Urban Youth and Life Success:

Rethinking Urban Education Policy

Robyne Stevenson Turner, Ph.D.
Copywrite 2010

I am neither a youth intervention expert nor an education expert. I can't tell you which programs work
well, which ones have any statistically significant success, or if one program is better than another.
There are experts who can testify to those questions. My purpose is to change the way we approach the
questions by asking different questions. Instead of, “why are students failing” we could ask, “why is
the institution failing to educate students?” But this has become the Gordian policy knot of urban
education – are students unable to learn because of their environment or are teachers unable to teach
this student body? There is no answer for this, because urban education is not a linear or singular
activity. It is a complex system of interrelated components that all serve to shape and simultaneously be
shaped by the environment in which a given policy is trying to succeed. To ask if students are failing or
teachers are failing is a question that will not lead to an improvement in urban education.

What I know, as many urban adults know, is that young people are not finishing high school, that they
are getting into legal trouble, get incarcerated, and their life is forever changed once they reach
adulthood and repeat this cycle. The incarceration rates for young black men is statistically shockingi
(six times greater than whitesii). Generations of men of color are being lost to the system that is
punitive towards urban survival behavior. Once young men of color go to prison and no longer are
eligible for wiping their juvenile record away, their future becomes extremely limited. The research on
recidivism, re-entry, and joblessness of the urban male ex-offender population is well documentediii. As
if the lack of education were not enough to hamstring an individual's progress, these men also have
conviction records that make them ineligible for many jobs, access to housing and other living
resources, educational finance assistance, ad infinitum.

My own experience with the advancement of young urban men of color is mixed. I have known at least
one who died of senseless gun violence, one who has dropped out of school while in and out of juvenile
lock-up and alternative schools, and two that have recently graduated high school and have plans to
attend an institution of higher education. I know several others that are in high school, doing well or at
least on track to graduate, but others who have had such tumult in their lives that they are unable to
maintain their eyes on the school prize. Frequent relocation, difficulty mastering school lessons under
the supervision of a rotation of teachers at different schools, poverty that yields real temptations to earn
what seems like easy money, and the pervasive 24/7 tenor of the urban streets all work against
educational success.

Dropping out of school is one thing that makes sense in the lives of these youth. If school success is
difficult to near impossible and survival is paramount, why would students stay in school? Urban
schools are filled with all the normal teenage angst that we see portrayed in movies and television
shows. The dramatic difference is that the angst may have lethal consequences when tempers flare,
lines are crossed, and dares are made. “Fitting in” on the urban streets includes dress, behavior,
accessories, and perhaps most importantly – loyalties and connections. Who you have as your friends is
a life altering choice. And by that I mean who has your back is more important than determining if this
person is likely to get you into trouble. Trouble is everywhere in the urban realm. Therefore, avoiding it
is the wrong strategy for survival. Surviving it is the most advantageous approach to dealing with
trouble.

The reaction of middle class and upper class people, including educators, to this scenario is to:
• admonish students to stay in school so they have a future
• say no to drugs and violence and enforce that with a zero tolerance policy in schools

The rest of the advice and rules that are brought to bear on these young people is often contradictory:
• guidance counseling and college preparation is often nonexistent in urban schools while an
emphasis is placed on attendance and test performance – two things that lead to school funding.
• Drug counseling, pregnancy prevention, and violence mediation are absent in an environment
where students face these troubling issues every day.
• Schools provide meals made of artificial food products provided by agribusiness food
corporations while students are in an environment where the nutrition they receive at school
may make the difference between learning and not learning in their daily life.
• Students are admonished to study in order to prepare for their future yet schools often do not
provide take-home books, access to technology, or extra learning opportuities. Homework is
often given lightly and taken even more lightly.
• there is little expectation for gainful employment in the neighborhoods these student live in, but,
abandoning a life you know is not an easy decision for any person to make, let alone a teenager.

The lives of generations of urban youth are frittered away while urban institutions – school districts,
city governments, the federal government, nonprofits and churches, and other well-intentioned entities
– fail to act deliberately. A program here and a gesture there have not stopped the tide of young
people failing to succeed at life. The result is not just a prison population that grows, but an under-
skilled, undereducated work force that cannot contribute meaningfully to the economy and who will
resort to non-profit and government assistance for their survival. This also is a population that will have
early and serious health issues that will be shared with the next generation because of inadequate access
to preventative and early health care, safe and healthy environments, and health knowledge. Drug,
street, and domestic violence are part of this unattractive environment and life-cycle. Youth who make
it to adulthood face a myriad of roadblocks and stumbling blocks to longevity and prosperity. This is an
unacceptably bleak prospect for citizens of the United States.

