At the start of the year, students in Francis Lewis’s Deliberative Democracy club sat down and wrote out the problems they most wanted to change about their school. From there, they worked together to build physical prototypes of solutions, ranging from small fixes within Francis Lewis to entire schools imagined around different values.
That process is the core of Deliberative Democracy, a school-based club that addresses issues in the public school system through open discussion. The club is connected to the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, and its members analyze other school systems and trace problems to their root causes in order to develop solutions together.
CPRL is a non-profit program based in Columbia Law School that works to improve public education systems. According to the program, it partners with other non-profit organizations to provide research-based learning and legal expertise, consults on education policy, and trains graduate students to become future policymakers. Its stated aim is to develop policies that make for a more refined and equitable school system.
Through a CPRL showcase event on February 20th, students from schools across NYC demonstrated their own solutions to problems in the school system. Their prototypes, developed over the course of the year through their CPRL-funded clubs, were judged and displayed at the event.
Chloe Li, a social media committee member in the Deliberative Democracy club, emphasized being able to delve deeper into problem-solving processes. This helped her engage in and understand the club’s objectives as a whole.
“In my experience at Deliberative Democracy, I’ve definitely learned a lot about how to collaborate with others and work together as a group to come up with prototypes,” Li said. “What I’ve learned from it is definitely how to implement everyone’s voice into one idea and portray it physically.”
Students themselves have also taken initiative to bring these ideas into their own school. The president of the Deliberative Democracy club, Amanda Shi, explained how the club first began as a way to connect students from different schools throughout New York.
“I suggested doing clubs since everyone involved in the program was from different schools, so if we started clubs, it could span across the boroughs,” Shi said.
After beginning the club, Shi and her team started organizing meetings and planning ways to implement the program’s goals at Francis Lewis.
“That’s how we really started to administer the club, blueprint, ideas, and figure out how to settle everything down and have the resources to fund it,” Shi said.
For Shi, the purpose of the club goes beyond discussion. She hopes to motivate students to become more engaged in addressing the problems they see around them, rather than overlooking them.
“When I look at the problems that are so prevalent in the school system and try to find solutions, I look for issues not only I’m facing, but the other students as well,” Shi said. “My biggest goal is to inspire others to be more engaged students.”
Vice president Zoe Allo also believes the club gives students a new opportunity to actively work toward solutions rather than just discussing issues.
“I think this is the first club of this kind at our school, and it really helps engage the student body and develop actual solutions for problems we experience on a daily basis,” Allo said.
During meetings, members participate in interactive activities that encourage creative problem solving by looking at the roots of the issues.
“We include a lot of hands-on activities that involve developing solutions through prototyping,” Allo said. “Thanks to CPRL, we were able to use methods like root cause analysis and backwards planning to figure out solutions.”
The work students are doing at Francis Lewis is supported by CPRL, the Columbia-connected program that focuses on giving students a role in shaping education policy. Erin Hanley, a CPRL evolutionary learning associate who has been part of the team since she started graduate school at Columbia Law School, noted the program’s approach to education policy work and its focus on giving students real opportunities to change the future of schools.
“I think from a lot of students in the club we get the question of like, will these ideas actually go somewhere, or is anyone in policy actually gonna take our ideas and implement them,” Hanley said. “That’s a personal goal for me, is actually helping bring these student ideas to fruition.”
This April, CPRL organized a two-day summit that connected the clubs it supports across New York and Kentucky, including FLHS’s Deliberative Democracy. Two students from a different NYC public school, Izaiah Bernard and Ryan Bodden, said the conference gave them an opportunity to network with peers and compare school settings.
“I feel like this conference went really well, like, I made a lot of connections,” Bernard said. “Also, I feel like the conversations we had were more meaningful and we had purpose behind every thought we said and every claim we debated.”
The summit empowered Bodden and other students to feel more prepared for leadership roles and to reflect on the impact they could make in the future.
“It was also, like, a great opportunity to basically become leaders and work for the leadership of the things that we might have in the future,” Bodden said. “Because at the end of the day, we’re the upcoming leaders.”
Abby Shirley, an attendee of the April summit from a public school in Kentucky, said the conference showed students they could collaborate with each other given the diversity of the group.
“My main takeaway was probably even though we live so far apart and we live in such different worlds, we still see the same problems in our school, and I think we all have really good creative solutions to fixing them,” Shirley said. “I’d say a lot of kids are just burned out. Everywhere, I mean.”
Shirley said that as students from different schools collaborated and exchanged ideas, they were also able to appreciate the features and environments of New York schools.
“A lot more diversity here, as far as, like, even, like, I don’t know, like everyone kind of acts the same and does all the same stuff where we’re from,” Shirley said. “Here everyone has more personality, it’s so open, so accepting, and yeah, I like it.”
