Kralovec, Etta. & Cuevas, Geo. (2011). “Trusting Students to Lead: Promise and Pitfalls,” Schools: Studies in Education, (pp. 143-165) Vol. 8, number 1.
Creating an Appetite for Democracy: Making Justice Social
Geovanni Cuevas, Dartmouth, class of 2014
Etta Kralovec, University of Arizona, South
Prologue
This is a messy story. As with any co-authored narrative, it is multiperspectival, capturing the contradictions and the partial truths of those who do not speak with one voice. As a result, the narrative is, on occasion, broken up awkwardly, with direct references to one of us and with sections written exclusively by Geo. We felt that this was the best way to handle the different perspectives that we each brought into this project. We acknowledge that ours is a story that raises more questions than it answers and that puts on the table some uncomfortable insights about charter schools. The school discussed here may appear dysfunctional to the casual reader, who will no doubt be compelled to ask how it could have a 100% graduation rate and high college attendance in the face of such dysfunction.
While the story is about the establishment of a student-led disciplinary committee in a small charter high school in East Los Angeles, we found that the issues swirling around the establishment of the committee reflected the larger challenges the school faced. Additionally, reflected in the process described below are the social inequalities we face in education today, the power differentials in our schools and the challenges that doing school differently brings. Thus the story captures the contradictions and conflicting challenges schools face today, which are always messy, open and festering. This story also reminds us of the challenges presented when adults are asked to share power with students and when democracy trumps procedures. It is the story of the tensions and resistances that arise when students take on adult responsibilities in a school.
We were principle figures in the attempt to provide students the opportunity to build civic virtues by experiencing leadership and democratic deliberation. Geo was a student at the school who designed and built a new discipline system based on trusting students to be leaders. Etta was‘on loan’ from her university to serve as the school’s principal.
Although a difficult and complicated story to tell, it is important to document the small victories and possibilities that occur in schools today. This is important, in part, because the era of NCLB has descended on schools like a thick fog, obscuring broader purposes, punishing teachers and silencing voices. One hopeful sign of reversing this trend is the nascent movement for including student voice in decision-making in public schools.According to the International Handbook on Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School,(Thiessen and Cook-Sather, 2007), school-based initiatives range from surveying students, to having them serve on school reform committees and redesign teams. While these are hopeful signs of an increased awareness of the need to understand student experience in schools, these efforts are typically adult-driven:
Few instances exist of such efforts in which students initiate an effort and assume responsibility for its activities. . . The lack of examples of autonomous student groups suggests that there are limits to the types of roles and voice that students can assume within the school walls (Mitra, 2007).
The limits that Mitra refers to above are all too familiar to educators, who struggle to find openings for innovation and student leadership in the increasingly narrow school day.The Discipline Committee (DC) design analyzed in this article, sliced out a routine of school life and opened it up to new thinking. We believe the results, while messy, provide insights into what can be done in schools today. School discipline is ripe for new thinking and reform and when students do the thinking and acting, new forms emerge.
Through the revision process of working on this story, it has come to our attention that the article might portray some of the teachers at this particular school as “villains” or at the very least, antagonizing to the cause and purpose of the Discipline Committee. Furthermore, this alleged demonization can be perceived as representative of the attitude of all or most teachers, but it is in no way our intention to allow the resistance of some member of this particular teaching staff to stand as a blanket characterization of all public school teachers. We are simply trying to tell a story from the point of view that accurately portrays what we experienced, and it would not surprise either one of us should the teachers at the school take objection to some of these truths. However, we did our best to simply report some teachers’ actions followed by our assessment of those actions.
There were deeper politics within the school at play that account for some teachers’ seeming indifference and some of those politics are discussed at the end of this article. Our concern in this piece is not to explore all the politics of the school, it is not to worry about how it will be received by unions or administrators; it is to report on an attempt to provide leadership opportunities to a population of students that desperately need them. Our concern is to reflect on an attempt to restructure the way our school thought about discipline. In an age of reform, scarce are the areas where student-driven reform is actually happening, and even more rare are reports on those reforms. Our hope is that this report provides some food for thought for all stakeholders in education. Obviously, there is an educational gap between the privileged and not privileged, which we were attempting to close. This gap is forever talked about in the world education and this is the story of one community’s attempt to close that gap, and the challenges involved in such a reform.
