Many charters in Néw Orleans tape a line in their hallways and insist that students must walk on the correct side of the line.
Reporter Danielle Dreilinger of the Times-Picayune writes here about this controversial policy and includes a video created by the charters to explain the value of this practice.
“Critics say it prepares students for prison, not college. A civil rights complaint filed this spring accuses Collegiate of imposing unnecessarily harsh penalties for stepping outside the lines — even, in one case, when a student’s disability made walking difficult.”
Defenders of the policy say it saves time and teaches automatic obedience to small rules, which later translates into unquestioning obedience to rules and authority, preparing students to succeed in life.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The reason charters have students walk the line and the reason for all the rest of their no excuses zero tolerance approach to discipline is to weed out all the students who challenge rules and who might potentially disrupt the learning environment. This is why the schools have fifty plus percent attrition rates. This, alongside their policy of not taking in new students, leads to high test score outcomes. The scores are the outcome of culling the students not educational innovation.
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Ask not, lest they need summon justification.
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Wow…and they aren’t even embarrassed to state their goal of “unquestioning obedience.” Frightening.
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Not to mention that several of the students seemed to be reading scripts off camera. Lovely brainwashing technique there. Yuck.
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really frightening
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Interesting that one of the adults speaks of the kids not crossing “invisible lines” later in life; talk about internalizing an ideology of domination and control!
Indeed, in addition to the condescending, and arguably racist, behaviorism – the apparent assumption being that “these children” need the threat of punishment to keep things running efficiently – the video is a textbook example of how the most widely valorized model of charter schools is about training and conditioning “those people” for their future station in life, whether it be prison or insecure, poverty-wage employment.
What do you think is the likelihood that in a school like this, kids are also punished for stepping outside the “invisible lines,” and challenging conventional thinking in class?
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Don’t know if you all saw this:
“The FBI and two other federal agencies conducted raids in Illinois and two other states at charter schools run by Des Plaines-based Concept Schools, FBI officials said Tuesday.
Search warrants were executed at 19 Concept schools in connection with an “ongoing white-collar crime matter,” said Vicki Anderson, a special agent in the Cleveland FBI office that’s leading the probe.
The raids targeted Concept schools in Illinois — where Concept has three schools in Chicago and one in Peoria — as well as in Indiana and Ohio.”
Individual charter chains aside, people in other states should pay attention to this, because it’s a governance structure they set up in these states:
“After its efforts last year to open two new taxpayer-funded charter schools in Chicago were rejected by Chicago Public Schools officials, Concept appealed to the Illinois State Charter School Commission, which overrode CPS and allowed Concept to open Horizon Science Academy McKinley Park at 2845 W. Pershing Rd. and Horizon Science Academy Belmont at 5035 W. North Ave.
CPS officials were more receptive to Concept earlier this year, approving what will be the chain’s fourth and fifth schools in Chicago, in Chatham and South Chicago.”
Charter school lobbyists push past local objections and oversight and move authority up to the state level, in order to open more schools. Charter schools can’t and won’t be regulated at the state level. It doesn’t work. That’s exactly what Governor Cuomo did in NY. You in NY will be in the same boat as these midwest states; IL, OH, IN. You’ll have a race to the bottom on charter regulation and oversight.
http://politics.suntimes.com/article/chicago/fbi-raids-concept-schools-illinois-2-other-states/tue-06102014-557pm
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Well, it doesn’t matter because one can CHOOSE a school in New Orleans. Oh, wait. No they can’t. They’re all charter schools. So much for choice.
I listen to speeches from pols and assorted lobbyists on charters and there’s this constant droning, patronizing lecture on how public schools have to adopt charter practices. Interestingly, there’s never ever mention of any reciprocal “learning” going on.
Apparently there is not a single public school in this country that could ever teach a charter school anything. That’s ridiculous. 100% spin. That isn’t how the world works, and it certainly isn’t how the “private sector” they all worship works.
Collaboration is reciprocal. It doesn’t work one way.
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As Eric Cartman of “South Park” fame once put it, “Respect my authoritah!”
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“Defenders of the policy say it saves time and teaches automatic obedience to small rules, which later translates into unquestioning obedience to rules and authority, preparing students to succeed in life.”
I see what you did there, Diane!
My guess is that the “boutique” phase charters in my state (RI) don’t do this stuff, because charters here are still at the phase where they are trying to lure parents of the “better” kids in. Those parents would not tolerate that sort of nonsense.
