OurEd Students Meet with Deputy Secretary of Education
In a first-of-its kind meeting, a group of high school students from across the nation met with Deputy Secretary of Education Ray Simon yesterday in Washington, DC to ask that the Department of Education take the lead in doing something that is startlingly rare in education policy: create a permanent channel for student voice.
In America today, five out of six local boards of education lack any form of student representation whatsoever, and only twenty state boards of education have permanent youth advisory committees or student members. So the idea of national level youth representation, while not unheard of in local and state policy circles, is far from the norm. Despite this, Deputy Secretary Simon agreed with the students that the need for further youth engagement in contributing viewpoints to school policy discussions on issues such as No Child Left Behind is an important one, and he pledged his support to explore possibilities with his staff for how to create such channels.
Mr. Simon made a number of other interesting comments on the inquiry into student participation in national level education policy conversations. His first suggestion to students was to become more involved in local level school boards—an idea that he focused heavily on when told that only 15% of school boards have youth representation. His reasoning behind this suggestion was that “the local level is where you can make the greatest difference”, though it must be mentioned that the scope of change possible at the local level is limited to individual school-by-school improvements. For example, if a group of students want to change their curriculum, request new instructional resources, or change a school start time in their school, they can do so by going to the local school board. But if the students seek to mount a serious challenge to inequalities in school funding across city, county, and state lines; if they seek to suggest ways that standardized testing can be improved in America; or if they object to the notion that children born in different states are held to different standards simply because of their geography, these are issues that only the federal government has the power to address in a systemic fashion.
Another point that the Deputy Secretary asked the group of students about was the idea of what youth representation at the national level should look like. How would students be selected to participate? Could it be done in a representative fashion? This is a point for which there are no obvious answers, since there are no clear examples in the history of American education. While several other nations do have youth involved in national education policies (Chile, Singapore, England to name a few), an American system of youth voice—one which empowers youth from all kind of schools, and particularly those which are in need of greatest improvement—may be more complicated to fashion given the size of the country and variety of schools we have.
What do you think student representation to the federal Department of Education should look like? Should it be one, two, or some other small number of representatives who apply to the department and are accepted to serve a one year term where they come to the department and advise key officials there on how certain decisions could impact youth? Should there be a national committee with representatives from every state, who in turn elect a few of their members to advise the department? How can we ensure that the students selected are truly representative of America’s youth? We’d love your feedback – email us at info(at)oured.org with any ideas.