A “No Excuse” Approach To Education Everyone Can Support
“No excuse” has been a mantra from people who present themselves as advocates for “reforming” America’s public schools. And the term is a“pillar” of more than one popular charter school franchise.
The term originated from the belief that “the schoolteacher’s age-old excuse” was that factors outside the classroom – such as “not enough money, indifferent parents, kids arriving at school not ready to learn, and bureaucracy” – were reasons for poor test scores and school dropouts, rather than, focusing on the real, unaddressed cause of low achievement: teacher “malperformance.”
Over the last twenty years, “no excuse” has become the law of the land as state after state – incentivized by Obama administration policies such as Race to the Top – is now rolling out evaluation systems that make teachers the ones who are most accountable for rises and falls in student test scores.
Classroom teachers have raised the alarm, in increasingly louder voices, that blaming “ineffective” teachers and “failing schools” for systemic