Necessary but Insufficient: How Educators Enact Hope for Formerly Disconnected Youth

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated how educators in urban second-chance high school settings made sense of their work with formerly disconnected youth. Using Duncan-Andrade’s framework of critical hope, we examined how adults’ orientations toward hope shaped the educational context in ways that were necessary and sufficient for student success. Findings from this study highlight the need for more critical approaches to student engagement, specifically for students most affected by systems of marginalization. Implications for urban educators and the institutions that prepare them are discussed.

Keywords

second-chance schools disconnected youth critical hope urban schools

In the 2003 book Young, Gifted, and Black, Perry, Steele, and Hilliard argue that for African American students to overcome the pitfalls of the academic achievement gap, two things must comprise their schooling: (a) they must be members of school communities that hold high expectations for them and normalize achievement, and (b) they must have a web of support that scaffolds achievement. Both elements are necessary for Black student success, and schools that fail to meet either need are insufficient. In the present study, we apply this analogy of what is necessary and sufficient for student success to the schooling experiences of vulnerable youth who have previously been disconnected from schools. We focus on educators in urban second-chance high schools who play critical roles in setting and maintaining expectations of students and in providing support to help students meet those expectations. We surmise that even when educators are interested and experienced in working with previously disconnected youth, those educators are not necessarily effective with such youth, as they may not possess the types of beliefs and mindsets that enable them to serve students well. Thus, we focus on identifying the types of mindsets that are necessary and sufficient for educators supporting academic success among vulnerable urban youth.

To explore these dynamics, we examine interviews with 30 educators in one network of urban second-chance high schools to consider how they understand their work with formerly disconnected youth. We seek evidence that these educators express a commitment to Perry, Steele and Hilliard’s (2003) assertions that students need to be members of communities that hold high expectations, normalize achievement, and provide webs of support that scaffold success. We operate from the belief that if educators are not committed to these foundational elements of schooling, disconnected youth will not be able to thrive in school or beyond. In looking for evidence of these commitments and beliefs, we use Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) concept of critical hope, which outlines material, Socratic, and audacious forms of hope that educators must offer urban students to equip them for success. Our investigation is guided by the following research questions:

Research Question 1: How do educators think about their work with disconnected youth and the role of schools in fulfilling students’ needs?

Research Question 2: How do educators’ orientations toward hope shape the educational context in ways that are necessary and sufficient for student success?

We posit that understanding the answers to these questions can inform efforts to increase the effectiveness of second-chance high schools. In particular, examining how educators understand their work through the lens of critical hope enables us to identify ways in which these educators are likely fulfilling students’ basic needs and what more they could do to support students in critical and empowering ways that are not only necessary but also sufficient.

In this article, we provide a brief review of the literature on disconnected youth and education. We then discuss how educators’ deficit mindsets toward these vulnerable youth thwart possibilities for the use of critical kinds of hope that foster these students’ school and life success. Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) six forms of hope provide a theoretical framework for examining the degree to which urban educators in second-chance high schools cultivate a learning environment in which formerly disconnected youths’ basic social and academic needs are met and they are equipped for success within and beyond school. We conclude by discussing what educators and institutions that prepare educators for urban schools can do to assist students as they strive toward academic success and self-actualization. It is our hope that the work presented here advances efforts of urban educators to confront the two levels of crisis prevalent in urban education: inadequate practices and programs that fail to meet the needs of urban students, and the shortcomings of research, theory, and policy to make significant strides in affecting urban schools (Milner & Lomotey, 2014).

Literature Review

Disconnected Youth

The White House Council for Community Solutions (2012) estimates that 6.7 million youth aged 16 to 24 in the United States (17% of this age group) are “idle”—disconnected from school or work, with over half of this population having not completed high school. Such “disconnected youth” are not in school, do not have a diploma or GED, and are not employed (Zaff, Ginsberg, Boyd, & Kakli, 2014). Compared with their in-school or employed peers, disconnected youth are expected to experience substantially lower lifetime earnings, higher rates of unemployment and incarceration, poorer health, and shorter lives (Fashola & Slavin, 1998; Jerald, 2006; Orfield, Losen, Wald, & Swanson, 2004; U.S. Census Bureau, 2006). Although there is great diversity among disconnected youth, statistics show that they tend to be youth of color from low-income families living in urban areas (Belfield, Levin, & Rosen, 2012). Many are also living away from their parents, lack stable housing, are parents themselves, and have few support systems as they transition into adulthood (Bridgeland & Milano, 2012). Homelessness is a critical issue among disconnected youth, as many meet the technical definition of homelessness detailed in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, including doubling up in homes with relatives, or living in shelters, substandard housing, or abandoned buildings (U.S. Department of Education, 2004; Zaff et al., 2014). From an educational standpoint, disconnected youth are often over-aged with regard to the number of credits they have toward high school graduation, which can deter them from reconnecting with the educational system to complete their high school education (Jackson, Sealey-Ruiz, & Watson, 2014).

