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Students Break The Silence

MEET OUR SPONSORS AND COLLABORATORS

When we say we want police-free schools, we are demanding not only that police infrastructure, culture, and practice be removed from schools, but also that this system is replaced by youth, parent, and educator led solutions that center liberation and restorative justice.

Police-Free Schools Means: Funding for Schools to Build Restorative, Supportive, and Safe Schools.

Cut the $40 million in the capital budget that is proposed for policing and surveillance infrastructure and NYPD collaboration, and reinvest that money instead in infrastructure that will make schools more accessible, safe, and welcoming such as air conditioning, new elevators, and repairs for crumbling buildings.
Abolish the NYPD's School Policing Division and reinvest that $450 million into creating restorative schools, which have social and emotional supports that build community and keep young people safe.

Police-Free Schools DOES NOT Mean: Shifting the NYPD's School Policing Division to the Department of Education.

We oppose the suggestions put forth by some city council members and the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) to merely transfer the School Policing Division (aka the "School Safety Division") from the NYPD to the DOE. The Department of Education should not be in the business of policing students and simply taking over from the NYPD. We demand the removal of police from schools and an end to policing culture. We demand that the city give schools resources to create jobs for people to serve their school communities in supportive and restorative ways. School policing does not make schools safe; well-resourced, supported school communities make schools safe.

Come Join Us

We meet once a month, between 5 and 6:30 on zoom

Meeting ID: 938 7476 1773

Passcode: 687272

BE IN THE KNOW

Yet every time our skin goes under,
it's as if the reeds remember they were once chains,
and the water, restless, wishes it could spew all of the slaves and ships
onto shore,
whole as they had boarded, sailed and sunk.
Their tears are what have turned the ocean salty,
this is why our irises burn every time we go under.

Every
December 16th,
December 24th and
December 31st
and January 1st,
our skin re-traumatises the sea.

They mock us
for not being able to throw ourselves into something that was instrumental
in trying to execute our extinction.
For you, the ocean is for surfboards, boats and tans
and all the cool stuff you do under there in your bathing suits and goggles.
But we,
we have come to be baptised here.
We have come to stir the other world here.
We have come to cleanse ourselves here.
We have come to connect our living to the dead here.
Our respect for water is what you have termed fear.
The audacity to trade and murder us over water
then mock us for being scared of it.
The audacity to arrive by water and invade us.
If this land was really yours,
Then resurrect the bones of the colonisers and use them as a compass.
-- from "Water" by Koleka Putuma

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Students Break The Silence MEET OUR SPONSORS AND COLLABORATORS When we say we want police-free schools, we are demanding not only that police infrastructure, culture, and practice be removed from schools, but also that this system is replaced by youth, parent, and educator led solutions that center liberation and restorative justice.

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Ethnic Studies in CA

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We received this email today from SFSU student leaders:

To the Student Body, Faculty and Staff of San Francisco State University, and community members,

We would like to express our collective disappointment with President Leslie Wong and his official response to our set of demands made last week in a public meeting here at San Francisco State University. In effect, President Wong has chosen to evade responsibility by addressing none of our demands. President Wong has continued to manipulate the issues at hand by blaming the College of Ethnic Studies' inability to "fundraise" and completely avoiding the issue of under funding that our college faces. We, the students in Ethnic Studies, are completely dissatisfied with President Wong's lack of leadership. We feel that Wong and his administration have blatantly disregarded the needs of students on this campus. We do not need more rhetorical support for Ethnic Studies; we have demanded and we expect material support according to our very reasonable but non negotiable demands.

As a result, we are left with no choice but to intensify our pressure, which is now emboldened by the unprecedented amount of support from our community and educational institutions around the country. President Wong and his Administration are playing a dangerous game. When Ethnic Studies is under attack, students and the larger community committed to our goals will continue to stand up and FIGHT BACK. President Wong, the students remain united. We will be loud. We will be heard. We will win. We are requesting a town hall meeting with President Wong and Provost Rosser on April 5th along with Chancellor White. In this meeting, we will discuss our Ten - demands and hold them accountable.

To continue to put pressure on the administration we have decided to start with disrupting normal business flow throughout this current week (March 2nd - 4th, 2016).

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR ACTION!

Request full transparency and documentation of the Academic Affairs budget. (Phone call script and email template can be found below).

Contacts/Locations for their offices:

Contact for President Leslie Wong's Office

E-mail: [email protected]sfsu.edu

Phone: (415) 338-138

1600 Holloway Avenue,

Administration Building, Room 562

San Francisco, CA 94132

Contact for Provost Sue Rosser's Office

E-mail: [email protected] (link sends e-mail)

Phone: (415) 338-1141

Fax: (415) 338-2514

Address:

1600 Holloway Ave

Administration building, Room 455

San Francisco, CA 94132
Parking + Directions
IN PERSON ACTIONS

The general student body have decided to walk up by waves:

THIS WEDNESDAY 12PM, 2PM, and 4PM.

THURSDAY & FRIDAY: 10PM, 12PM, 2PM, and 4PM

We will be meeting in front of the Ethnic Studies & Psychology Building 10 minutes prior to prep everyone and will make our way there. If you come late, feel free to meet us at the Administration Building.

PHONE CALLS

"Hello, my name is __________ and I am from ________. I would like to schedule a town hall meeting with *WHOEVER YOU'RE CALLING* on April 5th. I would like to have a town hall meeting with him/her in regards to full transparency of the Academic Affairs Budget. "

**Wait for response**

(They may ask for your email information and name again, it's okay if they do)

"Could you please let him/her know that the concerns of the students and the community needs to be addressed so we hope that this will be taken seriously. "

EMAIL

FOR STUDENTS

"Dear President Wong/Provost Sue Rosser,

I hope this email finds you well, I am writing to request a town hall meeting with the students of San Francisco State University on April 5th during Chancellor White's visit to campus to discuss our 10 demands and how we can resolve these issues within the context of Chancellor White's CSU Wide Ethnic Studies Task Force recommendations. Please let me know if you, and other campus administrators will join together with us to come to a resolution on this issue that is crucial to our success and future roles as leaders throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world. "

FOR THE COMMUNITY

"Dear President Wong/Provost Sue Rosser,

I hope this email finds you well, I am writing to request a town hall meeting with the students of San Francisco State University on April 5th during Chancellor White's visit to campus to discuss our 10 demands and how we can resolve these issues within the context of Chancellor White's CSU Wide Ethnic Studies Task Force recommendations. Please let me know if you, and other campus administrators will join together with students to come to a resolution on this issue that is crucial to our success and future roles as leaders throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world. "

Please feel free follow us through facebook for more updates: https://www.facebook.com/ethnicstudies4freedomandourfuture/
Demands made by students https://www.facebook.com/ethnicstudies4freedomandourfuture/posts/1523059411330667 President Wong's response to the Student Demands http://president.sfsu.edu/sites/sites7.sfsu.edu.president/files/Presidential%20Response%202-29-16.pdf
With love & solidarity

The Students of San Francisco State University

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We received this email today from SFSU student leaders: To the Student Body, Faculty and Staff of San Francisco State University, and community members, We would like to express our collective disappointment with President Leslie Wong and his official response to our set of demands made last week in a public meeting here at San Francisco State University.

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Interested in reparations? Read From Here to Equality by Darity & Mullens

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Interested in reparations? Read From Here to Equality by Darity & Mullens

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PROGRAMS

Telling stories that have impact

Each year, in partnership with Shout Mouse Press, some of our teens get the chance to become published authors. As part of the Summer Leadership Academy, they tell their own stories.

OUR IMPACT

BOOKS IN CIRCULATION

These diverse narratives give a glimpse of life through the teens' eyes. Titles like Deena Misses Her Mom , about a child dealing with her mother's incarceration, and The Hoodie Hero , which tackles bullying, give teens a chance to create characters that young readers feel connected to.

Not only do our teens get to add the word "author" to their resume, but Reach goes on to use these stories to motivate and inspire the young students in the After-School Tutoring program. Every year Reach is honored to give away 2,500 books to schools and organizations in Washington, D.C. that serve students who wouldn't otherwise have access to appropriate and relevant texts.

Author Spotlight: Camal

Camal is a junior at Coolidge High School with big plans for the future. He wants to study abroad in The Gambia, earn a civil engineering degree, and make millions as an entrepreneur. A natural networker, Camal recently created a LinkedIn account so he can stay connected with everyone he meets. And, Camal now has something new to add to his profile: published author. His book, Game of Pharaohs, is a twist on a traditional comic book and features characters and a message he hopes his students will love.

Learn more about our other programs

Summer Leadership Academy

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Teen-Authored Books | Reach Incorporated | Washington, DC

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PROGRAMS Telling stories that have impact Each year, in partnership with Shout Mouse Press, some of our teens get the chance to become published authors. As part of the Summer Leadership Academy, they tell their own stories. OUR IMPACT BOOKS IN CIRCULATION These diverse narratives give a glimpse of life through the teens' eyes.

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"Education is liberation" - Kaliah Yizar

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"Education is liberation" - Kaliah Yizar

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The 50in50 Campaign:
50in50 is a national, community-based initiative to get American kids active in their communities, working alongside The Cure Campaign team. The goal is to have one young adult from every state, fifty youth activists in all, with a project based in their community. Whether that be local, regional or state-wide our members will decide a project based on their skills and interests honing in on cancer research funding and awareness. Our 50in50 members have regional guides that help them along the way, providing them with resources or anything else our members might need. To be flexible and respectful to the time of our members there is no set deadline for when their project must be completed by. We ask our members to set a goal for themselves. For example, Shreya from Arizona wrote over 200 cards for cancer patients. When they reach that goal, their project is completed! While The Cure team is working to pass federal legislation to increase the National Cancer Research Budget, we want to inspire youth all over the country to get active in their communities! These community service projects can manifest in cancer research pamphlets, volunteer work, fundraising, working with underfunded hospitals, etc.

Apply here:

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“they say education is the same where you go, but if you plant a rose in the desert, how can you expect it to grow?”

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“they say education is the same where you go, but if you plant a rose in the desert, how can you expect it to grow?”

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"The fear of 'too much justice'" as represented by the obstructionism of what MLK called "the white moderate."

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Racism adapts, it morphs.

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Net wealth in New Jersey:
White people - $100k+
Black & Latinx people - $170

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Youth in Front: Understanding and Supporting Youth-led Activism

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Youth in Front: Understanding and Supporting Youth-led Activism

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Online course for educators and school and district leaders sponsored by Learning for Justice

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Youth in Front: Understanding and Supporting Student-led Activism

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This is an online course designed around promoting and discussing student-led voice in civic engagement. Our aim is to provide all educators with a historical lens as well as tools and frameworks to equip adults as allies and supporters in the development of youth voice and activism.

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Diversity Talks -- PD for Adults lead by Youth

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Diversity Talks -- PD for Adults lead by Youth

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Diversity Talks aims to increase the cultural competence of adults by providing youth-led professional development grounded in diversity, equity and inclusion.

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We want to make sure we acknowledge harm and trauma because we don’t know what people are showing up to the space with and what triggers them.

Maryam/ Integrate NYC on creating safe spaces for true integration

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We lean into discomfort. What about the students living at these intersections? Think about how uncomfortable they are. That’s why we fight and we won’t stop. Even if it doesn’t happen in our lifetime, we want justice for the students coming after us.’

Sahil/ Colorado Youth Congress

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How many people are here?  And is there a breakdown in numbers--students, educators, community professionals, caretakers/family members?

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NEW YORK CITY has two school systems. One is for the affluent and well-connected. It promises elite opportunities for families able to sacrifice time and money to compete for them. The other primarily serves low-income students of color and offers them a fraction of the opportunities that their more affluent peers get. Most people here, including policymakers, have little idea what actually goes on inside this dual school system.

That's why we - the students who know the system best - are taking you into our world. With guidance from adult editors, our team of interns is on a mission to expose the deep inequities in this school system through the voices of our peers. Along the way, we will investigate the people and policies responsible for this tale of two school systems.

Ultimately, we hope to shed light on solutions that will move us closer to the city's vision of equity and excellence for all children.

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NEW YORK CITY has two school systems. One is for the affluent and well-connected. It promises elite opportunities for families able to sacrifice time and money to compete for them. The other primarily serves low-income students of color and offers them a fraction of the opportunities that their more affluent peers get.

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We need Community, Celebration, and Consistency

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We need Community, Celebration, and Consistency

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"You witness the boundaries of progressivism when you start talking about school boundaries."

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Sahil: "That fallacy is what we call democracy"

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"That fallacy is what we call democracy"

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White supremacy is the water we are all in.

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White supremacy is the water we are all in.

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Hard conversations about race, parenting, segregation, and inequities in our schools.

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NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund Case from 2020

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NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund Case from 2020

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SETTLEMENT

In January 2022, a final settlement agreement has been reached in Sheff v. O'Neill. If the proposed settlement is approved by both a judge and the Connecticut State Legislature, it will result in a permanent injunction enforcing the key terms of a long-term Comprehensive Choice Plan (CCP) intended to redress the consequences of decades of disinvestment and exclusion. Among other provisions, the CCP commits Connecticut to significantly expand the number of available seats for students from Black, Latinx, and/or low-income families who have been the victims of entrenched and systemic discrimination. Additionally, the agreement would require Connecticut's Department of Education to publicly report data on educational equity and to commit to greater diversity in its hiring practices.

Since the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that the extreme racial segregation between the predominately Black, Latinx, and low-income schools in Hartford, and the overwhelmingly white and high- or middle-income schools in the surrounding suburbs violated the Connecticut State Constitution, a number of agreements between the plaintiffs and the state have resulted in the establishment of nearly 40 inter-district magnet schools, and a robust Open Choice program that allows Hartford students to transfer to suburban schools. Today, over 56% of Hartford students attend a magnet or Open Choice school.

AGREEMENT

On January 10 2020, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the Center for Children's Advocacy, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, and Horton, Dowd, Bartschi & Levesque, PC reached a new landmark agreement in Sheff v. O'Neill. Filed on behalf of Elizabeth Horton Sheff and other Black, Latinx, and white families, Sheff is a longstanding school desegregation case against the State of Connecticut that seeks to address the extreme racial and economic segregation of students in the city of Hartford in relation to its surrounding suburbs.

The new agreement adds up to 1,052 new magnet school seats, including a new middle school at the Riverside Magnet School and new prekindergarten classes at a Hartford host magnet and the Academy of Aerospace and Engineering Elementary School. Nearly 600 of these new seats are reserved for students from Hartford. Additionally, among other funding, Connecticut is furnishing $1.1 million for magnet schools to develop new themes to recruit more diverse student bodies, $800,000 to provide academic and social support for Hartford students participating in the Open Choice program, and an additional $300,000 as incentives for suburbs that agree to accept more Hartford students.

The new agreement lasts until June 2022 and seeks to place 47.5% of Hartford students in integrated schools. Before this agreement expires, the plaintiffs and the State will develop a long-term plan to take effect in 2022 and ensure that every Hartford student has the option of attending a quality, integrated school. The State is required to set up an advisory committee made up of experienced educators to provide guidance in the implementation of the Sheff programs.

The agreement also adopts a new lottery system to ensure that the magnet schools have a diverse group of students from all income levels. It further requires more public reporting and transparency to help families make better decisions when applying to magnet and Open Choice schools.

SHEFF V. O'NEILL BACKGROUND

In 1989, continuing in the tradition of Brown v. Board, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), alongside co-counsel the American Civil Liberties Union, the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union, attorney Wesley Horton, and others, filed the Sheff v. O'Neill complainton behalf of Black, Latinx, and white students in Hartford, Connecticut public schools who were being denied an education equal to that of their counterparts in suburban school districts due to the racial segregation and the economic disparities between Hartford schools and those in the nearby suburbs.

In July 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court found that Hartford schools were in fact racially, ethnically, and economically isolated, in violation of Connecticut's affirmative constitutional obligation to provide all schoolchildren with racially integrated and substantially equal educational opportunities. The Court ordered the State to immediately remedy the racial isolation endemic to schools in the area around the state capital.

As part of the Sheff remedy, the State established a voluntary integration program and a cohort of desegregated educational opportunities. As a result, the Sheff Plaintiffs and the State have agreed to numerous reforms and new programs designed to increase racial diversity. Today, because of Sheff, over 20,000 suburban and Hartford students attend either one of the over 40 magnet schools or a suburban school through the Open Choice interdistrict transfer program. Nearly half of Hartford's students of color now attend racially and economically integrated schools.

The integrated educational opportunities established because of the Sheff decision are having a lasting impact on student achievement. Children attending Sheff-related schools are outperforming their counterparts in Hartford schools and performing extremely well in relation to all other Connecticut students. The " graduation rates of Hartford students attending the magnet high schools exceed the rates of many suburban high schools. Further, research demonstrates that students attending integrated schools also will develop better critical thinking and analytical skills, and that diverse schools are better than high-poverty schools at counteracting the negative effects of poverty."

LDF'S POSITION

Yet, despite these significant gains, much work remains to ensure equal and integrated educational opportunities for all students in Hartford and across the country. For example, as the Brookings Institute found in 2012, Hartford-area housing costs and zoning laws are frustrating efforts to give more poor students and students of color access to high-scoring schools. Meanwhile, nationally, although Brown struck a fatal blow to legalized racial segregation, stark racial and economic disparities in education remain as many students of color-including about 30% of African-American and 22% of Latino students in Connecticut-still attend schools that are 90-100% minority. Despite the success of Sheff, the stubborn nature of inequality requires that we all work to ensure full financial support for the thriving Sheff remedial programs, expand the Sheff programs, solve problems of systematic inequality and concerns about affordable housing, and remain vigilant in the face of increasing racial isolation.

IMPACT

A series of agreements in the case have led to Sheff-related integration programs that allow students to apply to attend quality, integrated Interdistrict Magnet Schools or the Open Choice program, which lets Hartford students transfer to suburban schools. The plaintiffs (Black, Latinx, and white students, and their parents, from Hartford and the suburbs) and the defendants (Connecticut State officials) have reached a new agreement in the ongoing Sheff litigation that will last until June 30, 2022. The new agreement includes:

1. 1. Significant Expansion of the Sheff Voluntary Interdistrict Programs

Up to 1,052 new Magnet seats (with nearly 600 seats reserved for Hartford students)

$1,100,000 in funding for new school themes to attract students and increase applications at certain Magnet schools.

$190,000 to support the achievement of Open Choice students.

$300,000 for suburban districts that increase the number of Open Choice seats for Hartford students by 20%.

$800,000 over two years for educational advocates to support Open Choice students.

2. 2. Accountability for Diversity & Inclusion within the Choice System

A commitment to measurable racial diversity in magnet schools.

Corrective Action Plans for schools that are not meeting the diversity goals.

A new lottery assignment system that ensures that magnet schools are socioeconomically diverse.

State officials will work with Open Choice schools to develop a "statement of principles" defining their mission and commitments going forward.

3. 3. Transparency & Accessibility of Information to Help Families Make Choices

Publicly available data, broken down by Hartford and suburban students, to understand the experiences of all students in the Sheff Voluntary Interdistrict Programs and help address any inequalities within the programs.

A campaign to inform and recruit underrepresented populations to Sheff programs and help with lottery applications.

Moving the parent information center to a more accessible location.

Real time application information offered through a simplified application system.

4. 4. Long-Term Regional Planning for Success

An Advisory Committee, informed by input from the community, will review Sheff programs and make recommendations for their improvement.

Connecticut is required to develop a long-term plan to ensure the sustainability of the Sheff Voluntary Interdistrict Programs, including strategies to provide a seat for every student who applies through the lottery, to increase teacher diversity, and to address racial disparities in student discipline and academic achievement.

To read a complete list of the new agreement's benefits, please refer to the related documents.

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SETTLEMENT In January 2022, a final settlement agreement has been reached in Sheff v. O'Neill. If the proposed settlement is approved by both a judge and the Connecticut State Legislature, it will result in a permanent injunction enforcing the key terms of a long-term Comprehensive Choice Plan (CCP) intended to redress the consequences of decades [...]

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"Free education is not in the US Constitution, it's in the State constitutions."

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‘I’m from bacon egg and cheeses, Watchu know about that old school RnB, corn rows and black power fist Afro picks... I’m from  growing up way too fast, gone too soon, being over policed and underfunded...’

- Stephanie Pacheco

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Integrated Schools - Awkward Conversations Guide

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Integrated Schools - Awkward Conversations Guide

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The "schools conversation" happens everywhere: playgrounds, birthday parties, family get-togethers, even in line to get coffee. For many White &/or privileged parents, school choice anxiety is fed by peer pressure, our own insecurities about parenting, and a cultural assumption that our child's success and happiness in life hinge heavily on our educational choices.

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Blog with occasional reflections on school integration news & research

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Though it might go unnoticed in the hailstorm of coronavirus, election, etc news, the pandemic has caused cities to reconsider a bastion of racial segregation: gated entry for so-called "elite" public K-12 schools. Boston, for example, has three "exam" (or, I prefer, "restrictive enrollment") schools, which determine entry based on student GPA and scores on...
Continue reading →

In part 1, posted last week, Matt Kautz looked at the origins of school policing in Boston: as students peacefully protested conditions in the city's segregated schools, their dissent was criminalized. That post details efforts by the Boston School Committee, led by Louise Day Hicks, to frame student protest as dangerous, leading to police presence...

in Boston busing riots, ed history, school discipline, school-to-prison pipeline, sources and topics, youth activism.

In the discussion about policing following George Floyd's murder, we've learned (or been reminded) that contemporary policing has its roots in the slave patrols of the early 1800's. It turns out there's a sort of analogy with schools: instead of maintaining safety, school policing likewise began as an effort to criminalize people of color who...

in ed history, making the unequal metropolis, school discipline, school-to-prison pipeline, sources and topics, youth activism.

I'm excited to feature a post from Dian Mawene, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who recently published new research about a school rezoning effort in a diversifying Wisconsin suburb. Coauthored with Aydin Bal, the piece explores overlapping forms of segregation at the neighborhood, school district and school levels, all of which is...

in 2020 election, Attendance zone boundaries, Center for Education and Civil Rights, housing discrimination, new research, suburban school segregation, Trump Administration.

In Boston, school policing understandably gets a lot of attention- students, for example, have been deported for fabricated offenses and the district's proposed new policy doesn't appear to protect students from ICE. Though it gets less attention, things are also bad in Springfield, where the struggling district pays over $1 million for armed school resource...

in community organizing, new legislation, school discipline, school-to-prison pipeline, youth activism.

A few weeks before Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD) published a list of model state school integration policies. It was important then, but it takes on added significance in light of the protests that have followed Floyd's murder, the heightened attention to racial justice and segregation, and repeated...

in Attendance zone boundaries, Center for Education and Civil Rights, DOE and DOJ, education policy, new legislation, policy recommendations, school district secession, standardized testing, voluntary integration.

I've been aching to write something about the virus, quarantine and racial justice in education. It's been tough, though. It's tough to find a unique way into an issue that has clearly important, yet well-covered headlines- stories about things like racial disparities in access to online learning or about how school closures have raised even...

in community organizing, ed history, youth activism.

I'm excited to feature a new collaborating author on the SD Notebook - Jeremy Anderson is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State and a colleague on the voluntary integration research team led by Erica Frankenberg. On November 6, 2019, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced a state takeover of Houston Independent School District. With 209,772 students, Houston ISD is the largest...

in Uncategorized.

A new project out of Penn State University - co-led by Erica Frankenberg (professor of education and director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights, home of this blog) and Chris Fowler (professor of geography) - aims to collect longitudinal data on school attendance zone boundaries from school districts across the country. The researchers...

in Attendance zone boundaries, Center for Education and Civil Rights, new research.

A new report puts concrete (and indeed shocking) numbers on something we know anecdotally: White families with kids leave the city (in this case, Boston) when their kids get to be school-aged. Released last month, Kids Today from Boston Indicators looks at how these (and other) troubling trends have contributed to increased segregation in Boston's...

in Boston busing riots, new research, parental decision making, policy recommendations, research roundup, school resegregation, school segregation.

There was progress recently in a closely watched (and hopeful) school segregation lawsuit against the state of New Jersey, filed by a diverse coalition led by the Latino Action Network and the New Jersey NAACP (full complaint here). After a failed attempt at an out-of-court settlement and delay from the state (more about that below),...

in Uncategorized.

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Though it might go unnoticed in the hailstorm of coronavirus, election, etc news, the pandemic has caused cities to reconsider a bastion of racial segregation: gated entry for so-called "elite" public K-12 schools. Boston, for example, has three "exam" (or, I prefer, "restrictive enrollment") schools, which determine entry based on student GPA and scores on...

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book by Gordon Allport

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‘I’ve gone into schools and waited 20 minutes in the main office for someone to acknowledge my existence. If you were on your first date and they didn’t talk to you for 20 minutes- would you want to go out with them again?’

- Natasha Capers on the importance of creating safe, inclusive school communities for families

CRSE/ coalition for educational justice

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“...students should be treated as an asset not a problem”

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‘If you were watching a television show and you couldn’t identify with any of the characters would you finish the series?’

- Natasha Capers from the Coalition for Educational Justice on culturally responsive education

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Education in The Digital Age: How We Get There

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Education in the Digital Age: How We Get There

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What will education look like in the future? High school principal Nadav Zeimer takes readers through an in-depth evaluation of how digital technology is poised to transform education. Zeimer's compelling construct, academic capital, eliminates the need for standardized tests in favor of youth media

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Does anyone have any books suggestions by Dr.Gary Orfield ?

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Hello! I am curious to know how discussions of disability are part of the TTT work in education and equity.

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Mohammed Choudhury's Lunch Talk slides!?

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Mohammed Choudhury's Lunch Talk slides!?

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"Diversity is a resource"

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“Maybe You Should Try It This Way Instead”: Youth Activism Amid Managerialist Subterfuge

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“Maybe You Should Try It This Way Instead”: Youth Activism Amid Managerialist Subterfuge

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Abstract

The authors theorize what we call managerialist subterfuge, drawing on distinct ethnographic studies to examine how adult "partners" leverage the language and strategies of corporate managerialism to undermine youths' radical visions of change. Critical analysis of patterns in interview and participant observation data across two youth participatory action research projects revealed the ways in which adult interventions functioned to co-opt youths' activist agendas; following the rationale that youth who are presumed to be in need of adult management are "out of their depth" when it comes to civic matters. The authors assert that managerialist subterfuge functions as a mechanism to further bureaucratize youth activism and absolve state actors of accountability for harm that Black youth and youth of color experience.

Introduction

Black and Latinx youth activists have long confronted attempts to delegitimize their activist methods ( Murch, 2010) as "adult allies1" and the general public challenge young people's theories of change and methods of political action ( Taylor, 2016). At the dawn of the civil rights movement, there was friction between the young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the older generation of leaders in organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, stemming from what some older activists considered SNCC's more radical, abrupt, and ultimately "unrealistic" vision of Black progress. Organizations like the Congress for Racial Equality whose platform of social change promoted a type of protest and integrationism that appealed more to Black middle classes, and struggled to connect with the concentration of poor Black folks in cities for whom SNCC emerged as an organization that more fully reckoned with the fundamental flaws of the U.S. system and the need for revolutionary Black self-determination ( Allen, 1992; Perlstein, 2008). These tensions would eventually give way to serious ideological fractures that prompted divisions both within and between civil rights and Black power organizations, particularly around divergent notions of Black political power, progress, self-determination, leadership, and alliance building with non-Black folk ( Allen, 1992; Dawson, 2013; Perlstein, 2008; Taylor, 2016).

