EduShyster hosts a guest blogger, Layla Treuhaft-Ali, who demonstrates the results of a close reading of Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion,” which is required reading in no-excuses charter schools. EduShyster calls it “Teach like It’s 1895.”
She writes:
“The book, and its teaching techniques, looms large for any teacher who works in an urban school. Not only has the TLC model of teaching become a fixture of most *high-performing* charter school networks, but it is increasingly making its way into urban school districts as well. And that’s just the start. Teach Like a Champion’s approach also underlies broad efforts to transform the way teachers are educated, forming the *backbone of instruction* at an expanding number of charter-school-owned teacher education centers like Relay Graduate School of Education and Match’s Sposato School of Education.
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Teach Like A Champion advertises 49 discrete techniques that teachers can master to raise student achievement and help increase their students’ college readiness, with a strong emphasis on classroom culture and shaping student behavior, down to the most minute actions. As I was reading Teach Like A Champion, I observed something that shocked me. The pedagogical model espoused by Lemov is disturbingly similar to one that was established almost a century ago for the express purpose of maintaining racial hierarchy. Like Teach Like a Champion, this initiative was implemented largely through teacher education and funded and directed entirely by wealthy white businessmen and industrial philanthropists.”
She discovered that Lemov’s teaching philosophy was strikingly similar to the pedagogy of places like the Hampton Institute, where black students were taught to be docile and obedient in preparation for their subservient lives.
“Today, largely white philanthropists pour money into charter schools that place a high value on order, efficiency and discipline, serving children who are almost entirely Black and Latino/a. These wealthy elites are increasingly invested in teacher-training and pedagogy as a means of enacting their vision for minority children. Most disturbingly, this vision heavily emphasizes behavioral norms that are eerily similar to those used a century ago to preserve social hierarchy and prevent students from challenging injustices done to them by the powerful. Every detail of students’ behavior is scrutinized and corrected, even that which would seem to have little to do with children’s academic performance.”
Conformity, docility, obedience. Teach like it’s 1895.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This was a great piece. I had no idea this was actual state policy at one point.
“No Excuses” schools are a reboot of racist, colonialist ideology that endorse the type of discipline enlightened educators abandoned a hundred years ago. Fully educated educators realize that total compliance stiffles creativity and the development of a relationship a teacher must forge with poor minority students in order to establish trust on which to build learning and growing. Students should not be subjected to public shaming. I thought that type of behavior disappeared with the dunce cap. Students should not have to earn desks or deal with the stress of a picayune demerit system. Classroom management is a key element of teaching, but it does not have to insult students or undermine their self esteem. “No Excuses” discipline is an authoritarian tool for untrained teachers that must build a wall between them and students because they really do not know how to handle these young people. Authentic teachers know a better way. I know from teaching poor minority ELLS for many years, that this distorted top down authoritarian approach is less effective than teaching the whole student. The whole student approach respects each person, and encourages students to grow and thrive.
“Today, largely white philanthropists pour money into charter schools that place a high value on order, efficiency and discipline, serving children who are almost entirely Black and Latino/a. These wealthy elites are increasingly invested in teacher-training and pedagogy as a means of enacting their vision for minority children. Most disturbingly, this vision heavily emphasizes behavioral norms that are eerily similar to those used a century ago to preserve social hierarchy and prevent students from challenging injustices done to them by the powerful. Every detail of students’ behavior is scrutinized and corrected, even that which would seem to have little to do with children’s academic performance.”
Which begs the question, Why are black and brown parents enrolling their children into schools that promote the plantation model?
Have they been duped? Or do they see the alternative to be that much worse?
Media.
And advertising. You should SEE the slick, professional ads in my area touting the online charter school. One even has a girl who learned “so much” from online school that SHE became a teacher. Obviously false, but the advertisements are ubiquitous. If someone says something enough times, it must be true.
These parents want the best for their children. They want them out of the poverty that they are suffering. And if the steady drum beat for DECADES is that “public schools are failing,” and that is brought to bear by cherry picking the students who get to go to charters, leaving the more difficult (and expensive) students behind, then of course parents are going to look to them.
The charters have the veneer of safety and strong academics. The veneer is a sham, but how would parents know that?
I was assigned chapters in Lemov’s book as part of my Corrective Action Plan. I purchased and read the entire book. Needless to say, it has no research base. His gimmicks were based on observing teachers in charter schools. It is a quick read and some of his ideas prove useful. It does not hold a candle to the Socratic Method.
“I was assigned chapters in Lemov’s book as part of my Corrective Action Plan.”
Boy that sounds familiar. I’ve been given more than one book to read by administrators who thought (or should I say attempted to think) it would help me. I always read as much as I could before throwing up on the garbage I was reading but generally at least skim read the whole thing.
However whenever I would give an administrator a reading whether a book or article, they hardly ever read it-I’d go back and try to discuss it with them-they were always oh so busy to not have enough time to read it. And people wonder why I call administrators adminimals.
I think this young scholar (and prospective teacher) is off to a wonderful start. Thanks to EdShyster and Diane for giving her article visibility.
I have been thinking hard about a related article on racial identity and education, recently published in Educational Researcher. I am still thinking about the key points, especially in the light of my once-upon-a-time work as a teacher of visual art, grades 7-9, in a school built in the middle of the projects, high poverty, 98% Black. The school was named for the first Black principle hired by the school board.
The article “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Critical Examination of the Conceptualization of the Study of Black Racial Identity in Education” does not mention Doug Lemov’s book, but it is critical of lot of high-profile workers in education (including Eleanor Duckworth of grit fame) and amateurs with high public profiles who offer cures for “at risk” Black students (Obama and Oprah Winfrey, even Bill Cosby back in the day).
The writers are qalso highly critical of researchers who have helped to produce lay and profrssional understandings of Black students as damaged, “at risk,” anti-education, troublemakers, engaged in self-sabotage, not acting white enough, and so on.
These researchers ask: “Why are statements that position Black people as deficient and needing ‘fixing’ so readily accepted, and indeed lauded, when these statements are based on conjecture rather than research?
They show that many claims that have become entrenched in the research literature (and in practice) are not much more than anecdotes. Many “popular” theories about corrective action are based on a few observational studies, or judged “important” based on sales pitches from publishers or Google citations.
Here is the abstract:
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: A Critical Examination of the Conceptualization of the Study of Black Racial Identity in Education
Sabrina Zirkel and Tabora Johnson Educational Researcher, June/July 2016; vol. 45, 5: pp. 301-311, first published on June 29, 2016.
“The role that racial identity plays in the well-being, educational achievement, and life outcomes of Black youth has received tremendous attention from the early post-slavery years right up until today, and remains a surprisingly contested area of study. We call for the examination of why images of Black racial identity as “damaged” and “dangerous” persist despite scores of studies that demonstrate otherwise. (Those studies are cited).
Despite a proliferation of theories suggesting a “damaged” Black psyche and suspicion about its value to Black youth, we find the history of research about Black racial identity reveals robust and consistent evidence that Black racial identity is linked to a broad range of positive outcomes from measures of well-being—including greater resilience, coping with discrimination, higher academic performance, greater commitment to education, and improved educational outcomes on a number of measures. (Those studies are cited). Given this, we question why Black identity has been so controversial and why, 150 years after the end of legalized Black slavery, theories suggesting the “danger” of Black racial identity still hold so much power with both lay and professional audiences.
http://edr.sagepub.com/content/45/5/301.
My impression is that the authors fail to give sufficient attention to poverty as that intersects with race, or the power of popular culture in shaping the imagination of students and much more, including so many of the norms governing “proper behavior” in public schools.
This blog is in cloud-cuckoo-land when it comes to discipline; EduShyster is even more so.. There is no strong discipline that isn’t tyranny, racism, fascism. Bad behavior is not a real problem in schools; and if it is, it’s the teacher’s fault. Any humane teacher would not have discipline problems. Restorative justice –a fresh experiment with a slim track record –has been elevated to a sure-fire panacea. The word “punishment” has been banished from teachers’ lexicon; soon “consequences” will be next. Advocates of discipline are guilty of ThoughtCrime and will be sent to the Ministry of Love until they utter the words “Discipline doesn’t work” and mean it.
Meanwhile, teachers’ brains are occupied with images and thoughts of a handful of brazen bullies and disruptors who rattle classes day after day. The rest of the kids –so many wonderful kids –get neglected.
This is an interesting take on TLC that may very well stick to it permanently. As soon as we can use the word “training” instead of “teaching” to describe an educational activity, we may visualize a circus instead of a classroom as the scene.
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