This is, quite frankly, an alarming post.
EduShyster learns about the techniques, strategies, and philosophy of “no excuses” charter schools by interviewing Joan Goodman, who directs the Teach for America program at the University of Prnnsylvania.
Goodman describes how the “no excuses” charters program young children to obey authority without question. ” To reach [their] objectives, these schools have developed very elaborate behavioral regimes that they insist all children follow, starting in kindergarten. Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can’t really do this kind of instruction if you don’t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they’re told.”
“In order to maximize academic accomplishment, no time can be wasted and anything that’s not academically targeted, that’s not geared to what the students have to know, is time wasted. So there is almost no opportunity for play, for relaxation, very little time for extra-curricular activities. The day is jammed with academics, especially math and reading because that’s what gets tested. The view of time and strict discipline are related, by the way; in order to get these kids to attend over very long hours—they have extended days and extended weeks—you have to be tough with the kids, really severe. They want these kids to understand that when authority speaks you have to follow because that’s basic to learning. So they don’t have the notion of learning that more progressive educators have, that learning is a very active enterprise and that children have to be very participatory and thinking and speaking and discussing and sharing and having initiative. That’s not their view of learning. It’s too variable across teachers, the objectives are too non-specific, and time is wasted.”
Just as the children are programmed, their teachers too must be programmed to demand total obedience and not to permit any deviationfr the rules.
This is an important interview. It explain much about the robotic behavior that “no excuses” charters value. It is something that young white teachers do to black children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Progressive’s Public School Shakedown has an article in a similar vein. Here are some excerpts:
“As we can see from the work of Michael Katz, the education reformers’ playbook has not changed much in two hundred years. Today’s reformers take the same paternalistic approach to education.
Just how far is KIPP Charter School “no excuses” discipline from the 19thcentury reform school? Certainly, charter school disciplinary practices can be seen in the same paternalistic light that Katz has shown on the 19thcentury reformers.
Reformy billionaire Bill Gates and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman have both recently blamed children and their parents for American students’ “lack of motivation.” Reformers think that if only people would do what reformers think is the right thing all would be well.
No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Mayoral control of school boards and the Common Core State (sic) Standards all fit nicely into the reform playbook for subverting democracy through centralized control.
Attacks on teachers, teacher unions, pensions, tenure and seniority can all be seen as one piece with the traditional reform goal of providing education on the cheap.
The modern reformer argument that it is education that is the problem, not poverty and other economic and social forces, echoes the 19th century oversimplification of the problems facing the newly industrialized world.
It is apparent that over 200 years education reformers have not learned very much. Blinded by a paternalistic view of the “other” and driven by profit motives and a desire to control costs and shape the world in their own image, they fail to see the bigger picture or recognize the complexity of the problems.”
Blind obedience to authority is the antithesis of what our nation was founded upon. What a dangerous precedent to set. Eleanor’s point about oversimplified 19th century approach to education during industrialization and Lofthouse’s ominous warning about totalitarian regimes and the indoctrination process – Little Red Guard, Hitler Youth resonates!
Further adding salt to the wounds… I grow tired of hearing that music, art, play are separate from academics – THEY ARE NOT! Creative process is what leads a scientist or mathematician to test out a totally “out of the box” idea. Music involves math. How could a play structure be created without understanding of movement? Play or rest time is even an enabler of “out of the box ideas” to arise. How many of us have come up with a great lesson idea while swimming in the ocean, having a picnic or resting in bed? How many children gain knowledge while taking an after school field trip or an after school dance program? So tired of reading a comment that compartmentalizes learning in the quote I’ve referenced below. In the “reformy” quote below… one could take out the words, “academically targeted” and replace them with “high stakes tested”… Relaxation, play, creative process are all components of academics as far as I am concerned!
Ughh ….
