Urban Youth and School Pushout

Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 American Educational Studies Association's Critics Choice Award! Recent efforts to reform urban high schools have been marked by the pursuit of ever-increasing accountability policies, most notably through the use of high-stakes standardized testing, mayoral control, and secondary school exit exams. Urban Youth and School Pushout excavates the unintended consequences of such policies on secondary school completion by focusing specifically on the use and over-use of the GED credential. Building on a tradition of critical theory and political economy of education, author Eve Tuck offers a provocative analysis of how accountability tacitly and explicitly pushes out under-performing students from the system. By drawing on participatory action research, as well as the work of indigenous scholars and theories, this theoretically and empirically rich book illustrates urban public schooling as a dialectic of humiliating ironies and dangerous dignities. Focusing on the experiences of youth who have been pushed out of their schools under the auspices of obtaining a GED, Tuck reveals new insights on how urban youth view accountability schooling, value the GED, and yearn for multiple, meaningful routes to graduation.