These Kids

Identity, Agency, and Social Justice at a Last Chance High School

By KYSA NYGREEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03142-2

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………viiIntroduction: The Paradox of Getting Ahead……………………………1PART I. Social and Historical Contexts……………………………….CHAPTER 1. Situating Jackson High: Last Chance High Schools and the
Discourse of These Kids…………………………………………….25CHAPTER 2. Being Professional: Figured Worlds and the Construction of
Self……………………………………………………………..49PART II. Theorizing Identity and Agency………………………………CHAPTER 3. People Have the Power: Critical Consciousness and Political
Identity in PARTY………………………………………………….75CHAPTER 4. From Theory to Practice: Teacher Identity, Agency, and
Reproduction at Jackson High………………………………………..102PART III. Dilemmas of Social Justice at the Last Chance High School……..CHAPTER 5. Paradigms of Educational Justice: Contested Curricular Goals in
the Social Justice Class……………………………………………133CHAPTER 6. Social Justice for “These Kids”……………………………156Appendix: Last Chance Literature Review Coding Methods…………………179Notes…………………………………………………………….187References………………………………………………………..195Index…………………………………………………………….211

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Situating Jackson High:Last Chance High Schools and theDiscourse of These Kids

The Maytown City School District operated one comprehensive highschool, the well-regarded Maytown High, a large and racially diverseschool with over three thousand students. Most local residentsknew this as the city’s only public high school and did not know, or easilyforgot, that a second high school operated just a few blocks away. Locatedon a busy intersection at the corner of Cesar Chavez Boulevardand Henry Street, Jackson High was a nondescript, modest complex offreshly painted portable classrooms enclosing a small interior courtyardof grass and cement. Although few Maytown residents were aware of itsexistence, Jackson High was a school where students fulfilled basic graduationrequirements and earned high school diplomas, and where credentialedteachers and administrators worked under the same employmentcontract as those in the rest of the school district. But Jackson wasa continuation high school, and even though every school district in Californiais required to maintain at least one such school, continuation highschools remain largely absent from the general public’s consciousness(Kelly 1993a). Further, among Maytown residents who did know aboutJackson—because they either worked in the school district, lived nearby,or had a child transferred there—the school’s reputation was decidedlynegative, seen as a dumping ground for the worst students in the city.

Maytown is a small city of approximately one hundred thousand residentsin the middle of a large, urbanized metropolitan area. Its populationin 2000 was 59.0 percent white, 16.0 percent Asian, 14.0 percentAfrican American, 5.0 percent from “other races,” and 6.0 percent multiracial.Ten percent of residents were classified as Latino/a (of any race),and less than 1.0 percent each as Native American and Pacific Islander.Maytown is home to many well-educated professionals with high-statusoccupations, and median family income is substantially higher than stateand national medians. Despite these signs of privilege, Maytown containssubstantial socioeconomic diversity, and it is a city in which raceand class are largely conflated such that lower-income neighborhoodsare predominantly African American (and increasingly Latino) whilehigher-income neighborhoods are predominantly white. When I arrivedat Jackson as a classroom teacher, the school was 81.0 percent AfricanAmerican (compared with 36.0 percent at Maytown High), 4.0 percentwhite (compared with 41.0 percent at Maytown High), and 54.0 percentof its students qualified for free/reduced-price meals (compared with5.7 percent at Maytown High). Its students came disproportionately, ifnot entirely, from the poorest neighborhoods of the city. With a mix ofapartments, small single-family homes, and public housing units, theseneighborhoods were known around the city as centers of gun violence,street crime, and poverty. Underscoring this image, small corner liquorstores and street signs warning potential drug dealers to stay away werevisible on almost every block.

Like most continuation programs in the state, Jackson provided onlythe bare basics of a high school education—just enough to fulfill minimumrequirements for a diploma but too little to qualify a student foradmission to a state university. In addition to being excluded from collegepreparatory courses, Jackson students were barred from participationin extracurricular activities at Maytown High, including sports,even though Jackson itself offered no extracurricular programs. Everyyear, fierce debates ensued about whether Jackson students should be allowedto attend Maytown High School’s homecoming festivities, prom,and graduation ceremonies. Many Maytown parents, administrators,and teachers considered the Jackson students too dangerous and threateningto participate in these activities.

