Elizabeth Green of Chalkbeat discusses the arguments for and against “no excuses” charter schools like Success Academy, KIPP, and Achievement First.
She begins with the example of the video in which a first grade teacher at a Success Academy charter chastises a child, sends her to the “calm down”corner, and rips her paper in half.
Green acknowledges that there are charters where harsh discipline is common practice.
She reviews the critics’ view that such punitive discipline is unnecessarily humiliating and that it is fundamentally racist. The children are likely to explode or have psychological melt downs in response to strict control.
Those who defend “no excuses” discipline say that it teaches children appropriate behavior and self-control. Far from being racist, they believe they are rescuing poor children from a life of poverty, gangs, and drugs.
Is the “no excuses” regime an exercise in colonialism or is it the path to liberation? Can the demand for strict conformity produce people who are capable of initiative and self-reliance?
What do you think?
PS: Schools Matter dismissed Green as a shill for the corporate reform movement. I didn’t see this critique until after I posted.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Saying that black and brown kids need a fundamentally different kind of education is fundamentally racist and colonial. It doesn’t matter that many black and brown parents have bought into it – that’s part of what oppression does.
BTW, is there a link to Ms. Green’s piece?
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I added the link. Sorry.
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The fact that many African American and Hispanic parents have bought into this type of discipline is scary because it means they see their own children as needing to be punished in order to achieve in school. I’ve had this discussion with a number of parents of charter school students, I can’t understand this kind of feeling about one’s child.
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Helen – I agree, it is scary. And as a white woman, I don’t know how to address it.
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Found it: http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2016/03/08/beyond-the-viral-video-inside-educators-emotional-debate-about-no-excuses-discipline/#.VugZHebHm9h
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Charter schools, in general, are an alternate reality for a select few. They are not scalable and do not have the potential to solve our greater problems. In fact, they are a distraction and a cancer to public schools which aspire to prepare our future voters to be responsible citizens. As far as “no excuses” schools go, I have never found that one size management of students fits all. The compliant children in the “no excuses” schools would help to provide balance to classes in public schools. No teacher should have to manage large classes with many conduct disorder cases in it. Unfortunately, the proliferation of charter schools has made classroom management and teaching more difficult for too many teachers today as funds follow students to charters. The most logical, sensible argument against charters comes from Peter Greene. The fact is public schools have everything and more that charters offer as long as public schools get the kind of support they require. The institutionalized under funding of some schools has been a chronic problem in public education that must be addressed. This link is one of Greene’s best posts in my opinion. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/03/what-is-charter-difference.html
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I work in a charter school that has deliberately broken away from the “no excuses” model and I can say that it has drastically improved our school culture, the socio-emotional wellbeing of our scholars, and their academic performance. The type of humiliation and emotional abuse that occurs in “no excuses” environments is unacceptable and absolutely contributes to systemic educational oppression which disproportionately affects black and brown scholars.
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JessicaMunozESL: thank you for your comments.
😎
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Next, please try calling them “students” and not “scholars;” it’s a very pretentious and deceptive term.
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I’m not clear on why you think using the word scholars is pretentious or deceptive, when that’s what they are. I’m also not clear on why you think it’s necessary for you to police other people’s use of language. If you don’t like the term, don’t use it.
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I defend Michael Fiorillo on the absurdity of calling little children “scholars.” A scholar is a person who has devoted his life to study and the advancement of knowledge. A child is never a scholar. If you can use any word you want, call a child an adult. Why corrupt the meaning of scholarship?
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So a child who from age 4-5 is in school learning for 7-10 hours a day hasn’t devoted their life to study and the advancement of knowledge? I think by your very own definition, children are scholars. I respect your views enormously, but we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.
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A child is not a scholar. Even if they study 24 hours a day, they are not experts in any field of knowledge. They will not be asked about theories if knowledge in their field. They will not make scientific breakthroughs. There are Nobel prizes for scholars, and none of them are children. Children are students. They are not scholars. Scholarship requires years of study. It is not a title granted to a five-year-old on the first day of school. Except in charter schools where words don’t mean what they usually mean. Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter would feel at home in this topsy-turvy world where babies are “scholars.” What nonsense!
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Elizabeth Green is a very skillful and slippery shill for so-called education reform, which the site she edits exists to promote (along with some incidental reportage to inoculate it against charges that it’s nothing but a propaganda sheet. Feigning objectivity, the piece is in fact a sly defense and deflection in the service of Skinner Box charters, especially the chains.
