Archives for the month of: July, 2021
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The Teen Who Inspired Zaila Avant-Garde to Win the National Spelling Bee

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2021 //
13

The Washington Post wrote about the teen who inspired Zaila Avant-Garde, the first African American to win the national spelling bee. A 13-year-old girl from Akron, MacNolia Cox, was among the first Black Americans to make it to the national spelling bee, 85 years ago. Her story says a lot about her determination, but also about the racism and segregation that she had to endure when she went to the championship bee in Washington, D.C. (Zaila is not only a spelling champion; she holds three Guinness World Records for her basketball skills. Watch the video. She’s amazing.) I had never heard of MacNolia Cox, but Zaila had, and she knew anything was possible.

About 3,000 people jammed into Union Station in Akron, Ohio, on the evening of Sunday, May 24, 1936. A military band played. A young man led some of the crowd in cheers; others burst into song. They were all awaiting the arrival of an unlikely hero: a tall and slender 13-year-old Black girl named MacNolia Cox. The shy eighth grader was Akron’s spelling bee champion.

A month earlier, MacNolia had stood on the stage at the city’s armory with 50 other children — the top scorers on a written spelling test. After 24 rounds, there were two spellers remaining. After 37 rounds, there were still two. Finally, MacNolia emerged victorious. With the proper spelling of “sciatica” and “voluble,” MacNolia became one of the first two Black children to qualify for the National Spelling Bee, held annually in the nation’s capital. The other was 15-year-old Elizabeth Kenney of New Jersey, who was also bound for Washington.

John S. Knight, the publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal, which sponsored the regional competition, fretted over MacNolia’s win.
“Washington is a segregated city,” he told Mabel Norris, the 21-year-old White reporter assigned to accompany MacNolia, her mother Ladybird and MacNolia’s White teacher, Cordelia Greve, to the competition. “You will have all kinds of difficulties,” he said.

But MacNolia wasn’t thinking about any of that when she boarded the Capitol Limited with a new suitcase filled with new clothes, all gifts from the city’s Black community to a family that could not afford such indulgences. For 30 days, while she diligently studied, MacNolia had been celebrated by Black communities across the country, by churches, social clubs, academics and politicians, even by vaudeville celebrities. Band maestro “Fats” Waller and tap dancer Bill Robinson brought her onstage at the RKO Palace in Cleveland. Her name was mentioned in the same breath as Marian Anderson and Jesse Owens — and now, this send off.

“This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” MacNolia declared with a wide grin.

“Bring back the championship,” hollered one person in the crowd.
“I’m going to try,” MacNolia promised as she settled in for her first train ride.

Hours later, near the Maryland border, MacNolia and her mother were ushered from their berths into the Jim Crow car.

The stories Mabel Norris wrote for the Akron Beacon Journal from Washington in May 1936 describe a fairy tale. Young MacNolia was whisked around the capital, seeing all the sights and even meeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Beacon Journal did not seem to think its readers wanted to hear the rest of the story.

Norris did not mention the segregated train cars, and she described MacNolia’s accommodations in the city as “one of the finest tributes to the Akron district champion.” MacNolia and her mother were staying in great comfort, as the guests of a prominent Black surgeon, T. Edward Jones, who lived near U Street, the city’s “Black Broadway.” But they were doing so only because they were not welcome at the Willard Hotel where the other White competitors stayed. MacNolia could not understand why, and her mother was at a loss to explain.

On the night before the competition, the 17 finalists were invited to a banquet at the Hamilton Hotel. Mabel Norris waited by the elevator for the pair to arrive, until she felt a tap on her shoulder. The spelling bee champion, in a white frock, stood behind her. Mother and daughter had not been allowed to use the front entrance to the hotel. Instead, they were directed through the kitchen and up the backstairs. In the banquet room, a two-seat table had been set apart from the head table where the White children sat.

But MacNolia seemed undaunted as she crossed the stage at the National Museum auditorium in her blue organdy dress and blue socks just before 10 a.m. on the morning of May 26, 1936. “As cool as a cucumber,” Norris wrote. “The least excited and nervous of the group.” Spelling, certainly, was the same no matter if you were Black or White…

There were 10 spellers left when the competition began airing live on the radio over the Columbia Broadcast System; Elizabeth Kenney had been the 11th. “P-R-O-M-E-N-A-D-E,” MacNolia spelled.
There were just five left when MacNolia got the word “Nemesis.” “Oh, no!” Cornelia Greve exclaimed. She flipped through MacNolia’s dictionary, filled with red check marks for the words the girl had studied, but there was no mark next to “Nemesis.” She had believed proper nouns would be excluded from the word list.

