Are “No-Excuses” Charter Management Organizations the Descendants of Wackford Squeers?
Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby portrays child abuse at Dotheboys Hall, a remote Yorkshire boarding school of the mid-nineteenth century. Tucked away in the country, such schools were out of sight. Dickens’ expose of strict authoritarianism, enforced by Wackford Squeers and his wife who starved and beat the children, effectively damaged the reputation of such places, and many were immediately closed. Nobody today accuses the so-called “no excuses” charter schools of starving or beating children, but like Squeers, several charter chains these days create a school culture based on authoritarianism, strict obedience, and submissiveness. Such a philosophy of education would be unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans these days. What does it say about attitudes toward poverty and families of color that there seems to be wide acceptance of such a strategy in urban schools designed for poor black children?
Last Friday in her Washington Post column Valerie Strauss printed a fascinating interview by blogger Jennifer Berkshire with Joan Goodman, a University of Pennsylvania professor of education who has investigated the operation of so-called “no excuses” Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). These are the charter chains like Kipp, Mastery, and Young Scholars which operate through rigid rules of behavior and enforce obedience with rewards and punishments. Joan Goodman is the advisor for students from Penn who are entering Teach for America (TFA). While many of the “no excuses” schools have been resistant to external evaluation by researchers, Goodman has, while conducting observations of her students, been able to examine carefully the norms in the schools where many of her students are serving in TFA.
Berkshire’s interview follows up on a longer article published by Goodman in the March, 2013, Educational Researcher. In that piece Goodman describes the behavioral expectations in the “no-excuses” charter schools: “A conspicuous feature of the regulated environment is an insistence on continuous compliance to pervasive rules that shadow children throughout the day. The rules, covering even small details of children’s comportment, both in and out of class, move beyond traditional forms of discipline, making these CMOs a rather new model on the educational horizon. The effort to create totalizing environments using a variety of systemic behavioral engineering techniques represents a significant departure even from traditional schools avowing behavioral methodologies, where the use of reinforcement has been largely limited to achieving specific targeted behaviors…”
In the interview published by Valerie Strauss last Friday, Goodman describes “very elaborate behavioral regimes that they (the schools) insist all children follow, starting Are “No-Excuses” Charter Management Organizations the Descendants of Wackford Squeers? | janresseger: