The “summer slide”—a phenomenon in which young people experience learning loss during the summer months when they are out of school—contributes to disparities in student outcomes, according to some experts. But with so much dysfunction and disparity baked into American public education, is more school the answer?
It depends on the kind of school.
For as long as poor communities have fought for quality public schools, the dream of equal and quality education has been under attack. Professor emeritus of education James D. Anderson described how formerly enslaved Black folks were the first in the South to advocate for state-supported public education—a stark departure from planters’ ideology that kept the administration of children and their education within the confines of a home or the church.
In the century since formal schooling became compulsory and federal funding was first allotted to public education, white planters, wealthy business owners, and now middle-class right-wing Christians have fought against state-supported education by resegregating schools through tuition-based private schools, the defunding of public schools, and by physically threatening poor Black children who dare attempt to receive a quality education.
Just as conservatives recycle tactics, we too can learn from movements that came before about how to fill in education gaps for young people.
During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Black community leaders identified education as a key driver for organizing poor and working Black folks. On the electoral front, white leaders across the South implemented reading tests and other draconian and racist barriers to voting, which also prevented anti-discrimination candidates from winning the Black vote. Black leaders understood that beyond just reading the ballot, knowing the history and the sociopolitical context of the changing world was equally important for Black people to become active participants in the democracy America promised. By combining reading, writing, math instruction, comprehensive civics education, and organizing skills through a popular education model, the organizers behind the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project created the first Freedom Schools.
This Black-led, alternative education developed a “vision of a school rooted in self-reflection and inquiry,” and the legacy of Freedom Schools continues today.
Engaged learning
Civic participation, media literacy, and core critical thinking skills fall between what students want and need, and what’s provided by the rigid, test-based schooling model dominant in public schools. Freedom schools specifically target these core areas as tangible and foundational skills that community members—regardless of formal education—can participate in together.
According to the anti-oppressive educational approach known as liberatory pedagogy, engaged learning starts with one’s material reality as the foundation and disrupts the usual power dynamics between student and educator while also creating space for parents and children to learn alongside each other.
At the root of what makes Freedom Schools and similar community education models effective is the direct connection between learning and action. During Mississippi Freedom Summer, learners were able to immediately apply what they learned about reading, writing, and analyzing political platforms to the pivotal elections happening at the time.
Today, as students are denied access to diverse stories, historical accuracy, and foundational critical media skills, community education must respond to these needs. Texas high school teacher Baiyinah Abdullah told Prism that there are countless opportunities for engaged learning outside of formal classrooms.
As one example, Abdullah shared the story of a student who took a science lesson from class and applied it to their own life by testing the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in their neighborhood, where they suspected a local factory and nearby highway were responsible for their asthma. While CO2 levels represent only one potential environmental contaminant, Abdullah said the student’s results only sparked more questions—and perhaps an interest in environmental justice.
The student’s decision to run the test came about during the final days of the school year, the increasingly limited time between mandatory testing and the start of summer vacation when students and teachers can let loose and explore the year’s many unanswered questions.
But for millions of students, school continues into the summer via remedial courses, extra test prep, and advanced courses for those hoping to graduate early. Despite the boundless opportunities for experiential learning during the one season in which young people aren’t in a classroom eight hours a day, most summer school programs mirror the regular school year’s structure and learning goals. Worksheets and reading assignments are typically offered to most students by exhausted teachers who are stretched thin by the end of the year. Despite the vibrant potential of young thinkers, there’s not enough summer programming available to enrich students and fill the education gaps left by the regressive curriculum.
Organizations like the environmental justice education nonprofit Start:Empowerment are trying to change that. Focused on community-based education models that bring together kids, parents, and community members to learn together, Start:Empowerment also offers analytical, student-centered curriculum. The organization’s Summer School program is a six-week course taught by queer and BIPOC organizers and scholar-activists.
Start:Empowerment Co-founder Alexia Leclerq said that in her experience, young people embrace any opportunity for real-world learning outside the classroom—and that teachers seem to appreciate the extra community support.
