speech on school dropouts

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Rick Rigsby's Iconic Speech: Lessons from A Third Grade Dropout

Rick rigsby's speech - lessons from a third grade dropout.

In this passionate and life-changing speech, Dr. Rick Rigsby -- the former award-winning journalist and college professor at Texas A&M University turned motivational speaker --shares the three words that taught him how to enhance his life and make excellence a habit.

Rick Rigsby's passionate speech on the "Lessons of a third-grade dropout" that his father had bestowed upon him was watched over 200 million times on our Facebook page alone, quickly becoming one of the most passionate inspirational speeches ever heard, mobilizing millions of people to follow his advice: to Make an Impact!

Watch the full speech to learn how you too can make an impact and to soak in the lessons of the wisest third grade dropout -- Dr. Rick Rigsby's father, whose outstanding life lessons can also be found in Rigsby's now best-selling book, " Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout: How the Timeless Wisdom of One Man Can Impact an Entire Generation".

Transcript - Lessons from a Third Grade Dropout speech by Dr. Rick Rigsby:

The wisest person I ever met in my life, a third-grade dropout. Wisest and dropout in the same sentence is rather oxymoronic, like jumbo shrimp. Like Fun Run, ain't nothing fun about it, like Microsoft Works. You all don't hear me. I used to say like country music, but I've lived in Texas so long, I love country music now. I hunt. I fish. I have cowboy boots and cowboy ... You all, I'm a blackneck redneck. Do you hear what I'm saying to you? No longer oxymoronic for me to say country music, and it's not oxymoronic for me to say third grade and dropout.

That third grade dropout, the wisest person I ever met in my life, who taught me to combine knowledge and wisdom to make an impact, was my father, a simple cook, wisest man I ever met in my life, just a simple cook, left school in the third grade to help out on the family farm, but just because he left school doesn't mean his education stopped. Mark Twain once said, "I've never allowed my schooling to get in the way of my education." My father taught himself how to read, taught himself how to write, decided in the midst of Jim Crowism, as America was breathing the last gasp of the Civil War, my father decided he was going to stand and be a man, not a black man, not a brown man, not a white man, but a man. He literally challenged himself to be the best that he could all the days of his life.

I have four degrees. My brother is a judge. We're not the smartest ones in our family. It's a third grade dropout daddy, a third grade dropout daddy who was quoting Michelangelo, saying to us boys, "I won't have a problem if you aim high and miss, but I'm gonna have a real issue if you aim low and hit." A country mother quoting Henry Ford, saying, "If you think you can or if you think you can't, you're right." I learned that from a third grade drop. Simple lessons, lessons like these. "Son, you'd rather be an hour early than a minute late." We never knew what time it was at my house because the clocks were always ahead. My mother said, for nearly 30 years, my father left the house at 3:45 in the morning, one day, she asked him, "Why, Daddy?" He said, "Maybe one of my boys will catch me in the act of excellence."

I want to share a few things with you. Aristotle said, "You are what you repeatedly do." Therefore, excellence ought to be a habit, not an act. Don't ever forget that. I know you're tough. I know you're seaworthy, but always remember to be kind, always. Don't ever forget that. Never embarrass Mama. Mm-hmm (affirmative). If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. If Daddy ain't happy, don't nobody care, but I'm going to tell you.

Next lesson, lesson from a cook over there in the galley. "Son, make sure your servant's towel is bigger than your ego." I want to remind you cadets of something as you graduate. Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. You all might have a relative in mind you want to send that to. Let me say it again. Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

John Wooden coached basketball at UCLA for a living, but his calling was to impact people, and with all those national championships, guess what he was found doing in the middle of the week? Going into the cupboard, grabbing a broom and sweeping his own gym floor. You want to make an impact? Find your broom. Every day of your life, you find your broom. You grow your influence that way. That way, you're attracting people so that you can impact them.

Final lesson. "Son, if you're going to do a job, do it right." I've always been told how average I can be, always been criticized about being average, but I want to tell you something. I stand here before you before all of these people, not listening to those words, but telling myself every single day to shoot for the stars, to be the best that I can be. Good enough isn't good enough if it can be better, and better isn't good enough if it can be best.

Let me close with a very personal story that I think will bring all this into focus. Wisdom will come to you in the unlikeliest of sources, a lot of times through failure. When you hit rock bottom, remember this. While you're struggling, rock bottom can also be a great foundation on which to build and on which to grow. I'm not worried that you'll be successful. I'm worried that you won't fail from time to time. The person that gets up off the canvas and keeps growing, that's the person that will continue to grow their influence.

Back in the '70s, to help me make this point, let me introduce you to someone. I met the finest woman I'd ever met in my life. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Back in my day, we'd have called her a brick house. This woman was the finest woman I'd ever seen in my life. There was just one little problem. Back then, ladies didn't like big old linemen. The Blind Side hadn't come out yet. They liked quarterbacks and running back. We're at this dance, and I find out her name is Trina Williams from Lompoc, California. We're all dancing and we're just excited. I decide in the middle of dancing with her that I would ask her for her phone number. Trina was the first ... Trina was the only woman in college who gave me her real telephone number.

The next day, we walked to Baskin and Robbins Ice Cream Parlor. My friends couldn't believe it. This has been 40 years ago, and my friends still can't believe it. We go on a second date and a third date and a fourth date. Mm-hmm (affirmative). We drive from Chico to Vallejo so that she can meet my parents. My father meets her. My daddy. My hero. He meets her, pulls me to the side and says, "Is she psycho?" Anyway, we go together for a year, two years, three years, four years. By now, Trina's a senior in college. I'm still a freshman, but I'm working some things out. I'm so glad I graduated in four terms, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan.

Now, it's time to propose, so I talk to her girlfriends, and it's California. It's in the '70s, so it has to be outside, have to have a candle and you have to some chocolate. Listen, I'm from the hood. I had a bottle of Boone's Farm wine. That's what I had. She said, "Yes." That was the key. I married the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my ... You all ever been to a wedding and even before the wedding starts, you hear this? "How in the world?" It was coming from my side of the family. We get married. We have a few children. Our lives are great.

One day, Trina finds a lump in her left breast. Breast cancer. Six years after that diagnosis, me and my two little boys walked up to Mommy's casket and, for two years, my heart didn't beat. If it wasn't for my faith in God, I wouldn't be standing here today. If it wasn't for those two little boys, there would have been no reason for which to go on. I was completely lost. That was rock bottom. You know what sustained me? The wisdom of a third grade dropout, the wisdom of a simple cook.

We're at the casket. I'd never seen my dad cry, but this time I saw my dad cry. That was his daughter. Trina was his daughter, not his daughter-in-law, and I'm right behind my father about to see her for the last time on this Earth, and my father shared three words with me that changed my life right there at the casket. It would be the last lesson he would ever teach me. He said, "Son, just stand. You keep standing. You keep stand ... No matter how rough the sea, you keep standing, and I'm not talking about just water. You keep standing. No matter what. You don't give up." I learned that lesson from a third grade dropout, and as clearly as I'm talking to you today, these were some of her last words to me. She looked me in the eye and she said, "It doesn't matter to me any longer how long I live. What matters to me most is how I live."

I ask you all one question, a question that I was asked all my life by a third grade dropout. How you living? How you living? Every day, ask yourself that question. How you living? Here's what a cook would suggest you to live, this way, that you would not judge, that you would show up early, that you'd be kind, that you make sure that that servant's towel is huge and used, that if you're going to do something, you do it the right way. That cook would tell you this, that it's never wrong to do the right thing, that how you do anything is how you do everything, and in that way, you will grow your influence to make an impact. In that way, you will honor all those who have gone before you who have invested in you. Look in those unlikeliest places for wisdom. Enhance your life every day by seeking that wisdom and asking yourself every night, "How am I living?" May God richly bless you all. Thank you for having me here.

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Teen With Down Syndrome Is Thrilled to Be Invited to Party

When you're a teenager, parties can be the event of the year — that is, if you're on the guest list. Chances are, unless you were Regina George, at some point or another we've all been excluded from a party we were dying to go to.

There's no worse feeling than hearing about all your friends having the best night ever when you were stuck at home watching a re-run of Friends (the irony isn't lost on us).

So when one teenager with Down syndrome was invited to her first party ever, she was over the moon..but she had no idea what was in store for her.

A Dream Come True

Macy's life has often been marked by exclusion. According to her mom, Heather Avis, Macy has only been invited to a handful of birthday parties since starting school. So when Macy got into the car one day, clutching an invitation with a look of pure joy, Heather knew this was a moment to cherish.

"Yesterday, Macy showed me an invitation to a birthday party for a friend at school who is also in the life skills program," Heather shared in an Instagram post. "Her joy from this invitation is palpable. WOW! To me, it spoke of a longing fulfilled. All I could do was laugh with her and then cry as I celebrated with her."

