Educational Equity for Street Youth: Examining Street Schools through the Lense of Rightful Presence

Abstract

Street youth experience similar exclusionary tendencies in German regular schools as in the society at large. These negative schooling experiences push many street youth out of school, leading to graduation gaps and causing street careers to emerge. Street schools have responded to these inequalities, offering street youth more humanizing alternatives. Drawing upon a rightful presence framework, dialogic interviews with 14 educators and 10 school leaders, mission statements, and websites of street schools, we sought to understand how street schools may foster equitable educational opportunities for their students. Analysis focused on how street schools’ educators and leaders engage in an ongoing political struggle to support their students’ educational rights. Findings reveal that street schools not only criticize existing structures of the educational system, but also consciously reject them—despite consequences. The findings accentuate where and how the systems of schooling need to change to facilitate educational equity for street youth.