Community Schools with Co-Governance Can Combat Authoritarianism and Transform Public Education
Source: Alex Caputo-Pearl. "The Los Angeles Community Schools Model." April 4, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that community-controlled schools, where parents, students, and workers have real decision-making power, can help fight authoritarianism while improving education. He points to Los Angeles as proof that when communities organize together and run their own schools with a focus on racial justice, it creates better learning and stronger democracy.
Conclusion
The public Community Schools model, when embedded in racial justice and combined with labor and community organizing, can support fights to protect public education and experiment with co-governance as a way to reverse authoritarianism
Premises
- Fifty years of bipartisan neoliberal reforms have hollowed out the public sector, cutting funding and shutting working-class communities out of shaping institutions important to them
- Authoritarians have blamed institutional failures on marginalized groups (immigrants, black people, Muslims, LGBTQIA people) rather than addressing systemic issues
- Reversing authoritarianism requires that public institutions be run by the people through co-governance experiments
- The LA Community Schools Initiative successfully demonstrates expanded decision-making for parents, youth, and workers while centering racial justice
- The Extended Learning Cultural Model (ELCM) at Crenshaw High School proved that democratic schooling can create autonomous learners rather than dependent learners
- Years of organizing by education workers, parents, students, and community members created the conditions necessary for successful implementation
- Community Schools represent 'non-reformist reforms' that threaten rather than accept the status quo
Assumptions
- Co-governance between movements and government can effectively improve working people's lives
- Public institutions can serve as effective hubs for organizing and social change
- Democratic participation in education leads to better outcomes than top-down management
- Racial justice must be central to any meaningful educational reform
- Working-class communities have valuable knowledge and should shape the institutions that serve them