While primary and secondary education should ideally prepare students to be effective, critical citizens (Freire, 2000; Giroux, 2017), it is instead a vehicle to reproduce the status quo of disproportionate power structures through a hidden curriculum and disparate ideas of what good citizenship looks like. American students, of or soon to be of voting age, are prepared to be citizens by a system that directs them as passive beings in a wholly undemocratic approach (McQuillan, 2005). For some, this social reproduction is desirable (McLaren, 1989; Quinn, 2018), and for many parents who uproot their family lives and schedules for specific schools, it is likely their intent to maintain their children’s status in the same positions of elevated privilege that afford them the opportunity to attend the better school to begin with (Hagerman, 2018; Levinson et al., 2015; Nieto, 2005). Here, mere personally responsible citizens are the common goal, or to some lesser extent participatory citizens, but rarely if ever is the goal the formation from the elite the creation of truly justice-oriented citizens. Yet this is the choice that Freire offers us; to continue the norm or to empower students to challenge it (Negrón-Gonzales, Opoku-Agyemang, & Talwalker, 2016)

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