Youth Today: Still at Risk, but Not at Sea

By Karen Pittman, June 2003

Twenty years ago in April, the National Commission on Excellence in Education gave the country a wake-up call with the release of A Nation at Risk, the report whose warnings about the prevalence of low expectations and low performance in American schools set the stage for today's educational standards movement.

To celebrate the anniversary, Education Week asked a range of experts, including notables like John Goodlad and Theodore Sizer, to assess the progress made since the report was issued. The overwhelming consensus: We are still at risk. Students' academic course loads have increased, but the quality of courses is still uninspired. Poor and minority students are still underrepresented in advanced courses, despite the research that reveals these are the students whose life trajectories are most affected by the rigor of their schooling. All in all, those interviewed found little to celebrate.

The nation is still at risk. But I believe that this country is not as much at sea as it was two decades ago. Voices and perspectives that were locked out of the discussion are now gaining volume and authority.

Student voices, for example, were absent in the report completed 20 years ago. But they are increasingly factoring into the recommendations of more recent efforts such as, Raising Our Sights, the 2001 report issued by the National Commission on the High School Senior Year.

Even more importantly, students are being polled and involved in ways that fundamentally alter adults' understanding of the reality of school and that expand opportunities for students to be active shapers and critics of their own education. Researchers such as Michelle Fine at City University of New York and Jacque Eccles at the University of Michigan have been interviewing and surveying students for more than a decade, helping to bring legitimacy to their concerns about school environment and teacher engagement by demonstrating that children learn better in schools where they feel known, respected and challenged.

On the action side, Barbara Cervone and Kathleen Cushman, the dynamic duo behind What Kids Can Do, are creating more and more powerful ways to engage students and teachers in deep, action-focused conversations about educational outcomes and educational change. In the same spirit, Listen Up!, the youth media organization founded by John Merrow, is helping young people channel their ideas and opinions about education through local and national broadcast media.

Across the country, young people are finding their collective voice. It is evident when you take note of national organizations such as the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing and Listen, Inc., and it is even more apparent when you consider the accomplishments of youth organizers within local organizations such as the Philadelphia Student Union and Californians for Justice. These dynamic young leaders are chipping away at persistent racial, ethnic and economic biases that lie at the core of educational inequities.

However, something more important than student voices was missing from the report A Nation at Risk. There was no acknowledgement of the larger context of students' lives. One primary benefit of recent efforts to solicit youth opinions is that scholars, administrators and advocates have begun implementing youth-centered reforms that not only acknowledge that learning does not stop at the end of the school day or the school grounds, but that this is often where learning starts — especially for low-income, minority urban youth.

Fueled in part by the small schools movement, there has been an explosion of innovative efforts to "blur the lines" between the school day and out-of-school time, between school and community-based settings, between formal and informal learning, led by foundations and organizations such as Jobs for the Future, the Coalition for Community Schools and the Carnegie Foundation.

What is amazing is that this wave of youth-centered reform was called for 10 years prior to A Nation at Risk. University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman chaired a federal panel of experts who issued Youth: Transition to Adulthood, a provocative, but unheralded report that took a critical youth-centered look at education as the key gateway institution to adulthood. The Coleman report openly challenged the assumption that schools, as currently structured, are where young people should be spending significant amounts of time — questioning both the relevance of the curricula and the rationale for the autocratic structure. The report recommended the role of high schools be limited and students be assisted in finding reality-based sites for learning that would better prepare them for adult life.

The Coleman report was one of the first policy documents I read as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago. Recently, I pulled my dog-eared copy off the shelf and found I had highlighted the same passages that Theodore Sizer, professor emeritus of education at Brown University, quotes in his Education Week commentary on April 23, 2003: "'Schools are not a complete environment,' wrote Coleman, adding that they were also not empowering ones. He goes on to say that young people 'are subordinate and powerless in relation to adults, and outsiders to the dominant social institutions. Yet they have money, they have a wide range of communications media, and have control of some.'"

This statement was written in 1974, decades before the technology age that has altered life and created an incredible platform for learning, communicating and organizing, which young people have mastered faster than anyone else. Many dismissed the Coleman report because it de-emphasized the importance of high schools. I carried it with me because it emphasized the importance of helping young people find multiple opportunities for real learning. Coleman died in 1995. If he were alive, I believe that he would be pleased to know that although the report may have been forgotten by many, his thoughtful recommendations are finally being considered.

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Pittman, K. (2003, June). "Still at Risk, but Not at Sea." Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. A version of this article appears in Youth Today.

Karen Pittman is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment.