Trusting Students to Lead Promise and Pitfalls

Trusting Students to Lead: Promise and PitfallsAuthor(s): Geovanni Cuevas and Etta KralovecSource: Schools: Studies in Education, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 143-165Published by: The University of Chicago Press in association with the Francis W. Parker SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659444 .

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143

SYMPOSIUM

The School as Just Community: Part 2,Changing How Institutions Think

Trusting Students to Lead: Promise andPitfalls

GEOVANNI CUEVASDartmouth, class of 2014

ETTA KRALOVECUniversity of Arizona, South

Prologue

This is a messy story. As with any coauthored narrative, it is multi-perspectival, capturing the contradictions and the partial truths of thosewho do not speak with one voice. As a result, the narrative is, on occasion,broken up awkwardly, with direct references to one of us, Etta, and withsections written exclusively by the other, Geo. We felt that this was thebest way to handle the different perspectives that we each brought to thisproject. We acknowledge that ours is a story that raises more questionsthan it answers and that puts on the table some uncomfortable insightsabout charter schools. The school discussed here may appear dysfunctionalto the casual reader, who will no doubt be compelled to ask how it couldhave a 100% graduation rate and high college attendance in the face ofsuch dysfunction.

While the story is about the establishment of a student-led DisciplinaryCommittee (DC) in a small charter high school in East Los Angeles, wefound that the issues swirling around the establishment of this committee

Schools: Studies in Education, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2011).� 2011 Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. All rights reserved. 1550-1175/2011/0801-0017$10.00



144 Schools, Spring 2011

reflected the larger challenges the school faced. Additionally, reflected inthe process described below are the social inequalities we face in educationtoday, the power differentials in our schools, and the challenges that doingschool differently brings. Thus, the story captures the contradictions andconflicting challenges schools face today, which are always messy, open, andfestering. This story also reminds us of the challenges presented when adultsare asked to share power with students and when democracy trumps pro-cedures. It is the story of the tensions and resistances that arise when studentstake on adult responsibilities in a school.

We were principal figures in the attempt to provide students the op-portunity to build civic virtues by experiencing leadership and democraticdeliberation. Geo was a student at the school who led the design andbuilding of a new discipline system based on trusting students to be leaders.Etta was “on loan” from her university to serve as the school’s principal.

Although this is a difficult and complicated story to tell, it is importantto document the small victories and possibilities that occur in schools today.This is important, in part, because the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)has descended on schools like a thick fog, obscuring broader purposes,punishing teachers, and silencing voices. One hopeful sign of reversing thistrend is the nascent movement for including the student’s voice in decisionmaking in public schools. According to the International Handbook ofStudent Experience in Elementary and Secondary School (Thiessen and Cook-Sather 2007), school-based initiatives range from surveying students tohaving them serve on school reform committees and redesign teams. Whilethese are hopeful signs of an increased awareness of the need to understandstudents’ experiences in schools, these efforts are typically adult-driven: “Fewinstances exist of such efforts in which students initiate an effort and assumeresponsibility for its activities. . . . The lack of examples of autonomousstudent groups suggests that there are limits to the types of roles and voicethat students can assume within the school walls” (Mitra 2007, 742).

The limits that Mitra refers to above are all too familiar to educators,who struggle to find openings for innovation and student leadership in theincreasingly narrow school day. The DC design analyzed in this articlesliced out a routine of school life and opened it up to new thinking. Webelieve that the results, while messy, provide insights into what can be donein schools today. School discipline is ripe for new thinking and reform,and when students do the thinking and acting, new forms emerge.

Through the revision process of working on this story, it has come toour attention that the article might portray some of the teachers at this



Geovanni Cuevas and Etta Kralovec 145

particular school as “villains” or at the very least as antagonizing to thecause and purpose of the DC. Furthermore, this alleged demonization canbe perceived as representative of the attitude of all or most teachers, butit is in no way our intention to allow the resistance of some member ofthis particular teaching staff to stand as a blanket characterization of allpublic school teachers. We are simply trying to tell a story from the pointof view that accurately portrays what we experienced, and it would notsurprise either one of us should the teachers at the school take objectionto some of these truths. However, we did our best to simply report someof the teachers’ actions, following this with our assessment of those actions.

There were deeper politics within the school at play that account forsome teachers’ seeming indifference, and some of those politics are discussedat the end of this article. Our concern in this piece is not to explore allthe politics of the school, and it is not to worry about how it will bereceived by unions or administrators; it is to report on an attempt to provideleadership opportunities to a population of students who desperately needthem. Our concern is to reflect on an attempt to restructure the way ourschool thought about discipline. In an age of reform, scarce are the areaswhere student-driven reform is actually happening, and even more rare arereports on those reforms. Our hope is that this report provides some foodfor thought for all stakeholders in education. Obviously, there is an edu-cational gap between the privileged and the not privileged, and we wereattempting to close this. This gap is forever talked about in the world ofeducation, and this is the story of one community’s attempt to close thatgap and the challenges involved in such a reform.