For the past decade, youth activism has again garnered significant media visibility as young people organize and demonstrate around issues of systemic police violence, the expansion of the carceral state, immigration policy, economic inequality, and climate change, most directly threatening the lives of poor folks, Black folks, and other folks of color: joining organizations like Dream Defenders, the Sunrise Movement, Assata's Daughters, and the Movement for Black Lives. They too have been challenged by an older generation that takes issue with their organizational structure, methods of protest, and performance of incivility ( Ransby 2018; Taylor, 2016). This was thoroughly evident in the now-infamous exchange between youth climate activists and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein over the ambitious Green New Deal and her lack of support. The backlash that followed found one side claiming that young people's approach was rude and confrontational and needed to demonstrate more respect for the authority of a long-time public servant (i.e., Feinstein) and her knowledge of the reform process and the other side arguing the Senator's dismissive and abrupt posture in response was tone-deaf given their passion and the gravity of climate change (e.g., Chavez & Grim, 2019). Similarly, Taylor (2016) described the frustrated reaction of young activists in Ferguson, Missouri, to a speech given by Rev. Al Sharpton at Michael Brown's funeral-the teenager who was killed by Ferguson cop Darren Wilson-in which Sharpton condemned Black youth demonstrators; painting a picture of them as anti-achievement oriented "thugs." She elaborated, asking,

What gave Sharpton or Jackson or the NAACP or the Justice Department the authority to tell protestors how they should respond to the violence of the Ferguson police? What, really, did any of them know about the daily harassment local residents experienced? What had any of these officials ever done to stop police murder and brutality? ( Taylor, 2016, pp. 160-161)

It is enticing to read these as rhetorical questions; however, it is much more instructive to pose them literally. These questions offer a backdrop for the current study of how youth activists confront and respond to what we call managerialist subterfuge. Sharpton and many of the old guard had by and large adhered to a politics of gradualism, civility, and brokering with power structures, whereas many younger activists, like those involved in Ferguson and Sunrise, seem to be more hesitant to settle for policy solutions that even partially embrace maintaining elements of the system that take for granted the suffering of the poor and historically oppressed.

While contentious ideological fractures between younger and older generations over the best methods and approaches to advance social change constitute one way in which these divisions have played out, there is an increasing need to explore the often- polite ways in which adults in government, nonprofit civic organizations, or community-based nonprofit youth organizations, who position themselves as allies to young people, curtail what are often radical or progressive visions held by youth activists. In the context of her research with young people involved in AYPAL (Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership), Kwon describes "the institutionalization of activism and state incorporation of minority political aims via the expansion of politically neutral nonprofits" (2013, p. 84). Part of her analysis reveals that when youth activism is "facilitated" by the nonprofit arm of the state, it attempts to render activism politically impotent.

As opposed to youth development organizations that only provide youth services (e.g., academic help, guidance, mentoring, etc.), youth activist organizations take explicit political stances that seek to challenge the status quo ( Kirshner, 2007; Salisbury et al., 2018). These organizations offer a critical opportunity for young people to investigate and act to disrupt systems of oppression, as well as envision and create culturally sustaining and emancipatory spaces within their schools and communities ( Ginwright, 2007, 2010). Young people in activist organizations conceive plans of action based on their research findings and political values ( Oakes & Rogers, 2006; Rogers & Morrell, 2011); however, various studies overwhelmingly support the conclusion that adults and "allied" institutions often play a role in shaping/redefining youths' conceptions of "appropriate" political action (e.g., Gordon & Taft, 2011), oftentimes, in ways that limit or dampen what might be understood as radical youth-led visions and strategies of social change and resistance. Drawing on their respective experiences with individual youth activist programs, the authors use ethnographic vignettes to explore this process that we call managerialist subterfuge, understanding it as a powerful yet underexamined aspect of the relationship between activist youth and adult "allies."

A recent article by Baldridge (2020) in Educational Researcher implored education research to take seriously studying the complexity of community-based educational spaces (CBES), particularly with respect to CBES' role in both mitigating and contributing to various oppressions-a project that the current study undertakes. Baldridge argued that such work deserves "more legitimacy in mainstream education that extends beyond [CBES] being a supplement to schools or reifying neoliberal logics of academic success" (p. 618), demonstrating the ways in which inquiries into the political, social, affective, and education-related aspects of CBES, their youth workers, and/or their students have contributed to important discoveries and discussions with macro- and micro-level implications. This article contributes to this emerging tradition in the field of education research.

Thus, our inquiries focus on youths' experiences in two CBES, responding to questions in relation to underlying dynamics of managerialism, and how youth researchers negotiate action plans when challenged or "advised" by managerial forces. Specifically, we ask, how do managerialist impositions attempt to curtail, recreate, or redefine the scope or course of young organizers' political actions? and how do youths' political values and action plans respond to obstacles and limitations imposed by the neoliberal state and adult representatives of state institutions engaging in managerial subterfuge? To answer these questions, we draw on analyses of youth participatory action research (hereafter: YPAR) experiences based on both the east and west coasts that reveal how the processes of political meaning-making between youth and "adult allies" are contested and negotiated, and the notions of legitimate and meaningful political action get reconstituted.

Progressive Youth Activism and Adult Co-Optation

To elaborate on what we understand as managerialist subterfuge and its relationship to youth activism, it is first necessary to define what we mean by "youth." At a rudimentary level, we use the terms youth and young people interchangeably to describe people aged 14 to 18 years across both studies at the center of this article. Scholars have also noted that the social category of "youth" was historically constructed in relation to poor youth, immigrant youth, and youth deemed delinquent and indefinitely at-risk, unless they submitted to training in behavioral reform to become better citizen-subjects under the tutelage of the state ( Kwon, 2013, pp. 27-29). Despite the classed origins of the label, it is crucial to note that what binds this cohort extends beyond age; rather, it is the shared economic, social, and political burdens forced upon them by previous generations ( Cohen, 2010; Franklin, 2014; Rogowski & Cohen, 2015). This understanding of "youth" as a category with implications for civic life requires further explication through the demarcations that have been constructed between "youth" and "adults." Whereas the adult is considered to be a fully realized autonomous person capable of and therefore responsible for voting thoughtfully, paying taxes, and maintaining self-control-behaviors indicative of the "good citizen"-our society has deemed youths to be developmentally irrational and dependent on adults ( Kennelly, 2011). Adults are regarded as authentic citizens with the requisite authority to help, apprentice, or instruct youths' development while some youth-largely dependent on their race and class- are regarded as "citizens in waiting" (with potential to be "good" citizens) and others are cast as "noncitizens" (who can only ever be managed; Gordon, 2009; Tilton, 2010; Kennelly, 2011). This dynamic forecasts potential challenges and possible opportunities for confronting inequality in the context of activism and community engagement.

Several scholars have focused inquiry specifically on the collaborative aspect of the working relationship between youth and adults, or youth-adult partnerships (Y-AP) within civic or activist organizations (e.g., Kirshner, 2008; 2007; O'Donoghue & Strobel, 2007; Shiller, 2013), finding them beneficial for facilitating youth activism and civic engagement, along with the development of civic knowledge, critical social capital, and other traits deemed developmentally worthwhile (e.g., Ginwright, 2007; Ramey et al., 2017; Zeldin et al., 2013). Researchers have identified activist spaces occupied by youth and adults to exhibit various organizational structures and modes of adult-youth collaboration ( Kirshner, 2007, 2008). Some of these include youth-led spaces where adults serve in a support role, egalitarian partnerships where youth and adults share decision-making power, and apprenticeship models in which adults demonstrate "what it means to engage in social action or community organizing" ( Kirshner, 2007, p. 371). Kirshner (2007) rightly pointed out that cross-generational activist collaboration itself is valuable considering the social barriers constructed between youth and adults.

Surveying young people, Ramey et al. (2017) found that community organizations that facilitated greater youth-adult partnering were supportive of behaviors in youth like rigorous evaluation and processing of new information. Others have found Y-APs in activist community organizations support young people's commitment to activist work, sense of efficacy, and development of an activist orientation when relationships with adults offer opportunities for young people to have a meaningful voice in decision-making and when relationships are characterized by trust ( O'Donoghue & Strobel, 2007). Ginwright (2007) identified a Black community organization-Leadership Excellence-as facilitating Black youths' development of "critical social capital," finding specifically that relationships with adults in Leadership Excellence (i.e., "intergenerational ties") cultivated cultural and racial pride in youth, supported their reframing of seemingly personal challenges as politicized issues, and provided opportunities for young people to engage in civic leadership around issues affecting their lives and communities. Veronica Terriquez (2015) built on Ginwright's claims, highlighting how youth organizing groups engage in critical leadership development, and that youth within these organizations develop long-lasting political stances that keeps them in social movement related work.

On the other hand, some researchers have explored the tension inherent in civic and activist collaboration between youth and adults in shared organizational spaces, attempting to theorize and explicate divergences like unequal power dynamics and issues of "ageism" within the relationship between allied adults and youth activists ( Brion-Meisels & Alter, 2018; Gordon, 2009; Gordon & Taft, 2011; Lac & Fine, 2018; O'Donoghue & Strobel, 2007). Common critique within this line of inquiry is that this kind of relationship can reproduce colonial paradigms wherein the most powerless "partners" are effectively silenced and their participation is taken for granted ( Tuck & Guishard, 2013). Gordon and Taft (2011), for example, drew on two ethnographic studies to highlight the experiences of teenage activists finding that youth critiqued adult structured opportunities for civic engagement as oftentimes being symbolic, shallow, and patronizing attempts to "socializ[e] youth for the future." Gordon (2009) asserted that the construction of youth as "citizens in the making" is a political project that renders youth as unimaginable in the public sphere of politics and only imaginable as "citizens to be." This is specifically complicated for youth of color, who are simultaneously adultified and pushed out of the realm of political decision-making.

Additionally, while O'Donoghue and Strobel's (2007) study found several "youth empowering" aspects of the youth-adult relationship within the Effective Citizens community-based youth organization, their interviews with young people also reveal some tensions around issues of unequal power, authority, and decision-making. The authors stated,

Several youth expressed frustration with adults' being "always on them" and not allowing them to do what they wanted to do"; however, one student notes that this kind of autonomy may not be a good thing because youth might "do the wrong stuff on the wrong track. (p. 475)

Other young people expressed similar frustrations saying that they felt "hindered" and "less free" when "adults pushed their role as guide too far, becoming authoritarian and telling [youth] what to do" ( O'Donoghue & Strobel, 2007, p. 478). At one point, Effective Citizens youth even pushed back and refused to work on projects, feeling that adults made all of the decisions about the issues the organization worked on.

Scholars have given name to the kind of tension between youth and adults in civic collaboration where the scale or significance of young people's voice and authority to make decisions in school or community-based projects is reduced ( Brion-Meisels & Alter, 2018). Hart (1992), for example, offered typologies of inclusion in Y-AP that range from manipulative and tokenized examples of "nonparticipation" to authentic "child-initiated" and "directed" opportunities for participation. Terms like "bounded empowerment" ( Ozer & Douglas, 2013) and the "schoolification of YPAR" ( Rubin et al., 2017) reflect the pervasiveness of Y-AP that limit or constrain young people's capacity to pursue transformational social change projects. What these examples demonstrate is that despite what are often relationships premised on a shared interest in "social justice" youth-adult relationships in activist and other civically engaged spaces are fraught with complications that, at times, lead to the marginalization of the former. Understanding such incidences within activist spaces as isolated occurrences obscures the structured dynamic of the social and political distance constructed between youth and adult citizens in our society ( Kennelly, 2011). This is especially true in the case of youth of color, who are perceived to be perpetually "at-risk" ( Kennelly, 2011; Kwon, 2013).

Managerialist Subterfuge in Youth Activism

Through a series of discussions connected to some of the broader challenges with facilitating YPAR, Authors 1 and 2 began to notice several commonalities in our fieldwork with regard to the ways that youths' radical and progressive visions of change were thrown off course through the subtle yet authoritative dissuasions of adults. From these dialogues and critical reflections about our shared experiences, managerialist subterfuge emerged as a concept to articulate the systematic undermining of youth radicalism through various pacifying techniques of state managerialism. Y-APs in activism represent a kind of relationship that is inherently fraught with contention considering the stratification of youth and adulthood statuses with respect to citizenship. Another, possibly more significant, contention exists between the work of progressive social change and the desire of the state and its liberal arms (e.g., philanthropy, grass-tops organizations, etc.) to prevent such changes from occurring ( Kwon, 2013; Omi & Winant, 2015). For example, Rodriguez (2007) connected philanthropy and the privatization of citizenship to the limitations of social movement activism, asserting that nonprofits function to penalize radical social movements by funneling their activism into professional bureaucracies that are limited both in scope and political imagination. Sojoyner (2016) highlighted how Black gang formations, namely, the Crips who initially had political intentions, were made to change their name to more closely reflect reform and the racial liberalism of the Tom Bradley era of Los Angeles ( Felker-Kantor, 2018).

Several scholars have explored the duplicity of state incorporation and co-optation in relation to social movements (e.g., Allen, 1992; Richie, 2012). Omi and Winant (2015) offered a critical analysis of activist/government collaboration for "equality" in their discussion of the incorporation (and containment) of the Black movement of the 1960s, illuminating how the process of subversion works through co-optation. The state's response to Black demands for civil rights, political equality, and social and economic justice was met with both police and decriminalized White mob violence that served as a direct bulwark to Black activism (containment), while simultaneously, the federal government "conceded" to mollified versions of Black demands (incorporation). Incorporation thus becomes a tool in a much more intricate project of subterfuge against activist agendas. Achieving policy demands effectively meant that the state "was to take over for the movement, to institutionalize the movement" ( Omi & Winant, 2015 p. 202). Continuing, they contended,

That this incorporation of the movement agenda was enacted in a series of compromises and "moderate" versions only reinforced the fact that although the movement's "victories" were substantial, they also involved defeats. Not only did civil rights become law in 1964 in a limited and toothless fashion-for example, discriminatory practices were not criminalized but only made subject to civil remedies-but also incorporation of movement demands subsequently rendered the movement less effectual in respect to the deeper conflicts that shaped its original demands. (p. 202)

Despite the incongruence between the priorities of government and the goals of activism to ameliorate or disrupt racial and economic inequality, many social change projects invite some level of collaboration between the state and activists, both of whom express a commitment to disrupting the inequalities maintained by state institutions. In the current era of neoliberal governmentality, the state also increasingly outsources its responsibility to provide for the good of the citizenry to private and nonprofit intermediaries with "social justice" missions ( Rodriguez, 2007).

Within the context of youth activism, such arrangements forecast the emergence of youth-adult relationships in which young people advocate for social change in proximity to adults representing government institutions or their nonprofit arm who position themselves as allies ( Kwon, 2013; Lac & Fine, 2018). In a society that stratifies adult and youth citizenship and where the state has a vested interest in preventing radical change, this kind of social justice "partnership" can function to dilute, redefine, or bludgeon progressive youth activism, under the rationale that youth, who are presumed to be in need of adult management, are "out of their depth" when it comes to matters of civic change ( Kennelly, 2011; Taylor, 2016). Kennelly (2011) argued, "Within a neoliberal context, young people are culturally positioned as learners who must be carefully guided towards suitable degrees of self-regulation, in order to become legitimate citizens within contemporary (neo-)liberal democracies" (p. 337).

