Children, as young as seven, sitting on city councils as full-voting members. Teenage youth teaching regular classes throughout schools, from kindergarten through high school and into college. 12-year-olds driving on the streets, seven-year-olds voting for president or children sitting behind the counter in coffee shops - as owners. What is the greatest fear of adults about young people?

Adultism is such a strong force throughout our culture that it causes me to wonder exactly what we're afraid of. Because so often it appears to be just that: fear. A parent afraid that their 16-year-old won't respect them simply because they're too big to spank anymore. A teacher afraid of the first-grade student who is smarter than them in math. Police who are afraid that the graffiti art might never stop spreading, and store owners who are afraid that youth will stop buying their products if they have unfettered access to them.

John Bell wrote that this fear undermines young peoples' of self-confidence and self-esteem; increases their sense of worthlessness; and diminishes the ability of young people to function well in the world, among many other outcomes. Why would we do something like that to someone else?

I am developing a deeper appreciation for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who strongly advocated for young people, including the American Youth Congress and the National Youth Administration, which she was largely responsible for the formation of. ER often shared her apparent concern about the effects of the Great Depression on youth, in particular writing that,

"I live in real terror when I think we may be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary."

I am certain she would not be satisfied with her mission still today. Perhaps the greatest fear of many adults is not the greatest fear of all adults - because I share Eleanor's fear right now.

Close your eyes for a second and imagine a group of youth talking naturally among themselves. Go ahead, close your eyes.

Really, close them for just a minute.

Now, take a minute and write down your answers to these questions, one at a time:

1. What does that group look like?
2. Who are the youth standing there?
3. What races are they?
4. Where are they at?
5. What clothes are they wearing?
6. What are they talking about?

You might be familiar with this activity if you've participated in any of my recent workshops. In the last six months I've done it a dozen times, and each time adults will whip through the first five questions. The youth often look like the people in their programs or classrooms; sometimes they are even those particular young people. The locations are usually familiar, although sometimes they sound more like the TV show "Boston Public" instead of Papillion, Nebraska. There are the predictable gripes about clothing and incantations of acceptance.

The question folks get most hung up by is number six. For some reason we have such a difficult time imagining what youth are talking about, or worse still, what they are saying. Even when the youth are familiar, even when the setting is knowable, for some reason it is difficult to imagine exactly what youth are saying? Why does youth voice have to feel secret to adults?

When I conduct forums in schools, I usually ask that administrators and teachers leave the room in order to establish a "safe space" for students to have honest - and hopefully, authentic - conversation. More than once I've left the room, only to find a group of adults standing outside the door, waiting to evesdrop on the conversation. Or I've come to the teacher's meeting after school, only to hear the first question out of peoples' mouths: "What did they say?"

Take a moment and familiarize yourself with some authentic online youth voice sources. You can start by visiting our collection of school-focused youth voice sources at SoundOut and then check out the forums at YouthNoise, the National Youth Rights Association, or TakingITGlobal, and then visit the BLOC Network website and Freechild's MySpace page. Those sites offer an accessible way to begin listening to youth voice.

The voices are there - we need to learn to hear what they are saying.

"Youth Voice", as it were, cannot be engaged in schools. Once a young person walks through the doors of a school building, they are automatically thrust into the role of learner, which we call "student". Their public and private roles, that of youth or child (or kid, kiddo, yute, youngin', etc) are automatically and completely stripped from their person, and they have a completely different job. They are students. When I work in schools I am not looking for youth voice; rather, I am seeking to engage youth voice in the place youth voice exists: schools. Therefore, I am seeking student voice - a subtle, yet important distinction.

This week I am in Connecticut attending a retreat on school change for educators. While I'm doing a mini-session on meaningful student involvement, this week I am mostly a student myself, here to co-learn with folks within schools. As I think about what I want from this week, I am led to think about how I present meaningful student involvement to schools. Here's the gist of it: Meaningful student involvement is the deliberate and powerful engagement of all students in the school improvement process, for the purpose of strengthening their commitment to education, community and democracy. Sounds good, no? Ah, but it is full of holes! This week I hope to flesh out some of those holes and begin to construct a more comprehensive definition.

