Many market-oriented reformers have never had the pleasure of being teachers. They may know little about the complex professional judgement of teachers. They may not fully realize the complexity of the linguistic and caring skills necessary for helping the next generation learn to inherit a civilization. Some reformers may confuse their own work identities derived from their institutional affiliation with those of teachers who have a life-long identity with their profession.

Reformers may also overlook the fact that most teachers are women, many of whom who wanted to be teachers when they grew up. Few reformers may be able to project beyond their own bureaucratic work experience to deeply ‘feel’ how teachers of both genders can be motivated simultaneously by generational duty and by a passion for its own sake that loves children, learning and the pleasure of a child’s ‘ah ha.’ Most teachers are too tired to tell them.

Current educational reform is primarily a contest for control of institutional sovereignty. The publics versus private sector debates are institutional contests. So are the policy issues of decentralization, pitting districts against building sites. Many teachers are relatively untouched by these debates, primarily because many of them have a weak institutional identity. They may even have a weak union identity. For many, their professional identity is closely linked both to peer networks of colleagues who teach in the same academic discipline (reading, math) or group of students (special education, gifted), and to their roles as parents. Many are relatively indifferent to institutional affiliation.

Educational reformers not only have a limited understanding of teachers, they may know even less about the gentle, wacky, wondrous world of children in classrooms. They may know little about how teachers construct classrooms as ‘safe havens’ for imaginative learning with a sense of generational protection known in few places outside the home. Even fewer acknowledge that good teaching, like good parenting is not solely about results. Teaching and learning create generational conversations between individuals. Classrooms are rarely a sequence of predictable behavior controlled by the teacher. Good teachers, like good parents, know they can no more command a group children, each one wildly different from the next, to learn simultaneously with precision, than King Canute could command the waves.

Reformers who can only think about teaching as a conceptual, not lived experience, may adopt, as a consequence, framing metaphors that resonate with their own experience, but not necessarily with that of teachers. A metaphor schema allows people to think about new, unknown areas by adapting and translating a sturdy and intricate conceptual filter using a schema of assumptions, attributions and expectations developed in other arenas.

A strategic essay format and a schema analysis has been chosen here because it organizes analysis into a stripped down 'story line.' Traditional methods of strategic policy analysis assume that the author is working from only one metaphorical framework. This essay uses two metaphorical frameworks: consumption and generational learning. New formats are needed to manage this complexity because successful understanding of multiple perspectives demands that the text must resonate with readers, being both 'seen' and 'felt.'

Educational reform is less of an institutional management problem and more of a professional culture design problem. For the last one hundred years we have designed our educational systems to be 'schools in boxes' set apart from local communities. Their intent was to provide economic skills centers focused on literacy for work in industrial bureaucracies. Far from failing, they have been so successful that they have been copied in almost all countries in the world.

Today's world is more complex. Schools must continue to be economic skills centers. The need for high quality skills for the economy has never been greater. Schools also have had to take on a greater role as parent, providing safe places for children to play and learn so that they can keep their imaginations healthy.

The primary question of education for economic security remains. Another more primal one is emerging: education for generational security. The two are closely linked, but the latter is larger than the former. Children who are too unhealthy or too scared to learn may have trouble making an economic contribution. We are only beginning to understand the consequences of chronic stress for classroom performance. Schools that are not physically secure can create chronic stress for children and teachers alike.

Our current schema of classrooms as economic skills centers cannot alone easily address the larger issues. We also need to think of schools as 'safe havens' for children to learn to inherit and design civilization.

These words are easy to use, but when we examine the thinking behind them, they come from different intellectual traditions.

Much of the 'systems' thinking about educational reform rests on a philosophical framework of British positivism. This thinking has been enormously useful in 'seeing' education as a manageable system. Its objectivism has led it to focus on the world as a system of behavior in need of external control. This line of inquiry, reaching back into medieval Deism in Western Europe, has been very fruitful. It has given us many of our current understandings of education as science. It influences our thinking about the world as systems, usually mechanical or biological.

Its intellectual power, however, is not complete. Thinking about the 'felt' world has led thinking about phenomenology, about the world as a lived experience, about consciousness. This thinking has ancient roots in Eastern European and Asian philosophical traditions. It understands education as art.

This essay recognizes the value of positivist thinking while at the same time recognizing the contributions of phenomenological thinking found in literary discourse and constructivist psychology. This essay draws from the work of Adorno and develops a policy analysis framework using an 'aesthetic.' An aesthetic, as it is defined here, is a framework for meaning that needs not only to be 'seen' but also 'felt.' It is argued here that cultural learning necessary for generational survival must be both seen and felt. An aesthetic uses a complex metaphorical schema to orient personal relationships with the world. A competitive aesthetic, for example, leads to a different lived experience than a celebratory experience.

A metaphorical schema brings together two new fields to policy analysis: literary criticism and cognition. Metaphors are used in literary criticism to make comparisons by attributing the literal characteristics of one object to another. Metaphors are often used to convey complex meanings in literature. An example might be: "To some teachers, classrooms are the shop floors in knowledge factories. To other teachers the classroom is a mysterious Star Wars Bar."

A schema is a complex set of assumptions, expectations and attributions that people use to construct meaning out of complex information. For example, a teacher walking into a typical classroom does not expect to see a large purple cow sitting at a desk. The teacher may expect to see a floor, walls, desks, lights, etc., but a purple cow is usually not on a tacit list of things to be expected.

A metaphorical schema can help people construct very complex ways of construct meaning. If, for example, a teacher thinks of the world as full of scarce resources with each competing against all in a winner take all game, the world can be a pretty scary place. This schema can justify all kinds of helpful and destructive behaviors. The world as a scary place metaphorical schema can lead to a 'vale of tears' aesthetic.

Metaphorical schema can become so complex, widely shared and generationally transmitted that it becomes cultural conditioning. It may be difficult for people who share the schema to think of the world outside of it. A teacher who grew up in the city and went to visit a teacher in a rural area couldn't understand how people got along without streetlights.

Some people get righteous about their schema, claiming it is sovereign over all others. They rest their claims in tradition (Our ancestors always did it this way) and in claims of natural selection (It's a dog-at-dog jungle out there).

Educational reform has been dominated by a metaphorical schema of production and consumption for a competitive world of scarce resources. This schema has been widely established, tested and found to be 'true.' Its validity is not questioned here. What is questioned is its exclusive claim to truth. Is this schema tautological? Are there other metaphorical schemas that might also contribute to a more complex understanding of educational reform?

This essay argues that the current use of a consumption metaphorical schema is both and useful. It is also incomplete in two important ways. First, its explanatory power may be less successful than its predictive power. Competition for consumption is one excellent way of understanding today's economies. Is it also useful to explain the relationships of parents and their children? Perhaps. At least a challenging question should be raised.

