Trusting Students To Lead Promise and Pitfalls

Trusting Students to Lead: Promise and Pitfalls
Author(s): Geovanni Cuevas and Etta Kralovec

Source: Schools: Studies in Education, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 143-165
Published by: The University of Chicago Press in association with the Francis W. Parker School
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659444 .
Accessed: 18/08/2014 09:01
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
The University of Chicago Press and Francis W. Parker School are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Schools: Studies in Education.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 192.188.55.3 on Mon, 18 Aug 2014 09:01:17 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
143
SYMPOSIUM
The School as Just Community: Part 2,
Changing How Institutions Think
Trusting Students to Lead: Promise and
Pitfalls
GEOVANNI CUEVAS
Dartmouth, class of 2014
ETTA KRALOVEC
University of Arizona, South
Prologue
This is a messy story. As with any coauthored narrative, it is multi-
perspectival, 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, Etta, and with
sections written exclusively by the other, Geo. We felt that this was the
best way to handle the different perspectives that we each brought to 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 (DC) in a small charter high school in East Los Angeles, we
found that the issues swirling around the establishment of this committee
Schools: Studies in Education, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2011).
2011 Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. All rights reserved. 1550-1175/2011/0801-0017$10.00
144 Schools, Spring 2011
reected the larger challenges the school faced. Additionally, reected 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
conicting 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 pro-
cedures. It is the story of the tensions and resistances that arise when students
take on adult responsibilities in a school.
We were principal gures in the attempt to provide students the op-
portunity to build civic virtues by experiencing leadership and democratic
deliberation. Geo was a student at the school who led the design and
building of a new discipline system based on trusting students to be leaders.
Etta was on loan from her university to serve as the schools principal.
Although this is a difcult 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 No Child Left Behind (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 the students voice in decision
making in public schools. According to the International Handbook of
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
students experiences 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, 742).
The limits that Mitra refers to above are all too familiar to educators,
who struggle to nd openings for innovation and student leadership in the
increasingly narrow school day. The DC design analyzed in this article
sliced out a routine of school life and opened it up to new thinking. We
believe that 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
Geovanni Cuevas and Etta Kralovec 145
particular school as villains or at the very least as antagonizing to the
cause and purpose of the DC. 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
of the teachers actions, following this with 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, and 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 who desperately need
them. Our concern is to reect 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 edu-
cational gap between the privileged and the not privileged, and we were
attempting to close this. This gap is forever talked about in the world of
education, and this is the story of one communitys 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, which the school used
for their physical education classes. The park was dangerous and often the
site of drug dealing and gang activity. One morning, a student was mugged
while making a routine lap around the park. The founder quickly began
searching for a permanent facility for the school. In 2007, he succeeded
in nding a new location in East Los Angeles, He had a short four months
to renovate the facility before the start of the 20078 school year.
As public schools in Los Angeles go, the high 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 rst-gener-
ation 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 the
schools students qualify for free or reduced lunch. There is an expectation,
set by most parents and all faculty, that the students of this school 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 class-
rooms are of the garden variety type: lack of attention, failure to do home-
work, and what teachers often perceive as acts of deance.
The school shares many of the same problems that most charter schools
in California face: inadequate funding, facilities challenges, increasing com-
pliance mandates from charter authorizers, and a rotating door at the ad-
ministrative level. While all these challenges are enormous, the lack of
consistent leadership has affected 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 teachers select which rules to enforce
and which to overlook. Leadership opportunities for the students come and
go as new administrators put in place programs only to have them end
when the next administrator comes in. There is clear frustration among
the teachers, who have been buffeted by salary cuts, steep NCLB growth
targets, yearly facilities crises, and what many perceive as a lack of respect
from the schools 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; this was 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 teachers do what
they please during the advising period. While it is a much discussed prob-
lem at the school, this freedom offers teachers their only chance to design
a curriculum that speaks directly to the students and to teach from their
hearts.
A Mission of Social Justice
The schools founder, Roger Lowenstein, having roots in the civil rights
movement, developed the school with the following mission: Los Angeles
Leadership Academy prepares urban secondary students to succeed in col-
lege or on chosen career paths, to live fullling, 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, which has the powerful
yet simple vision: Social justice should be the underlying goal of all hu-
manity. 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 is refreshed yearly by the nearly 100 percent graduation rate at
the school. Equally comforting is knowing that 100 percent of the grad-
uating 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. Roger continues to follow the students after
they graduate, providing both nancial 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, Rogers actions are a clear indication of his commitment
to his students and his school.
