Social Justice for These Kids? A Book Review of These Kids: Identity, Agency, and Social Justice at a Last Chance High School

In her book These Kids: Identity, Agency, and Social Justice at a Last Chance High School, Kysa Nygreen explores the concepts of identity, agency, and social justice as they relate to students for whom the traditional American education system is not working. She uses the lens of last chance, or continuation, high schools to examine the often competing purposes of education and how those purposes are or are not fulfilled in continuation high schools. Nygreen’s approach is one of participatory action research, in which she recruits a small group of current or former continuation high school students. The point is not so much to detail the particular school but to capture the characteristics and perspectives of students who do not succeed in regular high schools. One important goal of this research was to “empower Jackson youth to demand better, more equitable educational opportunities” (Nygreen, 2013, p. 7). Through a clear historical examination and reflection on the research experience, These Kids explicates and explores the paradox of getting ahead in American schools and attempts to initiate an alternative discourse. The bulk of These Kids is a description of Nygreen’s research study. It includes the selection of participants; exploration of shared definitions of ideas important to the research, such as social justice; and planning for the research itself. Throughout the project the student participants were placed in leadership and decisionmaking roles. This experience and how the students reacted to these new roles indicated to the researchers that even a small group of people committed to creating more social justice and equity for underserved students could and would, unwittingly, replicate the constructs and politics of traditional education systems.