The School

The school started in 2002 for grades 6 and 7 in a rented, renovated church.By 2006, it included a high school and was relocated to a rundown motelin the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, with the motel still operating inan attached cluster of buildings. The “schooltel,” as the students lovinglyreferred to it, was adjacent to a neighborhood park, which the school usedfor their physical education classes. The park was dangerous and often thesite of drug dealing and gang activity. One morning, a student was muggedwhile making a routine lap around the park. The founder quickly begansearching for a permanent facility for the school. In 2007, he succeededin finding a new location in East Los Angeles, He had a short four monthsto renovate the facility before the start of the 2007–8 school year.

As public schools in Los Angeles go, the high school is a safe and




welcoming place for 250 students, many of whom travel over an hour eachway on public transportation to get there. The school is in the heart ofLincoln Heights, one of the poorest and least-educated communities inEast Los Angeles. The student body is composed primarily of first-gener-ation Americans. For the most part, students are deeply respectful of schoolauthority and lack much of the urban bravado that characterizes many oftheir peers attending larger urban high schools. Close to 100% of theschool’s students qualify for free or reduced lunch. There is an expectation,set by most parents and all faculty, that the students of this school willattend college. The school community does its best to create a strongsupport system to ensure that this goal is accomplished. Behavior problemsat the school consist mainly of tardiness, truancy, dress code violations,occasional tagging, and isolated cases of vandalism. Problems in the class-rooms are of the garden variety type: lack of attention, failure to do home-work, and what teachers often perceive as acts of defiance.

The school shares many of the same problems that most charter schoolsin California face: inadequate funding, facilities challenges, increasing com-pliance mandates from charter authorizers, and a rotating door at the ad-ministrative level. While all these challenges are enormous, the lack ofconsistent leadership has affected the school in a number of negative waysand has created a culture of instability. For example, school rules changewith each new administration, so most teachers select which rules to enforceand which to overlook. Leadership opportunities for the students come andgo as new administrators put in place programs only to have them endwhen the next administrator comes in. There is clear frustration amongthe teachers, who have been buffeted by salary cuts, steep NCLB growthtargets, yearly facilities crises, and what many perceive as a lack of respectfrom the school’s founder. A number of years ago, the animosity betweenthe founder and the teachers grew to such an extent that the teachersformed a union; this was one of the few charter schools to do so.

The school offers a very traditional high school curriculum, providingthe courses that students need to enter the university system in California.The advisory system, the heart and soul of the school, gives teachers achance to work closely with the students without standardized tests hangingover their heads. Advisors meet daily with their advisees and often formclose friendships. The lack of consistent leadership at the school has meantthat the advising program is without a set curriculum, so teachers do whatthey please during the advising period. While it is a much discussed “prob-lem” at the school, this freedom offers teachers their only chance to design




a curriculum that speaks directly to the students and to teach from theirhearts.

A Mission of Social Justice

The school’s founder, Roger Lowenstein, having roots in the civil rightsmovement, developed the school with the following mission: “Los AngelesLeadership Academy prepares urban secondary students to succeed in col-lege or on chosen career paths, to live fulfilling, self-directed lives, and tobe effective in creating a just and humane world.” Roger inherited his life-long commitment to social justice from his father, Alan Lowenstein, whostarted the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which has the powerfulyet simple vision: “Social justice should be the underlying goal of all hu-manity.” Roger has worked tirelessly and with great generosity to build aschool that provides educational opportunities for kids who would otherwisehave, to put it bluntly, none.

Roger is refreshed yearly by the nearly 100 percent graduation rate atthe school. Equally comforting is knowing that 100 percent of the grad-uating students have solid plans for college attendance or are headed intovocational programs. Students from the school attend colleges like Vassar,Dartmouth, Kenyon, Swarthmore, and the University of Michigan, as wellas local community colleges. Roger continues to follow the students afterthey graduate, providing both financial and moral support to alums. Knownfor providing cars for students who need them, taking students shoppingfor winter clothes, and ensuring that students have access to importantcultural events, Roger’s actions are a clear indication of his commitmentto his students and his school.

The school’s social justice mission has evolved over the years. Early inthe school’s history, the students and the teachers participated in overt socialjustice action projects. For example, in 2003 students demonstrated at thelocal Taco Bell over employment issues for Native American tomato har-vesters in Florida. In the charter renewal application in 2007, the schoolacknowledged the challenge to fulfilling the mission: “Social Justice meanslittle if one can’t read and write proficiently, master mathematics, anddevelop a world view beyond a five-block neighborhood.” As a result, allof the schools’ teachers now understand the social justice mandate to includeproviding students with a rigorous curriculum that will prepare them forthe realities of college life. Given the challenges that first-generation studentsface with college success, this has come to be seen as an aspect of the socialjustice mission.




Many of the teachers, in their roles as advisors, have developed theirown approach to social justice teaching. Some see social justice as com-munity service, while others see social justice as leadership and activismand thus teach their students how to approach social problems and howto lead community-based social change efforts. Some teachers attempt toincorporate social justice themes into their classes. For example, in biology,there is a once-a-week lesson on “current” biology, addressing the ethicaland moral implications of biological subject matter like genetics. A requiredcourse for all freshmen at the school, Facing History and Ourselves, is anational curriculum focused on human rights. In terms of politics, im-migration is an issue that directly affects the lives of many of the school’sstudents, staff, and teachers. It is not uncommon for a student of the schoolto fear the deportation of one or both of their parents, and often there isa fear among the students of not being able to attend college because oftheir undocumented immigration status. As a result, immigration is frontand center for a number of the teachers. A focus on immigration issues atthe school began when students attended a May 1 immigration rally in2006 in Los Angeles. The next year, there was a symbolic “border wall,”where students could write notes to a person they knew who had crossedthe border. In the 2010–11 school year, the school is focusing its socialjustice work on education about and support for the DREAM (Develop-ment, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act. Roger believes thiscould include hunger strikes and community organizing.