Second-Chance High Schools

Among the efforts to serve disconnected youth are second-chance high schools focusing on recovered dropouts who have previously left or been pushed out of high school, have spent some portion of time out of school and unemployed, and are now seeking a diploma and pathway to prosperous adulthood (Colvin, 2010). Such schools often focus on credit recovery, life skill development, work experience, and individualization, with many utilizing online credit recovery programs for helping students make up courses through flexible scheduling (Bridgeland & Milano, 2012; Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy, 2012; Tyler & Lofstrom, 2009). As one form of alternative education, the increase in second-chance high schools focused on recovered dropouts has mirrored the United States’s national increase in all types of alternative schools, which grew from just over 1,000 schools in 1990 to more than 6,000 schools by 2010 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). More recently, the heightened emphasis on second-chance opportunities reflects political and economic concerns about reconnecting disenfranchised youth, particularly given financial estimates that each disconnected youth imposes a lifetime burden of $529,030 on society (Belfield et al., 2012; White House Council for Community Solutions, 2012). In a review of rigorous evaluations of second-chance high school programs, Bloom, Thompson, and Ivry (2010) cite positive impacts for students in some programs, including higher rates of earning a GED, significant short-term increases in employment or earnings, and reduced rates of crime involvement and drug use. However, schools focused specifically on reconnecting formerly disconnected youth are relatively underresearched, and there is still little research on how second-chance schools operate and whether and how they sufficiently meet the needs of vulnerable youth in ways that generate positive educational and life outcomes for their students (Tyler & Lofstrom, 2009).

Despite the limited research, Bloom et al. (2010) do note some commonalities among programs that effectively serve high-needs youth such as homeless youth, gang members, and young parents. These commonalities include educators who engage in relentless outreach, provide a safe haven, seek out and implement wraparound services, and celebrate successes with youth while also being prepared for setbacks. To engage in these actions, educators must be persistent, caring yet firm, understanding, resourceful, and optimistic yet realistic. Oftentimes, the most effective educators for second-chance settings are those with a history of working with youth from disadvantaged or marginalized backgrounds, such that the educators are prepared for and equipped to handle the challenges that youth can bring (Golubtchik, 2013; Tyler & Lofstrom, 2009). Beyond teachers, educational settings for students who have struggled in previous schools also often include other positions—such as academic case managers, special educators, paraprofessionals, social workers, and counselors (Brown & Beckett, 2007; Morgan, Brown, Heck, Pendergast, & Kansas, 2013). Individuals filling these various roles require different skill sets and orientations toward the work, but they must bring an interest in and appropriate mindset for working with and meeting the needs of disconnected youth.

Educational Needs Among Disconnected Youth

Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs suggests that the instability of disconnected youths’ lives likely means that meeting basic physiological needs are initial priorities for such youth and the second-chance high schools they attend. For this reason, educators who serve disconnected youth well are likely those that help fulfill the fundamental needs on Maslow’s hierarchy while also providing access to learning and social conditions that fulfill higher needs for safety, security (particularly future employment), belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. As such, educators’ perspectives on the most critical needs of their students reflect their beliefs and mindsets about what it means to educate disconnected youth. For example, a necessary skill for fulfilling lifetime safety and security needs is functional literacy, which is defined as the ability to use “printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential” (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 2002, p. 2). As such, functional literacy could be considered the minimum academic skill needed for success in life, such that even if youth do not complete high school or earn a GED, they are able to meet their and their family’s safety and security needs. At the other end of the spectrum, self-actualization is presented as the pinnacle of development in Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy and refers to becoming “everything that one is capable of becoming” (p. 382). Self-actualization includes having self-direction, self-acceptance, free expression of emotions, a sense of responsibility to others, and an ability to confront challenging life circumstances (Jones & Crandall, 1986). Self-actualization also encompasses the intrapersonal domain of 21st-century skills in which individuals are able to regulate their behavior and emotions to reach their goals (National Research Council, 2012). As such, self-actualization could be considered an idealized need that is less foundational to life compared with something more concrete like functional literacy. Given the variation in needs across these domains, educators working with disconnected youth could understand their goals as ranging from providing students with foundational needs like functional literacy to fostering the fulfillment of more profound needs like self-actualization.

Educators’ Beliefs and Mindsets Toward Vulnerable Youth

Students who have dropped out of school or have been pushed out experience disconnection and often represent demographic groups that have been historically marginalized in educational settings and society; these include students of color, students living in poverty, students with special needs, students who are English language learners, and students with identities across these groups (DePaoli, Balfanz, & Bridgeland, 2016). Such vulnerable youth may very well have been driven out of their prior schools by negative experiences with educators holding deficit mindsets about their academic potential, their motivation for education, and their families’ commitment to education (Milner, 2012). Educators who embody these negative mindsets believe that, when students in marginalized groups do not perform well in school, the cause is something inherent in the student, their culture, or their family—as opposed to structures and conditions in society, schools, and classrooms that can impede student success (Milner, 2010, 2012). As a result, educators with deficit mindsets are unlikely to hold all students to high expectations and provide necessary supports for all students to succeed because they do not expect success for all students. In such cases, the expectations and supports that educators provide will be insufficient for student success (Perry et al., 2003). For formerly disconnected youth in particular, who have likely experienced low expectations and inadequate support in their prior schools (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006), we assert that it is particularly critical that educators believe students are capable of being academically successful and becoming valuable contributors to their communities. If educators do not see such goals as foundational to their work and hold mindsets that enable them to effectively act on and meet those goals, they are unlikely to create the educational expectations and experiences their students require. For this reason, we focus here on how educators working with disconnected youth talk about their hopes and aspirations for students, as these hopes and aspirations shape their mindsets about students’ potential for future success.

Theoretical Framework

The hopes that educators hold for their students serve as indicators of the possible futures that educators envision for those students. Thus, we use Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) framework on hope as the theoretical lens for this analysis. Duncan-Andrade asserts that there are three forms of false hope and three forms of critical hope that educators use in their work with urban youth. He argues that educators with different belief systems and orientations to their work adopt various approaches to instilling and facilitating hope in students. In delineating the different forms of hope, Duncan-Andrade asserts that educators relying on false hope fall drastically short of meeting the needs of urban youth, but that those working from a perspective of critical hope provide students with authentic support and guidance that can provide them with legitimately hopeful prospects for the future. In these ways, critical hope from educators can become a pathway to self-actualization for disconnected youth.

Duncan-Andrade (2009) lays out three forms of false hope, which he positions as the “enemies of hope” (p. 182). First, he offers hokey hope, which he describes as “an individualistic up-by-your-bootstraps hyperbole” (p. 182) in which educators assert that success is available to all who are willing to work hard and follow the rules. He also posits mythical hope, which rests on “a false narrative of equal opportunity emptied of its historical and political contingencies” (p. 183). Mythical hope uses isolated examples of individuals who have overcome racial and social barriers to achieve “the American dream” and dismisses the very real obstacles that continue to confront urban youth of color and that will require much more than mythical hope to be overcome. Duncan-Andrade’s third form of false hope is hope deferred, in which educators who might be savvy enough to realize the falsities of hokey and mythical hope still cling to a belief that something could change in the future—either for society or for individual students—that would broaden the possibilities for success and opportunity for urban students.

In contrast to these false forms of hope, Duncan-Andrade (2009) outlines three forms of critical hope that can and do support urban students and provide them with a genuinely hopeful path. The first is material hope, in which educators provide urban youth with resources to address their needs and equip them with tools for life. Such resources include those that are both tangible (e.g., shelter, food, supplies, and access to medical and social services) and intangible (e.g., knowledge, thinking skills, social connections, and community). The second form of critical hope is Socratic hope, in which educators and students critically examine the social inequality in our society and “share the sensibility that pain may pave the path to justice” (p. 188). Finally, Duncan-Andrade describes audacious hope, in which educators feel a sense of solidarity with the community and youth they serve, rather than seeing urban students as “others” who are different or distant. Unlike the false hopes that might occur in isolation, Duncan-Andrade argues that the three forms of critical hope must operate together to meet students’ needs and provide the necessary supports for success.

Method

To better understand how educators at second-chance schools make sense of (i.e., understand and discuss) both their work with disconnected youth and the role of schools in meeting their students’ needs, in addition to how educators’ orientations toward hope shape the educational context in ways that are necessary for student success, we utilized interviews and ethnographic observations at three urban charter high schools that are part of an international nonprofit organization serving vulnerable and homeless adolescents.

Research Site and Participants

The three academies (Cedar, Elm, and Sequoia) are located in a large urban, Midwestern city and collectively serve over 900 adolescents aged 16 to 21 annually —most of whom are previously disconnected youth. Cedar and Sequoia are within a five-minute driving distance of each other. Cedar is the original high school of the network of schools. The central administration office is located at Cedar as well as an on-site housing facility for youth. Of the three high schools, Sequoia offers childcare for students who need it. Elm is located on the east side of the city, approximately 30 minitues from Cedar and Sequoia. Elm is located in a severely underresourced neighborhood and is surrounded by abandoned homes and other buildings. Issues of safety were clearly present in the area. These second-chance high schools offer credit recovery and individualized attention through flexible year-round scheduling and wraparound support. The academies primarily use online learning through Education 2020 software; however, the three campuses are also increasingly using direct instruction to provide a blended instructional model for students. With a mean age of 18, the current student body across the academies is 85% African American, 10% Latinx, and 5% “Other.” A majority of the Latinx students attend Sequoia. Most students enroll with approximately eight credits toward their high school diploma (with 24 credits required for a diploma), and assessment scores indicate that students are, on average, reading and computing at the fourth-grade level.

In October 2012, each member of the research team was contacted by the charter schools’ parent organization to evaluate the “effectiveness” of the schools where study participants served as administrators and staff members. Knowing that it would be difficult to demonstrate the schools’ effectiveness in a traditional sense (i.e., test scores, graduation rates, college admission rates, etc.) given the unique characteristics of the student population served by the schools, the research team was asked to assess the schools’ pedagogical practices and structural supports. It is out of this partnership that the current study emerged. Our initial visit to the academies occurred in January 2013, and the partnership lasted for two years—ending in October 2014 with a presentation of study results to the academies’ Board. Study participants for the current analysis were 30 adults (3 principals, 7 teachers, 16 support staff, and 4 security guards) who worked across the three school campuses (see Table 1). All administrators and support staff participated, and we recruited a selection of teachers who worked with six students whom we also interviewed.

Table 1.

Adult Participant Demographics.

Name	Title/role	Gender	Academy/length of time there
Steven	Superintendent	Male	Unknown
Amy	Assistant superintendent	Female	8 years (has held multiple roles)
Ray	Principal	Male	Sequoia, 4 years
Lola	Lead teacher	Female	Sequoia, 4 years
Ms. Vincent	Social worker	Female	Sequoia, 7 years
Anita	Attendance officer	Female	Sequoia, 1.5 years
Mike	Security guard	Male	Sequoia, 4 months
Jay	Economics teacher	Male	Sequoia, 2 years
Ms. Krantz	Chemistry teacher	Female	Sequoia, 4 years
Linda	Math teacher	Female	Sequoia, 4 years
Ashley	Principal	Female	Cedar, 1.5 years
Freda	Academic caseworker	Female	Cedar, 4 years
Caleb	Retention manager	Male	Cedar, 7 months
Mr. Smith	Security guard	Male	Cedar, 6 months
Prentiss	Security guard	Male	Cedar, 2 months
Ms. Long	Attendance officer	Female	Cedar, 6 months
Sarah	Counselor	Female	Cedar, 1 year
Stella	Data specialist	Female	Cedar, 5 years
Ms. Vance	Teacher	Female	Cedar, 3 years
Mr. Mendez	Paraprofessional	Male	Cedar, 5 months
Malcolm	Principal	Male	Elm, 5 years (1 year as principal, 4 years as teacher)
David	Student support manager	Male	Elm, 7 years
Carol	Enrollment secretary	Female	Elm, 1 year
Yasmina	Retention specialist	Female	Elm, 6 years
Jasmine	Academic caseworker	Female	Elm, 5 years
Danny	Security guard	Male	Elm, 1 year
Dale	English teacher	Male	Elm, 6 months
Nina	Math teacher	Female	Elm, 5 years
Jacie	Science teacher	Female	Elm, 1 year
Ronald	Paraprofessional	Male	Elm, 6 years

