Education Week - October 11, 2021 - 18

STUDENT SURVEY
A democracy can't function properly without the
Which of the following
best describes your
school?
33%
Some students have
opportunities to take on more
traditional leadership roles
such as student councils,
patrols, or leading morning
announcements
37%
Students are offered many
opportunities to take on
leadership and decisionmaking
roles, lead activities,
and to be part of solutions
and projects to improve their
classrooms, school, and the
broader community
22%
Staff honor a broad range
of student perspectives and
experiences by engaging
students as leaders, problemsolvers,
and decision-makers,
offering ways for students
to have a real impact on the
school. Students regularly
initiate and lead activities,
solutions, and projects to
improve their classrooms,
school, and the broader
community
8%
Students do not have
opportunities to take on
leadership and decisionmaking
roles
SOURCE: EdWeek Research
Center survey, September 2021
participation of its people, and school is the perfect
place for students to learn these skills, dispositions,
and habits, said Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow
and the co-director of the Center for Universal
Education at the Brookings Institution, a Washington
think tank. In many parts of the country, schools may
be the only avenue for students to develop their civic
muscle.
Researchers estimate that 30 percent of urban
youth and 60 percent of rural youth live in what's
been described as " civic deserts, " said Winthrop.
These are communities where there are few resources
or opportunities-such as youth programming,
culture and arts groups, and religious congregations-
for youth to be civically active.
Nationally, civic engagement has been on the
decline for years.
" I am very worried about evaporating civic
disposition among large swaths of the adult
population and I'm worried about what effect that
is having on children, " said Winthrop. " No one is
modeling this to them. "
One doesn't have to look any further than a number
of recent school board meetings across the country
where community members have made death threats
to board members over masking policies, to see the
value of well-developed social-emotional skills to
civic life.
Giving students a say in how schools are run and
opportunities to work together to solve problems are
ways that schools can help students hone their social,
emotional, and civic skills.
'Students know best' on bettering
their communities
In New York City, the Union Square Academy for
Health Sciences is doing this by giving students the
chance to decide how some school improvement
funding is spent.
Through the New York City department of
education's Civics for All program-which was
designed to augment its traditional civics education
with civic-engagement opportunities-schools can
sign up to receive school improvement funding. But
there's a catch: The students decide how the money
is spent.
Students work individually or in teams to propose
improvement projects, and students and teachers
vote on their favorite proposal.
The first year the Union Square Academy, which
serves a high number of low-income families, took
part in the participatory budget program it was
awarded around $2,000, said David Edelman, who
teaches social studies at the school. The winning
proposal was for new water fountains.
Edelman had been discussing with his students the
news that there were high levels of lead in the school's
drinking water. The old water fountains had long
fallen into disrepair and were hardly used, he said.
18 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 13, 2021 | www.edweek.org
" I feel like students know best how to better their
communities and better their schools; they just need
the impetus, the support, and the resources to run
with it and to develop those solutions, " said Edelman,
whose students are primarily Hispanic, Black, and
Asian.
They are learning how to action-plan, make a case
for a cause, mobilize their peers, and build consensus,
Edelman said.
The participatory budget program is very similar to
one offered by the city government, so students are
learning how to navigate a process that they can use
after they graduate to drive improvements in their
broader communities.
" We have the right to have a say in how our school
functions, " said Brisa Pereyra, a senior at Union
Square.
She was a sophomore when the proposal for new
water fountains went up for a vote. Brisa remembers
waiting in long lines to get water from bottles and her
excitement when she saw the proposal to install new
water fountains.
In the last couple years at her school, Brisa has
become very involved in her school and local
community. She's part of her school's Key Club where
she has helped raise money for hurricane relief and
written letters to nursing home residents and children
at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. She's tutored
Ukrainian students in English. She spoke at forums
and on roundtables about climate change, youth
civic engagement, and voting. And she's joined in the
climate protests led by Greta Thunberg, the teenage
environmental activist from Sweden. Brisa credits her
teacher, Edelman, for encouraging her to get involved
and pointing students to different opportunities.
Brisa said she has learned that she can have a say in
what happens in her community and doesn't have to
just wait for things to happen.
" I'm learning to be prepared for other points of
view. In the past, I have had trouble accepting what
other people think, " Brisa said, " and learning to
accept what other people think and learn from it, so I
can have a better discussion for the next time. "
In a second round of participatory budget funding
prior to the pandemic, students voted to install
automatic hand-sanitizer dispensers around the
building and automatic flushing toilets in the
restrooms.
When Ryall, the director of Civics for All, sees what
students participating in the program are doing, she
sees them developing the core social-emotionallearning
competencies, such as self-awareness, as
defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social,
and Emotional Learning, or CASEL.
" With self-awareness, civics is asking students
to consider the issues they care about, consider
how they are impacted by their community, and
understand themselves as part of and responsible
to society, " Ryall said. " When you talk about social
awareness, you have kids considering the community
they are a part of, its assets, its deficits, its needs, what
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