Second, a consumption schema frames schooling as producers and consumers. These are the only two points of agency, both of them external to schools. This is important. In this schema, schools are assumed to be externally managed systems. In the strong form of the schema, children themselves are consumption goods. Parents chose to buy children rather than vacations. This view argues that the public doesn't ask taxpayers to subsidize vacations, why should it be asked to subsidize children? Teachers in the strong form are tools of production (achievement) to be managed by external agents (administrators). Teachers are therefore costs to be reduced to improve efficiency.

In a weak form of the schema, teacher agency is recognized but limited. Teacher agency is derived from membership in an externally managed institutional collective. It is not recognized as existing independently of the institution. Teachers are encouraged to voluntarily 'participate' in the 'vision' of the institutional collective. They are rarely considered to be agents, owners or visionaries themselves.

Most educational reformers tacitly use either strong or weak forms of the consumption schema.

This essay posits an alternative metaphorical schema: flows of cooperative generational relationships in history. It may also be important and useful. Alternative schema are not contests for domination. The issues is more complex. Can more than one metaphorical schema, taken together, improve explanatory and predictive power?

This essay only raises the issue for consideration. There is no research for more rigorous testing. It can merely ask the reader to play with these ideas by reflecting on his or her own experience as a source of sense-making. It is a test of resonance. Metaphorical schema are as much lived experience as natural law. Teachers and reformers may resonate with different schema. They are powerful sources of professional identities.

Professional, as well as generational identity is at the core of teacher empowerment. Are those identities derived from a collective through institutional authority? the authority of natural selection? Or are they derived from individual choices in relationships with others? The answer to both may be a resounding yes.

Schema thinking can reveal quirky interpretations. For example, do some reformers tacitly identify with a competitive schema so much that reform becomes a manly act of courage necessary to bring the discipline of the economic battlefield into the classroom lives of women and children? Is it more manly to describe markets as 'forces' of nature than the choices of some people? Must these 'forces' be 'obeyed' for the generational safety of the women and the children? Phooey.

Is consumerism the extension of the rugged individualist moved to the suburbs? Where are the metaphors of interdependence and mutual respect needed for a dense society?

Looking into the classroom, many reformers use a ‘consumption’ metaphorical framework for thinking. It assumes that competition for scarce products defines the primary relationships in a society. Economic competition frames thinking, even generationally.

A metaphorical schema allows reformers to filter their experience in ways that help them construct personal meaning. A consumption metaphor acts as a shorthand filter helping reformers translate the classroom experience for those outside it. Classrooms, for example, are translated into sales or shop floors where products are made and sold.

Consumption thinkers may assume that life is dominated by an endless contest for scarce resources. They may understand that much of today's economic competition plays out through the production of tangible goods. The production of tangible goods often requires complex organizations, so there is a tendency to identify with institutional, not professional authority.

They, in good faith, translate bureaucratic thinking about production and distribution into their understanding of the teaching and learning experience in the classroom. Consumption thinking forces reformers to describe classroom activity as though teachers and students functioned to make and sell a generic product: achievement. This thinking is thick. It expects that an orderly, concrete, sequential set of observable behaviors will, most probably, lead to predictable, standardizable results.

Consumption thinking is structured to efficiently produce and distribute toothpaste. It was never intended to adequately represent the exquisitely complex nuance of individual interpretation. Consumption thinkers may use a systems model to think causally, functionally and generically about classroom teaching and learning. They may focus on collective goals and objectives, organizing observable behaviors into a predictable series of small, concrete and sequential steps. They will reason that if an administrator tells a teacher do x then they assume that y will occur (or at least some probability of y). They will assume that teaching and learning is primarily an orderly, predictable, observable, controllable behavior. Unexplained predictability is called error.

Children and teachers are measured primarily in terms of their competitive relative performance against each other and against standards set by others. The 'system' is assumed to be agency free or agency derived and therefore in need of external control. In an agency free form of the consumption schema, teachers are assumed to be production tools, the same as chairs and computers. They are vessels for the intelligence of others. In a weak agency form, teachers are supposed to derive their agency from their association with the institutional collective. Teachers are assumed to be in need of guidance and are expected to 'participate' in the collective vision set by external agents.

A lack of or weak agency is then tacitly attributed to teachers by reformers, who, because of their metaphorical schema, assume that systems can only be fixed externally. In academic terms, consumption thinking is structural and functional, not volitional. It lacks authoritative agency or 'voice.' For example, school principals are primarily agents of the state; they are rarely elected from professional ranks. Yet they are expected to speak as the authoritative voice of teachers 'under' them.

Consumption thinking can be a grey world, because a contest aesthetic translates economic means into ends. It is built on assumptions of endless contests for economic sovereignty. It is a troubling metaphor because it focuses attention on the permanence of economic war and neglects the possibilities of peace. Reformers, eager to turn children over to markets of legitimate but savage and brutal competition , tacitly and inadvertently frame schools as boot camps for little children. There is a disturbing image in playful, imaginative children being raised for fodder.

Thus, from a consumer product framework, teachers are essential, but not necessarily significant participants in the learning process. The consumption schema may hold tacit assumptions that classroom teachers act simply as conduits for the external intelligence of others. Alas for teachers, many reformers who are consumption thinkers identify so deeply with the metaphor, they simply cannot think adequately outside of it.

Consumption thinkers are likely to see classrooms not as safe havens for highly individual and quirky imagination, but as predictable and orderly factory or sales floors. They translate classroom activities into achievement production processes that need to be externally controlled. Efficiency is assumed to benefit the external owners of an institutional collective. They see in the classroom a factory floor that has the tools needed to produce achievement: chairs, textbooks, teachers, computers, etc. It is the task of an external manager (or reformer) to organize these tools in a sequence of activities that cause the most efficient production of achievement. It is a model for thinking that works well in many settings…except those that need to engage human imagination.

From this framework, schools can become training grounds for life on the economic battlefield. Teachers become drill sergeants preparing children not for life in a peaceful, inventive, self-governing society prepared to defend itself if necessary, but for life in an institutional collective fighting endless wars of competition. Some teachers see themselves as drill instructors. Some are appalled by the image. They prefer to help children learn healthy and imaginative cooperation, which may include contests as a last resort, not an assumption.

From this schema the world is a scary place for teachers. They are assumed to be in need of external control and guidance. They are costs to be reduced. They are ungrateful for the visions given them. They are expected to participate, but not to own. Reformers from this schema will most likely create governance systems derived from external control. There will be a tacit assumption that professional self-governance is tantamount to letting the monkeys run the zoo. Control will be assigned primarily to the two key external agents: producers and consumers. They control of administrators may be help centrally and as tightly as possible. The hiring of teachers will be a power struggle for site-based or local patronage. Professional authority for the maintenance of standards will be withheld.

The 'consumer' schema is quintessentially suburban. As suburban power continues to increase, this schema is expected to grow and become more strident.

In contrast, many teachers see their roles as helping each child experience the pleasures of self-reliant and inventive learning. They believe that achievement according to a collective standard is important. They also believe that at least as important are students' capacities to adequately and responsibly think for themselves. They tacitly assume that critical and inventive individual judgement is the hallmark of a successful education in a self-governing society.