Rather than wielding authority in ways that create dramatic confrontations or tense eruptions, in what we are describing as managerialist subterfuge, representatives of the state rely on language and strategies of "corporate managerialism" to facilitate outcomes in youth activism that avoid addressing or only superficially address structural problems, or that avoid explicitly naming the culpability of the state in reproducing inequality-opting instead to "encourage" an institutional change process that adheres to the culture of corporate professionalism and the bureaucratic logic of professional organizations brought to bear on state processes. Although they are often conflated considering that they are closely related, neoliberalism is different from managerialism. Whereas neoliberalism is concerned with the application of free-market principles to societal development as a political project, managerialism is concerned with the application of universal management techniques in societal development as a preferred management strategy ( Klikauer, 2015). Klikauer (2015) urged,

Managerialism's prime concern is not politics but the management of capitalism and society in its image [emphasis added] . . . Managerialism is primarily about getting its managerial-reactionary ideology carried over from company into society . . . [It is] about a managerial-engineering approach to societal problems that have been converted into technicalities. (p. 1107)

Apple (2006) noted that the project of managerialism stretches beneath the macro-structural operation of government and "offers new and powerful roles for individuals and groups [emphasis added] who occupy positions within the state" (p. 25). In this way, state managers are not just cogs in the bureaucratic machine of government, they are state entrepreneurs endowed with power and expertise to serve the public good using innovative methods that hail from the private sector. Apple elaborated,

We might say that managerial discourse provides "subject positions" through which people can imagine themselves and their institutions in different ways . . . One can modernize the machinery of schools and of the government in general, be an efficient and business-like manager, and help people by ensuring "quality" at the same time. What could be wrong with that? (pp. 25-26)

When this managerial impulse or dictate is cleverly inscribed on the work of activism such that the common sense of corporate-style state management is imposed authoritatively as the most logical and, indeed, the universal standard of organizational operation, it is not hyperbole to characterize this as subterfuge, particularly when it functions to stymie community-led efforts to fundamentally challenge material problems or to explicitly name the state's culpability in reproducing inequality. Using ethnographic vignettes, this study analyzes the elements of managerialist subterfuge at work in both YPAR contexts and the ways in which youth activists' programs of action are affected by such instances. The authors conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of managerialist subterfuge in activist social change work.

Research Method and Context

This article draws on interviews and participant observations across two studies that both support the explication and critique of what we have termed "managerialist subterfuge" in youth activism and YPAR. To be clear, our study is not a "YPAR study" or an analysis of the merits of either YPAR project. For this to be a YPAR study, our youth would have collaborated with us on the study design, methodology, findings, and action plan derived from this research. Rather, the ethnographic vignettes and our analyses across both studies illuminate the day-to-day nuances of youth-adult interactions that may go unnoticed in other forms of qualitative inquiry that reveal what we call managerialist subterfuge.

Critical ethnography- specifically participant observation- supports the close examination of the everyday conflicts and inner workings of politics within cultural groups and organizations ( De Volo, 2009). In this article, ethnographic vignettes allow us to illustrate the everyday acts of managerialist subterfuge that youth experience as they align with adult allies. Our vignettes derive directly from audio recordings and field notes that were taken as the events in our studies were occurring ( Erickson, 1986; Humphreys, 2005). Narrative vignettes lend to the exploration of complexities ( Erickson, 1986) in particular moments or events with youth activists. Consistent with Humphreys (2005), we view ethnographic vignettes as "window[s] through which the reader can view situational depth" (p. 842). Across both studies, our findings respond to the following questions: "How do managerialist impositions attempt to curtail, recreate, or redefine the scope or course of young organizers' political actions? How do youths' political values and action plans respond to obstacles and limitations imposed by the neoliberal state and adult representatives of state institutions engaging in managerial subterfuge?

Study Contexts

Clay's study took place between summer 2015 and winter 2016 in a midsize Mid-Atlantic city called Milton2 whose population is primarily Black and Latinx, and where over a quarter of residents live below the poverty line. Clay-a cisgender Black male doctoral student in his late 20s at a public research university at the time-facilitated YPAR with a group of 19 Black and Latinx high school students in the Upward Bound precollege academic program-a CBES-that operated out of a community college campus in the city ( Clay, 2019b). Six YPAR participants became focal. (A detailed breakdown of youth participants across both studies appears in Table 1.) Over the course of 16 months, he audiotaped and transcribed approximately 50 group meetings including formal YPAR class sessions, city council meetings, and informal conversations with youth. He jotted nearly 50 pages of field notes taken after our meetings in a journal. Documents collected included city council meeting minutes, city planning documents, and youth-developed YPAR materials created in Upward Bound and organizing meetings. Clay interviewed focal youth twice as well as several nonfocal youth; he also interviewed community stakeholders and Upward Bound staff and administrators. Participant observations, resulting field notes, and student artifacts are the only data used from Clay's study to support our analysis of managerialist subterfuge.

The ethnographic vignettes presented in this article focus on the group's decision to pursue a youth-run community center and their advocacy efforts directed toward a local public-private partnership spearheading community redevelopment. These events occurred 8 months after the group organized a mixed-methods public informing project, wherein they studied and reported on issues of educational inequality in Milton. This research and advocacy experience were a first for both youth and Clay. This study draws on participant observation data from the final 4 months of our organizing efforts.

We began action research in summer 2015, meeting 4 days a week for 6 weeks, between early July and mid-August. Our action research group reconvened after a month-long hiatus in September 2015. We met five to six times throughout the fall before students felt compelled to pursue new projects. After progressing beyond brainstorming and other time spent building rapport (and generally procrastinating for various reasons), our group conceived of four major projects. We also went from meeting four times a week over the summer to once a week, on Saturdays, and using Google Hangouts and email to update one another on our work.

We would only work toward two of the four projects, one being the development of a youth-run community center in Milton.

Turner's study takes place during the 2016-2017 academic year in a large urban city in Southern California. The city's population is primarily Latinx, and the neighborhood where the study took place is primarily Black and Latinx. Turner, who identifies as a cisgender Black man, conducted participant observation while he was employed as a social justice instructional coach by a nonprofit program called the Urban Youth Leaders Program (hereafter: UYLP),3 which facilitates YPAR with Black male students in several local high schools in the area. Social Justice High School4 (hereafter: SJHS) is one of the schools where UYLP operates, and is the focal institution in this study. Turner's ethnographic vignette focuses on the time between the months of February through June 2017 during which 17 students total participated in UYLP at SJHS as their third period class. Eight youth are considered focal, with their deep engagement in the YPAR process with the class. A total of 20 sessions were recorded, including retreats, class sessions, and sessions where the young people engaged in data collection. In addition to recordings, Turner also took descriptive field notes as a participant observant, as well as collected the artifacts used for the YPAR study, including the political education tools used, the presentation that the youth gave, and their survey and interview instruments. Informant interviews with four of the youth in the study were conducted but are not utilized in this article. Participant observations, resulting field notes, and student artifacts are the key data points used from Turner's study to support our analysis of managerialist subterfuge.

The premise of UYLP was to provide youth with critical literacy skills, as well as wraparound academic support to help them go to college. The other goal of the curriculum was to have youth engage in YPAR and work to change something in their school or in their community to eventually build a pipeline of Black male youth into progressive, social movement work ( Dancy, 2014). With prior experiences teaching social justice-based curriculum, it was Turner's job to be a curriculum coach to work with Mr. Randle5-their teacher-to help him and other teachers facilitate students' completion of their YPAR projects for Black male youth. As an actual class at SJHS, UYLP had regular access to school administrators, counselors, and other teachers to ensure that the students in the program were successful. Even though the students experienced challenges in their school, there was an ecosystem built to support them academically, designed in a similar fashion to other boys and men of color programs in the era of My Brother's Keeper, except with a systems change and social justice focus ( Philpart & Bell, 2015).

Theoretical Framework

Our inquiry into Y-APs in progressive youth activist groups is guided by theories of social practice ( Holland & Lave, 2009) and affirmative governmentality ( Kwon, 2013). These frameworks offer a road map for understanding discursive and relational phenomena across both studies that speak to identity formation, agency, and the nation-state's technologies of power and reproduction.

First, we understand identities as temporally and spatially situated, and in constant negotiation between structure and agency ( Holland & Lave, 2009); young people negotiate their identities as "activists" through and against conflict with the state and within their own political alliances. In turn, how youth respond both individually and collectively in the face of a recalcitrant state or resistant adult "allies" is as much a function of their identity and agency as it is a function of the structural and political constraints placed before them both by the state and adult state intermediaries.

This is especially significant in the case of youth activism housed in nonprofit and public-private partnership contexts and their function in service of what Kwon (2013) called neoliberal affirmative governmentality. Kwon argued that nonprofit organizations, regardless of how oppositional their political posture is, have to negotiate the capitalist landscape of reproducing civil society, which suggests that nonprofits become the primary managers of youth deviance and political resistance. Kwon further argued,

The expansion of non-profits in the latter half of the 20th century is tied to the steady incorporation and professionalization of activism, evidenced in the legal restrictions of political activities allowed under non-profit status along with the state's post-civil rights affirmation and transformation of race and racial identities into categories of resource administration. (p. 5)

Here, Kwon (2013) specifically highlighted how the barriers of professional activism inhibit the potential to organize, along with state-specific ways of managing and distributing resources to racialized non-White communities.

Kwon's (2013) theory is instructive as it relates to understanding how the postcolonial state maintains control through cooptation rather than coercion. Focusing on state management illuminates the ways in which such modalities masquerade as formal guidance and technical support to coalitions of the citizenry though often function in service of neo-colonial hegemony.

Data Analysis

After preliminary discussions about our hunch regarding the nature of adult interference and redirection in YPAR, we conducted a first pass review of our respective participant observation and interview data to screen for (1) PAR youths' initial conceptualizations of action versus what actions were ultimately taken in each study and (2) adult interventions that misaligned with youths' principal visions of political action. Both authors then collaboratively coded transcripts and field notes across projects using Dedoose qualitative software. In the first round of reflexive open coding, we reviewed these data in addition to related documents and artifacts (e.g., reports referenced in Clay's study, the YPAR data used in Turner's study), highlighting "critical moments" in each that we saw as generative toward building a heuristic for understanding how youths' visions changed in relation to adults. The second round involved developing a codebook from the transcripts and field notes that included the following themes: "adult control,""youth voice,""youth vision,""youth-adult partnerships,""organizational conflict," and "youth redirection" among others ( Vaughn & Turner, 2016). Blair (2015) used the language "methodologically self-conscious" to describe the reflexive coding process; in this way, throughout both phases, we calibrated ourselves by verbally debriefing to verify the strength of the patterns we had individually identified in both studies and to examine how our particular perspectives influenced our respective coding approaches.

Ethnographic vignettes were subsequently chosen that best demonstrated the ways in which adults actively worked to steer young people away from their convictions for specific actions in both YPAR projects. These moments rendered visible Kwon's (2013) notion of neoliberal affirmative governmentality in the nonprofit (youth activism) sector, which informed our interpretation of adult managerialism as a subterfuge. From there, the authors engaged in further debriefing, which led to the development of analytic memos articulating the central features of the process that we would ultimately refer to as "managerialist subterfuge."

Findings

Findings in both the authors' studies illuminate two intersecting ways in which managerialist subterfuge (i.e., various pacifying techniques of corporate and state managerialism) worked to undermine youth progressivism and radicalism across both YPAR contexts. First, in Clay's study, we find local government and its proxies attempting to impose managerial limitations/mechanisms of control to redefine the political interventions that youth attempt to make. In Turner's study, we find that adult allies worked to limit the racial justice imaginations of students by encouraging a color-evasive ( Annamma et al., 2017) analysis of the data that youth collected. Teachers and other adults also leveraged the color-evasive frame to limit the types of demands that Black students could make of the administration.

Efficient Social Justice: Austerity and Tokenism in Neighborhood Revitalization

The Teen Center Project

In Clay's study, youth decided to organize around bringing a teen center to fruition in Milton. The teen center project originally began as an idea to obtain a building, initially for nonspecific reasons. Youths would eventually decide that it should become a teen center that offered comprehensive health care, formal and informal education (e.g., political education), and entertainment services, primarily for the purpose of facilitating comradery to heal a history of antagonism and suspicion between particular neighborhoods. On several occasions, youth researchers entered our meeting space crying or sullen in response to the death of a friend or classmate that they knew stemmed from these long-standing conflicts. To several youth, the violence and social distance between neighborhoods in Milton resulted from the convergence of resource scarcity, histories of conflict, police repression, a dearth of opportunities, and the failure of local public schools to deliver a locally relevant curriculum ( Clay & Rubin, 2020).

The center would be free to attend for all Milton youth and run by Milton students and young adults-beginning with the members of The Plug. A range of imaginative ideas came out of our conversations, with students deciding the center needed (among other things) the following: self-defense classes for women, a video game room and a music studio, a place to read magazines, computer rooms (one for internet browsing and one for homework), "an African American Lit class taught by an actual African American teacher," academic counselors, and a physical and mental health clinic.

Selena went on to describe a place with lots of greenspace for walking and lamented the lack of trees and grass offered by the city: "No real places to just take a stroll and enjoy the day." She and others talked about free meals and other healthy food options that could be offered by the center, noting the need for "vending machines with protein bars and fruit smoothies." Hector and Gustavo talked about a gym and basketball courts. This was a radical vision of a community center that departed from more traditional renderings of youth development centers ( Baldridge et al., 2017). They described a one-stop public CBES for all teens within the city, whether they were college bound, pushed out of high school, dealing with trauma at home, wanting to learn a trade, or taking a class in something that their schools did not offer. The demand for this kind of institution was powerful, and their passion for it was palpable in ways that they had not demonstrated with other project ideas. What several had come to understand as problems rooted in Milton's lack of investment in youth resulted in a desire to redirect public dollars in the interest of one of the most overlooked segments of the local citizenry.

Challenges arose in action research as Clay and youth began collaborating with individuals in and approximate to local government to realize the teen center in Milton. These challenges pushed Clay and youth researchers to adapt their focus in relation to the teen center project on efforts to justify its feasibility by drafting a report focused on how it would ultimately save the city money. As leaders resisted youths' proposal for the comprehensive teen center, rather than taking another approach (perhaps, direct-action), the group tacitly decided to "advocate" for the center within the framework of what was presented to them as acceptable by a local planner.

