COLUMN ONE : Students Stand Up on Campus : High schoolers have flexed their muscle across the country. Educators see some parallels with the 1960s, and many welcome the new activism.
In the Antelope Valley, it was the anti-gang dress code.
In Chicago, it was the firing of school principals.
In Contra Costa County, school budget cuts.
In Huntington Beach and Anaheim, it was the disqualification of football teams from the state playoffs.
The students who took to the streets in angry protest at two South Bay high schools Monday and Tuesday are part of a recent explosion in campus activism, the likes of which has not been seen since the civil rights and anti-war movements of late 1960s and early 1970s.
“The protest strategy is out there in the repertoire of political action again,” said Gary Orfield, a professor of political science and education at the University of Chicago. “Somehow, despite a generation gap and with no big movement and no big leaders, these kids are getting the idea that they can use their First Amendment rights and go demonstrate.”
The reasons for the high school protests run the gamut from demonstrating against racial injustice to venting anger over the football team’s being disqualified from championship playoffs. Educators who have been monitoring trends among students say they have been seeing a definite rise in campus activism recently but add that what is happening now does not necessarily represent a revival of the social and political involvement of the 1960s.
Moreover, high school demonstrations are not new and, in some instances, represent nothing more than kids just being kids, some educators note.
But others say that today’s students are a generation that has watched on television as democratic protest has spread around the world, and they are applying those lessons to their own lives.
Such activism bothers some administrators. But others who work with young people are welcoming the new wave of activism as long as it excludes violence, such as occurred in Chicago and the two South Bay high schools.
“We feel it’s a very, very healthy kind of thing as long as it is not violent,” said Nancy Pinson-Millburn of the American Assn. for Counseling and Development.
“What students are learning from what has happened in China, in Eastern Europe and (in various cities throughout the U.S.) is that it is OK to speak up, that students ought to be listened to. We find that kind of encouraging.”
In the high schools, the issues are close to home: dirty, unsafe or ineffective schools; students’ rights; unpopular decisions or policies. And the motivations are sometimes mixed.
This week’s demonstrations at Leuzinger and Hawthorne high schools in the South Bay’s Centinela Valley Union High School District, for example, were sparked by the resignation of a popular principal who faced reassignment by district trustees. As many as 2,000 students took to the streets Monday; there was a smaller morning-long demonstration Tuesday.
While the immediate issue was the resignation of the principal, the protest also encompassed allegations of racism against the school board.
“I think it’s right to fight for your rights,” said Miguel Cortez, 16, in explaining why he was demonstrating Tuesday at Leuzinger High. “If you’re Mexican, you have to have pride in your nation. And if you’re black, you have to have pride in your color.”
But Leuzinger sophomore Carmen Humphrey said others were less sincere:
“Yesterday, we participated because there was a cause,” Humphrey said Tuesday. “Today, we didn’t because what they’re doing is just for fun. It’s just hurting us.”
Some educators trace the upsurge locally to last year’s Los Angeles teachers strike.
Stalled contract negotiations between teachers and the Los Angeles Unified School District led to the largest wave of student-led protests in the schools in nearly 20 years.
More than 10,000 students at dozens of campuses participated in walkouts, sit-ins and protest marches around the two-week teachers strike.
“Some students were genuinely supporting the teachers’ demands and felt that the (school) board was wrong,” recalled Richard Browning, consultant to the district’s senior high schools. “Other students were afraid that their grades were being interfered with” because teachers threatened not to release grades until a contract was signed, jeopardizing graduation and college admission for some students, he said.
What is happening now on high school and even some junior high school campuses mirrors the findings of the latest national survey of college freshmen. It showed a dramatic rise in activism.
About 37% of this year’s freshmen said they had participated in organized demonstrations the year before entering college. That contrasts with about 21% in 1983.