To them, each child is unique, and that individuality must be understood and cherished. No wonder the imaginative conversations of teaching and learning are so complex. Managing this complexity requires teachers to understand the world from many perspectives: the teachers', the individual child’s, and the teacher and each child in relationship with each other.

Each child carries into the classroom an inherited view of the world, shaped by their families' language and culture. They are not tabla rasa-a clean slate. Quite the contrary. Children flow into classroom from thousands of years of history, carrying their ancestors with them in their language and gesture and metaphorical ways of thinking about the world. In multi-cultural classrooms, the variety can be joyously intoxicating. Can a metaphorical schema of consumption explain and predict the consequences of this perspective? No.

Many reformers are limited in their ability to translate this complexity. The current, cookie-cutter emphasis on a generic metaphor of consumption limits educational reform to conversations that just don’t make sense to many teachers.

Is the best that our civilization has to offer children a legacy of competitive consumption? Is there a little room for a different schema so that also focuses this generation's legacy of beauty in art, goodness in compassionate friendships, and truth in generational obligation? Many teachers see themselves a little less like economic soldiers, marching off to glory, and a little like more parents, neighbors and friends who pitch in to help out working parents. To these teachers our economies exist not to generate battlefields for armies, but to create safe places where they can coax joyous life from healthy children.

The focus on contests for institutional sovereignty and the resources that they generate may be one reason why many, if not most educational reformers ignore professional reform, let alone empowerment. These reformers carry with them a tacit assumption that professional identity is derived from an institutional collective. This means that teachers have no authoritative claim to resources other than those 'given' to them by the institutional collective. In an institutional collective, authority resides in the 'system' not with professional judgement. In bureaucratic collectives, ownership is assumed to beexternal and managed by agents. Bureaucracies are not self-governed.

There are two primary tests of the authority of an institutional collective. Both assume the assertion of individual and professional power. The first is the institution's capacity to respond to abandonment. ? The conservative Christian community has thrown down the gauntlet to NEA. If a teacher or a group of teachers moved across the street, would parents follow? It urges the public to abandon institutions based on democratic authority. How will the public respond? How will NEA staunch the flow of students out of the public school system? How will it coax children back to public schools? As one superintendent said recently…THAT is the problem.

The second test is a professional response to institutional collapse. What do teachers do in emergencies such as natural disasters or conflict? It is difficult to extend a consumption metaphor to explain the very real sacrifices of teachers to meet what they believe their generational commitments. Teachers who daily risk death to teach and to protect children who are not their own are too large to be contained by a consumption metaphor.

If classrooms are floors for the production of consumer products; student achievement is engineered and marketed like toothpaste; and teachers serve as conduits for publishing houses, software companies, testing services, and legislative mandates, then how important is the heroic daily experience of teachers?

Teachers are not central in the contests for institutional authority. These are the games of external control. Most teachers are exhausted from their daily efforts on the front line of civilization: the next generation. Most of them intuitively understand that generational security is too large for market forces. They know that markets make poor parents. Why should they make good teachers?

The educational reform rhetoric focuses on a metaphor of a product that is 'bought' by consumers. Teachers (and children themselves) are framed as factors in the production of achievement scores. From this production framework, teachers will be viewed primarily as costs to be contained and controlled. They are inputs to be reduced relative to outputs. Efficiency suggests, but does not demand the diminishment of teachers.

For example, efficiency thinking would seek to reduce the 'high' costs of teachers. These reductions can be achieved through market-based schools that hire teachers to serve 'at will,' through the reduction of professional rents (union membership), through the substitution of technology, and through increasing standardization of production of curriculum 'packages' and testing mechanisms. A 'deskilled' teacher is a cheaper teacher. A really efficient use of resources would create shopping mall franchises with minimum -wage teachers with standardized scripts, equipment and sites. This would signal to consumers a known product available from Honolulu to Miami.

It can be argued that from a consumption framework, there is little reason to consider the whole concept of professional 'empowerment'. It just doesn't fit the framework. Efficiency prefers lower to higher costs. People using the consumption framework may also assume that teachers need to be externally regulated to prevent 'shirking.' Governors, legislators, even voters themselves are increasingly adopting a suburban identity of consumption. Elected governments, acting as consumer protectors, set curriculum standards, not teachers' associations. Elected governments 'empower' consumers, not teachers, providing them access to more convenient choices through charters and vouchers. The consumption schema is well-honed. It is not a perfect substitute for reality.

One of the limitations of the current reform debates is its domination by a consumption metaphor. This cognitive framework is very useful, but not complete. The addition of another metaphorical framework for policy analysis may be useful if, in a juxtaposed balance, together they contribute to a richer understanding of education than one of them standing alone. Real life may be too complex for a single unifying metaphorical framework such as consumption. For example, what if life is more than an endless contest for scare resources? What if it is also a gift, an affirmation of life, a celebratory expression, an experience for its own sake? The history of education is deeply imbued with a celebratory aesthetic. Too much of the legacy of civilization is lost when it is reduced to a framework of economic contest.

Civilization is also about the creative joy that emerges from responsible self-expression: music, art, dance, stories, invention, and thinking. Thinking and learning themselves can be celebratory experiences. They are diminished when they are reduced to relative performance.

Not all reformers view education as consumption composed of an aggregation of choices of schooling preferences and marketable packages: (textbooks and curriculum materials, training modules, information systems and standardized testing). New work in cognition and linguistics shifts thinking from systems view toward professional judgement. Here education is not a series of concrete packages of materials applied in an organized sequence of steps that result in learning for a 'generic' student. Learning instead results from the highly complex linguistic interactions of individual teachers and students. The quality of this interaction or ‘engagement’ is very important. Cognition is more than literacy, it is the responsibility that children assume for their own learning with others. It resonates with the concepts of self-governance which require very high quality individual decision-making.

Education within this framework focuses on generational learning. Teachers are not translated into shop stewards or mall clerks. They are instead 'seen' as partners with parents and other members of a child's civil neighborhood. Students inherit not only language skills from teachers, but social skills and aesthetic views as well. Teachers are not the sole proprietors of generational conversations. They share this privileged relationship with parents, family members and civil neighbors. They vie for them against uncivil others.

Education from a generational learning framework places healthy, civil and productive relationships at the core of the teaching and learning experience. Teachers and students create and sustain these networks through a generational responsibility for each other. Some aspects of it are 'in loco parentis' and thus outside of market authority.

Businesses are culturally allowed to fail and die. Children are not. Teachers often act as daily guardians of children’s security, creating 'safe havens' for learning, protected from the physical and economic bullies around them. Teachers need institutional authority to protect children. If they cannot get it, then they need professional autonomy.

Challenges to the consumption metaphor are emerging in several different areas. One area is the exploding work in cognition and the construction of thinking. It reveals the complexity of each child's learning experience, making it difficult to think of children as 'generic' students. Traditional methods of lectures and rote memorization in the classroom are not always as cognitively successful as more individualized, linguistic and interactive approaches to teaching and learning.

