Systemic suspensions and excessive physical abuse undermine nonwhite students’ access to equal education and compound the impact of state-sanctioned privatization of schools and residential segregation. White educators are the culprit. Their commitment to preserving “order” and loco parentis dictates their pedagogy. Reveling in immunity, teachers have normalized cruel and arbitrary punishment, often in response to nonwhite students’ minor infractions. Troublemakers features brave youth activists and savvy litigants who have opposed these harmful disciplinary measures in schools, confronted discrimination in classrooms, and challenged racist curricula and leadership. Kathryn Schumaker convincingly demonstrates the geographical scope of youth activism and students’ critical contributions to notable legal victories by starting chapters with testimonies from unsung heroes like Canzetta Burnside, Neva Louise English, Reba Yeps, Rocky Hernandez, and Tyrone Washington. A much-needed addition to Rebecca DeSchweinitz's If We Could Change the World, Gael Graham's Youth Activists, and Jon Hale's Freedom Schools, the five chapters of Troublemakers carefully survey the deliberations of Supreme Court and circuit court judges over the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to students’ freedom of speech, due-process requirements, and the right to quality education.
Troublemakers begins in Philadelphia, Mississippi – home to the Freedom Schools and an important site of black youth mobilization. The narrative eventually and fittingly returns to Topeka, Kansas – where the first desegregation case was filed resulting in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. These bookends challenge the origin story of students’ rights, often tied to the legal victory in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), and override desegregation's triumphal tale. Chapter 1 excavates black students’ insistence on their right to freedom of speech in the 1966 Supreme Court decisions Burnside v. Byars and Blackwell v. Issaquena County (which laid the foundation for Tinker). Criminalizing students’ political activities in Mississippi, school and legal officials distinguished between “polite” and “aggressive” protests. The former implied students’ compliance with white power. Schumaker's mention of legal authorities’ disrespectful treatment of black youth on the witness stand invites further historical exploration.
Overcrowding, exclusion from clubs, an oversized police presence, and racist teachers and counselors define nonwhite students’ experiences at public schools. Chapter 2 centers on the protests of high-school youth of color against these conditions, community politicians’ demand for sensitivity training and administrative solutions to inequity, and the legal activism in Colorado that culminated in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Keyes v. School District No. 1 which made de facto segregation unconstitutional. Schumaker maintains that the decision ultimately upheld lower courts’ sovereignty over determining whether school board actions intentionally violated the Fourteenth Amendment. In response, organizations like the Mexican American Defense Fund focussed on the implementation of bilingual–bicultural programs, a more integrated curriculum, and community-based initiatives to equalize education.
When students of color protested educators’ racism and challenged academic marginalization in Ohio, school officials panicked. In Chapter 3, Schumaker traces the systemic criminalization of student activism and “habitual truancy.” High-school student Tony Shorter pointed to the injustice of a local ordinance that punished students more harshly than if they engaged in prostitution. To silence dissent and curb insubordination, school authorities resorted to “push-out” methods like suspensions. In truth, students simply wanted a say in school governance, a curriculum that reflected their cultural heritage, a more inclusive faculty body, and the removal of excessive police in schools. The legal battles over the lack of due process in suspensions culminated in Goss v. Lopez (1975), which cast school discipline as a “pressing issue of racial justice,” flouted the school officials’ ability to degrade student protest and expel students, and lifted teachers’ qualified immunity. While Goss “brought the fourteenth amendment into the classroom,” Schumaker astutely explains, Wood v. Strickland (1975) “demanded that administrators respect the Goss ruling” (128).
Chapter 4 details legal efforts to implicate state governments in maintaining racial segregation post-Brown. If lawyers could prove racist intent, states could be held accountable. Even when urban renewal projects proved state actors and school boards’ complicit in preserving inequality, legal authorities maintained that “lily-white suburbs” were not sufficient evidence “to warrant a court-ordered inter-district remedy” (137). Schumaker concludes that the 1973 Supreme Court decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez declared that students did not have a right to education. While the arguments about cultural deprivation and disability produced legal victories, Schumaker notes, they limited the broader application of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause.
With the “punitive turn” in American politics, schools institutionalized “law and order” tactics. In chapter 5, Schumaker chronicles student and parent activists’ successes in combating the disproportionate number of suspensions and paddling among students of color on the local level. However, the decision in Ingraham v. Wright (1977) determined that corporal punishment did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, marking a retreat from students’ rights. Schumaker provides a chilling example of the nation's uneven priorities when she points out that lawyers had invoked the Eighth Amendment, but the courts determined that it only protected the rights of convicts, not students. In the wake of desegregation orders, suspensions and abuse of students of color increased exponentially and states legalized educators’ “reign of terror.” The Reagan administration's political backlash gave these changes a sheen of acceptability and, as Schumaker stresses, emboldened school administrators to ignore due-process protections.
By detailing how legal authorities, school administrators, and teachers subverted desegregation policies, Troublemakers demands accountability. Schumaker illustrates the price students paid in defying white authority: a permanent record of delinquency, no credits, and, of course, no education. While students’ experiences inspired and grounded legal activism, adult perspectives, especially in the final two chapters, overshadow their voices. With a few exceptions, the perpetrators of re-resegregation, abuse, and discrimination largely remain nameless. The book misses a few opportunities to feature more fully the young individuals that ignited litigation. Even so, to better understand the persistence of unequal education in the wake of Brown and the institutionalization of the school-to-prison pipeline, this book is a must-read. But Schumaker's incisive analysis also affirms the power of youth in and beyond the courtroom. The fact that adults feared students’ free speech and due process as a procedural entitlement is telling. Teachers’ and administrators’ violent methods are admissions of their false sense of disempowerment and concerted efforts to preserve authority they could not secure by any other means.
One final quibble is the book's title. “Troublemakers” reproduces school officials’, judges’, and journalists’ criminalizing characterization of students’ resistance to the violation of their freedom of speech, educational inequality, and unjustified physical harm. The adults, not the students, as Schumaker so powerfully demonstrates, are the real troublemakers.