Her piece is subtle, but is ultimately a defense of “no excuses charter” schools, whereby readers are told that “public schools do it, too,” and ultimately, “There’s nothing to see here, move along.”
It’s advocacy, in the form of supposedly “objective” journalism.
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This ^^^^
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Eva Moskowitz has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today defending her “orderliness in schools” concept, attacking the NYTimes for questioning her use of no-nonsense discipline, praising parents who exercise choice, claiming that education professors and reporters have no expertise to offer, least of all if they lack personal experience with dysfunctional urban schools that students are forced to attend.
She then throws in some claims about the long wait lists for seats in charter schools. She pitches the growth of charters in ” relatively wealthy communities” (Upper West Side Manhattan) who want charters-claiming 3000 applicants for 100 seats and “academically rigorous” schools.
She claims that the unstated premise of her critics ” is that parents are being duped because they are poor and unsophisticated…linking that to ” the Marxist critique of how the proletariat could be mislead by capitalist society” … . She ends with by insinuating that her critics have ” contempt for parents’ intelligence and commitments their children.”
The effort to take down one unnamed reporter at the NY Times includes a word count of the stories, and the complaint that 34% of the coverage was negative. Only 34% ?
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She claims that the unstated premise of her critics ” is that parents are being duped because they are poor and unsophisticated…linking that to ” the Marxist critique of how the proletariat could be mislead by capitalist society” … . She ends with by insinuating that her critics have ” contempt for parents’ intelligence and commitments their children.”
But remember! Ed reformers are “agnostic”. Just looking at the data Rigorous science. No ideological bent towards charters. All pure and unbiased “data”.
It’s just that anyone who questions anything they do is a “Marxist”
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I don’t have access to the WSJ so didn’t read the piece.
Did Eva Moskowitz cite how many 8th grade students in her school this year tested high enough on the SHSAT to get into a specialized high school? The results just came out last week.
I imagine that as soon as she has brag-worthy results we shall hear about them.
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The article gives, basically “it works” as one reason to keep doing “no excuses”. “It works” basically means “high test scores” (although there is a nod to a greater percentage of KIPP students getting 4 year degrees than other low income kids). But even if we accept test scores as a “measure” of “it works”, the “no excuses” “discipline” isn’t the main reason for the high test scores. The article makes absolutely no mention of it, but the fact remains that charters cherry pick both on the front and back ends. I too could get a school to score high on tests if I’m allowed to only select the strivers that are willing to go through a rigorous application procedure and then “counsel out” the students who don’t “fit” with my school. Voila! High test scores. Guess that makes me an educational genius.
The article also basically says, in favor of “no excuses”, some kids like it. We really have to question that. Kids who are able to comply “like” to comply because they like the rewards – whether actual physical rewards or just the approval and attention rewards – they get for doing so. But the message is that attention and approval are limited commodities and that one has to be “worthy” to get them. This gives the compliant children the notion that they are somehow better than those who struggle to comply and makes them even more avid compliers. It doesn’t matter whether or not kids “like” the system – it’s inherently degrading and abusive to make approval and worthiness contingent on “proper” behavior – for both the “good” and the “bad” kids.
The third argument in favor is basically “these schools can change”. Well, maybe, but aren’t they the ones telling us that kids can’t wait? How long do the kids in these schools have to suffer abuse before these schools figure it out and reinvent the wheel? A lot of the revelations the article talks about that the schools have realized are things that anyone who knows a thing about child development could have told you up front. Further, as these schools change, are they making their changes loudly and publicly so that everyone knows they were wrong to begin with? Of course not, they’re just quietly walking back many of the methods and procedures they bragged so loudly about before.
And don’t even get me started on the strawman this article builds up about how these are the first schools to have “high expectations” for kids.
Overall, this is a darn good example of “fair and balanced” “journalism”. There really is no controversy – “no excuses” is bad for kids and bad for schools. But since we have to be “fair” and present “both sides” we have to come to some “reasonable” middle ground conclusion which necessitates overlooking many arguments against “no excuses” and overlooking a lot of the shortcomings in the arguments in favor.
(Incidentally, sorry for using quote so darn often, but considering how the language has been hijacked by the rephormers, there’s hardly any words left to use without quotes.)
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Dienne: well put.
😎
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The “no excuses” schools work great if they select those with the most potential and unload any problems or expensive students, about a third of the students. As stated before, this is an unnecessary alternate reality that fails to address our bigger problems, and it makes it harder for public schools to function when they splinter resources. We already have magnet schools why do we need charters? Why do we need middle class charters other than to make profit for a few at the expense of many. They serve no societal gain in my view, and they put undue burden on public schools. We don’t need to use public money to enhance segregation.
