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

4. “Where Youth Have an Actual Voice”: Teenagers as Empowered Stakeholders in School Reform

143 4 “Where Youth Have an Actual Voice” Teenagers as Empowered Stakeholders in School Reform Celina Su When Hector was a freshman in high school, he did not always study as hard as he could. At the urging of a friend, though, he joined Sistas and Brothas United (SBU) and began to work with them regularly after school. SBU is a youth organizing group that works to improve conditions at schools around the South and Northwest Bronx. The school Hector attended at the time, John F. Kennedy High, reported high rates of violence, a severe shortage of guidance counselors, broken escalators, and unusable fire-safety mechanisms. Hector struggled just to get through each school day. Still, when he had a chance to talk to administrators about his experiences, he could not help but get excited. It had taken a whole lot of persistence—a barrage of faxes and phone calls— to even garner a meeting. Maybe they could get some facilities repaired, or even hire some guidance counselors? He practiced his short testimony, again and again, with other SBU members. When Hector showed up, he found out that the school officials had, secretly and without authorization, pulled his school records. His grades were not exactly great, they said. In fact, they were straight-up bad. To these policy makers, Hector’s critiques reflected his low valuing of education rather than a set of legitimate concerns. They therefore rebuffed any suggestions Hector might offer. He did not exactly have the right to make any criticisms about school, now, did he? 144 Teenagers as Empowered Stakeholders Did he? By the time he was a senior, Hector had transferred to Satellite, a smaller, alternative high school. Satellite was much safer, and he got to know teachers there. Still, he had not given up on education reform campaigns. In 2004, Hector was one of the founding members of SBU’s STARS, the Student-Teacher Alliance to Reform Schools.1 He helped to collect survey data on the issues that concerned Bronx teachers most, like overcrowding and professional development, and chaired meetings on how teachers and students could join efforts to work toward reforms that were both ambitious and doable. He helped to strategize on whether press conferences, protests, petitions, or some other action would be needed to get the higher-ups to pay attention. This time, the reception of the teachers was strikingly different. They praised his good work, talked about how they were in it together, commended him on his administrative skills and his passion, and invited him to join them in fairly exclusive meetings with the city’s top Department of Education (DOE) officials. At one of the first STARS meetings, Hector’s friend Jeremy recited a poem he had written: There’s many problems with our education . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is it the students’ fault? Just try and think about their status: Got books from when the colony’s first established . . . . . . . . . . . . . Constantly treating them like a statistic, treating them like lab mice. Scantrons mess up and lower scores, and students pay the price. Well, if we say it is not the students’ fault, let’s look at a new vision. Are the teachers to blame? Now let’s just look at their position. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forced to teach 30−35 students, and feeling like they have no weight. Stressed while teaching, and the check ain’t even that great. . . . . . . . . . . . . . They are raising standards for us, and it sure ain’t fun, And who’s responsible for raising standards for all of them? In a way, Hector’s story began with how inner-city youth are portrayed in popular media—as wayward kids who struggle in school because they do not make sufficient efforts to do well, or as thugs who accuse their Teenagers as Empowered Stakeholders 145 academically successful peers as traitors for “acting white”—but it did not end that way. What changed? How did Hector transform from being seen as an easily dismissed troublemaker to a teachers’ darling? Part of the answer is that perhaps Hector was not a troublemaker in the first place. Rather, he did not have the means or support he needed to articulate well-constructed critiques of the school system in a manner palatable to administrators, and these policy makers never gave Hector the benefit of the doubt afforded to most teenagers. Hector’s story, and the stories of the dozen or so other youth leaders I present...