The schools social justice mission has evolved over the years. Early in
the schools history, the students and the 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 har-
vesters in Florida. In the charter renewal application in 2007, the school
acknowledged the challenge to fullling the mission: Social Justice means
little if one cant read and write prociently, master mathematics, and
develop a world view beyond a ve-block neighborhood. As a result, all
of the schools teachers nowunderstand 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 rst-generation students
face with college success, this has come to be seen as an aspect of the social
justice mission.
Many of the teachers, in their roles as advisors, have developed their
own approach to social justice teaching. Some see social justice as com-
munity service, while others 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, im-
migration is an issue that directly affects the lives of many of the schools
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 the teachers. A focus on immigration issues at
the school began when students attended a May 1 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 201011 school year, the school is focusing its social
justice work on education about and support for the DREAM (Develop-
ment, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act. Roger believes this
could include hunger strikes and community organizing.
Although most of the schools teachers would agree that the school is
not anywhere near to fullling its charter, most of them believe that the
school makes solid attempts. In contrast to that view, the schools com-
pliance ofcer from Los Angeles Unied School District recently had a
different take on what the schools social justice mission should look like
in practice. During the debrieng session after his rst 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 schools mission has had to compete with steep man-
dated growth targets for student performance. In 2008, the schools 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 founders 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 rsthand that democracy in schools is messy, time-
consuming, and often contentious, but she knows that this kind of authentic
participation is one of the only ways to build among the young an appre-
ciation for democracy and the necessary civic virtues it demands. Etta also
knows that this kind of participation is more common today in private
schools than in 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 schools social justice mission in its early days and
who has an innate sense of its meaning and practice. Geo was awarded a
scholarship to spend his junior year at an international program in Spain,
and the experience opened his eyes to a form of inequality that is not often
spoken about in education. While in Spain, Geo discovered that students
at private schools were trusted with leadership roles that were unknown at
his urban charter school. The following is Geos 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, with whom I consistently was told I was directly competing
for admission into colleges, certainly t the stereotypical prole I held
of privileged private school snobs: waspy, rich, 2000 SAT scores,
aspirations for Yale and Princeton, and a condent 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 av-
erage student at my schoolabove 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 condence in student lead-
ership.
It seemed to me that elite private schools such as Hotchkiss, Taft,
Exeter, and Andover trust their students. They do not need a charter
or a documented mission of leadership to create leaders, but rather
rely on the natural intellect of their student body to make positive
decisions by providing resources and setting systems in place where
power is placed in the hands of the students to start and run clubs,
committees, and councils. Hotchkiss, for example, has student coun-
cils that meet with teachers to approve changes in class schedules,
determine the amount of nightly homework, and establish policies
that prevent more than two tests in a day for one student. All of the
aforementioned institutions are member schools of the program that
sponsored my year in Spain. As a result, mostly student-driven policies
bled in from their home schools to the policies I had to abide by in
Spain. It bothered me that these traditions and the culture of student
involvement did not exist at my school, because I knew that our
student body was every bit as capable of managing our school policy.
I began to look for ways to change this and stumbled upon another
commonality among the private schools: a student-run discipline com-
mittee.
Geo returned to East Los Angeles from Spain committed to launching
new opportunities for student leadership,. He found a new leader at the
school, Etta, who shared his vision and understanding of the transformative
power that authentic leadership experiences can have on students. In Spain,
Geo had seen the value that participation in the discipline process has on
students. He also believed that this kind of experience levels the playing
eld for high school students aspiring to spots in elite colleges. Etta had
seen student discipline committees at work at both the high school and
the college level, and she knew that with students in charge of discipline,
not only does truth get told but also disciplinary rulings are often harsh
yet responsibly measured.
The Building Process
Over the summer, we met with other interested students to discuss ways
to increase student leadership opportunities at the school. The discussions
ranged from topics of representational leadership to power relationships
and trust among school community members of the school. Entry points
for our work together were debated, the purposes of education and dem-
ocratic values were agreed upon, and we set forth on the journey to provide
students with new opportunities in democratic participation and leadership
at the school. It was agreed to start this rededication of the school to student
leadership by reconstituting the student council. While this might not
appear to be a radical start, it was an important reform because the student
council had operated sporadically throughout the schools history. A key
teacher at the school agreed to lead the charge, and the new Leadership
Council was formed.