A Moment of Pure Joy — "We All Want To Be Wanted"

See on Instagram

In a heartwarming video, Macy's excitement is evident as she waves the invitation, her happiness contagious.

"You got invited to a birthday party?" Heather asks, her voice choked with emotion.

"Yeah!" Macy replies, grinning from ear to ear before letting out a joyful squeal.

Heather's voice breaks as she explains to TODAY.com , "My sweet girl is so elated to be included. It speaks to the common humanity that we all share. We all as humans want to feel like we belong. We all want to be wanted."

A Celebration of Belonging

On May 30, Heather shared an update that highlighted the significance of the birthday party. Macy is seen laughing and clapping, her body language speaking volumes.

"What did you tell me when we were there?" Heather asks.

"I love it here!" Macy responds, her joy undeniable.

Later, Macy adds, "I love birthday parties!"

Heather highlights an important detail: the birthday boy is a disabled student in the life skills class at Macy’s school. "The party was inclusive not because a student in the general education program invited Macy, but because a person with an intellectual disability invited both disabled and non-disabled individuals," Heather wrote. "It was inclusive because people like Macy and the young man we were celebrating, who are often excluded, truly understand how to include others. Let’s reflect on that for a moment!"

A Lesson In Inclusion

Macy's story is a powerful reminder of the importance of inclusion and the simple yet profound joy of being invited and included. It highlights the universal desire to belong and the impact that a single act of kindness can have. As Macy continues to find her place and share her happiness, she serves as an inspiration to create a world where everyone feels wanted and valued.

“We all have the opportunity to be the person to say, ‘I’m going to create a space where everyone can belong,'" she says.

"When I arrived at the party, I didn’t know anyone there. As Macy and I approached the birthday boy’s mom to introduce ourselves and thank her for the invitation, she greeted us with huge hugs and said, 'I’m so happy you’re here!' I confessed that I felt a bit nervous because I didn’t know anyone, and she reassured me, saying, 'Oh, these are our people. This is a safe space for all of us.' And she was absolutely right."

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Woman Moves in With Grandmother With Amazing Results

With the high cost of living, one woman just couldn’t afford to pay for a place of her own. So she moved in with her 94-year-old grandmother, and the heartwarming results prove that sometimes, multigenerational living is the best thing for everyone involved.

Moving in With Nonna

@rachelalbi ❤️❤️❤️ #nonna #italian #italy #italianfood #italiannonna #grandma #grandparentsoftiktok #fyp #queen #nana #italiano #italians #toronto

These days the financial struggles are real, with groceries, housing, and basically everything costing a lot of money . That can make it hard for a young person to live on their own, especially with only one salary to support them.

A woman named Rachel Albi found herself in that situation, so she moved in with her 94-year-old nonna. Some might think that that kind of living arrangement would be a strain on the grandmother and granddaughter alike. However, in a sweet video posted to TikTok, Rachel proved otherwise.

“POV: you can’t afford rent, so you move in with your 94-year-old Italian nonna, and it’s the best decision you’ve ever made,” she wrote in a video montage.

A Mutually Beneficial Decision

In the video, Rachel shared clips of her nonna making fresh pasta and sauce, bringing her tea in bed, and waving farewell from the front door as she drove off. One look at the sweet grandmother’s face and it’s pretty clear that she adores her granddaughter.

In other clips, Rachel celebrates her grandmother’s birthday, chats with her, and helps her make food. Before the 59-second clip is over, it’s hard not to smile at how happy they both seem to be with their new living arrangement. So naturally, the sweet relationship drew plenty of comments.

“You gave Nonna purpose again! No more loneliness ,” wrote one person. “This is how families should be,” wrote someone else. “The younger gaining knowledge and wisdom at the feet of their elders, and the elders feeling and being useful.”

“You can tell Nonna needed this just as much as you did,” added someone else. “You’re still her baby, and she just wants to take care of you.”

The Real Look of Success

Many of us grow up believing that in order to be successful, we need to afford our own place and go out on our own. But there are many parts of the world where grown adults continue to live with their parents, creating communities in the household that are mutually beneficial and full of love.

As parents age, they may need their kids or grandkids in the house to help take care of them. They, in turn, may continue to have drive and purpose by helping to look after the house and others who live in it.

At the end of the day, it’s relationships — not material things — that matter. Everyone’s situation is different, and people need different things. But by redefining our expectations of what success and living situations should look like, we can all embrace the sheer beauty of situations like Rachel and her nonna’s.

Copyright © 2024 Goalcast

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High School Dropouts and Their Reasons Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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Introduction

Educational reasons.

Education is an essential phenomenon in the modern world because it provides people with decent opportunities for further personal and professional development. It is believed that graduates of high schools tend to achieve more successful results in their lives compared to their less-educated colleagues. Even though it is difficult to overestimate the significance of high school diplomas, a few students fail to obtain them. Thus, there are many reasons, including educational, psychological, personal, and financial ones, that make students drop out of high schools before their graduation.

It is not a surprise that academic performance is one of the principal aspects that result in a dropout. The fact is that high schools can imply various standards that their students must meet. For some of them, these requirements are almost unachievable, which makes learners fail some courses. When the number of failed courses is high, the student’s future in a particular educational establishment is determined. The outcome above is a result of a few things. On the one hand, it refers to students’ mental abilities. One should note that everyone has their own knowledge and skills, and the same assignment can be either an ordinary task or an impossible problem for different people. On the other hand, poor secondary school preparation is said to be another essential phenomenon for the given topic. It is said that some students enter high schools without having gained the necessary levels of expertise in such general courses as language and mathematics. The information above means that there are a few educational aspects that prevent learners from graduating from high schools.

Financial Reasons

Financial issues are another phenomenon that is behind numerous high school dropouts. These problems are of two different groups, and each of them is significant. Firstly, it refers to tuition fees that can be high in some cases. Thus, if a young man or woman cannot afford their tuition fees, they will be expelled. What is more tragic, the same outcome will arise if a student shows decent or even excellent academic results. One supposes that many gifted learners did not graduate from their educational institutions because of that reason. Secondly, it is a typical case when a student leaves their education because they need to make money to support their families. In this case, the financial issue meets an educational one because many working students tend to show worse academic performance. At this point, these economic reasons represent a severe obstruction to obtaining a high school diploma.

Psychological Reasons

Many students are too young, and this fact creates appropriate mental challenges for them. High schools are a regular stage in the learners’ lives representing many new things and aspects. Thus, if a student is not satisfied with this new environment, they lose interest in education. Besides, some students are undecided about their future, which makes them attend high schools because they have to, rather than because they like it. That is why some of them choose the wrong course that can force them to leave education. All the examples above are summarized as a lack of motivation. In this case, a person does not understand why they should attend classes and what advantages this education can present. As a result, these psychological reasons both prevent students from showing decent academic performance and make them find some phenomena that will be more interesting than education. Both cases lead to situations when these students will be expelled from high schools.

Personal Reasons

The group of personal reasons represents one of the most common issues that make students leave their high schools. One should remember that every learner is a personality with characteristic features, feelings, and emotions. If some of them manage to control their thoughts and actions, others fail with this task. As a result, numerous conflicts occur between students, a student, and a mentor, as well as a student and their parents on an educational basis. When such situations happen regularly, it will make learners drop out of school. Thus, students, their families, and school officials should do their best to decrease this negative impact.

In addition to that, high schools make learners believe that they are adults and may do what they want. Often, it leads them to various problems and dangerous situations. For example, young women can get pregnant; this condition will make it difficult for them to continue their education. Furthermore, both male and female students are vulnerable to many temptations. It refers to the fact that they start smoking and drinking alcohol. It is the first step towards severer problems represented by drug consumption and joining gangs. In this case, it will be difficult for these young people to avoid legal issues. Once they arise, the fact of when a dropout will occur is only a question of time.

Education presents many benefits, but not all students manage to obtain them. It is believed that a significant part of all students drop out of high school before they graduate from them. There are four groups of the reasons, including educational, financial, psychological, and personal ones. It is impossible to state which group is more crucial or which one has made more students leave their education. When they exist, it is not reasonable to ignore the given state of affairs. As a result, it is necessary to eliminate the effect of these phenomena to make more people finish their education.

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Student disengagement: It’s deeper than you think 

By Charles Mojkowski, Elliot Washor | May 1, 2014 | Feature Article

American schools are failing to meet the expectations of a wide swath of students, many of them in low-income and rural communities. What’s needed is a new pact putting student expectations at its center.  

Even the president is talking about student engagement — or disengagement — in school.   

In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Obama gave special attention to education and particularly to the problem of high school dropouts. This isn’t the first time the President has used a major speech to highlight this problem. In a February 2009 speech to a joint session of Congress, the President said dropping out “is no longer an option.” Sadly, dropping out does remain an option for many young people — 1.3 million students leave high school each year without a diploma.  

Like the President, we’ve been paying attention for many years and have come to see the dropout problem as part of a larger and more pervasive one: student disengagement from their schools, communities, and productive learning. This disengagement is particularly strong and pervasive in poor urban and rural communities, where forces of disengagement are more formidable, and the resources for battling them more limited.  