MacNolia looked up at the ceiling again and started to spell “N-E-M- … ” she began.

Mable Norris jumped up in protest as MacNolia finished the word, spelling it incorrectly. Norris, too, believed the word violated the contest rules. “No capitalized words shall be given,” she reminded the judges. Nemesis is a Greek goddess who exacts retribution against those who show hubris.

After a long, heated argument, the judges huddled to consider Norris’s objection. Norris walked over to the CBS announcer and made her case on the air: It was discrimination, she told the national audience. The judges were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black winner, she said, a charge the judges would deny.

MacNolia’s retelling of the next moment, published in “Whatever Happened to MacNolia Cox?,” a biography written by her niece Georgia Lee Gay, is unemotional: “It was supposed to be spelled with a capital letter and was not part of the official list, so the judges ruled me out of the contest.” MacNolia did not shed a tear when she was eliminated, but Norris remembered crying for her.

A Black girl’s triumph

MacNolia Cox returned to Akron to a welcome as grand as her send-off. She was feted with armfuls of roses and chauffeured in a car parade in her honor. The procession ended at her school, where MacNolia was introduced to hundreds of cheering classmates. The city’s former mayor wrote a poem that underlined her achievements: “A child whose forebears sold for gold / On slavery’s auction blocks / Has brought renown to our old town. / All hail, MacNolia Cox.”

But the attention soon faded. Gay wrote that the opportunities and college scholarships that were promised in the months after the bee never materialized and MacNolia was left scarred by the prejudice she experienced. “In some ways, she felt she would have been better off to have never won the Beacon Journal bee,” she wrote.

MacNolia Cox — then MacNolia Montiere — died in 1976 at the age of 53. Her obituary mentioned the Beacon Journal bee, but her story has now faded for most but her family — and one 14-year-old Black girl from Louisiana.

As she stood on the National Bee Stage on Thursday night, Zaila Avant-garde told reporters, she thought of MacNolia and what she had endured 85 years earlier. Then Avant-garde looked down and calmly spelled the winning word — M-U-R-R-A-Y-A — becoming the first African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Categories Accountability, History, Racism, Segregation

Boston Changes Admissions Criteria for Exam Schools

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2021 //
28

Boston has several elite high schools where admission is determined by test scores. The most famous is the Boston Latin School. The Boston school board debated the admissions policy at length and voted unanimously to change it, to open the way for less advantaged students.

The Boston School Committee on Wednesday night unanimously approved the biggest overhaul of the city’s exam school admission process in more than two decades, adopting a new system that should give disadvantaged students a better chance of getting in…

The effort to change the admission requirements had generated heated debate among parents and a backlash over last-minute political meddling that initially influenced the proposal presented to the School Committee two weeks ago.

Hours before the meeting started Wednesday, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius stepped into the fray, releasing final recommendations that rejected a politically influenced measure reluctantly advanced by a task force that would have reserved 20 percent of all seats to students with the highest ranking composite scores citywide. The remainder would have been allocated in rank order within tiers based on geography and socioeconomic factors.

Instead, Cassellius favored the task force’s original desire to allocate all seats for Boston Latin School, Boston Latin Academy, and the O’Bryant School of Math and Science through eight tiers based on census tracts. The approach would group together qualified applicants from areas of the city with similar socioeconomic characteristics in an effort to reduce the likelihood that a low-income applicant would compete against an affluent one.

The task force abruptly abandoned the measure at their final meeting two weeks ago after its cochairs warned that they were under political pressure to create the 20 percent set-aside for students with the highest composite scores citywide and that the consequences of not doing so could be severe for the school system.

The political interference created a backlash among many parents and advocates who pushed to get rid of the 20 percent set-aside, while other parents advocated for a citywide competition for all seats. Cassellius said the backlash factored into her decision to drop the set-aside in an effort to restore public trust in the process.

”What is being considered tonight, I believe to be a huge step forward for our students, especially our students who have not been able to access our exam schools through no fault of their own,” Cassellius told the School Committee as she introduced the final recommendations. “While some of us might wish for a sweeping mandate that would dismantle, you know, ages of privilege and create equitable opportunity with one vote of the School Committee . . . I also know that holding out for a perfect solution could possibly lose this moment.”

The new admission policy replaces a far simpler process that has been used for more than two decades and allocated seats to applicants citywide in rank order based on an equal weighting of their grades and entrance exam scores.

Under the new policy, grades will carry greater weight, comprising 70 percent of the composite score for admission and an entrance exam will make up 30 percent. The entrance exam will be suspended again this fall for those seeking admission for fall 2022 due to disruptions caused by the pandemic, and only this upcoming school year’s grades will be used.

Categories Education Reform

Ohio Governor Signs Bill To Ban Schools and Universities from Requiring COVID Vaccinations

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2021 //
63

America, we have a problem. The COVID is spreading, largely through a highly contagious variant called Delta, but only 48.3% of the population is vaccinated. More than 600,000 Americans have died. In five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Louisisna—less than 36% are vaccinated.

Despite the resurgence of this deadly disease, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed legislation barring schools and universities from excluding unvaccinated students. The results are predictable: more hospitalizations, more deaths.

GOP legislators say they prefer to wait until the vaccines have received full approval from the Centers for Disease Control. The three in wide use-Moderna, Pzifer, and J&J-were approved on an emergency basis by the CDC and have been highly effective.

The CDC should move swiftly to give full approval to the vaccines and remove this excuse from the vaccine deniers.

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, conservatives ridiculed the vaccines.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/covid-vaccines-biden-trump/2021/07/15/adaf6c7e-e4bd-11eb-a41e-c8442c213fa8_story.html

From the Washington Post:

“Clearly they were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90 percent of the population into getting vaccinated,” activist Alex Berenson told the crowd Saturday, seeming to inflate Biden’s target. “And it isn’t happening.”


The crowd clapped and cheered at that failure.
What began as “vaccine hesitancy” has morphed into outright vaccine hostility, as conservatives increasingly attack the White House’s coronavirus message, mischaracterize its vaccination campaign and, more and more, vow to skip the shots altogether.


The notion that the vaccine drive is pointless or harmful — or perhaps even a government plot — is increasingly an article of faith among supporters of former president Donald Trump, on a par with assertions that the last election was stolen and the assault on the U.S. Capitol was overblown.


Appearing at CPAC, lawmakers like Reps. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) took aim at Biden’s push for “door-to-door” vaccine outreach, framing efforts to boost inoculations as a creeping menace from big government.

I can’t help but remember the national panic over polio in the early 1950s. As an adolescent, I was warned not to to the movies because the headrest on the chair might have polio germs. Children across the nation were terrified of spending their life in an iron lung or being permanently paralyzed (like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was crippled after contracting polio in 1921 at the age of 39) or dying. The biggest year for polio was 1952, when 58,000 were infected with the disease and about 3,000 died.

When Dr. Jonas Salk announced in 1953 that he had developed a polio vaccine, people clamored to be vaccinated. There were no anti-vaxxers. Everyone wanted protection from this deadly disease.

Yet here we are in 2021, after 34,000,000 cases of COVID and 608,000 deaths, and GOP states are passing laws to protect people’s right not to be vaccinated!

Has the country gone mad?

Categories Education Reform

Chris Whittle Loses His Home in the Hamptons, Once Listed for $140 Million

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2021 //
32

Being an eduEntreneur does not always pay off. Chris Whittle founded the Edison Project, which was supposed to be for profit, but after much turmoil, its stock price plummeted, and he moved on. (Read Samuel Abrams’ fascinating history of the Edison Project in Education and the Commercial Mindset).

Most recently, Whittle founded Avenues, which was planned to be a global chain of boutique for-profit, private schools. Tuition at the state-of-the-art Avenues in NYC is $59,800. It’s opening was announced Ina full-page ad in the New York Times.

A few years ago, Whittle and Avenues parted company. In 2014, Whittle listed his 11-acre home in the jet-set Hamptons for $140 million, but it didn’t sell.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Whittle’s property in the Hamptons was purchased by the Avenues Global Holdings for $700,000 and will be sold to pay off the $6 million debt that Whtitle owes the school.

