State Senator Sam Bell has been concerned about the punitive discipline in the no-excuses Achievement First charter schools, which is primed for a major expansion in Providence.
He toured an Achievement First charter school, and his worst fears were confirmed.
Please read the entire post, which I condensed.
Senator Bell writes:
On Friday, October 18, I toured Achievement First. It was a chilling experience, an experience I’m still processing.
They wouldn’t let me take any pictures or video.
The start time was 7am. I got there at 6:59. I expected a mob of kids rushing to class, but they must have all already gotten there early. I only saw one or two kids, each of them sprinting. Kids, apparently, fear being late so much that they really aren’t late, despite being forced to wake up at what is an ungodly hour for a middle schooler. My guide, though, was late.
As we started the tour, I noticed black and yellow lines taped on the floor of the hallway. The children, my guide informed me, are all required to walk only on these lines. Several times, I saw adults chastising students for not walking on the lines. Quite literally, students were not allowed to set a toe out of line.
The bathroom doors, I noticed, were all propped open. I asked if it was for cleaning. No, I was told, it was so that the kids in the bathrooms could be watched. They didn’t prop open the toilet stalls, but it still struck me as intensely creepy, a twisted invasion of privacy.
In the classrooms, it was constant discipline. The teachers spewed a stream of punishments, and I often couldn’t even see what the students were doing wrong. The students kept losing points or getting yelled at for things like not looking attentive enough. I can’t imagine what it would be like as a child to be berated constantly, to be forced to never even think of challenging authority. It was, of course, overwhelmingly white teachers berating students of color. (The walls, of course, were plastered with slogans of racial justice.)
The education, if you can call it that, was the most shameless teaching to the test. I was shown what I think was a social studies class, where the children were being drilled to respond to a passage about Rosa Parks like it was a passage on a RICAS ELA test. They were being asked to interpret the passage, not to think critically about what Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott meant for American history and what we can still learn from that act of heroism today.
I was shown another class, where the students were just straight-up practicing to respond to what looked to me exactly like a RICAS short answer question. The teacher went around looking over the kids’ shoulders, basically praising them for checking the boxes of a RICAS grading rubric. (The RICAS grading rubric primarily emphasizes a rigid organizational structure with a single central idea and lots of specific pieces of evidence to support it.) This was far and away the best of the classrooms I saw. It was teaching to the test, yes, but with a teacher who at least showed compassion to the students and focused on building them up instead of tearing them down.
I also saw something they call “IR.” I think it stands for “individual reading,” but I’m not sure. Basically, it was kids sitting quietly and working through exercises in a book. It was the kind of rigid, formulaic make-work that drills kids for taking tests well but does not teach creativity, critical thinking, or passion for learning. It also looked miserable.
Not once did I see a lecture, a group discussion, or a seminar…
And this was what they chose to show me, this was what they showed a critic, this was a hand-picked tour to promote what they do. Although I asked to see one of the computerized teaching classrooms, my guide was unwilling to show me one. I did see posters telling kids to put on their noise-cancelling headphones, open their computer, be quiet, and work through their exercises. To her credit, my guide did basically admit to me that the computerized teaching system was kind of a mess. She said that kids are allowed to opt out of it to do book exercises instead and are no longer forced to wear noise-cancelling headphones if they don’t want to.
I did see several classrooms where the students were taking quizzes on laptops. This of course would be great preparation for taking a computerized standardized test. It struck me how often I saw this, and I wondered how much of the time must have been taken up by practicing taking tests.
Despite the policing of facial expressions, I saw some of the most jarringly sad faces I have seen in a very long time. I remember the look on one young woman’s face. She had been sent out of the classroom. I’m not sure why. I think she was a rebel. She was one of the very few I ever saw not walk on the lines taped into the floor. Her face was contorted into a shockingly intense frown. It almost looked like a caricature of a frown, the sort of frown one might see on an overly dramatic actor on TV but not in real life. My guide saw something different, raving about “faces of joy.”
At one point, rounding a corner, I heard a child scream. I don’t know what was happening, and my guide quickly rushed me away.
What was most missing was social interaction. When were the students supposed to talk to each other? To form meaningful friendships? To flirt and begin exploring romance? And it wasn’t just the lack of small group discussion in the classes or the strict discipline that stopped the students from talking in class. Even in the pep rally I witnessed, the kids weren’t talking to each other. If they tried to, a teacher would appear immediately to discipline them. I saw one kid quickly whisper to another and get away with it once. That was it. Even in the hallway, they weren’t talking. They just marched through the halls on the lines taped into the floor, enduring a stream of rebukes for minor offenses like leaving too large a gap between students.
