John Thompson, historian and teacher, disagrees with Elizabeth Green about the future of “no excuses” charter schools. In the previous post, I referred to Green’s account of the arguments for and against such charters.
Thompson writes that Green balances the pros and cons, and then “concludes that no-excuses schools “are capable of changing, and that they can do this, to borrow their own language, ‘at scale.'”
Thompson wonders what persuaded her “that no-excuses proponents can scale up their current model, much less a more sensitive version of it. After all, I wonder if she’s seen a KIPP that serves the same high-challenge students that we do in high-poverty traditional public schools.
“Even the best of “high-performing, high-poverty” charters only retain as many suffering kids as they can handle. We in neighborhood schools serve everyone who walks in the door. The gap between those two realities is huge. And, the result of those two very different approaches is that the highest-poverty schools face even greater concentrations of kids from generational poverty who have endured extreme trauma, and bring their pain with them to school….
“All of Green’s observations are valid in terms of the questions she asks. But, how many educators demand that society “abandon” no-excuses schools? In my childhood, I would have despised such schools, and I wouldn’t send my own child to one. Its hard to imagine many parents choosing no-excuses instruction if they had any alternative. Unlike many reformers, however, my colleagues and I haven’t anointed ourselves as masters of the education universe. It’s not up to us to micromanage parents’ decisions.
“What we should abandon, however, is the willingness to ignore the elephant in the room. Can’t we acknowledge that it is a terrible tragedy that conditions exist where some educators and patrons embrace no-excuses behaviorism as the lesser of evils?
“What we should abandon is the idea that poor children of color should settle for a second class education because society won’t attempt to provide a humane, holistic, and high-quality education for all. We must abandon the idea that all poor children of color learn the same. We must abandon the corollary idea that all kids are supposed to conform to the ethos of test, sort, reward, and punish in order to be prepared for the global marketplace. We must also abandon the idea that corporate reformers are entitled to determine what rights of students and teachers must be abandoned in order to reinvent (or blow up) school systems.
“While I would never tell parents that their ability to choose no-excuses schools must be abandoned, I contend we must abandon the edu-politics of destruction. We must abandon the idea that no-excuses schools must be scaled up in order to replace neighborhood schools that are closed due to the mass charterization of school systems that corporate reformers see as targets to be destroyed by “disruptive innovation.” We must abandon the idea that children can be treated as lab rats as no-excuses charters are given even more time to heal themselves and, supposedly, figure out a way to successfully scale themselves up.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No excuses schools seem similar to the old Bureau of Indian Affairs schools that set out to obliterate native American children’s connection to their culture because the school operators believed white culture was superior.
No excuses school operators may not be racist in the sense of believing Black people are genetically inferior, but they are classist: They believe poor people would become prosperous if they could only learn to control their impulses — a skill they think middle class people have mastered.
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Excellent analogy about the BIA schools, but my only quibble is that the intense patronizing and condescension that pervades “no excuses” charter school ideology (and so-called education reform in general) is inherently racist.
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Is there a range of behaviors which all agree to be essential for learning to take place? I believe that their is such a range. Is there, amid poverty, oppositional attitude, or societal lack of support, some structure that will allow children ready to learn at a reasonable pace the opportunity to do so? If so, what is it?
Are these not the operant questions that must be answered in order to have a policy in place that will allow students to progress without having to push against the walls society has built for them?
We who oppose some of the modern trends toward harshness and domination need to advocate for specifics. I for one would start with small schools in small neighborhoods taught by experienced teachers who are members of the community. It’s expensive but worth it.
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You’re setting up a strawman argument. No one opposes structure or decency or other things that allow for an optimal learning environment. The argument is over how to get there. Simply expecting it to happen – and punishing those who can’t/won’t comply is not only ineffective in the long run, it’s damaging. The way to get to create an environment in which children can learn is to understand what’s standing in the way and to address those issues. For instance, if a kid can’t pay attention because she’s hungry, the solution is to feed her, not punish her for not paying attention.
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I was not trying to set up an argument at all. Rather I was trying to point out that a small local school will come closer to agreeing on the points concerning behavior and really understanding the kid behaviors that make a school. I agree with every word you said. Tight communities know when someone is hungry or when their folks are in trouble.
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Allow me to correct their for there in the previous post. “There is such…”
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