Presenting the Future: Students Organizing Communities

(Editor's Note: Sarah M. Fine teaches at César Chávez Public Charter High School)

Both President Obama and the founders of the American public education system would have been proud to be at the Fort Davis Recreation Center in southeast Washington, D.C. last month when 17-year-old Shantell Tyler stepped up to the podium. With her petite frame and childlike face, Tyler hardly looked the part of a community organizer, but as she prepared to speak it was clear that this, the monthly meeting of the District's Advisory Neighborhood Commission 7E (ANC), was her moment. She adjusted the microphone and surveyed the forty-odd audience members -- most of whom, like her, were African Americans who lived in the neighborhood, one of the most impoverished in the city. She inhaled.

"My name is Shantell Tyler and I'm a senior at the César Chávez Public Charter High School for Public Policy," she said. "I'm here tonight to talk to you about sexual content in the media." Her voice was steady and the audience was rapt. This was the first time in almost a year that a teenager had testified at one of the local governance organization's meetings. For Tyler's parents, stationed in the front row with a video camera, this was yet another reason to marvel at their college-bound daughter.

"Babies learn how to talk by listening to other people talk," Tyler said. "And kids learn to act based on what they see. You never know what they learn when they spend unsupervised time in front of the T.V." She rattled off a list of popular shows with graphic content. "Would you want a nine-year-old watching those?" she asked. There was a murmur of disapproval, and Tyler, buoyed by the support, began to gesture as she spoke. She suggested ways for parents to address the problem, including spending more time with their kids, locking certain channels and petitioning the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). "It takes a village to raise a child, so we really need to come together around this issue," she concluded. "I'm taking action. What about you?" As she stepped off the stage, the audience was still cheering.

Those who knew Tyler in past years would hardly have called her a budding activist. She slumped her way through a local D.C. middle school, earning straight D's and participating in few extracurricular activities. Even during her first years at Chávez, a rigorous 400-student charter high school near Capitol Hill, she was an average student at best. "I had a lot of time on my hands, and I didn't always use it well," she remembers.

Things began to change when Tyler entered 12th grade and began working on her "thesis" -- a yearlong project required of all Chávez seniors. At the start of the process, students choose one public issue on which to focus, and over the course of the year they write a 20-page research paper, deliver a formal presentation in front of a panel of outside experts and engage in some form of advocacy. For Tyler and her peers, many of whom still have significant reading and writing deficits from their time in the city's decrepit public school-system, this is no small feat. Chavez's non-senior teachers, including myself, are endlessly impressed with the outcomes.

During the same week that Tyler and her classmates were completing their advocacy projects and preparing for their thesis presentations, Washington Post education writer Jay Matthews published a column in which he argued that senior projects are a sadly underused practice. "These endeavors add depth to high school -- a chance for each student to explore something that intrigues him or her personally," Matthews wrote, "So why are they so rare in area public schools?" The specific projects to which Matthews alluded were open-ended: a baseball enthusiast analyzing ballparks, a carpentry-wiz building a newspaper rack for his school's main office, an aspiring ballerina writing about conservatory auditions. Such latitude is the norm in schools that require senior projects; in fact, the national Senior Project Center specifically trains teachers to help students pursue self-chosen topics.

mission: first, to provide students with a rigorous college preparatory education; and second, to foster good citizenship through a policy-themed curriculum. Accordingly, underclassmen take policy classes and complete end-of-year policy projects, juniors work as summer interns in local policy organizations, and seniors design their thesis projects around policy topics of their choice. Popular topics tend to involve issues that are close to home for the students: the achievement gap, high school dropout rates, domestic violence and teen pregnancy.

It seems like a no-brainer that academic and civic education would go hand-in-hand. When the American public education system was established in the 19th century, it was with the purpose that George Washington had named in his farewell address: to "enlighten" public opinion so that American citizens could participate in their own democracy. This vision is far from outdated. After all, the skills needed to be an engaged citizen overlap with those needed to be a successful student: literacy, numeracy, critical analysis, big-picture thinking. Democracy aside, new evidence published by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Education (CIRCLE) suggests that civically engaged students are more likely to perform well and go farther in school (PDF). Put it all together and you would think that schools like Chávez and projects like the senior thesis would be a dime a dozen.

Yet Chávez is the only school in the Washington metropolitan area that focuses on public policy. In the era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing, schools have become increasingly focused on "core" academic subjects such as reading and math. Meanwhile, civic education programs have joined art and music in the basement. Nobody wants to cut these programs, but it happens again and again -- particularly at urban schools like Chávez, where getting students to pass state tests can spell the difference between funding and closure. Ironically, these are the schools where students tend to be most disengaged with their academic work, and least likely to become civically engaged as adults.

It was the desire to make the thesis projects more "real" that prompted Chávez's Public Policy Director Julie Harris to create the advocacy requirement this year. "In past years the students were doing great research and writing, but we weren't instilling them with the belief that they could make things happen, and that belief is crucial," explains Harris. She plans to expand the advocacy requirement next year, and Ayo Heinegg, the thesis-class teacher, approves wholeheartedly. "For many of students, the advocacy project turned the thesis from a dry academic paper they 'had to' write, to a real-life, interactive experience that made both the topic and the thesis process come alive," Heinegg said.

The advocacy projects took a wide range of forms. Several students testified at government hearings, some made pamphlets and canvassed the city with them, and one organized a group to march at a pro-immigration rally. Reflecting on their work, almost all students focus on the perception of themselves as change-makers. Tyler is no exception. "I used to just think no adults would ever listen to me," she said, "but at the ANC meeting I started to notice that the people were really engaged with what I had to say. For the first time I was connecting with my community."

Tyler approves of Harris's idea to expand the advocacy project requirement next year. "A lot of kids don't like writing or reading, but almost all kids like talking," she said. "They like feeling important, like, 'Yeah, I did this, I changed this.'"

Chávez is by no means a utopian school, even by inner-city standards. It has struggled to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind, and as a result, the administration has put increasing pressure on teachers to focus on test readiness. This makes it difficult to fully integrate civic education into the underclass curriculum. Yet the school is certainly getting something right when it comes to senior year.

"I'm using my thesis in my everyday life now," Tyler said, explaining that she has been talking to her teen-parent friends about spending more time with their children and regulating screen-time. "I don't want my kids growing up with the T.V. as their only role-model, and I don't think other people do either. I realize now that people who are informed about an issue can talk to other people about it, and they will listen and make changes in their life. I never used to think that was possible."

Sarah M. Fine has spent the past four years working as an English teacher, department chair, and instructional coach at the César Chávez Public Charter School for Public Policy in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in D.C.'s Education Week and Teacher Magazine.