The School
The school started in 2002 for grades 6 and 7 in a rented, renovated church. By 2006, it included a high school and was relocated to a rundown motel in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, with the motel still operating in an attached cluster of buildings. The “schooltel,” as the students lovingly referred to it, was adjacent to a neighborhood park the school used for their PE classes. The park was dangerous and often the site of drug dealing and gang activity. One morning, a student was mugged during a routine lap around the park. The founder quickly began searching for a permanent facility for the school. In 2007, he succeeded in finding a new location in East Los Angeles and had a short four months to renovate the facility before the start of the 2007-2008 school year.
As public schools in Los Angeles go, thehigh school is a safe and welcoming place for 250 students, many of whom travel over an hour each way on public transportation to get there. The school is in the heart of Lincoln Heights, one of the poorest and least educated communities in East Los Angeles. The student body is composed primarily of first generation Americans. For the most part, students are deeply respectful of school authority and lack much of the urban bravado that characterizes many of their peers attending larger urban high schools. Close to 100% of theschool’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch. There is an expectation, set by most parents and all faculty, that students will attend college. The school community does its best to create a strong support system to ensure that this goal is accomplished. Behavior problems at the school consist mainly of tardiness, truancy, dress code violations, occasional tagging and isolated cases of vandalism. Problems in the classrooms are of the garden variety: lack of attention, failure to do homework and what teachers often perceived as acts of defiance.
The school shares many of the same problems that most charter schools in California face: inadequate funding; facilities challenges; increasing compliance mandates from charter authorizers and a rotating door at the administrative level. While all these challenges are enormous, the lack of consistent leadership has impacted the school in a number of negative ways and has created a culture of instability. For example, school rules change with each new administration, so most teachersselect which rules to enforce and which to overlook. Leadership opportunities for the students come and go as new administrators put in place programsonly to have them end when the next administrator comes in. There is clear frustration among the teachers, who have been buffetedby salary cuts, steep NCLB growth targets, yearly facilities crises and what many perceive as a lack of respect from the school’s founder. A number of years ago, the animosity between the founder and the teachers grew to such an extent that the teachers formed a union, one of the few charter schools to do so.
The school offers a very traditional high school curriculum, providing the courses that students need to enter the university system in California. The advisory system, the heart and soul of the school, gives teachers a chance to work closely with the students without standardized tests hanging over their heads. Advisors meet daily with their advisees and often form close friendships. The lack of consistent leadership at the school has meant that the advising program is without a set curriculum, so teachersdo what they please during the advising period. While a much discussed ‘problem’ at the school, this freedom offers teachers their only chance to design curriculum that speaks directly to the students and to teach from their hearts.
A mission of social justice
The school’s founder, Roger Lowenstein, with roots in the civil rights movement, developed the school with the following mission: “Los Angeles Leadership Academy prepares urban secondary students to succeed in college or on chosen career paths, to live fulfilling, self-directed lives, and to be effective in creating a just and humane world.” Roger inherited his life-long commitment to social justice from his father, Alan Lowenstein, who started the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice with its powerful yet simple vision: “Social justice should be the underlying goal of all humanity.” Roger has worked tirelessly and with great generosity to build a school that provides educational opportunities for kids who would otherwise have, to put it bluntly, none.
Roger isrefreshed yearly by the nearly 100% graduation rate at the school. Equally comforting is knowing that 100% of the graduating students have solid plans for college attendance or are headed into vocational programs. Students from the school attend colleges like Vassar, Dartmouth, Kenyon, Swarthmore, and the University of Michigan, as well as local community colleges. He continues to follow the students after they graduate, providing both financial and moral support to alums. Known for providing cars for students who need them, taking students shopping for winter clothes and ensuring that students have access to important cultural events, Roger’s actions are a clear indication of his commitment to his students and his school.
