Jersey Jazzman tries to figure out the definition of a no-excuses charter school. Is it in the eye of the beholder or is there actually a definition that is widely accepted. He traces the ideology back to Dtephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s 2003 book, “No Excuses.” I suggest he also take a look at David Whitman’s 2008 book “Sweating the Small Stuff,” which highlights several exemplary no-excuses schools. Whitman’s book was sponsored by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Soon after he finished it, Whitman became Arne Duncan’s chief speechwriter. That helps explain a lot about Duncan’s love of no-excuses charters. Even earlier was Samuel Casey Carter’s “No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (2000), which was launched by the Heritage Foundation, thrilled by the idea that schools could get high test scores without spending more money or reducing poverty.
The impulse behind the no-excuses schools, I believe, is neo-colonialism, the desire to teach poor children of color to behave like affluent white children.
I continue to impressed by the Dobbie and Fryer study of charter schools in Texas that found that they had no bearing on test scores or earnings. Dobbie and Fryer are supporters of charters.
They wrote:
“We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earn- ings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution of school quality. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what might explain our set of facts.”
The paper concludes with this speculation:
“Charter schools, in particular No Excuses charter schools, are considered by many to be the most important education reform of the past quarter century. At the very least, however, this paper cautions that charter schools may not have the large effects on earnings many predicted. It is plausible this is due to the growing pains of an early charter sector that was “building the plane as they flew it.” This will be better known with the fullness of time. Much more troubling, it seems, is the possibility that what it takes to increase achievement among the poor in charter schools deprives them of other skills that are important for labor markets.”
Maybe conformity and obedience are not enough.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
NYTimes has a good piece on the ed reform experiment in Michigan:
“Michigan’s aggressively free-market approach to schools has resulted in one of the most deregulated educational environments in the country, a laboratory in which consumer choice and a shifting landscape of supply and demand (and profit motive, in the case of many charters) were pitched as ways to improve life in the classroom for the state’s 1.5 million public-school students. ”
Michigan gambled, and lost.
The “80% of Michigan charters are for-profit” probably isn’t even accurate. It’s probably higher. One would have to examine the layers of contracts at each charter to determine an accurate number.
Often a for-profit company manages most of the public revenue even at “nonprofit” charters in the Great Lakes states. That’s true in Ohio so it’s likely true in Michigan.
Think of it as a thin non-profit “skin” over a for-profit contract that constitutes the meat of the thing, because that’s what the contracts look like.
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That’s what we get when we have little to no oversight or regulation. We get an industry that puts profit above all else. This climate attracts the sharks and vulture capitalists. We can count on corners being cut, problems swept under the carpet and phony press releases. Young people cease to be the most important element in education, profit is.
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Here’s the link:
This is Betsy DeVos’ track record. Michigan ed reform. Which is a disaster.
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Chiara, I passed this on to RealClearEducation (which tends to heavily favor Ed Reform), and I was told they’ll include this article tomorrow. Thanks for posting.
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No-Excuses:
Force parents who want to enroll to attend 4 pre-enrollment meetings in which you discourage all but the most motivated parents whose kids won the lottery from even enrolling their children.
Spend the first week with your “specialists” inside the Kindergarten classrooms noting which students demonstrate “unworthy” attributes and tell their parents to get them out of your school.
If any low-performing students make it through the first month, start targeting them and humiliating and punish them for any wrong answers until they eventually act out enough so you can suspend them over and over again. If a few of the students targeted actually improve as would randomly happen, declare the suspension policy a “success” even if many others disappear.
Rid yourself of any child with the kind of special needs that would not allow him to score high on standardized tests. Mild speech disabilities and mild dyslexia are fine. Any disability that impacts their ability to do well on standardized tests is not fine.
Lavish the remaining students with extras due to the extraordinarily high donations you get without needing to spend a penny on any “unworthy” (i.e. expensive) student.