Traditional methods of generic teaching do not require an ‘engaged’ or 'empowered' understanding of what students bring with them from home. Linguistically engaged teaching assumes that how each child thinks is 'situated' within his or her personal interactions within and outside of the classroom. It recognizes the importance of parental and community traditions. It assumes that teachers will be responsible for consulting with parents to learn about learning at home.

Engaged teachers daily need to be able to rapidly, often ‘intuitively’ assess each student's content mastery, development, cognition and cultural context- no small feat. It is this need for mindful, continuous assessment of individual learning within a generational conversation that places the relationships between teachers and students at the center of education.

Students are linguistically connected to teachers in ways not possible on the shop or sales floor. Teachers model logic, imagination and civility through their interactions with children. What is learned is more than literacy or vocational skills. What emerges is the test of a self-governing society- the quality of judgement that demonstrates competence, civility and inventiveness. Each generation within this framework is expected to be sufficiently competent to use, not squander its unique inheritance of the previous generation’s enterprise, civility and creative expression.

Students’ judgement is developed through practice with teachers and others. That judgement is much more complex than observable behavior. It is also be 'felt.' It requires complex cognitive schema of assumptions, attributions and expectations so that competence, civility and inventiveness can be ‘constructed’ and accepted. Learning is ‘situated’ in complex historical and cultural contexts that cannot be ignored by generic thinking about consumer products.

Each generation, from this framework learns not only to use, but also to critically appreciate the gifts of their ancestors. Otherwise, their enterprise, civility and creative expression might be squandered. Education means that each student needs to develop his or own reflective and inventive voice, situating it within histories and cultures of many generations. Neither commercial packages or ideological scripts can substitute for the single, real voice of an excellent teacher. They are often lone sentinels on the generational frontiers of civilization.

This emphasis on professional authority is particularly significant when institutions fail children. In the economic wars of markets, institutions are expected to collapse. What next? Do the lessons learned by teachers in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war speak to reform in the US?

The greatest lesson was simple. Education is a generational conversation. Teacher empowerment is deeply linked to generational empowerment. These generational conversation are fragile and can be lost. In war, institutions collapse. Teachers and students are abandoned. What next?

Teachers in Bosnia and Herzegovina daily made heroic efforts to ensure the continuity of the generational conversation. When soldiers deliberately shelled schools for sport, teachers could not turn to the institutions charged with protecting them. They turned instead to each other, to parents and to neighbors. When the power was cut, they taught in the dark. When the building were destroyed they taught in basements, in homes, wherever they could.

Meliha Alic, the director of the Druga Gymnazia in Sarajevo kept her school open six days a week during the siege. Students and teachers from all over the city daily risked their lives to go school. Their stories of courage and inventiveness in the face of unhuman violence are remarkable. Their school was an idea, a form of resistance, an assertion of humanity and dignity while their worlds collapsed around them.

Education itself became a national symbol: the preservation of a fragile generational legacy. Children learned math and science, they sang and created stories, they created beauty and comfort for each other. These bold, reckless and artful performances demonstrated an engagement with and affirmation of life that ran far deeper than the reporting ink of standard test scores. Teachers and students were ‘there’ for each other, through the daily drama of cultural insanity. They often cared for and protected each other from ‘giving up’ on life.

This mutual responsibility was not limited to teachers. When there weren't enough teachers, parents contributed. When parents weren't available, neighbors risked their lives to teach the children of others. Not all the stories are noble, but together they tell a story of education as a humanitarian response, an affirmation of beauty and civility that confronted bullies. Without the security of stable institutions, education was transformed into a communications network among teachers and committed community members who moved heaven and earth to help their children learn.

This commitment to a generational legacy re-asserts the importance of responsible communities creating 'safe places' for children to learn. How can children learn to inherit a complex society if they are too scared to learn, play and invent? It should not take a war to reminds us that teaching and learning is first not a market battlefield, but rich and varied conversations about generational relationships.

What happens when we look inside a classroom with this framework? We need to be mindful of how teachers and students communicate with each other on an on-going basis. There is an assumption that teaching and learning is situated, continuous and cumulative- punctuated by, but not driven by, important events, such as tests. We also need to be mindful of the flows of history and neighborhood relationships that pour into the classroom daily. How do these relationships work together to build safe places where children can learn the knowledge and skills they need to construct their own ‘voices’ so they can respond to their unique history?

Empowerment from a generational learning framework grows through sharing as well as through competition for relative performance. Parents, teachers and community members need to fulfill the generational obligations of the thousand generations that went before and do no harm for the next one thousand to follow.

Legitimate institutional authority is currently the primary source of empowerment. Without legitimate institutional authority, teachers lack the formal institutional protection for their professional judgement. Legitimate authority referred to here means the explicit and tacit contractual obligations that support and protect teaching and learning relationships. These include federal, state and local statutes and school codes, administrative policies, and collective bargaining.

Classroom teachers face four major obstacles to essential legitimate authority:

• Systemic policy misalignment across governmental authorities
• Political and economic cultures of patronage
• Weak institutional leadership
• Weak resource access

Systemic policy misalignment can be associated with two conditions: a) overdelegation and b) displaced competition. Overdelegation results in a 'delegator's dilemma.' This problem occurs when governments externalize and/or decentralize their authority, while, simultaneously, they are increasingly subject to external pressure. At first delegation appears to be a useful cost reduction practice. It reduces, however, the government's capacity to effectively respond to future demands.

Faced with new constituent demands, governments face 'delegator's regret.' They may act as 'virtual owners' exporting new constituent demands as mandates. These externally imposed mandates may create misalignments in state and local policies, reducing the effectiveness of classroom teaching and learning.

State and federal mandates may impose costs on local districts in two ways. First, they may limit the professional authority of the classroom teacher. Second, they may not be fully funded. Under-funded mandates reduce the discretionary budget authority of local districts. This further reduces professional access to classroom resources. Policy research has largely overlooked the growing impact of state and federal mandates on the empowerment of classroom teachers.

Limitations to both professional authority in the classroom and access to classroom resources can have powerful consequences for teachers. Reduced professional authority may limit a teacher's ability to adequately respond according to best professional practices. Reduced budget discretion may reduce the quality of the classroom learning experience for both children and teachers.

A second source of misalignment is displaced competition. Displaced competition occurs when levels of government compete inappropriately. Without regulations to support cooperation, expensive tax avoidance competition can break out among government levels of unequal authority. This may result in shifts in taxing responsibilities for education from stronger to weaker levels. Properties, for example, may be assessed at one level, and taxed at another. County commissioners may face voters who resist re-assessment; school boards in the same county may face voters who need services. 'Bully' state governments may control local governments by giving them mandates dollars and, at the same time giving local taxpayers referenda. This allows them to both leverage local dollars and displace political costs.

Together, overdelegation and displaced competition can lead to serious policy disjunctures between government authorities. Many classroom teachers face increasingly limits both on their professional judgement on access to classroom resources. Like senior doctors who have found their medical judgement overruled by junior insurance clerks, teachers can find their professional integrity violated by 'one-size-fits-few' mandates. The policy research in this area is weak and needs to be strengthened through a series of state cases.