Local Government Incorporation as Activist Pacification

As ideas for the center seemed to swirl indefinitely with very little sense of a way forward, Clay was concerned that the group had entered the stagnant space that they occupied with previous project ideas, despite the level excitement. Hoping to carry the energy forward and advance young people's vision into something actionable, Clay reached out to a community stakeholder who he knew at the time to only be a local civically engaged parent, who participated in a number of community-based programs and advocacy projects for Milton students as well as poor and homeless populations. Clay was connected to Jenice Gouche, a Black woman, by a colleague in graduate school who had met her through his own research in Milton. Clay invited her to come speak to the group so that they could get a better sense of the landscape of community work going on in Milton to help them see potential opportunities to collaborate or partner with groups who would support their vision. Her visit generated much excitement. Before she spoke with young folks, Clay filled her in on our work up to that point. When youth arrived, Clay (re)explained to young people why he had invited Ms. Gouche and she told them a bit about herself. Youth talked shyly about some of the group's plans at Clay's coaxing. This is when Ms. Gouche identified herself as an aide to a Milton city councilman and conveyed her thoughts about creating synergy between our group and the city council.

I'm Councilman Myers' aide. So he was looking for some kind of team to maybe sit down with, to help do something. That'll be good to plan, give him something to listen [to]. . . these are the issues that we're having. How do we get you involved, or maybe even having [the young people] come to sit in the city council meetings? Just to see how those meetings are run, and maybe we could do a city council kind of youth team, stuff like that. . . Maybe even sitting down and talking to the councilman and figuring out how it is that you can be engaged. Maybe just coming to the city council meetings.

Up until Jenice's visit, Clay was unaware of her position as an aide to a city councilman. He felt ambivalent about what she was alluding to. On one hand, it seemed important that young people "get involved" by learning about the government and some of the issues that the local leadership was working on. It also seemed important for them to meet with and discuss issues with the city leadership as most young people did not get opportunities to interlope in government institutions to see how decisions were made regarding resource distribution; however, he was concerned that this would be the genesis of transforming our group into a tokenized community service arm of the local government.

Clay wanted The Plug to transcend an approach to community engagement that required synergy with local government, but young people seemed very impressed by this bit of information and even more on board with the idea of working with the city council. Ms. Gouche's response upon first hearing youths' articulation of a teen center offering a robust array of services was to direct them, several times, to "sit down" with the city council to "see how things worked." While such language might appear innocuous, or even helpful, it might also be understood as a tactic of tokenizing redirection, or of bureaucratizing a radical agenda.

Ms. Gouche stayed over an hour talking with young people. After hearing more from them about the teen center, she filled them in on a local public-private partnership group, Milton180, that was designing redevelopment plans for Milton, and explained that she would connect us with the leader, Mr. Richard Greene, a Black man. If youth were intrigued by Ms. Gouche's offer to ingratiate with the city council, they were floored by the idea that they could actually participate in city redevelopment plans. They listened closely as Ms. Gouche spoke about some of the projects she was involved in and initiatives the local government was trying to get underway. Their energy and excitement were new, and drew Clay in as well. For young people who may have felt very little power or control over the governmental processes that shaped their lives and community, it was not hard to imagine why such an offer would mesmerize. After her exit, there was a new vigor in the room, and over the next few days, young people approached action research with a new level of confidence and unified commitment.

Although Ms. Gouche did not follow up regarding her suggestions to connect us more formally with the city council, soon after our meeting, youth decided that Clay would contact and introduce himself to Richard Greene to describe what the group was working on and to invite him to chat with young folks about their ideas. He agreed without any reservation. On this first call, youth were initially (what Clay perceived to be) shy about talking so Mr. Greene opened by informing us that the Milton180 plan was a collaboration between the city and several private planners and consultants across areas ranging from education and housing to public works and environment. This group had been contracted to develop a comprehensive report of ways to strategically improve Milton's infrastructure. Apparently, they had held meetings prior to conducting their own ecological survey of the city infrastructure, inviting the community's input on the kinds of changes they would like to see. As Clay and group had missed these meetings-which we all agreed were not well-publicized-they too were invited to contribute to this dialogue.

Upon hearing the comprehensive nature of the center that youth had envisioned for a single building or plot of land, Greene voiced subtle reservations. The teen center having its own building was a concern, he said, because it was cost-prohibitive and what he perceived as an overlap of services considering that Milton had several spaces like the local YMCA and other local nonprofit programs that catered to youth. Months earlier, in a discussion with another youth participant, Shante (a Black female rising high school senior) argued that the YMCA was too focused on small children, it was dilapidated, and staff treated youth like "prisoners" and "criminals." That this center would be youth-run made this a very different model that empowered youth with a significant level of autonomy.

Despite the city's level of investment in redevelopment and expansion, it was still focused on austerity (i.e., spending cuts) at least in some areas. Greene suggested looking at the nonprofit youth services dispersed throughout the city and to think about the possibility of housing new programming in already existing spaces-like school buildings-that would be framed as "after-school clubs." For efficiency's sake, he explained, this would mean not having to hire and pay additional staff because teachers ran after school clubs. Greene expressed that he lamented the city's tight budget and encouraged us to look at the preliminary vision articulated in Milton180's reports to identify areas where some of the needs the teen center intended to address would be addressed within the scope of the tentative Milton180 plan. Greene stated that what youth submitted in light of these considerations would accompany Milton180's tentative plan, and they would be able to present their proposal to both the school board and city council.

Young people's immediate reaction to this idea of dispersed services was discomfort as they had already begun brainstorming a grand vision of the teen center that primarily emanated from their concerns about curbing neighborhood rivalries. Moreover, there was something truly powerful about the idea of reclaiming abandoned private space, which reflects Milton's postindustrial history of neglect and debasement, and offering it back to this community as a public facility, as a representation of both the symbolic and material value young residents found in themselves. What Greene was suggesting disrupted this original purpose. Young people had talked for weeks prior to this meeting about what they wanted it to look like and the impact it might have on the culture and trajectory of the city.

After much deliberation and weighing of pros and cons, young people decided that the dispersed services model defeated the original purpose for the center-to bring teens of all stripes together under one central location. Much of the pushback against Greene's suggestion stemmed from concerns about the redevelopment plans. A significant portion of the "Opportunities" section of their Issues and Opportunities report highlighted areas where strategic investment should be targeted to attract home buyers and new industry. Milton180 had identified many of the areas tagged for beautification and redevelopment almost exclusively downtown and not in the neighborhoods in which young people lived. Discussing the areas of the proposal that addressed redevelopment, Shante voiced concerns about the plans:

. . . You can put all this stuff into one place!

It's like they want to put it all around.

It's not benefiting nobody but them, especially if they're getting money off it. It's not benefiting nobody but them.

Well, the goal is to . . . I think the city contracted them to develop a plan that's going to help Milton attract people with higher incomes. They want residents who make good money, and they also want businesses to come so that they can contribute to the tax base. That goal doesn't always have to align with what's best for the community. Right? It sounds like [that is] what you all are saying. You all are saying y'all want something that's going to benefit the people directly.

My thing isn't to attract the people to want to move here or to open up a business here. That's not what I'm aiming for. I'm aiming for getting our kids out of Milton. Giving them somewhere to go so they can think bigger and broader. Give them thinking space, so they won't be just in the house thinking, "Well, yeah this is how I'm living now." Give them somewhere where they can interact with people so that way, oddly enough, they get the public speaking aspect of how life really is. They get to talk to different people that they don't know. Stuff like that. I'm down for my people that I know live in Milton. I'm not really worried about the outside people yet.

Shante's and her coresearchers' comments in conversation about the "opportunities'' highlighted in the proposal suggested that Shante and others felt Milton180's leap for efficiency was actually not efficient at all. While Greene's suggestion of dispersed services undermined the plans that youth articulated for a community center, Clay's response to Shante's concerns here affirmed and broadened her critique of Milton180, alluding to elements of their plan that raised concerns about gentrification. Shante was then able to respond by reiterating her commitment to the community center model (i.e., "somewhere" for "[her] people") as opposed to what seemed like Milton180s potential interest in attracting new, higher income residents.

Balanced Budget Activism

Moving forward, youths' first inclination was to distance their group from Milton180. This sentiment was short-lived, however, and in less than 2 weeks after the initial meeting with Greene, youth ultimately decided that the group would still submit a proposal to Milton180. Only instead of identifying areas where Milton180's vision and plan fulfilled some of the ideas that youth wanted to see realized in the center, they decided to submit a plan that would justify the need for a teen center, and explain all of the ways in which our vision was in fact "the most efficient" way in which to achieve the goals Milton180 outlined. Co-opting this managerial language and rationale of efficiency, The Plug set out to both articulate its grand plan for the center and explain how it could be frugally financed.

Under this new direction, what once was envisioned as a free and comprehensive one-stop center for learning, entertainment, and job training for young Milton residents turned into a vision of a business enterprise. Much more of the group's focus centered on the fiscal solvency of the center: how it would pay for regular staff, maintenance, and programming expenses. Now instead of it being free, students played with the idea of charging a fee for entrance. The following exchange primarily between Selena, a Latina rising 11th grader and Clay is an example of the kind of conversations that were playing out regarding how the center might generate money.

[The teens] could make their own clothes.

Make their own clothes?

Yeah, their own clothing to sell. Yeah. . . .

( Reading Selena's additions) "Provide healthy food bar and the option of greasy and meaty food such as pizza, only available with the choice of healthy food." So, you're saying you can only get that if you got a healthy food option at the same time?

Yeah.

What do you think?

[pauses] I think it makes sense. Like . . . I . . . like, this is going to be nasty, but I'm eating it.

Yeah.

I don't know. I feel like if we have a healthy food option on a plate, people are more likely to eat it, than if it's not on their plate.

So, why even offer unhealthy options at all?

Because you still have that craving. It's still in your systems. Like, "Oh, I want this bag of salty chips, but I'm also gonna eat this."

Alright. No, I get it.

And we could say . . . we should offer unhealthy options because people are always going to have cravings . . . and they'll pay for it. [Pauses] Do we even have to mention the unhealthy options though?

I mean, that's what you're saying. That's what I'm saying, because I understand what you mean but I feel like . . . Well, remember, this is you all's thing; I only want to just challenge some of your opinions. But, ultimately, what you all decide is what we write. But, I think my thing is, when I think about this place, I think about it as a place that's supposed to be transformational. Right? We're trying to bring people together in order to stop some of the beefs between neighborhoods. So, it's not just like a recreational place, it's a place that's serving a good for the community. So, if we recognize that there's a challenge in the community with not having healthy food options, then maybe this place is where we only give them good food, and we definitely wouldn't want to make money from [serving bad food], right?

Selena suggested that selling unhealthy food was a viable way to make money-despite the fact that one of her primary objectives for the center was for it to provide access to healthy foods, considering that Milton was a food desert. While youths' vision of a comprehensive learning and social service center remained intact, once the concern with efficiency was raised by Milton180, our focus shifted to more singularly prioritize thinking about how the center could generate money and drafting a proposal to persuade Milton180 that the center would actually save the city money in the long run. While their drafting of the proposal to explicate how youths' vision would be financially viable was certainly a "reasonable" way to approach advocating for the center, it was also clear that we had internalized the logic and priorities of Milton180 instead of prioritizing the community challenges that the group had initially sought to address through the center. And while the group retained its commitment to the fortification of an independent physical space for Milton youth-against Greene's direction-it mainly towed the line of advocacy that Milton180 found acceptable by writing a proposal this way-instead of, perhaps, organizing with other local activists to formulate a direct action strategy, working with a local agency to apply for a community development grant ourselves, or planning any number of potential pathways forward that centered young people's commitment to comprehensively meet the needs of other Milton youth.

In retrospect, the whole group may have felt a little in over their heads, and Richard Greene and Milton180 provided some direction, which at the time made the project feel more manageable. Without any forcefulness behind his words, Greene's opinions about our project came across authoritatively, positioning him as a knowledgeable insider that understood "how things worked" that made his way seem "right,""logical," and "professional," while The Plug's status as working-class, political outsiders, nonplanners, and novice action researchers may not have inspired the same level of self-confidence to devise an alternative way forward. Indeed, this was reflected in a comment Selena made that indirectly referenced the group's experience with Milton180 during a discussion about the effort community residents expend to change their communities. She argued,

Yeah. We really only get to do so much, like that the government allows us. Like, "Oh, we want to do this, and this, and this to make this a better city." We go see the government, "Oh, you can't do that, though." Like, "Okay, then what can we do?"

In addition to alluding to her frustration with collaborating with Milton180, Selena's comment subtly suggests that she believed going through Milton180 to realize the teen center was perhaps the only or most appropriate way forward. Such is the work of managerialist subterfuge: to delegitimize and imply naiveté in relation to radical visions of social change whilst instilling the logic that tepid, incremental, bureaucratic processes of superficial change are legitimate and realizable. Milton180 accepted The Plug's proposal for the center with an added promise to follow up about its details. That never materialized. The group attempted to follow up with them but did not get a response back.

Color-Evasive Social Justice: Raceless Demands for Racialized Youth

In Turner's study, young people in the UYLP were presented with a critical dilemma: how to present their data to school adults given that it may lead to a potentially hostile reaction as their findings cast an unfavorable light on the anti-Black racism of these adults within their school community. Tensions arose between a teacher in the program, Mr. Randle, and the youth regarding how the youth should present data to the teachers about the negative treatment that students-Black students, specifically-encountered in classrooms. Instead of using videos and specific narratives in their presentation, students were encouraged to "remove race and student identities" from the conversation, because Mr. Randle argued that his fellow teachers would not respect their data if they racialized them.

The YPAR Project

The YPAR project in Turner's study emerged from early conversations between Turner and Mr. Randle, a UYLP teacher. In Turner's role as curriculum coach, he regularly met with Mr. Randle and provided guidance implementing the curriculum of UYLP, while also ensuring that the YPAR process was aligned with what the youth envisioned as necessary to change their school or community. As they began to brainstorm how to get students engaged for the YPAR project, Turner encouraged him to revisit "The Banking Concept of Education," a chapter in Paulo Freire's (2000)Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

As the students began to explore the text, they engaged in a passionate debate about epistemology and how students come to know and understand the world. As the discussion continued, the students made consistent reference to race, school discipline practices, and Freire's (2000) banking concept. As they worked to develop their YPAR project, the students ultimately landed on the following question: "In what ways does the banking concept of education enclose on the learning and opportunities of students at SJHS?" With their project, the students wanted to research how a particular form of education-banking education-can work to limit the opportunities of students at SJHS.

