who was willing to be flexible and take risks.

What can these two case studies teach us about democratic schools? Clearly influenced by Friere, Schultz understood liberatory education as a praxis that requires recognizing students as agents rather than empty vessels. This set Room 405 of Byrd Community Academy apart from La Escuela Fratney, which did not have a pedagogical foundation that utilized student potential. These schools demonstrate how culturally relevant and critical pedagogy is not in itself sufficient to deconstruct the hierarchies of traditional education. But by going further, by empowering students to engage in and transform their community, a school can begin to become truly democratic.