Urban Youth and School Pushout

Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED

Eve Tuck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415886086
• eBook ISBN: 9781136813825
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Winner of the 2013 American Educational Studies Association's Critics Choice Award!

Recent efforts to reform urban high schools have been marked by the pursuit of ever-increasing accountability policies, most notably through the use of high-stakes standardized testing, mayoral control, and secondary school exit exams. Urban Youth and School Pushout excavates the unintended consequences of such policies on secondary school completion by focusing specifically on the use and over-use of the GED credential. Building on a tradition of critical theory and political economy of education, author Eve Tuck offers a provocative analysis of how accountability tacitly and explicitly pushes out under-performing students from the system. By drawing on participatory action research, as well as the work of indigenous scholars and theories, this theoretically and empirically rich book illustrates urban public schooling as a dialectic of humiliating ironies and dangerous dignities. Focusing on the experiences of youth who have been pushed out of their schools under the auspices of obtaining a GED, Tuck reveals new insights on how urban youth view accountability schooling, value the GED, and yearn for multiple, meaningful routes to graduation.

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INTRODUCTION

Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED

Since the 1990s, efforts to reform school systems in urban centers across the United States have been marked by the pursuit of accountability, most notably through the use of federal mandates, state-required secondary school exit exams, and mayoral control. Though several volumes have explored the follies of contrived accountability (Apple, 2005; Skrla & Scherich, 2003; Kozol, 2006; Noddings, 2007), few have excavated the consequences of accountability policies on secondary school completion (see Amrein & Berliner, 2003). Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED examines the relationships between federal, state, and local education policies, the use and over-use of the General Education Development (GED) credential, and school pushout in New York City. I utilize the term pushout throughout this book to describe the experiences of those youth who have been compelled to leave school by people or factors inside school, such as disrespectful treatment from teachers and other school personnel, violence among students, arbitrary school rules, and the insurmountable presence of high stakes testing. Using new empirical data, I show how accountability policies such as mandatory exit exams and mayoral control, punctuated by pressures excited by No Child Left Behind, produce the conditions in which schools tacitly and explicitly encourage under-performing students to drop out under the auspices of the GED.

The GED has long been touted as an alternative to a high school diploma, but it is not an equal alternative. Rather, GED earners experience diminished returns when compared to high school diploma earners in post-secondary school access and completion, job placement, life-long earnings, health, and incarceration rates. In fact, life outcomes for GED earners more closely resemble school non-completers than diploma earners. Yet, in the past thirty-five years, the numbers of school-aged youth who pursue the GED have steadily increased. “For the vast majority of non-credentialed adults, and increasing numbers of teenagers, the GED has become America's largest high school, and its cheapest” (Quinn, 2002, p. 1).

Other analyses have observed the uneven outcomes of the GED plus the rising numbers of youth who pursue this depleted credential, and concluded that young GEDers are nihilistic, or dupes who have made a poor decision. The analyses presented in this book are distinct because they refuse to accept these depictions of young people. Instead, the empirical study reported here was conducted as youth participatory action research (PAR), which positioned pushed-out youth and young GEDers as researchers and experts on their own lives. Beyond analyses of youth GED seekers as duped or self-destructive, a third possibility emerged: the GED is valued by many youth not only as gateway to higher employment or higher education, but also, more importantly, as get-away from truculent high schools.

My research interests in the GED began in 2004 at an Urban Education Community Dialogue meeting in Manhattan at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The dialogues were a series of meetings for educators, organizers, policy makers, and academics on education to come together to discuss New York City public schools. I worked as part of the planning committee for these dialogues as a doctoral student, along with Dr. Jean Anyon, Dr. Michelle Fine, and Dr. Stanley Aronowitz, and several other doctoral students. In this particular meeting, one community organizer stood up and told the room that he had heard a rumor that the GED, a national credential, would be “canceled.”

My curiosity in this rumor deepened the next day when I went to my office at the youth community based organization where I was a Co-Director of Education for Liberation. My electronic inbox and voicemail box contained numerous messages from community organizers, staff at after-school programs and neighborhood organizations, and other concerned educators about the rumored phase-out of the GED. Many youth advocates at the time wondered aloud whether this was a good or bad thing for youth in educationally disenfranchised neighborhoods, and for the neighborhoods themselves.