Early on, we discovered that the group of students who stepped up to
this task wanted the Leadership Councils focus to be on social events at
the school. While this was important for building school spirit, we both
knew that the kind of leadership opportunities we hoped to provide had
to center on opportunities for authentic engagement and important deci-
sion-making processes at the school. While the teacher supervising the
Leadership Council would have liked to see the council tackle more sub-
stantive issues, she graciously oversaw fund-raisers for Paintball Friday
Nights and school dances, which allowed us to turn our attention to the
real vision we were formulating.
The work to form our program fully began as we outlined the processes
for the Discipline Committee (DC). We had informal conversations with
teacher leaders about procedures and outlined the initial ideas for the structure
of the DC, including how members would be selected, how hearings would
be held, and how the referral process would work. The rst written proposal
outlined the vision and was submitted for approval to the entire staff.
At an early faculty meeting, we gathered feedback from the teachers,
many of whom were largely unresponsive. We suspected that some of them
had not read the proposal. We took the few comments and suggestions
that the teachers did offer at the meeting and worked to rene the processes
and procedures in collaboration with supportive teachers and presented the
revised system to the full faculty. There was some grumbling from a few
teachers about putting too much work on them as advisors and about the
cumbersome process, so we rened the process again, and the teachers
nally agreed upon the process outlined below.
The Disciplinary Hearing Process: Initiating the Process
In school year 20092010, the Discipline Committee consists of three
seniors and two juniors, selected by the administration and leaders
of the Leadership Council. Junior students will serve for two years,
and students will be added as vacancies occur by the same process.
The Discipline Committee will meet bi-monthly and conduct hear-
ings when necessary. The steps for initiating a hearing process for
continual violations of school rules will be tracked through e-mail or
a paper trail and is as follows:
A. Advisor is informed of discipline issue.
B. Advisor works with student to resolve issue, including informing
parent.
C. Absent successful change of behavior, advisor informs the assistant
principal of need for a discipline hearing.
D. He initiates hearing process with committee.
E. Resolution announced to community.
In extreme cases, he can determine the need for a hearing process
after conferring with the advisor.
The Hearing Protocol:
A. Attending the hearing will be the committee, the assistant prin-
cipal, and the advisor.
B. A member of the committee will read a statement written by the
assistant principal about the issue.
C. The student in question will read a personal statement explaining
the situation from their perspective and recommend an action to
the committee.
D. The students advisor will read a statement of their own explaining
the situation from their perspective and sharing whatever infor-
mation they think is pertinent and will also recommend action
to the committee.
E. The committee will then ask questions.
F. The student and the advisor will leave the room, and the com-
mittee will make a determination. If a decision cannot be made
within 25 minutes, a second meeting will be held for the com-
mittee.
G. Once a decision is reached, the student and the advisor will return
to the room to hear the determination.
H. A formal letter from the committee will be given to the student
and parents and advisor regarding the action.
I. The decision of the committee will be reported to all the advisors
in a formal statement to be read to their advisees.
Condentiality: The Leadership Council will strictly prohibit any of
the committee members to discuss the details of any case outside the
context of a committee meeting; therefore it will be grounds for
dismissal from the committee if a member is proved to be suspected
of discussing a case outside the committee meeting.
The process highlighted two unique things about the way we envisioned
discipline at the school. The process gave the disciplined student and the
students advisor the opportunity to recommend a disciplinary action. We
believed that this forced students to understand that their actions were
within their control to change. In retrospect, this process that gave students
the opportunity to tell their side of the story may have upset some teachers,
many of whom believed that discipline problems were subject to adult
authority alone. It also may have accounted for some teachers increasing
hostility and, in some cases, indifference, toward the work of the committee.
Another key component of the process was that the whole community was
to be informed of the outcome of a hearing. Since the school was small,
most students knew when someone was in serious trouble. Sharing a verdict
with the whole community meant not only that typical rumors about what
happened were nipped in the bud, but it also enforced our belief that civic
virtues are built when individuals see that their actions have impacts on a
whole community.
Once we had the initial agreement from the teachers, we accepted ap-
plications from those students interested in joining the committee. A num-
ber of applications were received, and these were carefully reviewed with
the assistant principal. Four other students were selected to serve with Geo
on the committee, and the committee began its work. However, there were
many obstacles along the way.