Another related obstacle to empowerment is an institutional culture of patronage. A preference for patronage over professional standards can disempower teachers in two ways. First, it can result in reduced professional quality. Second, it can displace resources from the classroom to other areas of the budget.

For many years in some school districts, political patronage treated teacher-hiring practices as election spoils. These local school boards, armed with local votes and state indifference, systematically and persistently hired teachers based on personal, 'clan' or political loyalties over more qualified professionals. Little research exists on the consequences these practices on teacher empowerment.

Patronage cultures can also direct district budgets away from the classroom toward non-professional staff, supplies, equipment and construction that support a local 'economy of cousins' over high quality classroom teaching and learning. The NEA needs to be even more vigilant about personnel hiring and local budgeting practices.

State affiliates also need to become more visible in the construction of ‘damage control’ personnel management policies that protect professional standards in recruitment, selection, induction and development at the district and site level. Districts that persistently violate professional standards should be censured or returned to state control.

Misaligned government authority and patronage politics can lead to weak institutional leadership if authorities have few incentives to reduce mandates or patronage. The costs of reform in these areas may be high relative to the benefits of the status quo.

In ad hoc interviews, teacher board members reported school board members whose behavior persistently violated professional standards (Kushner and McClure 1998). These behaviors included: a) hiring weak administrators who would be grateful; b) vote-selling; and b) cultural preferences for promotion. Some reported district preferences for the deliberate selection of weak superintendents who would be both grateful and dependent-"..dumb or drunk, preferably both.."

Others reported school board members coldly threatened administrators if they did not approve contracts (personnel, construction, insurance, etc..) for relatives and campaign backers- 'You wanna come back? This is what it'll cost.' Two teachers reported that educators they knew serving on school boards needed much more training from professional associations. They said they were too naïve and too financially illiterate. State affiliates need to do more to help prepare education professional interested in serving on school boards to defend professional standards in cultures of political impunity.

When personal, political and community preferences push out professional standards, the teaching profession is diminished. Too many competent and experienced women teachers, for example, have been systematically passed over for promotion by local school boards who persistently prefer athletic prowess to instructional leadership. One teacher school board member said that culturally attractive young men were systematically promoted to building administration positions over more competent women as a matter of course. When asked if the same held true for professional association leadership, the answer was a strong affirmative.

A final critical source of disempowerment is a lack of access to needed resources. Some teachers teach from obsolete textbooks so that those districts can afford local sports teams. Others find their essential support staff cut to pay for new computers. Others work in districts so deeply in construction debt they cannot finance an adequate community program. Some education school graduates work for relatively low pay in desperately poor and needy districts. Others nearby with comparable credentials work for 'cousins,' a decent wage and solid working conditions.

There are three systemic obstacles to removing deficits in this area. The first is created by a weak regional economy which cannot sustain world class generational teaching and learning relationships, and which cannot be offset by current levels of state or federal investment. The second is a weak government which cannot defend itself against tax avoidance practices. The third is economic segregation which unfairly concentrates both the benefits and costs generated by a regional economy.

For example, a shopping mall is a regional asset that may provide returns to a sub-regional taxing authority. Property taxes in the district that includes the shopping mall may result in relatively higher wages and lower taxes than other districts in the region. This ability to import regional benefits and export regional costs may make some teachers happy, but may not be the best investment in longer term regional growth. Teacher associations that focus exclusively on a lighthouse strategy of targeting high profit ‘industries’ as a way of ratcheting up compensation industry-wide, may be underestimating the damage these practices can create for regional economies.

It is important to consider that one important source of teacher disempowerment may be the industry/state-wide, ‘winner-take-all’ collective bargaining practices of the teachers associations themselves. This ‘lighthouse’ strategy can only be effective under two conditions. First, there must be broad-based economic growth. Second, there must be public enthusiasm for public investment. Under both of these conditions, the rising economic tide can lift all boats. Good compensation settlements in wealthy districts can lead to pressure on the legislature for subsidies to poorer districts. A lighthouse strategy lifts absolute resource levels, but does little to overcome relative disparities.

A lack of policy focus on relative wealth created by the lighthouse strategy may contribute not only to growing problems of disparities within regions, but it may also weaken overall regional economic growth. One happy teacher in a shopping mall district may ‘create’ twenty unhappy counterparts who have fewer resources because they have been exported to the mall district. Teachers without malls are, in effect, subsidizing higher salaries for teachers with malls.

Weak regional economies, weak tax authorities and weak public interest in investments in education can lead to weak governments with chronically unstable budgets and tax support. Communities can become internally divided: generationally, economically and culturally. Senior citizens promote tax relief. Homeowners are reluctant to fund the children of renters. Church groups fear that teachers cannot adequately act in loco parentis.

These tensions can play out in contests for tax sovereignty that ignore generational responsibilities. Growing internal wealth disparities can create competitive conditions that shift attention away from the cooperation necessary for both community and regional growth. There are two great dangers created by inattention to these sources of teacher disempowerment. The first is that the quality of the regional workforce may suffer. The second is that the region’s educational and technological infrastructure may suffer from a lack of public commitment.

The NEA needs to be vigilant in its efforts to address the contributions of education to both community democracy-building and regional economic development. A house divided against itself generationally, economically and culturally can neither stand nor endure. Public education is not only an investment in individual achievement, it is an investment in the future of democracy. Young parents often have early exposure to democracy at work through contact with local school boards. They have a visible stake in the election process.

The NEA, with its strong capacity in grassroots organizing can make an important contribution to self-governance for the next generation. These tools for building a civil society cannot be imported from another country or purchased at a shopping mall. They have to be carefully crafted locally through use. Teachers associations working for a strong democracy can make important contributions to community development. The NEA should more visibly invest its expertise in building bi-partisan support for local schools through support of the League of Women’s Voters and other groups dedicated to appropriate debates of critical issues. Teachers are good teachers. They need to share their civic skills with the larger community, so to help ensure greater responsibilities toward children on election day.

Many teachers now know little about the regional economies that support them. The NEA should promote professional activities that can help regional businesses better understand how teachers contribute to regional workforce quality. Association leaders need to better learn how regional economies work and how they contribute to them. They also need to learn to develop a greater media presence related to these issues so they can serve credibly as counter-weights to reformers who benefit from a negative public image education. Much good work already exists. The association needs to better invest in on-line professional development centers, for association leaders, for teachers, for parents, community members and legislators as well.

The NEA should focus its strategic response along the following guidelines:

• reasonable alignment
• fair information
• secure voice
• professional autonomy and visible presence

Reasonable alignment, as it is used here, means focusing policy to ensure that federal, state and local policies clearly and explicitly support classroom teaching and learning. Reasonable alignment is difficult to achieve across levels of government today. It is both overlooked and strategically essential. For example, fine-tuning across state mandates and state school codes may better leverage state investments in local classrooms.

