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Young people say it best. Forget the politics; let’s talk experience. Forget feelings; tell it like it is. The title is a quote from a college student panelist at a past America’s Promise Grad Nation Summit.
Since hearing this, my mind has gone a hundred different directions thinking about why and how and where this plays out for a young man like this. He had been practically defaulted by his community into gang membership at age 12 and his unnamable, burning anger as a child for his life circumstances left him restless, fearful, combative, and often in school suspension (and yet making straight A’s). Who was fake? What was fake? What does fake even mean to a student in these circumstances? Why was a 12 year old worried about his own survival? At the end of the day, maybe the specific answers don’t matter that much. In fact, determining the specific answers for this young man would probably only do just that – give the answers specific to him. But, here’s what we need to acknowledge: Too many adults in his school and community were “fakes”. And, this means there are likely hundreds of thousands of other youth out there who feel the same way, even if for varying reasons. But expounding on the non-virtues that create a fake is a pretty useless effort. So, alternatively, how can we be real? After all, it’s a matter of survival! To be real, we have to be willing to be abstract. We have to own and work toward something we cannot calculate or put in a chart or checklist somewhere and say: “hey, we did it!” And yet, we all know “real” when we experience it. Being real isn’t an action, or even something you show. Realness is a mutual feeling, a oneness between people. It is the medium of a genuine relationship. It requires knowledge of the other and values his unique experiences. It shares power. It suspends judgment for understanding. It means getting dirty. Sharing pain. Sharing success. Being uncomfortable. It is presence. It is trust. It is humility. Being real means seeing and believing and living such that my destiny and your destiny are inextricably linked. In the words of Dr. King: “I cannot be what I ought to be until your are what you ought to be, and you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Now, that’s real! And, the more we talk about young people as test scores, budget items, graduation statistics, or care for them only based on their buying power, we move from mutual destiny to otherness and individual outcome. We disentangle ourselves and relinquish that which makes us “us” – and something more than merely you and I. We make ourselves and others finite variables in an educational and economic discourse that we pretend we have little control over, and yet create and recreate every day. Young people know this and feel this, and it feels fake. Thankfully, they will call it what it is! Now, we should listen and work with them to get real. “In a real sense all life is inter-related…We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…this is the way that the world was made…I didn’t make it that way, but this is the inter-related structure of reality.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Young people say it best. Forget the politics; let’s talk experience. Forget feelings; tell it like it is. The title is a quote from a college student panelist at the recent America’s Promise Grad Nation Summit.
Since hearing this, my mind has gone a hundred different directions thinking about why and how and where this plays out for a young man like this. He had been practically defaulted by his community into gang membership at age 12 and his unnamable, burning anger as a child for his life circumstances left him restless, fearful, combative, and often in school suspension (and yet making straight A’s). Who was fake? What was fake? What does fake even mean to a student in these circumstances? Why was a 12 year old worried about his own survival? At the end of the day, maybe the specific answers don’t matter that much. In fact, determining the specific answers for this young man would probably only do just that – give the answers specific to him. But, here’s what we need to acknowledge: Too many adults in his school and community were “fakes”. And, this means there are likely hundreds of thousands of other youth out there who feel the same way, even if for varying reasons. But expounding on the non-virtues that create a fake is a pretty useless effort. So, alternatively, how can we be real? After all, it’s a matter of survival! To be real, we have to be willing to be abstract. We have to own and work toward something we cannot calculate or put in a chart or checklist somewhere and say: “hey, we did it!” And yet, we all know “real” when we experience it. Being real isn’t an action, or even something you show. Realness is a mutual feeling, a oneness between people. It is the medium of a genuine relationship. It requires knowledge of the other and values his unique experiences. It shares power. It suspends judgment for understanding. It means getting dirty. Sharing pain. Sharing success. Being uncomfortable. It is presence. It is trust. It is humility. Being real means seeing and believing and living such that my destiny and your destiny are inextricably linked. In the words of Dr. King: “I cannot be what I ought to be until your are what you ought to be, and you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Now, that’s real! And, the more we talk about young people as test scores, budget items, graduation statistics, or care for them only based on their buying power, we move from mutual destiny to otherness and individual outcome. We disentangle ourselves and relinquish that which makes us “us” – and something more than merely you and I. We make ourselves and others finite variables in an educational and economic discourse that we pretend we have little control over, and yet create and recreate every day. Young people know this and feel this, and it feels fake. Thankfully, they will call it what it is! Now, we should listen and work with them to get real. “In a real sense all life is inter-related…We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…this is the way that the world was made…I didn’t make it that way, but this is the inter-related structure of reality.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If I had to guess, school played a central organizing role in probably 90% of my world when I was a teen. A few family things that weren’t around school, summer baseball (non-school), and maybe a couple of other small things rounded out the other 10%.