Resistances Came from All Sides
At the rst parent meeting of the year, the concept of the Discipline
Committee was presented by Geo in Spanish. The mostly traditional Latino
community of parents questioned why students should do this: Wasnt
this the administrations job? The feeling that students should be told
what to do was a strongly held belief among most parents, and they failed
to see the value of this kind of student engagement. None had attended
schools where students played this kind of role, and they did not see the
need for it. While they were all for more discipline at the school, that
discipline, in their view, needed to be adult-driven. Some were even offended
that a student had made the presentation. We made promises to keep
parents informed of the progress of the committee through presentations
at the monthly parent meetings. Interestingly, the parents with the strongest
objections to the student committee all had children who applied to be on
the committee, and one parent now has a son who serves on the DC. As
it turns out, while she allowed her son to apply to the committee, she still
questions its value.
And there were continuing issues among the teachers. Even though we
had their initial agreement and some teachers had written thoughtful letters
of recommendation for students who were applying for membership on
the committee, many felt we were imposing something on them. In the
halls, one would hear murmurs of the inmates are running the asylum,
a philosophy that some teachers felt the school was subscribing to. Some
teachers questioned having students involved in decisions about issues of
discipline that affected their classrooms. The discipline process under dis-
cussion put new responsibilities on teachers in their advising role, a re-
sponsibility that some had little interest in taking on. In spite of these early
warning signs, the committee pressed on.
As the committee began its work, a lack of clear communication with
teachers meant rumors were ying around the school, causing confusion
and resentment among some teachers. The assistant principal would remind
the students to keep teachers in the loop. The following e-mail from him
to the committee encourages that practice:
Also, if not doing this [informing teachers of the outcome of a hearing]
is not standard procedure already, I think its important that after
meeting with students, that a rep from the committee contact the
teacher who referred the student and let them know what was dis-
cussed and ultimately resolved. The more you guys communicate
with the teachers, the better. They can see how proactive the com-
mittee is. Do this even with the Chronic Tardy kids. From what I
can see and hear, you guys are doing a terric job. Having you on
board is such a positive thing.
Yet continuing concerns among teachers about being out of the loop
meant that students on the committee had to backtrack to clean up these
communication problems. The following is froma PowerPoint presentation
presented by the DC members at a faculty meeting:
We are sorry for making mistakes.
We are sorry for any lack of communication.
We are sorry if our system has in any way lacked effectiveness.
We are sorry if we have offended anyone, or made any of you feel
as if you are not supported.
We are sorry, really.
Roots of Discipline Problems: Emerging Issues
The ofcial hearing process turned out to be only one part of the work of
the committee. Often the DC would meet with the assistant principal to
discuss students whom he felt could benet from a conversation with the
committee. So, in addition to the ofcial hearing process outlined above,
the committee often met at lunch with students to discuss issues of atten-
dance and other non-classroom-related, more minor offenses. In these meet-
ings, the student met only with the members of the DC unless committee
members requested administrative support in the meeting.
The formal hearing process, on the other hand, was often initiated by
teachers. The following e-mail from a teacher to the committee gives a
avor of the kinds of issues the committee had to confront and the thought-
fulness with which some teachers approached their referrals to the DC
(names have been changed):
I have a student Ive decided to refer to the committee, David Torres.
He is failing four subjects. His parents didnt show up for conference.
He is repeatedly disruptive in my class, my advisory and in Sallys
class, often in Toms class as well. Nothing seems to be working in
changing his behavior or poor academic performance. He seems to
be actively trying to bring other students down with him, which is
why I feel he needs to hear from fellow students that his behavior is
unacceptable in our community. Do you feel its too last minute to
have him before this next committee meeting? I havent discussed
this with him yet, was thinking about it all the way back from
Washington and have been distracted by other things since getting
back. Would it be better to leave this for the next committee meeting,
or he is prepared, etc.? But when would that be, since I dont want
this to fester too much longer.