Although most of the school’s teachers would agree that the school isnot anywhere near to fulfilling its charter, most of them believe that theschool makes solid attempts. In contrast to that view, the school’s com-pliance officer from Los Angeles Unified School District recently had adifferent take on what the school’s social justice mission should look likein practice. During the debriefing session after his first compliance reviewin the Winter of 2009, he said: “I see social justice posters on the wall,but not in practice in the classrooms, which I saw as dominated by teachertalk.” In his mind, more democratic classroom practices demonstrate socialjustice, and not enough of that exists at the school. He also acknowledged,“It is close to impossible for a charter school to stay true to a strong missionwhile also meeting the letter of the NCLB law.” He was referring to thefact that recently the school’s mission has had to compete with steep man-dated growth targets for student performance. In 2008, the school’s failureto meet targets pushed it into Program Improvement status.




Tellers of the Tale

One of us, Etta, is a teacher educator and was “on loan” to the schoolfrom her university at the invitation of the founder. She served as principalwhile helping to prepare her eventual replacement from within the teachingranks. Etta shared the founder’s vision of social justice and brought extensiveexperience as an administrator in democratic high schools and colleges. Inthese schools, students sat on all decision-making committees and ran all-community meetings. She hoped to establish similar structures at her newschool. Etta has seen firsthand that democracy in schools is messy, time-consuming, and often contentious, but she knows that this kind of authenticparticipation is one of the only ways to build among the young an appre-ciation for democracy and the necessary civic virtues it demands. Etta alsoknows that this kind of participation is more common today in privateschools than in public schools, in part the result of high-stakes testing andNCLB mandates, which private schools have the luxury of turning theirbacks on.

The other of us is Geo, a student at the charter school since ninth grade,who had “gotten” the school’s social justice mission in its early days andwho has an innate sense of its meaning and practice. Geo was awarded ascholarship to spend his junior year at an international program in Spain,and the experience opened his eyes to a form of inequality that is not oftenspoken about in education. While in Spain, Geo discovered that studentsat private schools were trusted with leadership roles that were unknown athis urban charter school. The following is Geo’s account, written at thebeginning of his senior year, of what was missing at his school:

I spent a year studying in Spain with students receiving installmentsof their nearly 100 thousand dollar high school educations. Thesestudents, with whom I consistently was told I was directly competingfor admission into colleges, certainly fit the stereotypical profile I heldof privileged private school snobs: waspy, rich, 2000� SAT scores,aspirations for Yale and Princeton, and a confident New Englandswagger foreign to the average student attending our small charterschool in East Los Angeles. Throughout my year in Spain, I triedmy best to study these individuals and identify the exact ingredientin their clustered privileged formula that placed them above the av-erage student at my school—above me. The answer was a clear andresounding: nothing. The disparity between East Los Angeles andCambridge has nothing to do with ability or the capacity to learn,




but rather with monetary resources and confidence in student lead-ership.

It seemed to me that elite private schools such as Hotchkiss, Taft,Exeter, and Andover trust their students. They do not need a charteror a documented mission of “leadership” to create leaders, but ratherrely on the natural intellect of their student body to make positivedecisions by providing resources and setting systems in place wherepower is placed in the hands of the students to start and run clubs,committees, and councils. Hotchkiss, for example, has student coun-cils that meet with teachers to approve changes in class schedules,determine the amount of nightly homework, and establish policiesthat prevent more than two tests in a day for one student. All of theaforementioned institutions are member schools of the program thatsponsored my year in Spain. As a result, mostly student-driven policiesbled in from their home schools to the policies I had to abide by inSpain. It bothered me that these traditions and the culture of studentinvolvement did not exist at my school, because I knew that ourstudent body was every bit as capable of managing our school policy.I began to look for ways to change this and stumbled upon anothercommonality among the private schools: a student-run discipline com-mittee.

Geo returned to East Los Angeles from Spain committed to launchingnew opportunities for student leadership,. He found a new leader at theschool, Etta, who shared his vision and understanding of the transformativepower that authentic leadership experiences can have on students. In Spain,Geo had seen the value that participation in the discipline process has onstudents. He also believed that this kind of experience “levels the playingfield” for high school students aspiring to spots in elite colleges. Etta hadseen student discipline committees at work at both the high school andthe college level, and she knew that with students in charge of discipline,not only does “truth get told” but also disciplinary rulings are often harshyet responsibly measured.

