Hearing and Listening: Bridging the Leadership Divide between School Connectedness and Students’ Lived Realities

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to examine the disconnect between urban school expectations and actual lived realities of marginalized students. Taking into consideration the conversation surrounding the definitions of urban education, and the importance of school connectedness with youth, we chose to focus on the lives of five former high students navigating their education. Our qualitative study found that the students’ lives presented challenges to linear pathways to school success. Drawing from the student’s stories, recommendations are proposed to disrupt the deficit definition of urban education and educational leaders initiate critical school connections to students lived realities.

“Have I shown you a picture of my daughter?”

I have had this conversation in my classroom before — enough to not be floored by it but not so often that it was still a shock each time.

“I’m sorry, what?” I responded, buying myself a few moments to process the situation and gain the appropriate composure.

“Have I shown you a picture of my daughter?” he asked again.

“No, I don’t think you have. Let’s see.”

She was 2. He was 16.

This student became a parent when he was just 14 years old and, while he and the child’s mother were no longer partnered, they were working together to raise their little girl.

He has been juggling many different life dynamics, both those that were expected of a student in high school and those expected in adulthood. He attended General High School (a pseudonym), a large high school in a diverse metro area of a city in the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. It was this student’s story that led us to looking at students and their layered lives outside of school, which had a direct impact on their educational futures (Brown, 2016; Ginwright, 2016). Too often, urban contextual factors (e.g., poverty, structural racism) served as barriers to academic success associated with traditional school expectations. Often this has led to school administrators adhering to an urban school deficit ideology and degrading or just ignoring students based on biased prejudice, particularly against Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students or low-income students (Castro, 2020). This deficit ideology in urban education has defined the policy research conceptions and enactment of policy has been based on the nexus between the presence of BIPOC students and families, and the ingrained ideology that these populations of students cause urban schools to be viewed as “bad.” This negates the strengths of BIOPC populations and the cultural and racial wealth that is embedded within urban communities (Coloma, 2020). Milner (2012) conceptually defined urban education through the lenses of urban intensive, urban emergent and urban characteristic. Milner’s typology put forth urban intensive as characteristic of cities such as New York City or Los Angeles. An urban emergent definition focused on slightly smaller cities with the major metro sharing the same challenges such as lack of resources and shortcomings in academic development of BIOPC students. Finally, he posited that urban characteristic comprised schools that were not located in major metro areas or part of bigger cities, but exhibited similar challenges related to lack of resources or the influx of a new population of BIOPC students and where the leadership must help the district make sense of the demographic shifts and change assumptions and expectations (Evans, 2007). Welsh and Swain (2020) provided a finer grained analysis through their empirical study of urban schools and found that the deficit-oriented language undergirded policy, research, and the framing of urban education. Furthermore, this deficit perspective revealed an important gap in the analysis on viewing some smaller districts as urban that had educational inequality and racial diversity.

It is this conversation we are joining regarding an important aspect of school leadership in the urban education discussion: namely, how does this deficit assumption play out in the lived experiences of a small group of students who attended high school in a urban education context; how did they show various forms of asset-based directions to their education and reliance on their resiliency in spite of the barriers both inside and outside of school that they faced; and what are the recommendations that these students had for school leadership relating to their urban education experience and implications for building school leadership change?

There is already existing research on the importance of teachers building rapport with the students in their classes (Boykin & Noguera, 2014; Rodriguez, 2008). Educators know the difference connectedness in the classroom makes in a student’s educational experience. Indeed, we fully acknowledge many school leaders doing just this as well. However, the purpose of our work is to take on the deficit ideologies among some administrators directly (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019). The findings documented in this work can provide school administrators insight into what is really happening in the lives of the students who attend the schools they lead.

This focus was chosen because school leaders are central to the contextual direction and resource utilization within schools. These leaders set the tone for the culture of the school community through resource allocation, afterschool programming, and hiring, among other areas. Lyons (2018) argues that the school administrators can and do make a profound difference in the success or failure of a school. Their leadership can focus on developing and enhancing positive leadership or be out of touch and demonstrate perfunctory actions that end up being superficial. Often this leadership has a positive or negative impact on the students who are facing the most hurt and trauma. Therefore, our research is intended to build on existing literature regarding school leadership connectedness.

Furthermore, our work is intended to help school leaders better understand the nuances of urban realities that impact the lives of students’ lives outside of school, and its interrelationship with their performance and actions within school. We do this by sharing stories like the one at the introduction of our paper. In fact, it was the stories that led to further eliciting students’ voices, asking more questions, and listening to their answers without ascribing to deficit ideological judgment. Moreover, it was important to understand their individual life experiences outside of high school, and their perspectives on why it had an impact on their education, and what could have been ameliorated in their situations. It was this process that led to the following research questions:

1. How have some low-income high school students, who experienced various forms of life trauma reflect on navigating their lived realities, when the school showed minimal interest in their experiences? and

2. What do these students want and need from their educational experience to make schooling relevant to their current and future needs?

These main questions have important implications regarding the direction of the research on school connectedness as well as educational leadership. We argue that when school leaders have a deeper understanding of what is going on in the lives of their students, there is the potential to alter assumptions regarding their students’ realities inside and outside of school. When deficit urban school beliefs have the potential to be altered, educational practices can also change toward more critically inclusive and equitable ways of operating (Gorski, 2018). The salient component of the conceptual frameworks for our paper are the importance of connectedness through the sharing of youth narratives and listening to what they have to say, with implications for urban educational leadership toward critical change. To this end, we briefly highlight the conceptual framework utilized for this study and review relevant literature and research on school connectedness and critical ways it falters in schools. Then we will discuss the research methods used in this study. This will be followed by the findings of narrative reflections by the students and how they navigated their lived reality outside of their high school. Finally, we draw implications for educational leaders on purposeful school connectedness, for the varied needs of students who have faced the fallout from systemic racism and poverty conditions of purposeful neighborhood neglect (Ewing, 2018; Kang, 2020).

