High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America contributes to a body of literature by historians of education that argues high school students, not just college students, were central to activism and educational reform in the late 1960s and 1970s. By assembling accounts of student organizations and student rights publications, Aaron G. Fountain Jr. demonstrates how high school students faced repression from parents, educators, and police as they reshaped schooling. The book contends that these students became an “ideological pillar in the history of school reform” (p. 9); as they negotiated constitutional rights, they also encountered heightened surveillance and the modernization of carceral structures in schools.

The book is organized into three thematic parts. Part 1, “Politics” explores the networks of left-wing student-activist thought through their organizations and underground press. The next part, “Race,” explores how race shaped student organizing. Part 3, “Surveillance,” shows how the FBI collaborated with educators, parents, and students, routinely invading their privacy to build the contemporary school carceral apparatus.

The first chapter follows the San Francisco Free Speech Movement, zooming in on the organization Students Organized Education and Action League and its publication, Activist Opinion. Directly repudiating Cold War sentiments that “students needed protection from communist subversion” students used tactics of the civil rights movement and their publication to assert their autonomy and convictions through their politicized identity as students (p. 46). The book then zooms out, to observe how the anti-war movement shaped high school student chapters of the Student Mobilization Committee. The SMC created networks and spaces to share their grievances, and some students “came to see the war and the repression from school administrators as intertwined” (p. 70). This work laid the foundation for student groups to create organizations focused on school reforms and student rights. Focusing on one of these cases, Fountain details the origins and actions of the New York High School Student Union, a citywide coalition of over “108 public and private schools,” and its publication, the New York High School Free Press, both formed in the midst of the United Federation of Teachers’ Ocean Hill-Brownsville Teachers’ Strike of 1968 (p. 73). The Union marked a turn in high school student organizing, as it was simply a youth-based iteration of adult organizing; the organization connected the issues of the Vietnam War, race, and women’s and gay liberation to the unique issues of students’ rights (p. 73). Returning to the work of the SMC, Fountain closes the first section by underscoring how the organization united students’ rights struggles with Vietnam War organizing, exemplified by their efforts to create a Student Bill of Rights. Fountain observes that the Supreme Court ruling in the 1969 case of Tinker v. Des Moines provided students with the legal framework to express grievances, but, because of “vague judicial interpretations” in the wake of the ruling, protesting the war remained a fight for the “right to organize politically in schools” (p. 112).

In part 2, “Race”, Fountain draws a through line between efforts toward teaching Black history, increasing Black teaching staff, and police removal in schools to solidarity with national racial justice movements like the United Farm Workers union. Narrowing in on the case of Philadelphia, Fountain explores the evolution of the Student Bill of Rights campaign. In the fallout of the city’s 1967 racial uprising led by Black students and parents over curriculum revision, racial conflict, disciplinary policies, and violent police attacks on students, the Student Bill of Rights campaign emerged as one of the many strategies students employed to express their grievances and negotiate with school policymakers. As students organized around race, school officials summoned the police, sparking debates “over who was better suited to handle disciplinary issues: school officials or police” (p. 163). Student organizing around race and the response to it further demonstrates the linkages between harmful notions of Black and Brown criminality in schools and society, a point that could have been further expanded upon in the book. Fountain concludes the section by working to mend the archival record’s silence around the Cleveland race riots, an attack on Black students in 1970 by a violent white mob inside of Collinwood High School. As Black residents moved to the Collinwood neighborhood, they were met with several incidents of white supremacist violence from 1965 to the mid-1970s. Politicized by these events, Black students similarly demanded school reforms, curricular interventions on Black history, and an increase in Black teachers. Some Black parents and students in Collinwood High School envisioned finding safety through increased police presence in response to the racial violence that they experienced. However, even though these parents sought safety through policing, law enforcement did not provide the protection they desired.

The final chapters comprising part 3 expands upon the operations that curbed student activism through collaborations with students, educators, and families. Fountain finds that high schools were not only the site of the modernization of school “security,” but also the “location of clandestine investigations.” Targeting Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers, COINTELPRO sought to disrupt the organizing efforts of these groups in coalition with teen activists. Fountain points out that in this moment in history, teenage activists were in the “middle of a growing paradox: as they received expanded constitutional rights, they also faced intrusions on their privacy” (p. 258).

High School Students Unite! weaves together countless stories of student activism to provide a bird’s-eye view of organizing in the postwar era. As Fountain points out, each chapter of this book could be a book in its own right. The appendix lists numerous independent high school organizations and underground high school newspapers for historians of education to narrate in greater detail. Future scholars should continue to investigate the links between the surveillance imposed on students and the continuing carceral logics persisting in schools. Still, this book resurfaces important ongoing conversations in education research around student agency and school surveillance. Today, at a moment when high school student activism for Palestinian self-determination, the preservation of DEI initiatives, and against the kidnapping of neighbors by ICE is being met with extreme repression, this timely book documents and demonstrates a lineage of both organizing and backlash.