By Adrian H. Huerta

In March 2025, I officially wrapped up my National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, awarded in 2022. As an education scholar studying gangs, it’s interesting to note that some initial reactions to my work from colleagues was a genuine curiosity about studying gang-involved populations. My motivation to study such a unique topic was not fully aligned with traditional education topics such as school choice, high school to college transition or financial aid.

Over the last three years, my research team and I conducted multi-part interviews with 40 former/inactive gang members who enrolled in two- and four-year colleges across the United States. Each of the two-part interviews ranged from 75 to 180 minutes, and after initial reluctance or skepticism, our study participants opened up and shared their lives with us. Initial funding from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Poverty Research/JPB Foundation set the groundwork for this project.

We learned about their troubles with substance addiction, food and housing instability, and being victims (and victimizers) of various forms of physical and verbal violence. Most importantly, we learned from the participants that outside of the harmful experiences caused by gang involvement, how they transformed their lives through higher education degrees and credentials that will have a generational impact on their families. Across interviews, we laughed, cried and empathized with the living situation that caused them to join gangs and the shame many felt for the impact of their decisions on their families and loved ones. Some participants were involved in gangs for less than one year, while others were founders and active gang members for over 20 years and later regretted the negative impact of their gang legacy on their local communities. Some participants were freshly enrolled in two-year colleges and testing out higher education.

In contrast, some former gang members were years removed from graduate and professional programs where they earned undergraduate and graduate degrees and were firmly set in their professional careers. It is essential to disclose that I did not inquire about specific crimes or violence that they engaged in, as that was beyond the scope of the study. My criminology and sociology colleagues have long documented the types of crimes that gang members allegedly commit in their local communities. The data analysis required more time than I anticipated, as each month I tried to engage with the interview transcripts; I remembered the pain I felt from how external actors punished the participants, from cases of childhood abuse to stories of homelessness, drug addiction and living on the streets. By March 2025, we have applied more than 20,000 codes across the 3,500+ pages of transcripts. From this work, we make the following recommendations and observations that may be useful to K-16 educators and related stakeholders.

• Why do youth join gangs?  Most youth join a gang around middle school to early high school due to fractured relationships in their homes, schools and communities. Like other youth at that development stage, youth are exploring their identities, and gang membership is an identity — like that of jocks, nerds, goths or gamers. A significant difference in youth exploring a gang identity is the social stigma and the fear that is associated with gang membership. So, educators, if you have a K-12 student who you believe is gang involved, try to mentor and show consistent investment in them that they are not alone, that whatever social context is impacting their home life will pass with time, and to not give up on the educational system. If space and time permit, developing a peer mentoring group is necessary to create a community and a structured support system for kids who need a safe space to form bonds.

• Scaffolding Support Systems for Gang-Involved Youth. Suspending or expelling gang-involved youth or transferring them to alternative/continuation schools only adds to students’ educational frustration. In instances where students have drugs or weapons and acts of violence toward educators or students, this does warrant firm disciplinary policies or practices due to immediate safety concerns. However, practices where educators are hyper-critical of youth and calling them names or predicting early death or incarceration are not methods to build a trusting relationship. Developmentally, youth may not “hear” your plea to negatively change their attitudes or behaviors at school to “inspire” kids to think deeply. Youth may downplay your sincere concern because they may not feel loved by family members or others who are supposed to demonstrate concern for them. So, students’ skepticism toward you is not unfounded. So, many provide micro-affirmation for their positive efforts or gradual observed change. An example is, “Hey, I noticed how you helped a [student’s name] who fell during lunch — good stuff.” Please do not use this moment to lecture about the actions; instead, use a simple micro-affirmation and keep it moving. Creating opportunities for youth to feel empowered and connected to non-gang younger peers is another method to make the necessary scaffolding for students so that the troubled student can serve as a mentor for children.      

• Revise current policies and practices. As mentioned in the second recommendation, the use of aggressive disciplinary policies and practices only contributes to gang-involved students’ frustration toward educators and school leaders. School personnel have broad discretion in how they treat gang-involved youth, including writing citations for dress code violations for wearing gang-affiliated clothing or sending students to alternative learning environments. K-12 educators should consider how to support gang-involved youth and help them feel a sense of purpose and connectedness to their local community. How best to support gang-involved students and their parents/guardians may serve as a tension point for educators on the “best practices.” My colleague Daniel Soto (from USC Keck School of Medicine) and I are exploring how best to help K-12 educators and administrators in a recently launched project that explores how educators use current policies and practices to engage gang-involved youth and their families/guardians. As much of the available empirical literature in educational administration and criminology centers on gang-involved youth and their behaviors, we aim to step forward and focus on educators and administrators who are constantly negotiating the tension of what works and what can be improved to help this group of students. We hope that in a future newsletter, I hope to share emerging findings on what works and does not to support this student population.