My guess is that this stuff comes later, once charters have been given responsibility for the “riff-raff” as well.
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But we really don’t know anything about what the discipline is like at BVP. I personally do not.
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Nothing — nothing! — about these “no excuses” schools prepares a student for college.
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Yep. Last I checked, NO college requires you walk on a certain side of the hall, or not talk between classes, or wear uniforms.
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And what’s with those “invisible lines” that you can’t cross in college, according to one of the people on that video? What is that all about?
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That’s about knowing your place, and staying there.
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I think it’s sad that we treat poorer children as if the only path to success is austerity, obedience, and rote learning. I understand the value of creating routines for children, regardless of background. Walking the line, however, seems condescending. No upper middle class parent would tolerate it unless it were in a military school environment.
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Kate – It’s not likely that these kids are ever going to come up with some important but unconventional idea. However learning obediance to social norms, if that goal can be accomplished, might keep them out of prison.
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How do you know “these kids” won’t come up with great ideas, Jim? And if you say anything about race or IQ, I’m going to scream.
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The chances of these kids winding up in prison are much greater than the chances that they will come up with any important idea.
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It’s because of racists like Jim that our nation leads all others in incarcerations, nearly half of which are due to non-violent crimes and the war on drugs.
“We have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of even highly-repressive regimes like Russia or China or Iran.”
And, with the privatization of prisons came guarantees to privatizers that the prisons would be kept at least 90% full, regardless of decreasing crime rates:
http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-incarceration-nation/
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Thanks, Jim.
I don’t know if you intended it, but you just gave voice to the unspoken subtext of “no excuses” charter schools, though you were less tactful about veiling the racist assumptions than the so-called reformers.
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Michael – Tact probably isn’t my strong point.
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No innovators or creative thinkers allowed should be their motto: Robot is school mascot. 🙂
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RICO investigations of the charter world cesspool are long overdue, and should include the spiderweb of managers, Board members, crony CMOs and landlords, venture capital funders, authorizing agencies and other political enablers.
So-called education reform, with charter schools as the tip-of-the-spear for taking over the public schools, has so far been a state-sanctioned racket – defined as “a pattern of illegal activity carried out as part of an enterprise that is owned or controlled by those who engage in the illegal activity,… including bribery…fraud……embezzlement and… obstruction of justice” – and its past time for the government to re-assert its responsibility to protect the public good and prevent the wholesale transfer of public wealth to private, and often criminal interests.
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I’m afraid they’re just going to settle and collect a fine. They don’t seem to actually prosecute white collar crime anymore. It all seems to be deal-making.
Pearson made a contribution to a non-profit as “punishment” in their NY case. I don’t get it. How is that even a deterrent? Can ordinary people do that? Make a charitable contribution and escape prosecution? Not that I’m aware of, they can’t.
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Yes, Chiara, as on Wall Street, brazen criminal activity will result in fines, if that, and the fines will correctly be seen as nothing more than the cost of doing business.
A State captured by self-seeking, parasitic elites acting with impunity used to be the definition of a Banana Republic. Now, it’s what we call the USA.
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I remember my first year of teaching first grade in 1998, watching a little boy walk into my classroom backwards, do a spin, then skip to his seat. I smiled and felt jealous at his joyful romping and freedom of movement, while at the same time completely falling in love with teaching little ones. Shame on anyone who would strip children of being children.
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It’s not quite so charming when they are 5’10” and take two people out on their way. 🙂 That being said, there are ways to control hyperactivity, obliviousness, and passive aggression, to name a few potentially disruptive behaviors, that do not involve cattle prods. I do have to own up to a game of one on one with a basketball playing student though. He made the basket (paper in waste basket) and forced a foul, too!
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One thing I need to say about rules and boundaries: all children need the consistency of rules and boundaries, but especially children from chaotic backgrounds. That being said, they SHOULD be allowed question authority, and “authority” should have a deep understanding of WHY rules and boundaries exist so they can share that reasoning with children. When children from chaotic backgrounds are permitted to do as they please, chaos does ensue. The need for firm and consistent rules is present in every school. I don’t think having kids walk on one side of the hallway going in one direction and the other side going the other direction is a bad thing in and of itself. It IS more efficient for the sake of time and personal space, just like traffic on the streets. The error is in making it a “do or die” kind of policy where children will be severely punished or are not allowed to question why. You can see the difference in kids who have had HEALTHY rules and boundaries established in their lives. On the playground, kids with these boundaries are actually quite good at playing in their personal space and sharing. Children from chaotic backgrounds (which poor children often have to deal with) are much more likely to bump into one another and be unable to negotiate playing games next to their peers without scuffles erupting because they do not have that sense of personal space.
