Humiliating ironies and dangerous dignities: a dialectic of school pushout

Abstract

This article explores youth resistance to urban public high schools that both inadvertently and by design push out students before graduation. The author details how youth experience the institutional production of school non-completion as a dialectic of humiliating ironies and dangerous dignities, a dialectic of school pushout. The author describes how some youth position themselves in ways that are dangerous to the institution of schooling, and, at the same time, their own school careers.

Keywords:

• pushout
• youth resistance
• humiliating irony
• dangerous dignity
• dialectic

Notes

1. A state policy change phased out one of two routes to graduation: the local diploma, which did not require students to pass an exit exam. Now, in New York State, the only route to graduation is by passing five Regents exams, in addition to meeting other criteria. At the time of this writing, the policy is under discussion again, and one option on the table is to reduce the number of required Regents exams to three, eliminating exams in Social Studies. The phasing out of the local diploma has affected the use of the GED option and the use of another route to school completion, the Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) “diploma,” which is a certificate of completion that does not on its own yield access to higher education.

2. A series of animated educational music videos that aired on Saturday morning cartoons.