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Communities and Schools
VUE Number 23, Spring 2009

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EXCERPT:
illustration South Central Youth Empowered thru Action: The Power of Intergenerational Organizing

 By Seema Shah and Anne T. Henderson
Seema Shah is a principal associate in community organizing and engagement, and Anne T. Henderson is a senior consultant, at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
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A student organization in Los Angeles led a successful effort to institute a more rigorous curriculum in high schools.

NOTE: This article is adapted from the forthcoming publication Community Coalition: Securing a College Preparatory Curriculum for All Students [working title], by Seema Shah, Kavitha Mediratta, and Sara McAlister, to be published in 2009 by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

Almost every day, Black and Latino students from across South Los Angeles gather at the offices of Community Coalition, a grassroots group that organizes young people to fight for educational justice. Many of the young people refer to the Coalition as their second home. The atmosphere is warm and playful, punctuated by good-natured teasing among youth and staff and animated chatter about MySpace pages or the latest music videos.

At the same time, these young people come with a vision and a clear sense of purpose. When asked to describe the conditions of their South Los Angeles schools, students indignantly recount a litany of problems: dirty bathrooms, gang violence, out-of-date textbooks, poor-quality teaching, too many low-level classes, and far too few college preparatory courses.

Julio Daniel, a senior at Manual Arts High School, whose soft-spoken voice and calm demeanor belie his fierce convictions, is deeply disappointed in his experience at Manual Arts.

I didn't expect it to be as bad as what it really is.... One of the most shocking things that still stays with me is that the average reading level is at fourth grade — so that means a majority of the school reads at a fourth-grade level! And that was shocking. I mean, that made me wonder — do I really want to walk the stage for graduation because there are kids that are graduating who are reading anywhere from three to five years below grade level and people are allowing them to graduate? What kind of honor could that be?

Julio Daniel is one of over 700,000 students attending the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) — the second-largest district in the United States. While LAUSD faces many of the typical ills of urban school districts, as Daniel eloquently notes, schools in South Los Angeles are consistently among the district’s most overcrowded and lowest performing.

The glaring differences between these Latino and African American neighborhoods and wealthier, mostly White communities like Beverly Hills, are obvious to Clive Aden, an alumnus of the Community Coalition’s youth organizing program who is now in college.

They showed us, like, we went on a tour and they showed us L.A. and then we went to Beverly Hills and saw the difference and stuff and I realized what's going on in my neighborhood doesn't seem to be fair.... We have a liquor store on every corner and in Beverly Hills, they have grocery stores. We got check cashing places, in Beverly Hills, they have banks.... We've got fast-food restaurants and they've got dine-in restaurants.

Shifting his focus to the schools, Aden points out that Brown v. Board of Education called for an end to segregation in schools and for equal treatment of all students.

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