Several of the youth organizers I worked with had recently been pushed out of school, and I had been talking with them about getting a little GED preparation study group going, because the GED programs in the South Bronx neighborhood were filled to over-capacity and would not accept any “underage” youth. The rumor brought to my attention my own lack of knowledge on the GED, and whether attaining the credential would actually serve these youth in achieving their future life aspirations.

I did a little investigating, placed a few phone calls to the American Council on Education, the lobbyist group that sponsors the exam, and learned to my satisfaction that the GED was not being canceled. My conclusion was that the rumor was ignited by the then-recent (2002) revision of the exam, which included a more extensive essay element along with some other changes discussed in Chapter 4 of this book. Assured that the GED option would still be available for uncredentialed youth and adults, I still was unsettled by the questions of the use(s) and value(s) of the GED that the rumor had prompted in me. How might I, or anyone working in an advisory relationship with youth, support them in making sound decisions about the GED? How does the GED play out in young people's lives as one last opportunity for secondary school completion? Are the punishments for earning a credential widely perceived to be second rate worth the benefits? It was these questions, to which I genuinely had no answers, which sustained me as I designed this research study.

In my time as a community educator and as I began to conceptualize this research, I learned of many accounts in which urban youth were being encouraged, even compelled, by their schools to leave school for a GED. It was important to me to determine whether schools were pushing students toward an equal or unequal credential. I looked to the academic literature to tell me about the usefulness of the GED as an equivalent of a high school diploma. With few exceptions (Cameron & Heckman, 1993; Smith, 2005) the academic literature insisted that the GED is a diminished credential when compared to a high school diploma. This conclusion was based on life outcomes in terms of employment, income, higher education, military attrition, and incarceration. From these perspectives, the growing numbers of youth who pursued this weaker credential had been duped by their communities and families, society, and presumably by schools. Yet, there were no data from the youth themselves about whether they felt duped, or felt informed of the credential's diminished value, yet pursued the credential anyway for reasons that were unacknowledged by the academic literature.

I believed that this was an important distinction to make, and that hearing more from youth GED seekers and earners would yield important insights about the relationships between the GED and schools. I knew that my research would need to listen carefully to youth GED seekers and earners, so I conducted the study as participatory action research with youth co-researchers, aged 17–21, several of whom were seeking or had earned a GED. They helped me to design a study that would uncover what had been overlooked by prior studies on youth and the GED: why youth pursued a credential that was not equivalent to a high school diploma.

My ethical stance as a researcher, prior experiences as a community educator, and Aleut family's history with unethical research had primed my interest in participatory action research (PAR) long before I began designing the project that would become the Gateways and Get-aways Project. Existing GED research had been limited by not engaging with youth GED earners as co-theorists and co-analysts of the GED's values and uses. Further, existing research on the GED did not address issues of school pushout. I conducted this study as PAR because of political symmetry, but almost more importantly because I felt that this would strengthen the data and findings in ways that other studies on the GED had missed.

The Gateways and Get-aways Project

I conducted the study at the heart of this book, the Gateways and Get-aways Project, between 2006 and 2007, in New York City, with seven youth co-researchers, aged 17–21, several of whom had been pushed out of their former schools, and ultimately earned a GED. My co-researchers on this project were Jovanne Allen, Maria Bacha, Jodi-Ann Gayle, Alexis Morales, Crystal Orama, Sarah Quinter, and Jamila Thompson. In addition to this core group, five other youth, some school non-completers and GED earners, participated in the design of the study. They included Rafael “Q” Quinde, Luis Ravelo, Shermel James, Christopher Alvarez, and Tyrone West. My sister, Melody Tuck, also participated in designing many of the research instruments.

These youth were my co-researchers and co-designers in this study, not my research subjects. We conducted the study as participatory action research, which meant that we developed the research questions, designed the study, collected the data, analyzed our data, and determined our findings collaboratively (see also Tuck and Fine, 2007; Tuck et al., 2008; Tuck, 2008). Several of my youth co-researchers and co-designers, after the plans for the study and each research instrument were drawn, did decide to participate in the study by sharing their own experiences and perspectives in individual interviews. Co-researchers who also were interview participants in the study were Jovanne and Alexis, and Tyrone, a co-designer, also participated in an interview.