Replace the many missing students with ones who are pre-tested before enrollment and told that they are either up to snuff (can join their rightful grade since they are already high-performing students) or not up to snuff (told they have to repeat a grade or two in order to discourage their parents from enrolling them and leaving the spots in the older grades open for the students who are deemed “worthy”.)
Flunk and fail (“retain”) huge cohorts of at-risk kids so that they have years of extra time to learn the material. If this happened in a public school it would be investigated for bad teaching practices since this costs money. But if charters want to use lots of public money because their ill-equipped teachers need to flunk 10% or 20% of a class, it’s celebrated.
Celebrate the “100% passing rates” on state tests with the students who have proven to you over the past 3 years that they are worthy to stay in your charter because they will pass the state exam.
FYI — you can do this with ANY type of curriculum as long as you have immoral school operators who get rid of every child who can’t learn via whatever curriculum you want to promote and overseers who look the other way. We can say “elementary schools should be taught by smart teenagers” and create a school in which every elementary school child who can’t be taught by a smart teenager is treated in a way that would make him leave.
There is not a single study that has looked into how no-excuses works that would stand up scientifically if it was a new drug that claimed to cure all childhood leukemia being tested instead of a new education policy. When huge cohorts of subjects dropped out of a control group testing a new miracle drug for childhood leukemia, scientists don’t say “I’m sure all the parents of those young patients decided it was better for their child to suffer and die than to be cured by this miracle drug with 99% per cent rates so it’s unimportant that huge cohorts dropped out of the study.” A scientist studying a new drug would be fired and shamed if he made that ridiculous claim to justify intentionally ignoring the extraordinarily high number of patients who disappeared from the study.
But that’s exactly what those researchers do with their study of no-excuses charters. “I’m sure all the parents of those young students decided it was better for their child to suffer and learn nothing than to be taught in this charter school that turns 99% of the children in them into high performing scholars.”
It’s astonishing they get away with this immorality.
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Well stated, NYCpsp! Mind if I use and pass it on? (with proper attribution of course)
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Of course. And I’d be delighted if you re-wrote it so it wasn’t as verbose, too! I don’t need credit – if you can make it read more coherently, please edit into a better-written version!
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Why, Diane, you would put so much stock in the salaries earned at age 25 of just those who stayed in Texas is mysterious to me… In any event, a few more quotes from that Dobbie and Fryer study you alluded to…
“…we restrict our analysis to charter schools whose oldest cohort graduated high school in or before 2005-2006. This restriction ensures that students in our sample are approximately 25 years old or older in the most recent earnings data.
[…]
“As discussed in Section III, an important limitation of our data is that we only observe the earnings of individuals working in the state of Texas. If No Excuses charter schools increase or decrease the probability of leaving Texas, our estimates may be biased.
[…]
“Black and Hispanic children in No Excuses charter schools are also significantly more likely to graduate from high school or enroll in a two- or four-year college.”
[…]
“These results suggest that since students at No Excuses and other high test score value-added charter schools are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, their earnings schedule is likely flatter than regular charter students through age 22.”
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Stephen,
You have never taken the opportunity to explain why you are obsessed with charter schools.
Why aren’t you obsessed with the tragedy of poverty? Of income inequality? Of mothers who can’t afford to get medical care during their pregnancy?
Why is your compassion limited only to the charter operators who already have Bill Gates, the Walton family, ALEC, Trump and DeVos on their side?
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Stephen has already made it very clear that if a charter operator identifies 20% of the 5 year old Kindergarten students as violent, he absolutely knows it is true. Especially if that charter operator is white and the children being identified as violent at age 5 are not.
Stephen believes that what the following is a far-fetched statement that needs to be criticized and attacked:
It is IMPOSSIBLE that in a group of African-American Kindergarten children who all have caring and motivated parents willing to do all that they can to get their child a great education — it is IMPOSSIBLE that one out of every five of those children comes into the school with naturally violent tendencies that need to be “suspended” out of them by a white charter CEO.
Stephen won’t simply say “of course you are right”. He says “I’m not racist or anything but it is more likely than not that those African-American charter school children are all violent and how can I possibly judge?”
