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Voices in Urban Education
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High School Redesign
VUE Number 8, Summer 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Students as Co-constructors of the Learning Experience and Environment: Youth Engagement and High School Reform
By Francine Joselowsky
Francine Joselowsky is a consultant to the Academy for Educational Development on the Schools for a New Society initiative and former senior program associate at the Forum for Youth Investment.
> Author’s Biography
One of the most important assets schools and school systems have in redesigning high schools are in schools every day: the students themselves. Yet, few districts engage youth effectively.
What's wrong with the American high school? If you ask students in high schools across the country what they think about their school, they're likely to get to the heart of the matter, distilling poor test scores, low graduation rates, and high teacher turnover into a few profound words that hint at boredom, alienation, and lack of purpose. In preliminary results from the National Governors Association's Rate Your Future survey, designed to give students a voice in the organization's education reform conversation, a third of the 1,200 student respondents say they feel overlooked by their high schools, while 43 percent don't believe they are gaining practical and essential life skills in high school (NGA 2005).
None of this should be surprising. Students have been telling adults what they think for years; but often their words get lost in the race to improve test scores and end up only as headlines in newspaper articles, foundation reports, and legislative speeches. Herein lies the paradox: adults want to hear what students have to say but feel that they – the adults – are best equipped to decide how to meet those needs.
Take, for example, the recent tensions and allegedly race-related fights between students at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles. With 3,800 students on a year-round, three-track system, this comprehensive high school designed for 1,800 students has struggled with overcrowding, depersonalization, and low test scores for years. The response of the district and the city to the violence has been to deploy a heavy police presence and turn the school into a de facto lockdown facility, vowing to beef up security in the long term. But these tensions are not new to the students, who have often voiced their concerns and frustrations.
In a workshop last summer on developing youth-engagement strategies, students, teachers, and a small learning community coordinator from Jefferson expressed their concerns about the lack of student voice and developed an action plan to take back to their school to share with teachers and administrators. These students, who had never before been formally engaged in their school in any way, developed a plan to survey students and then present the collated information to teachers and administrators. Their goal was to motivate students and encourage them to become involved in their school and their education. As a priority, they highlighted the need for racial integration and a better physical environment in order to improve education and graduation rates.
However, when they returned to their school and presented their suggestions to administrators, they were dismissed. Instead, administrators developed their own strategy and brought – unannounced – a group of hand-picked students to a teachers' meeting to tell teachers what they were doing wrong. This left many teachers feeling attacked and defensive. Had administrators taken up the original student suggestions, they might have been able to identify the existing tensions and issues and develop strategies to address them before they escalated and eventually exploded.
Archives
High School Redesign
VUE Number 8, Summer 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Students as Co-constructors of the Learning Experience and Environment: Youth Engagement and High School Reform
By Francine Joselowsky
Francine Joselowsky is a consultant to the Academy for Educational Development on the Schools for a New Society initiative and former senior program associate at the Forum for Youth Investment.
> Author’s Biography
One of the most important assets schools and school systems have in redesigning high schools are in schools every day: the students themselves. Yet, few districts engage youth effectively.
What's wrong with the American high school? If you ask students in high schools across the country what they think about their school, they're likely to get to the heart of the matter, distilling poor test scores, low graduation rates, and high teacher turnover into a few profound words that hint at boredom, alienation, and lack of purpose. In preliminary results from the National Governors Association's Rate Your Future survey, designed to give students a voice in the organization's education reform conversation, a third of the 1,200 student respondents say they feel overlooked by their high schools, while 43 percent don't believe they are gaining practical and essential life skills in high school (NGA 2005).
None of this should be surprising. Students have been telling adults what they think for years; but often their words get lost in the race to improve test scores and end up only as headlines in newspaper articles, foundation reports, and legislative speeches. Herein lies the paradox: adults want to hear what students have to say but feel that they – the adults – are best equipped to decide how to meet those needs.
Take, for example, the recent tensions and allegedly race-related fights between students at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles. With 3,800 students on a year-round, three-track system, this comprehensive high school designed for 1,800 students has struggled with overcrowding, depersonalization, and low test scores for years. The response of the district and the city to the violence has been to deploy a heavy police presence and turn the school into a de facto lockdown facility, vowing to beef up security in the long term. But these tensions are not new to the students, who have often voiced their concerns and frustrations.
In a workshop last summer on developing youth-engagement strategies, students, teachers, and a small learning community coordinator from Jefferson expressed their concerns about the lack of student voice and developed an action plan to take back to their school to share with teachers and administrators. These students, who had never before been formally engaged in their school in any way, developed a plan to survey students and then present the collated information to teachers and administrators. Their goal was to motivate students and encourage them to become involved in their school and their education. As a priority, they highlighted the need for racial integration and a better physical environment in order to improve education and graduation rates.
However, when they returned to their school and presented their suggestions to administrators, they were dismissed. Instead, administrators developed their own strategy and brought – unannounced – a group of hand-picked students to a teachers' meeting to tell teachers what they were doing wrong. This left many teachers feeling attacked and defensive. Had administrators taken up the original student suggestions, they might have been able to identify the existing tensions and issues and develop strategies to address them before they escalated and eventually exploded.
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