I say this because it needs to be clear that you cannot teach if chaos is the order of the day. Rules and boundaries are good. Unquestioned authority is not. Rules and boundaries SHOULD be flexible… if they are NOT, then there’s a problem. The flexibility MUST come from a place of reason, and not be unquestionable or rigid.
So much of the rule questioning can be framed in terms of Kohlberg’s levels of moral development. If a child in your class hasn’t much conscience development, then rewards and consequences are what will be needed to negotiate behavior. This is why “carrots and sticks” are such a poor motivator for emotionally healthy adults, because with moral development, it’s much more about what is “good” and “right” (values that we constantly discuss and negotiate). Once a child’s development has moved past the rewards and consequences, praise works very well, and children are more likely to feel badly for breaking a rule, because they see the harm that they do (if it’s a rule with a good purpose!). Ideally, we develop a sense of doing what is right because it’s good for the majority of people and our decisions are based on principles.
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” If a child in your class hasn’t much conscience development, then rewards and consequences are what will be needed to negotiate behavior.”
No, no, no and no! “Those kids” don’t need bribes and threats (what rewards and punishment, respectively, really are) any more than “good” middle class kids do. Saying so is racist, classist and just flat out wrong. What they need – and what they get less of at home – is recognition of their humanity, individuality, experiences, emotions, joys and frustrations. Bribes and threats only seek to control, not to understand and are ultimately ineffective even if by “effective” you mean controlling behavior. Kids behave well when they know they are respected and valued. When they feel controlled, they simply do whatever they can to get around that control, and then you’re left throwing up your hands about how “bad” those kids are because they’ve never had “discipline” (by which you mean punishment). What they need – and what it is that they haven’t had – is unconditional positive regard.
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Don’t turn “rewards and consequences” into “bribes and threats.” I do agree, however, that the “no excuses” discipline philosophy is a pernicious and overly simplistic attempt to control behavior. Kids accept the need for rules in games; if they want to be included, they learn how to abide by them. There must be a way to leverage this understanding beyond the playground. I guess part of the problem is that too many children have limited access to playgrounds!
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Interesting points, all three of you.
I have no problems with lines. They represent boundaries and paths, two things that are important to learning life skills. They are used on our roads and in sports. They need not be viewed as threatening or demeaning. I would love to have them at my elementary school. There would most likely be a lot less aggressive behavior that fills our days.
I do not see a need for “no tolerance” here. Teachers are in the hall and gentle reminders may occasionally be needed but I expect that things would flow much more smoothly and “incidents” after students transition would likely decline.
Children are in school to learn. No matter their socioeconomic status, a line down the hallway serving as a guide should not be viewed as an intolerable assault on free thinking.
When I get in my car to go to work tomorrow I will be glad there are lines on the road and that everyone who is out there with me in most cases knows what they are for and will take full advantage of them.
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Dienne, you’re interpreting an awful lot from what I’m saying. I’ve taught children in high-poverty as well as middle income areas. Children (regardless of their parents income or the color of their skin) need to have rules and boundaries to feel safe. If the adults around them cannot establish order, they will not feel safe because then the bullies will run the show. There are children who have very poor conscience development (again, REGARDLESS of parental income and skin color), and if they are allowed to do as they please, the other children will not be safe. Children with poor conscience development could care less about the humanity in themselves or others, and until they can internalize that value, they have to see what’s in it for them. This has nothing to do with race or class; however, having taught in both arenas, the children from lower incomes tend to come from more chaotic backgrounds. At the same time, children from higher income families can have the opposite problem: entitlement. Both require appropriate boundaries and limits, and sometimes very firmly so. A challenging child will walk all over the adult who is wishy-washy. You can have unconditional positive regard while still maintaining order. You CANNOT let a strong-willed child hi-jack the classroom, or none of the children (including the strong-willed child) will have a chance at an education.
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Mostly agree with Hannah there.
I can’t quite understand the logic of people who: 1) oppose accountability on the ground that it’s basically impossible to educate poor minority kids who have chaotic home lives and chaotic neighborhoods, and who bring that chaos into the schools, yet 2) mocking inner-city educators who actually try to do something for these kids.
