Get Loud

Like free speech in too many circles these days, student voice is under attack inside our traditional K-12 school system.

Student voice is the serious process of listening to young learners about how they like to learn and what they like to learn. Sometimes it’s referred to as learner agency.

The Atlantic, in an article titled “The New Chilling Effect,” written by three high school journalists, reported in excerpts below that,

“If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many placed you could start. You could, for example, worry about the all-consuming phones – or the gambling and TikTok addictions that come with them. You could worry about the free fall in literacy, the decline in math fluency, the rise of AI, the insanity of college-obsessed parents, the sharp increase in truancy, the teen mental-health crisis, and on and on.”

“Yet somet5hing that deserves more attention is damage to free expression – not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.”

“The three of us are the editors of our high-school student newspaper in Washington, D.C., with a staff of about 60 student journalists. We ask a lot of questions. We want to know when and why things happened. We cover big policy changes (a ban on phones) and small schedule changes (an earlier start date to the school year). We cover all kinds of controversies – among them, senior pranks, changes in faculty, and debates about assemblies and theatrical productions. Writers argue in our opinion section about calculator theft, the cure for teenage sleep deprivation, grade inflation, AI policies, and more.”

“Recently, the Montgomery County, Maryland, school district made local headlines after officials required administrators to review student newspapers prior to publication and outright censor certain reports based on vague standards. School officials tend to approach such matters with varying degrees of subtlety: One administrator at our school floated the idea of a prior-review system for our articles and instructed us on how we should contact sources, while another told us our decision to public and article about them was reprehensible.”

“Administrators owe it to their students to support a culture of free expression, and high schoolers need to keep contributing to that culture by saying what they think. Free expression is a principle that seems easy to uphold in theory, but requires some degree of courage in practice. To start, we must reaffirm that our individual and collective right to free expression transcends the substance of anything that any one of us might say. A robust – and sometimes messy – marketplace of ideas is in the best interest of all of us.”

“In Des Moines, Iowa, in 1965, five students wore black armbands emblazoned with peace symbols to school in protest of the U.S.’s escalating involvement in the Vietnam War. Local high-school administrators suspended three of the five students. The school district soon found itself justifying the suspensions in a three-year legal battle that ended with a Supreme Cour victory for the students in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District.”

“The Des Moines administrators said they blocked the armbands because of the possibility that the silent protest could create a disruption, even though no disruption occurred. If a police officer were to prohibit a person on the street from wearing a black armband because that person could hypothetically incite a large protest, any reasonable American would right see the officer’s actions as a violation of the First Amendment. The same logic should apply across society.”

“Of course, creating a culture of openness and respectful debate requires more than staving off government interference. If large groups of people decide that silence is safer than risking disagreement, and if they instruct children to be silent in turn, our fundamental right to free expression will crumble from within.”

When I was a high school principal, I listened more to the kids than the adults. And this frustrated the hell out of most of the adults.

When our high school opened, I formed what was called the Principal’s Council, a group of students elected by their peers to serve as advisors to me, the principal. We had other student government groups, but everyone knew the Principal’s Council was the one that mattered. The students knew that they voices would be heard, and many of their ideas became new policies for the school. Changes in daily schedules, changes in student dress code, new courses introduced, and a plethora of other decisions started with the Principal’s Council. The students knew I believed in them, and they rarely disappointed me with their input.

As a mentor superintendent told me when I was a principal, schools aren’t built for adults. They are built for kids. So it stands to reason that those young learners should be afforded the right amount of student voice or learner agency to insure a well-run learning organization.

Anything less would be a disappointment.

Til tomorrow. SVB