Wish me luck, and feel free to share your two cents.

"This isn't just a simple case of black and white - we're in it too deep for that," an eleventh grade white student told me. Some of the rest of the mixed group bobbed their in unison, but there was some hesitancy.

I was at an urban high school in the Seattle area talking with students about race relations in their experiences at school.

"What are other ways you experience inequity?" I ask them, hoping for a breakthrough.

I had introduced the topic earlier in the training, expanding on a definition I heard from a teacher at Roosevelt High School in Seattle earlier in the year. I explained that equality is everyone starting the race at the same point and seeking the same finishing point. Equity is recognizing that everyone does not want to run a race, or reach the same goal - and if we do, we aren't starting at the same places with the same equipment or backgrounds, and acknowledging that we're going to finish at different times. Oh, and equity is seeing that before some folks came to the race they were kicked in the knees. Others wouldn't even make the race, and if they did they would be snatched out of it by a seemingly arbitrary force that sought them out only for the color of their skin.

Suddenly, a young women in the class raised her hand and said she felt awkward holding hands with her girlfriend in the halls "like everyone else does." Another spoke up, saying she wasn't allowed to try out for football last year. "Shoot, they were afraid of a girl beating them anyone," said someone else in support of their classmate.

"What about when I'm at the store and some dude follows me around? Why do they do that?!?" This guy was about 17, and he honestly sounded confused. "What about the teen dance ordinance?" "Why can't we cruise anymore?" "I want to vote about that new law."

A firestorm of conversation picked up, with questions and answers volleying back and forth like the call-and-response between the DJ and the crowd in a club. While it was interesting, it quickly began to decline towards gripping about ignorance. I asked the group what those experiences felt like, and one of the students wrote the words up on the board. Hurtful. Pain. Stupid. Sucks. The list grew quickly.

Then I parts of a guide from Racism and the Experience of Asian American Students. After a stunned moment, the students started talking again, although this time there was a different tone to the group.

Just then the bell rang, and the student from the beginning of the class said loudly, "I guess we're not all equal."

Making connections between racism and youth voice seems too obtuse for many adults. We become so concerned about simply acknowledging youth as having a powerful voice that we - particularly white people - forget about the experiences of people of color. That's easy for white people to do - but that doesn't make it fair or right.

The fact of the matter is that many of the institutions set up to support young people succeed at supporting white students. In 2004 48% of Washington State students of color graduated on time. Meanwhile, community-based agencies across the country are re-aligning their missions and feeling pressure from foundations and government funding sources to standardize and assess their youth programming into oblivion.

These realities simply do not address the differences between people of different skin color - and there are real differences. The United States was born on that back of those differences, and has only grown because of them. Children and youth of color need youth voice experiences that acknowledge and celebrate those differences, using them as a foundation to build substantive and meaningful opportunities to express, examine, challenge and transform our schools and communities.

The most power example I know of is Bob Moses' Algebra Project. Working across the country, the Algebra Project Young Peoples' Project hires high school students to teach middle school students algebra. This would be simple if we were talking about a group of people who traditionally have access to learn algebra. However, Moses learned about education while working in the Civil Rights movement. Using the knowledge that algebra is power, Moses has designed a model that demonstrates and imposes the reality of algebra by having students of color effectively teach their younger peers. His program has been at work on this since the early 1980s.

That is the best and most thorough example I can share to illustrate the point that approaches to youth voice need to be as diverse as the youth they engage. Only in that way will they be as sustainable and effective as we, the adults who run the programs, want them to be.

Continuing on my journey of critical reflection about CommonAction's 2006/07 school year, tomorrow I will examine gender and youth voice.

The last school year has been incredible and busy. I have worked in schools across the country with SoundOut. I started working with Amanda Irtz and Teddy Wright to develop a national model for the Washington Youth Voice Institutes. Grantwriting, contracting and publication distribution have been increasingly successful, and as an organization, CommonAction is moving forward - tentatively, but deliberately.