On a human level, it was hard for me to take. When people tell stories about Providence school tours so bad they are moved to tears, I usually think they’re exaggerating. But I couldn’t stop tearing up at Achievement First, and I had to keep dabbing my eyes with a tissue. Now, I did have the ducts that drain my tears plugged to treat dry eye, so I do cry quite easily. But still….
After what I saw, I can easily see how this approach is great at producing amazing test scores. If you focus solely on test-prep and brutal discipline, yes you will boost test scores. Learning how to do well on a RICAS ELA test is learning how to think the way the test wants you to think. It’s learning not to think different. It’s learning to take the least challenging answer. It’s learning to sit still and robotically churn through boring and pointless questions.
But the human cost is so high. At what point is it worth subjecting kids to such misery? Even if the “achievement” were real learning, would it be worth the misery it takes to achieve it? Putting kids under that kind of stress dramatically increases the risk of lasting mental health damage.
Achievement should not come first. Children should come first.
Achievement First is planning on expanding. They’re asking to open a high school, and now they’re asking for a new elementary school, too. Some politicians, parents, student advocates, teachers, and unions have timidly objected to the funding Achievement First rips away from the already suffering public schools. But for me, the money pales in comparison to the raw human pain. Cruelty towards children is just plain wrong. It’s about people, not numbers in a spreadsheet.
Sometimes, overly mild rhetoric is irresponsible. We have to think carefully about the language we use. Words matter. If we water down Achievement First to a budgetary issue, then the Mayor of Providence will feel justified in letting them expand as long as better charter schools are prevented from opening or expanding in Providence. Instead, we must condemn Achievement First as a fundamentally immoral institution.
Half measures are not enough. No expansion is acceptable. Instead, we must talk about a turnaround plan to revamp and fundamentally reform these schools, returning actual learning to the classrooms, ending cruel discipline, and respecting the human rights of the students. And no turnaround plan will be real, no reforms will be lasting, without replacing the toxic administrators currently in charge with turnaround leaders who have true compassion for the students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please don’t call this “discipline”. Discipline means to teach. Call this what it is: abuse.
From the Latin disciplina, “to teach”; yes, this school has strayed very far from that definition. It’s living out the medieval definition: “to mortify the mind and body.”
However, this is, to a large extent, what the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the high-stakes standardized tests based on it have wrought. How do I know this? By witnessing what has become of the preparation of K-12 educational materials.
When, below, I speak of “the old days,” I’m talking of the days before the Common [sic] Core [sic].
K-12 educational publishing houses are typically divided into departments by subject area. In the old days, the leaders of these departments were subject-area specialists–scholars of language arts, mathematics, history, or whatever. Today, the leaders of those departments are typically “project managers” with business backgrounds.
In the old days, the in-house subject-area specialists would outline a coherent chapter or unit and then hire a writer, typically, again, a specialist in the subject area, to write it. Often, the house’s editors and the writer would go back and forth to refine the chapter or unit outline. So, for example, the editors might outline a unit on the short story, divided into sections on setting, characterization, plot, and theme. The idea would be to teach, systematically, using famous short stories as examples, how short stories work so that kids might understand them and be able to produce them on their own. So, for example, the character section of that unit on the short story might systematically introduce kids to the concepts of the protagonist and antagonist, static and dynamic characters, stereotyped and full characters, the central character’s internal or external struggle, the plot as a working out of that struggle, and methods of characterization.
Now, the in-house project manager starts not with the outline but with two things: 1. a spreadsheet with the Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list in the left-most column and columns to the right of this showing where each item from the bullet list is “taught” and 2. pages and pages of detailed specifications of exercise and activity types based on the state examinations on the Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list–often specifications dealing with automatic computer coding. In other words, THE STANDARDS [sic] AND STATE TEST QUESTIONS HAVE BECOME THE CURRICULUM MAP, and the whole idea of developing a unit, coherently, to teach a subject is out the window. The spreadsheet and the specs are then turned over to a development house that in turn hires freelance writers at very, very low rates to turn out tiny pieces of the whole. So, that unit on “The Short Story” becomes a random set of random selections followed by random activities and exercises on random items from the standards [sic] bullet list. I call this the Monty Python and Now for Something Completely Different approach to language arts instruction. And, ofc, the quality of the writing tends to be terrible because the business project manager farmed the project out to the cheapest development house which in turn hired writers at the lowest possible pay.