School was:
These things made school “sticky”, a place I wanted to be for a variety of reasons even when academics weren’t always one of them. Because of this, there was an opportunity cost for missing school (including, by the way, peace at home if I made poor choices). But, the student cost calculus has flipped today. For this generation of students, 90% of their world is on, or directly accessible through, their phone or tablet or laptop, all of which go wherever they go. So, when they check their devices at the school door, when they can’t access their social networks, when they can’t just immediately Google anything they want to know, they experience a loss. In other words, this generation of students experiences an unprecedented opportunity cost of going to school. (All I left behind was a television and a Nintendo. And, candidly, Days of Our Lives, Super Mario Brothers, and Techmo Bowl weren’t too much to sacrifice!) While a wholesale sellout to technology is not the answer for schools, it is, in fact, our competition for student bandwidth. And, while blended learning and BYOD (bring your own device) strategies are key to improving the educational delivery system, they do not focus on the development of the whole student or the school as community. As we push for ed reform and build new technologies to support it, we must remember that schools, when most successful, are more than just educational delivery systems. They must offer a broader value proposition for students, today more than ever. If we are going to truly transform education, we must reduce the opportunity cost of going to school. If we want students to participate, we need to provide opportunities for them to participate.
If we want student voice, we need to create avenues to hear and capture it meaningfully. If we want students to be leaders, we need to be willing to step back and let them lead. Every day, adults use terms like voice, leadership, and engagement, and we design opportunities and programs based on them – but typically based on an indecipherable mash-up of what are unique and distinct concepts. Several years back, seeking clarity, I sat down in an attempt to organize and articulate some of these terms more fully. I ended up writing the Continuum of Youth Involvement. I wanted to help adults get on the same page about what we really want, what we are really willing to give up, and what we can gain when it comes to the meaningful involvement of our students/youth. After all, if we don’t know what we want from the start then we will continue to build programs and opportunities that don’t live up to our ill-defined aspirations (or perhaps surpass them in ways we are unprepared to see). If we don’t know what we are willing to give up as adults (power) then we will inevitably over-promise and under-deliver for the student in regard to their power. If we try to collaborate with youth and with other partners without clarifying our expectations, we will end up with little to show for our efforts. For example, I have seen countless schools, community groups, and citywide youth collaboratives who all said they were interested in “student voice”. So, they work for days or weeks or even months together around this idea only to find out that one person, or an entire group, just meant that they wanted to survey youth, another wanted focus groups and a youth on the “youth voice” committee, and yet another wanted students to have an ongoing and unfettered say on important issues in the school and community. After all that time and work, they realized they were never even close to being on the same page. Now what? Days, weeks, and months of work go down the tubes. Adults are frustrated. Youth are confused. Energy and resources are wasted. The efforts of the group often get documented in a wholly un-actionable set of ideas, plans, and programs and most everyone returns to business as usual. Worse yet, adults are less likely to invest in youth voice again (even through a better process) and students are less likely to trust adults when they hear that term. So, let’s commit to saying what we really want and are prepared to work for first. Let’s be honest about where we are and where we want to be along the Continuum of Youth Involvement. If we don’t have many students participating, let’s start there and not talk about engagement yet. If we aren’t sure how to develop meaningful leadership opportunities, let’s start by listening to students and get their “voice” on what is important to them. We can co-create leadership from there. If engagement feels too abstract, let’s work with students to facilitate real leadership, which done well, will spur deeper engagement. Before we can do what we say, we need to know what we are saying. The boom in educational technology is revolutionizing conversations about what school is and what it could be, where it can be and when, and how it delivers education to students.