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I have been against charter schools for years.
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I do not undestand how or why anyone thinks that humiliating and berating children is acceptable. If it works so well, then the charter school proponents should be enrolling their own children.
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What do I think?
I think this gulag level of harsh discipline will either break children and turn them into obedient automatons that live lives of depressing desperation—many of them will suffer with mental illness (PTSD, for instance) increasing the suicide rate—or shove them into the fast lane for the poverty to prison pipeline.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Imagine Moskowitz’s explanation if that had been Sasha Obama humiliated. Or, in future, Chelsea Clinton’s daughter. Unacceptable. Unthinkable.
Who gets to make mistakes and be given second chances? Who get to learn from missteps without having a ton of bricks fall on them? Charter schools decide this on their own, insulated from society at large. Their “founder’s” kids get all sorts of special treatments, beginning with the family wealth that their CEO parent provides, thanks to the taxes of any homeowner unfortunate enough to be in a district colonized by charter neighbors.
Charters are a fundamentally unfair and unbalanced system.
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Count me as skeptical of the “No Excuses” model of behavior modification.
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Does anything interesting or worthy of note ever happen in a public school?
Thousands of public schools and the entire ed reform movement revolves around 3 charter chains.
It’s almost like there’s some kind of bias operating here, but I know that can’t be true, what with all the reliance on “data” and the rigorous scientific method that always seems to lead them back to the same 3 charter chains.
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Your point really strikes home. Our school district has developed a radical new promotion program for middle school students. We offer it for free – and it costs nothing to implement. It absolutely alters the culture of a middle school, yet we can get no traction promoting it thanks to RTTT/CCSS and the charter reform obsession.
I’ll try again to link to the article.
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Even at the tiny private middle school I attended, mean girls savaged the wonderful young Mt. Holyoke grad who taught us English. Kids –whether they be white and privileged or black and poor –can be awful, and that’s why all schools should be allowed to keep a bottle of stern discipline in the medicine cabinet. There should be other, less potent medicines in there too. But without the strong medicine, the disease can get out of control. Many of the writers on this blog, it seems to me, hold an inadequate conception of what an immature human being is. They see an innocent or an angel. Every misbehavior is the result of a “trauma”. Non-traumatized kids are usually nice. Be nice to kids and they’ll be nice in return. If they show disrespect it’s because the adults are disrespecting them (if this is true, then I must conclude that all teens’ parents are guilty of disrespecting their teens). All discussion of discipline needs to be grounded in an accurate conception of what humans are. A falsity-ridden orthodoxy has ossified around the discussion of discipline in America. Like the Protestant Reformers of the 16th Century, the ed reformers are smashing this orthodoxy –along with many good things that don’t deserve smashing. My hope is that the education establishment, in the wake of this upheaval, will undertake a Counter-Reformation, as the Catholic Church did, wherein they defend what’s defensible about their practice and fix what’s indefensible. The magical thinking about angelic kids is indefensible (not to say full-KIPP is the way to go either).
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Very few people believe in “angelic kids”.
But no one believes that suspending a 5 and 6 year old child over and over again because he is supposedly “violent” in your school is a teaching method. It is a method to get rid of those kids.
No excuses schools don’t keep enough of their students. Now this would be acceptable with an unpopular school, but apparently there are thousands of students on the wait list whose parents are desperate for just these types of “no-excuses” schools. If these schools were truly working, very few students would leave. But since these schools simply use “no excuses” as their ONLY excuse for humiliating and punishing the kids on the “got to go” list until they leave, their attrition rates – at least for the ones getting the “best” results — are sky high.
Lots of schools have strong discipline and don’t simply look the other way at misbehaving kids. What distinguishes the “no excuses” schools is that they simply force the kids they don’t want out instead of figuring out methods to get them to behave better.
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This is a typical example of the “false choice” fallacy, whereby we are supposed to believe that the only choices we have are between a racist, Skinner Box boot camp, and students abusing teachers and each other.