In our work with students in these communities, we’ve identified several reasons. Young people feel that who they are and what they want to become doesn’t matter to teachers and schools. While students are required to fit into a restrictive school structure, culture, and curriculum, schools do little to fit themselves to their students.  

Many students drop out because of academic failure, behavioral problems, and life issues; many more stay in school but drop out in their heads — gradually disengaging from what schools have to offer. These disengaged students pass the tests and get passing grades, but they limp to a tainted graduation and a diploma that papers over their lack of readiness for successful postsecondary learning and work. Often these disengaged students are just off the radar screens of those early warning systems devised to detect potential dropouts.   

Researchers have calculated the cost of dropouts to society, but they’ve missed the significantly larger cost of disengaged students. They are the ones who graduate from high school but are unprepared for lifelong learning. Their talents and potential have been sadly ignored, often because those talents reside just outside the traditional subject-matter bins of a cognitive-abstract curriculum.  

Just as schools have high expectations for students, young people have high expectations for schools. Through our work with young people, we’ve identified 10 such expectations. We  believe student expectations constitute the rules for engagement in a new relationship that young people want with school. We frame these expectations in the form of questions that students might — and often do — ask their teachers.  

Relationships  

Do my teachers — including others who might serve as my teachers — know about me, my interests, and talents?   

Do my teachers help me form relationships with adults and peers who might serve as models, mentors, and coaches concerning my career interests?   

Do my teachers help me build relationships in the school community and in out-of-school communities?  

Relevance  

Do I find what the school is teaching relevant to my interests, including my career interests?   

Do my teachers help me understand how my learning and work contribute to my community and the world?  

Do I have real choices about what, when, and how I will learn and demonstrate my competence?   

Do my teachers help me make good choices about my learning and work?  

Challenge  

Do I feel appropriately challenged in my learning and work?   

Am I addressing real-world, high, and meaningful standards of excellence?  

Authenticity  

Is the learning and work I do  regarded  as significant outside school by my communities of practice, experts, family members, and employers?   

Does the community recognize the value of my work?  

Application  

Do I have opportunities to apply what I am learning in real-world settings and contexts?   

Do I have opportunities to contribute to solving problems my community and the world are facing?  

Do I have opportunities to explore — to make mistakes and to learn from them — without being branded as a failure?   

Do my teachers coach me in tinkering, experimenting, and speculating?  

Do I have opportunities to engage in deep and sustained practice of the skills I need to learn?   

Do my teachers guide me in practicing correctly?  

Do I have sufficient time to learn at my own pace?   

Am I allocating sufficient time for my learning — to go deep as well as broad?  

Can I pursue my learning out of the standard sequence?   

Do my teachers help me determine the right time for pursuing a project or taking a course?  

This list is by no means definitive or even comprehensive, but these student expectations capture what we consider essentials for a student learning experience leading to sustained engagement in deep and productive learning.   

The key to addressing the dropout problem is in not addressing the dropout problem  alone.  We recall the reminder that became a meme — “it’s the economy, stupid,” — popularized by James Carville, President Clinton’s former campaign adviser. Carville’s invocation was a reminder to himself to stay focused on the right issue. And we’ve been reminding ourselves that “it’s disengagement, stupid” that should attract our attention.  

The key to addressing the dropout problem is in not addressing the dropout problem alone.  

The education system focuses on dropping out, which it attempts to solve by creating early warning systems that tag potential dropouts for special attention. But we should not fool ourselves. This is an old magician’s trick. We’re watching the dropout issue, but we’re being distracted from the deeper and more pervasive problem of student disengagement.   

Could the misdirection of our attention be motivated by an unconscious unwillingness to undertake the much more fundamental changes that would be necessary to deliver the student expectations and thereby engage all students in deeper and productive learning? After all, addressing the dropout problem does not require schools to redesign themselves or change how they operate. School life can go on as usual even as schools create a special set of remediations for potential or actual dropouts.   

By redesigning themselves to deliver on student expectations, schools can move from remediation to prevention, similar to the approach suggested for American health care, which is so skewed to treatment that an estimated 30% of all diseases are iatrogenic — caused by the doctor or the hospital implementing a treatment.   

In a similar vein, many high school dropouts are produced by the system itself. How might educators redesign schools to increase deep and sustained student engagement? We propose a prevention system with student expectations as its design imperative. In such a redesigned  school teachers would act as fiduciaries for students, giving serious attention to their choices regarding their education, considering what’s best for each student, and helping each discover what’s best for him or her.   

In  Leaving to Learn  (Heinemann, 2013), we argue that traditional school structures, cultures, programs, curricula, and instructional practices can’t adequately respond to student expectations unless schools develop opportunities for all students to do some learning outside school. To accomplish this, schools must take down the walls that separate learning that students do inside the school from outside of it.   

Student expectations describe what students want with respect to learning opportunities and learning environments. Note, however, that teachers can use the expectations as student competencies. For example, with respect to relationships, students ask their teachers to know who they are and to use that knowledge to shape their learning opportunities. By turning the lens 180 degrees, however, it is possible to see the expectation regarding relationships being used by the teacher to push the student to develop deep and meaningful relationships with adults and peers outside the school who are doing learning and work the student wishes to do. Each of the expectations can serve this dual purpose.   

Our intention is to develop a suite of tools that teachers, students, and parents can use to assess how well schools and students are doing with respect to each of these expectations. Schools that deliver on these expectations will see high and sustained levels of student engagement in deep and productive learning.   

The relationship between schools and their students is deteriorating in our nation’s high schools. Hundreds of charter and alternative schools around the country are attempting to change that relationship, but they only patch a system that requires fundamental redesign, a safety valve that unintentionally reduces the pressure for more fundamental and systemwide reform. By using student expectations as design imperatives, educators can fundamentally reshape their schools.    

We look forward to the day when every school posts these student expectations on their web page to signal their new student-centered focus. Indeed, it’s our expectation!  

Citation:  Washor, E. & Mojkowski, C. (2014). Student disengagement: It’s deeper than you think. Phi Delta Kappan , 95 (8), 8-10.  

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Charles Mojkowski

CHARLES MOJKOWSKI is a consultant and designer specializing in developing nontraditional, technology-enabled schools, programs, curricula, and instructional practices. He and Elliot Washor are coauthors of Leaving to Learn: How Out-of-School Learning Increases Student Engagement and Reduces Dropout Rates . Portions of this article were published earlier as a blog at the Huffington Post.

Elliot Washor

ELLIOT WASHOR   is cofounder of Big Picture Learning in Providence, R.I. 

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Delinquent. Dropout. At-Risk. When Words Become Labels

Anya Kamenetz

Sidney Poitier (right) and Glenn Ford (standing) in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle. The Kobal Collection hide caption

Sidney Poitier (right) and Glenn Ford (standing) in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle.

Much of our recent reporting , especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school nor working. There are an estimated 5 1/2 million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States.

But what do we call them? The nomenclature has fluctuated widely over the decades. And each generation's preferred term is packed with assumptions— economic, social, cultural, and educational — about the best way to frame the issue. Essentially, each name contains an argument about who's at fault, and where to find solutions.

"I think the name matters," says Andrew Mason, the executive director of Open Meadow , an alternative school in Portland, Ore. "If we're using disparaging names, people are going to have a hard time thinking that you're there to help kids."

Mason has worked in alternative education for more than 23 years and has seen these terms evolve over time.

The New Vocabulary Of Urban Education

To delve deeper into just how much the taxonomy has changed, I used Google's Ngram Viewer tool to track mentions of some of the most popular phrases in published books. I started at the year 1940. Back then, the prevailing term was:

Juvenile Delinquent

This is among the oldest terms used to describe this category of young people. It was originally identified with a reformist, progressive view that sought special treatment for them, outside of adult prisons. It lumped together youths who broke a law, "wayward" girls who got pregnant or young people who were simply homeless.

The New York House of Refuge, founded in 1825, has been called the first institution designated exclusively to serve such youth. An 1860 article in The New York Times described its mission as "the reformation of juvenile delinquents."

This was the beginning of the "reform school," aka "industrial school" movement. The primary response to young people in these situations was to institutionalize them, sometimes for years, with varying levels of access to food, shelter, work and education. Meanwhile, the first designated juvenile court was established in 1899 in Cook County, Ill.

The Ngram graph shows rising interest in "juvenile delinquents" throughout the 1950s and 1960s — reflected in pop culture images like West Side Story and Rebel Without A Cause. A series of Supreme Court cases in the late '60s and early '70s established that courts could not have carte blanche in institutionalizing young defendants; their rights should be similar to those of adults.

Nell Bernstein, a journalist who has written several books about juvenile justice, points out that the term "juvenile" is more commonly used to refer to animals than people. "I have two teenage children, but I don't call them juveniles," she says. "It's dehumanizing."