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Well said. I am reminded of a suburban middle-class dominant-culture person who had been reading negative “news” articles about my inner-city 98% minority school, and who then told me, when I, as a person who actually worked in the school, disagreed with his assessment, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
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^^^Also, the reason “no-excuses” has never worked in white communities is that the charter operators can’t get away with claiming that all the little white 5 year olds come in as naturally violent and those violent tendencies their parents gave them must be suspended out of them. No one would believe him. But he refuses to acknowledge that it is just as much of a lie when it is said about African-American 5 year olds.
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It’s called colonialism.
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It’s called greed.
Stephen isn’t a colonialist. He does what he is paid to do. He supports what he is paid to support and looks the other way at things he is paid to look the other way about.
He is simply an unethical and immoral person trying to make a living by making sure to say nothing that would criticize the favorites of those who pay his salary. Even if that favorite has said that lots and lots of little African-American 5 year olds come into her charters with naturally violent tendencies that can only be tamed by suspending them over and over again.
Stephen says “how can I criticize such a thing — after all, who knows whether many African-American 5 year olds with caring and motivated parents are violent or not? I can’t judge since I just don’t know as it “could be true”. But I’m not a racist. I just think it “could” be true that lots of 5 year olds are very violent in the African-American community. But not because I’m racist. Because a white charter CEO who my billionaire funders like says it is true.”
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The suspensions of black students (even as young as five) is a complicated issue. I can’t speak for charter schools, but I did work in the inner city of Buffalo and the no fighting rule which resulted in an automatic suspension led to an over abundance of suspensions, mainly for boys but also girls and especially minorities. Perhaps other ways of dealing with an attitude of “you dis me, I’ll knock your block off” would be a slightly different approach. Counciling, mediation, in school suspension – a sort of time out, all would set an example of how to deal with conflicts besides using fists. Alternative schools with psychiatric evaluations, daily counseling sessions, and small group classes with a lot of one on one assistance would be optimum for those difficult to handle students.
My grandson who is almost seven has a tendency to physically lash out when frustrated and we have to constantly remind him to use his words not his hands. He, of course, has some other issues which we recognize need to be identified and addressed, but the school has been working with the family and has been very understanding. Despite his occasional antisocial behaviors, he has never been suspended. Then again, he attends a predominantly white suburban elementary school with lots of services. Too bad the urban schools, where children are exposed to violence, sometimes deadly, or have a physical need which isn’t being addressed (whether it’s medical, hunger, or lack of consistent housing), don’t have the same amenities.
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Think of my obsessions like an elephant, Diane. And yourself as tickling one toenail.
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You are extremely annoying, Stephen. You mean to be. It is not amusing.
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Your grandson has a “tendency to physically lash out when frustrated”
But you refer to inner city 5 year old Kindergarten children who you seem to think reflect a culture of “you dis me, I’ll knock your block off”.
That culture of “you dis me, I’ll knock your block off” exists in white rural or suburban cultures. (Anyone watching the Trump rallies gets this.) And children of all races are likely to “physically lash out when frustrated” if they are humiliated and made to feel less than nothing and “frustrated” because they aren’t learning fast enough.
It isn’t that hard for an adult in a position of power over a 6 year old to torment him until he either lashes out at others or lashes inward at himself. Think of the children victimized by bullies who lash out or hurt themselves. No excuses charters give power to bullies whose interests are in promoting their own brand, not in doing what it right for children whose test scores don’t help the charter promote it.
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I agree with you NYC public school parent that a child can be pushed to violence by the teacher or other adult as well as a peer. I do think that when 5 year olds lash out its because they don’t have fully developed coping mechanisms in place (which I feel is normal for their age). However, if a little boy hits a teacher with a chair hard enough to send them to the doctor, well, I guess some sort of suspension is appropriate even if they are only five (I tutored such a child).
And you are right, fights are common in suburban schools as well as urban because some kids are more prone to protecting themselves and their reputation with their hands – and in this case color doesn’t matter.