Next…
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I get what you are saying, Ponderosa. I spent my career working with special ed kids. Most of them were well behaved and at least open to learning although they tended to have very low opinions of themselves. Some of them could drive a saint to “unsaintly” behavior. They had many years to perfect avoiding the appearance of inadequacy. Obviously, I am talking about older children, but even younger children can be challenging and need interventions beyond what a classroom teacher can provide on occasion if she/he is going to teach an entire classroom of children. Where we have fallen down in recent years is in providing support for teachers when students need support beyond what a teacher can provide or should be expected to provide in the moment. Administration too often has abdicated all authority to deal with discipline issues that can reasonably considered to be beyond a teacher’s control. Let me make clear that I am not in favor of punitive solutions to behavior problems, but I am in favor of teachers having the support of administrators who can handle problems that need immediate attention outside the classroom even if it is only to deescalate behavior. Too many times I heard from teachers how students who had been sent to a dean were returned to the classroom within five minutes. The only response from the administrator was that the teacher had poor class management skills. So helpful!
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“No excuses” doesn’t work. The reason we know it doesn’t work is that the schools that are “no excuses” lose a disproportionate number of at-risk students. The saddest part is that the children who are left don’t need the no excuses and would more than likely thrive in a wonderful school that didn’t treat them like criminals. But without the ability to get rid of up to half — maybe more — of the at-risk kids who win the lottery, the “no excuses” schools would have mediocre test results and so they sacrifice the “strivers” and force them into a demeaning education because they are in schools where most kids are poor and thus high numbers need to be weeded out in order to keep test scores high.
How do I know this? Because the no-excuses schools that have affluent children don’t treat the affluent kids with the same humiliating tactics designed to push out the kids on the “got to go” list. Take a look at the video of the parents at the Success Academy school who went on record explaining how kind the “model teacher” treated THEIR children. Every one of those parents looked like a college grad. None of them were living in homeless shelters like the child who was treated in a manner guaranteed to get her to eventually leave. She had already been held back one year — would she ever have made it to 3rd grade or – if her mother had kept her in the school – would she have been held back yet another year?
I am starting to think that the only way to fight the lies of the no-excuses charters is to have the public schools run competing lottery schools that are well-funded but only for students who behave and can perform at grade level or above. Any parent of a child like that who has a choice of a “no-excuses” school or one that has loving teachers would choose that one. It would starve the “no excuses” schools of the families they want and they would be forced to educate the kids they don’t want.
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You touch upon the funding issue which is huge. Public schools already offer options for students through magnet, vocational and other innovative schools. Could we do more? Yes, with funding! The narrative that public schools cannot innovate is anti-union rhetoric. I have seen many public teachers dive into new programs with zeal, but I worked in a smaller district. In fact, public school teachers are much more able to rise to the challenge as we are better prepared and certified. We need to put our public dollars into improving public schools. We don’t need to waste tax dollars on lining the pockets of corporations and lobbying or advertising for charters. In my opinion, this puts public schools at an unfair disadvantage. Public schools cannot buy political clout or pay for spin doctors and media coverage, nor should they have to. They are part of the public trust. Public schools put the money into programs for students where it belongs.
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Retired teacher,
What is behind the rapid expansion of charters? It is a quick and easy way to get rid of unions and to have employees with no rights at all.
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‘Defenders argue that subtracting freedom in the short term is actually the more radical path to defeating poverty and racism in the long term.’ No, it just means you are neglecting to model– for children in their formative years– how to deal with varying degrees of freedom, whether it be learning to verbally negotiate disagreement, learning how to express one’s individuality while respecting & accommodating that of others, etc. The lesson taught is already available on the street: those in power establish rules that keep them in power: submit or fight.
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“The lesson taught is already available on the street: those in power establish rules that keep them in power: submit or fight.”
This. Exactly this.
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It’s all part of the Golden Rule:
“Those that have the gold make the rules.”
SLANT the night away!
😏
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I do believe that all children need to learn self disabling. But I don’t know anyone who developed this through overly punitive means. Teach them yes humiliate no.
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Disapline
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Who is Elizabeth Green? She graduated in 2006 from Harvard, and she’s been a journalist since that time. She’s never taught. She says that a friend told her that SOMEbody “needs to record what’s happening [inside schools].” So, that gives her “the right,” and presumably the credibility – which it appears she has morphed into expertise – to write about education.
Take a peek at Green’s Chalkbeat “team.” Mostly young non-educators, Ivy-League connected. What educational experience exists on the “team” is tied to Teach for America. Funders of Chalkbeat include the Gates and Walton and Milton Friedman Foundations. Green also has ties to the Education Writers Association, which is funded by the Gates Foundation and by the likes of the conservative Kern, Dell, and Walton Foundations.
To Elizabeth Green, it’s a truism that American public education is in crisis and needs “reform,” the latest iteration of which is the Common Core.
