Department of Good Stuff: Organizing students

Education Week

As Andrew Brennen crisscrosses the country listening to high school students, he is trying to build a huge wave of sound: the sound of students raising their voices to make school better.

Brennen, 20, is on a national tour to engage 10,000 high school students in conversations designed to help them claim powerful roles in their education. The field director for the activist group Student Voice, Brennen has been catching buses and trains from city to city since February, often sleeping on friends' couches, as he meets with teenagers in their schools to talk about what works there, and what doesn't. He plans to keep doing it until December.

"The goal of our tour is to amplify and elevate all students' voices, to shift their confidence about the role they can play in their schools," he said in an interview from San Francisco. Diplomas Count Wraps Up Decade-Long Run To Build a Better High School, Coherence Is Key Vt. High School Takes Student Voice to Heart One Student's Quest to Reshape Schools Students in El Paso Get Leg Up on College Students Blaze Career Paths at Omaha High School Cleveland School Makes City Its Classroom Boston Solicits Public for High School Redesign Ideas Redesigned Denver School Gets Rocky Start Minnesota High School Designed for 'Flexibility' Arkansas High School Expands on a Human Scale U.S. Graduation Rate Breaks Another Record

He begins those discussions by asking students to tell him things about their school that adults don't know. Typically, students start out with little to say, Brennen said. He walks them through the Student Bill of Rights, which Student Voice created to highlight key areas of school life that students can influence, from fair testing and use of technology to free expression, safety, and well-being. Bit by bit, conversation will build.

"By the end of the roundtable, when I ask them again what adults don't know about their schools, they have so much to say they're tripping over themselves," Brennen said. "It's because they've started learning to think critically about school."

Brennen is building on activism skills he learned as a high school student in Kentucky, where he worked with the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence to infuse state policy with student input. He later formed a student-voice team for the committee whose members, from middle school through college, have pushed state lawmakers for more education funds.

To help "create space" for student empowerment nationally, Brennen decided to take a year off from his communications and journalism studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and work with Student Voice.