However, as Paulo Freire implored in his first book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, action without examination is merely action; devoid of critical examination action robs the human of purpose - we are not merely actors on a stage. With that in mind, I offer this, my first installment in a series examining Equity and Youth Voice.

A child or youth who never actually examines their voice is being robbed of the opportunity to explore and identify new ways of using that voice. The adult who sees youth voice but does not examine it is doing more than robbing youth - we actually steal opportunity from ourselves. Over the last year I worked in a number of high schools in Seattle, Boston and New York State where there were a range of students whose voices were engaged. However, when I talked with students one group was consistently critical and conscious of their voices, the voices of students around them, and the inadequacies of adults who were engaged in listening to them. Those students consistently identified themselves as poor, low-income or working class.

Once privilege has been taken from someone, or if someone is acutely aware of their lack of privilege, it becomes so important to grab a hold of any kind of authority or power you can. I know this personally from my own experience growing up occasionally homeless with a family living in situational poverty. One of the other things I learned growing is that poverty breeds a kind of anger inside, especially once you become conscious of the causes and perpetuations of poverty.

Ruby Payne is an internationally-known writer and speaker who focuses on poverty. Her most popular book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, has been soaked up by thousands of teachers and youth workers who want to understand the students they work with. Many people support her simplistic analysis of the reasons why people are poor, including the responsibility she pins on poor people for being poor in the first place. Rather than examining the causes of poverty and the complex relationships between generational, racial, cultural and economic forces that drive poverty, Payne oversimplifies being poor, simply concentrating her energies on identifying (read: stereotyping) poor students and prescribing (read:standardizing) the ways adults should respond to poor young people.

This brings to mind the ever-popular models of youth voice that the national youth organizations have been promoting nationwide throughout the course of the youth voice movement. Ever since these clarion calls for youth councils, youth board members and youth voice trainings went out, a whole segment of America's population of children and youth have been nominated and chosen and called and voted and drawn towards youth voice activities - routinely and effectively excluding millions of young people who actually need more opportunities for more youth voice. 1 in 5 American people under the age of 18 are poor. (source) We need youth voice programs for those young people.

What do these programs look like?

EarthForce - Using a popular national curriculum, many teachers across the country have actively engaged low-income youth in learning about the environment and designing powerful projects that help their local areas. I saw particular power to this approach in the Tampa-area when I visited Melissa Sherwood this year. She showed me how non-English speaking students and working-class students from throughout her middle school were actually learning and doing really cool projects. What blew me away was the fact that many of the students were actually coming from homes with parents who are migrant laborers. It means something when you learn about what affects you most everyday - and then learn to do something to help or improve it. Read more about EarthForce here.

Student-led Organizing - In 2005 Kari Kunst started documenting the successes of student-led organizing focused on school reform for SoundOut. Since then I've watched as dozens of groups across the country have led schools in transforming from reactive to proactive, passive to active agents who are working with low-income youth to actually transform learning, teaching and leadership throughout schools. This is power in action. Much youth-led community organizing on any issue is focused on engaging low-incoming youth as well. Freire would be proud - especially considering what these youth activists are learning every single day.

Youth Media Council - Across the nation there is a growing movement among low-income youth to create the media that has for so long targeted them. They are doing that, and they are becoming more powerful as an outcome. In Oakland the Youth Media Council engages low-income youth in creating media, helping youth organizations create successful media, and supporting the Bay Area's powerful organizing campaigns.

These stories continue, even here in Olympia: GRuB and PIPE offer great programs designed to engage low-income youth voice. The stories continue to become more powerful. But there are particular challenges to engaging youth voice in low-income communities, with the greatest among them being AUTHENTIC ACCESS, sustainability and funding. Staff from Stanford's Gardner Center youth-led research program wrote about some of these challenges in 2003. Young people working with the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada were so concerned about the treatment of youth voice that they went so far as to write a report called the Declaration of Accountability On The Ethical Engagement of Young People and Adults in Canadian Organizations.

There has to be a watershed coming, where finally our schools and youth-serving organizations and larger communities all realize that all people have a role in creating, fostering, challenging and transforming democracy. Tomorrow I'll explore Race and Youth Voice to see if more answers become apparent.