Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture

Introduction: Three High Schools with Three Distinct Ideas about School Success

1 Deshawn, a high school freshman, sits with me for an interview during his lunch break.1 It’s a Tuesday in January, but Deshawn is not at school. Instead, he is at his internship, where he works from 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, busing tables, running the cash register, and learning the ropes of food service at a popular lunch café in a busy suburban shopping and business district. Deshawn hopes to become a chef one day, and he sees this internship as a good step toward attaining his dream career. His school, a place I call Alternative High, not only supports balancing school with internship work but actually mandates it. School days are scheduled on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only. Students are required to spend time in the world of work (usually unpaid) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The goal of the internship program is to allow students to gain real-world knowledge and experience so that after graduation they have a clearer sense of what college and career paths they might like to pursue. In addition, they can tout their internship experience on their résumés when they apply for jobs. From Deshawn’s perspective, the arrangement is working well. As a teenager in a low-income, single-parent home, he certainly appreciates the free lunches after his shift. But he also takes his job experience seriously. He is con- fident that high school and job success go hand in hand, and he sees his internship as part of that relationship. “I want to become an executive chef,” he tells me, “so that I can really do what I like. And so at home, I just try a lot of different things. I don’t really go out [to eat in restaurants] because of money. Money issues, you know? I don’t really go out there. But if it was like a box or something, I can do it. You know, I am learning from boxes. And I try to do as much of the cooking as I can because I am trying to determine if I do want to be an executive chef or not, or a pastry chef. You never know.” Introduction Three High Schools with Three Distinct Ideas about School Success 2 DEFINING STUDENT SUCCESS In his daily life Deshawn has very limited access to resources, but Alternative High has designed its mission around preparing him and other low-income urban youth for bright futures. The school prides itself on providing opportunities for students to discover their talents and passions and build futures around them. Deshawn takes advantage of these opportunities. Even though he is not actually learning any chef-level cooking skills, he is an eager intern and works hard at the lunch café. His attitude can be seen as a personal commitment to the ideal of hard work. Yet as I argue in this book, looking only at students’ individual characters is shortsighted. We need to look at students’ school environments if we want to comprehensively understand how their ideas and behaviors relate to the concept of success. In other words, to understand Deshawn’s dedication to the low-skill labor of busing tables and running a cash register, we need to recognize that his high school actively fosters an ethic of hard work. At Alternative High, hard work is heralded as the essential ingredient for success in life. According to Deshawn’s principal, “if the culture and the school environment [are] there, then students can get all As and [they] will have options as far as careers are concerned.” As the lunch rush dwindles to a handful of customers, Deshawn sits down to talk with me. Against a backdrop of clanking dishes, I ask, “Why do students go to school?” “To learn how to work in our environment,” he responds. “We usually learn how to be productive and how to be very businesslike in school. And after we have received a good amount of education, we are able to be really into our own working field. And we would probably be successful in that because of our education . And after college, usually you do get a good job because of the fact that you stayed in school rather than going and doing your own thing, you know.” Throughout our interview, he reiterates the idea that the purpose of school is to prepare students for the world of work. Rather than claiming that students...