South San José’s Gunderson High School doesn’t appear to be the scene of a policy revolution. The campus is rather typical, with stucco buildings and a quickly filling parking lot. Most adults drive by it without giving it much thought. However, a small group of students sat down there last year to discuss what school could be if it truly worked for them. One desired practical work experience. Another requested additional counselors. More modestly, a third simply desired better desks.
That last request can be easily written off as insignificant. Really, it isn’t. Desks are the kind of detail that indicates a school district has been making decisions without consulting the individuals occupying the chairs.
These discussions served as the basis for a Stanford research project conducted by the Law School’s Law and Policy Lab in collaboration with the Graduate School of Education and the Center for Racial Justice. Sixteen so-called “at-promise” students—a term purposefully substituted for “at-risk”—were interviewed by the researchers, who created composite characters from their narratives to preserve anonymity while maintaining the authenticity of the teens’ actual speech. That approach has an almost literary quality. It views the students more as individuals whose experiences merit a story than as data points.
Hoang Pham, who co-led the project, said that the results were clarifying rather than shocking. The topic of relationships kept coming up for the students. being observed by an instructor. having a therapist who could recall their name. receiving practical advice about what to do after graduation as opposed to ambiguous advice to “figure it out.” It’s the kind of discovery that, once you hear it, seems obvious, but the majority of education policies are created without anyone bothering to inquire.
This disparity is not exclusive to San José; Brookings has been documenting a similar phenomenon on a global scale, surveying thousands of youth in ten different countries and discovering that few educational systems incorporate any genuine mechanism for student input on the decisions that shape their education. There are many student councils, but they are primarily used to organize pep rallies and dances rather than to provide input on matters that truly matter, such as curriculum design or discipline policy. Institutions ask young people to live inside systems they did not create, which is a pattern worth considering.
The translation process is what gives the Stanford project its unique feel. It involves more than just listening; it involves attempting to transform what students have to say into something that the school district can implement. Transfer the outreach of a program from the tenth to the ninth grade. Include water fountains. Employ more therapists. Simple, almost unglamorous solutions, but ones based on reality rather than a consultant’s best guess.
It remains to be seen if San José Unified truly implements these suggestions beyond Gunderson. According to Associate Superintendent Jodi Lax, the district wants all of its high schools to have comparable listening procedures, which seems encouraging on paper. However, such intentions don’t always make it through budget season, so it’s important to keep an eye on whether this turns into a template or merely a well-documented pilot.
However, treating sixteen teen interviews as substantial evidence rather than anecdotal evidence has a subtle significance. For a long time, people who haven’t attended a classroom in decades have shaped education policy from the top down. This kind of research proposes an alternative approach: first consult the students, then draft the policy. It’s not a difficult concept. It’s just one that hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