“So much of knowledge is not taught in schools and is held by community leaders and community members,” Leclerq said.
Regressive institutions
Young people today endure about 180 days of grueling test prep, mandatory standardized testing, a gutted curriculum, comprehensive book bans, and increasingly policed campuses. It’s no wonder these students conclude the year feeling drained and no more prepared to take control of their future than they did at the start of the year.
Abdullah, who is trained in culturally responsive pedagogy, cares deeply for her students’ overall preparedness but also acknowledges how little room there is to tend to them as humans and address their desires for a more grounded education.
In parallel with the eight-hour workday meant to improve worker productivity, the eight-hour school day is hyperfocused on discipline and repetition, creating an environment more akin to jail than to proper educational institutions.
“The way that scheduling works and the way that kids are held to their daily routines feel very much like the carceral system,” Abdullah said. “And students that I have had that have been in jail have said that to me—that our hallways are like jail, that our school looks like jail.”
The now popularized phrasing of “school-to-prison pipeline” acknowledges the ties across mandatory testing, school and prison funding, and the funneling of undereducated poor kids into precarious living situations and imprisonment. Despite ample scholarship on this and other harmful patterns characteristic of our dominant education models, standard public school systems remain regressive institutions more focused on controlling students’ bodies than empowering them as autonomous thinkers and change agents.
In addition to the outdated structure of formal schooling, the content of public education is increasingly under revisionist attack by conservative politicians and organizations that seek to root out “wokeness” from curriculums.
The erosion of public education playing out at full speed today is the continuation of a decades-long coordinated campaign to gut public education and specifically undereducate poor Black, brown, and white youth. In 2023 there were attempted book bans in every state except Vermont, many of which were successful in removing classic and diverse titles from classroom shelves. Sweeping curriculum changes also forbade teachers from delving into actual American history, including chattel slavery and colonialism. Information related to gender and sexuality is also banned, along with other important subject matter deemed “inappropriate” for young audiences as part of the woke panic.
Many of the regressive changes to public education can be traced back to right-wing conservative organizations. In Texas, Texans For Education Freedom (TEF) packs school boards with right-wing candidates who aim to fight against critical race theory and other “anti-American agendas and curriculums” to “bring power back to the parents, and help elect leaders who are committed to getting back to the basics and keeping politics out of the classroom.”
TEF and similar organizations purport to want apolitical public education while utilizing fake statistics to demonstrate their claim that what young people learn in public schools is a threat to freedom. However, young people appear more aware than ever of the oppressive society they’re inheriting, and when they vocalize that they want to explore alternative systems, conservative parents and politicians respond by attacking their already dismal public school curriculums. By packing school boards, gutting libraries, and gagging teachers, they effectively thwart any classroom potential for critical thinking and thorough civic education.
Young people are inheriting a world shaped by inequality and driven by greed—and because life doesn’t wait until they’re older, many students in U.S. classrooms are already dealing with immigration struggles, housing instability, climate depression, intimate partner violence, and other simultaneous oppressions. Queer and trans youth are also navigating a slate of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation nationwide, and more than a million minors have one or more incarcerated parents. An education that does not respond to these conditions or teach students about the systems that fundamentally impact their lives fails young people and jeopardizes their ability to build the world they want to see.
Freedom schools and other community education programming can fill the gaps created by regressive education policy. While politicians treat public education as a stage for political theater, there are models for how community members can take matters into their own hands.
Organizations like Start:Empowerment, The People’s Forum’s Revolutionary Summer School, the Claudia Jones School for Political Education, and W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction all experiment with summer and year-round education programs that supplement classroom education for young people while also working to reengage adult learners. As the classic conservative strategy of weaponizing education against the poor and oppressed regains strength, the work falls into the hands of classroom teachers and community members to raise up a generation of humans prepared for the challenge of democratic participation.
“Young people want to be changemakers; they want to initiate projects; they know the issues that their communities and their schools and their families are facing, and they want to be a part of the change,” Leclerq said.
Summer freedom schools provide an increasingly rare opportunity for engaged learning is a story from Prism, a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work today.
