Samuel Abrams worked for many years as a teacher in a New York City public school. After earning his doctorate, he became executive director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. The Center consistently produces valuable reports about privatization. Consider joining its mailing list.
Here, Abrams reviews Joanne Golann’s recent book Scripting the Moves, a close analysis of “no excuses” charter schools. Open the link to read the full review and an excerpt from the book.
Abrams writes:
Few education initiatives have generated as much praise as well as philanthropic funding as the “no-excuses” charter school movement. Yet criticism of the movement has recently been growing, from both inside and out, so much so that KIPP (short for Knowledge Is Power Program), the movement’s standard-bearer, dropped its motto—“Work Hard. Be Nice.”—one year ago in acknowledgement of the conflict between the organization’s rigid code of conduct and its goal of fostering student independence.
No book captures the tension between these competing forces as well as Joanne W. Golann’s Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a “No-Excuses” Charter School (Princeton University Press, 2021). In this NCSPE excerpt, Golann lays the foundation for her analysis, a sociological case study based on 18 months of observations at a “no-excuses” charter middle school beginning in March 2012. In keeping with much case study research, Golann, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, does not identify the school or its location, other than to note it is not part of a large network of charter schools and is situated in a medium-sized former industrial city in the northeast. Golann gives the school a pseudonym: Dream Academy.
As Golann recounts, the “no-excuses” movement began with the founding of one KIPP middle school serving low-income minority students in Houston in 1994. Another KIPP middle school serving low-income minority students in the Bronx opened in 1995. With students at both schools posting top scores on state reading and math exams, KIPP won acclaim. “For its first eight years, KIPP Academy Houston was recognized as a Texas Exemplary School,” Golann notes, “and KIPP Academy New York was rated the highest performing middle school in the Bronx for eight consecutive years.”
A segment on 60 Minutes in 1999 made that acclaim national and brought to the fore the school’s “no-excuses” pedagogical strategy: a much longer school day (running from 7:25 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.), strict behavioral expectations, and unyielding commitments by parents and teachers alike to student success, all in the name of guaranteeing that every student makes it to and through college.
Embodying KIPP’s unrelenting focus on deportment has been its ubiquitous prescriptive acronym, SLANT, standing for Sit up straight at one’s desk; Listen attentively to teachers and peers alike; Ask and answer questions; Nod in acknowledgment of instructions; and Track the speaker with one’s eyes.
In the wake of the segment on 60 Minutes, more positive coverage followed. In addition to a subsequent segment on 60 Minutes, laudatory articles appeared by David Grann in The New Republic, Bob Herbert and Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, Stanley Crouch in The New York Daily News, Leonard Pitts in The Miami Herald, and Jay Mathews in The Washington Post. Mathews built on those articles in his book about KIPP called Work Hard. Be Nice (Algonquin, 2009). The husband-and-wife team of historian Stephan Thernstrom and political scientist Abigail Thernstrom earlier praised KIPP for its resolve and methods in their book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Malcolm Gladwell devoted a chapter of his book Outliers (Little Brown, 2008) to KIPP’s impressive academic outcomes and linked them to the extended hours required of both students and teachers. Paul Tough likewise commended KIPP for its dedication to character education in his book How Children Succeed (Houghton Mifflin, 2012).
In conjunction with this positive coverage, the philanthropic spigot opened up. Doris and Donald Fisher, founders and owners of The Gap, gave $15 million to KIPP in 2000 to start replicating and afterward continued to give the organization about $5 million a year to that same end. Other foundations, including those steered by the Waltons and Gates, have since contributed many millions more. And in 2010, the U.S. Department of Education gave KIPP an Investing in Innovation grant of $50 million to further replicate.
By 2020, Golann reports, KIPP served 110,000 students in 255 schools across the country. Of these students, 88 percent came from low-income families; 95 percent were Black or Latino. Thirteen similar “no-excuses” networks evolved in KIPP’s shadow. By 2020, these networks, from Achievement First and Aspire to Success Academy and YES Prep, together enrolled another 200,000 students in 433 schools across the country. The demographics of Dream Academy, in particular, reflected those of KIPP: over 80 percent came from low-income families; about 67 percent were Black; about 33 percent were Latino.
To Golann, the problem with these “no-excuses” schools is not scalability, though scaling up these networks is indeed difficult. These schools depend on a finite number of young teachers who can work such long hours. They also depend on a finite amount of philanthropic funding to cover the cost of after-school music programs, supplementary tutoring, field trips, and college visits. More fundamentally, these schools depend on students and families that can handle the steep behavioral and academic expectations.
This last constraint is indisputable. In this regard, Golann cites the failure of Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD). “In 2010, Tennessee created the ASD to take over and contract with charter management organizations (CMOs) to turn around the state’s lowest-performing schools,” Golann explains later in her book. “By 2014-15, eighteen of the twenty-three ASD schools were managed by CMOs, many operating from a ‘no-excuses’ framework. After five years of turnaround efforts, the ASD schools failed to show any significant gains in students’ academic outcomes.” The key difference between conventional “no-excuses” charter schools and those in the ASD, writes Golann, is that the former involve an application process as well as specific commitments from parents and students alike to follow a contract while the latter simply enrolled all students from the designated neighborhood.
As I document in “Education and the Commercial Mindset” (Harvard University Press, 2016), a similar story unfolded over the same time period in Houston, where the economist Roland Fryer applied the KIPP curriculum to nine district high schools and eleven middle schools in an undertaking called Apollo 20. Without the application process as well as student and parent contracts defining KIPP, Apollo 20, like Tennessee’s ASD, lacked the buy-in critical to the everyday operation of “no-excuses” schools.
Please open the link to complete the review and to read an excerpt from the book.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“In this regard, Golann cites the failure of Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD). “In 2010, Tennessee created the ASD to take over and contract with charter management organizations (CMOs) to turn around the state’s lowest-performing schools,” Golann explains later in her book. “By 2014-15, eighteen of the twenty-three ASD schools were managed by CMOs, many operating from a ‘no-excuses’ framework. After five years of turnaround efforts, the ASD schools failed to show any significant gains in students’ academic outcomes”
The whole ed reform team from the ASD now have an ed reform organization where they direct public school districts on how to succeed:
“Malika Anderson previously served as Superintendent of the TN Achievement School District (ASD). Prior to joining the ASD, Ms. Anderson led school turnaround and principal leadership development for DC Public Schools and helped organizations improve their management and operational systems with A.T. Kearney Management Consulting and WrightWay Consulting”
https://instructionpartners.org/team/
One can have an entire career going from ed reform initiative to ed reform initiative, and they all have the same resume- it’s Broad and TFA and working for one or another echo chamber member at the federal or state level. It’s a closed system – no one from outside the echo chamber need apply.
Public schools need a pro-public school pipeline of policy people. Ed reform so utterly dominates that people may not even know there are options for public schools that don’t include the narrow ed reform list of acceptable “reforms”.
It strikes me that the no excuses movement just tapped into what was already going on within public schools. Some teachers were allowed to be very strict in their classes so that the only students who were allowed there were the ones who were very serious. Many of these teachers would demean and berate the students as a method of control, and thus drive out those who were not willing to put up with them in order to learn.
My Psyche 101 prof explained it this way. “Oldest trick in the books. The coach yells at the kids. The kid thinks: “I must be doing this because I like basketball, because I hate the coach.” His dissonance is resolved in a way that makes him love the sport.”
The reason for the failure of extreme discipline schools is that they are not dependent on a small few. Schools are for all because we need everybody. We might not need everybody to do everything, but we need everybody to do some things really well. Everybody needs to be capable of selecting good leaders. Everybody needs to be capable of telling truth from fiction. Everybody needs to understand the basics of most of the subjects we teach so they understand when their children encounter the same subjects or something related. So it is not surprising that KIPP and their clones fail. They just looked good in the short term because they could look good.
The practice of using “no excuses” practices to drive out or keep out an unwanted student isn’t really workable in public schools on a large scale, though. That’s because a student driven out or pushed out of a public school must still be served by the school district in some way. The unwanted student lands in a school headed by a colleague of the principal who did the pushing out, taught by colleagues of the teachers in the “no excuses” public school. By contrast, a charter school that drives out or keeps out an unwanted student never has to give its pretty little head another thought of that student.
exactly!
Welcome back, Caroline.
I have missed your contributions to ed policy debates and discussions.