Wearing baggy/saggy pants and a backwards baseball cap does not lead to juvenile incarceration or
drugs. Those are nothing more than clothing items like mini-skirts and forwards baseball caps.
Smoking weed and drinking is as likely to create health risks for urban youth as it is rural or suburban
youth. The difference is that suburban youth are likely to have a stronger immune system and access to
health care and intervention than are urban and rural kids. Urban youth that live in violent
environments are much more likely to die young than are suburban and rural youth who do not live in
violent street environments. Poverty and jail are more likely to be the life result for youth that have
poor education, few job opportunities, and a hostile environment that expects them to fail and will not
tolerate behavior outside of the dominant norms. Urban youth are often living in one environment and
needing to succeed in a different environment. How likely is it that they will navigate these two
cultures if they are given a dichotomy of either/or choices?

Answers and responses range from:

• Urban youth of color need to act and respond more closely to middle class and white norms.
Everything from dress codes to police profiling tells us that. So does the demand for integration.
 • Urban youth of color are unable or unwilling to pass standardized high school tests and
therefore, need social promotion or otherwise be failed or held back. Rarely is the response that
the system of education is failing to provide an educational approach that works for urban
youth.
• While institutional admonitions have improved since the days of “just say no,” there remains
little in the way of confidence building, strategy-building, or teaching choice selection to urban
youth. When faced with a myriad of bad options and environmental schisms, urban youth are
admonished if they don't make the right choice, but given few directions on how to navigate to
that choice without compromising themselves in a dynamic and complex urban system.
• Rap and hip-hop music is defined by non-listeners as either a damaging force that should be
avoided or a poetic discourse on urban life. Urban youth are given few tools about how to
discern the messages and interpret the influences because no one who has a clue about their life
is available to discuss it with them.

What is the Answer?

There is no single answer, no magic bullet. Anyone that says they have “the” program to save kids is
selling you so they can make money. There is no likelihood that all the moving parts of this problem
can be addressed in great enough significance through one program to eradicate the trajectory of
trouble for urban youth. Systems thinking is a significant way that education can succeed in this
environmentiv. The Harlem Children's Zone has taken an wholistic approach to these problems and
roadblocksv. Perhaps that is why their model has been embraced by the Obama administration as
Promise Neighborhoodsvi. The model tries to focus on many moving parts at once in order to create a
supportive climate in which to raise children. The replication of the Zone as PN's, however, is very
slow. So far, it's just drops in the bucket.

Systems thinking is challenging. First, there is a cognitive dissonance in this area that prevents serious
and reasonable people from taking on the problems of urban youth. The reliance on the “I can't change
the world, but I can save one kid at a time” is noble, but unsustainable unless you plan to isolate this
child from the environment they navigate daily. Second, the “change the system” approach can succeed
only if there is recognition that we are living in a multiple-system world where interdependencies of
systems are evidenced every day in the lives of urban youth. Education, health, nutrition, family,
mental health, employment, housing, environmental quality, transportation access, parenting, and more
are intertwined to create the life forces of urban youth, adults, and everyone else. In the face of that
complex reality, most people throw up their hands and say nothing will change, or they redouble their
efforts to focus on one segment of the problem with determination to make things better. Michelle
Obama is an example of doing great things on one issue that will have limited impact. Her campaign to
get kids to eat healthy and eschew junk food is admirable, but unless food stamp use, school meals,
advertising, and food deserts are radically changed, her efforts will not show significant results.
Multiple systems have to be addressed simultaeneously.

The answer, such as it is, must be to transform the dominant thinking to implement sustainable
approaches – sustainable meaning based on a complex reality, not the simplistic dichotomy of the way
we wish things would be.
Excuses
Discussion of this subject may degenerate into a blame game. One blame is that no excuses should be
made for urban youth making “poor” or “wrong” choices. This fits in with the zero tolerance approach
that schools use. A second blame may be that urban youth “are pressured” into bad choices because of
their surroundings. They can't escape peer pressure, the mean streets, and the economic realities of their
existence. This suggests that they are incapable of free will or moral discernment.

The practical reality may be that urban youth negotiate the complexities of their environment by
understanding the relationship of the system pieces. If they do X, then Y will repond. If they don't do
X, Y will respond in a different way. Intervening R, S, and T influences must be considered as well and
weighed against the likelihood of occurrence. Navigating the urban environment is complex. The pros
and cons of snitching, being involved with anyone related to drugs, or doing what you have to do to
“fit in” are an example of that complexity.

We cannot expect young people to make the best choices all the time, but neither can we leave them
free from accountability. Students need information on both the constructed realities and the realities
that have yet to be constructed. Urban youth need guidance in constructing and responding to their
realities. They cannot do it alone and they cannot do it without assistance.

The Program
Most non-profit and educational professionals will search for a program to address the issue of urban
youth success. They try to pick the best one or the right one or the one that is likely to work within their
organizational constraints. Rarely is “the program” approach determined based on the characteristics
and reflections of the youth themselves. Rather the program is selected based on what we want them to
be or worse, the constraints of the organization to implement the program.