The Building Process

Over the summer, we met with other interested students to discuss waysto increase student leadership opportunities at the school. The discussionsranged from topics of representational leadership to power relationshipsand trust among school community members of the school. Entry points




for our work together were debated, the purposes of education and dem-ocratic values were agreed upon, and we set forth on the journey to providestudents with new opportunities in democratic participation and leadershipat the school. It was agreed to start this rededication of the school to studentleadership by reconstituting the student council. While this might notappear to be a radical start, it was an important reform because the studentcouncil had operated sporadically throughout the school’s history. A keyteacher at the school agreed to lead the charge, and the new LeadershipCouncil was formed.

Early on, we discovered that the group of students who stepped up tothis task wanted the Leadership Council’s focus to be on social events atthe school. While this was important for building school spirit, we bothknew that the kind of leadership opportunities we hoped to provide hadto center on opportunities for authentic engagement and important deci-sion-making processes at the school. While the teacher supervising theLeadership Council would have liked to see the council tackle more sub-stantive issues, she graciously oversaw fund-raisers for Paintball FridayNights and school dances, which allowed us to turn our attention to thereal vision we were formulating.

The work to form our program fully began as we outlined the processesfor the Discipline Committee (DC). We had informal conversations withteacher leaders about procedures and outlined the initial ideas for the structureof the DC, including how members would be selected, how hearings wouldbe held, and how the referral process would work. The first written proposaloutlined the vision and was submitted for approval to the entire staff.

At an early faculty meeting, we gathered feedback from the teachers,many of whom were largely unresponsive. We suspected that some of themhad not read the proposal. We took the few comments and suggestionsthat the teachers did offer at the meeting and worked to refine the processesand procedures in collaboration with supportive teachers and presented therevised system to the full faculty. There was some grumbling from a fewteachers about putting too much work on them as advisors and about thecumbersome process, so we refined the process again, and the teachersfinally agreed upon the process outlined below.

The Disciplinary Hearing Process: Initiating the Process

In school year 2009–2010, the Discipline Committee consists of threeseniors and two juniors, selected by the administration and leadersof the Leadership Council. Junior students will serve for two years,




and students will be added as vacancies occur by the same process.The Discipline Committee will meet bi-monthly and conduct hear-ings when necessary. The steps for initiating a hearing process forcontinual violations of school rules will be tracked through e-mail ora paper trail and is as follows:

A. Advisor is informed of discipline issue.B. Advisor works with student to resolve issue, including informing

parent.C. Absent successful change of behavior, advisor informs the assistant

principal of need for a discipline hearing.D. He initiates hearing process with committee.E. Resolution announced to community.

In extreme cases, he can determine the need for a hearing processafter conferring with the advisor.

The Hearing Protocol:

A. Attending the hearing will be the committee, the assistant prin-cipal, and the advisor.

B. A member of the committee will read a statement written by theassistant principal about the issue.

C. The student in question will read a personal statement explainingthe situation from their perspective and recommend an action tothe committee.

D. The student’s advisor will read a statement of their own explainingthe situation from their perspective and sharing whatever infor-mation they think is pertinent and will also recommend actionto the committee.

E. The committee will then ask questions.F. The student and the advisor will leave the room, and the com-

mittee will make a determination. If a decision cannot be madewithin 25 minutes, a second meeting will be held for the com-mittee.

G. Once a decision is reached, the student and the advisor will returnto the room to hear the determination.

H. A formal letter from the committee will be given to the studentand parents and advisor regarding the action.




I. The decision of the committee will be reported to all the advisorsin a formal statement to be read to their advisees.

Confidentiality: The Leadership Council will strictly prohibit any ofthe committee members to discuss the details of any case outside thecontext of a committee meeting; therefore it will be grounds fordismissal from the committee if a member is proved to be suspectedof discussing a case outside the committee meeting.

The process highlighted two unique things about the way we envisioneddiscipline at the school. The process gave the disciplined student and thestudent’s advisor the opportunity to recommend a disciplinary action. Webelieved that this forced students to understand that their actions werewithin their control to change. In retrospect, this process that gave studentsthe opportunity to tell their side of the story may have upset some teachers,many of whom believed that discipline problems were subject to adultauthority alone. It also may have accounted for some teachers’ increasinghostility and, in some cases, indifference, toward the work of the committee.Another key component of the process was that the whole community wasto be informed of the outcome of a hearing. Since the school was small,most students knew when someone was in serious trouble. Sharing a verdictwith the whole community meant not only that typical rumors about whathappened were nipped in the bud, but it also enforced our belief that civicvirtues are built when individuals see that their actions have impacts on awhole community.

Once we had the initial agreement from the teachers, we accepted ap-plications from those students interested in joining the committee. A num-ber of applications were received, and these were carefully reviewed withthe assistant principal. Four other students were selected to serve with Geoon the committee, and the committee began its work. However, there weremany obstacles along the way.

Resistances Came from All Sides

At the first parent meeting of the year, the concept of the DisciplineCommittee was presented by Geo in Spanish. The mostly traditional Latinocommunity of parents questioned why students should do this: “Wasn’tthis the administration’s job?” The feeling that students should be toldwhat to do was a strongly held belief among most parents, and they failedto see the value of this kind of student engagement. None had attended




schools where students played this kind of role, and they did not see theneed for it. While they were all for more discipline at the school, thatdiscipline, in their view, needed to be adult-driven. Some were even offendedthat a student had made the presentation. We made promises to keepparents informed of the progress of the committee through presentationsat the monthly parent meetings. Interestingly, the parents with the strongestobjections to the student committee all had children who applied to be onthe committee, and one parent now has a son who serves on the DC. Asit turns out, while she allowed her son to apply to the committee, she stillquestions its value.