One point about the Malcolm Gladwell chapter of “Outliers” attributing KIPP’s “success” to its longer school day and school year: Gladwell’s chapter actually (inadvertently?) reveals the real “secret sauce.” He interviews a KIPP student who describes the intake process at her school. The student says the principal scared her so badly describing how hard the work would be that she almost cried. She also says her friends from her old school won’t consider the KIPP school because they heard the work is so hard. That’s the actual creaming method, or one of them — ensuring that only motivated, compliant students from motivated, compliant, supportive families enroll in the KIPP school.
Well, that was the ASD experiment. The idea was charter schools are intrinsically better than public schools regardless of any “creaming” effects so replacing (essentially) the whole system with charters would improve the schools.
But the ASD failed. Not that it matters and not that it will have any effect on policy or practice in ed reform going forward. They’re still chasing the privatization secret sauce, except now they’ve added vouchers. They’ve not backed down on privatization at all- they’ve doubled down to the extent that they’re now headed directly toward universal vouchers.
It’s amazing how fast it moved. In ten years this “movement” has gone from insisting they weren’t privatizing to proudly proclaiming total privatization of the whole K-12 system as the only “solution”.
They can’t make privatized systems work without universal vouchers, so it was inevitable the whole echo chamber would embrace them.
An “Amazon marketplace” of education product – the private sector consumer model they all adhere to- won’t work without a universal voucher system.That was inevitable.
They’ve already gone beyond Barry Goldwater’s wildest dreams. It as as far Right as it is possible to go and still claim to provide universal K-12 education. I think they have to jettison compulsory schooling soon- it won’t work with the consumer model.
No excuses discipline and SLANT have little to do with middle class values. They are tools to control and manage student behavior. Most middle class schools do not impose such repressive and oppressive forms of strict behavior management that KIPP uses on its mostly Black and brown students. Middle class parents would be knocking on the principal’s door if such tactics were applied on a regular basis.
Any success that Kipp has is mostly due to their rigorous application process and system of weeding out defiant and non-conforming students. Ultimately, KIPP schools are a selective school. Comparing them to public schools that accept all students is an unfair comparison, and their model and requirements are difficult to scale up in the real world.
“Middle class parents would be knocking on the principal’s door if such tactics were applied on a regular basis.”
Read about what happened when Success Academy opened its new middle school at Hudson Yards, which included families from their charters serving disproportionately more affluent students that Mayor Bloomberg helped them open in buildings in very affluent neighborhoods. (Where Eva Moskowitz then changed her lottery preferences so that economically disadvantaged students were not given priority).
The new middle school parents sent this letter:
“We are a large group of parents from Hudson Yards Middle School who are outraged by Principal Russell’s policies and treatment of our children.
Last week we met with Principal Russell to voice our concerns and these are the issues and specific incidents that were discussed:
HYSA faculty broke our children’s spirit and erased their self confidence in less than 3 weeks.
Our children who once loved the SA, who were proud of being a part of a great school, rallied in Albany and other events, now simply no longer want to go to school.
Some of our children are getting physically sick, experiencing meltdowns, vomiting, having nightmares and/or having sleepless nights and are unable to concentrate etc. Some of our children have even requested to be homeschooled although they had been award winners and popular last year.”
The new principal the parents wanted removed had been trained in one of their Harlem Middle Schools that had almost no white students. He was obviously running the new Hudson Yards middle school the way he had seen the Harlem Success Academy Middle School run.
It probably won’t surprise anyone that Eva Moskowitz didn’t invite those Hudson Yards middle school parents to leave if they didn’t like it. She met with them and that principal was replaced.
I watched a video of two classes at the same no excuses charter chain, but one was in a class with virtually no white students, and the other seemed to be in one of their charters that had a significant number of white and Asian students. There was a difference in how students were allowed to act — one school students had been trained to have eyes on teacher at all times and sit without fidgeting, etc., and the other school the students were allowed to less rigidly follow the rules.
that very important distinction: Most middle class schools do NOT impose such repressive and oppressive forms of strict behavior management (because parents would be knocking on the principal’s door)
Most experienced teachers would find the punitive approach harmful to the self esteem of young people. While there are rules and consequences routinely in classrooms, most teachers would reject a “prison like” atmosphere and believe that such a punitive atmosphere would be counterproductive to learning.
“…philanthropic funding to cover the cost of after-school music programs, supplementary tutoring, field trips, and college visits.”
Does the author (or your research, Diane) include the actual per-student cost of these separate programs? Or any less specific data or estimates on costs?