Data Collection

Data were collected between July 2013 and May 2014. The research team included three faculty members and seven doctoral students. Individual interviews lasting approximately 45 minutes were conducted with each adult between July and September 2013. Interviews focused on adults’ descriptions and understandings of how the academies’ resources and organization inform the social processes between youth and adults and, potentially, interact to meet the academic and social needs of youth. To inform our understanding of the school and local context, we also spent 12 days at the three schools over the course of just more than a year. We conducted 30 ethnographic observations (30 minutes each) in multiple spaces across the three campuses (e.g., classrooms, hallways, etc.), interviewed each of the six students twice over a three month time period, surveyed the student body on their motivation and experiences in fall 2013 and spring 2014, and collected demographic, attendance, and assessment data from school records in fall and spring. Although this article draws only on the adult interviews, our understanding of the learning contexts is informed by this full body of data.

Data Analysis

For the analysis presented here, we transcribed the adult interviews and coded each one for evidence of the six types of hope as defined by Duncan-Andrade (2009). Each researcher separately coded a subset of the interview transcripts for evidence of the six types of hope that Duncan-Andrade defines. We met collectively to discuss unclear passages of text and to review examples of the six types of hope as a way to calibrate our understanding of the various types of hope. We then examined those codes for relative frequencies of the types of hope espoused, and we created analytic matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1994) and concept maps (Maxwell, 2005) to delineate the relationships between different contextual elements (e.g., homelessness, students’ prior educational experiences, a second-chance setting, etc.) and educators’ perspectives on how to serve students as evidenced by the types of hope they expressed. We chose not to distinguish participants’ roles in this analysis, because we view the voices of support staff as equal to those of teaching staff and administrators. It is important to acknowledge that the hope mentioned by some participants as they described their work with youth represented more than one form of the six types of hope that serve as a conceptual framework for the study. However, we calibrated data to categorize participants’ comments in the most salient type of hope. Although these discrepant cases are not highlighted in the study’s findings, adults’ discussions with researchers about their work are considered as they relate to the overall educational context of these second-chance schools.

Researcher Positionality

Because researchers are drawing on frameworks such as Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) critical hope and theories such as Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs to analyze adults’ understanding of their work and their students’ possibilities for success, it becomes important to acknowledge the research team’s positionality. We are a research team made up of faculty at a major research university in the Midwest—one Black male, one Black female, and one White female—who actively reject deficit-oriented frameworks that are commonly used to examine and report on the educational experiences and outcomes of marginalized youth. For these reasons, the research team made a concerted effort to look for the strengths and assets of youth and adults in these research sites, while also maintaining a critical lens that acknowledges that school sites are institutions of social reproduction (Collins, 2009). Collectively, the authors have 15 years of experience as practitioners in urban schools (traditional public and charter) and 33 years of experience as researchers exploring phenomena in urban schools.

Findings

Data collected from adults across the three campuses revealed a larger number of comments from adults that lend themselves to Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) notion of false hope. Although there were a number of comments from adults at these second-chance high schools that lend themselves to the notion of critical hope, most examples fell within the category of material hope with instances of Socratic hope and audacious being observed less frequently.

False Hope

We found considerable evidence that educators held notions of false hope in their work in these second-chance high school settings. In terms of hokey hope, there was a clear belief that students simply needed to work hard to achieve. Educators made frequent comments similar to the principal of the Elm campus who said, “A lot of it is just trying to motivate the student and keep them going.” An academic caseworker described how she discussed attitude with students:

So if your attitude is the same that got you kicked out of the other school, what makes you think you’re gonna be a success here? . . . It all boils down to personal, educational work ethic on the individual student. . . . Excuses are nothing but self-inflicted wounds, saying I can’t, I won’t, or it’s someone else’s fault that I am an underachiever in my life.

To bolster their hokey assertions that students simply needed to work hard and take responsibility for getting ahead, some educators also used mythical hope by holding up the small annual classes of academy graduates as examples of students who put in the hard work and “made it.” The caseworker quoted above also asserted, “The biggest difference is that those who graduate from here took our wisdom and imparted it to their life and dedicated themselves to be better.” The principal at the Sequoia campus described using graduation as a beacon to motivate students. He explained that helping a student be successful requires “making plans of graduation for the student, giving them the exact date, keeping them motivated, doing a set of things for retention, and exposing [students] to that paradigm that knowledge is power.” Coupled together, these false forms of hokey hope and mythical hope attempted to send students the message that those among them who were most successful and made it to graduation were those who worked the hardest. Furthermore, mythical hope represents “a profoundly ahistorical and depoliticized denial of suffering” (Duncan-Andrade, 2009, p. 4) that many of the academy students experience living within structures that systematically prevent them from progressing in life. As the final form of false hope, we also found evidence that some educators across the campuses held to notions of hope deferred, such that they believed there would ultimately be a change in society or in an individual student’s life that would open up possibility. To this end, the principal at the Elm campus described a speech he gave to all new students at their orientation, noting, “I talk to them about forgetting the past and facing the future. What you did, wherever you’re coming from, we don’t walk with our heads turned to the back. We walk with our heads forward.” This type of blind trust that students can and should ignore debilitating institutional and structural barriers that impede a sense of accomplishment, safety, or a feeling of fairness embodies the very type of false hope so dangerous for youth in urban contexts. Despite these adults’ clear intentions to inspire and motivate students through these hokey, mythical, and deferred forms of hope, such messages stand as examples of false hope that fail to acknowledge the true realities of students’ lives and have the potential to further their oppression. Critical forms of hope, by contrast, would be those that acknowledge and address the very real obstacles these students faced in their own lives and in the broader society. The rest of the Findings section details those instances when adults at these second-chance high schools described examples of critical hope in their work with formerly disconnected youth.

