ABSTRACT
This chapter summerizes the five norms of democracy, but though democracy is self-rule, participation, understanding, inclusion, and equity, it is, above all, conflict. Policymakers who believed that the norms of inclusion or equity could bring faith in American democracy to nonwhites, low-performing or special-needs students, and poor school districts faced a difficult dilemma. The debacle surrounding the history standards serves as a warning to policymakers that democracy cannot have a shared understanding of the past and its politics. In democracies, participation through groups undercuts inclusion and thrives on inequity. But the democratic dilemma is that group politics can succeed at broadening inclusion and improving equity. Self-rule can thwart inclusion, equity, understanding, and participation-but rarely everywhere at once. From one perspective, the constellation of American educational policy is an attractive vision of democracy. But this vision of democracy also surrenders the Progressives' core success: the triumph of the norms of inclusion and equity.