Though somehow more minorities are suspended.
So the question is – why? Are they provoked by teachers? Fellow students? Their home life? The violence in the streets? Gang warfare? An innate tendency? Anger issues? . . . .
Even without a definitive answer – is suspension the best means to resolve the issue? Just as the charter school concept has not produced any significant results, massive suspensions of minority students has not changed their behaviors. Not only that, it has had a negative impact thus the phrase “school to prison pipeline”. Which is fine if you support Privitized Prisons (who are the same people who want to privitize schools). Maybe there’s a pattern there.
Anyway, for the rest of us, perhaps we need to decide that since it is not working, we need to chuck it and try something else.
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Students who are naturally violent are not prone to throwing chairs at teachers. Students who are naturally violent will seek out victims among weaker students and try to harm them.
Throwing a chair at a teacher demonstrates is something I could imagine if a teacher asked you to answer a question and when you didn’t know it, ripped up your paper, harangued you, told the class that you had ruined it for all of them in order to make you a pariah and the object of disgust, and then sent you to a “calm down” chair so your humiliation could be better witnessed by the other children who they hope would follow their “modeling” behavior and treat that child in the manner in which that child deserved for their lack of “success” in learning. Imagine being treated that way over and over again when you are 6 years old. That’s when you throw a chair.
And when you throw a chair after a teach has constantly bullied you and you have absolutely no way of escaping the constant bullying during the school day, being out of school for a day and then returning to the same teacher who continues to bully and humiliate you in front of other 6 year old children will probably cause you to throw a chair again sometime in the future. Being bullied can do that.
Of course, Stephen B. Ronan would say you are just one of those naturally violent 5 year old African-American children who are always so disproportionately found in Success Academy schools. And you deserve every punishment you get.
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I agree, there was something going on with that particular child. He was a “little” off, very anti social, and difficult to engage even one on one. He definitely needed something that a Kindergarten teacher with thirty kids in her class and only a half time aide could not provide.
It is rare, although not unheard of, for children that young to be suspended in Buffalo.
My main focus is that at some point during his suspension there should have been some mechanism to see the reasons for his behaviors and to provide a pathway for him to return to a regular classroom with the extra help he needed to be successful. In my grandson’s school district he would be assigned a personal aide to assist him as necessary. Not in Buffalo, unless he was placed in a 6-1-1 classroom, but usually only if he needed medical attention.
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If slaves had been allowed to go to school this would have been the template. We are teaching children to obey without questioning and accept the truth as told by the authorities while limiting their scope of learning which is perfect for their future low paying grunt work.
On the other hand, those who can afford those expensive private schools get the whole enchilada resulting in students who are ready to take on the leadership roles which pay the big bucks.
In between are those pesky public school kids who are way too competitive and threaten the privileged’s “right” to those high placed positions. Now how to shackle those potential competitors? Right, try Common Core, a restricted curriculum which banishes the entire idea of critical thinking – a skill necessary for career advancement. Get the other elitists on board, Incentivize the policy makers, and hoodwink the public, then Voila! Problem solved!
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How about “NO EXCUSES” for congress and big $$$$$?
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“‘. . . Much more troubling, it seems, is the possibility that what it takes to increase achievement among the poor in charter schools deprives them of other skills that are important for labor markets.’
Maybe conformity and obedience are not enough.”
Quite correct Diane with the last statement.
As far as the former, well, I’ve never given a damn about “increasing achievement”. As a teacher I only worried about whether the individual student was learning as much as he/she could and/or wanted to learn (including what the parents/guardians wanted).
“Raising student achievement” is one of the false memes that drive the edudeformer agenda. It is a focus on outputs, versus a focus on the varied inputs that go into the teaching and learning process. “Raising student achievement” is a ludicrous and risible goal that does very little to nothing to address the true needs of the teaching and learning process.
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“What makes a no excuses charter school?”
Bubble blowing without gum or soap?
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Thanks as always, Diane. I recall reading about Whitman’s book but never actually read it myself. I will check it out.
The reason I concentrate on the Thernstrom’s “No Excuses” is that it is repeatedly cited by economists doing “lottery” studies of charter schools. Many work with data from Boston; many are associated with MIT. For some reason, the Thernstrom’s book is their touchstone when describing what no excuses pedagogy is.
The problem, as I say in my post, is that the book is simply not worthy to be cited in a serious journal article. It’s pure ideology, not scholarship.
That said, even the Thernstroms acknowledge that one of the reasons charters “succeed” is that they are schools of choice, designed to keep away “difficult” children. I don’t know why this is so hard for some people to accept.
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I have never received a clear explanation for how these MIT lottery studies are done that account for attrition and the charter school’s unique ability to hold back any student they choose to hold back. They just say things like “we include all the children who leave charters as part of their group when we compare to public schools.” But how can they do this if some kids spend a day in the charter and others spend 2 years?
Perhaps I don’t understand because it seems as if the MIT ones are always about high schools or at least middle schools, so they begin with much older students who immediately have test score performance to compare. So there is no need to deal with a charter that starts in K but only 1/3 or 1/2 of the cohort makes it to testing grade when they should.
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Many of the MIT lottery studies use “years enrolled in a charter” as the definition of the treatment. If you spent a year in a charter, that’s considered different than two years, or no years.
The two biggest cautions with this are:
1) The results can only be generalized to students who enter the lottery. In other words: if there are differences in, say, parental involvement between students who do and don’t enter the lottery, the results are not necessarily going to be the same as if we opened up charters to students who wouldn’t normally enter the lottery.
2) The treatment is “years in a charter school.” But what if the charters spend more, have longer days/years, have peer effects, etc.? That’s the real treatment. Why, then, do we need to put schools under non-state actor control to gain those advantages?
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Thanks for your reply.
Honestly, I hear explanations like “the studies use years enrolled as a charter” and it still gives me no idea how this is done. Just because they say they “use” it doesn’t mean that they use it in any way except to cover up instead of enlighten. Such use of “years enrolled” would seem to reward charters who identify the low-performers early instead of later and get them out of their charter as fast as possible. Seems like a no-excuses charter that specialized in getting rid of students pre-enrollment and the first few weeks would look “superior” to one that kept students. And that is exactly what happens.
Did you see the recent MDRC study that Success Academy paid for?
It purported to do what you describe and take into account students who start and leave under some mysterious formula that we are just supposed to accept because they said they “accounted for it” without explaining exactly HOW that would work with a specific example.. What is most interesting is that this study never gave any hard numbers about the number of students being studied.
In other words: 100 students win a lottery, 50 are weeded out pre-enrollment, out of the 50 who enroll another 10 leave the first week, another 10 are retained, leaving the 30 highest performing students’ performance as the only group whose test scores are looked at. (Maybe they include the “short-termers” who leave the first year as a very tiny negative since they spent so little time in the charter.) That meets all the MIT requirements of “the studies use years enrolled in a charter”. Meanwhile, another charter encourages every child to come and encourages even the lowest performers to stay. That also uses “years enrolled in a charter”. The MIT study would show that one charter far surpasses the other — which MIT would deem an utter failure compared to it. And it would be a lie. Because the lower performing charter had an attrition rate — especially in the early years — that is a fraction of the higher performing one. And MIT would say “that’s irrelevant, we’ve accounted for it?!!” And people never make them explain how they can possibly account for this.
Hiding the exact number of students in a study who won the original lottery and make it to the testing grade in the appropriate number of years because the study claims such data is totally irrelevant and we should simply trust them that they have mysteriously accounted for that top secret number of students who left in the early days has to be the most absurd thing I have ever heard. It shocks me that researchers get away with that. There is no way that would happen in a peer-reviewed study of a new drug where all data is available.
Can you imagine a peer-reviewed study of a new cancer treatment for children where the corporate scientists insist that the huge attrition rates of the sickest children with the most advanced cancers who enroll in the trial are irrelevant because the only thing that matters is “years taking the drug”? Of course a study where one drug’s control group doctors spend huge resources to weed out the sickest patients early and the final study group is only 30% of its original size would do better than another drug that ends up with a study group 80% of its original size because it makes no effort to weed out sick patients early. You’d never say “let’s give all children’s cancer patients this new miracle drug that works 100% of the time and take them off the one that “only” works 75%” because in fact, the drug that worked 75% kept 90% of the patients and the one that worked 100% kept 30%. It would be an evil thing to do. Scientists would know better.
But that is how we judge charter schools. Attrition is deemed irrelevant.
What MIT’s study really proved is that “a school that spends a lot of effort to weed out the lowest performing students as early as possible will have better test scores later than a school that doesn’t do this.” And the conclusion would be “to get better schools we need to eliminate the unworthy students early and let them rot.” Which is exactly what the reformers really think.
Mark “JJ” Weber, what really worried me is when you wrote:
“But what if the charters spend more, have longer days/years, have peer effects, etc.? That’s the real treatment. ”
We have no idea if longer days/years help at all. Why are we even assuming that works when the method to study this has been corrupted?
If anything that a high performing charter did actually made a difference, then why do they need to lie, weed out students, humiliate them, have got to go lists, and use whatever means necessary with all the millions in resources they have to get children OUT? They would be keeping as many students as possible, not marking them for removal in the first week of school as the dad testified to the NAACP happened to his child and 4 others.
The nasty little fact that no-excuses charters hope no one notices is that the best-performing charters have some of the highest attrition rates of any charter chains. It is one of those counter intuitive findings that would have been a huge red flag if the people doing the research were ethical and not doing what they are paid to do and pretending attrition is irrelevant.
With charters, outrageously high test scores correlates very strongly with outrageously high suspension rates of 5 year olds and outrageously high attrition rates for at-risk students compared to other lower-performing charters teaching the same students. This is always covered up by researchers determined only to compare them to failing public schools and not to other (lower-performing) charter chains with the same motivated parents.
They get away with this because the missing parents are likely to be at-risk families. And those charters work hard to get us to believe that all those missing families — the most motivated at-risk families who chose their charter because it was so high performing — prefer crappy and mediocre charters to the highest performing one that has millions in donations to lavish on its students. Just like they work hard to get us to believe that their 5 year old children are disproportionately violent because of some naturally violent tendencies they brought with them when they entered Kindergarten and not because the charter harrassed them into acting out.
It would never happen if these kids were white middle class students. BASIS Charter chain is another high performing charter that loses lots of students. But the students it loses are middle class and far more likely to be white instead of African-American. BASIS doesn’t claim those white middle class parents despise high performing schools or that their children are violent or otherwise too dysfunctional to belong in any school but one for severely violent kids and BASIS doesn’t suspend huge cohorts of those white children to get them to leave.
BASIS makes no bones about it. They are only for the students who can do the work and the ones who can’t are not welcome. They don’t take millions in donations under the pretense that it is for all those at-risk kids who were failures in public school that they turned into high performing scholars. They don’t hire researchers to do limited studies to prove how they turn every at-risk kid who walks through the door into high performing scholars. No doubt there would be plenty of educational researchers happy to do that if the price is right. Maybe some are even at MDRC.
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NYC public school parent
What you describe is heart breaking. The problem is that the number one focus is not the child but the $$$$$ to be made on the backs of the children (and teachers) coerced into participating in an abusive environment. In a way, you could say those kids who are ejected from these no excuses schools are the lucky ones.
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The charter school I work for has made a commitment to be culturally and socially responsive, ever since we opened our doors in 2015. Much time and energy has been spent on breaking down these biases (as discussed here) that, we as a predominantly white staff, have about minority cultures. Two great books that have helped with this topic are: For White teachers who work in the Hood….and the Rest of Y’all Too, written by Christopher Emdin, and Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning, written by Sharroky Hollie. These are two great resources that really break down institutionalized oppression and how it can affect a students learning.
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