Critical Hope

Material hope

Overwhelmingly, adults saw themselves as primarily providing material hope, particularly by meeting basic needs of youth and providing love, safety, and physiological and emotional support. When describing the types of needs youth have in these academies, the Elm campus principal noted,

They’ve got definite physical and emotional needs that aren’t being met. You don’t have a place to sleep that’s consistent. Don’t have consistent food. You could be on the streets tomorrow. . . . I think that’s what keeps the kids coming back because here they do find that love, that concern. They find a safety here that they don’t find anywhere else.

Adults described how the academies provide wraparound services for students and the significance this plays in meeting students’ basic needs. The Cedar campus principal stated that the academies meet the socioeconomic needs of students well:

I think that the socioeconomic needs, [we] do well. If a student comes in with a need, this place has got just about everything you can imagine to meet that need. The homeless liaison, we’ve got social workers, we’ve got a psychologist, we’ve got student advocates. All of those people are looking to meet health needs. They’re looking to meet housing needs. . . . We’ve helped students get away from abusive situations, we partner with lots of organizations to help them get glasses, dental work, things that are normally way out of reach. We have programs coming in teaching them job skills, resume skills, all of those wraparound services [the academy] does well.

The Elm campus principal described how student support staff helped a young male identify a way to protect his money from his parents:

The young boy I was telling you about with the sickle cell, you know, we helped him to open a new bank account because the parents know the number, knew his PIN and would go get his money. So we helped him to open a new bank account in a different bank and, you know, now don’t share the PIN . . . the wraparound services are huge. And I think that’s one of the things that we do well.

Across interviews with adults in the academies, a recurring theme emerged of providing wraparound services designed to ensure to the greatest extent possible that students were cared for in holistic ways. When asked what nonacademic needs are met for students, a social worker from the Sequoia campus described how the academies provide safety and support:

Many people come in to make sure they eat food. People will come in just for the socialization. Not get a lot of work done but they socialize and they feel comfortable. People come in for the security. They need to feel secure. . . . People come in because they still believe someone believes that they can still do it.

It became undeniable over the course of the study that these educators provide material hope in the form of tangible and intangible resources, as described by Duncan-Andrade (2009). We heard numerous examples of adults describing their work as supportive of students’ need to feel loved, safe, and encouraged. Staff were able to convey their emotional support for students by utilizing their own stories of struggle to help students understand their sincerity in seeing them achieve. The social worker from the Sequoia campus provided an example of how she encourages students to understand their strengths and weaknesses:

Support. Love. Love. They need to know they are important. Every human being is important. Every human being has their strengths and weaknesses. . . . I want them to know that it doesn’t matter, we’re gonna be, we’re gonna have strengths in some . . . in some we’re not gonna have strengths and it’s okay. I’m LD, learning disabled. I learn differently. I said you’ve got an IEP. So what? You’re unique. You learn differently. That’s it. Doesn’t make you any less [than] anyone else here.

Educators in the academies worked to cultivate students’ success by providing basic needs that had not been met on a consistent basis prior to students’ arrival in the academy setting. One such need was having humanizing schooling experiences despite dehumanizing life experiences. For these students who were utilizing an alternative educational space to meet their personal goals, providing material needs was necessary for fostering their success but insufficient in and of itself.

Part of helping students feel supported is providing a safe space where they can work through difficult emotions that stem from their challenging life situations beyond school. Adults describe the academies as a place where this is possible. The Elm campus principal described a female mentoring group that existed in his building that helped students understand how to manage anger. The female mentoring group was “a very candid group” that allowed students to talk about various social issues and needs they had never been taught. “How can we expect them to, you know, behave or take care of themselves in a way that’s right when they’ve never been taught?” Although the male mentoring group is not as stable, he discussed other mentoring opportunities that exist for students through the development of personal relationships with staff. Through these relationships, some of the young men who are parents are able to talk with male staff about how to balance being a young father who is also trying to finish school.

Adults prided themselves on the academies’ ability to provide basic hygiene needs for students, a critical component of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for healthy life development. Because one of the campuses has a housing facility, students have access to hygiene resources that are commonplace for youth living in less oppressed situations. An attendance officer at the Cedar campus describes the academies as “try[ing] to remove every barrier” through the resources that are provided to students in the housing facility. “If kids come in here need a shower, they can go over there and get a shower, get them deodorant, get them whatever they need.” In addition, the academies are able to provide students with clothing. A teacher at the Cedar campus described the closet in the building available to students where they could retrieve clothes if needed. A guidance counselor at the Cedar campus described how adults utilize their own resources to ensure students have what they need:

A lot of the staff here chip in. We’ll buy hats, gloves, umbrellas, clothing. . . . I’ll try to every now and then [to] go through my husband’s closet and if he hasn’t worn this I’ll bring it in. Under my desk I went to the dollar store and I have hats, gloves, because you never want a child walking around freezing. I don’t feel that I have a specific role. I try to do what I can as a human being, as a counselor. If a student comes up to me and asks me for a dollar because we ran out of bus tickets, if I have it I’m going to give it. It’s not a specific role as defined by my job description; it’s just part of being a decent human being.