SJHS did not actively practice suspending students for willful defiance-a nebulous violation that scholars and communities have identified is subjectively interpreted and enforced, contributing to racial disproportionality (among other concerns); however, even though the school did not suspend, teachers were allowed to send their students out of class (e.g., Skiba et al., 2009). This presented an opportunity for the UYLP students to interview the students who were most affected by push-out and the punishing side of student-teacher relations. The students surveyed 250 of their peers and interviewed 16 peers. The students developed an interview protocol and audio/video recorded interviews that lasted between 3 and 7 minutes. Since Latino students were widely represented in their survey data (180 out of 250 students, or roughly 72%), they primarily interviewed African American students to hear their voices. Among other insights, they discovered through their research that Black students felt they experienced discipline, reprimand, and "teacher care" differently than their Latinx peers. Among the students interviewed, two interviews with Black students presented striking critiques of both teaching and schooling practices, including the following exchange between Bryce, a Black UYLP student in the 11th grade, and a male student:

Do you think you are treated fairly by your teachers?

I get treated like everyone else

(To male student) What's that mean?

Basically like, [the teachers] ain't really caring about the students. They get paid to do what they gotta do.

In the interview above, the male student presents a critique of teacher disengagement and student-teacher relations on campus. As a Black male student, his reply, "I get treated like everyone else," points to the ways in which he perceived Black students on his campus were rendered invisible, and did not receive the individualized attention necessary in order to be successful academically, which is indicative of similar narratives in urban education (e.g., Carey, 2020; Wood et al., 2018). Noting that "teachers are just here to get paid" illustrates how some students interpreted teacher disengagement. In a later debrief of the interviews, the students in the UYLP highlighted his interview as one to include in their final presentation.

Bryce also interviewed a Black female student who happened to be a friend. Discussing the climate in classrooms brought to the fore similar issues in teacher-student relations, reflected in the following exchange:

. . . I get that. What are some creative ways that your teachers have helped you and your peers?

Do you think that you're treated fairly by your teachers?

Okay. You said you don't think you're treated fairly by teachers. Why not?

It's like they pick and choose between certain students, and I don't like that. They don't give, "bad students" like, chances.

If you can, if you can do me a favor, just explain what you mean by like, um, explain what you mean by, "bad students"

Well, say somebody messed up one time, they don't want to give them another chance.

And can you give me an example of like, when teachers treat you or somebody who they consider to be bad . . . what's that look like?

Okay. If I raise my hand, and another person raises their hand at the same time as me, they would go and help that person before they help me.

The above exchange highlights the tension some students felt between themselves and their teachers. Although the interview began relatively dispassionately, the tone of the interview changed immediately when the student was asked, "Are you treated fairly by your teachers?" When pressed to further explain, "why not," the student highlighted that there is a difference between the ways that "bad kids" and "other" students are treated. Implicit in her comment about "bad kids" is the racial politics of the school: given that one of the most prevalent and consistent concerns expressed by Black students was the feeling that they were treated differently than Latinx students at SJHS. More specifically, in the survey that was conducted by the students in UYLP, Black students and Black girls specifically were more likely to report that their school looked and felt like a prison. In addition, Black students were more likely to report that they did not feel that their voices were heard on campus. These findings were critical for the youth in UYLP because they began to identify how race, specifically anti-Blackness, played a role in their campus climate and how students were treated.

Youth Research Retreat and Raceless Social Justice

For each YPAR project that UYLP youth adopted per course, an overnight retreat was held to mine through the data they collected. At this retreat, the youth developed hypotheses, generated claims, synthesized data from their interviews and surveys, and tested whether they were substantiated by the data. To theoretically ground their project, the students drew from the work of Damien Sojoyner (2016) and his articulation of educational enclosures, and from Paulo Freire (2000) and the 10 major tenets of the banking concept of education. In their demands connected to the project, they wanted the student voice to be reflected in the classroom, and they initially wanted to place a particular emphasis on Black students. The students were interested in uplifting how their school, even though it was dedicated to social justice, did not always manifest its stated values in practice. This is where the most visible racial disparities were, and this is where the students wanted to address anti-Blackness.

While at the retreat, Turner worked with the YPAR team that made the first claim that the UYLP students introduced, arguing that the school-to-prison pipeline played a direct role in taking away opportunities for learning at SJHS. While working with the students on data analysis, one thing that became particularly evident was that Black students consistently reported their school to be a more negative environment than their Latinx peers. For example, in the 250 surveys they collected, 59% of Black males and 64% of Black females agreed that their school looked and felt like a prison, compared to 59% of Latino males and 59% of Latina females. A total of 45% of Black males and 57% of Black females disagreed or strongly disagreed that their school disciplines them fairly, compared to 32% of Latino males and 51% of Latina females. When Shannon, a Black male ninth grader said, "Yo, Black students ain't really f**king with [SJHS] like that," Mr. Randle replied, "Yeah, I know. But we can't just make it about Black students. The teachers won't hear it. Trust me, as soon as you mention race, they will shut down." In this moment, Mr. Randle engages managerialist subterfuge by suggesting that the teachers will not be receptive to a racial justice analysis-undermining students' ability to accurately name their oppression prevents them from fully addressing the mechanisms that uphold it. This type of managerialism returned in other parts of the project.

Connected to the interviews from the Black male and female interviewees, the students asserted that Blackness played a role in the negative ways that students were treated. As an initial piece of their project, the students wanted to include the video recordings of their Black peers in the presentation, blocking out their faces but keeping their voices. They wanted the teachers and staff who would be receiving this presentation to see that Black students were the ones with these critiques of the school, thus they needed literal student voices in the project aside from their own. Turner and students worked together to locate the appropriate technology to make the visual and audio components complement their data and findings. Ultimately, youth put together an extremely well-done and convincing presentation though it still needed some work before their official presentation some weeks ahead.

At the Urban Leaders Institute (the larger program behind the UYLP initiative) office, the students got together with Urban Leaders Institute staff members and Mr. Randle to practice their presentation before the big youth activism conference where they were going to debut their findings. At the office, youth uploaded the videos into the presentation, and they were giving the presentation some final run throughs before everyone went to sleep for the night. In the first official full run-through, the students played the interviews. When the students played an excerpt from their video with a quote from one of the Black female students that they interviewed, Mr. Randle vehemently refused to include it, saying,

No. No. No. If you use that video, or even mention her race, they are going to know that it's her, and she's always brought up in teacher's meetings. Same for the student that Bryce interviewed. We can't use those, or make it tie back to them, because those are the bad students. Let's chop up those quotes and take their identity out of it.

At that point, both Turner and students were confused about this assertion. When asked about these teachers' meetings, Mr. Randle assured us that he knew his coworkers, and that they had particular sensitivities to race and racial discourse. When Turner reminded him of the importance of connecting what the students experienced back to the data, he doubled down on his assertions, suggesting again that "they will shut down as soon as you just make this about Black students. Let's just use their quotes and take the video out of it. And especially her." The students ended up making the adjustment after working until 1:00 a.m. to practice, and it changed the nature of their project. Without the explicit focus on Blackness, the project became more about how all students felt about SJHS, even though Black students felt the greatest sense of alienation and had the most to say about SJHS.

Respectability and Managing Race

Respectability, as a term, represents the ways that marginalized groups attempt to present an image of themselves that appeals to the moral sensibilities of the dominant group. Evelyn Higginbotham (1993) defined respectability as "a deliberate, highly self-conscious concession to hegemonic values" (p. 193). It also represents the multifaceted ways that marginalized groups attempt to police each other in order to make their political and social issues coherent. In the case of the students who had their videos taken out of the project, both their race and their reputations were critical factors in the decision-making process to exclude them. The students who were interviewed were not perfect victims, and Mr. Randle highlighted how the behaviors of those students came up in staff meetings, and essentially, because they were not deemed respectable, their experiences were disqualifying. The attack on Black youth, particularly working-class and poor Black youth, is done when "Black elites draw the line between honorable, hardworking, and respectable young Blacks," which then isolates the "deviant, drug selling, and baby producing ones" ( Cohen, 2010, p. 20). In this instance as in others, respectability becomes a project of anti-Blackness rendering issues that primarily affected Black individuals illegible ( Cohen, 1999).

This process, while it may seem small and even practical to some, is connected to managerialist subterfuge in two major ways. First, the students being discouraged from making it about race, especially at a school that claims to care about social justice, connects to a larger strategy for the ways that racial justice may be hinted at but never structurally addressed. Second, because the youth were explicitly discouraged from bringing in racialized data, they did not incorporate any racialized demands. This process, in turn, prevented the students from addressing racial inequity in their school in any real or material way. While Mr. Randle certainly wanted the students to be taken seriously by administrators and the teaching staff, in his adherence to the hegemonic values of respectability and color-evasiveness, he managed to deracialize what the students felt was an explicitly racialized experience. They were ultimately able to convince teachers to take on more project-based learning and student-teaching opportunities, but Black students continued to experience anti-Black racism.

Discussion: Toward an Understanding of Youth Activism Amid Managerialist Subterfuge

In both studies, young people who were engaged in the YPAR and advocacy process were derailed in their political imaginations and in their engagement with adults. In Clay's study, the youth wanted to develop a comprehensive teen center as a safe place for autonomous learning, play, and community building to combat teen violence and incubate and community engagement. Instead of following through on that vision, youth were encouraged to think within the confines of both the existing city budget and Milton's current political structures. Young people in the Upward Bound CBES were encouraged to merely participate in city politics as opposed to taking an active role in determining and shaping its future, and this process circumvented the demand of the students for Milton's political economy to invest in youth. Because of this, youth began thinking of ways to generate revenue, and they fell victim to the neoliberal logic of prioritizing private revenue accumulation as the foundation for advancing social change.

In Turner's study, the young people of the UYLP CBES who were engaged in the YPAR process were encouraged to not explicitly racialize their demands. Even though the students noticed a clear disparity between the ways that Black students were responding to issues compared to other students, they were still cautioned against making the issue a "Black issue." With the deracialization of their project, the students came up with recommendations for practices that did not provide an intervention into the rather explicit anti-Black bias that students experienced on campus.

Both examples represent the ways that managerialist subterfuge plays a role in the management and control of young people. Youth can, and often do, have radical critiques and imagine interventions into systems of inequity and oppression ( Turner, 2018). While some of these critiques can be contradictory and even inaccurate ( Clay, 2019a; Tuck & Yang, 2014), other times, young people can provide both the strategic direction and the mobilizing force to create transformative demands that work to shift systems ( Gordon, 2009; Turner, 2016). However, what we learned in our study, consistent with some literature in critical youth studies, is that there is a concerted effort to control youth activism and the activism of communities of color ( Kwon, 2013; Rodriguez, 2007). Our study adds to theory and research on the ways that youth activism is co-opted by naming a precise method of co-optation-managerialist subterfuge-in its attempt to funnel radical or progressive youth activism into more bureaucratic and limited goals or into processes that do not explicitly implicate the state and its proxies. In this sense, the political imaginations of youth in both Clay and Turner's projects were circumscribed in ways that ushered them in line with the role of bureaucratic managers who provide technical solutions to maintain the status quo or, at best, marginally improve conditions for some, rather than social actors who transform systems or relationships of power. In working to transform these relationships of power in mind, we offer some analytic tools for both practitioners and scholars to use as they engage in YPAR projects and organizing with young people.

Managerialist Subterfuge as Bureaucratizing Change

One common theme across both studies was attempts to bureaucratize the demands of the youth in ways that were not authentic to the youths progressive or radical visions for social transformation. In Clay's study, city representatives attempted to bureaucratize youths'' vision for the youth center by funneling young people's energy into both the existing city planning process and budgetary model as well as by connecting the youth to "opportunities to learn about the civic process." These moves saw youths attempting to realize radical goals through bureaucratic action as their priorities shifted to budgetary planning and fundraising schemes in lieu of direct-action approaches that could have pushed the city to reallocate spending in ways that supported the youths visions in the first place ( Kwon, 2013; Lacques-Zapien & Mendoza, 2014).

Managerialist Subterfuge as Absolving the State

Another common theme across studies was the underlying "risk" presented to youths by adult actors of explicitly naming state-facilitated disjuncture and harm across both contexts. In Turner's study, the students were explicit about uplifting the voices of Black students and naming anti-Black racism. Even though they still ultimately made a presentation and helped to shift some of the school's teaching practices, by not naming anti-Black racism, Black students still continued to be pushed out of class and not supported in the process. By absolving the teachers of accountability for their own anti-Black practices, which were reflected in the student surveys and interviews, the school then did not have to directly address race. This represents the tension highlighted in Gordon (2009), where youth of color may be organized to become political subjects but still may not have the power necessary to materially change conditions because youth of color and their racialized experiences are on many occasions excluded from key decision-making processes.

Ultimately, we assert that managerialist subterfuge is one specific way that adults have worked to limit and control the progressive political imaginations of young people. To be clear, we do not assert that adult input as a whole is problematic. In some cases, older adult allies have helped to drastically improve the strategy and organizing of young people (see Payne, 2007; Ransby, 2003). While we know that there are adult allies who are interested in transforming relationships of power, we use our ethnographic vignettes as cautionary tales to provide examples of the ways that adults can use their positions of authority over young people to manage their political ambitions.

Limitations

While our study aimed to analyze the subterfuge of adult managerialism in two youth change projects, one of the major albeit rarely discussed challenges for adults working with youth in PAR and those who facilitate youth-centered approaches to learning is knowing when/how to grapple with challenging or pushing back against youths' ideas, analyses, or approaches to inquiry. Although we do not engage this discussion, it is fair to say that challenging youths' ideas and methods is often necessary, even when adults genuinely support their radical visions for change. Future YPAR scholarship and scholarly discussions of progressive pedagogy would benefit from more deliberate attention to these conflicts and how we might usefully delineate between adult pushback that is ultimately encouraging of change versus other kinds of pushback, like managerialist subterfuge, intended to curtail youths' radical convictions and maintain the status quo.

