style="font-size:15px;"> A Study of Urban Youth
WHEN I FIRST decided to study urban adolescents’ perceptions of their worlds, I had already been working for two years at the high school that would be my research site. I was a mental health counselor in training with ten assigned cases a semester—pretty plush circumstances given that the school’s full-time guidance counselors each had more than three hundred cases. While there was a tremendous need for me to take on more cases, my school-based supervisor protected me from being overloaded because I was there to be trained. Since few of my peers in training wanted to work in this school (given the ratio of need to the resources provided and the fact that we were not paid), my supervisor feared I would leave if the work load became unmanageable. I stayed on after my practicum was over to counsel students for another few years; to help procure a federal grant to set up and codirect a five-year prevention/intervention project for at-risk youth in this school; and to follow, for my research study, a group of adolescents over three years.1 None of the students whom I counseled, however, were involved in my study.
The Sample
Because my intention was to conduct an in-depth investigation of urban youth in their passage through adolescence rather than to generalize to larger populations, I chose to investigate a small sample of teenagers. Twelve girls and twelve boys from the urban school in which I worked were selected from a larger pool of students who had participated in a cross-sectional study in which I was also involved.2 In order to recruit students, the research team from the cross-sectional study (including myself) announced the project to all the students in ten academically diverse classrooms. Eighty percent of those who were told about the cross-sectional project volunteered to participate, and 93 percent of those students who were eligible for my smaller, longitudinal project were willing to participate in my project. The adolescents in my study identified themselves as African American (12), Puerto Rican (3), Dominican (3), West Indian (2), Bolivian (1), El Salvadoran (1), Irish American (1), or half Irish American and half Puerto Rican (1).3 Those who participated have spent most or all of their lives in the United States and speak English fluently. All came from poor or working-class families4 and lived in the neighborhoods surrounding the school in which the interviews took place.
The Setting
The school in which I conducted my research had been a fairly prestigious boys’ school with a predominantly white student body in the 1960s but has gradually transformed into a coeducational, almost exclusively ethnic minority school with a poor reputation. The mostly white teachers typically blame the students for the school’s decline; and the students, for the most part, also blame themselves, as will be seen in a later chapter. At the time of the study, the school had an approximately 33 percent dropout rate, among the highest in this northeastern city. About 25 percent of the students (girls and boys) became parents by the time they graduated from or left high school. The city’s primary newspaper has called this school “violent and dangerous”: the principal has been held hostage by a student at gunpoint, both teachers and students have been attacked in the hallways, and students have been shot at the subway stop next to the school. Black as well as white security guards roam the hallways, stand at the doors, and interrogate any “suspicious-looking” persons. I rarely got stopped by the guards while I searched for kids to interview, while my partner, Stacy, an African American middle-class man, was stopped repeatedly. During the last year of the study, metal detectors were installed at the front doors, but this novelty was quickly criticized for slowing down the morning surge to classes, and for its lack of success in preventing weapons from coming into the building. The suspension rate was high during the first two years of the study. However, when the principal was reprimanded by the school superintendent for such a high suspension rate, efforts were quickly implemented to cut it down.
The school’s physical building is in fairly good condition. There are only a few seriously damaged sections, and paint peels in only a few of the rooms. The greatest problem is lack of space. The building is much too small for the twelve hundred students who attend. Between classes, students push and shove as they try to make it to the next class in the allotted three minutes. Fights often erupt between classes because a student has pushed another one into the wall and one or both of them are angry. Like so many other public school buildings, this building was originally designed for a much smaller student body. Designed to be a junior high school, it was transformed into a high school when the high school was moved from its former location in an affluent neighborhood in another part of the city. The building looks like a factory, with no “real” windows, only large panes of scratched plastic “safety” windows dully covering the gaps in the walls. On sunny days the rooms feel dark and dirty, with the smudged windows preventing the light and air from coming in. Students, many of them suffering from asthma, complain that it is difficult to breathe in this building. I felt similarly whenever I spent any time there. The circulation in the building is poor and musty smells of sweat and stale science projects float through the air. This lack of circulation may be, in part, a reason why students are seen sleeping in virtually every classroom.
The school is considered an “okay” school academically but since a more academically demanding “school within a school” left the building (it used to be located on the top floor and recruited some of the best students in the city), many have complained that all the good students have left. The school is now divided into two programs or houses—“the bilingual program” and “the traditional program.” Each program has its own floor. The bilingual program consists primarily of Puerto Rican and Dominican students. A good part of the school’s resources goes into the bilingual program and the more inspired teachers are likely to be found teaching here rather than in the traditional program. Students and teachers in both programs are acutely aware of this discrepancy, creating an obvious tension between programs. The traditional program is made up primarily of African American students and houses many of the teachers who have been teaching at the school for over twenty years. The students who participated in my study came predominantly from the traditional program.
During the time of the study, eighty percent of the students in the school were on the city’s reduced or free lunch plan, which means their families’ incomes were close to or below the national poverty line. Dotted with empty lots and boarded-up buildings, the neighborhoods surrounding the school are considered the city’s most dilapidated and desolate and testify to a general reluctance both by city officials and the business community to invest here. A subway stop is located a block away from the school, a working-class Irish pub/restaurant sits across the street, and a small luncheonette is down the street. While many students buy lunch at the luncheonette, no students are ever seen in the pub/restaurant that is closer to the school and has food as cheap as the luncheonette. Tensions between white ethnic groups and people of color abound in this neighborhood and are practically palpable when students skirt past this Irish working-class establishment before and after school.
When I arrived at the school from the subway stop down the street, as I did every week for five years, I was often greeted by small groups of students hanging out in the parking lot or on the steps of the school, cutting classes or being denied access to their classes because they were late to school. On a daily basis the front doors are locked and students are not allowed into the building after the second-period bell rings. However, there are many secret routes into the school, and students seem to go in and out of the building throughout the day. School security is not as thorough as the administrators claim it to be. The school is a place where some kids want to be because, they told us, it is better than being at home or out on the streets. For many others, however, it is a place of frustration, boredom, and, at times, humiliation. Nevertheless, this school is the place in which the teens in this study spent most of their days, and it is the place where the students told us their stories.
Strategies