Perhaps the sentiments of the academic caseworker at the Elm campus sum up adults’ commitment to provide urban youth with resources to address their needs and equip them with tools for life. In her interview, the caseworker underscored staff’s ability to understand what students experience in life outside school stating,

We just put ourselves in their shoes and say okay you know a lot of . . . if we were going through some of the stuff they go through, we wouldn’t be here, there would be no way I could deal with being on the street, walking around for hours until it’s time for me to go to school, because somebody put me out, because they were just sick of me being in there or they wanted time with their boyfriend.

Staff see themselves as doing a good job at providing the tangible and intangible needs that youth have that are not being met in traditional school spaces or in their environments outside of school. However, despite adults’ responsiveness to such needs, we found little reference to material hope in the form of high-quality instruction. The urgency of the schools’ context seemed to prioritize social and emotional services over high-quality, rigorous academic services. When asked her opinion of classroom instruction and whether or not students are learning across the campuses, a secretary at Elm stated,

I wish that the instructors would be more interactive with the students because you have students black or white asking their teacher for help and they’re not helping [them]. That doesn’t make sense to me because that’s what they are there for but it’s just, I would, honestly like [students] to be equipped with skills and knowledge that they’re gonna need if they decide to off to college, trade school, whatever. I think we need to make sure this is being done. I don’t care how they look at it, that’s just my opinion though.

With students’ primary means of academic engagement originating from their utilization of Education 2020 software, opportunities for educators to engage students in critical dialogues about the world around them seemed limited. The type of engagement with students that encourages a critical questioning of the world they occupy and the justifiable anger that students might feel as a result of their experiences being pushed out of schools and on to the margins of society can lead to self-actualization.

Embodying a material hope for these disconnected youth provides a basic foundation for their success; however, educators can run the risk of setting marginalized youth up for future failure if they are not equally attentive to forms of Socratic and audacious hope. Adults’ attention to these forms of hope enable students to question, critique, and respond to a fundamentally unjust world through meaningful stances of solidarity in the face of discrimination and in response to marginalization—without which students remain ill-equipped to respond to the powers affecting their lives.

Socratic hope

Unlike the multitude of examples of material hope, we identified only a handful of instances that we considered to represent Socratic hope—and within these instances, we only noted some of the attributes of Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) notion of Socratic hope, whereas other facets did not appear in our data. Not surprisingly, given the prevalence of material hope, we found examples of what Duncan-Andrade described as “amplifying” material hope (p. 189), such that investments of time, money, and effort illustrated educators’ willingness to sacrifice for students. Similarly, we found evidence of educators willing to confront the painful realities of students’ lives, yet still expecting students to meet their responsibilities as a student. An anecdote shared by an attendance officer captures both these forms of Socratic hope. In response to a question about the challenges of working in this setting, the officer noted, “I know that they’re hurting.” She went on to share,

One particular student, he lives way over on . . . the east side, that’s deep east [a particularly distressed part of the city]. And I went to take him a bus ticket, not knowing what I was really going to see, thinking because he’s 17, he’s got to be living with someone, right? I get over there, and the house is so overgrown, you can’t hardly see the house. He’s sitting on the porch [which is] boarded up, and he’s got a stray dog with him. He comes up to the car, because at this point I’m not getting out. And he comes to the car, him and his stray dog. I give him the ticket. Now he’s, “[Teacher’s Name], can I just get some change so I can get some noodles? I haven’t eaten.” Here I am now, I’m digging because I’ve learned not to carry cash at all. . . . But see the thing is, I have to ride away, I have to pull away knowing that I’m leaving him at a vacant house, no lights, no gas, no water, and hungry.

In this example, we see that the attendance officer is not only willing to drive into a neighborhood where she feels unsafe to take the student a bus ticket, but also that she finds it painful to face the reality of this particular student’s life. Yet, she does not let this reality be an excuse for the student to discontinue attending school. Rather, she delivers a bus ticket, indicating her expectation that he will make it to school the next day. In this way, the attendance officer is acutely aware of this student’s circumstances. Based on this event, and additional stories about the attendance officer’s relationship with the student, it is clear that she pushes him to pursue his education.

In a similar example, a security guard described learning about a 21-year-old student’s life and discovering a mentoring opportunity. He shared,

I started focusing on him so much to where it was like, “Man look you an adult, okay? I don’t know what’s going on at home or what’s the problem, what you need. But you got to get more focused on your education. This is what this is for: your education. And you’re gonna need it.” It got to the point where he got kicked out of class and then they didn’t want him in school, so I had to walk to his house. And come to find out, he’s living with his grandparents. I didn’t ask about his mother and father, but both of [the grandparents] are sickly. So it’s like, “Okay you, the kindness in they heart. They love you as they grandchild and they taking you in and this is how you repay them? You’re kidding me. No, no, you’re gonna have to get your act together.” So after I talked to them and then I talked to him and like a couple weeks later, he just been coming in on the ball. So I’m like okay, cause you gonna have to take care of them so.