The concept of a high school dropout was nonsensical through the early 20th century. That's because so few people graduated from high school in the first place. There was a concerted government effort to increase high school enrollment through the Great Depression. But graduation rates topped 50 percent of the population only by 1940 .

As we can see here, the drumbeat about a "dropout crisis" rose steeply in the 1960s and reached a peak in the early 1970s. Part of that was due to demographics. The baby boom had subsided into a "birth dearth," and enrollment was flattening for the first time in U.S. history. In the meantime, the economic benefits of an education continued to grow.

Bernstein says that in her experience, the rise in use of the term dropout was tied to psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary's famous slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

This image of dropping out as a cultural or social choice has persisted, she says. "When I did research on homeless youth, there was a strong misconception that they were '60s-style dropouts who had left in pursuit of freedom and because they couldn't do as many drugs at home."

Bernstein favors also using the term "pushout," which, she says, "opens up the possibility that the onus isn't entirely on the dropout" and "looks at root causes." In our New Orleans reporting we often found people talking about students getting "pushed out" of school.

Concern about dropouts soared again in the 1990s. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush set a a national goal of cutting the dropout rate to 10 percent.

However, says Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, high school graduation rates kept declining, to a modern-day low of 69 percent by 2002.

It has since rebounded to an all-time high.

But, he says, "I worry about emphasis on this one statistic, because it masks variations that are quite important." He cites a Brookings Institution study that says that to raise your chances of becoming middle class by age 40, it's necessary to avoid jail, avoid becoming pregnant as a teen and pass high school with at least a 2.5 GPA.

At-Risk Youth

The term "at-risk youth" gained currency in the wake of the 1983 publication of the policy report A Nation At Risk . The report cautioned that America's way of life was threatened by a "rising tide of mediocrity" within the school system. The term "at risk" suggests a focus on prevention and intervention, in the form of social services, tutoring and related programs. According to the Ngram, it seems to have risen in popularity just as "juvenile delinquent" declined.

"Delinquent" conjures up a state of being, while "at risk" suggests a vulnerable person in need of help. A scholarly paper by Margaret Placier at the University of Missouri, Columbia argues that "at risk" became a buzzword because it was vague enough to be defined broadly or narrowly, depending on the purpose. But Bernstein and Mason both point out that "at risk" also focuses on the negative.

Superpredator

A 1995 article by John J. Dilulio Jr., a professor and author with appointments at Princeton University, the Brookings Institution and the Manhattan Institute, was titled, "The Coming of the Super-Predators." It predicted a rising tide of youth violence: a burgeoning generation of homicidal thugs without a conscience, "elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches," found "in black inner-city neighborhoods." The culprits, Dilulio wrote, were drugs, child abuse and other types of "moral poverty."

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In New Orleans, A Second-Chance School Tries Again

The concept caught on in the media and among politicians. In the 1990s, as part of a broader "tough on crime" trend, almost every state passed laws that raised the number of young people being tried as adults. But the promised boom in youth crime never arrived — in fact, by the '90s, juvenile offenses had begun to level off, and today they are at their lowest rates ever.

When Gina Womack founded Families And Friends Of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children, an advocacy group, 17 years ago, she had to contend with the image of the aggressive, incorrigible "superpredator." Gradually, she says, it faded. "Kids were thought of, and talked about, as children, and not so much as these horrible monsters."

Bernstein calls the superpredator stereotype "absurd and devastating ... an insult you can't take back." She points out that, like juvenile, it compares people to animals. As the Ngram chart shows, the word never really went away.

Opportunity Youth

Opportunity youth is a phrase of such recent vintage, it doesn't show up in a Google book search.

John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises, a public-policy firm in Washington, D.C., coined the term in a 2012 report . It was created with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which funds education coverage among other areas at NPR). Bridgeland had previously authored a national survey and report on dropouts, titled "The Silent Epidemic."

"I'm not one to paper over reality or hardship," he says. "I don't like buzz terms or jargon." But in talking with young people in these situations, he says, he saw "Extraordinary untapped potential. ... They saw the benefits of finishing school and getting a decent job. They were extremely hopeful, notwithstanding their challenges. My bottom line was, if they can be hopeful, why can't we?"

Bridgeland's "opportunity" had a second meaning. He commissioned economic calculations of the social costs of these young people, as measured in lost wages and increased use of social services. "They cost the economy and our society $93 billion every year," he says. "If you're not compelled by the moral, individual argument, maybe the economic argument will wake you up."

The Aspen Institute , among others, has funded "opportunity youth" initiatives that seek to bring together schools, community groups, foster care programs, family court and the juvenile justice system to help young people find their way back.

"Some folks who do this work like it. Some don't," Melissa Sawyer, whose Youth Empowerment Project serves this population in New Orleans, says of the "opportunity youth" catchphrase. It can be seen as empowering, she says, or condescending. "At one level, it's semantics."

• Insights & Impact

When Students Speak and Educators Listen: Student-Voice Tools for Dropout Prevention

Posted on 02.27.2015

Asked what she would tell adults trying to understand why students drop out of high school, Andrea * quietly responds: “Just because a student wants to drop out of school doesn’t mean she’s stupid or she’s lost hope.

“Listen to her. It might be the best thing you ever do.”

Like a disconcerting number of students across Nevada, Andrea, a teenager in Washoe County School District (WCSD), dropped out of high school. With only 71 percent of the state’s students graduating in the class of 2013, WCSD administrators have tried various strategies to reengage students like Andrea and keep them supported and on track to graduate. But they found that even when, through considerable effort, they could get students who had dropped out to return to school — attending district reengagement centers and receiving academic coaching — the same students often dropped out again.

So WCSD decided to tap into a rich source of data that had been missing from their previous efforts to reduce dropout rates: input from the students themselves.

“To support students in persisting and graduating, we knew we needed a deeper understanding of their reasons for quitting school,” says Jennifer Harris, a WCSD program evaluator. “And to do that, we needed to ask students to tell their personal stories of dropping out and returning to school, and really listen to what they had to say.”

Stress from mental health problems and bullying led Andrea to leave school, but she says that her determination to earn a high school diploma and pursue vocational training helped her decide to reenroll. She shares these insights in a powerful student-produced video in which she and seven other students who reenrolled in WCSD schools speak frankly about why they stopped attending school, the kind of support that would have helped them persevere, and why they came back. The video grew out of a partnership between WCSD and the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) West at WestEd that focused on collaborating with WCSD students at risk of dropping out in order to better address their unique challenges.

This video has become a powerful tool for raising district- and state-level awareness of the challenges, strengths, and aspirations of individual students who dropped out of high school but later returned, giving themselves another chance to graduate — told in the students’ own words. The student-produced video has been shown to counselors and principals across WCSD, and Nevada’s state superintendent has requested that it be shown to school leaders in the state.

“I usually get calls from principals after it’s shown,” Harris says. “They ask me to show it to their whole staff.”

Finding the right tool for the job

Even though WCSD was committed to the notion of listening to student ideas about school improvement, “we had difficulty imagining what that would look like in our classrooms and schools across the district,” says Harris, who is part of a WCSD team that secured a five-year High School Graduation Initiative (HSGI) grant in 2011 from the U.S. Department of Education to build new pathways to graduation for students at risk of dropping out or for dropouts who return to school.

With momentum from their HSGI projects, in 2013 the WCSD team began to discuss additional practical strategies with BethAnn Berliner, a senior REL West researcher who works with a number of states and local education agencies in making data-based decisions to address dropout prevention and reengagement efforts. Those conversations led to the idea of developing a toolkit designed to elicit student perspectives and engagement — or student voice — to inform districtwide approaches to helping students persist and graduate.

While eliciting student perspectives to guide school improvement initiatives is not necessarily a new strategy, student experiences and ideas are usually “voiced” indirectly through responses to surveys or participation in meetings structured and led by adults, says Berliner. “It’s much less common for students to have authentic opportunities to partner with adults to wrestle with school problems,” she says, “and even rarer for students to plan and lead such efforts.”

Although the toolkit initially focused on dropout prevention, the final version developed and produced by WCSD and REL West, Speak Out, Listen Up! Tools for Using Student Perspectives and Local Data for School Improvement , is designed for use by all grade levels to address local school-improvement-related topics or problems. Berliner notes that students are seen as a key to finding solutions, rather than as a source of school problems. Research on the effectiveness of using student voice to address school change is just emerging, says Berliner, but the literature suggests that listening closely to what students say about their school experiences can help educators better understand and address local challenges and rethink policies and practices.

School climate research corroborates the connection between the use of student input to inform school improvement decisions and positive school outcomes. For example, a 2011 federally funded project to improve the climate of 58 California schools drew heavily on two strategies to incorporate student perspectives: using Student Listening Circles (like the Inside-Outside Fishbowl tool described later in this article) and having students analyze and discuss data from the California Healthy Kids Survey. A WestEd report on the project revealed that after two years, 86 percent of participating schools — which were selected based on their poor climate scores —improved their school climate. Furthermore, a large majority significantly improved their academic performance, as measured by students’ results on statewide standardized tests.