Participatory action research has emerged from many diverse peoples and distinct places all over the globe. PAR shares much common ground with popular education, which seeks to engage people in a learning process that positions them as experts in their own lives, and critically interrogates social injustice in order to determine and develop needed skills to take social action (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). Rather than a set of methods, PAR is best described as an ethic, as a set of beliefs about knowledge, where it comes from, and how knowledge is validated and strengthened (Fine, 2008). PAR aims to “return to the people the legitimacy of the knowledge they are capable of producing through their own verification systems . . . as a guide to their own action” (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991, p. 15). This tenet characterizes PAR at every turn, both in the larger framing and impetus for the research, and in the interpersonal relationships cultivated in doing the research. In PAR, those who historically would have been the research subjects are engaged as co-researchers. This can mean that they co-construct the research questions and study design, collectively select and prepare research methods and instruments, collaboratively collect and analyze data, and co-produce communications of study findings. PAR involves the belief that people have deep knowledge about their own lives, and the communities and institutions they inhabit. PAR anticipates that “those who have been most systematically excluded, oppressed, or denied carry specifically revealing wisdom about the history, structure, consequences, and the fracture points in unjust social arrangements”(Fine, 2008, p. 215). Further, participatory action researchers hold that collaborative research strategies yield strong and useful data (Tuck, 2008; Tuck et al., 2008).

Deeply pedagogical, PAR is well-suited for educational research because it confirms what those concerned with education know to be true about learning (Cammarota and Fine, 2008); PAR can be engaged in schools and communities to enrich learning, and at the same time, procure knowledge and analyses that can improve conditions and achieve justice.

To begin a PAR study on school pushout and the GED, in 2006 I brought together an initial group comprised of several youth I had met while doing community organizing with a number of community based organizations around the city. Some members of this first group brought friends, or other youth organizers, and at that initial meeting held in my Brooklyn apartment, we began to sketch the plans for our study (for a full discussion of the design process of the study, see Tuck et al., 2008; Tuck, 2009b; and Tuck, 2008). We named our research team the Collective of Researchers on Educational Disappointment and Desire (CREDD) (see Figure 1.1).

The Gateways and Get-aways Project spanned 18 months in 2006 and 2007. In a co-authored chapter for an edited volume on youth PAR, my co-researchers and I used these words to describe our work:

We are united by our disappointment in the New York City public school system, and our desire to affect political and educational change in school policies and practices . . . We have developed a critique of a school system that was never intended for us in the first place. Our group defines itself against racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, the criminalization of poor people, and pushout practices in New York City public high schools. We are in favor of schooling that is rigorous, accessible, and free.

(Tuck et al., 2008, p. 49)

FIGURE 1.1 The CREDD seal. Created by Sarah Quinter.

CREDD designed the Gateways and Get-aways Project around four interconnected areas of inquiry: (1) the perceived and lived value(s) of the GED, (2) pushout practices in New York City high schools, (3) state exit exams and diploma options in New York State, (4) meritocracy and the false promises of the American dream. This book reports data and findings from across these four areas of inquiry.

The Gateways and Get-aways Project utilized qualitative and quantitative methods that are regularly employed in social science, including individual interviews, focus groups, and an opinion poll. We also tailored schoolyard games, popular education exercises, community organizing techniques, and borrowed techniques from journalism to create a variety of secondary data collection methods (see Table 1.1; see Tuck, 2008). The methods that yielded empirical data are described in the chapters in which the data appear.

Table 1.1Gateways and Get-aways Project Methods

Method	Description	Sample*	N
Interview	Structured, open-ended interviews lasting approximately one hour; tape recorded; transcribed; coded with 87% inter-reader reliability.		35
		Youth GED earners and s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Urban Youth and School Pushout
• Critical Youth Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Accountability Policies and School Pushout
• 3 Humiliating Ironies and Dangerous Dignities
• 4 Repatriating the GED
• 5 Repurposing Schooling
• 6 Educational Renewal
• Appendix A
• Notes
• References
• Index