Conceptual Framework: School Connectedness to Student Life Stories

Chhuon and Wallace (2014), discussed the ways in which creating connectedness was integral in their focus group study of high school youth. They found that high school students needed not only a sense of belonging, but a sense of being known in their education experience. The students in their study discussed the importance of relationships at school, not only around academics but also their personal well-being and having influence over their motivational feelings and overall sense of self. Students felt that when they were sent to the principal’s office, while it may have been for a violation of school policy, the encounter was layered with social deficit discussions by the principal, which in turn caused students to feel they did not belong or were wanted in school. There was no sense of understanding or even listening to the issues they were facing outside of school that impact their lives in the school setting. Chhuon and Wallace (2014) argued that high schools needed to shift their focus work with youth in high schools specifically, toward being relational as opposed to purely pedagogical. Chhuon and Wallace’s (2014) findings also stressed the importance of creating a sense school connectedness because the students then felt they were known at school.

Literature Review on Urban School Connectedness and Leadership

The literature review we used as our guide featured: (1) an overview of the research around school connectedness; and (2) previous studies on students’ life stories that do not fit the linear pattern of academic success and models of school connectedness. There has been much work on the importance of students and a sense of school connectedness and belonging (American Psychological Association, 2014; Blum, 2005; McNeely et al., 2009). For example, the federal advisory guidelines on school connectedness determined that there are factors that have stood out to create a sense of school connectedness (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009). High expectations and standards paired with teacher support have been a basic factor in shaping school connectedness. Respectful and positive relationships between adults and students have also emerged as key to school connectedness, as well as the creation of a safe school environment. In addition, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2009) report placed emphasis on schools improving school connectedness by creating more opportunities for families to be involved and better professional development for teachers to meet the diverse educational, emotional, and social needs of adolescents. Blum (2005) advocated that administrators and teachers increased connectedness to schools when they avoided labeling and sorting students, and instead provided extra opportunities for their educational needs. Coupled with the research on school connectedness was the concept of academic success tied to teachers and administrators showing that students “mattered” to them as learners. Tucker et al. (2010) illustrated the importance of this idea when they studied the successes of low-income African American male urban high school students. The accomplishment of these students was tied to the teachers establishing relationships that “mattered” by paying attention to the feeling of belonging which in turn prompted their full engagement in school.

However, when one looks at some state-wide data, the effectiveness of school connectedness lessens in middle school and high school. For example, a report from by Austin et al. (2018) for the California Department of Education showed a marked decrease in high school connectedness survey data as 6 of 10 youth reported little to no connectedness in their schools. While there is a plethora of research on Title I schooling performance related to funding, connectedness, and academic achievement, most of this has been geared toward the elementary school level, as high schools have on average received only ten percent of Title I funds (Riddle, 2011). Nevertheless, there are high performing high schools with Title I populations that have made strong gains in higher cohort graduation rates, especially for BIPOC students. This has been especially true around high school preparation for college. Knight and Marciano (2013) and Kolluri (2019) were among those who have examined how changes in the curriculum, pedagogy, and connections with the students’ home communities made a difference in high school success for these students.

Yet, critical trends in this research have added more considerations to explain the sometimes lack of school connectedness and its impact on youth. For example, Nasir et al. (2011) explored school connectedness in an urban high school comprised mostly of Latina/o and African American/Black students. Their study revealed dual dimensions of connectedness at both the interpersonal (e.g., having good social relationships with teachers and administrators) and institutional (e.g., academic engagement and achievement) levels. The students who were connected to the school at both the interpersonal and institutional levels had higher grades and graduation rates. Those who were high on their institutional connections with the school but low on their interpersonal level had the second tier of success. Students who had good interpersonal connectedness, but low institutional success fared less; and students who were institutionally and interpersonally disconnected were the worse off in terms of missing/failing classes and being largely invisible in the school. One of the implications of this line of research was that more attention needed to be paid to distinct patterns of student engagement within and outside of school.

The undergirding linear pattern of first generation and BIPOC students’ progress in high school as an assumed model of success despite structural inequality and pressing life needs, was a key point of critical analysis by Anderson and Larson (2009). They looked at a college-bound program designed for low-income youth of color, with the intent that extra academic preparation work both after school and in the summers would serve as an effective model for college readiness. However, the flaw in this model was that the program design did not consider the complex lived realities of the students for whom it was intended to serve. Often these youth had other pressing family obligations or financial hardships not known or taken proactively by administrators, which had a deleterious impact on the success of the students.

Finally, Brown’s (2016) ethnographic study provided a perspective on BIPOC youth who were in school but who also engaged in street life activity. She argued that researchers, policy makers and school leaders often see youth involved in street activity (e.g., gangs, drug dealing) as maladaptive and abnormal. Brown countered with the premise that these students were engaged in creating an adoptive sense of survival and escape from personal trauma and structural inequities impact on their lives. She posited that school leaders and teachers need to stop viewing these students as deficits. Instead, school personnel should pay more attention to the outside lives of the students and how they have responded to the conditions of their socioemotional, physiological, and psychosocial lives.