“In order to maximize academic accomplishment, no time can be wasted and anything that’s not academically targeted, that’s not geared to what the students have to know, is time wasted. So there is almost no opportunity for play, for relaxation, very little time for extra-curricular activities…
It seems to me that the bad-teacher PR started right after a raft of poverty-is-the-real-problem articles. Education “reform” was like a many-pronged attack (like Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine”): charter schools! no unions! untested unfair bureaucratic evaulations! school closings or takeovers! …..that absorbed all the oxygen leaving no room for discussions of the real problem: poverty.
I’ve seen a few more articles talking about poverty being the real underlying problem since charter schools have not magically solved the problem. Perhaps we can get back to that.
Goodman describes how the “no excuses” charters program (expects or demands) young children to obey authority without question.
I’m thinking of the Hitler Youth and Mao’s Little Red Guard. Mao used children to launch the Cultural Revolution and he then turned it over to children and sat back as they dismantled and destroyed a culture that was several thousand years old.
The most powerful totalitarian weapon is children who are raised to obey authority without question. These children will even turn their parents in to the executioners.
Humans are biological computers and the input that programs how they think is life. Control that programming and you control everything—-the odds are heavily against this happening in a democratic, transparent public school district with an elected school board that changes with elections.
But with an opaque, private sector CEO, and a few share-holder controlled corporations in control of the schools and children, they have the power to do whatever they want without question.
Right now, we have about 15,000 democratically run public school districts. If Obama’s fake PubEd reform movement wins, then we will have about 6 corporations controlling the majority of the schools and the rest of us will have no say over what they feed our children’s brains.
The future will be VERY bleak.
This is about institutionalizing these children early. Walk with your hands in you pockets; no talking in the hallway.
Young people are suppose to question authority, make up their own minds, push the envelop to test the waters of being an adult. Schools that respect young people know this. Schools that care about young people know this.
I will again risk offending the Quaker’s.
Arne Dumcan’s rise to power can be traced back to his mother’s “learning center” which employs the strict controls embraced by charters. There is a dvd available that celebrates Sue Duncan’s life and work. I was always worried about my shirt being tucked in and sitting up straight when I volunteered in Sue’s program. In that context the strict protocol was balanced by adequet time for play and sports. Arne didn’t seem to get that aspect of his Mother’s program.
If you think that you may offend the Quakers if you say something controversial, perhaps you should not say it.
For an excellent reflection on the difference between authoritarian and authoritative teaching, see Paul Thomas’ essay:
http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/authoritarian-v-authoritative-with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility/
Too big of a brush. I work in a “No Excuses” KIPP school in Newark, NJ and completely reject the notation that we want our students to submit and do not value them as people. Mr.Goodman and Ms. Ravitch are warmly invited to our school, Rise Academy, at anytime to see for themselves how misguided this article is when tested against the reality of our school.
Thomas,
I can’t speak to your specific KIPP school, but there’s KIPP approach.
70% of the KIPP grads who are accepted to college bomb out once there. That is, they quit and give up without attaining a Bachelor’s degree.
Mind you, those are the students that survive the sky-high attrition rates at KIPP schools—as high as 70% to begin with.
What happened?
Your students are put through such intensive drudgery—longer school days/school years, plus 2-3 hours of homework… they basically gave up their childhood and—if they attended a KIPP high school—their adolescence. After they’ve quit college, they have nothing to show for it. Once they drop out of college, the KIPP programming to the kids was and is: “It’s your fault you failed. You suck!”
Something is wrong with KIPP’s total obedience and compliance pedagogy. When your KIPP-sters start attending college, they’re going to be sitting next to students who were taught things they were not—critical thinking, independent thinking, how to challenge authoriity, that it sometimes is a moral imperative to challenge authority… and argue all these things persuasively.
When seasoned private school and public school teachers see their students participating in some political action or civil disobedience, they know that they’ve done their job right.
KIPP teachers teach the opposite. That’s a big part of the reason the ones who make it so college are bombing out.
Look into it!
