Sustainability and scaling in youth urban education organizing: a historical case study of the Philadelphia Student Union
| Author(s) | Searson, Aaron | |
| Date Accessioned | 2021-01-07T13:51:38Z | |
| Date Available | 2021-01-07T13:51:38Z | |
| Publication Date | 2020 | |
| SWORD Update | 2020-09-06T16:04:14Z | |
| Abstract | Since 1995, the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) has been a leading youth-led urban education organizing group. PSU has operated at several scales—including the school, district, state, and national levels—as well as in ideological dimensions. Thus, PSU is an appropriate unit of analysis to gauge the extent to which urban youth education organizing can forge sustainable and scalable progressive reform visions. ☐ Based on interviews and textual analyses—conducted primarily from 2012 through 2015—PSU benefitted from exceptional executive leadership and adopted strategies to enhance internal stability, including: decentralized, transformational, and servant leadership development; leadership pipelines; mission integrity; an individual donor model; leveraging intermediary support; youth-focused recruitment; systemic and diverse supports; harnessing institutional memory; and planning and self-evaluation. Nonetheless, PSU and youth organizing are vulnerable to staff and student turnover, limited resources, and intermediary uncertainties. ☐ Sustainability is a prerequisite for scaling, which requires change theories, strategies, and methods. PSU’s model of scaling change begins with self-representation and politicization. Equipped, empowered youth are then given meaningful opportunities for collective action. Significantly, empowerment does not guarantee political power. ☐ Framing around root causes is a core theory of change for PSU. Additionally, PSU’s reputation as principled, informed, effective, reliable, and proactive has garnered it widespread credibility, essential to scaling. ☐ PSU also embraces “glocalized resistance” (Köhler & Wissen, 2003), which confronts immediate anxieties through community organizing while affecting larger structures through extralocal and framing strategies (Warren, 2011; Gold, Simon, & Brown, 2002). In education, glocalism connects across “constituencies, issues, and geographies” to influence national framing about public education’s “purpose, problems, and promise” (Fine & Jacobs, 2014, p. 4). PSU has scaled school and local mobilization through cross-cutting coalitions, while balancing collaboration and conflict with decision makers. It has scaled “down” through small schools, and strived to achieve spread and power through media and movements (Elmore, 1996, p. 20). ☐ Yet a multi-dimensional approach overextends its limited capacities and exposed resource and infrastructure shortcomings in the youth organizing infrastructure, particularly at the state level. Governance trends in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), in statehouses, and at the federal level make lasting progressive change virtually untenable. PSU thus increasingly adopted adversarial and movement-building theories and tactics. This transformation aligns with Fung and Wright (2003) and Oakes and Lipton (2002), who argue external pressure and movement approaches are logical when reform contexts become degenerative and inegalitarian. Multiscalar, intersectional movements with political and ideological power are crucial to scaling sustainable and progressive urban school reform. | en_US |
| Advisor | McNutt, John G. | |
| Degree | Ph.D. | |
| Department | University of Delaware, School of Public Policy and Administration | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.58088/r7ma-mk24 | |
| Unique Identifier | 1229094229 | |
| URL | https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/28462 | |
| Language | en | |
| Publisher | University of Delaware | en_US |
| URI | https://login.udel.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/sustainability-scaling-youth-urban-education/docview/2454175836/se-2?accountid=10457 | |
| Keywords | Neoliberal urban school reform | en_US |
| Keywords | Scaling urban school reform | en_US |
| Keywords | Youth education | en_US |
| Keywords | Philadelphia Student Union | en_US |
| Keywords | Leadership pipelines | en_US |
| Keywords | Individual donor model | en_US |
| Keywords | Self-evaluation | en_US |
| Keywords | Student turnover | en_US |
| Keywords | Infrastructure | en_US |
| Title | Sustainability and scaling in youth urban education organizing: a historical case study of the Philadelphia Student Union | en_US |
| Type | Thesis | en_US |