Exploring Alternatives: Alternative schools and metrics of success

• In Event: Between Constraints and Possibilities: Narratives of Agency and Hope in Surveilled Educational Spaces

Abstract

New York City’s non-geographical D79 houses a set of schools focused on creating alternative pathways to graduation. Recognizing that not all traditional public high schools support all learners, transfer schools exist as district-wide intervention to address secondary schooling’s failures. Rooted in the history of informal, community-based education institutions originating in the 1960s in New York, transfer schools take on a complex tradition of reconceptualizing schooling (Baum-Tuccillo et al., 2020). As such, these schools are often misunderstood by district and state leaders that put forth a narrative of failure. Yet, in a report created by a team of researchers at CUNY Graduate Center, students’ voices told a different story of the work of these schools. Most significantly, students shared that transfer schools were unique sites of connection between students and staff. Transfer schools offer support, connection and belonging as well as content area learning.
Informed by a feminist material-discursive (Ahmed, 2016; hooks, 1984) framework and literature that deconstructs normative approaches to adolescence and academic success (Lesko, 2001; Vasudevan & Campano, 2009), this work examines the binaries that surround how success is defined within transfer schools. Additionally, by examining the research around constructions of ‘at risk’ identity and the pedagogical and systemic interventions sought to ameliorate it, this work problematizes the flattening and normativity of these narratives.
The field of education can be defined by binaries (i.e. academic success versus failure). The existence of transfer schools complicates neat binaries. For example, students stepping out (or pushed out) of the public school system—a perceived failure in traditional understandings of academic success—can also be read as a refusal (Campt, 2019) of traditional schooling practices that do not serve them. In returning to a transfer school, students reimagine what is possible in educational spaces and re-envision it to better serve their needs. This (re)engagement contradicts characterizations of transfer school students rooted in deficit perspectives.
This paper examines how transfer schools complicate these narratives by focusing on two moments taken from a larger qualitative study: an informal survey in which students were asked to share their reasons for coming to a transfer school, and my fieldnotes from one transfer schools’ public hearing in which parents, students and staff shared their experiences to produce a counternarrative to the district’s accountability measures.
I thematically code (Saldaña, 2021) both the informal survey and my field notes to explore students’ dis/re/engagement and the narratives that surround them on the individual and institutional levels. Examining these moments disrupts facile explanations of transfer schools and phenomenologically explores how success is constructed within these schools.
This analysis surfaces layers of meaning in which students share that they come to school in order to both fit into neoliberal structures of school and work, while also renegotiating the boundaries of what constitutes school. This kaleidoscopic view of engagement and resistance—particularly given transfer schools’ liminality within systemic boundaries—disrupts beliefs about the purpose of school and disrupts silence often surrounding alternative schooling spaces.

Author

• Adrienne Vitullo, Teachers College