The last phrase makes me cringe even as I write it. While my search has certainly not been exhaustive, when I look around the ed tech landscape I see more innovation that supports the institutional side (the supply side) of education and less on the the student side (the demand side). The former is still about educational delivery; the latter about student learning, development, and engagement. While these are not mutually exclusive, they are distinct in their premise about how education happens. Public education has not arrived at its current state simply for lack of technology. It has arrived at it for myriad reasons that I don’t have the time or the inclination to explore here. But, the most important reason for me is that schools have failed to adopt new strategies for engaging students as active participants and co-creators of their own education and learning. Youth-centric brands, media, gaming, and seemingly everyone else constantly solicit youth input, offer options and customization, and track youth engagement to inform and strengthen their product offerings. Schools are literally the only place students lack this sort of customization, choice, and power. Mirroring and reinforcing this reality, one of the largest ed tech companies in this country proudly lists its stakeholders on its website. Students aren’t among them. Students are technology consumers, and savvy consumers at that. If technology is going to help change the way schools do business and the way students engage in their own learning and development, it cannot simply mirror the demands and “needs” of the educational (delivery) system. To create meaningful change, ed tech innovators need to work with school systems and students to develop products that put students at the center as active consumers and co-creators, rather than mere recipients, of education. This may seem odd as so many of our high schools struggle with students who read many grade levels behind, whose math skills are elementary, and whose writing is more understandable in a texting format than in a research paper. Logically and for years, we have invested in academic supports and remediation strategies early in high school to get students “up to speed”. But for many students, these interventions, while perhaps “catching them up” academically, do not generate the ongoing academic discipline that continues them on a trajectory of sustained academic growth and improvement. In other words, students may catch up, but too many just stay even or fall slowly (or quickly) behind again.
We are intervening with solutions that don’t address the root cause of the problem. As students fall behind and yet still get promoted along from grade to grade, yes, their academic pathway gets broken and confused. But, the more significant reality is that their developmental process gets corrupted. As students fall behind, many are developing a set of skills and a view of education and of their own development that is far more catastrophic than whether or not they can do Algebra at a given time. The fact is that youth development is happening, even if it is youth development that does not support academic or other positive outcomes. It is happening in every minute of every day in every school. And, this youth development process is the medium upon which academics emerge and are carried along (or not). While academic failure is what we assess and where we have intervened, when a student has fallen behind, it is often this developmental medium that has become fundamentally tainted. Make no mistake, students are developing a sense of work ethic when they figure out they can pass without actually doing the work. They are developing important social skills when they learn crafty avoidance rather than how to ask questions when they struggle. They are developing their sense of identity when we demonstrate we don’t value them enough to ask and persist in helping them develop a positive vision of the future and a pathway to get there. They are establishing their understanding of trust when they fall behind and the people and institutions that have failed them blame them. And so, they bring this identity, these skills, this perverted sense of vision and trust into school with them as part of who they are. If we want to invest in a meaningful way in catching these students up (academically and developmentally) and putting them on a sustainable path of improvement, we have to intervene by helping them unlearn much of what they know. We cannot wait for investments in early education to hopefully “trickle up” and manifest in high school improvement. We also cannot continue to try to patch complex adolescent developmental challenges with only academic interventions. If our most struggling high school students are going to learn how to learn, they may first need to unlearn. A few years back when working with Tennessee’s GEAR UP coordinators to develop a youth summit for their students, my colleagues and I heard a consistent refrain repeated in a number of different ways, but summarized as: “Our kids come home from college before they ever even have a chance to succeed or fail academically!”
When asked to explain further, the coordinators talked about things like fear, lack of sense of belonging, low self expectations (their kids expect not to succeed, so when college becomes challenging it just proves they are right), cultural and social barriers as students experience a more diverse community than they have ever lived in, homesickness, other pressures from home, time management, study skills, financial responsibility, and so forth and so on. For all of these reasons, they felt their students were not quite “ready” to succeed in college. So, why is it that the pervasive discussions and definitions of college readiness focus almost exclusively on academics, when those working most closely with students see a much more complicated and more developmental picture? Is it because academics are so much easier to measure? Is it because this is what we have narrowed K12 education down to, a single variable? Is it because we do not have the right people in the room to develop a good definition? I suspect it is some of all of these along with many more reasons that each of you could add to the mix. With all of the emphasis on higher education right now, we really need to get “readiness” right. At a minimum, every student needs to have a vision of where he wants to go in life. He needs the dispositions to help him focus on that vision, to believe in it even when times are hard, and to rally others to support his vision. And, ultimately, yes, he needs the academic, interpersonal, and leadership skills to make it a reality. The skills, however, work in service to the vision and dispositions; they don’t lead them. So, let’s start a conversation about how K12 and higher education help students develop a vision, not of what job they want, but what they want their lives to look like when they are 40. Let’s make sure that those working most closely with young people, as well as the young people themselves, inform our collective strategies to support positive dispositions and generate resiliency. Let’s make sure our academics, our social-emotional development, and our leadership development are identifiable within every student’s vision of themselves, and not just the vision of the schools, communities, or families from which they come. This is a different conversation, a broader vision, and includes different voices in defining “readiness.” But, if we are going to get “readiness” right, we must be ready to have the right conversations. For roughly four years now, we have heard the far ranging reports about the housing foreclosure crisis amid the other challenges in the economy. The country has seen millions of families lose their houses and destroy their personal credit. Many of these families have lost the one significant asset they had as they worked to build their American dream. The impact of the foreclosure crisis has been deep and devastating and continues to resonate in many communities.