Empowering students to take action

Published by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the toolkit comprises three student voice tools, each of which has three essential components: collaboration between adults and students in a school setting, local data gathering and/or analysis on a school issue or problem, and an action step to address school improvement. The tools are:

• ASK (Analyzing Surveys with Kids) : Students analyze and interpret existing local data (like survey results) associated with a school-related topic or problem, then produce explanations and suggestions for school improvement.
• Inside-Outside Fishbowl : Students and educators trade roles as speakers and listeners during a structured discussion of a school-related topic or problem, and jointly develop an action plan.
• S4 (Students Studying Students’ Stories) : Students lead a digital storytelling process in which they produce and analyze videotaped interviews of other students discussing a school-related topic or problem, then host forums with educators to suggest improvements.

The tools vary in complexity, duration, and the amount of student responsibility. For instance, the S4 tool used to produce the WCSD video took a class of students at an alternative high school an entire semester to develop, with support from their teacher and a video editor. Those students — who had themselves dropped out of school and reenrolled — developed the interview questions, interviewed and videotaped the volunteer subjects, created a story line from the raw video footage, and participated in the editing. While they were still attending high school, they also introduced the video at showings for educator groups and participated in structured, reflective discussions afterward.

“The tools can help give disengaged students more responsibility and buy-in for school improvement efforts,” Berliner says, “and can help ensure that changes made to the school environment actually reflect student perspectives and needs.”

Gaining insights and challenging common perceptions

Many student comments in the video interviews confirmed that the reasons for dropping out are varied, complex, and personal. Some examples: mental health challenges not being addressed; special learning needs not being recognized or met; parents who have addiction and other problems; being bullied or in abusive relationships; or other life circumstances that interfere with staying on track to earn a diploma.

A common theme voiced across all the interviews was the fundamental need for a caring adult in the school setting who checks in with them regularly. “One of the reasons these students persisted was because they had caring teachers, coaches, and others in their lives who believed in them,” says Berliner.

Both Harris and Berliner have noticed that the students’ stories are challenging common preconceptions about who these students are as individuals. “They are smart and articulate, they take pride in being students, and they have high aspirations,” says Berliner. “And they want to be happy.”

Five of the eight students in the WCSD video graduated and are now working or in college. Two students are currently working toward a high school diploma, and one student dropped out again.

Using student voice to address a range of local challenges

Beyond offering a practical way to support dropout prevention, the Speak Out, Listen Up! toolkit has become a catalyst in WCSD for a different way of thinking about and acting on a range of school issues and problems. “New conversations are taking place in the district,” Harris says, “on topics like student mental health, the need for stronger wraparound supports for at-risk students, and improving school climate.”

WCSD has launched an interdisciplinary districtwide task force to better incorporate student voice in school improvement efforts. And the toolkit is being introduced to school teams across grade levels through the district’s Social and Emotional Learning Initiative. “Students are better able to realize and practice their social and emotional competencies when they can communicate their views on issues that are important to them,” Says Harris.

“I only fully realized how valuable the toolkit was when we started introducing it to other educators,” Harris says. “Now, when people ask us for support in using student voice to address school-improvement issues, we have solid strategies to offer them.”

For further information about the Speak Out, Listen Up! toolkit, contact BethAnn Berliner at 415.302.4209 or [email protected].

For further information about using the toolkit, including developing and using a student-produced video, contact Jennifer Harris at 775.333.3766 or [email protected].

* Andrea is a pseudonym used to protect this student’s privacy.

• New toolkit elicits student perspectives and engagement to address local school improvement problems.
• Student-voice tools can give disengaged students more responsibility and buy-in for school improvement efforts.
• Washoe County collaborated with students at risk of dropping out in order to better address their unique challenges.

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Speak Out, Listen Up! Tools For Using Student Perspectives and Local Data for School Improvement

Listening to student voice — listening closely to what students say about their school experiences — can help educators understand topics or problems and rethink practices to ...

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Student Disengagement: It’s Deeper than You Think

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American schools are failing to meet the expectations of a wide swath of students, many of them in low-income and rural communities. What’s needed is a new pact putting student expectations at its center.

Even the president is talking about student engagement — or disengagement — in school.

In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Obama gave special attention to education and particularly to the problem of high school dropouts. This isn’t the first time the President has used a major speech to highlight this problem. In a February 2009 speech to a joint session of Congress, the President said dropping out “is no longer an option.” Sadly, dropping out does remain an option for many young people — 1.3 million students leave high school each year without a diploma.

Like the President, we’ve been paying attention for many years and have come to see the dropout problem as part of a larger and more pervasive one: student disengagement from their schools, communities, and productive learning. This disengagement is particularly strong and pervasive in poor urban and rural communities, where forces of disengagement are more formidable, and the resources for battling them more limited.

In our work with students in these communities, we’ve identified several reasons. Young people feel that who they are and what they want to become doesn’t matter to teachers and schools. While students are required to fit into a restrictive school structure, culture, and curriculum, schools do little to fit themselves to their students.

Many students drop out because of academic failure, behavioral problems, and life issues; many more stay in school but drop out in their heads — gradually disengaging from what schools have to offer. These disengaged students pass the tests and get passing grades, but they limp to a tainted graduation and a diploma that papers over their lack of readiness for successful postsecondary learning and work. Often these disengaged students are just off the radar screens of those early warning systems devised to detect potential dropouts.

Researchers have calculated the cost of dropouts to society, but they’ve missed the significantly larger cost of disengaged students. They are the ones who graduate from high school but are unprepared for life-long learning. Their talents and potential have been sadly ignored, often because those talents reside just outside the traditional subject-matter bins of a cognitive-abstract curriculum.

Just as schools have high expectations for students, young people have high expectations for schools. Through our work with young people, we’ve identified 10 such expectations . We believe student expectations constitute the rules for engagement in a new relationship that young people want with school. We frame these expectations in the form of questions that students might — and often do — ask their teachers.

This list is by no means definitive or even comprehensive, but these student expectations capture what we consider essentials for a student learning experience leading to sustained engagement in deep and productive learning.

The key to addressing the dropout problem is in not addressing the dropout problem alone . We recall the reminder that became a meme — “it’s the economy, stupid,” — popularized by James Carville, President Clinton’s former campaign adviser. Carville’s invocation was a reminder to himself to stay focused on the right issue. And we’ve been reminding ourselves that “it’s disengagement, stupid” that should attract our attention.

The education system focuses on dropping out, which it attempts to solve by creating early warning systems that tag potential dropouts for special attention. But we should not fool ourselves. This is an old magician’s trick. We’re watching the dropout issue, but we’re being distracted from the deeper and more pervasive problem of student disengagement.

Could the misdirection of our attention be motivated by an unconscious unwillingness to undertake the much more fundamental changes that would be necessary to deliver the student expectations and thereby engage all students in deeper and productive learning? After all, addressing the dropout problem does not require schools to redesign themselves or change how they operate. School life can go on as usual even as schools create a special set of remediations for potential or actual dropouts.

By redesigning themselves to deliver on student expectations, schools can move from remediation to prevention, similar to the approach suggested for American health care, which is so skewed to treatment that an estimated 30% of all diseases are iatrogenic — caused by the doctor or the hospital implementing a treatment.

In a similar vein, many high school dropouts are produced by the system itself. How might educators redesign schools to increase deep and sustained student engagement? We propose a prevention system with student expectations as its design imperative. In such a redesigned school teachers would act as fiduciaries for students, giving serious attention to their choices regarding their education, considering what’s best for each student, and helping each discover what’s best for him or her.

In Leaving to Learn (Heinemann, 2013), we argue that traditional school structures, cultures, programs, curricula, and instructional practices can’t adequately respond to student expectations unless schools develop opportunities for all students to do some learning outside school. To accomplish this, schools must take down the walls that separate learning that students do inside the school from outside of it.

Student expectations describe what students want with respect to learning opportunities and learning environments. Note, however, that teachers can use the expectations as student competencies. For example, with respect to relationships, students ask their teachers to know who they are and to use that knowledge to shape their learning opportunities. By turning the lens 180 degrees, however, it is possible to see the expectation regarding relationships being used by the teacher to push the student to develop deep and meaningful relationships with adults and peers outside the school who are doing learning and work the student wishes to do. Each of the expectations can serve this dual purpose.

Our intention is to develop a suite of tools that teachers, students, and parents can use to assess how well schools and students are doing with respect to each of these expectations. Schools that deliver on these expectations will see high and sustained levels of student engagement in deep and productive learning.

The relationship between schools and their students is deteriorating in our nation’s high schools. Hundreds of charter and alternative schools around the country are attempting to change that relationship, but they only patch a system that requires fundamental redesign, a safety valve that unintentionally reduces the pressure for more fundamental and system-wide reform. By using student expectations as design imperatives, educators can fundamentally reshape their schools.

