Youth Activism in an Era of Education Inequality

Ben Kirshner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479805426
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

Winner, 2016 Best Authored Book presented by the Society for Research on Adolescence This is what democracy looks like: Youth organizers in Colorado negotiate new school discipline policies to end the school to jail track. Latino and African American students march to district headquarters to protest high school closure. Young immigration rights activists persuade state legislators to pass a bill to make in-state tuition available to undocumented state residents. Students in an ESL class collect survey data revealing the prevalence of racism and xenophobia. These examples, based on ten years of research by youth development scholar Ben Kirshner, show young people building political power during an era of racial inequality, diminished educational opportunity, and an atrophied public square. The book’s case studies analyze what these experiences mean for young people and why they are good for democracy. What is youth activism and how does it contribute to youth development? How might collective movements of young people expand educational opportunity and participatory democracy? The interdependent relationship between youths’ political engagement, their personal development, and democratic renewal is the central focus of this book. Kirshner argues that youth and societal institutions are strengthened when young people, particularly those most disadvantaged by educational inequity, turn their critical gaze to education systems and participate in efforts to improve them.

PART I

How Activism Contributes to Human Development and Democratic Renewal

1

Critique and Collective Agency in Youth Development

On May 5, 2010, Luis and Gabriela, two ninth graders, showed up at school expecting to see colors from the Mexican flag adorning their classmates’ gear, just as they had seen students wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day six weeks earlier. It was Cinco de Mayo, a day that commemorates the Mexican army’s victory over French forces in 1862, and, in the United States, has become a day when people honor and celebrate Mexican cultural traditions. Luis, born in the United States to parents from Mexico, wore the Mexican flag behind his T-shirt, in his words, “to honor my parents’ country.” Gabriela, born in Mexico, was less familiar with the holiday, but felt a sense of connection to her peers who celebrated it.

The school, Roosevelt High, had for most of its history been majority white, but had experienced a demographic shift during the housing boom of the early 2000s.1 The combination of Latino settlement in certain neighborhoods and a change in school boundaries to include a nearby high school meant that by 2010 the school had become roughly 60 percent Latino and 40 percent Anglo, with those identified as Latino including recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America as well as Hispanic families with many generations of U.S. citizenship. Teachers and administrators at Roosevelt High were still overwhelmingly English-speaking and white.

When Luis and Gabriela entered the building on May 5, instead of a celebration of culture, they encountered hostility and harassment. Luis described it later in an interview:2

I go upstairs, and you see all these whites with American flags, and you’re going, “Whoa! What a drag! What’s going on?” And then you look out to the parking lot and you see all these cars with American flags . . . . And yeah, it was terrifying for me. I was like, “Whoa, what’s going on?” . . . That’s when everybody started, like . . . chanting racial slurs.

You say they were chanting, like, in the hallways?

Yeah, it was pretty much every hallway, the library, I don’t know. When I saw the flag, it was in the hallway over here. I remember Ms. S——, I was walking, and I even see a teacher with the American flag shirt, and I was like, “Whoa, the teachers are like that, too?” It was pretty terrifying to be a freshman, ’cause you’re not used to the high school environment, you know? You’re just getting used to it. And then you see this happening and you’re like, “Whoa!”

Rumors spread that one group of white students was planning to burn the Mexican flag in the parking lot and that a group of Mexican American students would retaliate if that happened. The action shifted to the parking lot outside the building, where, in Gabriela’s words:

There was some American people with their flags on . . . saying, “Oh, go back to your country.” . . . Then the American people thought they were so tall and bigger, they were pushing everyone and this kid was wearing like a soldier theme. It said border patrol.

Additional people, including students and staff, reiterated versions of these stories in interviews and writing. Jennifer, a native Spanish-speaking student in Luis and Gabriela’s class who was learning English as her second language, wrote the following in response to her teacher’s prompt to recount her experiences on Cinco de Mayo at the school:

My experience with Cinco de Mayo in the past years are a very strong negative because many Mexicans get excited to celebrate/party with their familys. Get all together and remember Mexican tradition.