NEA should seriously consider three kinds of structural changes to local school boards to help bring them in better alignment with professional standards for classroom teaching and learning. The first should consider lengthening school board terms. Education is so complex that the learning curve gets steeper every year. More research is needed to assess the impact of school board term length on teacher empowerment policy.

The second should consider aligning the number of school board members with voter representational equity. For example, in states that have the same number of board members in small and large districts, representational inequity is very high. Little is known about the consequences of this inequity on teacher empowerment. Would districts function better with varied school board size? For example, small districts with large numbers of board members and low voter turnout may be particularly vulnerable to the 'economy of cousins' problem. They may also be particularly vulnerable to externally imposed agendas that disregard professional standards.

The third should consider restructuring school board membership to be better aligned with taxpayer representational equity. If state taxpayers give money to local districts, then their interests should not be delegated. Local school boards should have state representation in proportion to the state's investment. This forces the state to be more responsible for its mandates.

The problems created by state and federal overdelegation, mandate control and displaced competition should be solved through better internal alignments and cooperative leverage, not through externalization. Charters and voucher should be a last, not a first resort. There is no reason to resort to a surgical cure when a slow but consistent regimen of herbal tea would be more appropriate.

Selection for representation might follow a state’s judiciary selection practices. Collective bargaining could then shift toward a more professional contractual relationship, including plan signoffs that more directly account for the impact of madates on local classrooms. Teachers and investors might even begin to agree to a contract that included a multi-year strategic plan signoff and a flat dollar amount, leaving professional management to professionals, not state agents. The NEA might more seriously consider charter districts with management packages.

School councils should interpret the implementation of the district's strategic plan through site policies that balance professional, parental and community standards. These policies need to be written and signed. For example, school councils can develop codes of civil conduct to be signed by members of the school community. These site-based policies and codes may need to be recognized and aligned within the district's bargaining agreement.

Insufficient attention has been paid to this critical policy area. A strategy for improved teacher empowerment will have limited success without serious attention to reasonable alignment. The growing costs of mandates are one of the most significant obstacles to successful empowerment.

Fair information means fair not only for teachers and children, but also for their sustaining economies. High quality professional decision support systems are increasingly at the core of local, state and federal affiliate planning, negotiations and policy. NEA is in a strategically critical position to provide coordinated policy impact research information services for complex, multi-level mandates such as IDEA to federal, state and local policymakers. These services need to be extended.

NEA research offices should be carefully documenting the policy impact of IDEA on a wide variety of classroom teaching and learning experiences. Special education is the soft underbelly of public education. Its consequences for regular education need to be thoroughly documented and analyzed. The future of teacher empowerment policy could live or die on special education policy. Federal special education mandates may be badly out of alignment with state school codes. This is an area that needs policy attention.

Professional information services can combine high quality decision support with peer learning and distance mentoring, chaining the work of local, state and federal affiliates.

State affiliates should make a unique contribution to the state and national reform literature through the use of 'cumulative case studies' that track classroom teaching and learning from the classroom view over time. State affiliates need to provide locals with more complex policy and decision support systems that more clearly link the regional economy with collective bargaining and community development.

The consequences of neglect can be high. One county is the home of several powerful conservative Democrat state and federal legislators who are looking increasingly favorably on vouchers. One school district, one of the poorest in the state had school taxes that were so high, they crowded out municipal taxes. A township in desperate need of development went for years without enough money to lay a simple, relatively inexpensive water and sewer line to a developer's property. Teachers in the interim received several raises, and voters became increasingly hostile, especially since most of them earned less than one half of what teachers earned. Both the superintendent and the local affiliate leader were unaware of the consequences of their bargaining. State affiliates need more complex information systems about the impact of educational investment on regional economies.

Local affiliates need to invest in decision support systems for school councils and boards, providing high quality indicators of classroom success within the community context. The co-construction of quality school success indicators within unique community contexts should be a major contribution of local affiliates working with school councils. Strong comparative and contextual indicators and narratives are needed. The quality needs to be fairly consistent across sites so that they can support decision-making at the state and federal level.

School councils need to be 'embedded' in the local community. This does not mean that members should be drawn only from the local community. School councils could have in balance with parental representation, school district representatives, members of regional child and youth health and welfare services, businesses and community groups. The mix should be approved within the collective bargaining contract as having met or exceeded professional standards.

The technology exists for affiliate support of local community memory repositories of expertise, indicators, narratives and teaching materials that can be created locally and shared globally. School councils in partnership with local affiliates can help collect, organize and publicize the contributions of education and local culture to each other.

There is a lot of high quality materials created by local teachers using community resources. The use of community and regional resources needs to be both a larger part of the curriculum and its reporting. Both children and taxpayers need to learn more about their interdependence and responsibilities to each other. Who, besides public school teachers will help them learn? Teachers need to build strong alliances with community and regional organizations committed to a civil democratic market economy. These alliances should be based on three critical needs of children: health and safety, communications and inventiveness. Teacher association representatives should sit on regional technological infrastructure investment councils to ensure that schools are not marginalized in the rush to e-commerce or exploited by their lack of knowledge.

Secure voice means that teachers have their individual professional judgement protected in the classroom throughout their career. Individual career portability services should be expanded through the NEA or a joint AFT effort. These include: a) professional credentials for teacher education programs nationally and internationally; b) portable health care benefits; c) supplemental insurance plans; d) supplemental pension fund contributions; and e) job relocation services.

A secure voice also means one that can speak differently and still be heard. Local and state affiliates need to extend their professional development services to strengthen professional quality at the local level. Three key areas include: a) issues of academic excellence and inclusion; b) education and technology; and c) revenue generation.

NEA should also build on its credibility for generating high quality policy information and analysis to generate greater public visibility. For example NEA could coordinate an annual major media event (visibility on CNN nationally and internationally) with state affiliates simultaneously issuing annual state of the state's classrooms. These reports would contain unique and comparable quantitative and qualitative indicators of success in classrooms. These reports would describe the strategic political and economic context of classroom success, acting as a counterweight to less sophisticated, context-free reports such as standardized test scores.

The NEA needs to begin to seriously consider alternative forms of school site governance including majority teacher representation in site-based selection of principals. Teachers need to provide funding communities with clear evidence of high quality teaching and learning relationships.

Some reform-oriented districts have attempted to separate instructional leadership from financial control through decentralization to the site level. Sometimes the separation improved quality in both the instructional and the logistical, information and financial systems the transparency of their interdependence. Other times they simply served to concentrate logistical, information and financial authority and reduced transparency.

Visible presence means that affiliates promote a strong positive public presence for the profession in community newspapers, regional newspapers television and radio markets, and national television, radio, and print markets, in the film industry and on the Internet.

Local affiliates also need to develop greater autonomy in community reporting systems. Tax payers need to more about what is going on in schools than what they are currently hearing in the media or from elected officials. Community taxpayer investors need to hear from professional and community groups through clear and vibrant reporting mechanisms that provide yeasty, complex stories about the generational contributions of their schools.