Approximately 10 percent of California’s secondary students attendcontinuation high schools (Ruiz de Velasco et al. 2008), and yet relativelylittle educational research has focused on these schools. In this chapter,I attempt to make up some of this ground by providing a thorough historyand discussion of continuation high schools, their development,and relative positioning vis-à-vis “regular” high schools. Deirdre Kelly’sbook Last Chance High (1993a) provides perhaps the most thorough historyof continuation high schools available in print. In it, Kelly reconstructsthe history of these schools from their inception in 1919 throughthe 1980s, focusing on their role and positioning within the overall systemof secondary schooling. Drawing extensively from Kelly’s work, thischapter highlights two key insights that are significant to the story I willtell about the PARTY project at Jackson High. First, instead of providingan alternative for students, Kelly argues, continuation high schoolshave largely reproduced the deep structures and practices of mainstreamschooling. Second, her analysis shows how continuation students havepersistently been defined in opposition to normative standards of the”successful” student and with the use of deficiency tropes that positioncontinuation students as inferior.

Building from these points, this chapter shows how policy discoursesassociated with the establishment and maintenance of a last chance highschool system contributed to the development of a new social category or”kind of kid”: the at-risk, dropout-prone youth for whom special schoolingin a segregated context is (presumed to be) needed. In using theterm kind of kid throughout this and future chapters, I am drawing fromJames Gee’s (2000) notion of “kinds of people” to refer to social categoriesthat become sources of identity. At Jackson High, other teachersand I often used the phrase these kids as a shorthand way of talkingabout this particular kind of kid. This term appeared in comments suchas “These kids need discipline” or “I don’t know how to handle thesekids!” As a classroom teacher myself, when I talked about “these kids,”I meant to convey a bundle of unspoken assumptions and meanings:as opposed to “normal” or “mainstream” high school students, “thesekids” were constructed as deficient, deviant, and difficult. In this chapter,I show that these kids was not simply a localized term used amongJackson teachers but representative of a broader public discourse aboutyouth who are socially located at the bottom end of the educational hierarchy.I identify what I call the discourse of these kids—a dominant educationaldiscourse defining who these kids are, what they need, why theyare a problem, and what the purpose of high school is (or should be) forthem. I examine the historical development of this discourse as well asits scope and reach in contemporary policy, practitioner, and researchtexts. This historical and discursive analysis of continuation high schoolsand their students provides essential context for understanding the dynamicsof the PARTY project and Jackson High.

The (Attempted) Makeover of Jackson High

In my second year as a teacher at Jackson, the school’s negative reputationwas addressed in a faculty meeting. Eight Jackson teachers—fourblack and four white, including me—sat around a rectangular conferencetable. At the head sat our principal, Mr. Jones, and the principalof Maytown High, Ms. Dawson, both African American. After briefintroductions, the principals informed the teachers that Jackson Highwas going to change. It looked bad, they told us, to be a predominantlyblack school in a racially diverse city, especially when enrollment was involuntaryrather than a choice. Two things needed to happen: Jacksonneeded to become “diverse,” and enrollment needed to become voluntary.It would be our responsibility to recruit and retain a more diversestudent body at Jackson. At this point, the middle-aged African Americanman who taught math asked the principals if by “diverse” studentsthey meant white students. Without the slightest hesitation, Ms. Dawsonreplied affirmatively. Then an older African American woman whohad taught at Jackson for more than a decade cleared her throat and proceededslowly, as if contemplating her words with great care, and askedMs. Dawson if she could please explain what white students in the cityof Maytown would ever choose to enroll at Jackson. Ms. Dawson againreplied without any hesitation. There were plenty of students, she said,who were alienated from the mainstream educational system—hippies,punks, skaters, ravers—and these were the kids we should target for recruitmentto Jackson High.

Although not mentioned at this faculty meeting, this was not the firsttime Jackson had sought to rehabilitate its image by attracting white studentsof the hippie-punk-raver variety. In the late 1960s, the school officiallychanged its name from South End Continuation High School toJackson High School. The move was intended to eliminate the stigma associatedwith South End, which by then had become known as a dumpingground for the district’s worst students. Then as now, South End wasa predominantly African American and high-poverty school, in sharpcontrast to the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the city of Maytownand its other public schools. Under a visionary new principal, the newlynamed Jackson High implemented a program of nontraditional pedagogyand branded itself an “alternative” high school. At the time, theschool district was experimenting with several small alternative schools,and an emergent alternative schools movement was spreading acrossthe country. In this context, Jackson was able to present itself as one ofseveral new alternative programs that students could choose to attend.Although Jackson High was still technically a continuation school—meaningstudents could be involuntarily transferred there for poor academicperformance—it also started to attract voluntary students, amongthem a sizable number of white and middle-class students seeking a progressivealternative.

