Dropping out – or being pushed out?

Five educators and activists discuss a disconnect between communities and schools.

by Shani Adia Evans and Benjamin Herold

Photo: Harvey Finkle

Instead of empowering students and communities, Marc Lamont Hill and others maintain that the school are stripping students of their sense of possibility.

Often, the roots of the “dropout problem” are identified as poor parenting, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior, and students’ academic deficiencies. But five local scholars and activists interviewed by the Notebook argue that such discussions effectively blame youth and families for a crisis that is largely caused by shortcomings in how schools and districts relate to local communities.

“We’re asking the wrong questions,” says Marc Lamont Hill, assistant professor of urban education and American studies at Temple University and a graduate of city public schools.

“Instead of asking why so many students are leaving school, we should be asking why schools are pushing so many students out,” he says.

High school is often “four years of continuous trauma” for low-income urban students, Hill argues. “That’s when [young people] realize that their opportunities are limited and that they don’t matter nearly as much as they thought they did. They go through a process of being stripped of their sense of possibility.” No amount of effort can successfully push students to engage in such a system, he cautions.

A failure to affirm

The people interviewed, all of whom have been vocal about school-community relationships, make the case that many urban schools and school systems devalue students and their cultures and are disconnected from the communities they serve.

“You can’t teach me if you don’t understand who I am,” says Dolores Shaw, a parent organizer with the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project. “Teachers don’t know what urban life looks like, so how can they teach in an urban environment? Students are not interested in structured academics because it doesn’t speak to what they’re about.”

Margaret Beale Spencer, professor of psychology at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. “You learn a lot more about an idea if it’s linked to what you’ve experienced.” She says that not enough is done to train educators “to be comfortable about other people’s experiences that may be different” from their own.

Eric K. Grimes, founder of S.E.E.D. Concepts, an organization specializing in African American male youth development, goes further. “Plain and simple, Black youth are not affirmed in school,” he says. “From kindergarten through 12th grade, their history, their image, and the ways they dress, talk, and relate to each other are denigrated and devalued. They are taught that their success is defined by their ability to ‘break away’ from their peers, parents, family, community, and color.”

Grimes and others say that such failure to affirm students’ cultural identities and basic humanity contributes heavily to student disengagement. This failure is evident not only in the curriculum, but also in the fractured relationships between schools and students, parents, and the surrounding community.

As an example, Shaw says that she is often patronized during her frequent interactions with school and District staff with comments such as “That Dolores, she speaks so well.”

Schools “need to stop thinking parents are idiots,” she says. “There are a lot of smart, motivated parents, but the District doesn’t take advantage of them as a resource.”