Within education and youth studies, the concept of “positive youth development” has been taken up by researchers and practitioners usually as a framework for structuring learning settings and pedagogy to optimize educational achievement. At the same time, such frameworks stop short of the questions of “to what end” or “for what purpose”? As such, this text questions the assumptions and limitations of positive youth development frameworks, especially as their efficacy is increasingly reduced to its correlation with measures of academic achievement. Based upon two and a half years of ethnographic field work with Latinx and Asian American youth organizers in San Francisco, this text focuses how social movements served as contexts for youth development. Youth organizers developed skills and built community through agitation, refusal and resistance rather than through conventional notions of individualism, professionalism and compliance associated with schooling. Through their active participation and investments in movement campaigns for housing justice, educational inequality, environmental justice and workers’ rights, youth organizers in San Francisco illustrated how movement work can foster alternative visions of youth development and career readiness that are intertwined with social justice.

This Policy Brief explores how a community-based truancy prevention program mediates against absenteeism, truancy, and dropping out and positively transforms the lives of Black and Latino youth. Findings suggest that community–school partnerships are critical in the quest to combat truancy and the alarming dropout rate among urban youth. This study shows how committed individuals can work to engage and empower low-income urban youth who are disengaged from school. Extensive interviews and observations with Latino and Black youth demonstrate how the intervention program mediates against social and academic failure. Using grounded theory, this case study explores four student- identified dimensions that impact his (re)engagement with school:(a) the importance of space that promotes peer relations, (b) incentive structures within programs,(c) the need for social networks, and (d) youth advocacy as a mechanism for institutional accountability. Implications for combating truancy, reducing dropout, and promoting student engagement are discussed.