I am fortunate to work in a school where very stern discipline is not necessary, but I do think there are schools where it is. In such situations it seems to me more ethical to be stern than to allow chaos. An orderly environment will allow the transmission of knowledge that frees minds. Chaos leaves kids mired in disempowering ignorance. To those of you who deplore KIPP style strictness, do you deny that there are many chaotic schools? What is your diagnosis for that problem, and what is the cure if not strict discipline?
The dereliction of duty, greed and cowardice of college faculty, in both education and economics departments, in both private and public universities, earns them the label, “the worst professorial generation”.
The public fights (a) corrupt charters (b) failed on-line schools, owned by convicted financiers and campaign donors, and (c) the money-leeching tech and test international corporations. When a courageous professor joins them and testifies, in his state capitol, citing research against testing abuse of children, he gets punished, internally and externally.
On the other hand, faculty across the country take grants and receive funding to push an agenda, against the 99%. They testify for copyrighted curriculum, privatized public goods and whatever the wealthy foundations and think tanks want.
And other faculty, count the number of their weak polemic arguments, published in discipline-specific periodicals ( e.g. research that concludes by telling powerless teachers to “advisedly” reject false reformer claims). Then, they pat themselves on the back, as if they didn’t reflect the worst of their profession.
Unfortunately, this brave new world of mind-control educational philosophy has silently crept into the public school system through No Child Left Behind and the encouragement which became mandatory through the PBS (Positive Behavior Support) program.
I’ve battled this, with little success, for several years now. Instead of lessening the school to prison pipeline this approach accelerates it and watching little children march in lockstep, hands behind their backs, mouths closed, in identical uniforms makes my skin crawl.
My district (through state Differentiated Accountability mandate) has hired a whole group of so-called ‘behavior specialists’ whose job is little more than going into classrooms where teachers complain about disruptive children and indoctrinating the teacher and children into compliance-based behaviorist techniques like those used in the charter schools.
We will have a generation or two of compliant children who grow into compliant adults and who will fear questioning anything, especially authority figures, and that scares me more than I can express.
This paternalistic way of schooling sounds a lot like the Catholic schools you’ve been found of Diane. Not alarming at all – actually quite traditional.
Citizen Stewart, not at all like the Catholic schools I have visited, which had a moral and ethical core and a respect for the dignity of each child as a child of God.
Just as all charter schools are not alike. If there are charter schools that parents should not be allowed to choose for their students, by all means close them. Let the ones that parents are allowed to choose from concentrate on the education of their students.
I think people see things with a different set of eyes when their own children’s education is at issue. I’m Catholic (technically speaking) and spent a few unhappy years in a parochial school that respected the dignity of each child on its own monstrously coercive and utterly typical terms. 25 years later, I was desperate enough about school options for my daughter that I toured one of the most highly regarded Catholic schools in NYC. The place was cheerful on a surface level, but after one glance at a wall of God-related “art,” I was asking myself how I could have ever even considered doing this to my daughter.
A certain amount of order is essential in any school. No child can learn or be safe in a chaotic environment, but freedom of self expression must also be encouraged and honored. I taught for more than three and a half decades so I have seen trends come and come. My least favorite teaching experience was when I taught French through a scripted program. I still remember all the glazed eyes staring at me while they yawned. When I first started teaching ESL, no one really knew what it was! I invented everything! It was a challenge and very rewarding. For most of my career, I planned lessons with Bloom’s Taxonomy in mind, and I always looked for ways to get students to apply, analyze and synthesize what we had learned. I understood that people learn differently so I planned activities that tapped into students’ learning styles. These were some of my most memorable lessons! Many former students came back to tell me how much they got out of the class. I’ve always considered teaching part craft and part art. As for authority, I know it is earned. I didn’t have too many problems with students. Overall, I had earned their respect, and there’s a lot less time for nonsense when students are engaged.
It’s about crowd control: Hitler, Mussolini, Amin, Stalin—they were all masters of these techniques. This is what the industrial model of education is all about: crowd control.
“Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can’t really do this kind of instruction if you don’t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they’re told.”
Unfortunately this is exactly the ethos that Arne Duncan wants to propagate through federal policies, and specifically by pitting states against each other for funding, offering bait for programs that require total compliance.
The alarming part of this “shove it around and trickle down” policy ethos is that educators who ought to have more respect for the profession of teaching are swallowing it and without a second thought.
A case in point is the Maryland Compact that requires teachers to conform to a scheme for micromanagement of their work no longer used by business–Drucker’s management-by-objectives revived for pay-for-performance plans and now called “Student Learning Objectives.”
On June 27, 2014 six major education agencies in the state of Maryland, including the Baltimore Teachers Union, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) endorsing the use of SLOs statewide and stating that; ” 1. The primary goal of evaluating teaching should be to improve effectiveness in the classroom, which will lead to student growth. “The SLO process is an important component of effective instruction,” When collaboratively developed and implemented appropriately, the use of rigorous objectives coupled with multiple strategies, measured by multiple assessments, leads to academic success and growth on the part of students.”
2. The parties shall coordinate resources and strategies to assist educators in the development of rigorous and measurable, but obtainable SLOs.
3. The parties shall effectively assist teachers and principals in fully understanding, utilizing, and embracing SLOs, by focusing on professional development that, minimally:
a) Identifies the key elements of a rigorous SLO, utilizing common definitions and content to develop consistency across LSSs;
b) Assists in setting measurable and obtainable benchmarks;
c) Recognizes progress/growth and effective strategies for achieving SLOs.
This project is intended to micro-manage the work of teachers. An SLO is writing assignment for teachers and if it is “rigorous” it must meet about 26 criteria, including a prediction of the proportion of students who will meet or exceed a “target’ for learning– expressed as a test score, and a target for “growth” a euphemism for the difference between pre-test and posttest scores.
This process has been marketed by the Boston-based Community Training and Assistance Center since 1999 when it was piloted for the Denver pay-for-performance project. These Maryland organizations say they want to use because it will provide a ” common language, streamlined communication and implementation strategies.” Common language? is that a threat? Streamlined communications? is that a problem or an excuse to truncate thinking and a revival of the speech police?”
These is no evidence that this process improves student learning. It is all about compliance with a dated system of “personnel management.” It creates a blizzard of paperwork. It is filled with traps for teachers, and in business was dubbed by one economist “bureaupathology.”
This is appalling. Why do educational institutions (like my state) experiment with methodologies (personnel management) that were abandoned elsewhere because they didn’t work? In addition they’re untested on children, but they roll them out as a massive experiment on thousands at a time. It’s like hucksters go around selling the latest snake oil and our departments of education don’t do any “due diligence”, they just buy it. How did it get to be this way? In Tennessee we’re always trying something that California gave up on 5 years ago. Why would we do that? It seems completely illogical — if your goal really is improving educational outcomes.
Laura, thanks for this. This is exactly why I get frustrated with Randi Weingarten, Linda Darling-Hammond, and other supposed ‘allies’ of teachers: they have bought into and accepted the ‘improvement-based needs’ rhetoric, which was clearly a rhetorical trap that prevents advocates and allies from defending the teaching profession and public schools.
It’s exactly what hobbled Barack Obama in his ‘negotiations’ with conservatives, Republicans, and Tea Partiers. Giving away your foundational position for the sole reason that you want to be seen as willing to meet in the middle robs you of any effective bargaining strategies. Teachers, in general, have historically done a great job at educating a diverse public (with acknowledgement of the need to continue working against institutionalized classism, sexism, racism, and homophobia).
There was not and is not a “need for improvement” or a “better evaluation methodology”. These are buzzwords created by the destructive reformists. Dr. Bracey and Diane both have extensively documented how US schools were consistently ending the achievement gap and achieving historically high rates of general literacy, high school graduation, and higher education.
By creating their MOU based upon the lies of the reformists, the MD ‘allies’ have sold their teachers down the river.