But the era of Jackson as an alternative school was short-lived. By thetime I arrived in the late 1990s, it had long since regained the stigma previouslyassociated with South End, and it had lost the racial and class diversitythat had brought it some temporary status. So, in the years followingthe faculty meeting with Ms. Dawson, Jackson High underwentanother name change and implemented a series of reforms in an attemptto become “diverse.” The school was renamed Maytown AlternativeProgram (MAP). It scrapped the block schedule—according towhich classes met every other day for ninety minutes—and replaced itwith a traditional schedule in which each class met every day for forty-fiveminutes. It lengthened the school day by ninety minutes and addeda ninth grade, demonstrating that it was now a “real” high school (asopposed to a continuation program, which typically had shorter schooldays and served grades ten through twelve only). A new (white) principal,Mr. Galo, was brought in from the central administration officeto replace Mr. Jones. And, remarkably, the school district abandonedthe policy of involuntary transfer. From then on, counselors at MaytownHigh could recommend struggling students for transfer to Jackson (nowMAP) but could not, technically, compel them to transfer.

Despite these efforts, between 1998 and 2004 the school remainedpredominantly African American (fluctuating between 72 and 78 percent),followed by Latino/a (12 to 14 percent), with a small number ofwhite and Asian / Pacific Islander students. In the year that ninth graderswere recruited as its first voluntary cohort, about five white freshmenenrolled (in a class of approximately twenty-five students). By theend of their sophomore year, all of these voluntary white students hadtransferred out—either to Maytown High, the independent studies program,private schools, or other school districts. Although the involuntarytransfer process had been technically abandoned, in practice thepolicy of recommending students for transfer operated in much the sameway and resulted in the same population of students winding up at Jackson.In short, despite efforts to reinvent itself as an “alternative” programwith higher status, Jackson High continued to look strikingly like acontinuation high school by every measure.

The story of Jackson’s failed attempt at transformation is emblematicwhen placed in its social and historical context as a continuation or “lastchance” high school in California (Kelly 1993a). Deirdre Kelly’s bookLast Chance High (1993a) shows that continuation high schools haveoccupied the bottom rung in a vastly differentiated educational hierarchyfor nearly a century and have always experienced the stigma associatedwith that role. As Kelly demonstrates, continuation high schoolshave repeatedly sought legitimacy by adopting new narratives to portrayboth their mission and their students in a more positive light, but theseattempts have tended to be short-lived, routinely drowned out by morepowerful images of continuation students as genetically and culturallydeficient racial outsiders. Moreover, instead of creating true alternatives,repeated reforms have resulted in programs that look more like traditionalhigh schools rather than less, and often focus on attracting higher-statusstudents instead of seeking ways to serve the existing student bodymore effectively. Both of these points were evidenced in Jackson’s transformationinto MAP.

The remainder of this chapter reconstructs much of the history of continuationhigh schools that was first published in Kelly’s book (1993a),and then extends this history to the present day. The first three sectionsrecount the three major time periods that Kelly identified: expansion andgrowth (1918–30), decline and transformation (1930–65), and reborn asalternative schools (1965–83). I follow with a fourth section based on myown analysis of the current historical moment, the era of accountability(1983 to the present). For each of these four time periods, I examinepolicy, practitioner, and research texts about continuation high schoolswith attention to two themes: the definition of the continuation studentand the purpose of the continuation school. To research this history, Iconsulted a range of secondary sources and historical documents, andconducted my own independent analysis of contemporary policy, practitioner,and research texts, but I am deeply indebted to Kelly’s work forproviding the essential analytical frames and questions that anchoredmy inquiry. In addition to helping us think about the social constructionof failure and the social category of “these kids,” the history of continuationhigh schools reveals the enduring challenge of defining a purposefor education at the bottom of the educational hierarchy. Further,it sheds light on a set of processes that I refer to as the hierarchization ofeducation.

Expansion and Growth: 1918–30

The continuation high school emerged during the first three decades ofthe twentieth century, an era in which high school was becoming the newfrontier of educational advancement. From 1900 to 1930, high school enrollmentroughly doubled every decade (Martin 1961). As enrollmentsgrew, so too did a public belief in the power of schooling as a solutionto new social problems (Perkinson 1995; Tyack and Cuban 1997). Accordingly,the reformers of the day sought to keep more young peoplein school for longer periods of time, and their success in accomplishingthis was largely seen as a measure of general social progress (Kliebard1999; Tyack and Cuban 1997). In this new social context, leaving schoolbefore graduation came to be defined as a “problem” for the first time,and some reformers saw continuation schools as a solution. The idea forcontinuation schools (as well as the name) came from the German educationsystem, where working youth attended a part-time school for fourto eight hours per week. Inspired by the German model, a reform movementin the United States emerged in the early twentieth century to establishpart-time continuation schools here (Imber 1985; Katznelson andWeir 1988; Kliebard 1999). By 1920, twenty states, including California,had passed legislation mandating the establishment of part-time continuationschools (Mayman 1933, 195). And by 1930, thirty-four statesand US territories (including Puerto Rico and Hawaii) had establishedpart-time continuation programs, and these programs were serving up to340,000 young people a year (Kelly 1993a)—approximately 8 percent ofall students enrolled in public secondary schools (Beales 1941).
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