Joanne W. Golann: I spent a year and a half at a 'no-excuses' charter school – this is what I saw - The Conversation

I spent a year and a half at a 'no-excuses' charter school – this is what I saw

I spent a year and a half at a ‘no-excuses’ charter school – this is what I saw

1. Joanne W. Golann

   Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education, Vanderbilt University

Disclosure statement

Joanne W. Golann has received funding from the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the American Sociological Association.

Charter schools are 30 years old as of 2021, and the contentious debate about their merits and place in American society continues.

To better understand what happens at charter schools – and as a sociologist who focuses on education – I spent a year and a half at a particular type of urban charter school that takes a “no-excuses” approach toward education. My research was conducted from 2012 through 2013, but these practices are still prevalent in charter schools today.

The no-excuses model is one of the most celebrated and most controversial education reform models for raising student achievement among Black and Latino students. Charters, which are public schools of choice that are independently managed, show comparable achievement to traditional public schools, but no-excuses charters produce much stronger test-score gains. No-excuses schools have been heralded as examples of charter success and have received millions of dollars in foundation support. At the same time, no-excuses schools themselves have started to rethink their harsh disciplinary practices. Large charter networks like KIPP and Noble in recent years have acknowledged the wrongfulness of their disciplinary approaches and repudiated the no-excuses approach.

Here are 10 of the most striking things that I observed at the no-excuses charter school where I spent 18 months.

1. Teachers let nothing slide

Teachers at no-excuses schools “sweat the small stuff.” The long list of infractions at the school that I observed included: not following directions, making unnecessary noise, putting one’s head down on a desk, being off-task, rolling one’s eyes and not tracking the speaker.

Students on average received one infraction every three days. One fifth grader managed to accumulate 295 infractions over the school year. Infractions resulted in detention, loss of privileges like field trips and school socials, and “bench” – a punishment in which students had to wear a special yellow shirt and could not talk to their classmates or participate in gym class.

2. Teachers constantly explained the ‘why’

Teachers were encouraged to explain the “why” of infractions so students would understand the rationale behind the school’s unbending rules. Why did students receive detention for arriving one minute late to school? Because supposedly it helped them develop time-management skills. College applications would not be accepted if they were one minute late, they claimed. Why were there silent hallways? Because, the school argued, self-control would get kids to and through college.

3. Students developed distorted ideas about college CONTINUE READING: I spent a year and a half at a 'no-excuses' charter school – this is what I saw

Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime

The Noble Network is the leading charter chain in Chicago. It boasts of high test scores. It is the darling of the Chicago white elite, including such luminaries as former Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and billionaire Penny Pritzker, who served as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce. White apologists and admirers of the strict no-excuses discipline policy claimed that black and brown children needed the tough rules so that they could learn middle-class behaviors. David Whitman published a book praising “no-excuses” schools called Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, in which he praised the high-performing schools (mostly charters) that enforced “no excuses.” His book was published in 2008; in 2009, he became the chief speech-writer for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who often lavished praise on “no excuses” charter schools.

The Noble Network wrote a letter to its alumni, apologizing for its strict “no excuses” policy, which it acknowledged was “racist.” Over the years, critics have said that the practices of “no excuses” schools are racist, but they were defended by charter advocates based on their test scores. They argued that the ends justified the CONTINUE READING: Chicago Charter Chain Apologizes for “Racist, No-Excuses” Regime | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism – radical eyes for equity

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism – radical eyes for equity

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism

Sarah Karp offers a long overdue and somewhat surprising opening lede for WBEZ Chicago, home to a number of charter school chains:

Chicago’s largest charter school network sent a letter to alumni this week admitting that its past discipline and promotion policies were racist and apologizing for them. The apology is notable not just as an acknowledgment of misguided policies, but as a repudiation of the “no-excuses” philosophy adopted by many charter schools during the 2000s.

 TOP CHICAGO CHARTER SCHOOL NETWORK ADMITS A RACIST PAST

“No excuses” ideologies and practices have been a foundational staple of charter schools disproportionately serving Black students, Hispanic students, and poor students well back into the 1990s but blossoming in the 2000s since both political parties jumped on the charter school bandwagon. By the late 2000s, mainstream media and the Obama administration were all-in on charter schools as “miracles.”

There were always two problems with the charter school mania and propaganda—data never supported the “miracle” claims (see my “Miracle School Myth” chapter), and worse of all, “no excuses” ideology has always been racist, shifting the blame and gaze onto students and teachers in order to ignore systemic inequity and racism.

“No excuses” schools always began with the assumption that Black, Hispanic, and poor students are fundamentally “broken” and must be “fixed”—an ugly and racist version of deficit thinking.