And that explains the incoherence of the textbooks and online teaching materials that you now see. the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the test question formats have metastasized throughout the curriculum, consuming all the substantive teaching. Imagine reading “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, but instead of discussing the experience that one has as a reader of the story–the shock and horror–and the issues that the story raises–how social sanction can lead to the unexamined perpetuation of horrific norms–you were instead allowed to respond to the story only in a multiple-choice question on how the use of a piece of figurative language affected the mood of paragraph x (coverage of Standard 666a), followed by a multiple-choice question on a word with multiple meanings in paragraph y (standard 666b). The whole point of the reading–why we read–to learn how literature works and what authors have to say–is lost.
In the old days, after the house produced its coherent unit on the short story, it would go back, after the fact, and “correlate” the unit to the various state “standards.” This was largely a frivolous exercise that no one took terribly seriously because the “standards” were vague and broad, and one could usually find somewhere, in a textbook, where that stuff was “covered.” The new standards are equally vague and broad (and backward and inane), but the difference is that now they are universal and high stakes. And so, they have become the curriculum map. And the map has become the territory, which is a great pity because the standards [sic] are (and for the most part always were) an almost content-free list of abstract “skills” completely inappropriate as the curriculum maps that they have become.
So, the “accountability” project that the Ed Deformers have run for the past generation has led to this dramatic devolution of ELA curricula, and the curricula in other subject areas has been similarly adversely affected. It’s easy enough to see how bad this is in this particular school–how the school is doing all test prep all the time. What few see is how this has become true of enormous amounts of our K-12 curricula in general as now found in print and online textbooks. Most ELA textbooks, print and online, are now inane test prep driven by the inane standards [sic], and we now have a whole generation of young English teachers who think this normal.
My 2nd child attends a private HS. Public school had become a nightmare for him (and for his parents!) with Common Core curriculum and the never ending testing. His private school purchased text books from the state that are 20-25 yrs old. For the first time in a long time, he is learning (and liking school) and I can understand what is going on if he needs help. Some of the parents don’t like that the books are “old”, but they don’t understand how awful the new books are and how common core has skewed education into one big, obscure multiple choice answer.
And this was the point of Ed Deform–to lead to the privatization of schools and the transition to a digital curriculum based on one national standards bullet list. It was always a business plan.
the insane circular irony: take schools which had been working and mess them up so badly that kids pull away from the public schools looking elsewhere for that which HAD been working
I know the plan was/is privatization….but what do you do when your 14 yo child has decided that getting up at an ungodly hour to go and rot in an over crowded (and unruly) building for 7 hrs a day is not worth the time? How can we as parents, justify that the “education” (CC) he is receiving in public school is worthwhile when we don’t see value in what is being “taught” (test prep)? I’m sad that public education has turned into this big mess, but as a parent, I must do what is right for my child. The state of MD won’t abandon CC and standardized testing anytime soon.
I understand completely, Lisa. Thank you for your insightful comments.
Oh, and BTW, typically, in one of these K-12 print or online text programs, these days, there will be a list of “authors” at the beginning. And typically, none of those people did any of the writing. They were consultant EduPundits hired, after the fact, and given nice, fat checks to put their names on whatever travesty the publishing house has created.
I would be terrified to be a student at this “school,” which reminds me of a jail. Like prisoners, the children are constantly being watched and told what to do, even to the point of not stepping off a line of tape on the floor of the hallway. And the bathroom doors are open? Yikes.
BTW, so does the boys’ restroom not have urinals? Or are the boys expected to use them in full view of anyone looking through the open door? I guess that’s one vote in favor of being female – at least everything in the girls’ room happens behind a closed stall door.
The politically active and influential leader of the Providence Catholic Church wrote Catholic schools are a viable alternative to public schools. And, presumably, the legal teams of Napa Institute and Liberty are ready to try to get tax funding for religious schools.
hmmmm
What is most disgusting is that ed reformers give low-income parents two choices:
The first is an underfunded public school, falling apart, with large class sizes and no resources to handle the myriad of issues that come up when a school’s population includes some of the most economically deprived students in this country.