In an auction that took place Tuesday morning, Avenues was awarded right and title to the property, subject to other liens, for a credit bid of just $700,000, the spokeswoman said. The auction was a forced sale to satisfy more than $6 million in debts owed to Avenues by Mr. Whittle. Avenues expects to officially take title to the property next week and will make plans for the property soon after, the spokeswoman said.

“We hope that this facilitates the recovery of the more than $6 million that remains owed and unpaid to Avenues,” the spokeswoman said.

The property had been on the market most recently for $95 million, down from the $140 million Mr. Whittle first listed it for in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Reached by phone, Mr. Whittle said he has “had better days.” He said he had taken out a very large mortgage on the property in order to fund his latest venture, Whittle School & Studios, another for-profit school network, but the Covid-19 crisis derailed his plans.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit

Bruce D. Baker: Time to Tax Churches!

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2021 //
66

Bruce D. Baker is a school finance expert at Rutgers University. He writes here that the changing legal status of religious schools opens the door to taxing churches.

He begins:

On June 30th 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that if a state has a program of providing public financing for private entities to provide educational services, that program cannot exclude from participation any institution simply because that institution is religious (see Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue). The decision involved a taxpayer financed tuition tax credit program providing vouchers for children to attend private schools, which under the state’s constitution (Blaine amendment), prohibited use of those vouchers at religious schools. This decision followed an earlier SCOTUS decision that prohibited Missouri from excluding religious institutions from access to a publicly financed program for playground refurbishing. These cases combined reverse a long history of state enforced Blaine Amendments which excluded the use of taxpayer dollars for religious institutions, even where taxpayer dollars were available to other private providers.

Of course, one difficulty with such provisions is having the government play any role in defining what is, or isn’t religion, when determining whether a tax benefit or public financing should be bestowed on an institution. Jedi? Religion! Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Religion!…

If a state cannot exclude from access to taxpayer resources institutions simply because they are religious, a state also cannot exclude from taxation, institutions simply because they are religious. Indeed, to the extent that properties on which private schools operate are exempt, then this exemption would also apply to properties on which private religious schools operate. But the exemption would not extend to the church itself, or for example, rectories, religious retreats or other lands and buildings used solely for “religious” activities, including worship. The state cannot define religious activity in-and-of-itself to qualify as public service because the state should not be in the business of defining “religion,” and bestowing differential benefits on that basis alone.

Categories Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Missouri: GOP Passes Vouchers

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2021 //
30

The voucher movement should be dead, in light of the numerous evaluations showing that voucher schools do not get better results than public schoools, and in many evaluations, voucher students lose ground compared to their peers in public schools.

The GOP is determined to siphon public dollars away from public schools and send them to religious schools.

Missouri Governor Parson just signed a voucher bill that will allow students to attend low-cost private and religious school while reducing the state’s revenues and reducing funding for public schools.

This is choice for the sake of choice, not for the benefit of students. This is the Betsy DeVos model.

The Associated Press reports:

Missouri students as soon as next year could have access to scholarships for private school through a new tax credit program signed Wednesday by Gov. Mike Parson.

Under the voucher-style program, private donors would give money to nonprofits that in turn would dole out the scholarships. The money could be used for private school tuition, transportation to school, extra tutoring and other education-related expenses.

Donors to the program would get state tax credits equal to the amount they give, an indirect way to divert state tax dollars to private education.

Parson’s signature represents a long-sought victory for primarily GOP advocates of so-called school choice legislation, which has struggled to gain traction with Missouri Republicans in rural areas where public schools likely would be students’ only option regardless of changes in state law.

“This legislation will empower students and parents with access to resources and educational opportunities that best meet the individual needs of their child,” Sen. Andrew Koenig, a suburban St. Louis Republican, said in a statement.

Critics of school voucher programs have said they funnel money away from public schools by drawing students out of those districts, leading to a drop in attendance and a subsequent drop in funding.

“Missouri is 49th in the country in average starting teachers’ salaries,” Melissa Randol, who heads the Missouri School Boards’ Association, said in a statement. “We need to invest in Missouri’s high quality teachers, rather than funnel money to institutions that have no accountability to taxpayers for how they spend taxpayers’ dollars or how they educate our children.”