We look forward to the day when every school posts these student expectations on their web page to signal their new student-centered focus. Indeed, it’s our expectation!

All articles published in Phi Delta Kappan are protected by copyright. For permission to use or reproduce Kappan articles, please e-mail [email protected] .

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Student Engagement and School Dropout: Theories, Evidence, and Future Directions

• First Online: 20 October 2022

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• Michel Janosz 3 ,
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• Véronique Dupéré 3  

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School dropout is a major preoccupation in all countries. Several factors contribute to this outcome, but research suggests that dropouts mostly have gone through a process of disengaging from school. This chapter aims to present a synthesis of this process according to the major theories in the field and review empirical research linking student disengagement and school dropout. This chapter also presents the common risk and protective factors associated with these two issues, the profiles of students who drop out as well as the disengagement trajectories they follow and leading to their decision to quit school. Finally, it highlights the main challenges as well as the future directions that research should prioritize in the study of student engagement and school dropout.

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Archambault, I., Janosz, M., Olivier, E., Dupéré, V. (2022). Student Engagement and School Dropout: Theories, Evidence, and Future Directions. In: Reschly, A.L., Christenson, S.L. (eds) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07853-8_16

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School feeding program to be expanded to check dropout rate: Finance Minister in budget speech

S angsad Bhaban, June 6 -- The government has taken up a new project titled 'School Feeding Program' covering all primary schools from 150 upazilas of the country to prevent further dropouts at primary education level.

Finance Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali disclosed it while delivering his budget speech in the National Parliament today (Thursday).

Budget 2024-25: Uncertainty surrounds VAT exemption for Metro Rail tickets

With a view to preventing dropout at primary education level, stipend is being provided to 100% students through EFT. The ongoing school feeding program for more than 27 lakh students from 15,470 government primary schools in 104 upazilas of the country through the project titled 'School Feeding in Poverty-stricken Areas' has been completed recently.

In continuation of this, a project has been taken up with the aim of starting 'School Feeding Program' in all primary schools from 150 upazilas of the country, he said.

The Finance Minister also said that the net enrolment rate in primary education has increased from 90.8 percent in 2009 to 97.56 percent in 2022 as a result of well-thought-out government policies. At the same time, the dropout rate in primary education was 45.1 percent in 2009, which declined to 13.95 percent in 2022, he added.

Besides, integrated education program has been launched to ensure education in mainstream government primary schools for all children of the society including children with special needs at primary level.

CPD applauds tax reductions on essentials in budget but criticises black money whitening provision

Moreover, wheel chairs, crutches, hearing aids, etc. are being procured and distributed to children with special needs and funds are being allocated based on demand in each upazila for the purchase and distribution of such aids, he said adding that ramps are being constructed in primary schools to facilitate access to classrooms for children with special needs.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from United News of Bangladesh.

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The Battle Over College Speech Will Outlive the Encampments

For the first time since the Vietnam War, university demonstrations have led to a rethinking of who sets the terms for language in academia.

A pro-Palestinian protest on Columbia University’s campus this spring. Credit... Mark Peterson/Redux

Supported by

By Emily Bazelon and Charles Homans

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine who also teaches at Yale Law School. Charles Homans covers politics for The Times. He visited the Columbia campus repeatedly during the demonstrations, counter-demonstrations and police actions in April.

• Published May 29, 2024 Updated May 31, 2024

Early on the afternoon of Nov. 10, Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, was on his way into a meeting in Low Library, the domed neoclassical building at the center of campus, when an administrator pulled him aside. The school, the administrator said, was about to announce the suspensions of the campus chapters of the organizations Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, an allied anti-Zionist organization — a move that alarmed Jaffer given the fraught politics of the moment.

Listen to this article, read by Gabra Zackman

The day after Hamas’s brazen Oct. 7 attack on military and civilian targets in Israel, the S.J.P. and J.V.P. chapters co-signed an open letter declaring “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance.” The letter described the attacks as “an unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza” and a “counteroffensive against their settler-colonial oppressor.” It would be tantamount to “asking for quiet submission to systemic violence” for anyone to call for peace now, after years of Israeli violence and military campaigns against Palestinians. The groups issued a list of demands to the university — divestment from companies doing business with the Israeli government, the end of Columbia’s affiliation with Tel Aviv University and a recognition of Palestinian “existence and humanity” — and announced a demonstration on Oct. 12 on the steps of Low Library. They signed off: “See you Thursday.”

The Oct. 12 demonstration appeared to be in violation of campus rules, which required student groups to give 10 days’ notice for gatherings in public spaces, but Columbia had not been enforcing such requirements amid the emotional responses to the Hamas attacks and Israel’s retaliatory bombing in the Gaza Strip. “We got some pushback from the university,” recalled Cameron Jones, an organizer of the J.V.P. chapter, “but not insane pushback.”

As the sit-ins, teach-ins and die-ins continued, however, that began to change. Pro-Israel groups held counterdemonstrations, and tensions built on Columbia’s small, enclosed central campus. “In the past, demonstrations were basically students protesting against the establishment, and that was, you know, unidirectional and fairly straightforward,” the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, said in late May, in her first interview since December. “In this crisis,” she went on, “students are opposed to other students, faculty opposed to other faculty. And those internal dynamics and tensions have made this much more difficult than past episodes.” Outside Columbia’s library, several Israeli students were physically attacked after they confronted another student tearing down posters of Israelis held hostage by Hamas. Students wearing hijabs and kaffiyehs reported being called “Jew killers” and terrorists.

By Oct. 25, when S.J.P. and J.V.P. staged a walkout of college classes, “our relationship with the administration was really crumbling,” Jones recalled. Two days later, Israel’s invasion of Gaza began. On the night of Nov. 8, with another demonstration planned for the next day on the steps outside Low, a faculty adviser told the organizers that they were out of compliance with school rules and asked them to postpone the event. They did not , and the university suspended them.

When Jaffer heard the news, “I said, ‘Suspending the groups seems like a very draconian penalty for that offense,’” he recalled. When the administration in a public statement also cited the groups’ “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” Jaffer grew more concerned: What speech crossed that line? In an open letter, he asked Columbia for an explanation.

The university didn’t publicly provide one, and the organizations received mixed messages from the administration. In a meeting with the student groups at the end of November, one administrator said that while the groups had not violated speech rules, Israeli students could hear accusations that Israel was committing genocide or was an apartheid state as an incitement to violence. “I left that meeting extremely confused,” said Maryam Alwan, an organizer of the S.J.P. chapter.

Shafik said this month that the suspensions of S.J.P. and J.V.P. were “content neutral” — they were about breaking the rules regarding demonstrations, not political views. Regardless, the university’s decision lit a fuse. In the months that followed, as the invasion of Gaza continued and civilian casualties mounted, dozens of student groups rallied in solidarity with S.J.P. and J.V.P. On April 18, Shafik asked the New York City Police to clear a pro-Palestinian student encampment on the Columbia lawn. That move, which included dozens of arrests, in turn sparked a wave of demonstrations at universities across the country. Columbia protesters rebuilt their encampment and, on the night of April 29, some of them stormed the school’s Hamilton Hall, occupying the building and locking and barricading the doors. At Shafik’s request, a large deployment of police returned to campus the following night, raiding the building and arresting its occupiers .

When private universities set rules for what speech they allow, including when, where and how students can protest, they can impose more restrictions than the First Amendment allows in public spaces. But for decades, they have claimed free speech as a central value, and that promise has a particular history at Columbia. In 1968, the administration called in the police to evict student demonstrators from Hamilton Hall, which they had occupied in protest of the university’s involvement in military research and a new neighborhood-dividing gymnasium project in Morningside Park.

The occupation and its violent end, the images of bloodied students dragged away in handcuffs, was a seminal moment for the Vietnam-era left; the following year, several Columbia demonstrators helped found the Weather Underground, the radical organization that bombed government buildings in the 1970s. The clash also occasioned an on-campus reckoning with long-lasting institutional consequences. The university senate, which includes faculty and students, was given a hand in disciplinary matters to check administrative power — a system the administration bypassed in suspending the pro-Palestinian groups.

For more than half a century now, campus activism and universities’ responses to it have mostly occurred within the paradigm shaped by 1968. Activists have used fights over investments, curriculums and development projects as platforms for radical politics and for a kind of revolutionary experimentation in the form of building occupations and other direct actions. Administrations have more often than not responded tolerantly or at least cautiously, out of a mix of principle and pragmatism. The building occupiers and tent-camp residents may be breaking laws or at least campus policies, but they’re also the university’s consumers.

But the upheavals on campuses across the country this spring were different. The campus war over the real war in Gaza did something no issue since Vietnam had done. It seemed to have prompted an abrupt rethinking of free-speech principles that many in academia assumed to be foundational.