A few months into their work with errant students, the committee
members began seeing patterns in discipline problems. They rightfully saw
that students with more serious problems also exhibited a lack of respect
for standard school rules. Geo had been reading Tipping Point (Gladwell
2002), and the broken window theory discussed in the book inspired
him to develop its application to school discipline problems. The theory
postulates that if broken windows in vacant buildings are not xed, it leads
to vandalism, squatters, and perhaps the eventual destruction of the build-
ing. Geo believed that if Giuliani could improve the quality of life in New
York City by xing the small stuff, that same principle could be applied
to the school. Geo convinced the DC members that if they could address
these smaller problems, the school culture would improve. The DC mem-
bers requested to attend a faculty meeting to try to get teachers on board
with their emerging views on discipline with another PowerPoint presen-
tation:
It has come to our attention, after various meetings and consultations
with referred students, that big discipline problems often come with
a foundation in minor discipline problems. Meaning that the kids
that bring pot, tag, ditch, lie, use excessive profanity, and display
obnoxious behavior in class are generally the culprits in disregarding
uniform policies, chewing gum, talking in class, and coming to late
to class.
In light of this, we have decided to introduce a re-emphasis of the
smaller school rules. We ask you to help us create a culture of rigidity
when it comes to discipline at the school. Your support and active
involvement in the reinforcing of school rules is crucial to building
the type of academic environment the committee would like to see
at the school.
What was not lost on some of the teachers was that these students were
calling them to task for not enforcing school rules in their classrooms. The
shift from viewing discipline problems as student problems to viewing them
as having a teacher dimension was something that was now on the table.
What may have been lost on some of the teachers was that the students
on the DC were calling for a kind of learning environment that the students
felt did not exist at the school. They sent the message that they believed
behavior problems at the school were social problems, not just problems
of individual students.
At the faculty meeting, the DC members tried to gently remind teachers
that school rule enforcement in their classrooms had to be the foundation
of the school discipline process. And while no one wanted to police teacher
classrooms to see if they were enforcing rules, the students themselves said
they were feeling cheated by a lax school environment and a lack of con-
sistent enforcement of rules by the teachers. This theme of viewing discipline
problems as having root causes in both student behavior and teacher be-
havior was to become a strong thread in the DC discussions and the
committees approach to their work. This no doubt also accounted for
some teachers increasing indifference toward the work of the committee.
New Approaches: When Kids Talk to Kids
Before implementation of the DC, when students got in trouble, the pre-
vious assistant principal would follow the discipline procedures in place.
These involved suspending kids, calling home, and keeping students after
school; in essence, offering up the warmpabulumof approaches to discipline
common in schools today. Talk of logical consequences, zero tolerance, and
choices peppered adult-driven conversations and were the letter of the law,
even though the schools charter specically states that the school would
not use a zero tolerance policy. When students took over the work of
enforcing discipline at the school, the conversation shifted from adult-to-
student to student-to-student.
New approaches to discipline began to emerge because of student-led
conversations about behavior at the school. While the students were often
harsher in their assessment of student behavior than the administrators
were, they were also more understanding of the causes of deant behavior.
They knew the struggles their fellow students were facing and wanted to
be able to address discipline issues in the context of the students complex,
and often confusing, lives. The committee discussed with the referred stu-
dents their explanations for tardiness, their bringing minute amounts of
pot to school, or their status on academic probation. These conversations
were frank, an attribute made possible in part because the students were
often without adult voices driving the lunchtime meetings. Geo points out
the mechanisms that operate when students speak directly to students:
We (the committee) were exempt, in many ways, from the political
correctness that typically limits an adults ability to directly address
sensitive issues with students. These issues include familial obligations,
learning disabilities, personal conicts with teachers, and what was
often the most dreaded topic: their futures. We were trusted with
issues concerning troubled homes, troubled classrooms, and troubled
histories and futures. No one was claiming that a similar level of trust
cannot be established with an adult teacher or administrator, but
students talking to students is an invaluable and unique resource. We
were often attempting to break the stereotypes and negative attitudes
our students harbor toward themselves.
Of the ve members of the committee, only one had a consistently
good academic track record; one was a former gang member, one
struggled with mediocre grades and health issues, another considered
himself a surrogate parent to four siblings, and another was an un-
documented immigrant from El Salvador who started speaking En-
glish at the age of 14. All, however, were college-bound students who
at one point or another shared a similar need for guidance as those
being referred to the committee.
Our school provided us with teachers who were constantly telling
us to go to college and hammering us on what needed to be done
to get there. Perhaps the only difference between committee members
and our peers is that we were more easily convinced that college was,
without question, the right thing to do. We were able to rid ourselves
of our own personal stereotypes with more ease, and our teachers
were a big part of that process by exposing us to new ideas and
providing the guidance many of us lacked at home.