The school’s social justice mission has evolved over the years. Early in the school’s history, the students and teachers participated in overt social justice action projects. For example, in 2003 students demonstrated at the local Taco Bell over employment issues for Native American tomato harvesters in Florida. In the charter renewal application in 2007, the school acknowledged the challenge to fulfilling the mission: “Social Justice means little if one can’t read and write proficiently, master mathematics and develop a world view beyond a five-block neighborhood.” As a result, all teachers now understand the social justice mandate to include providing students with a rigorous curriculum that will prepare them for the realities of college life. Given the challenges that first-generation students face with college success, this came to be seen as an aspect of the social justice mission.
Many teachers, in their roles as advisors, have developed their own approach to social justice teaching. Some see social justice as community service, whileothers see social justice as leadership and activism, and thus teach their students how to approach social problems and how to lead community-based social change efforts.Some teachers attempt to incorporate social justice themes into their classes. For example, in biology, there is a once a week lesson on “current” biology, addressing the ethical and moral implications of biological subject matter like genetics. A required course for all freshmen at the school, Facing History and Ourselves, is a national curriculum focused on human rights. In terms of politics, immigration is an issue that directly affects the lives of many students, staff and teachers. It is not uncommon for a student of the school to fear the deportation of one or both of their parents, and often there is a fear among the students of not being able to attend college because of their undocumented immigration status. As a result, immigration is front and center for a number of teachers. A focus on immigration issues at the school began when students attended a May 1st Immigration Rally in 2006 in Los Angeles. The next year, there was a symbolic “border wall” where students could write notes to a person they knew who had crossed the border. In the 2010-2011 school year, the school is focusing its social justice work on education about and support for the Dream Act. Roger believes this could include hunger strikes and community organizing.
Although most teachers would agree that the school is not anywhere near to fulfilling its charter, they believe that the school makes solid attempts. In contrast to that view, the school’s compliance officer from Los Angeles Unified School District had a different take on what the school’s social justice mission should look like in practice. During the de-briefing session after his first compliance review in the Winter of 2009, he said: “I see social justice posters on the wall, but not in practice in the classrooms, which I saw as dominated by teacher talk.” In his mind, more democratic classroom practices demonstrate social justice and not enough of that exists at the school. He also acknowledged, "It is close to impossible for a charter school to stay true to a strong mission while also meeting the letter of the NCLB law.” He was referring to the fact that recently, the school’s mission has had to compete with steep mandated growth targets for student performance. In 2008, the school’s failure to meet targets pushed it into Program Improvement status.
Tellers of the Tale
One of us, Etta, is a teacher educator and was ‘on loan’ to the school from her university, at the invitation of the founder.She served as principal, while helping to prepare her eventual replacement from within the teaching ranks. Etta shared the founder’s vision of social justice and brought extensive experience as an administrator in democratic high schools and colleges. In these schools, students sat on all decision-making committees and ran all-community meetings. She hoped to establish similar structures at her new school. Etta has seen firsthand that democracy in schools is messy, time-consuming and often contentious, but knows that this kind of authentic participation is one of the only ways to build an appreciation for democracy and the necessary civic virtues it demands among the young. Etta also knows that this kind of participation is more common today in private schools than public schools, in part the result of high stakes testing and NCLB mandates, which private schools have the luxury of turning their backs on.
The other of us is Geo, a student at the charter school since ninth grade, who had “gotten” the school’s social justice mission in its early days and has an innate sense of its meaning and practice. Awarded a scholarship to spend his junior year at an international program in Spain, the experience opened his eyes to a form of inequality that is often unspoken in education. While there, Geo found that students at private schools were trusted with leadership roles that were unknown at his urban charter school. The following is Geo’s account, written at the beginning of his senior year, of what was missing at his school:
I spent a year studying in Spain with students receiving installments of their nearly 100 thousand dollar high school educations. These students, whom I was consistently told I was directly competing with for admission into colleges, certainly fit the stereotypical profile I held of privileged private-school snobs: waspy, rich, 2000+SAT scores, aspirations for Yale and Princeton and a confident New England swagger foreign to the average student attending our small charter school in East Los Angeles. Throughout my year in Spain, I tried my best to study these individuals and identify the exact ingredient in their clustered privileged formula that placed them above the average student at my school--above me. The answer was a clear and resounding: nothing. The disparity between East Los Angeles and Cambridge has nothing to do with ability or the capacity to learn, but rather with monetary resources and confidence in student leadership.