Check out the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention web
site for model practices: http://www2.dsgonline.com/mpg/. At this site you will find options for
programs in prevention, immediate sanctions, intermediate sanctions, residential, and re-entry
categories. There are upwards of 17 model programs under each tab. Pick the one you like best and
begin your reformation. Each of these programs will “work” depending on your definition of success.
If there are 17 different model programs for prevention, then shouldn't we expect to implement all 17?
Is any place doing that? If we only implement one or two, aren't we acquiescing failure to at least some
segments of the urban youth population that won't be helped? How comprehensive should we expect to
be in order to achieve a broad success rate that is sustained over time? Once you review the model
programs, you can see the list of dozens of other prevention programs. Surely there is something for
everyone here, but largely unlikely to actually transform or sustain success for a broad segment of at-
risk urban youth. The other tabs have similar panoplies of options.

Teachers and administrators often complain that they are not social workers and cannot be expected to
take on yet another responsibility by implementing a non-academic program. The fact that the realities
of their student's lives have a direct bearing on their educational achievement seems to have little
bearing on this admonition. The reaction that attention to the social environment is an “add-on” to
educational duties is at the base of the need for transformation. If we can't provide a holistic
educational process, then we can't expect educational success for all. Where is it set in stone that
schools are to educate by addressing only academic curriculum that is devined by educators, many of
whom have never experienced what their pupils face daily?
After-school programs led by non-profits are well-intentioned and often successful at affecting
selective issues. The problem is in the staying power of those effects and a systemic connecting of the
dots between the different approaches and issues. For instance in Kansas City there are after school
programs, tutoring programs, mentoring programs, therapeutic equine programs, gang-prevention
programs, character-building programs, and the list goes on. Well-intentioned, well-meaning, results-
producing programs are completely unconnected and leave youth and parents (or guardians, schools,
and churches) to “shop” for a program they like or to reject the laundry list of possible helps as inept
science. Without any connections between programs, schools, and civic institutions, the impact of each
program will be modest.

The dilemma is reminiscent of the host of education curriculum options that schools face. When given
such a smorgasbord, administrators and decision makers may resort to the easiest soundbite to digest so
that they can feel good about the choice. Trying what appears to be “the answer” could take districts
down multiple rabbit holes of failure and lose generations of students because they could not make the
“right” policy selection. This type of pseudo-science using school children as lab rats is unacceptable.
The answer lies not in making children perform, but in establishing an environment where anyone can
learn, regardless of what conditions they present. Schools must become that environment.

Imagine if a teacher were an academic doctor who could call up a phallanx of support for their students
in real time in the classroom to support their academic work. Doctors can't succeed without
pharmasists, therapists, and technicians. But the systems thinking burden cannot be placed on
individual teachers. Rather, educational institutions need to adopt a systems approach and let the
teacher be the lead or be the academic practitioner.

Imagine if urban youth were given in-school tutoring, after-school mentoring, weekend gang
prevention activities, weekly academic coaching from the guidance counselor, academic support
systems, and so forth. A holistic transformation of their understanding of their options and how to
create their realities along with a menu of programs that could sustain success, regardless of what the
young person presented as their vulnerabilities.

Sustainability
The final word on urban youth and their success must be “sustainability.” The focus on which approach
works and under what circumstances is unrealistic and dissatisfactory. We have a veritable menu of
workable approaches. We have a known expanse of urban environment factors that affect student
achievement. We don't need a definitive diagnosis. What we need is a broad spectrum of support that is
available easily and constantly and one that can adapt to the interconnections of the urban system.
Teachers will not deliver all these services, but they could be the point of authority to oversee the full
educational plan (akin to a medical treatment plan). Outsourcing the treatment plan to a community
resource office in the school district is another option. Teachers remains the seminal point of contact for
the educational success of the student. But you can't separate academic teaching from life coaching and
environment intervention. The teacher has to be consulted and kept apprised on how the student is
improving and what needs must be adjusted. Without this systems thinking, learning does not occur at
its full capacity. Learning will and does occur without such a broad approach, but it will never reach its
full potential.
A wholistic approach to educational achievement is a way to connect the dots of programs that aim to
help, curriculum that aims to teach, and support people who want to make a difference in the future life
of a student. Without connecting these dots, there is no sustainability in educational success. Without
connecting these dots, there is no means to hold anyone accountable for the professional work they
undertake on behalf of urban youth. Without connecting these dots, the educational system is merely
marking time and shuffling students through their doors. Educators may as well cross their fingers or
roll the dice if they are going to do nothing more than focus on academic issues when it comes to urban
youth.
i Plight Deepens for Black Men, New York Times. March 20, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
ii http://allotherpersons.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/factoid-black-male-incarceration-rate-is-6-times-greater-than-rate-for-
white-males/ Citing U.S. Department of Justice statistics
iii www.urban.org/uploadedpdf/410857_freeman.pdf
iv From Theory to Practice: A Cognitive Systems Approach. 1993. J.B. Biggs. Higher Education Research &
Development. 12:1, 73-85.
v http://www.hcz.org/
vi http://www2.ed.gov/programs/promiseneighborhoods/index.html