Democracy, Deliberation, and Education by Robert Asen (review)

In his latest book, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education, Robert Asen locates school boards at the heart of the meaning-making process that is education policy. As important sites of public participation in policy discussions and decision making, he notes that "school boards affirm the relationship between democracy and deliberation" (3). Over the course of the book, Asen meticulously unpacks this relationship through two analytical chapters, three in-depth case studies, and a characteristically thought-provoking conclusion. This new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the rhetoric of public policy, the rhetoric of education, or the successful comingling of rhetorical and qualitative research methodologies.

Democracy, Deliberation, and Education is a product of the Research on Education, Deliberation, and Decision-making (REDD) project funded by the William T. Grant Foundation and facilitated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Spearheaded by Asen, the REDD project involved observations, interviews, and the collections of documents in three Wisconsin school districts: West Bend, Beloit, and Elmbrook. REDD focused on the deliberations and other activities of the three school districts' school boards from 2009 to 2011. Democracy, Deliberation, and Education draws its primary source materials from that body of fieldwork.

Democracy, Deliberation, and Education is as useful a book for concerned school administrators as it is for rhetoric scholars. In that way, it models an outward focus rhetorical studies too often lacks. After an introduction and a first chapter concerning the networked nature of educational policymaking, Asen proceeds to the case studies, where he explores a series of concepts that drive educational policymaking at the local level. In West Bend, Asen addresses the influence of ideology as he recounts the school board's reluctant approval of a new chapter of a gay-straight alliance in their high school. In Beloit, Asen examines the deleterious influence of scarcity as a school board copes with the fallout of the Great Recession by underutilizing its taxing authority. In Elmbrook, Asen questions the role of expertise in school-board deliberations as the affluent district uses new administrative software to determine that its participation in a decades-long desegregation program is no longer warranted in light of its precise financial cost, which they could not previously quantify. By recounting the events in each school district and then critically evaluating the school-board deliberations surrounding them, Asen models the rhetorical analysis of local-level deliberative discourse. In addition, he offers lessons about deliberative discourse that are potentially useful for the citizens and elected officials who participate in it. For those interested in models of scholarship that bridge the gap between rhetorical criticism and its applications beyond the university gates, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education is for you.

Following the individual case studies that make up chapters 2–4, chapter 5 cuts across the experiences of school-board members in West Bend, Beloit, and Elmbrook by analyzing interviews carried out at all three locations. In chapter 5, Asen develops the concept of "deliberative trust," a "relational practice" in which "interlocutors may transform relations of trust through their interactions, strengthening or weakening levels of trust in a deliberation" (145). Resisting definitions of trust that define it as a prima facie quality, or input, brought to a deliberation, Asen calls his readers to consider how trust is made, destroyed, and remade through the deliberative practices of flexibility, forthrightness, engagement, and heedfulness. Asen's processual conception of trust should offer inroads for future rhetorical scholarship, though one wonders whether it is the deliberative process per se that threatens trust in places like West Bend, where school-board candidates claiming to be nonpartisan are supported by the local affiliate of Americans for Prosperity.

In the conclusion of Democracy, Deliberation, and Education, Asen offers two trenchant takeaways for both the study of the rhetoric of public policy and for the future of education policy. Asen reckons that local-level deliberations are underappreciated and underutilized in the networked process that is education policymaking. This is genuinely provocative. Taken seriously, Asen's...