The second – if a student is well-behaved, no learning issues, and his parents are willing to jump through hoops and do whatever is asked of them — is a well-funded charter school awash with money to throw around that looks like what is described at Achievement First.
That is the only choice that ed reformers want them to have. They would never offer only that choice to white, middle class suburban students because they know that they could not get away with it. When NJ Governor Chris Christie tried to put charter schools in affluent suburbs to undermine public schools, he got so much pushback he had to retract his demand that the charters be located there.
Pro-privatization billionaires pay politicians to make sure this is the only choice for poor students, but they send their own children to private schools costing nearly $50,000/year that have small class sizes and that $50,000/year is what these billionaires accept without question is the cost of teaching children with no learning issues whose parents will also pay extra for private tutors should they struggle academically. But billionaires want us to believe their lie that it costs a whole lot more to teach a very rich child who has been given every advantage from birth than it does to teach an extremely disadvantaged child.
Achievement First is institutionalized oppression. It prepares students to be compliant drones in order to train them to accept what the over class allows them to have. It also damages children’s spirits and self esteem. Children should be in schools that allow the whole child to develop, even if it is sometimes messy or unruly. At the very least all schools should teach students to think for themselves and think critically so that students can grow up and fully participate in democracy. Achievement First does not prepare students for the real world, Life is not one big multiple choice test. Achievement First is an example of modern day colonialism. It is unbelievable that this behavior is accepted as “education” today.
A senator is elected by the people of Rhode Island to protect and oversee — among other duties — all “public schools” (as charter operators always insist their schools are), but the senator can only tour one of these “public” schools, — again, for which has a sworn duty to protect and oversee — if he is barred from taking pictures or video of any kind during that tour, or else he’s barred from that school site.
That says it all, folks.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled charter schools are not public.
It was a ruling related to a a hundred million dollar charter fleecing of taxpayers.
And “most” of this mess would go away….if the almighty standardized tests would die. Every bad practice mentioned has a tie to a score on a test.
Exactly. No progress will be made until the federal high-stakes standardized testing mandate is ended. None.
It is obscene that our teachers’ unions have not mobilized people in the streets to end the testing mandate. Obscene. Malfeasance of the highest order.
I used to be proud to belong to “professional” organizations, NEA and NCTM being two of them. With all that is happening these days, I no longer feel that way. Even my cherished Mathematics Teachers organizations seem to have been drawn to the “dark side”.
A start: https://www.newsday.com/long-island/education/what-kids-should-learn-in-k-12-1.38007977
But far more has to be done. Our schools have been under siege by the high-stakes testing advocates for a long, long time.
Susan-
Also take a look at what Gates-funded SETDA (government employees) are doing to promote digital learning and public private partnerships.
Sounds like an intense re-education camp like China is allegedly doing in Xinjiang with the Muslim Uighurs … and what China did during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1965 – 1976) to an entire nation — not just its public education system.
If today, China had private schools replacing its public school system that was doing the same thing, the U.S. media would crucify China like it is doing for the Xinjiang allegations.
Only one thing missing: ovens big enough to roast humans to death and/or gas chambers to get rid of them without flames.
Once those are installed and in use, that one rebellious girl that wouldn’t walk on the lie, the one with the dramatic frown would be shackled, beaten, tasered, and force-marched into one of those chambers to be executed.
What was witnessed in that abusive charter schools also reminds me of the Catholic Inquisitions during the Dark Ages? The screaming child that was heard but not seen was allegedly being tortured on the rack or waterboarded because they wouldn’t keep their eyes glued on the teacher.
Diane,
What I read here is absolutely horrifying! Are there any actions that can be taken to uplift these students? My concern is very real. I’ve spent quite a few years doing after school programs in the schools and I write books with activities for children that help them to feel competent and good about themselves. If there is a way to get digital copies of my books to children (at no cost to them), I would like to explore that possibility.
Kas Winters
And, pretty soon (whatever the date in RI is) kids will start crossing those yellow lines or get in a fight or talk back to a teacher.
Student gets expelled to go to, wait for it, the neighborhood real public school AND the charter schools gets to keep all the per pupil state funding.
Can you imagine a parent of a child with disabilities, English language learner, ADHD or history of behaviors and the parent is trying to provide structure taking a tour of this place and deciding to send his/her kid there? Charter answer: Oh, well, we provide services and take kids but very few apply.