Aaron Regunberg: Why 16-Year-Olds Know Better than You
Friday, January 13, 2012
Last Monday, I had lunch in the school cafeteria at Providence’s Hope High School, where I treated myself to a filling salad with fresh vegetables and all the fixings from Hope’s new, permanent salad bar. This salad bar is the first of its kind to be offered in any Providence public high school, and it exists today for two reasons: first, the activism of the youth comprising the student group Hope United, who worked continuously for months to advocate for these and other healthy changes in Hope’s cafeteria; and second, the willingness of the food service provider Sodexo to take students’ input seriously and, through a collaborative and open conversation, take positive action to better serve the community.
In fact, I think this case could be used as compelling evidence for the value of including student voice in schools’ and school districts’ educational decision-making processes. The argument being made by young people—not just from Hope United, but from all the great youth leadership programs in Providence, including Youth In Action, Young Voices, PrYSM, and Seeds of Change—is that students have the ideas, information, and capacity necessary to make the education transformations we in this country keep trying (and usually failing) to make.
Their argument is pretty simple, and goes like this: young people actually know stuff. Unlike the politicians and administrators and non-profit heads who usually design policy, students actually go to these schools. Every day of their lives is spent doing “field research”—observing what practices are more or less effective inside classrooms, what gaps or problems are keeping students from engaging in their schoolwork, what schools should be doing to better support their students, and what kinds of services are necessary outside of school to ensure that youth are able to access education despite the constraints of poverty.
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To try to reform education without utilizing the input of those with the most intimate knowledge of school and district failings and the fullest understanding of student needs is like trying to do surgery with a blindfold on—it’s possible to attempt, and maybe if you’re super lucky things might work out, but why in the world would you want to take the chance when it’s within your power to utilize this incredibly valuable tool that’s right there at your disposal?
Which is not to say that surgeons should rely only on their eyesight when doing these complicated procedures. When the subject of student voice comes up, I often hear people say that we can’t just let students run the schools. That’s true, of course, but it’s also a total straw man argument, because that’s not what Providence’s students are asking for. Hope United didn’t demand that Sodexo allow them to take over school lunch operations entirely, and had they, things probably wouldn’t have turned out so well. What they requested, instead, was the opportunity to make some suggestions based on their experiences in Hope’s cafeteria, and to be a part of the conversation about how lunch could be improved. To Sodexo’s great credit, that is exactly what happened, and it led to what the company’s district manager described as a “win-win…the students, the parents, the district and us, we were all part of the process. It was a wonderful example of students working with a community partner to institute changes.”
So with this example in mind, my question is how many other great win-win solutions are we currently missing out on by refusing to give those most directly impacted by our education policies a seat at the decision-making table? We want to decrease student tardiness rates? Well, maybe we should listen to students when they repeatedly tell us that sometimes their families can’t afford bus passes and walking 2.8 miles (the cutoff distance to receive a free bus pass is three miles) through the cold is often a huge barrier to getting to school on time. We want to improve student attendance rates?
Then we should take youth seriously when they tell us that electives like art and music are what inspire many students to get up to go to school in the morning, and so we should make sure that these students have the opportunity to take such an elective every semester (which they currently cannot do). We want to increase students’ engagement in the classroom? Well, we should probably ask them what kinds of teaching methods—project-based lessons, group work, role-playing, etc.—work best for them, and see how we can integrate those practices better in our curricula. And speaking of curricula, young people might be more interested in their coursework if they had been involved in helping to craft their lessons and choose what they will be spending so much of their time studying.
The Sole Voices
Again, students shouldn’t be the sole voices on any of these issues. Teachers, administrators, parents and “experts” all have their own knowledge and experiences that need to be included in the design of a successful school or district. But the key word there is “all”: we need every one of these stakeholders to be involved in shaping our education system, and right now students are 100% closed out of that process.
That is a particular shame, because involving students in these conversations is not only necessary to achieve the optimal policy outcomes; we should also see it as a vital component of the well-rounded, democratic education we need students in our city and country to receive. If we want our schools to produce the next generation of American citizens who will be capable of taking responsibility for their communities and stepping up to the challenges of 21st century life, then we’ve got to start teaching students to be citizens, to take responsibility, and to step up to challenges. And that’s not achieved by lecturing to them about these issues—it’s achieved by encouraging (instead of forbidding) students to make their voices heard, by offering opportunities for them to think critically about the world around them, and by working with them to come up with creative solutions to the problems they face.
This has to be done thoughtfully, of course. Since we haven’t been encouraging students to behave like critical, democratic citizens, many of them currently do not, meaning it isn’t going to be easy to begin engaging young people who aren’t used to thinking of themselves as leaders in the work of leading. But it’s clearly possible, and I firmly believe we’re not going to see the educational outcomes we want and need until we fully commit to this goal. Listening to students is good policy and good pedagogy, and it’s about time we adults get over ourselves and begin to recognize this.
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