And there were continuing issues among the teachers. Even though wehad their initial agreement and some teachers had written thoughtful lettersof recommendation for students who were applying for membership onthe committee, many felt we were imposing something on them. In thehalls, one would hear murmurs of “the inmates are running the asylum,”a philosophy that some teachers felt the school was subscribing to. Someteachers questioned having students involved in decisions about issues ofdiscipline that affected their classrooms. The discipline process under dis-cussion put new responsibilities on teachers in their advising role, a re-sponsibility that some had little interest in taking on. In spite of these earlywarning signs, the committee pressed on.

As the committee began its work, a lack of clear communication withteachers meant rumors were flying around the school, causing confusionand resentment among some teachers. The assistant principal would remindthe students to keep teachers in the loop. The following e-mail from himto the committee encourages that practice:

Also, if not doing this [informing teachers of the outcome of a hearing]is not standard procedure already, I think it’s important that aftermeeting with students, that a rep from the committee contact theteacher who referred the student and let them know what was dis-cussed and ultimately resolved. The more you guys communicatewith the teachers, the better. They can see how proactive the com-mittee is. Do this even with the Chronic Tardy kids. From what Ican see and hear, you guys are doing a terrific job. Having you onboard is such a positive thing.

Yet continuing concerns among teachers about being “out of the loop”meant that students on the committee had to backtrack to clean up these




communication problems. The following is from a PowerPoint presentationpresented by the DC members at a faculty meeting:

We are sorry for making mistakes.We are sorry for any lack of communication.

We are sorry if our system has in any way lacked effectiveness.We are sorry if we have offended anyone, or made any of you feel

as if you are not supported.We are sorry, really.

Roots of Discipline Problems: Emerging Issues

The official hearing process turned out to be only one part of the work ofthe committee. Often the DC would meet with the assistant principal todiscuss students whom he felt could benefit from a conversation with thecommittee. So, in addition to the official hearing process outlined above,the committee often met at lunch with students to discuss issues of atten-dance and other non-classroom-related, more minor offenses. In these meet-ings, the student met only with the members of the DC unless committeemembers requested administrative support in the meeting.

The formal hearing process, on the other hand, was often initiated byteachers. The following e-mail from a teacher to the committee gives aflavor of the kinds of issues the committee had to confront and the thought-fulness with which some teachers approached their referrals to the DC(names have been changed):

I have a student I’ve decided to refer to the committee, David Torres.He is failing four subjects. His parents didn’t show up for conference.He is repeatedly disruptive in my class, my advisory and in Sally’sclass, often in Tom’s class as well. Nothing seems to be working inchanging his behavior or poor academic performance. He seems tobe actively trying to bring other students down with him, which iswhy I feel he needs to hear from fellow students that his behavior isunacceptable in our community. Do you feel it’s too last minute tohave him before this next committee meeting? I haven’t discussedthis with him yet, was thinking about it all the way back fromWashington and have been distracted by other things since gettingback. Would it be better to leave this for the next committee meeting,or he is prepared, etc.? But when would that be, since I don’t wantthis to fester too much longer.




A few months into their work with errant students, the committeemembers began seeing patterns in discipline problems. They rightfully sawthat students with more serious problems also exhibited a lack of respectfor standard school rules. Geo had been reading Tipping Point (Gladwell2002), and the “broken window” theory discussed in the book inspiredhim to develop its application to school discipline problems. The theorypostulates that if broken windows in vacant buildings are not fixed, it leadsto vandalism, squatters, and perhaps the eventual destruction of the build-ing. Geo believed that if Giuliani could improve the quality of life in NewYork City by fixing the small stuff, that same principle could be appliedto the school. Geo convinced the DC members that if they could addressthese smaller problems, the school culture would improve. The DC mem-bers requested to attend a faculty meeting to try to get teachers on boardwith their emerging views on discipline with another PowerPoint presen-tation:

It has come to our attention, after various meetings and consultationswith referred students, that big discipline problems often come witha foundation in minor discipline problems. Meaning that the kidsthat bring pot, tag, ditch, lie, use excessive profanity, and displayobnoxious behavior in class are generally the culprits in disregardinguniform policies, chewing gum, talking in class, and coming to lateto class.• In light of this, we have decided to introduce a re-emphasis of thesmaller school rules. We ask you to help us create a culture of rigiditywhen it comes to discipline at the school. Your support and activeinvolvement in the reinforcing of school rules is crucial to buildingthe type of academic environment the committee would like to seeat the school.

What was not lost on some of the teachers was that these students werecalling them to task for not enforcing school rules in their classrooms. Theshift from viewing discipline problems as student problems to viewing themas having a teacher dimension was something that was now on the table.What may have been lost on some of the teachers was that the studentson the DC were calling for a kind of learning environment that the studentsfelt did not exist at the school. They sent the message that they believedbehavior problems at the school were social problems, not just problemsof individual students.

