“You love school when it makes you feel smart. When you know the teachers care about you and your future, when they act like they think you’ll be someone in life.”
                                                             — Veronica, Oakland, CA

In many classrooms across the country, neither students nor teachers feel very smart. The refrains are familiar. School is boring, students complain. It's hard to see a connection between what we're taught and the real world. Teachers don't explain things in ways we understand. What we think doesn't seem to matter.

We can't do everything, teachers respond. Students are unprepared. It's tough to reach kids whose backgrounds are so different from our own. Too much of teaching is really just classroom management. Students need to meet us halfway.

Even in "high performing" schools, the aspirations of students and teachers require persistent tending, and pockets of alienation belie the trophy cases. A relentless focus on tests and grades can consume all the oxygen, snuffing out the sort of learning that ignites excitement. School becomes a place where you go through the motions. Students and teachers alike feel robbed of their sense of agency; the most discouraged simply quit.

What if teachers and students became steady allies rather than frequent adversaries? What would it take for students to become stakeholders not just in their own success but also in that of their teachers and schools?

With support from MetLife Foundation, What Kids Can Do (WKCD) has explored these questions for several years in an initiative called "Students as Allies." In Chicago, Houston, Oakland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, WKCD has collaborated with teams of students and teachers organized by a local non-profit intermediary. The efforts in each city include several parts: helping students conduct survey research about their own schools, then supporting dialogue and constructive action around the research results, while nurturing youth leadership all along the way.

Making students active partners in improving schools is patient work, and we consider our efforts—and those of other groups and colleagues across the country—just the beginning. Here, we share what we've gathered and learned so far. Most of what we've included are downloadable PDF's that require Acrobat Reader.

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