In particular, I would like to know how the costs of the KIPP after-school music programs compare to the costs of public school music programs. Also the content: does the Kipp music curriculum include band? choir? orchestra? lessons? general music class?
Do all students participate in after-school music, or is it by choice?
Are the music teachers part-timers, and who are they –college music majors? new graduates? retired musicians? career freelancers? music hobbyists?
Also, by the way, I studied KIPP closely in the past, and among other things many years ago submitted an application for my daughter, then entering 7th grade, to KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy. I wanted to see what requirements KIPP would impose. They contacted me to schedule her test. KIPP denies that it gives entrance tests. I questioned their PR person after that, and he claimed the test is to determine the student’s academic grade level. Uh-huh.
You have reporter’s instincts. Unfortunately, too many educational journalists would rather rewrite press releases than ask the obvious questions.
The charters backed by billionaire money don’t even have to worry about the disconnect between what they say and what they do – they know that the education media won’t ever question them.
When it comes to covering charter schools, much of the education media treats them like Fox News hosts treat Republicans. They can say some of the most absurd things, and it will go unchallenged.
It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. Having reporters praising the naked Emperor’s new clothes is funny, until you realize that by doing so, they signal to the Emperor they will never question anything he says, but simply report it as fact.
“the test is to determine the student’s academic grade level.”
I believe – from stories that their own parents tell at press conferences – that this is a frequent way to discourage parents from filling open seats in a grade unless their kids are academically proficient. Parents are brainwashed into believing that the charter is doing it because it is a best practice, not a way of excluding students.
If a charter tells parents of a rising first grader that the child can’t come to the charter unless the child is placed in Kindergarten, it discourages many parents from enrolling their kid. And if a low performing kid is held back over and over, eventually the parent will get the message.
If we had good education reporters instead of lazy and incompetent ones, there would be a lot of questions about how many students are held back in no-excuses.
Yes, it absolutely is a way to discourage less-motivated parents. Plus we’re talking about kids at 5th-grade age, so un-compliant kids may not docilely agree to take a test either. And I’m told that in the community, the tests ARE viewed as enrollment tests that the kid has to pass to get into the school. … The issue with education reporters is complicated. Since I work in mainstream journalism I would say my colleagues aren’t lazy or incompetent, but are stretched very thin, and investigating the practices of a single charter chain with a small number of schools in the local area is viewed as too far in the weeds/inside baseball. (Even if the reporters may be interested, their editors are seeing it that way.) With general-assignment reporters swooping in without background to do an education story, my take is that they often don’t even get the possibility that a source would lie to them about something as straightforward-seeming as a school.
I’m starting a new charter school, where every student is given a dish of vanilla ice cream each morning before class. Every single student in my school aces the state exams and their parents adore the school! Education journalists present me as discovering a miracle way of teaching — give all students a dish of vanilla ice cream each morning!
(Did I mention that I also give frequent practice tests in school and target the students struggling academically and harangue and suspend them and flunk them if necessary until their parents remove them from the school? That’s not important, I tell educational “journalists” — what’s important is that vanilla ice cream!)
The fact that there has to be critiques of no-excuses because reporters have been so lazy or incompetent or willingly co-opted has been so harmful to public schools.
I think of educational reporters like the townspeople praising the naked Emperor’s new clothes. If well-funded charters and their PR hacks told them that vanilla ice cream was the secret sauce, because billionaires decided their goal was to increase the sale of vanilla ice cream, I suspect that there would be endless articles about these “successful” new charters giving their students vanilla ice cream each day. With the backing of my billionaire friends, I would commission studies that ignored attrition rates and the students in ice cream charters that were put on got to go lists, and instead those studies would focus exclusively on how the students who remained all ate vanilla ice cream and thrived.
Have any of the no-excuses promoters claimed it works on affluent white students? Have any reporters even asked that question?
I demand chocolate!
Sorry Duane, I’ve presented clear and unimpeachable evidence that only vanilla ice cream works. My vanilla ice cream school results in all students who pass state tests. (Please don’t notice I kick out all students who can’t pass state tests because that’s irrelevant – it’s the ice cream flavor!)
I’d never before pondered that we have two separate no-excuses school models to compare: KIPP et al with application process and parent/ student contracted commitment, vs public school districts [like TN’s ASD and TX/ Fryer’s Apollo 20] which have neither. Very interesting that the former type gets good achievement stats while the latter does not. There’s a simple stat for you: proves ‘no excuses’ isn’t scalable—it succeeds only with a ‘bullpen’ [larger pubsch population] to select from and reject back into. We’ve known this forever about charter schools in general, not just KIPP, Success Academy, etc. It’s just common sense.