At the faculty meeting, the DC members tried to gently remind teachers




that school rule enforcement in their classrooms had to be the foundationof the school discipline process. And while no one wanted to police teacherclassrooms to see if they were enforcing rules, the students themselves saidthey were feeling cheated by a lax school environment and a lack of con-sistent enforcement of rules by the teachers. This theme of viewing disciplineproblems as having root causes in both student behavior and teacher be-havior was to become a strong thread in the DC discussions and thecommittee’s approach to their work. This no doubt also accounted forsome teachers’ increasing indifference toward the work of the committee.

New Approaches: When Kids Talk to Kids

Before implementation of the DC, when students got in trouble, the pre-vious assistant principal would follow the discipline procedures in place.These involved suspending kids, calling home, and keeping students afterschool; in essence, offering up the warm pabulum of approaches to disciplinecommon in schools today. Talk of logical consequences, zero tolerance, andchoices peppered adult-driven conversations and were the letter of the law,even though the school’s charter specifically states that the school wouldnot use a zero tolerance policy. When students took over the work ofenforcing discipline at the school, the conversation shifted from adult-to-student to student-to-student.

New approaches to discipline began to emerge because of student-ledconversations about behavior at the school. While the students were oftenharsher in their assessment of student behavior than the administratorswere, they were also more understanding of the causes of defiant behavior.They knew the struggles their fellow students were facing and wanted tobe able to address discipline issues in the context of the students’ complex,and often confusing, lives. The committee discussed with the referred stu-dents their explanations for tardiness, their bringing minute amounts ofpot to school, or their status on academic probation. These conversationswere frank, an attribute made possible in part because the students wereoften without adult voices driving the lunchtime meetings. Geo points outthe mechanisms that operate when students speak directly to students:

We (the committee) were exempt, in many ways, from the politicalcorrectness that typically limits an adult’s ability to directly addresssensitive issues with students. These issues include familial obligations,learning disabilities, personal conflicts with teachers, and what wasoften the most dreaded topic: their futures. We were trusted with




issues concerning troubled homes, troubled classrooms, and troubledhistories and futures. No one was claiming that a similar level of trustcannot be established with an adult teacher or administrator, butstudents talking to students is an invaluable and unique resource. Wewere often attempting to break the stereotypes and negative attitudesour students harbor toward themselves.

Of the five members of the committee, only one had a consistentlygood academic track record; one was a former gang member, onestruggled with mediocre grades and health issues, another consideredhimself a surrogate parent to four siblings, and another was an un-documented immigrant from El Salvador who started speaking En-glish at the age of 14. All, however, were college-bound students whoat one point or another shared a similar need for guidance as thosebeing referred to the committee.

Our school provided us with teachers who were constantly tellingus to go to college and hammering us on what needed to be doneto get there. Perhaps the only difference between committee membersand our peers is that we were more easily convinced that college was,without question, the right thing to do. We were able to rid ourselvesof our own personal stereotypes with more ease, and our teacherswere a big part of that process by exposing us to new ideas andproviding the guidance many of us lacked at home.

That isn’t to say that our families were not supportive. The mem-bers of the committee had families that strongly supported the pursuitof a higher education, but for the most part, they were ignorant ofthe process of how to get there. Many of our families were not welleducated, and almost all were immigrants who grew up in foreignsystems with foreign expectations. Having them on our side, though,was what mattered.

The “at-risk” students (for lack of a better term) who came beforethe DC often had families who were not only ignorant of collegeand its importance but also indifferent to it and in some cases ve-hemently against it for traditional or religious reasons. Others had atough time in school and were victims of learning disabilities of whichthey were not aware. This made it much harder for them to createbonds with teachers because the conversation often shifted from“What are you doing to go to college?” to “Why aren’t you doinganything at all?” Unfortunately, many of the troubled kids also made




very poor choices in terms of friendships and were often involved inillegal or vandalistic pastimes.

Whenever a student brought up an excuse as to why a homeworkassignment was not turned in, or why that student did not arrive ontime, or why it was difficult to concentrate on school, a committeemember would often, to be blunt, call the student on their bullshit.We soon saw our work as including problem solving. We instituteda tutoring program for those with below-average grade-point averages.Since we had found ways to get to school on time, even if it meantwaking up at 5:40 in the morning to catch two buses or three trainsor learned to ask to carpool with someone, we helped students researchalternative routes to school. We found ways to ignore the turbulentsituations often found in our homes and neighborhoods, so we en-couraged students to visit the school counselor, to talk with theiradvisors, and to seek help.

In our experience, we often found that adults, no matter theirintentions, were often afraid or wary of crossing certain boundarieswith students for fear of seeming insensitive or not understanding.As students, we had no trouble navigating those boundaries becauseof our personal experience dealing with the exact situations our peersface. We can frankly and genuinely pose the question: We did it, whycan’t you? That is a question with tremendous power to spark revo-lutions and to change perspectives and lives.

Discipline Goes Public

The foundational idea that discipline issues were public issues drove DCdecisions into the community in a number of innovative and powerfulways. Reprimanded students often addressed their peers at assemblies, andsome wrote apologies in the school newspaper or to a class that they haddisrupted. Others had their parents “shadow’” them for a day at school.Discipline decisions were sometimes made public through announcementsto advisories. This more public approach to discipline helped everyone seethat the real impact of discipline issues is on the whole school and not justa single student. While these public pronouncements did not cover thedetails of the discipline issue, they did provide the school community withclosure and began to build a culture of civic responsibility at the school.