One of the great problems that schools have is that most people receive their information from television, which is organized for regional and national audiences. Community information too easily gets lost. Greater emphasis on local means of communication, radio, newspapers is needed. Internet use needs to be much more systematically explored. At a regional level, association leaders need a much more visible presence. They need to be seen as major investors in the region, with seats on regional economic development boards.

Empowerment can thus be seen from two complementary and contradictory metaphors of contest and affirmation: 'consumer product' and 'generational conversation.' Within a consumer product framework, teachers are factors of production, are products themselves, and are competitors for control of the production process. Within a generational conversation metaphor, teachers and children are individuals with unique voices. Within classrooms teachers and children create the conversations of generational continuity.

From a consumption view, teachers are factors who have to compete with other factors, such as school buses. They may have to compete for a place in local budgets against the glitzy buildings and the athletic programs school boards need to attract realtors and votes. They have to compete with state governors for control of the professional standards and accreditation that shape their economic identity. They have to beg others to give them technology because, even in the information age, they lack the encouragement and opportunities necessary for them to create and profit from their own ‘professional capital.’

Teachers need a strategy of empowerment that is linked to their professional commitments. They need to be protected from the damage created by educational reformers who tacitly assume they are costs to be contained. Rich classroom generational conversations cannot be reduced to a never-ending obsession for the more efficient production standardized test scores that measure a child’s relative performance. Test scores are useful, but limited in their scope.

Children inherit civilization. The skills they need to create an economy are an essential component of an identity with this heritage, but not its totality. Teachers must create safe places for children to learn to appreciate their own and others' histories, to invent responsible solutions for new problems, and to work together in healthy and creative ways. Children need to learn to construct their own 'voices' out their unique experience of the world. Those voices need to be heard by others. Children also need to be 'visible' in communities, so they can be acknowledged. Voice and visibility are as critical to an identity with civilization as economic skill. Children need to learn how to participate in market economies and democratic communities, so they can build the identities they need to generate their own civilization.

When a consumer-product framework is applied to education, it can seriously circumscribe thinking about teacher empowerment linked to generational learning. Quite simply, 'generic' thinking that frames teachers and children solely, or even primarily, as collectivized factors in a production process is uncivilized. Civilized institutions in democracies and free markets are held together by generational agreements, not by the violent force of economic or political collectives.

Teachers and children are not to be talked about solely as skills, performances or achievements to be managed for consumption by others. They are individuals who legitimately own the rights to and responsibilities for their own experiences. Those rights and responsibilities cannot be sold in the marketplace or traded away in a voting booth.

Teachers and children must be cherished as much for their uniqueness as for their value to current and future employers. One cannot substitute for the other.

Consumer product frameworks alone cannot adequately provide the 'language' needed to construct a complex strategy for teacher empowerment linked to generational legacy. They must be balanced with other, more interactive and 'engaged' thinking that acknowledges individual experience. This complexity is essential for an empowerment strategy that needs to focus on the complex generational relationships of teaching and learning.

In market economies, children not only need basic literacy and numeracy skills, they need to learn how to create products and services for sustainable, peaceful trade. In democratic communities children need to learn to construct civilly-balanced individual political, economic and cultural identities, so they are not swayed by bullies. A teacher empowerment strategy must begin with a re-examination of the importance of civility and balance in the construction of teachers' own professional identities.

This strategy needs be two-pronged. The first should focus on damage control created by educational reformers who tacitly and solipsistically assume the validity of a consumer product framework is self-evident. This requires strategically focused attention to the legitimate support of a teacher’s professional judgement in the classroom.

The second should focus on developing strategic alliances with those committed to a civilized society. Now is the time for inclusion, not exclusion. There needs to be more critical attention paid to the roles of teachers on the front lines of the next generation of civilization.

In some places, teachers stand as a child’s last hope for opportunity for security, comfort and challenge. Children must find room to create an identity that helps them balance their roles as responsible members of family, political, and economic communities. If they grow up over-identifying success with gangs or violence, whether in the neighborhood or in the mass media, then of what value are standardized test scores?

Children without voices and visibility are powerless. Teachers must be empowered with their own visibility and voices. They need to serve first as healthy role models in communities dedicated a civilized life.

Srebren Dizdar, the former permanent secretary for education in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war had something similar in mind when he said, if you asked me before the war about the value of education, I would have said schooling is good, more is better. The war changed that forever. Many highly skilled people I knew well, designed and managed the war for personal and ideological gain. What did their education have to do with the continuity of civilization? Now I think of education as preparation for the future. How do we need to prepare children to survive it?

In the US, how should we weigh the needs for economic and political skills against the importance of responsibly balanced family, political and economic identities? Should teachers be empowered only to focus on economic skills, and leave the rest to God and chance? Civilization ends when any person, no matter how well-educated, is permitted by a community to take righteous pleasure in the pain of others. Teachers have a professional obligation to protect children against bullies. If others turn their backs those who bully children, teachers are diminished. A teacher's power rests in the strength of the generational relationships entrusted to them.

Teachers represent some of the most important investments that each generation makes in the next. Teachers are vital to the future. They need the cooperation of the civil community to help protect children from the bullies on the street corner, on the school bus, in school bathrooms and locker rooms. Teachers need to make clear alliances with parents and others who are willing to stand with them. Children need to learn to distinguish between the restrained and responsible participation needed for civil democracies and the powerful and sometimes compelling personal satisfaction in lawlessness and violence.

According to Gonzalo Retamal, a senior diplomat at UNESCO's Institute for Education in Hamburg, the children of each generation need to learn first to cherish the artfully restrained responses of civilization against the compelling and satisfying forces of impunity. Teachers sing the songs of time to coax children from their shells into the light of liberty. Teachers carefully weave the carpets of history. They patiently tend the rose gardens of souls.

Teacher empowerment begins with the moral obligation to strengthen the health of the generational relationships entrusted to them. When others turn their backs on children, teachers cannot look away. Teachers represent the most important investments that each generation makes in the next. They are essential to the construction of the future.

They need the cooperation of the entire civil society to help protect children from individual and collective bullies who intrude into classroom life. Teachers need to make clear alliances with parents and others who are willing to stand with children for healthy, well-balanced identification with a civilized society.

The generational relationships of teaching and learning are the core of education. Children need long periods of time to learn how to survive the history they will inherit. What will be the quality of their generational experience?

Teaching and learning is the practice of relationships - language, civility, trade, invention. In democracies and market economies, an educational premium is placed on self-governance through an emphasis on individual identity and teamwork. Citizens and consumers are 'sovereigns' who participate in democracies and markets through the responsible expression of their own individual 'voices' in a cooperative, workable balance with others. The sustainable success of self-governing democracies and markets requires voters and owners to know how to demonstrate mutually respectful relationships.