“I think there is a general feeling that there are things in this culture that need fixing, that there are issues that have been put on hold and that must be addressed,” said Alexander W. Astin, a UCLA professor of education and director of the annual freshman survey. Published in January, this year’s survey involved almost 296,000 freshmen at 587 campuses.
That heightened level of activism has shown up in recent protests at high schools and junior highs around the country. They include:
Selma, Ala., where about 150 black high school students staged lengthy sit-ins after the white-controlled school board decided not to renew the contract of its black superintendent.
Chicago, where the firings of several principals touched off waves of student protests in several neighborhoods.
Northern California’s Contra Costa County, where about 2,000 students at four high schools marched and picketed at their campuses to protest teacher layoffs and other budget cuts they said would hurt their education.
Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, the Westside’s University High, Monrovia High and Peary Junior High School in Gardena--where students hit the bricks over new dress codes.
Inglewood, where students streamed out of Morningside High School and went to district offices to complain about dirty restrooms, textbook shortages, gang activities and unqualified substitute teachers.
Cantwell High School in Montebello, where students at the parochial boys’ school staged a two-hour walkout when the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles announced it was replacing the schools’ priests and teachers from the Congregation of Christian Brothers with others from the Jesuit order.
Two Orange County high schools--Savanna in Anaheim and Huntington Beach High--where last November, students walked out of classes to protest their football teams’ disqualification from playoffs.
Marine View School in Huntington Beach, where about 100 seventh- and eighth-graders streamed off campus after they were told the traditional field trips to Yosemite and Santa Catalina Island might be canceled because of bogged-downed contract talks with teachers.
UCLA’s Astin said his survey of entering college freshmen showed that today’s students are different from their counterparts of almost a quarter-century ago.
“For one thing, we still have a very large and influential group of students who are looking out for money and jobs and getting ahead,” Astin said. “But there is a rapidly growing minority of activists that are becoming more influential and a force to be reckoned with.”
Some administrators, believe students are more conservative now, more concerned about things they believe will affect them directly.
During the dress code protest at Antelope Valley High, Angela Bruno, a 14-year-old freshman, was moved to boycott classes by uncertainty over what what attire was permitted:
“How are we supposed to know what we can wear if they won’t tell us? Why don’t they go out and buy us our own outfits?”
Demonstrations often are aimed at changing school policy.
That was the goal of a youth at Palmdale High School who objected to school officials’ condemning protests of the Antelope Valley district’s dress code and disciplining participants. “They tell us it’s wrong, but a lot of things in history were done through protesting,” he said.
In fact, some administrators say lessons learned during the student demonstrations in the ‘60s have helped to keep many campuses calm during the renewed tide of activism.
“A lot of the protests in the ‘60s and ‘70s had to do with student power,” Los Angeles Unified’s Browning said. Now students have more vehicles for participating in the running of schools.
In cities like Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, students serve on school committees that help make the rules, and in most places administrators are more sensitive to being responsive to student concerns than they were 20 years ago.
“An issue came up here not long ago where kids were interested in ethnic studies classes,” said Marvin Starr, principal of Los Angeles’ Manual Arts High School. “That had been a big issue in the ‘60s, when students had to fight to get them.
“Here, we talked about it with the students and we reinstituted them. We don’t believe it should get to the point of protest anymore,” he said.
But, like their counterparts in the 1960s, some students today are suspicious that people over 30 might have lost their stake in social change.
At Leuzinger High School on Tuesday, Supt. McKinley Nash tried to use the image of the 1960s to encourage students to return to class. He told them about being jailed during civil rights protests in the South, and his days on the stump with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
But the angry students shouted him down and stormed out of the auditorium. Later, outside the school, Malcolm Ratliff, a 17-year-old Leuzinger student, said that if Nash still believed in what King stood for, the superintendent “would be out there with us, fighting this to the end.”
Times staff writers John Chandler, Marc Lacey, Hugo Martin and Hector Tobar contributed to this story.
More to Read
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.