But this stat also proves that the pedagogy is irrelevant. When you apply the same method to all comers– as opposed to just those who want it and commit to it contractually—the achievement difference evaporates. You could just as well set your sights on graduating kids who can stand on their heads and spit jellybeans: work only with those who specifically buy in and commit, and your achievement stats will be higher.
When Chris Barbic left TN ASD, he wrote an article saying that charters can’t succeed if they take over “ failing” school. They have to open a new school to create its own culture and choose willing students.
“Willing” is defined as “does well with the system we have created”. It isn’t defined as “students whose parents want that system.”
They start with a huge advantage — willing families. But that advantage isn’t enough, because if it were, those charters would have extraordinarily low attrition rates, not unusually high ones.
They don’t want willing students. They want students who perform well without needing experienced teachers.
Wouldn’t we all like to be able to select only those students we want to teach. Barbic might have more accurately suggested that the rigors of living in poverty could not be mitigated, all bets are off when it comes to helping its victims. Unfortunately, that would have required candor.
KIPP also has a bad habit of rejecting special education students. Why bother with those expensive, challenging SPED kids when you can just kick them back into the real public school system? That’s part of their secret sauce, not only KIPP, but many of Oakland’s charter schools do the same thing. The secret sauce is no longer a secret. https://cloakinginequity.com/2020/03/03/how-does-kipp-charter-really-treat-parents/
When a district has several selective charter schools picking the “strivers” and those with most concerned parents, it changes the dynamics of the public schools that must serve the neediest, most dysfunctional and most expensive to educate. However, the public schools also have lost a lot of money from charter drain. Do they expect miracles?
Some years ago the mom of a child with autism described her family’s experience applying to KIPP on our (then)-local school parents’ listserve. She felt KIPP would be a good fit for her son because of the rigid structure. She said the school admins gave her son the entrance test in a busy, noisy location, the worst possible setting for a child with autism, and her son melted down, and the mom objected and was ordered off the school property. This was KIPP Bayview in San Francisco, sometime in the mid-2000s. (But it’s a miracle!)
I blurted “Plunk your magic twanger froggy.”
Froggy, ears blocked from a head cold, thought
I said “Twainer”.
Froggy said:
It ain’t what you DON’T know that causes trouble,
It’s what you know for sure, that AIN’T so.
Knowledge is power, AIN’T so.
What DON’T we know about testing, choice schools,
reformers, poverty, racism, yadda yadda…
While the lessons/narratives du jour, spotlight the demons,
the cul de sac of spotlighting has yet to keep the demons
at bay.
Beyond the pretenses of control, lies ACTIONS.
ACTIONS defines what an organization values, as
opposed to the ones it professes to value.
A CNN article on public schools that doesn’t include a single comment or contribution from anyone who has any direct involvement in public schools:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/31/politics/back-to-school-covid-explainer-what-matters/index.html
It’s ludicrous. The ed reform “movement” have essentially barred public schools from having any involvement in public school policy. We hear nothing from our schools- it’s all filtered thru the ed reform activist anti-public school lens.
Enough. It’s gone on long enough.Time to bring public schools back in. I want to hear from the actual people who work in and attend public schools. They have been shunted to the side long enough.
Ed reformers don’t speak for our schools. Our schools can speak for themselves.
One of the reasons “no excuses” charters have been able to get away with their ridiculous claims is that they locate in large cities, where the public has been conditioned to believe the false narrative that because many public schools have a significant population of struggling students, that means that public schools are failing with almost every student, and thus it is impossible for no excuses charters to cherry pick.
How many times have I seen a white education reporter who demonstrates no understanding of numbers who writes an article in which it is clear that privileged white reporter has internalized the false narrative that there are so few non-struggling Black and Latino students in NYC public schools that their success in no-excuses charters can only be attributed to no-excuses education!
In 2019, just among students in 3rd through 8th grade, there were 90,000 Black and Latino students who scored proficient or higher on state exams. 90,000! That’s an average of 15,000 Black and Latino students in every grade who are at or above grade level in NYC public schools, despite public schools being underfunded and having to teach a far more disadvantaged group of students. Fifteen thousand students a grade times 13 grades in K-12 is 195,000 Black and Latino students performing at or above grade level in NYC public schools.