Additionally, urban elementary and secondary school leaders have faced significant challenges to creating a social justice equity environment. For example, Hamilton et al. (2014) showed how the accountability measures of turning around low-performance schools was wrapped up in a deficit ideology which in turn posed significant barriers to the principals in this study as they found that the reconstitution exposed more of the problems with trying to improve school achievement. Reed and Swaminathan (2016) engaged in a case study of an urban high school principal who when faced with school improvement measures, emphasized the importance of contextually responsive leadership practice as a better way to address the complexity of urban issues in the high school, than a top-down one size fits all scenarios leadership model. Theoharis and Haddix (2011) focused on six white school principals who engaged in purposeful continuous leadership questioning of white supremacy that served them to lead teachers and staff through resistance to do racial social justice equity work. Loder (2005) presented findings from studying how relationships that African American women principals changed when the Chicago Public Schools started to implement mandated accountability reforms. Loder found that the principals had previous roles as leaders with the African American local school community of interest at the forefront of school equity; yet that changed when these principals had to implement centralized urban school accountability measures. Finally, Gardiner and Enomoto (2006) profiled six urban school leaders who stressed the importance of enacting a critical multicultural approach to leadership to affirm student diversity and achievement. This type of leadership was important to establish a culturally relevant leadership purposely driven for critical school-wide equity.

In sum, the review on urban school leadership and school connectedness presented a dual lens of how important this concept is to the high school success of BIPOC students, particularly first-generation low-income students, and those from stressful socioeconomic backgrounds, particularly around college-readiness. However, this has been tempered by research that has shown the complexity of the layered lives of students and how this needed to be considered regarding connections with schools or lack thereof. This was in addition to the ways previous research noted the deficit framing of urban education that needed to be fixed by more accountability measures so that urban school principals had to overcome these barriers to have any chance of creating a school context that affirmed diversity and was connected to BIPOC students.

This duality informed our study in that we posited that low-income students, BIPOC students and first-generation students do not follow atypical lock-step patterns of school connectedness which leads to achievement. There needs to be more consideration of the nuanced and complicated lives that some students have, and that for some, their pathways to finishing high school or going on to college has been a zigzag, not linear (Lardier et al., 2019). Therefore, research in this area and school leaders’ and teachers’ perspectives, need to be more open to find out more about the lived reality of students. Educational administrative structures and those who lead them need to be changed to meet students where they are, through hearing and listening to student stories. It is then that students can feel connected to school.

Research Methods

Narrative inquiry research methods guided our work in addressing the two-fold purpose of this study (Clandinin & Connelly, 1999). We sought a greater understanding of the students’ lived realities and how it could further inform school connectedness research and educational leadership. The purpose of our study was to explore the lives of a targeted group of high school students and hear about their out of school experiences as they reflected on their various educational pathways. The conceptual framework was grounded in the urban education deficit definitions and school connectedness research; juxtaposed to the personal stories of high school students who did not fit into the normalized educational pathway toward success.

Regarding ethics, trust and positionality, data for this project was collected, analyzed, and reviewed with and from the perspective of the students. Each of these students are individuals with whom the lead author first worked and developed relationships as a teacher in their school. The lead author was a teacher at the school and came to this research project almost exclusively as an outsider as a straight, Caucasian woman with multiple college degrees. The second author is a straight African American male faculty member and associate dean at the local college and came at this through association with college recruitment and admissions efforts at this high school. It should be noted that while the lead author had previous relationships with the students, these student narratives should be read as simply a means to convey those stories. We decided to use narrative inquiry because it was the best way to use the stories from the students themselves to understand their life histories and corresponding social patterns within the school and outside the school’s urban context. Narrative inquiry gave meaning to the students as social actors with agency in their lived stories, and what matters are the words of the five students who shared within school and outside school histories about living their high school lives. (Tierney, 1998).

Participant selection: The participants included five young adults who all graduated from General High within the 2017 to 2019 period. The participants were selected through purposeful sampling. Each was a student of the lead author (teacher) at some point during their high school career and she knew them each well enough to know they had a unique story of struggle that affected their daily lives during high school. The lead author also knew that much of their individual story was unknown to other teachers and school leaders, highlighting the importance of eliciting and hearing students’ stories through their own voice to offer necessary support.

Site Selection: General High School is in the heart of Rocky Mountain Town, a diverse suburban community located near a major metropolitan area in the inter-mountain west. The school is comprised of a faculty, staff, and administrative team of approximately 180 adults and a student body of more than 3,200 students. The General High School student body is diverse as the students speak more than 44 different languages and represent 43 different countries. Most of the student body (60%) is Latina/o, and 21% is Caucasian. Pacific Islander students make up 7% of the student body, Asian students make up 5%, Black students make up 4%, and American/Alaskan Native make up 2% of the student body. More than one-quarter of the entire student body qualify for services as English Language Learners. General High is designated a Title 1 school with 74% of the student body considered at or below the poverty line. According to the General School District McKinney-Vento Liaison, as of the 2016 to 2017 school year, there were 60 students attending General High School who were experiencing homelessness. Among General High and all its feeder junior high and elementary schools, there were 203 students experiencing homelessness.

The following is an introduction to the five former students who were interviewed (pseudonyms used): Louis, a 22-year-old bilingual Hispanic male who was a teenage father; Dana, a 20-year-old trilingual Bosnian female whose parents were refugees; Crystal, a 22-year-old bilingual biracial female who lost both parents by the time she entered high school; Ricky, a 19-year-old bilingual Hispanic male whose father was arrested in front of him and then later deported; and Mary, a 22-year-old bilingual Hispanic female whose mother evicted her weeks before her high school graduation.

