Dissertation Defense Schedule
Academic Excellence
Sharing original dissertation research is a principle to which the University of Delaware is deeply committed. It is the single most important assignment our graduate students undertake and upon completion is met with great pride.
We invite you to celebrate this milestone by attending their dissertation defense. Please review the upcoming dissertation defense schedule below and join us!
PROGRAM | Urban Affairs & Public Policy
Sustainability and Scaling in Youth Urban Education Organizing: A Historical Case Study of the Philadelphia Student Union
By: Aaron Searson Chair: John McNutt
ABSTRACT
Since 1995, the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) has been a leading youth-led urban education organizing group. PSU has operated at several scales—including the school, district, state, and national levels—as well as in ideological dimensions. Thus, PSU is an appropriate unit of analysis to gauge the extent to which urban youth education organizing can forge sustainable and scalable progressive reform visions.
Based on interviews and textual analyses—conducted primarily from 2012 through 2015—PSU benefited from exceptional executive leadership and adopted strategies to enhance internal stability, including: decentralized, transformational, and servant leadership development; leadership pipelines; mission integrity; an individual donor model; leveraging intermediary support; youth-focused recruitment; systemic
and diverse supports; harnessing institutional memory; and planning and self-evaluation. Nonetheless, PSU and youth organizing are vulnerable to staff and student turnover, limited resources, and intermediary uncertainties.
Sustainability is a prerequisite for scaling, which requires change theories, strategies, and methods. PSU’s model of scaling change begins with self-representation and politicization. Equipped, empowered youth are then given meaningful opportunities for collective action. Significantly, empowerment does not guarantee political power.
Framing around root causes is a core theory of change for PSU. Additionally, PSU’s reputation as principled, informed, effective, reliable, and proactive has garnered it widespread credibility, essential to scaling.
PSU also embraces “glocalized resistance” (Köhler & Wissen, 2003), which confronts immediate anxieties through community organizing while affecting larger structures through extralocal and framing strategies (Warren, 2011; Gold, Simon, & Brown, 2002). In education, glocalism connects across “constituencies, issues, and geographies” to influence national framing about public education’s “purpose, problems, and promise” (Fine & Jacobs, 2014, p. 4). PSU has scaled school and local mobilization through cross-cutting coalitions, while balancing collaboration and conflict with decision makers. It has scaled “down” through small schools, and strived to achieve spread and power through media and movements (Elmore, 1996, p. 20).
Yet a multi-dimensional approach overextends its limited capacities and exposed resource and infrastructure shortcomings in the youth organizing infrastructure, particularly at the state level. Governance trends in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), in statehouses, and at the federal level make lasting progressive change virtually untenable. PSU thus increasingly adopted adversarial and movement-building theories and tactics. This transformation aligns with Fung and Wright (2003) and Oakes and Lipton (2002), who argue external pressure and movement approaches are logical when reform contexts become degenerative and inegalitarian. Multiscalar, intersectional movements with political and ideological power are crucial to scaling sustainable and progressive urban school reform.
The Process
Step-by-Step
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Dissertation Manual
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Defense Submission Form
This form must be completed two weeks in advance of a dissertation defense to meet the University of Delaware Graduate and Professional Education’s requirements.
