Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education

Methodological Appendix: Listening to Young People

215 Methodological Appendix Listening to Young People Gaston Alonso The commitment to get close, to be factual, descriptive, and quotive, constitutes a significant commitment to represent the participants in their own terms. This does not mean that one becomes an apologist for them, but rather that one faithfully depicts what goes on in their lives and what life is like for them. —John Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings (1971) In the introduction to this volume, Celina Su recounts how at a 2006 meeting of the New York City Department of Education a young woman affiliated with the Urban Youth Collaborative implored the gathered officials: “Please. You keep staring at your piece of paper and referring to questionable ‘data.’ Please look up and listen to us. We’re sitting in front of you. We are the data.” Our Schools Suck takes this young woman up on her plea. In the preceding pages, African American and Latino high school students testified to their experiences growing up in innercity communities, attending the overcrowded and underfunded schools found in such communities, looking for employment in racialized labor markets, and working to change the conditions in which they study and live. They also told us about the school subjects they love and those that they hate, about their desire for “real learning” and their dislike of standardized tests, about their aspirations for the future and their fears about the present, and about their yearning for schools with good teachers, caring counselors, clean bathrooms, and safe hallways. 216 Methodological Appendix In taking the self-interpretations of students as our data, we insist that social scientists and policy makers treat young people as social agents in their own right rather than as the mere objects of their studies and policy discussions. The students who are the subject of this book are actors capable of placing themselves in history, interpreting the objective conditions of their lives, and contributing to the scholarship and public policies that shape those conditions. If we are willing to listen, they have much to tell us about “what life is like for them” in the hypersegregated and underresourced schools in which we as a society have confined them and about the kind of schools and teaching that would engage them as students. As described in the Introduction, during the spring of 2006 the authors of this book became concerned with the tone that public discussions about the education of students of color were taking. As one highprofile figure after another denounced these young people as “cool pose” troublemakers doomed to academic failure by their cultural norms and values, we came together to discuss how such simplistic representations did not match the complexity of the data that we had gathered in our previous research with young people of color. Rather than simply relying on how adults describe young people of color and their values, scholars and policy makers, we believe, need to do the hard work of documenting and grappling with how such young people understand themselves and express their values. We began to imagine constructing a collaborative ethnography that brought together three distinct critical ethnographic projects, each guided by different scholarly interests and questions and each focusing on a different research site and deploying a variety of methods. Despite such differences , the case studies focused on the same population—inner-city African American and Latino high school students. By placing Jeanne Theoharis’s study of the written self-expression of eleventh graders from Fremont High School in Los Angeles alongside Noel Anderson’s interviews with young men of color attending a New York City Upward Bound program and Celina Su’s ethnography of high school student activists from the South Bronx, we could examine how these young people—so hypervisible and talked about in our society but so seldom heard from— interpreted themselves and their schooling. “Humans are complex, and their lives are ever changing,” Andrea Fontana and James Frey observe. “The more methods we use to study them, the better our chances will be to gain some understanding of how they construct their lives and the stories they tell us about them.”1 As we read the cases together, we noticed Methodological Appendix 217 that despite the methodological differences among them, the data gathered consistently told us that African American and Latino youth construct their lives in far more complex and contradictory ways than those suggested by the heated public discussion about...