Although a small sample, the five students introduced above represent the wide range of personal stories, types of traumas students, and dealing with systemic racial and social inequalities related to where they lived. These students also represented diversity in their levels of academic success in school. While all five graduated high school with their class, two were exceptionally successful interpersonally and institutionally, gaining acceptance to elite universities and college programs, earning fully funded scholarships based on academic success, and representing their school as student body leaders and valedictorian. Two of the students, on the other hand, struggled to engage in their classes or to connect meaningfully with adults in the school building while juggling chaos in their home lives. The fifth student, Mary, wanted desperately to be able to focus solely on school, however, she operated constantly in survival mode.

Data collection: Data was collected for this project via an interview with each former student during the spring and summer of 2019. The interviews were recorded with an audio recorder to maintain the students’ voices and stories in their own words. They were completed in one-on-one settings and conducted in a semi-structured style with the following questions (Ravitch & Carl, 2016):

1. Did school impact your life outside of school? Explain how?

2. During high school, what were your goals? What did you want in and for your life?

3. What are your goals now? What do you now want in and for your life? What has changed? Why?

4. What did you need from high school to support you in your needs then and moving forward?

In sum, students were asked to recall their days during high school, both in and away from school, and share what was, at the time, their greatest challenges, concerns, goals, and successes (Ravitch & Carl, 2016). The importance of placing the storytelling in the hands of the students was to capture the unfiltered, unguided voice of students describing what their lives were like through their own reflective perceptions (Herron, 2018). In addition, the lead author had them in classes and got to know each participant in teacher-student settings, where she initially heard about their stories outside of school. Across the two school years, she had almost daily interactions with the five participants and observed their classroom and social interactions during the time of the study.

Data analysis: After data collection was complete, transcription of the full content of each conversation occurred. The student data was then organized and analyzed through narrative thematic analysis. This allowed for focus on the individual students’ personal stories, while reviewing what themes emerged from the stories to specifically answer the research questions (Ravitch & Carl, 2016). During the transcription process, commonalities across interviews as patterns began to appear, including discussion about the impacts of poverty, a focus on family, condescension from teachers and counselors, support from coaches, school as an escape, and a desire to attend and complete college. Once all five interviews were turned into text, the content was broken up into specific conversation themes based on the patters that emerged. Those categories were: (1) rigor, academics, accountability at school; (2) poverty, students of color, standing out, not fitting in; (3) compartmentalizing, code switching; (4) needing more help, more adults in school, nonacademic resources, strategies; (5) what students needed, student suggestions; and (6) the student’s unique situation and family dynamics. The lead researcher shared the results with the students, then returned to code and group the data based on these organizing patterns.

Results: Students Life Stories

Each of the five former students interviewed had a unique story about what they experienced during their high school years. Some of them needed space from their families, while others wanted closer relationships. Some experienced homelessness, while others were secure in their living space. Some students had major dreams for their post-high school lives, while others were operating in survival mode.

Louis

Louis and the mother of his child were both just 14 years old when they learned of the pregnancy. He did not know how to cope with the news, so he kept himself preoccupied and remained quiet.

“I’m telling you that basketball was a stress reliever,” Louis said. “I remember when I found out she was pregnant. I was in the gym from when they opened to when they closed. Literally all day.”

He did not talk to his parents until his dad approached him, around 7 months later.

“The reason he says he knew is because I started going to the gym a lot,” Louis said, recalling that crucial conversation with his dad. “He was like, ‘I know you’re thinking about something, and then seeing this little girl over here with this belly, I kinda already knew.’”

Louis spent every moment of his high school experience caught between being a kid and raising a kid; learning to navigate his teenage years, school, and playing for the school basketball team while also learning to navigate co-parenting.

He said he was often late to school because he had been out late working the night before or because he was caring for his child before school, or both. He missed classes when his child was sick, and he occasionally took his child to basketball practice to simultaneously be a dad and a member of the team.

Still, for Louis, it was a priority to keep the two worlds separate, hoping they would not interfere with each other. “I would keep them separate,” he said. “When I was at school, I was at school. When I’m at the house, don’t think or don’t worry about school.”

Louis continued balancing being a parent and a student after graduating from high school and enrolling at the university in his town. He spent four semesters in college, feeling more and more out of place each term before leaving school without a degree.

A son of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, Louis grew up in a tight-knit family that, financially, could always provide “everything we needed, but not a surplus. Everything we needed, and that was it.”

Not knowing what he wanted to do for a career and not wanting to spend money on tuition as he wandered aimlessly through degree options, Louis opted to work and sock away money until he discovered what he wanted to do with his life.

After spending a few years on the road, working, and earning a paycheck, he came to a couple of conclusions: he wants financial freedom; he wants to graduate again; and he wants to be near his family.

“I think that’s why I want to go back” to school, Louis said of graduating. “There’s not a lot of moments that make you feel crazy-good like that. I think graduating was one of them. It’s definitely something I want to do again.”

Missing his family is what motivated him to return from his life of traveling, following jobs and working as a laborer.

I want to “just be good company to my family, trying to make their lives better,” Louis said. “Us, together, we’re just happy together.”

That, of course, includes his child.

“I would say I could have played a bigger part in raising [them],” Louis said, adding that his child refers to their biological grandma as Mom. “[They] know I am dad. But [they are] getting to the age where it’s not going to make sense soon.”

The problem: Louis is not on the child’s birth certificate.

“I question my 14-year-old self about that every single day.”