Only K-12 students in the state’s largest cities — those with at least 30,000 residents — would be able to get the scholarships. That includes St. Louis, Kansas City and many of their suburbs. It also covers Springfield, Columbia, Cape Girardeau, Jefferson City, Joplin and St. Joseph.

https://www.newstribune.com/news/news/story/2021/jul/15/missouri-governor-signs-school-voucher-bill-into-law/879201/

Categories Education Reform, Funding, Missouri, Vouchers

Jay Mathews Corrects an Error on the Blog

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2021 //
35

Jay Mathews writes about education for the Washington Post. Although he and I don’t always agree (he is a huge admirer of KIPP and wrote a book about it), I have always found him to be extremely congenial. He recently sent me the following note, asking for a correction, and I asked and received his permission to post it in full. I don’t recall whether Tom or I wrote the sentence he quotes, but I want to set the record straight no matter who wrote it.

He wrote:

Hi Diane—-I was having fun reading Tom Ultican’s blog, then found something you wrote last year that needs a slight correction. You said:


Mathew’s methodology has now become the US News and World report ranking of “the best high schools” in the nation.

Many people have the same impression. It is hard to keep this stuff straight. My methodology has NOT become the US News high school list. I started mine in 1998. It ran in Newsweek for many years. US News started theirs in 2007. Their method is quite complex, with an emphasis on average test scores and extra points for low income schools that show test score gains. They also include something similar to my counting participation in AP and IB tests, but it is a small part of their method. I like the US News guys but complain that any method that includes test scores becomes misleading. I have noted frequently that their number one school, Thomas Jefferson, in a system that is supposed to detect the best low income schools, has only 2 percent of its students from low income families.

My Challenge Index list is now on my website, jaymathewschallengeindex.com. I exclude TJ and all other public schools that have average SAT or ACT scores above the highest average for any neighborhood high school in the country.

I hope you are having a splendid summer. —jay

Categories High School Graduation, Standardized Testing

Fred Klonsky: What Happened When Marjorie Taylor Greene Visited Illinois

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2021 //
12

Fred Klonsky writes here about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent visit to Illinois. She came to support a member of Congress who is running for re-election and shares Greene’s extremist views.

She campaigned in the most conservative part of the state, where the Ku Klux Klan was popular in the 1920s. Note the sponsors of one of their rallies, whose rally brochure is portrayed on Fred’s blog. Ford Motor Company was one prominent sponsor. There was no shame attached to being an outright racist and anti-Semite and all-around bigot at that time.

Fred described the setting as follows:

It turns out that Effingham and nearby Sangamon County – home of our state capital in Springfield – once held giant Ku Klux Klan rallies, including at Illinois the state fair grounds.

It was common for Klan rallies in the area to draw tens of thousands of locals.

I’m not picking on downstate Illinois. In the 1920s Chicago had the largest KKK membership of any metropolitan region in the United States.

According to WBEZ journalist Dan Mihalopoulos, Greene spoke for nearly an hour, and true to form, she spent most of her time mocking other members of Congress. She ridiculed another Illinois Congresswoman because she has a transgender daughter.

Greene peppered her speech with other bigoted comments about “the great Chinese pandemic” and Muslim members of Congress and their allies, who she called “the jihad squad.”

The Midwest director of the Anti-Defamation League said it’s time to end the politics of hate, but it’s unlikely that Greene has any other mode of expressing her views. That’s who she is.

Categories Illinois, Racism, Republicans

Dennis Shirley: Standardized Testing Is Obsolete

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2021 //
27

Dennis Shirley is the Duganne faculty fellow and professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. His new book with Andy Hargreaves is entitled Five Paths of Student Engagement: Blazing the Trail to Learning and Success.

Shirley contends in this article in Commonwealth Magazine that standardized testing no longer fits the needs of students, if it ever did.

He writes:


AS WE EMERGED from the pandemic’s constraints, we finally had the freedom to book dinner reservations and plan a summer vacation, but in the midst of that liberation, our students were obligated to the policy of standardized academic testing.

Despite opposition by every Massachusetts professional educational association, the political appointees in the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the commissioner and secretary of education responded to COVID-19 by administering the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) to third to eighth grade students to conclude the school year, even though Superintendent Jeff Riley previously said, “We’ve spent a lot of time on systems and structures, on accountability and test scores. We need to get back to instruction, and deep teaching and learning.”

What’s going on? For years, standardized testing advocates have been on the defensive because the tests failed to improve student achievement as promised by reformers. Second, the rise of the testing industry was correlated with growing rates of anxiety and depression among young people. Third, tests aggravated rather than ameliorated differences in achievement among racial and ethnic groups, and between social classes.