Almost a decade ago, I spoke at the University of Arkansas after the publication of my book on poverty and education; in that work and talk, I CONTINUE READING: The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism – radical eyes for equity

The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy

Eva Moskowitz is a former NYC council woman who was chosen by hedge funders to operate a charter school chain in New York, Success Academy (SA).

Her authoritatian leadership produces high test scores (from “little test-taking machines”)– and high student and teacher attrition. 

 SA’s ever-percolating dysfunction has found expression on the Instagram site, @survivors_of_successacademy, described as “a place to anonymously share your experience of racism and/or mismanagement at Success Academy.”

Below are some entries detailing a twisted inhumanity at SA:

“On my last day at SA as an assistant, I fainted in the blocks room with my K kids. This was after a nonstop day, in the hot sun with them outside, and no lunch break besides trying to snack when I could sneak away to my bag really quick during the day. … My head teacher was annoyed I missed dismissal because I fainted. She realized it was bad when I needed my dad to pick me bc I wasn’t comfortable driving. I called the dean on the way home and quit.”

“In the 2018-19 school year, my leadership team made us keep scholars who had low grade fevers in school. I would call their parents and tell them we would ‘monitor’ the situation, even though SA guidelines are to have scholars with a fever  sent home. Only if the fever kept rising is when we would ask for them to [be] picked up. My direct manager, a business operations manager, made the main office switch from an in-ear thermometer to an orl thermometer because she thought the ear thermometer was giving inaccurate results. She then told us we couldn’t order the oral thermometer covers because it would make the readings higher. When we expressed to her how unhygienic that was, she told us to ‘wipe the thermometer with an alcohol pad after each use.'”

“[One of our teachers this year] wasn’t feeling well on a Wednesday and found out she had the flu. She was still asked to come in for the full day Thursday CONTINUE READING: The Awful Inhumanity of Life at NY’s Success Academy | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

POLITICO Article on Charter Schools Entirely Misses the Point | janresseger

POLITICO Article on Charter Schools Entirely Misses the Point | janresseger

POLITICO Article on Charter Schools Entirely Misses the Point

Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, the ethicist, tells us that “justice is the community’s guarantee of the conditions necessary for everybody to be a participant in the common life of society… It is just to structure institutions and laws in such a way that communal life is enhanced and individuals are provided full opportunity for participation.”  (Christian Perspectives on Politics, pp. 216-217)  Because public education is systemic and schools are operated according to the law, it is possible to ensure that public schools protect the rights and serve the needs of all children, while charter schools are designed to serve the choices of individual families.

Charter schools were set up according to a theory of social entrepreneurship—the idea that if you give individuals enough freedom, they will experiment and innovate and do a better job of meeting the needs of particular students one school at a time.  Of course, our nation’s public schools have never fully embodied the principle of justice; like all core social institutions they have reflected the injustices and biases of the society they represent. But over the generations, as our society has begun to acknowledge racial and ethnic biases and realized that disabled people ought to be made full participants in our society, our representatives have passed laws and regulations to protect the rights of children formerly left out of the blessings promised in our nation’s principles. Our representatives in Congress passed Title I as part of the War on Poverty in 1965 to supplement investment in the public schools that serve concentrations of our nation’s poorest children. In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to help public schools pay for expert teachers to support the needs of disabled children. And the courts have protected the rights of immigrant children—even undocumented students—in the public schools. Further, in accordance with the principles of equity embedded in many state constitutions, courts in a number of states have been able to CONTINUE READING: POLITICO Article on Charter Schools Entirely Misses the Point | janresseger

Schools Matter: Awakening to Racist Child Abuse of Charter Chains

Schools Matter: Awakening to Racist Child Abuse of Charter Chains

Awakening to Racist Child Abuse of Charter Chains

Fabiola St Hilaire is among a growing number of teachers from the "no excuses" cultural sterilization charter schools who are calling out the racist child abuse by charter chains like Success Academy. 

Working for this organization has truly showed me that as long as I stand with the inaction and blatant disregard for child morality and healthy development it in turn will make me complicit, which I will never be. --From former Success Academy teacher Fabiola St Hilaire's resignation letter

  

From a story by Michael Elsen-Rooney for New York Daily News:

. . . . For [some] educators and parents, however, Success’s approach feels heavy-handed and inflexible at a time when many families need the opposite.

“It’s inhumane,” said Fabiola St Hilaire, who resigned as a first-grade teacher at the network’s Flatbush, Brooklyn elementary school — lasting just one week under the new remote rules.

 “Just seeing how difficult it was for the kids to stay focused and still as they want them to be, it was like wow,” she said. “You see the fidgety bodies, you see the blank stares.”

Under the plan, kids as young as 5 have to log on by 8:50 a.m. wearing their checkered orange and blue uniforms, pictured here, and sit still with their hands clasped for nearly CONTINUE READING: Schools Matter: Awakening to Racist Child Abuse of Charter Chains