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You left out 3) people who whine ceaselessly about how charters were supposed to be laboratories that would take the most challenging kids the districts had to offer, educate those kids, and then faithfully convey their findings to the district (put aside for a minute whether that’s actually the true origin of charters), but who then decry the tendency of charters to focus on structure and how it relates to maximizing instruction and time spent on task.
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I don’t think anyone on here is questioning the need for rules and order. And NO ONE is mocking people who “try to do something for these kids.”
You really read a lot into Hannah’s comment. She says that order is necessary–which we all agree on. BUT, she also says that flexibility is ALSO important. It’s a question of fighting the right battles. Do we punish a kid for going two inches over the line? Or do we ignore small, inadvertent infractions and focus on the REAL priorities–learning, cooperating, thinking?
If a teacher spends their entire day focusing on the minute, unimportant details, then that teacher cannot focus on the real importance of school–LEARNING. Most teachers discover that on their own in the first couple of years of teaching, and then learn to ignore the small stuff that doesn’t matter. I used to send kids to the office for all kinds of small things when I was first teaching. Now, I mostly don’t have to. Obviously, if a small thing builds into something larger, I take care of that. BUT, most of the small things DON’T build up. I have learned to choose my battles. And I teach in a high poverty school. When the kids learn that you trust them with the small things, they mostly don’t try to fight you on the important stuff.
Every teacher has her or his own threshold and things that she or he finds important. But when an entire school is so focused on a minute detail as to make an entire video about it, then something is not right.
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Talk about abusive treatment but oh, that’s not done in charters because there is no oversight at charters. Maybe some cursory inspection of school funds but monitoring of charter school teachers, not done. Demanding that kids adhere to stupid rituals to instill compliance is not what I want my child to be subjected to. Also, it doesn’t work, walk the line one day, tag and erase the line the next. How can New Orleans get away without public education. It must not get federal money for education and it sounds unconstitutional
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Preparing them for lives in prison or lives as unquestioningly obedient automatons; I’m not sure which is worse. It seems we are witnessing an all-out war, not just on public education, but on childhood itself.
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My zoned neighborhood school, and dozens and dozens of other NYC DOE K-5 and K-8 schools built during the 50s-70s, have a permanent tiled line running down the middle of all corridors that was installed expressly for this purpose. One weeps for all the creativity and independent thinking those lines have sucked out of multiple generations of students.
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I sense some mocking in this comment. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Anyway, I don’t think anyone is saying that the lines in and of themselves are the problem. It’s the incessant “getting” kids for minor infractions–stepping a few inches over the line–that is the problem. Why spend time and energy punishing kids who go over the line? What does that teach the students? Is it worth everyone’s time and energy to focus so much on that? Sure, have the line as a rule of thumb, but should teachers be spending the time between classes greeting kids and making them feel welcome, or constantly harping on “staying on your side of the line?” I’d rather be interacting with the kids.
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Yes, you sense some mocking, and yes, I’m aware that some charters do not have an appropriate sense of proportion when it comes to enforcing their rules. But I find the claim that making kids follow instructions in school is part of a master plan to prepare them for a life in prison to be patently absurd.
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I never suggested that the line itself or working to keep kids organized and moving efficiently through the halls is a problem. It’s the constant punishment of kids who dare to, accidentally or on purpose, step over the line. If a kid is constantly blocking the hall, then fine. Take care of it. But do the kids have to go to detention for crossing the line or blocking the hall, unless it’s constant or egregious?
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It’s not about lines; it’s about the difference between whether a school seeks to foster cooperation or enforce obedience.
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You go Tim!!
ToW -I doubt much “harping ” is needed if students are consistently expected to follow the rules, code of conduct, or expectations. Students can be reminded with a gentle voice and a smile. They can be thanked for proceeding in an orderly fashion. This is not punishment – it’s life.
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Tim–You may–MAY–be correct in your response to ToW, that it is absurd to suggest this is about preparing them for prison (although life has taught me not to discount any possibility, even an absurd possibility, off-hand–how many things that “could never happen” have ended up happening anyway? ). However, the schools’ PUBLICLY STATED defense that they are doing this to foster an attitude of “unquestioning obedience” in students is downright chilling.
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Tim,
Having a line in the hallway is no more abusive than having a line on a highway, to separate traffic lanes. The issue is much larger, going to minute behavior control that is exercised in an authoritarian way.