These sovereign, distinct voices are heard in a continuing relationship with neighbors, near and far, past and future. Sometimes the voices are in consensus and harmony. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes voter and market dissensus is necessary for innovation and justice. Self-governing power does not rest in claims 'over' others as it is in traditional claims of natural hierarchy. All are equal in the voting booth and before the vending machine. Nor does the legitimate power of self-governance rest 'in' a privileged collective identity (religious, ethnic, institutional).

As Americans we define ourselves as standing for self-governing polities and markets with liked-minded allies. We not define our identity in righteous resistance against demonized human beings. We don't have to be scared into assuming a collective identity. We want our teachers to teach the pleasure of learning over rule by fear. We like children, we like being parents and we want our teachers to act 'in loco parentis,' providing safety no profit-driven market can provide. We expect our teachers to 'be there' for children, offering encouragement and solace. A teacher's role is larger than the marketplace. It is sustained not by profit, but by generational obligation.

Our everyday individual identities as Americans balance multiple roles of family, work, church, state, etc. These multiple roles sometimes result in tension as we are pulled in many competing directions. The dilemmas these divided loyalties create can be good. In democracies and markets we don't have to think of these conflicts as signs of imperfection, failure and error. We accept them as an ordinary part of adult life.

We expect our children learn to recognize dilemmas, and have the strength to doubt, to question, and to negotiate creative solutions with their neighbors. We know that uncertainty is necessary for innovation. We know that self-governance works best when it continuously improves the quality of experience of those in our 'neighborhood.' We assume that both our own and our neighbor's children will learn to struggle deeply to 'do the right thing' as an expected part of growing up. We cherish our teachers who help generation after generation of children learn not only to think for themselves, but also to help them feel responsible for themselves and their neighbors. How else can we sustain civil self-governing democracies and markets over long periods of time?

Children who are encouraged to debate, struggle and invent in communities dedicated to civil self-governance might be a bit feistier than the children of theocracies and ethnic nationalist states who are taught to be unquestioningly loyal and obedient to a hierarchical collective authority that protects them. These collective claims of natural hierarchy and privilege assume that some children are more equal than others are. Collective claims stand in stark contrast with the claims of the natural dignity. Individual sovereignty is requisite for self-governance and impossible in collectives.

In collectives, children are identified BY hierarchical relationships. Their identities are generically derived from their functional association with hierarchy. They are the school's 'students.' Under individual sovereignty, children's identities are assumed to be unique. They are Ernestine Perriwinkle's daughters, Leticia and Gerrie.

A belief in a natural hierarchical collective forces teachers to emphasize sorting children by relative performance. The priceless generational gifts of learning about individual sovereignty and the cooperative self-governance of neighbors may be neglected at great peril.

Democracies and markets both rest on the belief that self-governance based on the claims of individual sovereignty and cooperative authority can better endure than governance based on claims of natural hierarchical privilege. 'Natural selection' may not distinguish between the bullies and the brave. Education in self-governing societies is very expensive because each person in each generation is obligated to provide for it. Our civil societies require that children learn to accept and cherish their individuality through personal and mutual respect. Children need long periods of time to not only learn to develop their own independent voices, but also learn to balance and blend them with others, both in harmony and in constructive dissonance.

Individual sovereignty and the cooperative self-governance of democracies and markets are, by definition, generational. Individual sovereignty is a hard-won gift from our parents. It is a torch handed from each member of a generation to the next. Children in each generation are obligated, if possible, to assume responsibility for and not squander this cultural light created by our ancestors. Many of our ancestors died to give their children the opportunity to learn that they have a voice they can call their own. Our children do not have to grow up thinking that they need to be just like those in authority in order to belong. Our children do not have to grow up thinking of themselves as imperfect before the standards created by others. In the safe light of classrooms, children need to learn the courage they will need to be responsible in voting booths and market places.

Democracies and market economies not only require rugged individuality, they assume interdependence. Self-governance requires civil reciprocity. The self-centered worlds of adolescents gives way to a respect for both the legitimate contributions of those who are very different, and for the contractual relationships that permit successful self-governance in complex democracies and markets.

Teachers stand near the center of our diverse and contractual society, acting as translators and diplomats across generations.

The greatest threat to self-governing states and markets arises from the personal and collective abandonment of responsibility for mutual and generational interdependence. Bullies and gangs who explicitly or implicitly assert a natural hierarchical privilege at the expense of natural dignity are a continuing problem to democracies and markets. Individuals and collectives may be very successful, creating wealth for the moment with one intimidating hand and squandering it for the future with the other. If the gains of a few damage the quality of experience for the many, bullies and gangs may create more overall damage than gain. Teachers and parents must be vigilant in their protection of children from bullies and gangs. Too many still accept bully behavior as 'natural' and don't do enough to stop it.

Bully and gang problems are greatly exacerbated when they threaten a child's opportunities to learn. Generational security, once a cultural assumption, is a growing policy threat. Opportunistic conservatives push for the righteous dismantling of 'big government' schools as failed experiments in socialism. What is not said is that both democracies and market economies rest on the self-governance of neighbors.

A thoughtful balance of well-informed, well-endowed public and private school investments clearly demonstrates to young parents the essential generational commitment of a self-governing society. A withdrawal from neighborly self-governed funding for education is an open invitation for families to abandon their generational obligations to little children who are not their own.

The clock cannot be turned back. Most Americans live in relatively dense, technologically complex and globally interdependent regional economies. How well will the children who will inherit these regional economies be prepared to assume these enormous responsibilities? The education needed for complex self-governing states and technological markets is very different than that needed in agrarian and industrial states and economies where a chosen few can speak fully for all.

'Vox populi, vox dei.' The multiple voices of citizens and consumers generate a need for individuals to balance the complexity, diversity and inventiveness these many voices create. Parents, teachers and community members need to help students learn to construct and balance their personal interests with their loyalties to others in their families, workplaces, voting booths and places of worship.

In a 'free' society, teachers are expected to responsibly balance their loyalties at home, at work, in church and in the voting booth. We expect teachers to have complex loyalties that inform and balance, not overwhelm their professional identities as teachers.

The professional practice of balanced loyalties contrasts with collectives in which major economic and social relationships are derived primarily from a single ethnic or religious identity. The growth of rogue collectives such as gangs is particularly troublesome. Children whose only economic access is through the personal fealty of gangs will have difficulty inheriting either democracies or healthy market economies. The birthright of their individual voice will be sold into silence. If they live at-will in a brutal economic collective, they will speak in generic voice, not their own. Many teachers and parents struggle together to help children learn to balance their loyalties so they can develop their voice. Children need to learn they do not need to humiliate themselves in order to receive protection, approval and identity. How can we help them?

These distinctions are essential in the debates over teacher empowerment. Across the US and many parts of the world, the next generation needs to rapidly learn to inherit highly complex technological regional communities in internationalizing economies. The needs for individuals to make sense of and improve the complex, diverse and interdependent relationships they will inherit have never been greater. Education is one of the most significant investments in legacy this generation will make in the next.

Education is too important, complex and diverse in democracies and market economies to be assigned to a single governing source such as the private or public sector. Generational security requires both sectors in balanced generational alliances that are seen as just.