Harper High School and the Role of Education

For this blog post, I chose to listen to a podcast from This American Life on how one high school dealt with gun violence (part one here, part two here). The reporters for this story embedded themselves in the school for a full semester, recording the perspectives of staff and students, documenting everyday conversations and meetings, and charting the events that unfolded over the course of the year. I would really recommend listening to it if you get the chance—hearing individual people’s stories, often through their own voices, grounds these abstract concepts in a really moving way, and because they were offered so much access to the day-to-day happenings of the school, the reporters picked up on a lot really important and interesting nuances that a more typical news story might not have. The story of this school is important in its own right, but it also highlights some really central concepts in education justice as a whole. 

Harper High School, located on the South Side of Chicago, was a small, closely knit community of around 550 students (it’s closed since the podcast was released). In the year prior to the one chronicled in the podcast, 29 current or former students were shot outside of school, and 8 of them died. It was a place where everyone was touched by violence, and one where the role of education in students’ lives looked really different from what we might be used to. 

One of the most essential parts of this difference was the breadth of responsibilities shouldered by the school’s staff. Many of them were deeply involved in and knowledgeable about their kids’ lives—they drove students to school when necessary, visited them in their neighborhoods, and went to extraordinary lengths to keep them afloat through their education. The adults of Harper were almost constantly faced with the challenge of guiding their students through intense, complex trauma and grief, all while processing the same emotions themselves. The podcast describes how, even for the most passionate, relentlessly persistent school counselors and administrators, it was a hard decision to continue in a job where they watched their students, present and past, die year after year. 

Teachers, counselors, and administrators were also at the epicenter of the response when these crises arose, forming strategic, comprehensive plans when violence arose that included monitoring kids’ communication on social media, pulling kids from class to get information to piece together, and managing times of the day when conflicts were likely to come to a head. And, at the same time, these staff members worked to maintain for their students the milestones and traditions of a normal high school career, balancing protecting kids and offering them a sense of normalcy. 

This podcast illustrates an incredibly important point: that education never exists in a vacuum. Life at Harper High School was shaped by so much more than the day-to-day happenings that went on inside it, and the structures, relationships, and norms that blossomed in response were just as specific to the broader context of the community. Harper was the way it was because of the forces of poverty and racism, chronic underfunding, and the dozens of other factors that shaped the neighborhood around it. And Harper was also the way it was because a group of adults who cared incredibly deeply about their students understood all of this, and worked harder than any educator should have to to try to give their students what they needed. 

In the end, Harper’s fate was the same as so many public schools’ of late. A temporary buffer of “turnaround” funding reached its expiration, and the school was forced to let go of several staff members and programs. This would have been a blow for any school, but because these counselors and administrators had such close, all-encompassing relationships with their students, losing the people looking out for these kids was especially impactful. 

Eventually, in 2021, Harper High School closed after years of declining enrollment. Most of its would-be students now attend the bigger, better-funded charter schools popping up in the neighborhood. But I think the reactions of its teachers say a lot about the place that it was—deeply underfunded, filled with grief, imperfect, but also a place of safety, one filled with educators who couldn’t bear to pack up their classrooms or search for new jobs until the doors finally closed for good. Harper was made up of the world around it, but it was also a place students could take refuge from this world and gain a helping hand to move through it. And ultimately, no matter where and how it happens, that should be the hope for any education.