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Authoritarian rule becomes a twisted, abusive substitute for genuine, respectful relationship building that fosters true learning.
So-called “no excuses” turns children into standardized test taking objects. Charter school teachers with a conscience know this.
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deutsch29: re your first sentence, some folks would state it as a difference between an authoritative approach and an authoritarian one.
I am for the former, against the latter. For, among other reasons:
1), When considering the indisputably best pedagogical practices personally favored by the leaders of the self-styled “new civil rights movement of our time,” I fail to find charter school practices as outlined here a feature of any of the schools they send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to. For example, Lakeside School [Bill & Melinda Gates] or U of Chicago Lab Schools [Mayor Rahm Emanuel] or Sidwell Friends [President & Mrs. Obama] or Delbarton School [Governor Chris Christie] or Spence School [former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg] or Harpeth Hall [Michelle Rhee], just to name a few. Those schools are indeed preparing their students to be the movers and shakers of the future. These charters are preparing their students to be the ones who are “moved and shaken.”
2), IMHO, the main reason isn’t for the benefit of the students. It’s for the benefit of the adults; i.e., to make their work environment less stressful and demanding—if the students benefit, that’s incidental.
3), As others have remarked, it internalizes feelings of docility and obedience, and is reminiscent of the way that a lot of people train animals. Yet note this mind numbing contradiction by the so-called “education reformers”: this most cage busting innovative 21st century requires people that can think outside the box, but young man/lady, stay within the lines!
Thank you for your comments here and your blog.
😎
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Glad to see appropriate terms and distinctions between these approaches!
I think a primary problem is that many who support authoritarian rule and external rewards and punishments don’t have a clue about other options, because they are not experts in education or child development. Then they accuse those of us who believe in an authoritative approach, which promotes intrinsic motivation and happens to be supported by research, of basically being permissive –a claim that is patently untrue.
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I recommend reading the Carver Collegiate handbook. It can be found here: http://www.carvercollegiate.org/images/uploads/CCA_2013_Handbook.pdf
There is a tone that many find truly disturbing. And the “saving time” argument doesn’t make sense, because they take a tremendous amount of time to shake every faculty member’s hand in the morning, and their out of school suspension rate of nearly 70% — with students getting suspended (built up demerits) for things like not locking their elbows when they raise their hands and wearing the wrong color belt — suggests that time in the classroom is not valued so highly.
Here is my take:
http://www.louisianaweekly.com/civil-rights-complaints-are-filed-against-three-n-o-schools/
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You should have warned us to not read that handbook if we had just eaten. I’m now sick to my stomach. NO family of privilege would look at this handbook and say, “Well, sign my kids up! That’s exactly what they need.”
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Threatened – You are right; just reading some of it left me feeling nauseous. If you know how to teach, you don’t need all these rituals. I can only imagine what the staff handbook must look like!
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My junior high school ran like that. There was a line down the middle and one was for going up the hall and the other down. Ours, like many NYC schools had our staircases labeled the same way. Hence you never went UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE. We didn’t walk a single line, we just had to stay to one side. Teachers would stand in the hall between periods to make sure we went from room to room in an orderly fashion. This was a safety concern, but to now label it as the “invisible lines of life” and obedience is very creepy. I wonder how much a child in these schools are allowed to be who they are and be creative. Every classroom has a joker. What happens to that student who blurts out something funny in the middle of a lesson?? 20 years from now there will be lots of memoirs written about their times in these charters, and I expect it will be frightening.
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I don’t find this offensive. Where I taught, it might have helped to turn the hallways into a road with one way on one side, but enforcing it would have meant a large police force with two or more officers or teachers outside during every break in each hallway and even then it wouldn’t have been easy in the beginning.
Rules are easy to write but difficult to enforce without manpower and then that’s just one more responsibility for teachers, because costs for a large campus police force are not going to help Charter profits.
That means the lower paid Charter teachers will be given one more responsibility too many and cause more churn.
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“Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.” – Maria Montessori
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“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” [William Arthur Ward]
Chris in Florida: more than an apt quote, this is a gem.
Most humbly, the kraziest of props.
😎
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Striving for the goal of total unquestioning obedience is a brutal ambush attack against our most cherished American values of democracy.
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Authoritarian rule becomes a twisted, abusive substitute for the respectful relationship building that fosters real learning.
Sent from my iPhone
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