Dana

Dana is the daughter of Eastern European refugees who relocated to the United States when they were around 20 years old. At that point, they started working long hours and living paycheck to paycheck to provide for their family.

“My parents, they were extremely stellar students,” Dana said, “and when they immigrated here as refugees, they couldn’t go to college because we constantly had to have everyone in the home working.” Despite the struggles, one factor remained constant: the pathway out of poverty was through education.

“It definitely instilled in me the sense of motivation that I needed to focus on school in order to get, not only myself out of that situation, but my family too.”

With this focus at the center of everything, Dana spent all her time, both in school and outside of it, loading up on advanced and college-level courses, extracurricular activities, and experiences that would benefit her in the next phase.

“In high school, I automatically knew I wanted to get into an Ivy League school,” Dana said. “Since I was 8 years old, that was always a goal of mine. I really structured what I did around getting in. I asked myself, ‘ok, what do you need to do to get as many scholarships and increase your chances of getting into these schools and getting these scholarship awards?’” she said, adding that as a first-generation student, she is navigating this system for her family as well as for herself. “I did a lot of research before high school of what college admissions boards look for on applications in terms of extracurricular activities, GPA requirements, ACT requirements, SAT subject tests, and then I started from there.”

Dana vaulted from high school to an elite, private college in the east without missing a step, setting even higher goals for herself. She wants to continue her academic excellence and gain valuable experiences in route to law school, where she plans to use her family’s story to impact the world. She is already recognizing how her world is impacting her experiences.

Crystal

Losing both of her parents at such a young age certainly impacted the life Crystal was about experience. While she believes her remaining family loved her the best they could, they were not there for her the way a young girl needed. She and her younger brother grew up living with her mom’s parents, who also both loved her and made life extremely difficult for her. Over the years, the relationship between Crystal and her brother became more and more tense and ultimately became physically violent. “He would try to start fights, fist fights, and we’d go at it. We’d destroy each other,” she said. “I’d get the cops called on me when he would throw his hands on me first. He could do no wrong.” “Growing up, I had a lot of resentment toward my grandparents, the aunts that hated me, and my brother,” she said. “I was always out of the house. I stopped caring if the cops got called on me. I started doing what I wanted because I was getting so tired of doing what everyone said and getting sent to the psycho ward.”

She paused, and then added, “Doing what I was told wasn’t working so I might as well do it my way. And when I did it my own way, I was never in that house. Ever.”

Instead, Crystal stayed at friends’ houses, filled her time with soccer and basketball practice, and worked as many hours as she could once, she got a job as a server. As for school, she said she just stopped caring.

“‘My junior and senior year, I just stopped caring about everything. I was just like, ‘I don’t want to go to school anymore. I quit. I quit everything.’”

She let her grades drop so far that she was ineligible to play soccer her senior year. By allowing that to happen, she broke her own heart. It was a reality check, and she knew she wanted to do better for herself. She recommitted to her classes and promised herself she would make the basketball team again that winter.

Throughout high school, Crystal’s days were filled with early morning workouts, classes, practices, or games, and consistently working until 1 a.m. Maintaining this schedule was difficult but it also served two purposes: one, being so busy gave her valid reasons to never be home and two, her family did not have the money to pay for class fees, school lunches, sports participation fees, and athletic equipment.

None of this, however, was ever discussed with the adults in her school life.

“I didn’t really go to anyone. I liked to keep my life really quiet at that time because I had a lot of things going on,” she said. “That’s when my organization really got under control. I managed my time perfectly and I was always on time, so I didn’t have to worry about it.”

Since leaving school, she has become a mother, gotten married, purchased a house, and figured out what she wants to do with her life. Her future goals include returning to college and eventually opening her own business. For the moment, she is content.

“I’m able to pay my rent, my baby has enough clothes, food and everything,” Crystal said. “But I want extra money to save up for her future, because I don’t want her to go through what I did.” Years removed from high school and in a better place with her brother, Crystal can reflect on her experiences and hold some gratitude for what she went through.

Ricky

Life was not exceptionally difficult for Ricky during high school. No, his family’s struggles began around the end of his time in elementary school and the beginning of junior high.

“My dad was arrested because there were allegations toward him that he raped a girl,” Ricky said. The story, as Ricky described it, is his older sister was having a sleepover with some friends, the next morning the girls went home, and 8 months later he watched as his dad was arrested. Something had happened during that sleepover.

It took 2 years but “my dad was declared innocent, thankfully,” Ricky said. Among the people who were renting the downstairs apartment of the house where Ricky’s family was living was a man who had a history of sexual abuse that they didn’t know about. It was ultimately discovered that this man raped the young girl.

Although his father was exonerated, Ricky’s family’s trials did not end there.

“After he was declared innocent, I thought everything was good,” Ricky said, “but while he was in jail, ICE did a screening of everyone that was in jail and they saw that he was illegal.”

Ricky’s dad immediately started fighting a new case against Immigration, Customs and Enforcement.

“He fought really hard, but it was a lot of money and it was hard for him because when he was younger, there was an incident,” Ricky said. As a younger man, his father had driven while intoxicated and, with that was on his record, it made it hard for him to win his case. “So, he decided to leave it and he had a voluntary deportation back to Mexico.”

Starting from the moment Ricky’s father had been arrested, he said his mom was essentially a single mother, working multiple jobs and all hours to make ends meet. But it was not enough.

“During that time was when we faced homelessness,” Ricky said. “My mom didn’t make enough money, so she would miss her payments for rent or bills and then we would be evicted and have to find a new place to live.”

They stayed with friends, couch surfing until they found a new place. Sometimes, however, they could not find a new place due to price restrictions and bad credit.

