Voices in Urban Education

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Skills for Smart Systems
VUE Number 17, Fall 2007

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EXCERPT:
Stepping Up, Stepping Back: Developing Youth Leadership

By Kavitha Mediratta
Kavitha Mediratta is a principal associate in the Community Involvement Program at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author's bio

> Full article [PDF: 10 pages]

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A youth organization in New York City develops young leaders to press for improvements in local schools and across the city.

In New York City, a group of high school students came together in October 2004 to talk about how their high school experiences and, more generally, high school education in the city might be reshaped to support youth success in more powerful ways. Youth believed that by increasing the opportunities and support for young people to have a voice in schools, they could challenge pervasive low expectations for their academic success that contribute to under-resourced academic programs, overcrowded facilities, and punitive safety and discipline strategies. In framing the mission of their new effort, they wrote:

The Urban Youth Collaborative brings New York City youth together to fight for change through local and citywide organizing strategies.We strive for social and economic justice throughout our communities.We are committed to building a strong youth voice to ensure that our high schools prepare students for college, for jobs that pay a living wage, and to work for justice in our society.

Three years later, the work of the Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC) has grown into a citywide effort that has engaged hundreds of New York City students. This fall, young people in Bushwick – the neighborhood in Brooklyn that was the site of the earliest youth struggles for voice in the city's high school reforms – are launching a Student Success Center to increase access to comprehensive college-access services.

Through its work, the UYC is redefining – and developing – youth leadership. In the parlance of youth organizing, a leader is a volunteer member of the group who actively participates in reform campaigns – who articulates the needs and desires of the group, supports the positive development of other youth, and mobilizes them in strategic action to achieve common goals. What can this practice of leadership contribute to the educational process inside schools and to how educators understand both the purpose and role of schools in educating students successfully?

The experience of the UYC offers a window into how young people's involvement in youth organizing builds leadership and how these processes can be usefully supported through partnership with reform support organizations. The UYC's work suggests that youth organizing is important not only for improving educational outcomes for young people, but for transforming how those outcomes are defined and measured.


From Individual Frustration to Collective Change: Developing a Citywide Agenda to Meet the Needs of All Students

The UYC was founded in 2004 by three youth groups – Make the Road By Walking, Sistas and Brothas United of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, and Youth On the Move/Mothers On the Move. All three organizations had spent years working for public education reform in New York City and were frustrated by the lack of student involvement in educational decision making; this lack of involvement, the groups felt, contributed to the city administration's failure to fully grasp and respond to the complexities of problems in local schools.