One particularly memorable case involved that most public of all places:MySpace. Two students were caught “smelling of pot” by their English




teacher. A bag search by the assistant principal turned up a small bagcontaining a pot pipe but no pot. The student whose bag contained theparaphernalia was a student who had never been in trouble before and whoclaimed her friend just asked her to carry something. The friend, the childof an alleged long-standing LA gang family, argued vehemently that theparaphernalia was not hers. She maintained that she did not use drugs andin fact was not “carrying” anything. Her father was adamant that hisdaughter did not use drugs and was not to be punished, since she haddone nothing wrong. Threats of lawsuits and tears went on for a coupleof days as the DC struggled along with the administration to untangle thecase.

During one meeting, a member of the DC went to the student’s MySpacepages and found that the girl who claimed she didn’t “do drugs” had writtenextensively about her drug use. The student was clearly lying to the com-mittee. This discovery helped the committee resolve the issue, showed thefather that indeed his daughter was involved with drugs, and showed usthat when students are involved, schools have new tools to use. Had theadministration tried to resolve this case, the discovery on the MySpace pagemight never been made.

New Principal/New Year

As we write this, a new year begins at the school. What was to have beena two-year assignment for Etta was cut short. The impact of massive statebudget cuts on her university meant that she was “called back” after onlya year at the school. At the charter school, the state budget crises meantthat the year was punctuated by a 2 percent across-the-board salary cutand cuts to the after-school athletic program. Necessary curricular changesmeant a long-standing teacher was let go, and administrative salary cutsdrove another member of the staff out. A new principal was hired at thelast minute, continuing the revolving door leadership model at the school.

The new principal, along with the assistant principal, have renamed theDiscipline Committee the “Student Civic Committee,” and they have cen-tralized its work through the principal. The committee members will playmentoring, tutoring, and mediation roles for the school. According to theadministration, these changes were made in part to give students moreopportunity to focus on their “schoolwork.”

We are happy to see that the new principal has enough interest in studentleadership to work to improve the DC. We worry, however, that in a morecentralized system, the full trust of adults for students to act autonomously,




which in our minds was a key to the educational value of the committee,may become a lost opportunity for the students. Sadly, we feel that someof the teachers did not see the educational value of the work of the DCnor did they use its work as a springboard for lessons in the classroom.On the face of this, it is easy to see why the new principal thought of thecommittee as a distraction from schoolwork. Yet, the DC’s founding mem-bers got the equivalent of a Policy 101 class, learning to navigate thecompeting interests of various stakeholders, aligning policy with schoolculture, law, and teaching practices; honoring cultural differences; and learn-ing to “speak truth to power” (Wildavsky 1987).

Lessons Learned

We found that leadership breeds leadership. We saw student initiativesflourish during the year. For example, a successful student store was designedand implemented by two enterprising juniors. These girls raised money tostart the store, kept it stocked, and kept the books. They hired studentworkers and trained them. And while there was adult concern about whatthe store was selling and when, the students proceeded with basically noassistance from the administration. Student environmental projects plantedgardens, and the student radio station grew in its importance and popularity.The school had a small radio station that played music occasionally, butduring the year, students stepped up to use the radio station to start andend the school day. Rather than being made over loudspeakers, daily an-nouncements came over the airwaves. Yet in the case of the radio station,there was again adult concern about the fact that the students were in thestudio “unsupervised.” Had the advisor been there moment by moment,we doubt the students involved would have taken the kind of ownershipof the project that they did.

We found that if teachers don’t laud students for their student-led ini-tiatives, students don’t fully understand their value. A frustrating aspect ofthe experience was that even the students had to be convinced of theimportance of their work. Rather than publicly acknowledging the studentsfor their leadership skills, teachers complained when they missed class, andsome advisors were grumpy because DC students missed daily advisorymeetings. Students had to navigate this resistance by keeping their advisorsand teachers up to date on daily activities of the committee and otherstudent projects. Learning to communicate on this level with teachers andadvisors was new for many students, and the need to do it also came as a




surprise. One student on the committee, Erick Martinez, sent the followinge-mail message about his experiences with teachers:

At the beginning the resistance and hostility of the teachers directedtoward the Discipline Committee was a complete fiasco. From theorigin to close to the end, teachers felt as if their powers of disciplinewere being stripped and handed to students who were not profes-sionals and their insecurity made the acceptance of the DisciplinaryCommittee difficult. In retrospective, the simple idea of students incharge of discipline was not ordinary, but we dealt with it by showingleadership potential. We managed the resistance from the teachersthrough communication.

We also found that there was little room for celebration of these kindsof student accomplishments. While we celebrated student AP and SAT testscores and college acceptances, little attention was given to the tremendousprojects students had successfully undertaken. Perhaps most significantly,the work led by student initiative never entered life in the classrooms. Whileit may have happened, we know of no instance when teachers called uponthe DC students to discuss the principles upon which decisions were madeor the role of the committee as an example of democratic leadership. Theeconomics of the student store were never discussed in the economics classes,and discussions of aesthetic taste in regards of the music on the radio wereabsent from classroom discussions.