We also understand that the limitations of time ultimately played a role in determining the outcomes of the campaigns in both Clay and Turner's studies. While neither of us describes the outcomes of these campaigns using terms like "success" or "failure," it is unlikely that the kinds of setbacks both groups encountered in relation to managerialist subterfuge could not have been overcome in longer term struggles.

Implications for Research and Practice

For adult allies who work with youth leaders in their communities, it is often a constant challenge to "get out of the way" of young people, while also guiding them so that they may effectively deliver a campaign victory. While the logic of community organizing sometimes necessitates concession, it does not, however, necessitate that young people cannot explore more radical possibilities in what they seek to accomplish. For example, youth leaders from Innercity Struggle and Community Coalition were able to win a college access campaign in Los Angeles, where they forced the district to provide a college access curriculum to all of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District ( Rogers & Morrell, 2011). College students from the Afrikan Black Coalition, a coalition of Black student unions across the state of California, were able to force the University of California system to divest over 400 million dollars from companies that were invested in private prisons ( Williams, 2016). Poor communities are replete with young people who have radical imaginations and the courage to take action to improve the material conditions of their communities and larger society and/or to waylay the systematic suffering felt by people at the margins. For practitioners and youth workers, it is imperative that we work in solidarity with our youth to help them achieve their most radical visions, not dampen them or steer them away. This study does not suggest that it is best for youth to organize alone, without adult support. History demonstrates the relative strength of multigenerational organizing ( Franklin, 2014). Instead, this study challenges adults allied with youth activists (including the authors) to wrestle with the ways that they show up in spaces.

Adult allies of youth activists or facilitators of YPAR should ask themselves these questions when they engage young people: (1) What is it that young people envision for themselves and their communities that makes me uncomfortable? (2) How does that affect my interactions with them? What specific tools are young people missing that I can provide? (3) How can I help them understand the context and political landscape, while still empowering them to make decisions that best support their visions? (4) How can I encourage and amplify the voices of youth and community members in ways that go beyond typical state-sanctioned bureaucratic solutions (e.g., taskforces, study groups, work groups, etc.)? (5) In what ways can I return decision-making power to youth and community members over public processes and decisions that extend beyond traditional civic engagement approaches?

For scholars, additional research is needed to deeply understand the ways that managerialist subterfuge impacts activism and other forms of social justice work. Other research is needed to compare both context and identity- for example, are girls and femmes managed differently from boys? What about LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning) youth? Does managerialism look different in suburban contexts? How does managerialist subterfuge take place in social movements, where movement demands such as "defund the police" are circumvented for electoral politics? We invite other scholars who study youth activism and social change work to rigorously interrogate the ways that managerialist subterfuge plays a role in the lives of youth activists. By doing so, we can move closer to naming the ways that movements led by youth and communities of color are derailed and weakened in state-like bureaucracy and hesitancy to change the status quo.

Notes

Funding: National Academy of Education/ Spencer Dissertation Fellowship (Clay).

1
The term "adult allies" appears in quotes here not to suggest that adults cannot be legitimate allies to youth in activist work-indeed they often are; instead, we intend to convey through this article that some purported allyships can function in service of undermining youths' visions for material change.

2
Hereafter, all names of people and places in Clay's study are pseudonyms

3
Urban Youth Leadership Program-an initiative of a larger community-based organization-is a pseudonym

4
Social Justice High School is pseudonym. It is a community school in which teachers' dispositions and the workplace culture reflect a "social justice" ethos.

5
Mr. Randle is a pseudonym. He is an African American male in his early 40s at the time of the study.

References

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Maybe You Should Try It This Way Instead": Youth Activism Amid Managerialist Subterfuge - Kevin L. Clay, David C. Turner, 2021

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Abstract The authors theorize what we call managerialist subterfuge, drawing on distinct ethnographic studies to examine how adult "partners" leverage the language and strategies of corporate managerialism to undermine youths' radical visions of change.

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Listen to TTC Summit by Alexander Rodriguez on Apple Music. Stream songs including "Issues / Hold On", "Let It Go (feat. Missy Elliott & Lil 'Kim)" and more.

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Youth Justice Project

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Related to discriminatory screening in exam schools

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Related to discriminatory screening in exam schools

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Some patterns reported across different cities with selective public schools, given COVID and some admissions exams being cancelled

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Lee Cheng graduated from San Francisco's Lowell High School in 1985. He counts himself one of the lucky ones. Lowell High, which was the only local public school specifically for high-performing students, had a strict racial-quota admissions policy when he applied. No racial or ethnic group could comprise more than 40 percent of the school's student body. The rule was aimed at desegregating the district, but even as a teenager, Cheng found it unfair. It meant that Asian students had to score higher on the entrance exam than white students, who in turn had to score higher on the exam than Black and Hispanic applicants. Cheng's friend-his orchestra partner-was not admitted, though if he had been of a different race he might have earned a seat. The boy's parents were poor immigrants-his father a waiter and his mother a seamstress. "He would have gotten in, but for being Chinese," Cheng said.

Years later, after Cheng graduated from Harvard, he and several of his former classmates from Lowell joined a federal class-action lawsuit against San Francisco over the policy, Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District. After five years of litigation, the district agreed to a settlement and abolished its race-based admissions. Instead of adopting a single standard, Lowell tried a variety of systems to achieve the racial balance it sought. In 2001, it adopted a three-band approach. Seventy percent of students were admitted on the basis of their test scores and grades. Another 15 percent were admitted on a combination of those factors plus some more holistic considerations such as community service and demonstrated ability to overcome hardship. The remainder of the students were selected from underrepresented schools.

In October 2020, that system ended-perhaps temporarily, but in all likelihood permanently. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, all of the students in San Francisco public schools received only pass-fail grades in the spring semester of the 2019-20 school year, and the exam for admissions was never administered. In the spring of 2021, applicants will be chosen for Lowell with the same formula used at other schools in the city-some combination of lottery, sibling preference, and geography. Covid-19 may have provided the impetus for the change, but the new policy also plays into a political phenomenon: in the past few years, pressure has been building for the city to reconfigure the school's student body so that it more accurately mirrors the racial composition of the city.

Lowell is not alone among the specialty schools, known as exam schools or magnet schools, in deciding to change its admissions standards this year. According to a survey conducted by Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett for their 2012 book Exam Schools, there are about 165 stand-alone public high schools with selective admissions processes in the United States. Some of the biggest and most renowned of them are currently undergoing existential debates. Boston will not be administering the test it previously required for admission to its three academically competitive schools. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the district has announced plans to eliminate the test for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and admit students from a lottery of applicants who have at least a 3.5 GPA and a year of algebra. And in New York City, parents anxiously awaited an announcement for almost a year about the test date for Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science, three schools whose entrance is determined entirely by test scores. Admission to other "screened schools" in the city that use the same exam but also judge students on other criteria was altered to eliminate preference for students who live near the schools, and there is still a possibility that the test for those schools will be abolished.

While the leaders of all four of these school systems assert that the pandemic-driven modifications are temporary, they face tremendous pressure by activists and political leaders to make long-term changes to their admissions policies because the student populations of the specialty schools do not reflect the racial composition of the areas where they're located. In some cases, that pressure is likely to result in permanent changes that would fundamentally alter the character of these schools. Indeed, the Covid crisis seems to have provided an ideal opportunity for activists, school administrators, and politicians to effect the systemic transformation they have been pushing for years.
Lowell High School in San Francisco
The proposed change at Lowell, a school of about 2,700 students whose graduates include Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, comedian Carol Channing, and novelist Jennifer Egan, was announced with little fanfare the Friday before Columbus Day weekend in 2020. The San Francisco Board of Education met the following Tuesday to hear public comment about the proposal. At the five-hour Zoom meeting, which was recorded, the board set aside one hour-30 minutes for those who supported the change and 30 for those who opposed it-with each speaker given 60 seconds before his or her microphone was cut off. The opposition included parents, students, and alumni. A number of speakers wondered why the decision seemed so rushed. Others asked why grades from previous years couldn't be used as a factor in the application process.

The supporters of the change spoke not only about the small percentage of African American students at Lowell but also about their experiences of racism there. In February 2016, about two dozen of the school's Black students walked out of school and marched to city hall to protest a Black History Month poster created by a non-Black student. The poster featured rappers and a picture of President Barack Obama wearing a diamond stud earring, as well as the hashtag #gang.

At the October 2020 school-board meeting, Shavonne Hines-Foster, one of two student representatives on the board, spoke immediately after the public comment period. A Black student at Lowell, she decried the "privilege" of those opposed to the change, wondering why these people had not spoken up about the racism at her school or a suicide there or reports of sexual assault. Some of the opponents, who apparently had not been fully muted, began to speak over her, questioning the relevance of her comments to the proposal.

At this point, the other board members grew visibly angry-one seemed to be in tears. They not only demanded that the moderator mute the offenders but also that he kick them out of the meeting entirely. The moderator asked, "Did we catch names?" and the board members began to call out names of people who had interrupted. One board member said, "Yeah, I'm listening to a lot of racist people." No racial slurs or insults were audible on the recording, but another board member noted, "This was not a good day for San Francisco," referring to the interruptions as "disgusting" and a source of "ugliness." Another noted that "when we talk about meritocracy . . . these are racist systems," and she decried the "Trumpian language" of the proposal's opponents, noting that tests like this one and the SATs "began as ways to justify racism."

One white parent of an 8th grader told me in a phone interview that his son had been planning to apply to Lowell this year but no longer sees the point, given the new admissions policy. Lowell is one of the only schools in the city that this father thinks could give his son a real education. The man declined to be named in this article because his son was applying to private schools and he worried that the boy's chances of admission there would be diminished if he were among the parents labeled "racist" for supporting merit-based admissions. A self-described progressive, this father says that he has been "shocked" at just how disconnected the board is from the people they represent. "I can't deny their reality, but it's so far from the reality I'm living in, it's laughable," he said.

San Francisco already has one of the nation's largest percentages (55 percent) of students attending private schools. New York, by contrast, has only 20 percent. The change in Lowell's admissions policy is likely to make more middle-class families either flee to the suburbs or send their children to private schools, especially since the board's desire to remake the admissions system shows no signs of abating. At the October 2020 school-board meeting, the vice president of the board ended the discussion by saying that "if there's a way to extend this [new admissions system] past this year, to end this illegal process, I will support that." All but one of the other members made it clear that they agreed.
Boston's Exam Schools
Boston School Committee chair Michael Loconto resigned in October 2020 after he was heard on a hot microphone mocking the Asian names of some of the speakers during a meeting about a plan to transform exam-school admissions. But that was not enough to derail the proposal.

The city's three exam schools-Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the O'Bryant School for Mathematics and Science-had required applicants to submit test scores and grades. For admission in fall 2021, the board has adopted a policy whereby the top 20 percent of admitted students will be chosen solely on their grades, with students across the city competing for the spots. The remaining 80 percent will be selected on the basis of grades and by zip code, with students from the lowest-income zip codes given preference. In 2019, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius replaced the Independent School Entrance Examination, a test also used by private schools, with the MAP, or Measure of Academic Progress. The objection to the ISEE was that it included questions about material not covered in typical public-school curricula, and research indicates that the exam puts Black students at a disadvantage. But what began as a move to replace one admissions test with another became a plan to eliminate the entrance exam for the 2021-22 admissions cycle because of Covid-19.

Boston schools did not return to in-person learning in fall 2020, so the administration of the test presented a challenge, though other tests such as the SATs were offered in Boston Public School buildings. But then, as with Lowell, many parents asked why the school couldn't simply use grades that were available. Why the new zip code approach?

Boston too, it seems, is using Covid as an opportunity to solve what its leadership sees as a race problem. The problem is not new. In 1974, as part of the city's busing plan, Judge W. Arthur Garrity required exam schools to reserve 35 percent of their seats for underrepresented minorities. But a quarter century later, the First Circuit Court of Appeals struck down these explicit racial set-asides. The percentage of Black and Hispanic students at the city's exam schools fell to about 16 percent from about 30 percent. And the number at Boston Latin School-the most prestigious of the three magnet schools-is closer to 8 percent.

Racial tensions have continued to present a problem as well. The Boston Public Schools' Office of Equity found that between November 2014 and January 2016 there were seven race-related incidents at Boston Latin School, most of which were related to social media postings by students. The office said that the school's internal policy was violated in one of those incidents. In 2016, the U.S. Attorney's Office launched an investigation and found the school to be in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for failing to properly investigate the allegation of a threat by a white male student to lynch a Black female student, among other incidents. The school's headmaster and assistant headmaster resigned.

Under this year's admissions plan for the magnet schools, each zip code would be assigned a certain number of seats based on the average household income in the zip code and the number of school-age children who live there. Supporters believe that what they see as the more-equitable distribution of seats across the city will help the underserved communities and also make Black and Hispanic students feel more comfortable at the exam schools. The Boston Globe noted in reference to Loconto's ethnic slur at the school-board meeting: "It was an awkward moment for members. . . . Nearly seven hours into the Oct. 21 meeting, exhausted members seemed to struggle to comprehend how a political leader who was on the verge of shepherding through a historic change that would provide Black and Latino applicants with greater access to the exam schools could at the same time disrespect another community of color."

Critics of the new program, such as Darragh Murphy, a longtime Dorchester resident who attended Boston Latin School in the 1980s, don't have trouble comprehending this at all. Murphy, who is white, said she believes that the school board decided on the result they wanted "and then worked backward." The point here, she and others hold, was to reduce the percentage of Asians at Boston Latin School. Chinatown, for instance, has a high average income, driven up by the presence of some luxury apartments, but the families applying to exam schools from this area are not wealthy. Chinatown is projected by the school district to lose exam school seats under the changes.

Fania Feghali and her husband are first-generation Lebanese immigrants who live in West Roxbury, a neighborhood of the city that is projected to lose exam-school seats under the new system. Feghali is an auditor, and her husband is a diesel mechanic. She studied the website Greatschools.com before choosing a place to live and says the most important thing to her was "preparedness for college." The cheapest private high school near her charges $23,000 annually. The Feghalis currently have two children in a local Catholic school (which they struggle to afford at $7,000 annually) but will consider moving from the city if their 6th grader cannot get into Boston Latin School. "My responsibility as a parent is to offer my kids the best education I can," Feghali told me.