Like the attendance officer had done in the prior incident, the security guard used the insights he gained into the student’s life to push the student to accept his educational responsibilities. Rather than letting the student slide because of the hardships in his life, the security guard reframed the situation as the student having a responsibility to his grandparents, and he stood with the young man as a mentor.

Despite these examples of Socratic hope, we experienced some tensions in considering this form of critical hope at the academies—particularly in regard to the facets of Socratic hope that were missing. Problematically, we did not see young people or educators questioning the injustices of students’ lives within this impoverished city and within a society that allowed these circumstances to exist. Although the attendance officer was troubled by the living situation of the young man to whom she delivered the bus ticket, she seemed to accept his circumstances as inevitable—not something to challenge or even to be angry about. In the anecdote, we also do not get the sense that the young man expressed anger about his situation. Yet, in Duncan-Andrade’s (2009) conceptualization of Socratic hope, he notes, “Effective educators teach Socratic hope by treating the righteous indignation in young people as a strength” (p. 188). To this end, though we heard references to students as “hurting,” we did not get the sense that adults in the academies recognized “righteous indignation” in these young people. We also saw very little in the academies that framed youth from a strength perspective. Rather, we noted that adults tended to talk about the youth as having extensive needs of the material type. In this way, students were framed as having many deficits, not strengths.

Audacious hope

It was also difficult to find clear examples of audacious hope (i.e., a hope in which educators feel a sense of solidarity with the community and youth they serve) when talking to adults about their work with students and the role of academies that serve disconnected youth. This is possibly due to the fact that important nuances exist in Duncan-Andrade’s description of audacious hope. According to Duncan-Andrade (2009), audacious hope is characterized by first boldly standing in solidarity with urban communities, “sharing the burden of their undeserved suffering” (p. 190). He adds that we cannot treat urban youth as “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995) and that a stance in solidarity with students requires educators to share in their pain. Several adults in the study make notable references to staff and students being a family at these second-chance high schools. The principal at the Elm campus mentions, “I think we’ve developed more of a family atmosphere.” A retention manager at Cedar describes how she shares in her students’ frustrations with life and school and how she commits herself to working with youth:

I love the kids. These kids, I’ve cried, cried a million times over half of them. You know, whether I was battling them and we came back and hugged and cried. But I wouldn’t even want any other kind of kids. I like at-risk kids so they say, in every area.

This example is one of the clearest illustrations of when Duncan-Andrade (2009) says “their pain is our pain” (p. 190) when describing audacious hope. However, there are additional components to audacious hope that make identifying examples more difficult to pinpoint when talking to adults at these second-chance high schools.

According to Duncan-Andrade, the second component of audacious hope is that it “defies the dominant ideology of defense, entitlement, and preservation of privileged bodies at the expense of the policing, disposal, and dispossession of marginalized ‘others’” (p. 190). He goes on to say that an audacious hope is a hope that seeks to change what seem to be insurmountable forms of social, institutional, and structural forms of oppression: “we must connect our indignation over all forms of oppression with an audacious hope that we can act to change them” (Duncan-Andrade, 2009, p. 191). Data collected from adults in the study clearly indicate an understanding of the suffering that their students endure and the needs that their schools can meet. For example, a retention manager at Cedar notes,

They want that structure. They want that attention. God, I have never seen as many kids. . . . If I had my way, I’d be all these kids’ parents because they, I tell them, from day one, and I got kids that still call me pops, that call me pops. The girls, that’s my dad, that’s my dad, that’s my dad. . . . And the way I look at them is they’re not at . . . if I’m gonna use the term at-risk, it’s not because, it’s because if I had to use at-risk, my meaning would be that they need somebody in their life that cares. That’s my at-risk . . . that’s why I go with “at promise” because I want to give these kids the promise of them being successful in life as well as education.

In this example, we see another adult articulate both an awareness of students’ needs and a commitment to reframing students’ status as promising. However, none of the adults who participated in the study made any mention of challenging or changing the oppressive structures that so profoundly affect students’ lives. They seem to take those structures as indisputable facets of life in their world. We posit that though sharing in students’ pain is a necessary component of the type of critical hope that educators should embody for vulnerable youth, it is insufficient for changing the life outcomes of these students.

Discussion and Implications

Our investigation of how educators think about their work with disconnected youth and if their orientations toward hope shape the educational context in ways that are necessary and sufficient for student success yielded important findings that reaffirm how significant it is for adults to attend to the basic needs of the students they serve. However, our findings also suggest that efforts to attend to any one of Duncan-Andrade’s forms of critical hope independent of meaningful efforts to address the other forms of critical hope still short-change students who deserve more. It became clear over the course of this study that adults’ provision of tangible and intangible resources as well as emotional support, though necessary, conflicted with their false hope–oriented mindset and practices.

We recognize that the work of educators in the United States is difficult and oftentimes finds itself the target of criticism and disdain. An unfortunate reality for educators in the United States is that the prevailing discourses that surround their work are characterized by accusations of carelessness and ineffectiveness. This is especially true for educators working in systematically marginalized communities. Nevertheless, we view education as a critically important site for the betterment of all members of a pluralistic and democratic society. Although the data collected from adults at these second-chance high schools point toward the perpetuation of false hope, our goal in this article is to focus on critical hope because this is a type of pedagogical mindset that can be most transformative in educating vulnerable youth. In this way, we suggest that educators who work with formerly disconnected youth in second-chance school settings are better able to meet the needs of their students when they attend to basic foundational needs (i.e., physiological needs, safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem) while helping students work toward self-actualization (self-direction, self-acceptance, free expression of emotions, a sense of responsibility to others, and an ability to confront challenging life circumstances) through enactment of forms of critical hope. We argue that these are necessary in work with formerly disconnected youth and that any one of these in operation by itself is fundamentally insufficient.