Between the loss of his dad and their housing situation, living in such a state of unknown led Ricky toward unhealthy coping mechanisms. “There was a time in junior high where I was curious about drugs,” Ricky said. “I found someone that sold marijuana, bought it, and starting smoking. Luckily, and thankfully, my mom caught me.”

His mother pointed out that she was working hard to create a life for he and his sister while he was wasting time and money doing something that was not going to help him in the long run. He said his mom’s reaction to catching him with marijuana caught his attention. At that point, he opted to refocus on school.

While Ricky, his sister, and their mom were still in the same place, Ricky’s dad took the risk to return to the United States illegally. He is very grateful to have his dad close, but he also lives on edge with worry.

“Every day I live with the fear that he will get deported again,” Ricky said. “Sometimes I drive with him and we drive by a cop car with their lights on and my heart starts racing. I think ‘what if they have a barricade and they’re screening everyone that passes through that road and they deport him?’”

Ricky’s parents have since divorced and both remarried, expanding his foundation of support as he navigated junior high and high school and has entered college. Throughout high school, Ricky participated in a variety of extracurricular activities. As a senior, he was a Student Body Officer and he placed in the top five in the state in wrestling.

He was awarded a fully funded scholarship at a flagship university in the Rocky Mountain area. As a first-generation college student, that was a defining moment in Ricky’s life.

Mary

“I work for Planned Parenthood. At the location that performs abortions,” Mary said when asked what she does and if that job weighs heavy on her.

“No,” she said. “Not after what I have lived.”

When she was 5 years old, Mary’s parents got divorced. Her mom was having an affair with a man who was addicted to drugs and her dad essentially disappeared.

“My dad wanted an escape, I guess, from everything my mom put him through,” Mary said. “That’s why he was never really involved in our life.”

For her mom, that affair became a relationship that took a lot of her time and attention.

“She was just leaving us with our grandma,” Mary said, referring to herself and her brothers. “Ended up losing our home, cars, everything, and we were living in my uncle’s garage.”

Mary finished elementary school, went through middle school, and completed her first 2 years of high school while living with her makeshift foster family. Aside from being far from home, she had everything that she could ask for growing up, including horses and land.

“It was great, until I hit puberty,” Mary said. “The ‘father’ ended up sexually molesting me for several years.”

To keep her quiet, he used Mary’s relationship with her mom against her, threatening to send her back home and telling her that nobody would believe she was being abused.

Over time, he became more aggressive, and Mary became more promiscuous, rebelling against him with her own risky behaviors.

“When he found out that I had lost my virginity, he totally freaked out and started calling me a prostitute,” Mary said. “Telling me that I’m a piece of crap and that I'm going to end up like my mom and locked me in my room.”

Mary knew then that she did not want him to get any more physical with her than he already had. She called her mom, told her what was happening, and her mom drove to get her.

“I packed all my stuff and just left in the middle of the night. I didn’t say nothing to any of them.”

When Mary rejoined her family, approximately 6 years after leaving, they were living in a two-bedroom duplex. She had a new sister, all five siblings shared one bedroom, and her mom was still with the drug addict boyfriend. Her mom was the only person in the house working and, according to Mary, she spent the rest of her energy caring for, and being manipulated by, the boyfriend.

“I had just gone through that trauma and then, October of my junior year, [the boyfriend] stabbed his uncle to death in front of me and my siblings,” Mary said. “They let him off on self-defense, so we had to go back to him still being a drug addict, still acting super crazy. He would walk around with a knife.”

The boyfriend and his uncle were both gang-involved and after the murder, there were threats made toward the boyfriend, his home, and his family. They had to move to a new living space and Mary had to quit the volleyball team. She tried to distract herself from it all by digging into school.

“I had always been the type that had good grades, that really tried at school, because that’s my getaway,” Mary said. “And it was always to try to make my mom proud. I just wanted her, somehow, some way, to see me and to be proud of me and to acknowledge me.”

While school was the focus, her living situation made it difficult to get to the campus consistently. Mary’s younger sister, whose father was the drug addict boyfriend, had missed nearly an entire year of school because he would not make sure she got there. So, she took on the responsibility of getting her sister to the elementary school, which started over an hour later than the high school.

Mary also struggled to get to school on time because she had no way to get there other than public transportation. If she missed a bus or a train, she walked or waited, and arrived late.

Despite the challenges in getting to school, Mary looked around and knew, at 16 years old, that she didn’t have a choice. A high school diploma was a required first step out of the situation in which she was living.

“When all that stuff happened, I thought, ‘I need to make sure I have something that’s more than $7 an hour out of high school,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘if I don’t have a job after this or I don’t have a way for me to take care of myself, I’m going to end up in a homeless shelter.’”

Nearing the end of Mary’s senior year, her mom asked if she would help her write a restraining order against the boyfriend. She did, and the day before they went to court, “she kicked me out and told me I needed to leave, that he was going to stay,” Mary said. “It was 2 weeks before my graduation day.”

Mary was homeless, couch surfing as she tied up final loose ends at school. After graduation, her aunt gave her a place to stay for a while before she had to find her own space. After a few months, Mary had secured a job, saved some money, and found her first apartment. Her adult working life had commenced, but that’s not what she had wanted.

“I wanted so badly to go to college right out of high school,” she said. “I wanted so badly to have the life that some kids have, that they take for granted, to have two supportive parents that let them stay at home to do their academics, not have to worry about anything and have a part-time job and just go have fun with their friends. But I didn’t have that, and it took me a while to be able to have enough money to live, and then finally go to school.”