Like many other parents, Feghali does not understand why the exam couldn't have been offered despite Covid. Her own children have been going to school in person every day since September, and there were no positive cases at the school in the fall. Why was offering a socially distanced in-person test deemed impossible?
New York City
That is a question eating away at parents all over New York City. With the city's schools having returned to at least some form of in-person learning for most of fall 2020, the postponement of the Specialized High School Admissions Test (the test required for admissions to three exam schools and various other screened schools) makes even less sense in the Big Apple than it does in San Francisco or Boston. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have expressed their outrage over the small number of Black and Hispanic students admitted to Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science. In 2019, for instance, Stuyvesant offered admittance to 895 students. Only seven of them were Black, down from 10 the year before. When the topic of schools came up at a recent mayoral press conference, a reporter noted that de Blasio campaigned on "a tale of two cities" and asked the mayor which one Asians belonged to. De Blasio replied, "The specialized high schools still don't make sense."

It is worth asking, though, why the schools are not seen as equitable to begin with. Wai Wah Chin, who has had four children graduate from Stuyvesant and is the president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York, notes that "when you have kids chosen only by merit, that's fair. If you start jiggering, all sorts of abuses happen." She asserts that with a strictly exam-based system, no one knows "whether parents are rich or poor or whether a kid is tall or fat. The only question is: Can you do the work?"

While some outsiders may assume that the fact that the big three exam schools in New York are majority Asian means that they are catering to a wealthier population, this is far from true. More than half of the students at these schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. (While New York City offers free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of income, officials use Medicaid data to determine which students would qualify by income so the city can receive reimbursement from the federal government.) Many of them are the children of recent immigrants. Unlike middle- and upper-class New Yorkers, they don't have resources for high-cost tutoring. But, as Chin notes, you can get practice tests out of the local public library.
Questioning Admissions Tests
Some observers wonder whether it makes sense for public high schools to require admissions tests at all. Why shouldn't schools funded by tax dollars be open to anyone residing in the jurisdiction? If charter schools can help even students from the most difficult circumstances succeed without screening applicants, why can't other public schools? Though an exam-based process may seem evenhanded, that's not so when schools fail entirely to prepare broad swaths of the student population in the years leading up to high school. The racial disparities in exam-school enrollment, these critics say, just make the inequities among these students all the more glaring.

For one thing, the older students get, the harder it is to make up for these educational deficits. Perhaps that's why no one seems to object that public universities don't accept every state resident who applies. And it's why almost no elementary schools require admissions tests-though some of them offer gifted and talented programs that may have academic criteria for participation. What's more, the most successful charter schools require a strong degree of parental support and commitment that mirrors that of the low-income parents who manage to get their children into the exam schools.

Prior to the Covid crisis, de Blasio's hands were tied. In 1971, the state legislature in Albany mandated that admission to the big three and five smaller schools be based on an exam, thereby heading off an attempt by New York City leaders to shelve the test. And state leaders so far have shown little signs of movement. Last year, the mayor pushed an alternative plan that would offer admission to the top 7 percent of students at each middle school. An analysis by the state budget office concluded that under de Blasio's plan, "About 19 percent of admissions offers would have gone to Black students, compared with the less than 4 percent who actually attended specialized high schools in 2017-2018. Hispanic students would have received about 27 percent of admission offers, compared with the 6 percent of Hispanic 9th graders who attended the schools last year. The number of Asian students receiving admissions offers would have fallen by about half, to just over 31 percent, while offers to white students would have remained relatively flat."

The mayor's proposal did not even get a vote. Alumni, led by businessman and philanthropist Ronald Lauder, a Bronx High School of Science graduate, launched a multimillion-dollar campaign opposing the change. Asian groups also pressured lawmakers, who probably didn't want to risk harming the schools' international reputation. The big three have produced 14 Nobel Prizewinners among them, more than most countries. On the other hand, the November 2020 election brought Democrats a supermajority in the Assembly and Senate, meaning that they could change the rules, even over the governor's objections.

In December 2020, the mayor announced other sweeping changes to the system. The city will eliminate all screening for middle schools for at least one year. Formerly, almost half of the city's middle schools used grades, attendance, and test scores as admissions criteria. At least for now, all middle-school admissions will be determined by lottery. In January, the mayor also announced that the city's education department would no longer test children entering kindergarten for gifted programs.

The exam-school question became a campaign issue in a state assembly race in Brooklyn, where a Republican challenger accused a Democratic incumbent of wanting to dismantle the schools, a charge the Democrat denied. The Republican lost by the narrowest of margins in a district that has been held by Democrats for 80 years.

Asians are hardly the only supporters of the Specialized High School Admissions Test and the idea that admission to these schools should be based strictly on merit. Barbara Rivera, who came to this country 20 years ago from Hungary and met her husband here, says the real problem is the pipeline from lower-school grades. She remembers that, when her son was entering elementary school, a judge who lived on her street in Borough Park advised her to get her son into a gifted program. She didn't think he was gifted and dismissed the idea of sending him to a school farther away from home. By the time he was in 3rd grade, though, it became increasingly obvious to her that her son's school was not very serious. She remembers a teacher marveling that her son "passed a test."

"Why," she wondered, "was the bar so low? Because his last name is Rivera?"

Indeed, the key question in so many of these debates over exam schools is whether it makes sense to wait until high school to try to address inequities in public education. Why aren't more elementary and middle schools successfully preparing students for these exams in the first place? Commenting on Boston's new admissions policy suspending the entrance exam, Darragh Murphy wrote in the Dorchester Reporter in November 2020, "The real tragedy is that all this disruption imposed on our 6th and 8th grade families and schools by our mayor and city council is designed to hide the real crisis that we have allowed to grow more dire with every passing year-that the mostly Black and Latinx kids in our Boston public elementary schools are being failed by our leaders and administrators."

Preparing such students to compete for a spot in a specialized high school is not impossible. In 2018, students of color at three middle schools run by the large Success Academy Charter Schools network in New York were three to four times as likely to gain admission to the exam schools as students in the same demographic citywide.

In other words, it is possible for young people in all racial and ethnic groups to achieve academic success and gain admission to competitive exam schools, but for that to happen at scale would require the kind of systemic change in public-school education that politicians and other leaders have not been willing to make, in New York and elsewhere.

The dispute seems to be reaching a boiling point in New York City. While wealthier New Yorkers have been able to flee the city during the pandemic, the middle and working classes of all races have been stuck and increasingly frustrated with remote learning, as well as the confused messages and lack of leadership from the mayor and chancellor. A public opinion poll in October 2020 showed that three times as many New Yorkers want the state to take over the city school system as want the mayor to remain in control. In early December, a coalition of groups who oppose the exam wrote to Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, asking him to lift the testing requirement this year through executive order, but the governor's unwillingness to change things before does not bode well for the activists' demands. Another group filed suit against the city, demanding that the mayor and chancellor set a date for the test. Eventually, the mayor announced a January 27 test date for the city's 8th graders.

The Boston plan could sail through without any state involvement, just as San Francisco's has. Boston may face more legal scrutiny, though, because its convoluted formula seems designed to achieve a particular racial result. (San Francisco's, by contrast, simply makes Lowell's admissions criteria the same as every other school in the city.) As Joshua Thompson of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that has litigated racial discrimination cases, notes, "There are legal methods to challenge policies that have a facially neutral purpose but have a differential effect." While he says these cases are hard to challenge during Covid, going forward opponents could "try to get at the true purpose of the law. If racial balance is the goal, it should be enjoined." Given how open these politicians and school leaders have been about wanting more racial balance-and even their blatant bias in some cases-that would seem easy to prove.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia
Earlier this fall, the Pacific Legal Foundation sent a letter to the Fairfax County School Board warning them that their attempt at racial balancing is "patently unconstitutional." Citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the letter notes that "when examining the outcomes of the merit lottery process, it is impossible to see the changes to the TJ admissions process as anything other than an attempt at racial balancing according to the demographics of Fairfax County."

A few weeks later, the board altered the plan. It now would reserve 100 slots for the highest-evaluated students based on a holistic review of their applications, including recommendations or a problem-solving essay. The remaining 400 seats would be filled by "merit lottery," with seats divided evenly among students with a minimum 3.5 GPA in the geographic areas Thomas Jefferson serves. But these changes did nothing to address the legal criticisms made by the Pacific Legal Foundation lawyers.

The battle over Thomas Jefferson-a regional magnet school that consistently ranks at the top of the U.S. News and Newsweek surveys of America's best high schools and that regularly claims winners of nationwide science competitions-began almost a decade ago with a civil rights lawsuit filed by the NAACP in 2012. The filing asserted that Black and Latino students were being shut out of Thomas Jefferson because Fairfax County consistently fails to identify them for gifted programs during the lower grades. Despite renewed outreach efforts, the district has failed to get more Black and Hispanic students into Thomas Jefferson. Today, the student body is 71 percent Asian, 19.5 percent white, 2.6 percent Latino or Hispanic, 1.7 percent Black, and 4.7 percent students who identify as another ethnicity.

Last year, the school's racial soul-searching took on a new tone and urgency. In June, the principal sent a note to parents explaining that "the recent events in our nation with Black citizens facing death and continued injustices remind us that we each have a responsibility to our community to speak up and take actions that counter racism and discrimination in our society." Among the concrete steps she recommended was replacing the school's mascot, an American Colonial figure, because of "colonialism's role in our country's history where certain classes exerted power over others as a means to economically exploit, oppress, and enslave them." After noting that Thomas Jefferson's racial makeup does not mirror the community's, she asked, "Do the TJ admissions outcomes affirm that we believe TJ is accessible to all talented STEM-focused students regardless of race or personal circumstance?"

Many parents objected to the changes in the admissions process, and the debate has become bitter. Suparna Dutta, the parent of a sophomore at Thomas Jefferson, worries that plans for racial rebalancing run the risk of making this country more like her native India. The quota system instituted for education and employment there to make up for the caste system of old, she says, has "led to a lot of brain drain. People flee for better opportunities." Now, she says, "I'm afraid my adopted country is going down this road."

What is particularly curious about the proposal to eliminate Thomas Jefferson's exam and simply admit students by lottery is that the school's white population is projected to more than double under the new criteria, going from 18 percent of Thomas Jefferson students to as high as 48 percent-figures that were calculated by a parent group called the Coalition for TJ. Even if Fairfax County accomplished all of the outreach to Black and Hispanic families that the district promises-something it has failed to do in the past-the end result of the district's attempt to achieve racial balance would be the presence of many more white children at Thomas Jefferson.

The potential increase in white students at Thomas Jefferson is just one of many unintended consequences that could arise from the admissions-policy changes in San Francisco, Virginia, New York, and Boston. It seems likely that these urban areas will lose a significant number of families to private schools or to the suburbs. Some of the policy changes may prove to be temporary, but with cities seeing higher rates of crime and homelessness and so many professional jobs going remote, many families may see the shifting admissions practices at these schools as the final straw.

Like the school boards in San Francisco and Boston, the Fairfax County board has become the subject of public ire this year and seems increasingly disconnected from the families it is supposed to serve. Schools there did not reopen in the fall of 2020. A recent study found that remote learning resulted in an increase of 83 percent in students who are failing two or more classes. The district came under heavy criticism in fall 2020 after paying the anti-racism activist and scholar Ibram X. Kendi $20,000 for a one-hour presentation to school leaders. The district sent out a memo discouraging parents from forming educational pods for their children because "they may widen the gap in educational access and equity for all students." Meanwhile, the superintendent himself has enrolled his own child in private school. The district's parents seem more interested in the failures going on in their children's (virtual) classrooms than any of the racial drama on offer.

Perhaps realizing that the lawsuits over racial bias seem rarely to provide clear answers and also can take years to wind their way through the court system, the opponents of this change at Thomas Jefferson have tried a new tactic. In November 2020, they filed a lawsuit arguing that the proposed change in admissions requirements goes against the Virginia law establishing and regulating Governor's Schools-of which Thomas Jefferson is one-meant to serve gifted students. That law specifically requires that Governor's Schools include a "nationally norm-referenced aptitude test" as part of the process for identifying children with particular academic aptitudes. The plaintiffs argue that "under the No-Testing Decision, the Thomas Jefferson Governor's School will no longer be a high school devoted to the education of gifted students."

The Indian-born author Asra Nomani, whose son is a student at Thomas Jefferson, said that demanding that the school district serve gifted children-just as they serve other kinds of learners-will prove more effective than a racial-bias argument. "Kids that are advanced learners have faster processing skills. They're the ones firing questions at teachers and yet do not have great social skills," Nomani said. These may be generalizations, but there is certainly a case to be made that school districts serve students with such varying levels of skills and aptitudes that a one-size-fits-all approach is not going to meet anyone's needs well.

One thing that's clear is that schools for gifted students are oversubscribed. When Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York, for instance, he expanded the number of screened schools-but even that did not meet the demand.

It is possible that some of these urban parents are not even looking for "gifted education," but simply a decent education for their children. Many parents of academically motivated students are not worried about science competitions and just want their children to learn in the company of other strivers. Even though there is some evidence that the schools themselves do not make an enormous difference in the future prospects of their students-at least when it comes to college enrollment, college graduation, or college quality-parents may want their children to be in an environment with peers who have similar interests.

Though many politicians, school-board members, and activists may see the Covid crisis as an opportunity to change longstanding admissions policies they view as faulty, the pandemic also seems to be a kind of double-edged sword for education policy. The switch to remote learning and the failures of public education to deliver even basic instruction during this crisis have forced a laser focus on school and district leadership by parents nationwide. Middle-class parents who were previously able to find ways for their children to get a decent education have found themselves frustrated and angry at local politicians and school administrators for running roughshod over the interests of their children. And plans for radically altering some of the only schools that seem to be working are not going over well.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.

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Exam-School Admissions Come Under Pressure amid Pandemic

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Lee Cheng graduated from San Francisco's Lowell High School in 1985. He counts himself one of the lucky ones. Lowell High, which was the only local public school specifically for high-performing students, had a strict racial-quota admissions policy when he applied. No racial or ethnic group could comprise more than 40 percent of the school's student body.

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Would love to have the texts and recordings of these poems to use as mentor texts in my 9th grade classroom...

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"Common core standard for human decency"

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Can we get panelists' contact info? I missed it!

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Heard an incredible quote during this lunch talk!

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Gary Orfield's 2016 Report

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https://www.epictheatreensemble.org/fifty/