Urban Youth and School Pushout: Gateways, Get-aways, and the GED

Recent efforts to reform urban high schools have been marked by the pursuit of ever-increasing accountability policies, most notably through the use of mayoral control and secondary school exit exams. This innovative and provocative volume 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 provacative analysis of how accountability tacitly and explicitly push-out under-performing students from the system. A theoretically and empirically rich treatise on school push-out, Urban Youth and School Push Out 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.

Eve Tuck is Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at The State University of New York at New Paltz.