Enter climate change strikes that peaked in 2019, the pandemic, and the surge of racial struggles during the past year. The triple whammy of environmental, health, and societal challenges was surprising and emboldened critics who want a different kind of education that speaks to their concerns and aspirations rather than the clamoring for accountability of distant government bureaucrats.nullThe critics are no fringe group. For years, public opinion surveys have revealed that a majority of Americans agreed that there was too much testing in schools. Defenders fought back by arguing that the tests are objective, that they inflict little or no damage on students, and that they emphasize that what is taught in schools must be taken seriously. If there are problems with testing, they say, the tests can be revised–but not suspended.

Is there an escape from the impasse?

Shirley believes there is.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get our schools focused on teaching and learning rather than testing and accountability. We must not squander it. It’s going to be arduous, but the trendlines are clear: COVID-19 is winding down in the US, so let’s make dinner reservations and summer vacation plans, and when it comes to schools, let’s make sure our students are free to learn—and that our teachers are free to teach, too.

Categories Education Industry, Real Education, Standardized Testing

Jan Resseger Reviews an Important New Book About “No-Excuses” Schools

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2021 //
14

In this post, Jan Resseger reviews Joanne W. Golann’s Scripting the Moves: Culture & Control in a No-Excuses Charter School. What she describes is a culture of behaviorism and strict control.

Resseger writes:

Joanne W. Golann’s new book is all about schools that insist their teachers follow the guidance of Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion instead of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but whose principals and teachers have convinced themselves they are liberating students from oppression.

Lured by the promise that their middle school will put them on the path to college, many of the students in Scripting the Moves: Culture & Control in a “No-Excuses” Charter School quickly become angry and disgruntled as teachers assign them demerits for failing to sit at attention or whispering or speaking as they walk in straight lines marked by squares on the hallway floors. At Dream Academy, teachers are driven obsessively to “sweat the small stuff.” School leaders warn teachers that the whole system might collapse if anyone loses control.

Golann explains that, Dream Academy, the pseudonymous name of the school where she conducted her ethnographic study, typifies to one degree or another no-excuses charter schools managed by many of the huge charter management organizations, beginning with KIPP, but also including Achievement First, Aspire, Democracy Prep, Green Dot, IDEA, Mastery, Match, Noble Network, Promise Academies, Rocketship, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools, and YES Prep.

Anyone with the most rudimentary, university-based, public school teacher certification training—including philosophy of education, educational psychology and learning theory—will likely find it shocking to read what Golann describes observing in her year-and-a-half ethnographic study. Yet Dream Academy exemplifies the kind of schooling so many families are choosing—based on a promise that college admission will follow…

Golann explores Dream Academy’s failure to work with students to develop critical thinking and the kinds of study and interactive skills they will need if they do go on to college: “Dream Academy was successful in getting its middle school students to think about college and in getting its high school graduates to apply to, and be admitted to, college. But… Dream Academy’s rigid behavioral scripts did not encourage students to develop the types of cultural capital that higher-income students use to gain advantages in college. Cultural capital, which I have defined as tools of interaction, comprises the attitudes, skills, and styles that allow individuals to navigate complex institutions and shifting expectations. These tools include skills like how to express an opinion, be flexible, display leadership, advocate a position, and make independent decisions.” (p. 58)

Finally Dream Academy teachers’ obsession with minute behavioral infractions undermines trust and generates anger and antagonism: “No-excuses schools ‘sweat the small stuff.’ Under a sweating-the-small-stuff approach, authority is exercised over ‘a multitude of items of conduct—dress, deportment, manners—that constantly occur and constantly come up for judgment.’… (A)s teachers took on the role of disciplinarians, they became enmeshed in a racist system that perpetuated stereotypes of Black and Brown bodies as needing to be controlled rather than one that humanized students as individuals to be understood, cared for, and respected. It is unlikely that belittling and shouting at students, for example, would be acceptable at an affluent White school, yet these practices are common at no-excuses schools, which serve almost exclusively Black and Latino students.” (pp. 86-99)

The term “sweating the small stuff” is the title of a book written by David Whitman and published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2008. It praises several no-excuses charter schools for their strict discipline and paternalistic control of students. The next year, Whitman became Arne Duncan’s chief speech writer.

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline, Racism
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