For the last three decades, public education “reform” has been based almost entirely on teacher and school “accountability.” It’s been top-down, it’s often been punitive, and it’s been based on high-stakes standardized testing. It’s also been almost entirely unnecessary. But this is the kind of “reform” that Green extols.
During the Reagan era, A Nation at Risk was released. It warned that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened American national security, and it said “We have squandered the gains in student achievement” necessary “to keep and improve the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets.”
But none of it was true.
The Sandia Report, published in the wake of A Nation at Risk (Journal of Educational Research, Volume 86, May/June 1993) found there WAS no crisis in public schools, concluding that:
* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
* “The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any pervious generation.”
But mainstream education reporters – and politicians – took no notice. They still seem to be as myopic as Mr. Magoo.
Bush gave us No Child Left Behind, and Obama has delivered Race to the Top. The newest element of corporate “reform” is the Common Core standards, developed to ensure American “economic competitiveness,” and backed strongly by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable. Yet, the “economic competitiveness” argument is a canard. As the World Economic Forum data show, the United States already has been and IS internationally competitive, and when it drops in the competitiveness rankings it’s because of stupid economic policies, precisely the same policies supported by the Chamber and the Roundtable.
But Elizabeth Green and many if not most of her colleagues rarely write or talk about ANY of these things. And what they DO write and talk about –– the ACT or SAT, Advanced Placement, STEM, math education, charter schools –– is often filled with error.
For example, Green wrote a piece about a year-and-a-half ago in the New York Times, titled “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” That article was taken apart by experts who made it clear that Green is not so hot at math, statistics, and education research. And yet, that’s exactly what she often writes about. One critic said that Green’s math piece was “…based on bad science, bad history, and unfortunate myths that will lead us away from, rather than closer to, the improvement of math instruction in the United States.”
I don’t think her book on teacher effectiveness and training is really any different.
Nor is her reporting on charters.
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The title of Green’s book, “Building a Better Teacher,” gives the game away, since from the first it posits teachers as passive objects to be molded according to the vision of some Master Planner(s).
Gee, those Master Planners (who in reality are predators and parasites) wouldn’t happen to be directly or indirectly connected to the people who fund her website, now, would they?
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Michael,
Elizabeth Green leans heavily on the teaching ideas of Doug Lemov. Lemov, as you may know, is primarily a taxonomical technician. He’s big into test scores.
Also not unsurprisingly, Lemov is associated with charter schools. He was formerly “the Vice President for Accountability at the State University of New York’s Charter Schools Institute and a founder and principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School in Boston.” Pacific Rim is a college prep charter that has a “a longer school day and a longer school year” than regular schools and terms itself “rigorous.”
Lemov now heads up a charter network, Uncommon Schools. The “team” there has deep ties to Teach for America. Its Chief Academic Officer, its Director of Professional Development, and both of its Associate Directors of Professional Development are former TFAers.
Apparently, Lemov (and thus Green) thinks that Teach for America is a model worth replicating.
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Yes, I am aware of Green’s ties to Lemov, who has successfully marketed pseudo-science by framing his revanchist pedagogy as scientific “taxonomy.”
That he should be associated with Uncommon Schools, one of the most egregious of the “no excuses” Skinner Box boot camps, and professional home of the execrable and incompetent John King, also completes the picture.
The lies and deception, including self-deception, are so thick and deep among these people that you’d need heavy equipment to excavate it, and miles-long freight trains to transport it to a toxic waste dump.
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Green “made” Lemov when she wrote a profile of him in the NY Times magazine
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There are others who think – who believe – Lemov has nailed down what good teaching is.
U.S. Soccer officials read Elizabeth Green’s piece in the New York Times magazine and asked Lemov for help in training soccer coaches so the U.S. can be more internationally competitive. Sort of like how we have to have our students do better on international tests so that we can be more economically competitive in the global marketplace. Sigh.
The NY Times piece by Green cited Willam Sanders, the value-added guru, and conservative economist Eric Hanushek, and Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, and Thomas Kane.
I think it’s interesting that Green attended Montgomery Blair Magnet High School. Blair is big on College Board stuff, like Advanced Placement and the PSAT. In fact the school and its foundation brag about the number of National Merit Semifinalist winners at Blair. National Merit winners are determined by PSAT score. The best predictor of PSAT – and SAT – score is family income.
Magnet students make up only a small portion of the school’s overall population, and getting in requires high achievement in the intermediate grades, an application, and acceptable scores on a two-hour entrance test. The test is made “by a national testing service.”
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