So how to explain the awe and admiration some white education reporters at prominent media companies have for no-excuses charters in NYC that teach a tiny fraction of that number? Implicit racism. If a white reporter didn’t already begin with the racist belief that certain students needed harsh discipline, they would have questioned no-excuses high attrition rates and cherry picking long ago. If no-excuses was serving primarily white students, and a shocking number of those white students’ parents were pulling their kids from a school where they were guaranteed to become high performing scholars, those education reporters would certainly point out that plenty of white students have become quite good students without being subject to harsh discipline, and they would take seriously when white parents explained how their kid was pushed out, especially when there was video, e-mails, and all kinds of evidence that confirmed that was done.
No-excuses charters cherry pick. That is not “what critics from the teachers union say”. It is a fact. And only an implicitly racist white education reporter who has internalized the false narrative that most black students can’t lean without harsh discipline would mischaracterize that truth as “an opinion”.
… “only an implicitly racist white education reporter who has internalized the false narrative that most black students can’t lean without harsh discipline would mischaracterize that truth as ‘an opinion.’ “
You mean like this white education reporter?
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/no-apologies-no-excuses-charter-schools
Thank you for the link.
“It’s been turning the charter school sector against its own most successful model.”
What??!! Who could ever imagine that a no-excuses charter school that sheds all the students that struggle would ever be more successful than those mediocre, embarrassing charters that supposedly “tolerate failure” by continuing to teach the students that struggle when they could easily also put those students on “got to go” lists like the charters that Pondiscio fawns over do? How dare charters that don’t demonize children criticize those who do demonize those children. They should be fawning over those charters instead, just like Pondiscio does.
Here is the implicit racism in what is implied by the words in this essay which I have added in ALL CAPS:
“no excuses” signaled the non-negotiable belief that the root cause of educational failure and black-white achievement gaps was not poverty, not parents, not children, and above all not race. (AND ABOVE ALL, NOT CHARTER TEACHERS OR THEIR CEOS! AND FORGET WHAT I SAID ABOUT CHILDREN OR PARENTS NOT BEING THE CAUSE, BECAUSE OF COURSE IF A CHILD IS STRUGGLING IN A CHARTER AND GETS PUTS ON A GOT TO GO LIST, THAT IS ENTIRELY THE FAILURE OF THE STUDENT AND THEIR PARENTS.)
“It was the belief that failing schools were the source of the problem and that great schools could be the solution—provided, of course, that everyone associated with them refused to tolerate or excuse failure (BY PUTTING THE KIDS WHO DID FAIL ON GOT TO GO LISTS AND BLAMING THEM AND THEIR PARENTS FOR THEIR FAILURES AND ALSO PUBLICLY DENOUNCING THEM AS DANGEROUS AND VIOLENT 5 YEAR OLDS WHO NEEDED SUSPENDING).
“Schools that embraced the “no excuses” mantra and mindset shared standard features such as longer instructional days, data-driven instruction, school uniforms, insistence on proper classroom behavior, an embrace of testing and accountability, (HIGH SUSPENSION RATES OF KINDERGARTEN AND FIRST GRADE STUDENTS, PUBLICLY HUMILIATING 6 YEAR OLDS FOR THEIR ACADEMIC STRUGGLES AND TELLING THEM IT IS THEIR OWN FAULT, EXTRAORDINARILY HIGH ATTRITION RATES WHICH I AS A WHITE MAN BLAME ON THEIR PARENTS BECAUSE I, AS A WHITE MAN, JUST ASSUME THAT THE HIGH ATTRITION RATES ARE DUE TO PARENTS WHO GIVE UP ON THEIR OWN CHILDREN INSTEAD OF NOTICING THAT IT IS BECAUSE THE CHARTER GAVE UP ON THEIR CHILDREN)
“and an unshakable commitment to get all students (WHO REMAIN AFTER NO EXCUSES CHARTERS HAVE CORRECTLY AND ADMIRABLY IDENTIFIED THOSE WHO MUST LEAVE) to and through college—features that remain in place in many charters (and other successful schools) today.”