Conclusion

Whether the other students who first served on the DC will ever understandthe importance of and unusual role the committee played at the schoolremains a mystery. By initiating and assuming full responsibility for thework of the committee, students presented a new vision for what the schoolcan and should be.

As we write this, Geo is off to Dartmouth and Etta is back at heruniversity. As we were writing, we have had to confront some aspects ofthe teacher community at the school that neither one of us wanted to face.We suspect many teachers felt the work of the DC was an annoyance andinappropriate. At the beginning of the year, some students on the DCattended faculty meetings but were soon asked, by a number of teachers,not to attend meetings in the future. The indifference of some teacherstoward the work of the committee may have come from their lack of beliefin its importance and their traditional views of the role of students in




schools. Some teachers saw the process the committee used as extra work.And certainly the DC was seen by a number of teachers as oversteppingthe boundaries of what students should be involved with. One teacherwould often tell members of the DC who were in her classes that she didnot approve of the committee and its work.

We disagree, however, about the causes of this indifference and thesometimes open hostility on the part of some teachers. For Geo, the schoolwas his second home and reflecting on the year and its challenges, especiallyin terms of some of the teachers indifference to the hard work of thecommittee, has been painful to acknowledge. Seeing teachers whom herespected turn their back to the committee’s work was hard to face. Forhim, the teacher’s resistance to students being in faculty meetings was asign of a basic lack of trust. Teachers’ level of discomfort when meetingwith students in the presence of the DC was also a sign of this lack oftrust. He vividly remembers one teacher telling him of her level of dis-comfort in these meetings. Geo feels the teacher wanted someone to “wagtheir finger” at the students, while the committee wanted to understandthe situation from the student’s perspective as well as the teacher’s and towork to solve the problem.

For Etta, a life-long teacher and teacher educator, the experience highlightsthe negative impact that the charter movement and NCLB have had onteachers. Many of the long-standing teachers at the school felt beaten upand seemed exhausted by outside pressures to increase student performancelevels. Waves of internal chaos caused by technology problems, facilities crises(which contributed to financial problems), and challenges with the founder,who was not an educator, added to the frustration levels of some teachers.These kinds of challenges may be more typical of charter schools than theirsupporters are willing to admit. Etta has always been a supporter of charterschools, believing that they offered an opening for possibility and innovationin education and could provide new models for public schools. Yet, NCLBmandates have forced charter schools into more narrow and conventionalschooling patterns, leaving little time for the kind of re-visioning of schoolsthat was the promise of the charter movement.

From the perspective of a teacher educator, the lack of strong foundationscourses in most teacher education programs has meant that new teachershave not had to confront the idea that schools must foster a desire amongthe young for democracy and community (Dewey 1916). As a result, theseteachers fall back all too easily on their own “apprenticeship of observation”(Lortie 1975) in traditional, teacher-centered classrooms. Etta believes that




this lack of course work in educational foundations may well have accountedfor the indifference and hostility that many teachers felt toward the studentsattempting to share power at the school. They simply had never seen dem-ocratic forms in schools, nor had they debated the theoretical foundationsor merits of conceiving of a school as an embryonic community.

From the perspective of an educational leader at the school, Etta believesthat she should have played a more forceful role in bringing the teachersand parents on board. Etta felt that it was important for the students toprovide leadership across the board on the initiative, including cleaning upthe messes that were made along the way. In retrospect, if the leadershipof the school had led discussions with faculty and parents, providing op-portunities for them to get an understanding of why we were doing whatwe were doing, the DC might still be operating today.

We do both agree, however, that had we had another year to develop aculture of democracy and shared leadership at the school, the teachers wouldhave come to value this increased role for students. Although it was short-lived, we built and operated a new system for discipline at the school thattrusted students to lead. We approached discipline problems not as psycho-logical shortcomings of individual students but rather as sociological prob-lems, with roots in school, community, and society (Counts [1932] 1978).And we tried to build a system whereby students could see that their actionshad an impact on the life of the school community. This more publicapproach to handling discipline problems was not intended to be a publicshaming, but rather an introduction into the enactment of civic virtues thatdemocracy demands. We hope that the story of our efforts encourages othersto find those openings where students can begin to become members of amore democratic community. Our story also provides a fair warning of thechallenges along the way. Dewey taught us that a central responsibility ofschools in democratic societies was to create an appetite among the youngfor democracy. In this age of high-stakes testing and narrowed visions of thepurposes of schools, we wonder what will be the long-term social costs ofschools turning their backs on this central mission.

References

Counts, George. (1932) 1978. Dare the School Build a New Social Order?Republication of 1st ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.Gladwell, Malcolm. 2002. The Tipping Point. Boston: Back Bay Books.




Lortie, Dan C. 1975. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Mitra, Dana. 2007. “Student Voice in School Reform: From Listening toLeadership.” In International Handbook of Student Experience in Ele-mentary and Secondary School, ed. Dennis Thiessen and Alison Cook-Sather. The Netherlands: Springer.

Wildavsky, Aaron. 1987. Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft ofPolicy Analysis. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.



Trusting Students to Lead Promise and Pitfalls

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