I came across this article today and was, as always, thrilled to see high school students coming together to make their voices heard for better schools. Duluth is going through some challenges that are fairly common to public schools across the nation in our current economic picture, including a controversial debate over new school construction measures.

What's remarkable about the student organizing that has emerged in the past few weeks is how much media attention they've drawn. The group, made up of 14 student organizers at three Duluth High Schools and some 300+ members on Facebook, was featured in two local TV news stories yesterday. I've embedded one video below (skip ahead to the 1:15 mark unless you want to hear about local Minnesotan reactions to the Brett Favre signing), and the second, better story, can only be viewed here.

As the group spends the next year fighting to ensure that the local school board's policies best reflect the needs of students, the pressing question will be whether that kind of youth engagement--a positive for all parties involved, to be sure--is enough to lead to the kind of serious, systemic reform needed. This is the kind of challenge that faces youth organizing groups in all facets of public policy, the challenge of walking the tightrope between two very different kinds of positive outcomes: civic engagement and participatory benefits for the students versus serious progress on the social and policy issues that the students seek to address.

Not that the two goals are mutually exclusive, of course--see the history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Civil Rights Movement for example. But there are two kinds of messages that the news media and the students themselves can try to sell here. Are the students going to consider themselves successful if they participate in school board meetings, have forums to discuss issues, and get students excited about democratic engagement? Or will they measure their own success based on whether their organizational goals have been met from a policy change perspective.

It sounds like the group is leaning towards the former, by choosing to remain neutral on key Duluth school issues such as the school construction debate. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder whether youth activists are at a disadvantage against other interest groups because observers can chalk up the participation of students in policy debates as an end of itself, and get good press for it without regard for the actual policy goals asserted by the youth activists. For instance, a school board can much more easily say, "we met with a group of students before making our decisions" and come out in a positive light even without doing anything the students ask for, than it can say, "we met with the teachers unions before making our decisions" while failing to cede to any of the union's demands.