That isnt to say that our families were not supportive. The mem-
bers of the committee had families that strongly supported the pursuit
of a higher education, but for the most part, they were ignorant of
the process of how to get there. Many of our families were not well
educated, and almost all were immigrants who grew up in foreign
systems with foreign expectations. Having them on our side, though,
was what mattered.
The at-risk students (for lack of a better term) who came before
the DC often had families who were not only ignorant of college
and its importance but also indifferent to it and in some cases ve-
hemently against it for traditional or religious reasons. Others had a
tough time in school and were victims of learning disabilities of which
they were not aware. This made it much harder for them to create
bonds with teachers because the conversation often shifted from
What are you doing to go to college? to Why arent you doing
anything at all? Unfortunately, many of the troubled kids also made
very poor choices in terms of friendships and were often involved in
illegal or vandalistic pastimes.
Whenever a student brought up an excuse as to why a homework
assignment was not turned in, or why that student did not arrive on
time, or why it was difcult to concentrate on school, a committee
member would often, to be blunt, call the student on their bullshit.
We soon saw our work as including problem solving. We instituted
a tutoring program for those with below-average grade-point averages.
Since we had found ways to get to school on time, even if it meant
waking up at 5:40 in the morning to catch two buses or three trains
or learned to ask to carpool with someone, we helped students research
alternative routes to school. We found ways to ignore the turbulent
situations often found in our homes and neighborhoods, so we en-
couraged students to visit the school counselor, to talk with their
advisors, and to seek help.
In our experience, we often found that adults, no matter their
intentions, were often afraid or wary of crossing certain boundaries
with students for fear of seeming insensitive or not understanding.
As students, we had no trouble navigating those boundaries because
of our personal experience dealing with the exact situations our peers
face. We can frankly and genuinely pose the question: We did it, why
cant you? That is a question with tremendous power to spark revo-
lutions and to change perspectives and lives.
Discipline Goes Public
The foundational idea that discipline issues were public issues drove DC
decisions into the community in a number of innovative and powerful
ways. Reprimanded students often addressed their peers at assemblies, and
some wrote apologies in the school newspaper or to a class that they had
disrupted. Others had their parents shadow them for a day at school.
Discipline decisions were sometimes made public through announcements
to advisories. This more public approach to discipline helped everyone see
that the real impact of discipline issues is on the whole school and not just
a single student. While these public pronouncements did not cover the
details of the discipline issue, they did provide the school community with
closure and began to build a culture of civic responsibility at the school.
One particularly memorable case involved that most public of all places:
MySpace. Two students were caught smelling of pot by their English
teacher. A bag search by the assistant principal turned up a small bag
containing a pot pipe but no pot. The student whose bag contained the
paraphernalia was a student who had never been in trouble before and who
claimed her friend just asked her to carry something. The friend, the child
of an alleged long-standing LA gang family, argued vehemently that the
paraphernalia was not hers. She maintained that she did not use drugs and
in fact was not carrying anything. Her father was adamant that his
daughter did not use drugs and was not to be punished, since she had
done nothing wrong. Threats of lawsuits and tears went on for a couple
of days as the DC struggled along with the administration to untangle the
case.
During one meeting, a member of the DCwent to the students MySpace
pages and found that the girl who claimed she didnt do drugs had written
extensively about her drug use. The student was clearly lying to the com-
mittee. This discovery helped the committee resolve the issue, showed the
father that indeed his daughter was involved with drugs, and showed us
that when students are involved, schools have new tools to use. Had the
administration tried to resolve this case, the discovery on the MySpace page
might never been made.
New Principal/New Year
As we write this, a new year begins at the school. What was to have been
a two-year assignment for Etta was cut short. The impact of massive state
budget cuts on her university meant that she was called back after only
a year at the school. At the charter school, the state budget crises meant
that the year was punctuated by a 2 percent across-the-board salary cut
and cuts to the after-school athletic program. Necessary curricular changes
meant a long-standing teacher was let go, and administrative salary cuts
drove another member of the staff out. A new principal was hired at the
last minute, continuing the revolving door leadership model at the school.