All this while the children of the plutocrats attend private schools where higher order thinking, arts, music, field experiences, and no lock step practices flourish. Which children will be ready to lead the next generation and which will be expected to follow?
It resonated with me when Goodman said she realized the student “didn’t think they deserved freedom”. Any of us that grew up in an authoritarian household could have told her about that consequence.
Exactly what the 1 Percent want!
For more information, please read the Alternet article:
“Why We Let Cops Get Away With Murder But Vilify Even the Best School Teachers”
For a little perspective.
This blog, 11/21/2012, a posting entitled “When Gary Rubinstein Visited KIPP.”
The entire posting: “Gary Rubinstein was among the nation’s earliest Teach for [A]Merica teachers. Unlike most TFA, however, he became a career teacher. He now teaches at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. This is a very interesting report on a visit he paid to a KIPP school. Be sure to read t[h]e comments.” [brackets mine]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2012/11/21/when-gary-rubinstein-visited-kipp/
In the posting is a link [highlighted by color] that will take you to Gary Rubinstein’s original blog posting.
And yes, I second the suggestion to read the comments.
😎
The comments on the EduShyster piece are well worth reading.
It’s probably self-evident to point out that many New York City families applying to “no excuses” charters-slash-eugenicist reprogramming centers are zoned for schools that are chaotic to the point of dysfunction. How or why the zoned school got that way is irrelevant.
This is indeed an important interview, and I’m good with your take on it, Diane, right up until your last sentence:
“This is an important interview. It explain much about the robotic behavior that “no excuses” charters value. It is something that young white teachers do to black children.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the values and methods described here are not unique to charter schools (one local example: the alternative public high school in Ann Arbor (not the “hip” one, Community H.S., but the at-risk one, Roberto Clemente), had all the usual trappings of a charter in terms of strict discipline, parent contracts, and so forth, at least as far back as the late 1990s, and it is definitely NOT a charter.
Further, the long-time principal there, now retired at, was a notoriously hard-nosed disciplinarian who would fit in perfectly with every “No Excuses” charter I’ve ever visited or read about. His name is Joe Dulin. And he’s most definitely black.
Nor is he an aberration. I’ve met people like him in Detroit, Flint, and other primarily black and Latino, working-class public school systems.
While I don’t think he’s perfectly typical, my point here is that to put the above-described values and methods on young white teachers is more than a bit unfair. It’s certainly what TFA and similar outfits would LIKE their teachers to do. And the majority of those teachers are young and white. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that this is just a problem of white pseudo-teachers and black kids. That misses the bigger picture of this particularly heinous approach to dealing with children in ways I don’t think we can afford to do.
Hitler et al could not have stated it better. Mind control. All tyrants wish to exercise this.
In chaotic classrooms, the mind control comes from pop culture, dysfunctional peers and parents, and the Internet rather than the teacher. Stern discipline can be a tool for mental enslavement –or for mental liberation. I’m inclined to believe that most teachers resort to it for the latter purpose.
Without discipline, how does a child learn to set goals and follow through? I think there’s a big difference between discipline and mind control and/or brainwashing.
I agree with you that most teachers resort to discipline for mental liberation. The other choice is anarchy and chaos.
Lloyd,
Does your belief that most teachers resort to discipline for mental liberation include teachers at charter schools? That does not seem to be the orthodox opinion here.
From what I’ve learned about Charter schools, the discipline is harsh and students, who don’t bend to those harsh rule,s are kicked out and the largest number of those students are at-risk children and children with learning disabilities who are the most difficult to teach.
What does that leave the Charter schools? I think the answer is children who are easier to control, manipulate and brainwash.
For instance: Arkansas charter school operator teaching creationism in Texas
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2014/01/16/arkansas-charter-school-operator-teaching-creationism-in-texas
They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state. If voters don’t like the foundations’ reform agenda, they can’t vote them out of office. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountable power.