Throughout school days in cinco de mayo made me feel worthless and no power because many americans here in the united states make unappropriate comments. Every Mexican student waking up in the morning happy to wear their Mexican flag colors and to get threaten by it saying “to go back to our country” makes me feel like were nothing.

There’s a lot going on in these accounts: Nationalism. Xenophobia. Racism. Contested space. Competition over who belongs and who can claim rightful space in the school. As Luis later told me, Why did the white students decide to express their patriotism on this particular day? For the Latino students, it was a message of exclusion: You don’t belong here. Go back to where you came from. According to Luis, a U.S. citizen, it was “terrifying.” It must have been even more threatening for those students who were undocumented and whose families were at risk of deportation during one of the most punitive eras in U.S. immigration policy.

Imagine you were a teacher at the school, or an after-school provider, or a school counselor: How would you approach this problem of racism and intergroup conflict at the school? In particular, if a student like Jennifer, who in the excerpt above described feeling “worthless and no power,” came to your door, what developmental theory could you call upon for guidance? How should teachers, after-school youth workers, counselors, or administrators support and guide Latino students experiencing this kind of harassment?

Answers to these questions are not only relevant to situations, like Roosevelt, where racism and intergroup conflict are out in the open. They are important more broadly for educators who seek to be developmental allies for young people experiencing varied kinds of “dispossession.”3 Some might be in a school where they confront everyday microaggressions that disparage their intelligence or work ethic.4 Others might be undocumented youth experiencing exclusion from legal employment or youth growing up in neighborhoods with high rates of violence and attending dysfunctional schools.5

Situations such as these call for an educational approach that encourages critique and collective agency. Critique refers to the practice of questioning and denaturalizing the sociopolitical context of one’s life. Collective agency refers to people working together to dismantle barriers to their education or to forge new educational pathways that did not exist before. Too often students hear exhortations to stay in school or reduce the achievement gap without any acknowledgment of structural racism or inequality. Young people experiencing oppression need more than just good mentors or academic skills; they need opportunities to talk about challenges in their everyday lives, examine root causes of inequality, and take action, broadly defined, about issues that affect them.6 Opportunities for critique and agency contribute to sociopolitical development, which refers to “a process of growth in a person’s knowledge, analytical skills, emotional faculties, and capacity for action in political and social systems (p. 185).”7

Luis and Gabriela’s effort to change the climate at their high school exemplifies how this mix of critique and agency can contribute to youth sociopolitical development. In this chapter I draw upon data gathered over two years by a small team of researchers, most of which were collected through ethnographic fieldwork by then-doctoral student Elizabeth Mendoza. (This chapter builds on, and departs from, a conference paper co-authored with Elizabeth Mendoza and Carrie Allen).8 Data included interviews with students over the course of two academic years, student-led tours of the school, and field notes describing classroom activities during the second year of the project.

I draw on these data to characterize the social order of Roosevelt High and show how students questioned and challenged that social order as part of their ESL classroom project. The term social order here refers to a constellation of taken-for-granted norms, practices, and hierarchies in a particular social system, such as a school. Excavating the social order requires attention to who has power and which types of students are positioned as the leaders and achievers. I privilege student perceptions of that social order, rather than adult personnel.

By considering their story we can see how Luis and Gabriela developed as sociopolitical actors over the course of a yearlong project they undertook with the guidance of their ESL teacher. I draw on qualitative evidence to describe changes in the way they made sense of the social order of their school and corresponding changes in their participation and voice. This way of theorizing development gives pride of place to how people transform their participation in social groups over time: the kinds of roles they take on, the ways they apply knowledge and skills to new situations, and their contributions to changes in cultural practices. This viewpoint, called a “sociocultural” approach, was first articulated by Lev Vygotsky in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and has recently been expanded by Barbara Rogoff, who describes it this way:

It examines individuals’ roles in the context of their participation and the ways they transform their participation, analyzing how they coordinate with others in shared endeavors, with attention to the dynamic nature of the activity itself and its meaning in the community. The investigation of people’s involvement in activities becomes the basis of understanding of learning/development rather than simply the surface that we try to get past. (p. 279)9

According to this view, when we talk about development we must also be explicit about the particular end, or telos, toward which people are developing. Social scientists try to measure change over time: but change in what direction? After all, what is good or normative in some cultural communities is problematic in others. In some contexts being “a good citizen” means obedience to laws and devotion to authority; for others it means judging the current government against a set of moral criteria.10 Beliefs about good citizenship are highly contested and linked to different ideologies around what kind of society we want to be.

From my perspective the kinds of activities in which Luis and Gabriela participated were good—but on what grounds? I draw on key insights from critical theory to articulate the value of sociopolitical development and how it represents an advance over existing paradigms of youth work.

The Limits of Prevailing Approaches to Working with Youth

Zero tolerance policies, which blame young people for their struggles and use criminal penalties to both deter and punish youth, are neither effective nor just.11 Although increasingly under scrutiny, such policies are still common in schools with high percentages of African American and Latino/a students.12 You can see the zero tolerance approach put into practice at Roosevelt High after the scuffles that took place on Cinco de Mayo. The following year the school brought in more police cars and heightened security to prevent violence. This strategy suppressed overt demonstrations of hostility among students that day, but did little to address the deeply rooted tensions, mistrust, and misunderstandings among social groups at the school. It was a Band-Aid that did not heal the deeper problem.

A more compelling, but still limited, response is offered by social and emotional learning (SEL).13 SEL programs work from the premise that people’s social and emotional development is a central part of what it means to function in the world; moreover, social and emotional competencies shape students’ capacity to focus on academic learning. For example, are you aware when you are becoming angry, stressed out, or anxious and can you manage those emotions rather than let them manage you? Do you persist even after encountering challenge or failure? Several recent meta-analyses document the positive impact of SEL for young people, such as reduced emotional distress, positive social behaviors, positive attitudes toward school, and improved test performance.14 Interest in SEL is part of a broader trend toward recognizing the importance of “noncognitive outcomes” in school and life, such as the concept of “grit” studied by Angela Duckworth, popularized in Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, and embraced by inner-city charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP).15 Grit refers to “the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals” and, like other types of social and emotional attributes, grit is correlated with educational attainment and performance.16

Psychological qualities such as grit, the ability to manage conflict, and emotional regulation are valuable, even necessary, in an increasingly high-wire economy with no safety net, but they are not sufficient for young people or the democracy we aspire to live in. A single-minded emphasis on grit or emotion regulation leaves social conditions unexamined and reinforces the myth of self-reliance. Although a rare few will develop the kinds of resilient stances required to persist in a hostile school or overcome years of nonrigorous classes, self-determination by definition does not get at the roots of the structural contradictions that many young people face. The cultivation of grit helps youth defy the odds, but it does not challenge or change them, particularly in an era when social mobility is stagnant and income inequality is growing.17 Education scholar Mike Rose said it well:

Given a political climate that is antagonistic toward the welfare state and has further shredded our already compromised safety net, psychological and educational interventions may be the only viable political response to poverty available. But can you imagine the outcry if, let’s say, an old toxic dump was discovered near Scarsdale or Beverly Hills and the National Institutes of Health undertook a program to teach kids strategies to lessen the effects of the toxins but didn’t do anything to address the toxic dump itself?18

Rose makes an important point: The existence of social and emotional interventions becomes an excuse to ignore the social conditions that give rise to the need for those interventions. Youth growing up in affluence get strong schools, safe routes to school, and stable ladders to sustainable employment; those growing up in poverty get interventions to promote their coping skills.

A third paradigm to consider is positive youth development (PYD). Like SEL, this work is sound empirically and represents a major step forward for research and practice. Perhaps the biggest achievement of this literature is to reframe young people as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. how activism contributes to human development and democratic renewal
• Part II. learning ecologies of youth activism
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author