In reality, though, this shift was not so abrupt. It reflected broader changes in the institutional structures and power balances within American universities and disagreements over free speech that have gradually redrawn the battle lines inside and outside academia. That the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would prove the catalyst, too, was not surprising. Few conflicts had so directly centered on the power of language and who sets its terms.

In 2019, Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president before Shafik, wrote an essay for The Atlantic called “Free Speech on Campus Is Doing Just Fine, Thank You.” The occasion was an executive order President Trump issued that March, proclaiming that colleges and universities that received federal funding were required to “promote free inquiry” — a mostly symbolic measure that reflected several years of alarm on the right over what Fox News and others had declared a “free-speech crisis” on American campuses.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, college activists tried to block various appearances by speakers whose views they found repellent. At Middlebury College, they derailed a talk by the conservative social scientist Charles Murray and at William & Mary shouted down a speaker from the state A.C.L.U. chapter. Schools like the University of California, Berkeley , and Grand Canyon University , a Christian institution in Arizona, canceled or disinvited right-wing media figures for fear of demonstrations.

If Columbia managed to steer through this period with a minimum of turbulence, it was in large part thanks to Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar who defended the right of people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus. “I am of the view that one such disinvitation is one too many,” he wrote in The Atlantic essay, while noting that, in fact, disinvitations had been far rarer than the pundits and politicians suggested. But Bollinger cast the debate over the limits of campus speech as itself a part of the tradition of campus speech, and he concluded that “universities are, today, more hospitable venues for open debate than the nation as a whole.”

Five years later, this picture lay in tatters. Bollinger’s own university — he left office last June — was once again synonymous with building occupations and police crackdowns, and Columbia was facing legal action from both Jewish and Muslim students alleging harassing speech, among other complaints. In an interview in late April, Bollinger, who has not otherwise spoken publicly about the Columbia clashes, said that his own optimism was dimming. “There was a fair consensus that private universities,” he said, like public ones, “should embrace free-speech principles and set an example for the country in how free speech applies to a public forum. And now I think that’s breaking down.”

Other schools were also stumbling. In December, testifying before a House committee hearing on antisemitism on college campuses , three elite-university presidents equivocated when Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman from New York, asked them whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the rules on their campuses. One of them, the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, was out of her job within days ; a second, Claudine Gay of Harvard, resigned amid accusations of plagiarism that surfaced amid post-testimony scrutiny .

Shafik, testifying before a similar panel in April, fared better in the hearing room but worse back on campus. Under repeated questioning, she said that she found pro-Palestinian chants like “From the river to the sea” and “Long live intifada” antisemitic but added that “some people don’t.” Columbia also turned over documents to the committee about faculty members accused of antisemitic speech whom Shafik named in her testimony — disclosures the administration says that it was obligated to make but that infuriated professors, hundreds of whom signed open letters declaring it a breach of academic freedom. “She threw some of us under the bus,” said Katherine Franke, a Columbia Law School professor, who was among those criticized in the hearing. “But to me, that’s less important than her inability to make a defense of the university.”

To free-speech advocates, it was ominous that these presidents weren’t arguing for the university as a forum for fostering free speech, however controversial. “That commitment is really at the center of universities’ missions,” Jaffer said. “It is disappointing that so many university leaders failed to make that case.”

In the post-Oct. 7 demonstrations, however, universities confronted a dilemma far more complex than any Bollinger faced during his tenure. The invasion of Gaza has drawn students with a range of views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the protests, but S.J.P. and other groups at the vanguard have been clear on their own lines : They reject the idea of a two-state solution and consider the existence of a Zionist state in Israel to be illegitimate and immoral. This is a change from the early 1990s when Edward Said, the Jerusalem-born literary theorist and pro-Palestinian activist who made Columbia a leading bastion of Palestinian scholarship, championed a two-state outcome (though he rejected the idea in the last years of his life). The movement’s politics have hardened, and so have the facts on the ground. Hopes for a two-state solution have receded amid the increasingly extreme politics of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, including the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah .

Historically, when “Zionist” becomes a pejorative, persecution of Jews has followed, and many American Jews see the rise in reported incidents of antisemitism as evidence of this once again. Some protesters crossed the line from rejecting Israel to using antisemitic imagery on posters and making threats. For example, Khymani James , a student leader of the protests at Columbia, said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” in a video of a school disciplinary hearing that he posted on social media. (James later apologized.) Chants like “We don’t want no Zionists here,” which continued at Columbia and elsewhere, made many Jewish students, including critics of Israel’s occupation, feel there was no longer a space for supporting a Jewish homeland in any sense.

But pro-Palestinian activists now often view the rejection of Zionism as an irreducible part of the cause — and are aware of how accusations of antisemitism have been wielded in the past to the detriment of that cause. When Columbia deans called for acknowledging the “genuine hurt” of both sides of the conflict in December, noting some of the language of the protests, Rashid Khalidi, a historian of Palestine at Columbia, accused them of having decided that “the oppressed should take permission from the oppressor as to the means to relieve their oppression.”

The clash over politics and language has created a rare point of real political vulnerability for universities. Several face the threat of House Republican investigations of their federal funding, which at Columbia amounts to $1.2 billion in annual grants and contracts, accounting for 20 percent of its budget. And Republicans, who have long criticized universities as fortresses of liberalism and leftism, now have allies among the many congressional Democrats who remain supportive of Israel, as well as many of the universities’ own donors, administrators and trustees. (Columbia’s board includes only one academic and no Muslims or Arabs other than Shafik.) In May, a bipartisan majority in the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require schools to potentially risk their federal funding if they don’t restrict speech that, for example, denies “the Jewish people their right to self-determination” — a suppression of views that would run headlong into the First Amendment.

Back on campus, the conflict about antisemitism versus anti-Zionism has landed in the middle of a decades-long, unresolved argument over speech itself. Today’s students have grown up with the idea that speech can be restricted if it causes harm — but also believe that restricting their speech can be its own kind of harm. “I can’t think of another case,” says David Pozen, a Columbia law professor, “where a group not only refuses to stop using language it’s told is harassing and intimidating and demeaning but also flips it around to say, ‘Your very demand is a tool of oppression.’”

Debates over free speech on college campuses have invariably been debates about power. This became clear in 1964, when students at the University of California, Berkeley, handed out leaflets organizing demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, held in San Francisco that year. The dean of students barred them from using a campus-owned plaza. Months of protests and hundreds of arrests followed, until the university finally capitulated.

The Berkeley movement proved a useful foil for conservative politicians fighting the early skirmishes of the culture wars — Ronald Reagan successfully ran against it in his 1966 campaign for governor. But the Supreme Court upheld campus speech protections in 1967 and onward. And when a more enduring critique of campus speech emerged years later, it came not from the right, but from the left.

In an influential 1989 law-review article, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii and an early critical-race theorist, argued that the significance of speech and its acceptability on a university campus turned on who was speaking and who was being spoken to. Racist speech, in particular, could be more than offensive. When it reflected historic imbalances of power — when a white student hurled a racial slur at a Black student, for instance — it reinforced and perpetuated those imbalances in ways that shut down discussion, debilitating students’ academic lives. That meant that schools should treat it not as a matter of expression but as a real-world harm and sanction it. “Racist speech is particularly harmful because it is a mechanism of subordination,” she wrote.

By the early 1990s, more than 350 colleges and universities had adopted hate-speech codes imposing sanctions on students who demeaned someone’s race, sex or religion. But the codes collided with the First Amendment. Every court that considered a university speech code between 1989 and 1995 reached the same conclusion: The rules were vague, overbroad or discriminated against speakers because of their points of view and were thus unconstitutional.

Many First Amendment scholars agreed. They recognized that hate speech causes real harm but thought that banning it caused its own problems. Geoffrey Stone, a law professor and frequent collaborator of Bollinger’s, led a committee at the University of Chicago that issued a landmark 2015 report on free speech. It proposed “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge and learn” while allowing for limits on the time, place and manner of protests and on genuine threats and harassment.

The Chicago principles, as they are called, have since been adopted by more than 100 other schools. But this view of free speech never achieved a consensus. Within many humanities departments, Matsuda’s theories have retained currency. Ideas about identity and power have suffused progressive politics more broadly in recent decades. And in the Trump era, incursions of white nationalists and right-wing extremists into the political mainstream caused many liberals to rethink tolerating hate speech. Such speech no longer seemed confined to the far edge of American politics, and the death of a counterdemonstrator at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 reinforced the argument that hate speech was inherently violent and should be stopped at all costs.

But as progressive students extended this justification to even conventional conservatives and some civil liberties advocates, a more generalized intolerance took hold. In a 2022 survey of college students, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties organization, found that liberal students were far more likely to say that preventing speech through protest was acceptable. Fifty-three percent of students who identified as “very liberal” said it was always or sometimes acceptable to shout down a speaker to block their appearance on campus. Only 13 percent of “very conservative” students did.