The new principal, along with the assistant principal, have renamed the
Discipline Committee the Student Civic Committee, and they have cen-
tralized its work through the principal. The committee members will play
mentoring, tutoring, and mediation roles for the school. According to the
administration, these changes were made in part to give students more
opportunity to focus on their schoolwork.
We are happy to see that the new principal has enough interest in student
leadership to work to improve the DC. We worry, however, that in a more
centralized system, the full trust of adults for students to act autonomously,
which in our minds was a key to the educational value of the committee,
may become a lost opportunity for the students. Sadly, we feel that some
of the teachers did not see the educational value of the work of the DC
nor did they use its work as a springboard for lessons in the classroom.
On the face of this, it is easy to see why the new principal thought of the
committee as a distraction from schoolwork. Yet, the DCs founding mem-
bers got the equivalent of a Policy 101 class, learning to navigate the
competing interests of various stakeholders, aligning policy with school
culture, law, and teaching practices; honoring cultural differences; and learn-
ing to speak truth to power (Wildavsky 1987).
Lessons Learned
We found that leadership breeds leadership. We saw student initiatives
ourish during the year. For example, a successful student store was designed
and implemented by two enterprising juniors. These girls raised money to
start the store, kept it stocked, and kept the books. They hired student
workers and trained them. And while there was adult concern about what
the store was selling and when, the students proceeded with basically no
assistance from the administration. Student environmental projects planted
gardens, and the student radio station grewin its importance and popularity.
The school had a small radio station that played music occasionally, but
during the year, students stepped up to use the radio station to start and
end the school day. Rather than being made over loudspeakers, daily an-
nouncements came over the airwaves. Yet in the case of the radio station,
there was again adult concern about the fact that the students were in the
studio unsupervised. Had the advisor been there moment by moment,
we doubt the students involved would have taken the kind of ownership
of the project that they did.
We found that if teachers dont laud students for their student-led ini-
tiatives, students dont fully understand their value. A frustrating aspect of
the experience was that even the students had to be convinced of the
importance of their work. Rather than publicly acknowledging the students
for their leadership skills, teachers complained when they missed class, and
some advisors were grumpy because DC students missed daily advisory
meetings. Students had to navigate this resistance by keeping their advisors
and teachers up to date on daily activities of the committee and other
student projects. Learning to communicate on this level with teachers and
advisors was new for many students, and the need to do it also came as a
surprise. One student on the committee, Erick Martinez, sent the following
e-mail message about his experiences with teachers:
At the beginning the resistance and hostility of the teachers directed
toward the Discipline Committee was a complete asco. From the
origin to close to the end, teachers felt as if their powers of discipline
were being stripped and handed to students who were not profes-
sionals and their insecurity made the acceptance of the Disciplinary
Committee difcult. In retrospective, the simple idea of students in
charge of discipline was not ordinary, but we dealt with it by showing
leadership potential. We managed the resistance from the teachers
through communication.
We also found that there was little room for celebration of these kinds
of student accomplishments. While we celebrated student AP and SAT test
scores and college acceptances, little attention was given to the tremendous
projects students had successfully undertaken. Perhaps most signicantly,
the work led by student initiative never entered life in the classrooms. While
it may have happened, we know of no instance when teachers called upon
the DC students to discuss the principles upon which decisions were made
or the role of the committee as an example of democratic leadership. The
economics of the student store were never discussed in the economics classes,
and discussions of aesthetic taste in regards of the music on the radio were
absent from classroom discussions.
Conclusion
Whether the other students who rst served on the DCwill ever understand
the importance of and unusual role the committee played at the school
remains a mystery. By initiating and assuming full responsibility for the
work of the committee, students presented a new vision for what the school
can and should be.
As we write this, Geo is off to Dartmouth and Etta is back at her
university. As we were writing, we have had to confront some aspects of
the teacher community at the school that neither one of us wanted to face.
We suspect many teachers felt the work of the DC was an annoyance and
inappropriate. At the beginning of the year, some students on the DC
attended faculty meetings but were soon asked, by a number of teachers,
not to attend meetings in the future. The indifference of some teachers
toward the work of the committee may have come from their lack of belief
in its importance and their traditional views of the role of students in
schools. Some teachers saw the process the committee used as extra work.
And certainly the DC was seen by a number of teachers as overstepping
the boundaries of what students should be involved with. One teacher
would often tell members of the DC who were in her classes that she did
not approve of the committee and its work.