Adults across the three campuses examined in this study demonstrated clear examples of providing for students’ basic foundational needs. The significance of adults’ ability to connect students with housing, clothes, food, security, and love as students worked toward completing the requirements for a high school degree cannot be understated. For students at Cedar, Elm, and Sequoia (many of whom meet the technical definition of homelessness detailed in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act), this connection could very well be understood as a prerequisite for learning. Students are unable to pursue higher needs (i.e., self-actualization) when their basic human needs are not being met (Maslow, 1943). This ultimately inhibits academic performance (MacLeod, 1995; Valenzuela, 1999; Willis, 1977). Although we found abundant examples of adults’ responsiveness to basic needs, we found little reference to material hope in the form of high-quality instruction. As Duncan-Andrade (2009) notes, “[t]he most effective urban educators…connect the academic rigor of content areas with their students’ lives . . . we must reflect on how to connect our pedagogy to the harsh realities of poor, urban communities” (p. 187). An enactment of high expectations and engaging pedagogies as pillars of material hope must be included in any approach to teaching vulnerable youth in urban contexts.

This means that educators and institutions involved in the preparation and development of school workers must seriously consider how they are prepared to equip teachers and principals with the tools they need to work in urban schools and second-chance schools. For example, we need to engage educators in training focused on critical theories and critical pedagogies that raise the critical consciousness of adults working in schools. Moving beyond frameworks that seek to placate students’ frustrations with society by telling them that all they have to do is work hard and wait for things to get better creates opportunities for students to recognize their own humanity. This involves conversations dealing with systems of power, oppression, and opportunity that sometimes get glossed over in teacher education and principal leadership programs. All educators must be equipped with the tools to understand and engage in different forms of hope with their students. Although a focus on meeting students’ basic foundational needs is needed, it alone is insufficient.

An approach that both meets students’ basic needs and strives toward self-actualization through engagement in critical hope is especially important for second-chance high schools to consider. Second-chance high schools have demonstrated that engaging in relentless outreach and providing a safe haven in addition to wraparound services are important to cultivating an environment in which students can thrive academically (Bloom et al., 2010). However, second-chance high schools must recognize that though it is critically important to provide these resources to their students, it becomes equally important to combat forms of false hope. Far too frequently, the expectations prescribed to formerly disconnected youth focus on meeting basic requirements for graduation such as passing tests, recovering credits, and developing functional literacy. Meeting students’ basic needs can serve as a foundation for a high-quality education with high expectations. Educators in these second-chance schools can begin to think about providing material hope in ways that intentionally focus on high-quality instruction. As Duncan-Andrade (2009) has argued, “we have to bust the false binary that suggests we must choose between an academically rigorous pedagogy and one geared toward social justice” (p. 186). Furthermore, second-chance schools must commit to a normalization of achievement that also includes an embedded critique of systems of power and marginalization. Educators at these schools should ask themselves what it means to normalize achievement in an urban context that gets beyond the hokey work-hard-and-you-will-get-there narrative, the mythical legends of achievement, and the deferred hope of a changed future. A more critical approach to working with previously disconnected youth that is concerned with both meeting basic needs and empowerment through critical hope provides the best chance for students to reach the self-direction, self-acceptance, free expression of emotions, sense of responsibility to others, and ability to confront challenging life circumstances that characterize Maslow’s (1943) notion of self-actualization.

Conclusion

The “enemies of hope” that Duncan-Andrade (2009) warns against are unfortunately far too common in urban schools today. Although the data in this study demonstrated the presence of false hope among adults working in these second-chance high schools, it is important to acknowledge that examples (albeit a few) of material hope, Socratic hope, and audacious hope were also present across the research sites. Adults have the ability to provide urban youth with resources to address their needs while also critically examining social inequality in a bold stance with their students. This can make a significant impact on the lives of students at second-chance high schools. However, educators and the institutions that prepare educators to work in urban contexts and second-chance high schools must develop curriculum and initiatives based on the principles of critical hope to assist youth as they work toward self-actualization. We can do more than meet students’ basic needs alone. Once an approach to educating formerly disconnected youth that prioritizes safety and love in addition to a critical reading of the world is provided to students, educators can begin to feel more secure in the idea that they are doing what is both necessary and sufficient.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the Detroit Schools Higher Education Consortium via Ford Foundation Mini Grant.

Author Biographies

Terry K. Flennaugh is assistant professor of race, culture, and equity in the department of teacher education and coordinator of urban education initiatives for the College of Education at Michigan State University. His research focuses primarily on the educational experiences of Black males and other students of color in urban contexts. He also studies issues of educational access and equity for communities of color in addition to single-sex educational spaces for urban youth.

Kristy S. Cooper Stein is associate professor of K-12 educational administration at Michigan State University, where she teaches courses on instructional improvement. Her research examines systematic approaches to increasing student engagement in K-12 classrooms – with the ultimate goals of enhancing student learning, improving students’ affective experiences in schools, and increasing high school graduation rates. In pursuit of strategies for enhancing student engagement, Cooper Stein studies instructional leadership, instructional improvement, teacher leadership, and alternative high schools.

Dorinda J. Carter Andrews is assistant dean for equity outreach initiatives for the College of Education and associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University. She teaches courses on critical multiculturalism, critical race theory, and racial identity development and its relationship to schooling and achievement. Her research broadly focuses on racial justice and equity in P-21 education and teacher education; students’ experiences with discrimination in schools, and critical race praxis with P-12 educators.

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