She decided she wanted to press charges against the man who had molested her as a child, but too many years had passed.

A male friend who she met after high school became friends with her and he has not left her side since. He has become her boyfriend and “the person that I think I’ve needed to really help me go forward. I’ve never had more support than I’ve had with him.” He has made sure she has gotten to every therapy appointment, had any medications she needed, helped her get her driver’s license, and helped her start going to college again, and all despite the many challenges the situation generates.

“I have borderline personality disorder because of everything I have been through,” Mary said. “I have anxiety. I have depression. There’s times that it’s so hard for me to have a relationship with any individual because of the way I react because of the trauma or waking up in the middle of the night and just beating on him because I don’t know who it is, I just forget.”

For Mary, the next phase of life includes finishing school, finding her space in the medical field, and becoming a mom.

Thematic Analysis and Implications for Educational Leadership

Our study was intended to explore the lived realities of the five-youth profiled at this urban high school. The themes of our study emerged from the interview data through a consistent pattern of the responses to our interview questions (Glesne, 2016). This revealed a similarity of common themes around school connectedness, and where it was lacking and could have made a difference. Our findings are part of a larger conversation as to what urban education is, how it is defined, and the need to move away from a deficit ideology and view students as assets with their own potential in the face of systemic urban context barriers such as poverty, homelessness, lack of resources, racism, etc. (Coloma, 2020; Milner, 2012; Welsh & Swain, 2020). Despite their differing personal lives and trajectories, they all described challenges that were similar as well as school-based supports that would have better prepared them for the next phase of their lives. Furthermore, while all five individuals faced radically different realities, each illustrated challenges and needs that fell into three common themes: I Need More: Academic Rigor; I Stand Out: Poverty and BIPOC students; and I Need More Help: Resources, Strategies and Student Suggestions.

The need for more academic rigor: All five former students identified that academic rigor was missing from their high school experience. This finding was consistent with the importance of setting and following through on high academic expectations as part of school connectedness (Blum, 2005). Dana’s comments were the most direct, stating that she simply needed more from her educators:

“I had to research it on my own or do it on my own to be able to achieve what I wanted,” she said. “Including in my AP (Advanced Placement) classes.”

In that same vein, multiple interviewees mentioned their perception that they felt their educators, both teachers and school counselors alike, did not believe they or other students in their school were capable of greater academic rigor.

“I feel like the teachers sometimes approached it from the perspective of, ‘oh, these kids don’t even want to take the end of year (AP) test, why should I bother teaching them the full curriculum by March so they can study and pass the test?’” Dana said. “I had to do a lot of self-studying because the curriculum was not taught at the pace it was needed to allow me to be able to successfully take the test.”

These messages were particularly problematic when students started believing them, as Ricky did:

“One thing that I wish I would have done differently in high school was take more AP classes,” Ricky said. “They really scared me, and I thought that I would fail them because that’s what my counselors would give off. ‘Oh, they’re super hard, you’re going to fail them unless you study for eight hours after school’.” Yet, after experiencing part of a college-level AP course firsthand, his fears subsided R wished he would have been more courageous and more supported in signing up for the more challenging courses.

For Crystal and Ricky, the lack of academic rigor was apparent because they did not feel much of a connection between what they were doing in class and the lives they were living outside of the school walls:

“I felt like high school didn’t teach me the outside world and how to really manage the outside world,” Crystal said, relaying that she felt like she floundered through her experience moving away to college. “I wasn’t prepared. I knew about my math equations and who did what back then and how to speak proper English . . . but it didn’t really teach us about the real world and about how everything really worked.”

For Ricky, the disconnect came in the form of college applications. “One thing that I learned that my counselors didn’t tell me was the writing is really important,” he said. “If you’re a bad writer, all the things you do in high school go down the drain.” He added that, “counselors told me ‘be involved in this, be involved in this and that will increase your likelihood of getting a scholarship or getting accepted to college’ but I didn’t know that I had to effectively communicate that through essays. I wish they would have stressed that more, that writing is really important.”

For Mary, the conversation was never about academic rigor. She stated she was a good student who worked hard and earned good grades, but her struggle was simply getting to school consistently. She had difficulty accessing the material not because she was incapable or unwilling, rather it was simply because she could not get there to do so. For her, school turned into just getting assignments done and turned in, however and whenever possible. It was about survival, just getting through, so she could eventually stand on her own.

Standing out because personal situations complicated by urban poverty: For four of the five students’ poverty and racial/ethnic identity were intertwined as both racism and the crushing effects of poverty had a damaging effect on their lives. All five former students spoke about their personal experiences living in poverty and its deleterious impact on their adolescence. All five identified school activities that they were excluded from or needed help with because they could not afford the fees or fines that came with the activity. All five had jobs during high school, whether it was to support themselves or to contribute to their family expenses. Three of the interviewees described times when they experienced homelessness, some on their own and other times alongside family.

Crystal had a job in high school because her grandparents could not afford to pay for athletic equipment for her participation in basketball and soccer or for the fees for school, lunch, and other extracurricular activities. Ricky experienced homelessness with his mom and sister when he was in junior high. During high school, the three of them and Ricky’s stepdad lived in an apartment complex that Ricky described as lower rent and included families who were in lower income brackets. Throughout those years, Ricky’s family accepted assistance in the form of food stamps, the food bank, and from local church organizations to pay rent and have food on the table.

Mary’s experience includes experiencing homelessness with her family, when they were living in her uncle’s garage, and on her own, when her mom kicked her out of the house just before her high school graduation. During the latter situation, like Crystal, she was couch surfing to get through to graduation and figure out her next step.