We disagree, however, about the causes of this indifference and the
sometimes open hostility on the part of some teachers. For Geo, the school
was his second home and reecting on the year and its challenges, especially
in terms of some of the teachers indifference to the hard work of the
committee, has been painful to acknowledge. Seeing teachers whom he
respected turn their back to the committees work was hard to face. For
him, the teachers resistance to students being in faculty meetings was a
sign of a basic lack of trust. Teachers level of discomfort when meeting
with students in the presence of the DC was also a sign of this lack of
trust. He vividly remembers one teacher telling him of her level of dis-
comfort in these meetings. Geo feels the teacher wanted someone to wag
their nger at the students, while the committee wanted to understand
the situation from the students perspective as well as the teachers and to
work to solve the problem.
For Etta, a life-long teacher and teacher educator, the experience highlights
the negative impact that the charter movement and NCLB have had on
teachers. Many of the long-standing teachers at the school felt beaten up
and seemed exhausted by outside pressures to increase student performance
levels. Waves of internal chaos caused by technology problems, facilities crises
(which contributed to nancial problems), and challenges with the founder,
who was not an educator, added to the frustration levels of some teachers.
These kinds of challenges may be more typical of charter schools than their
supporters are willing to admit. Etta has always been a supporter of charter
schools, believing that they offered an opening for possibility and innovation
in education and could provide new models for public schools. Yet, NCLB
mandates have forced charter schools into more narrow and conventional
schooling patterns, leaving little time for the kind of re-visioning of schools
that was the promise of the charter movement.
From the perspective of a teacher educator, the lack of strong foundations
courses in most teacher education programs has meant that new teachers
have not had to confront the idea that schools must foster a desire among
the young for democracy and community (Dewey 1916). As a result, these
teachers fall back all too easily on their own apprenticeship of observation
(Lortie 1975) in traditional, teacher-centered classrooms. Etta believes that
this lack of course work in educational foundations may well have accounted
for the indifference and hostility that many teachers felt toward the students
attempting to share power at the school. They simply had never seen dem-
ocratic forms in schools, nor had they debated the theoretical foundations
or merits of conceiving of a school as an embryonic community.
From the perspective of an educational leader at the school, Etta believes
that she should have played a more forceful role in bringing the teachers
and parents on board. Etta felt that it was important for the students to
provide leadership across the board on the initiative, including cleaning up
the messes that were made along the way. In retrospect, if the leadership
of the school had led discussions with faculty and parents, providing op-
portunities for them to get an understanding of why we were doing what
we were doing, the DC might still be operating today.
We do both agree, however, that had we had another year to develop a
culture of democracy and shared leadership at the school, the teachers would
have come to value this increased role for students. Although it was short-
lived, we built and operated a new system for discipline at the school that
trusted students to lead. We approached discipline problems not as psycho-
logical shortcomings of individual students but rather as sociological prob-
lems, with roots in school, community, and society (Counts [1932] 1978).
And we tried to build a system whereby students could see that their actions
had an impact on the life of the school community. This more public
approach to handling discipline problems was not intended to be a public
shaming, but rather an introduction into the enactment of civic virtues that
democracy demands. We hope that the story of our efforts encourages others
to nd those openings where students can begin to become members of a
more democratic community. Our story also provides a fair warning of the
challenges along the way. Dewey taught us that a central responsibility of
schools in democratic societies was to create an appetite among the young
for democracy. In this age of high-stakes testing and narrowed visions of the
purposes of schools, we wonder what will be the long-term social costs of
schools turning their backs on this central mission.
References
Counts, George. (1932) 1978. Dare the School Build a New Social Order?
Republication of 1st ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2002. The Tipping Point. Boston: Back Bay Books.
Lortie, Dan C. 1975. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Mitra, Dana. 2007. Student Voice in School Reform: From Listening to
Leadership. In International Handbook of Student Experience in Ele-
mentary and Secondary School, ed. Dennis Thiessen and Alison Cook-
Sather. The Netherlands: Springer.
Wildavsky, Aaron. 1987. Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of
Policy Analysis. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.

Trusting Students To Lead Promise and Pitfalls

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Trusting Students To Lead Promise and Pitfalls

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Trusting Students to Lead: Promise and Pitfalls

Author(s): Geovanni Cuevas and Etta Kralovec

You might also like