This article explores youth resistance to urban public high schools that both inadvertently and by design push out students before graduation. The author details how youth experience the institutional production of school non-completion as a dialectic of humiliating ironies and dangerous dignities, a dialectic of school pushout. The author describes how some youth position themselves in ways that are dangerous to the institution of schooling, and, at the same time, their own school careers. (Contains 2 notes.)