As I pointed out, if those charters served vanilla ice cream and their funders wanted to include “serving vanilla ice cream” as the reason their students succeeded, no doubt Pondiscio would mention that serving vanilla ice cream was a “shared standard feature” of no-excuses charters and he would still pretend not to notice all the students who leave because only implicit racism can explain why Pondiscio is so certain that the charter wanted to teach those missing students but those uncaring and nasty parents just preferred them to fail. I doubt very much if Pondiscio would be so quick to blame the parents if that was a very high performing mostly white public school where so many middle class white students left. I have never heard Pondiscio extolling BASIS for turning failing and mediocre white and Asian students into high performing scholars. But with no-excuses charters that serve primarily Black and Latino students, Pondiscio gives all credit for students’ success to the charters, and all blame for their failures on the children or their parents. What a hypocrite.
These pro-“no-excuses” charter folks are PRO-EXCUSES! Any excuse to demonize a child or parents that a charter doesn’t want to teach is fine for them.
So, when students return from the Coronavirus crisis, and they haven’t gained in their skills will we: 1. Do like New York City, give no “F”, and move ahead w/o learning, or 2. Fail and retain assuring students are closer to dropping out rather than graduating at 20 years old. Or. 3. My favorite, put them in summer school and pretend sitting time is all that is needed to pass. It’s so easy for politicians to pretend.
It all boils down to economics. The investor class simply wants the working class to get used to longer hours for less compensation. And no dissent. No unions. Eyes forward. Walk the line. They say we all need to have the grit or resiliency to “sit” longer. That’s why billionaires invest in no-excuses charter chains. That’s why they tried unsuccessfully to push after school tutoring and summer school this year on an exhausted nation. Insane greed.
Cap,
Since you are talking about NYC:
If 100% of the students were retained for a year, it is likely more than half of them would still be only 18 when they graduated.
Anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of a typical NYC public school first grade class would have students the same age of Kindergarten students in private schools.
NYC is one of the few places where half the students may still be17 when they graduate high school.
Not that I’m advocating that. Just saying that even if students weren’t “retained” but public schools slowed down the curriculum and added an extra high school year/middle school/elementary school year for students who seemed to need it, the students would not be particularly old in those grades.
Spot on: “In ‘scripting the moves,’ as she titles her book, “no-excuses” charter schools mechanize the learning process and in doing so deny students the opportunity to think for themselves and thereby develop the agency they will need to succeed in college and beyond.”
“The Education Exchange: Abolish School Districts, a New Book Proposes”
Just to let you know what’s up next for ed reform- abolish public schools completely.
The ed reform “movement” is unrecognizable from even a decade ago- now prouldy and aggressively anti-public school.
It is really misleading to the public for these folks to continue to claim they work to support public schools and students- that simply isn’t true. They’re engaged full time in an ideological project to privatize K-12 education- they do no other work.
https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-abolish-school-districts-a-new-book-proposes/
I wonder which state legislature will be the first to put forth the first “abolish public schools bill”
My money is on Florida- that’s the ed reform model. Probably by next session, at the breakneck speed they’re privatizing everything in sight.
Oh, the news is very bad for public schools and public school students, warn the Professional Public School Critics Association members of ed reform:
“And it gets worse. We now have a full set of student test scores from Texas that suggests the pandemic erased the last seven years of gains in reading and math. And that’s in a state whose school closures were relatively short-lived.
At the same time, local school boards find themselves in a no-win situation as a kind of collective cultural panic triggers vast numbers of people on both sides of the aisle to embrace illiberalism.”
Grim, grim, grim for public school students. Why, if they keep pumping this propoganda out long enough maybe they can bump up charter and private school enrollment!
I know why ed reformers spend a good part of every work day bashing public schools and promoting charter and private schools, but what I can’t figure out is why anyone who values or supports a public school listens to any of them.
What’s the return on ed reform for public school students? What does ed reform contribute to your schools or students? If the answer is “nothing”, cut em loose. If gthey don’t benefit your students or schools- and they don’t- why accept directives from them?
KIPP’s dropped motto—“Work Hard. Be Nice.”— reminds me of The Bridge on the River Kwai. The Japanese commander of the POW camp repeatedly told the starving, disease-riddled POWs forced to work on the Japanese military railroad to “Be happy in your work.”
I do not see any difference between that Japanese POW camp commander in the film and the vicious, greedy, autocrats that run KIPP or any other publicly funded, opaque, very profitable, private-sector Charter Reform Schools.
No matter what KIPP’s management says to look like cute sheep, they will always be vicious vampire predators.
Nice catch.