There is another foreclosure crisis, however, that is even more critical to our economy and to the health of our communities; and we still have not even talked about it. This foreclosure crisis has been wreaking havoc over generations, not just since 2008. It is an insidious foreclosure emanating from within the individual rather than imposed by forces from without. And, unlike housing, this foreclosure crisis shows no signs of moving in the right direction. This crisis is the foreclosure by our youth on their own futures. I was reading recently about “identity status theory” which proposes four statuses that help describe the degree to which a young person has committed to an element of his identity. While I don’t want to go into much detail in an area where I am less than a novice, I was compelled by one status presented in this theory: foreclosure. This is the state in which a young person has given up on an element of his identity without fully exploring it or truly understanding it. For instance, a young person has given up on becoming a college graduate even before he knows what it truly means or why it might be, or become, part of his self concept.* With this theory in mind, it became clear that millions of students around the country, particularly low-income students and students of color, have foreclosed on their own futures (we often misrepresent it as lack of motivation). Their social, familial, and educational networks have instilled that certain jobs are not for people like them; that certain educational paths are not for people from their community; that certain dreams are not for families like theirs. And, these messages have been internalized and are guiding identity development. As a result, our young people’s time (hope) horizon becomes shorter; the potential importance and impact of good education decisions neutralized; and their personal motivation becomes more reflective of external influences and limitations than internal drivers and individual aspirations. Given the poverty and isolation of many of our urban and rural schools, this state of identity foreclosure defines the landscape of a large part of our public education system – particularly those areas most targeted for reform. As a result, attempts at reform that fail to address this fundamental identity development issue will continue to make only peripheral improvements. Investing in education reform efforts that do not account for such basic youth development is sort of like investing in lawn care to stem the housing foreclosure crisis. And yet, youth development is rarely mentioned in education discussions. We talk discipline instead of decision-making. We talk content and curriculum instead of self-concept and culture. We talk about teaching without paying much attention to how students learn. When we invest in teacher training, are we doing so with a deep understanding of the physical, social, and psychological realities of our students? Are we sharing the latest research on the teen brain and developing education strategies accordingly? Or, are we training teachers to be facilitators of the education system? When we invest in new curricula, are we doing so with new strategies that acknowledge students can Google anything they want to know? That they have access to content on their phones that my generation did not have access to at all? Or, are we merely plugging updated content into old and ineffective distribution models? When we invest in new education technologies, are we developing and purchasing products that students actually want to use? That contribute to their identity development, motivation, and engagement in school? Or, are we investing in products that make sense for the institution and facilitate the system, but that students only use begrudgingly? Are our technologies developed with student interests or with adult interests in mind? As so many of us seek to find a way forward in building strong public education, postsecondary opportunities, and a strong economy, we can no longer afford to ignore the fundamentals. If we are going to truly reform public education, we can no longer ignore youth development in schools. Left unaddressed, identity foreclosure will inevitably undermine any and all of our education reform efforts. A must read: Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success by Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne M. Bouffard Over the years, I have done a lot of work with educators and youth workers across the country and have often found myself trying to help them identify what I call “the intention-to-practice gap”, the space between what we believe and we value in our work and our actual delivery of our work. At the practical level, this frequently plays out with frustrated adults who genuinely want to empower young people but may not have effective skills around sharing power, facilitating open/honest dialogue, or creating democratic environments in which youth feel some shared ownership. These are complex concepts and require ever-evolving skills. I have always seen my job as merely helping to spur reflection on and acknowledgement of the gap and offer a few tools to try to close it. With new awareness and a few tools, we can turn our frustration into a positive generative force.