Three and a half decades ago, when Matsuda first laid out her case for sanctioning hate speech, based on the identity of the speaker, one of the most challenging tests of her framework was Zionism. Were Zionists persecutors, as pro-Palestinian activists contended? Or, given the history of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, were they victims? Matsuda’s answer, in effect, was: It depends. She rejected the charge that Zionism was, by definition, racism. Zionists would receive a “victim’s privilege,” she said, if they spoke in “reaction to historical persecution” but not if they allied themselves with a dominant group.

Her response captured the duality of modern Jewish identity — vulnerable on a global scale, as only 0.2 percent of the world population and the subject of centuries of prejudice but wielding significant power in some contexts, most obviously the Israeli state. It also showed the difficulty of putting Matsuda’s analytical framework into practice. Doing so depended on a shared understanding of where power lay and who possessed it.

The lack of such a shared understanding is on display in dueling legal complaints Columbia now faces over the campus clashes , from Jewish and Israeli students and their supporters in one case and Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students and their allies in another. Each document incidents of face-to-face harassment, and each claim to be on the wrong side of power or social clout. The Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students say in their legal filing that they were “treated differently by high-ranking administrators,” citing the S.J.P. suspension. Jewish and Israeli students, by contrast, report being excluded from student organizations (an L.G.B.T.Q. group, a dance club, a group representing public-school students at suspension hearings) that either condemned Israel or said Zionists were unwelcome, forcing them to forfeit a core part of their identity to stay in the group.

Both complaints claim Columbia is violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires universities to respond when discriminatory harassment is “so severe or pervasive” that it limits or prevents students from participating in their education. The federal Department of Education has in recent years interpreted the law to apply to religious minorities like Jews and Muslims with “shared ancestry,” and to say that speech is a form of conduct that can violate the law.

The tension with free-speech principles is evident. In mid-December, the dean of U.C. Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, and the chancellor of U.C. Irvine, Howard Gillman, expressed concern about briefings for universities in which the Department of Education suggested that slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” likely created a hostile environment for Jewish students. “We know that some Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students similarly feel threatened by protesters who chant, ‘We stand with Israel,’” Chemerinksy and Gillman wrote in an essay in The Sacramento Bee. “Do they also require investigations and mitigation efforts?”

The day before Shafik called the police to Columbia for a second time, she issued a public statement suggesting that Title VI was forcing her hand. Calling the encampment a “noisy distraction,” she said it “has created an unwelcoming environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty.”

David Schizer, a former dean of Columbia’s law school and a chairman of the antisemitism task force the university convened in the wake of Oct. 7, said in an email that “after the occupation of Hamilton Hall, the police were preventing trespassing and vandalism, protecting the ability of all students to do their work, sleep and prepare for finals, and were also preventing discriminatory harassment against Jewish and Israeli students.” But Jaffer, the Knight Institute director, took issue with invoking Title VI as a rationale for the police action.

“Of course we want universities to protect students from discrimination,” he said. “But whatever federal anti-discrimination law means, it doesn’t mean universities are obligated to call in hundreds of riot-clad police to suppress mostly peaceful protests.”

In 2021, Shafik wrote a book called “What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society.” Before Oct. 7, she said, she hoped that her presidency might be dedicated to a similar theme, of strengthening the frayed social contract between universities and the country and within their own on-campus communities. That was still the challenge ahead, she believed. “I think we’re all thinking very hard,” she said, “about, you know, what we’ve learned.”

While the school’s board remains behind Shafik, on May 16 members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which among the school’s professors had been the most vocal in their criticism of her, passed a resolution of no confidence in the president by a margin of 65 percent to 29 percent. In an email to her colleagues, Virginia Page Fortna, a political-science professor, pointedly noted the title of Shafik’s book. “If we are to heal,” she wrote, “then Shafik owes Columbia: an apology, a strong and credible commitment to completely change course in how decisions are made, and an independent investigation of what has gone wrong.”

At the same time, few schools could credibly claim to have gotten things right in April. Institutions across the country, from large state schools to small liberal-arts colleges, struggled as the protests escalated, crossing into the terrain of encampments and building occupations, which aren’t protected by the First Amendment. Some schools that permitted encampments for a time also wound up in crisis. At the University of California, Los Angeles, on April 30, pro-Israel counterprotesters violently attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment while the campus police force mostly stood by. Even at the University of Chicago, the administration’s decision to tolerate an encampment ended when negotiations with the demonstrators broke down and the president called in police in riot gear . The several schools that did persuade students to end their encampments mostly did so by promising to consider divestment in Israel at a later date, punting on rather than resolving the underlying issue.

In the logic of protest politics, police crackdowns and the attention they generate are their own kind of victory. The campus clashes forced the war in Gaza into the center of American public life in a way that seven months of headlines about Israeli bombing campaigns, aid-shipment blockades and thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths did not. They drew attention to American dissent over the war and the United States government’s role in supporting it. Khalidi, the Columbia historian, speaks of the campus clashes as a turning point for younger Americans. “The protests have highlighted the fact that majorities of Americans oppose Israel’s war on Gaza and the Biden administration’s support of it, a fact that elites, politicians and the mainstream media systematically ignore,” he wrote in an email.

Universities now face the challenge of rebuilding their communities even as the debate over speech limits that divided them, to say nothing of the war in Gaza itself, remains unsettled — and the incentives of some interested parties, like congressional Republicans and pro-Palestinian organizers, seem to run in the opposite direction. The most realistic aspiration, perhaps, is that many students will tire of division and police deployments and make a path toward recovering a sense of empathy for one another — taking a step back and seeing their own political positions, however irreconcilable, as others might see them.

Matsuda, who did as much as anyone to shape the interpretation of language through the prism of power, had been thinking, too. “I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable on campus,” she said. “But stopping a protest movement, I don’t think it’s the way to make Zionist students feel comfortable.” At the same time, “it’s also really important for universities to help students move beyond slogans and see what might be hurtful or impactful about them,” she said.

At the height of the spring conflict, there were signs this was possible. At some schools, pro-Palestinian protesters modulated their own speech in deference to the requests of other students, even avoiding the common chant, “From the river to the sea,” which others have defended as peaceful. The protesters who made these choices didn’t do so because of a law or rule. They were sensitive to the nudge of peer relationships and social norms.

Bringing students together to hash out community standards about language is “the only way I can think of for there to be a set of norms about what speech goes too far that students on all sides would accept as legitimate,” David Pozen, the Columbia law professor, said. He felt the tumult of this spring, which at Columbia resulted in early student departures and scrambled graduation plans, aggravated and exhausted many students who did not themselves participate in the demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. “Students are feeling anguished and alienated, and maybe that’s an opening,” Pozen said.

Clémence Boulouque, a religion professor who serves on the university’s antisemitism task force, hoped Columbia could recover a sense of itself as a “place where people can coexist” and where mediation and discussion might forestall endless grievance and grief. If the divisions opened up by the protests were litigated in an endless back-and-forth of Title VI complaints, fought in the zero-sum realm of the law, then the school would fail at one of the oldest concepts in education: the moral development of its students. “Denying the pain of others, it’s not a great way of conflict resolution,” she said. “It’s also self-inflicted moral injury.”

On one level, this focus on de-escalation avoided the deep unresolved disagreements over where the political ended and the personal began. On another, it was its own kind of blunt realism. “We have to heal together and live together,” Boulouque said. “It’s just like Israel-Palestine. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

Read by Gabra Zackman

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by Quinton Kamara

An earlier version of this article misstated the date that Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, asked the New York City Police Department to clear a pro-Palestinian student encampment on the university’s lawn. It was April 18, not April 17. The article also misstated the position of the literary theorist and activist Edward Said on a two-state solution. He supported the proposal in the early 1990s but changed his public stance to support a one-state solution later in that decade.

How we handle corrections

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. More about Emily Bazelon

Charles Homans is a reporter for The Times and The Times Magazine, covering national politics. More about Charles Homans

The Campus Protests Over the Gaza War

News and Analysis

​Police officers arrested 13 people after pro-Palestinian protesters barricaded themselves  in the office of the president of Stanford University.

​Harvard said that it will no longer take positions on matters outside of the university , accepting the recommendations of a faculty committee that urged the school to reduce its messages on issues of the day.

​Weeks after counterprotesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, the university police made the first arrest related to the attack .

The Right Price for Protests:  ​At pro-Palestinian demonstrations, students have broken codes of conduct and, sometimes, the law. But the question of whether and how to discipline  them is vexing universities.

A Free Speech Champion’s Advice:  ​U.C. Berkeley’s leader, Carol Christ, has spent the last several months asking students  to consider the way speech and protest affect the entire campus community.

Making Sense of the Protests:  In the weeks leading up to graduation, our reporter spoke with more than a dozen students at Columbia University and Barnard College about how the campus protests had shaped them .

A Complex Summer:  Many university leaders and officials may be confronting federal investigations, disputes over student discipline  — and the prospect that the protests start all over again in the fall.

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