Needing more help, resources, and student suggestions, all five former students were specifically asked what they had needed from their high school experience but did not receive. Each of the five had a list of items to share, most without even needing to pause to think about it, most prominent among them was need.

All interviewees adamantly stated that they needed their teachers and school leaders to be aware of the changes and life events they were going through outside of school. They also said they needed their teachers and other adults (assistant principals, guidance counselors) to be more patient and flexible while still holding them to high expectations. Crystal said she needed someone to say “‘hey, I might not be able to help you at home 100%, but I think I can find someone’ and then also pushing me in school way more.”

Some of the former students, specifically Crystal, said they could have been more vocal about their needs but did not know who to talk to. Others said they reached out to the adults in their school but were often met with resistance or judgment. When students reached out and the adults supported them at times, or at least listened and adjusted in their classroom, and it made all the difference.

“The No. 1 way to help students that are struggling is to not let them be ashamed of what they are going through,” Ricky said, adding that even if students are facing homelessness, hunger, the divorce of their parents, family members being accused of a crime, or deportation. “Not being ashamed of what you’re going through helps you realize and accept that you’re going through something and that you need help. And then the next step is being ok with asking for help.”

Dana remembers moments when her peers were doing all they could to stay afloat, but a teacher dismissed the efforts despite their personal story. “I’ve experienced teachers who tended to be very condescending to students. It’s very easy to look at them and say, ‘well, you just need to work harder. Why aren’t you like this student?’” she said, and then continued “which I feel that approach needs to be revised. We really need to understand that the kids at our school and schools like ours don’t have the same circumstances.”

For Ricky, the next step seemed simple: “Maybe what schools can do is train teachers and administrators to better help them interact with students that are facing really harsh situations. Help them be more understanding,” he said, “instantly, the teachers think ‘he’s a bad student, he doesn’t care about school’ but they don’t take the initiative to learn about the backgrounds of the student or ask them,” Ricky said. He wanted educators “to be more understanding of them and help them get out of those situations and have vision for the future.”

Recommendations to Disrupt the Normalization of Failure

The findings from our research should be viewed in connection with the existing studies of high performing urban high schools serving low income BIPOC students and how the leadership at these schools create a culture of responsive leadership and advocacy for these students (see for example, Khalifa et al., 2016; Knight & Marciano, 2013; Kolluri, 2019; School Redesign Network, 2007). Two common threads run through these and other studies of successful urban high schools: (1) a high degree of personalization and major efforts to connect students within small learning communities and long-term relationships with significant adults for academic and social/emotional support; and (2) a robust instructional program that takes students where they are at as unique individual learners, but guides all of them toward academic success through a professional commitment of school administrators and teachers to continuously and collaboratively work on curriculum and instruction that in the best interest of the students. An important component of this existing research that can offer guidance for recommendations is ensuring that school principals have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to manage change and garner resources within a critical social justice leadership framework.

To do this, we propose implementing the suggestions offered directly by the students interviewed for this project in ways that meet individual school needs and are in consort with changing the normalization of failure that undergirds the deficit ideology that defines urban education (Boykin & Noguera, 2014; Coloma, 2020; Milner, 2012; Welsh & Swain, 2020). For example, a start would be to create a mentorship program that connects every student with an adult for guidance and support. This mentorship program should have a structure that includes consistent meetings and offers students support in both academic and personal experiences. Mary’s suggestion of a student success plan for each student would allow for students, educators, counselors, and school leaders to develop a flexible plan specific to the school and life needs of each student. For Mary, that might have meant online courses in the morning, access to more transportation support, a designated safe space and safe person on the school campus, and technological devises to take home.

In addition, the concerns each student offered regarding preparation for college should be addressed. Students in urban high schools with majority BIPOC populations should see more college options and given guidance from the colleges in conjunction with educational leadership initiatives. For example, to make this happen, the leadership connections between superintendents, principals, and college and university admissions recruiters should be strengthened, and the format of the visit should be changed. Rather than typically handing out swag and information fliers at drop-in sessions, they should be hosting smaller, more personal meetings. These meetings should also allow recruiters and students an opportunity to get to know each other so students have a contact when they get to campus. High school-college recruitment visits should also aim to provide information about their universities and supportive learning communities; what specific high school classes and content and teaching need to be critically and radically altered to truly prepare for post-secondary education; doing more than just helping to fill out financial aid forms, rather, both school leaders, college administrators and admissions recruiters understanding the deleterious complications of the racialized-economic urban context and its personal impact on the financial knowledge and opportunities for some students. This in turn can lead to a more socially just system of financial aid and partnerships with high schools and universities in urban (and rural) regions (see Hillman & Weichman, 2016).

Conclusion

Far too many of our school leaders, teachers, students and even some parents have grown used to the normalization of failure in urban education, be it in big cities, or medium sized urban areas, or smaller districts that have undergone demographic change. To reverse course and create serious change, urban education needs to do more to meet the students where they are. Students need an environment in which they can embody their realities and share their stories. It is precisely these lived realities that students experience daily, that need to be heard, acknowledged, and validated by their teachers, and most importantly school administrators.

While making these shifts can be difficult, student connectedness to high school entails a rehumanization of relationships tied to student’s life stories through educational leadership. Comprehensive relationships should be the new normal to give students the sense that they are respected and belong in school and provide critical leadership to support student goals. School leaders must ensure that all students have opportunities to learn and that the stories of the students are seen, heard, listened to, and acted upon to achieve school connectedness and critical social justice leadership.