Andrea Batista Schlesinger was a high school senior when she first learned how to make politicians squirm. As the only student representative to the new York City Board of Education, representing more than 1 million of her fellow teens, Andrea didn't get to vote, "so the idea was to figure out how I could have the biggest voice," she says. Her solution: to put together press conferences with educational officials- "but I would invite only high school press to come do interviews and watch the officals sweat!" she says with a laugh. "Since they didn't pay me (to be on the board), I didn't really have anything to lose."

These days the stakes are a bit higher for Andrea, 28, who in January took over as head of the Drum Major Institute, a progressive think ank in New York City. yet she is proving to be as in-your-face as ever when it comes to holding politicians accountable-and, more important, getting young people excited about significant issues by writing editorials for college newspapers and speaking on campus panels. "We're trying to change the conversation about public policy by changing the participants," she says.

For Andrea, A University of Chicago grad, that includes reaching out to residents of inner cities, particularly Latinos. Pointing to a recent newspaper article that focused on the number of people in the city who don't speak English and the need for them to learn the language, Andrea says, "That's fine-but how about, in the meantime, providing them with translators so that patients can communicate with their doctors? Or making sure (bilingual) materials get sent home with them?"

Andrea's "passon for social and economic justice," in the words of her mentor, former Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer, stems from her own experience growing up in Brooklyn with a Jewish American father wo runs a computer-consulting business and a Dominican immigrant mother. '"My mom and I) learned to speak English together watching Sesame street," Andrea says. Now she hopes to make the "American dream" that her parents achieved accessible to the next generation. "The idea of owning your own home, sending your kids to college-that's why my mother came here," she says. "We want to make sure there's still something to work your way up to."