Several years ago, with no intention of facilitating this type of workshop, my colleagues and I accidentally stumbled upon perhaps a deeper analysis than the intention-to-practice gap suggests; and it is one that I continue to mull years later. That’s what I am doing here, finally mulling in writing, and asking you to mull with me. Two colleagues and I asked a group of about 25 educators and youth workers about their work as part of a casual conversation before a workshop. As might be expected, they all talked sincerely about how much the loved their students and how working with youth was their “passion”, their “life” and their “life’s mission”. This is what we almost always hear; no one is in education or youth work because they dislike youth, right? So, when we started the session formally, we facilitated an opening brainstorm by asking the group to give us, in rapid fire format, words or ideas that come to mind when we say “youth culture”. We spent the next 15 minutes literally filling a 4 x 6 foot white board with their thoughts, writing furiously. When the ideas slowed, we all took a moment to peruse the now completely filled white board. My colleagues and I had used this exercise simply to break the ice, but it quickly became the content of the workshop. Almost every (probably 90%) idea, comment, or word captured on the board had a negative connotation (if it was not outright negative). The 100+ comments could be captured by the following themes: Derogatory slants on media, music, fashion, and teen relationships. Drinking, smoking, sex. Rebellion. Laziness. Instant gratification. Lack of focus. Entitlement. Selfishness. Superficiality. No clue about the “real” world…and so forth and so on. If you didn’t know better, it would be obvious that whoever brainstormed these ideas about youth culture, really, really disliked youth. But, these were educators and youth workers, people who have dedicated their lives to young people, who genuinely love them! It was quite an unexpected moment for all of us and generated a pretty powerful group reflection. To see if this experience was an anomaly, my colleague repeated the process several months later in a workshop with a different group of about the same size and again made up of educators, advocates, and youth workers. Same results. Almost identical. Somehow in the prompt of “youth culture”, we had accidentally objectified the idea of young people in such a way that the participants no longer envisioned “their” young people when they responded. Perhaps we moved them from what they “feel” about their youth to what they “think” about youth more generally. The implication, then, would be that somehow “their” young people are not a part of youth culture, which, of course, the participants all acknowledged was not the case. So, how can we disparage youth culture to this extent and still be effective mentors, supporters, and advocates for and with youth? This experience stands as one of the most profound in my years of facilitation and suggests the need for adults to check our language, our intentions, and our practices to see if they are all really aligned. If we are failing in connecting with our young people, we can guess that they may not be. It’s not just a matter of “practicing what we preach”. It’s more complicated. It’s practicing what we believe and believing what we practice. It’s about consistency and honesty with ourselves and our young people. We all may need to step back and objectify our own practices, remove how we feel about our work, and think clearly about what we are really doing, how we are doing it, and why. We may well be feeling one way, thinking another, and acting somewhere in between. Part of the confusion and pressure of being a middle and high school student is not just that relatively new feeling of “otherness” (i.e. being different) but that this feeling charges our emotional and cognitive development in ways that can last a lifetime. These are truly formative years. Starting in our teens and carrying through the rest of our lives, we develop habits in response to our “otherness” in which we: 1. conform and adapt so that we are included (eliminate otherness), 2. isolate and look for proxies for positive social relationships (neutralize otherness), or 3. develop the confidence to be who we are regardless of what others think (celebrate otherness).
The reality is that during the teenage years we move in and out of all of these responses quite frequently and without notice. This is kind of what defines the teenage years. It’s why adults think teens are weird! It is also what makes the teenage years such a critical time for inclusion and genuine engagement. But, for many students with physical and intellectual disabilities, the option of “conforming” feels impossible in a traditional sense. They are so strongly considered “other” by peers and adults that the opportunity to just become one of the group is out of their hands. Similarly, they are often structurally isolated – both socially and physically – living parallel lives to their same-aged peers in their own wing of the school, with their own teachers, classrooms, and school and community activities. And, as long as this is the case, as long as they are the “others”, inclusion and full engagement are impossibilities for everyone. The fact is that every teen, every one of us actually, is “other”. We are all different and we all need to have a say in our own development and the paths we choose. When otherness is allowed the space to be celebrated, inclusion, rather than isolation, becomes the norm. When everyone is understood as other then otherness as we know it no longer exists. And, when we engage others, we all engage our best selves. |
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