Two educators in the District of Columbia were fired because they refused to implement the harsh, no-excuses pedagogy of the so-called “Relay Graduate School of Education.”
One of the fired educators was a respected principal of an elementary school, Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King. She objected to the practice of barking out commands to students and demanding unquestioning compliance. She said it was racist. She and another school employee who agreed with her—Marlon Ray—were fired.
I was invited to write a deposition on behalf of the fired educators, and I did. The Relay “no excuses” pedagogy would never be acceptable to middle-class parents of any race. Children are not dogs. They should not be trained like dogs. Why is this harsh treatment reserved for low-income Black children?
Peter Greene wrote about the case, which is going to trial in a few weeks at Forbes, where is a senior contributor.
When Relay Graduate School of Education was brought in by D.C. Public Schools to do staff training, administrators Carolyn Jackson-King and Marlon Ray blew the whistle on the disciplinary methods they mandated. The two lost their jobs, in what they claim was retribution for speaking out. They sued the district; now that lawsuit is finally moving forward.
Carolyn Jackson-King spent almost two decades working in the District of Columbia Public School system, including seven years as principal of Lawrence E. Boone Elementary School.
Jackson-King started there is 2014, inheriting a school that was chaotic, with fighting, low morale, and weak academics. Jackson-King started there when the school was still named Orr Elementary, after Benjamin Orr, D.C.’s fourth mayor. When a student in the predominantly Black school discovered that Orr had been a slave owner, Jackson-King worked with the school community to have the name changed to honor the school’s first Black principal.
Jackson-King was respected in that community (they reportedly called her Dr. J-K or Principal JK). She told WAMU, “In order to have a culture like the one we have at Boone, we have to build relationships and that’s what we do best.” Boone’s rating went from 1 star to 3 star. Jackson-King appeared to be a successful, well-respected principal who had lifted up a struggling school in an underserved community. Then Relay Graduate School of Education came to town.
The defendants opposed the Relay methods and refused to comply.
Their argument is not that complicated: They stood up for the students against a program they saw as abusive and racist (a point on which many authorities agree, including charter schools that had previously implemented the model), and the district retaliated by taking their jobs…
What is Relay GSE?
Relay Graduate School of Education was launched in 2007 as Teacher U. It was set up by three founders of charter school chains as a way to beef up the teacher pipeline for their schools. The founders had little formal teacher training of their own. In 2011 they changed the name to better reflect their expansive new plans, expanding Relay’s operations across the country.
Relay is not a graduate school in any traditional sense of the word. As Lauren Anderson, chair of the Education Department at Connecticut College, once put it:
It is a charter-style network of independent teacher preparation programs created by the leaders of three prominent charter school chains (Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First), primarily as a means to bypass traditional teacher education.
Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote of Relay:
It has no scholars, no researchers, no faculty other than charter teachers. It is a trade school for teaching tricks of test-taking and how to control black and brown children and teach them to obey orders without questioning.
Please open the link and read the rest of this enlightening article.
If you have any personal experience with Relay and its pedagogy, please let me know or write a letter to the lawyer representing the two educators. The lawyer who represents them is Raymond C. Fay. He can be reached at: rfay@faylawdc.com
Frankly, it is shocking that a successful principal would be fired because she refused to bow to the demands of a pretend “graduate school” led by charter school teachers with far less experience than she has. Relay’s leaders undoubtedly attended prep schools and elite suburban public schools where they were never subjected to “no excuses” pedagogy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perhaps, the term should be changed from no excuses “pedagogy” to no excuses “pathology.”
True.
It’s also ridiculous to bring “no excuses” into public schools because the success of the program is that it gives charters an excuse to punish and humiliate the students they want to “encourage” to leave.
I don’t know how good the lawyers for the educators are, but it would be great if the trial resulted in charter operators using “no excuses” having to provide under penalty of perjury the true numbers of the students who win the lottery who enroll, and the true number of the students who win the lottery, enroll in Kindergarten, and have progressed to the appropriate grade 5 years later, ESPECIALLY in the so-called “high performing” no excuses charters where very low attrition rates would be expected and high attrition rates would be a huge red flag. No excuses was always about giving administrators the excuse to target kids they want to leave, and the freedom to impose a double standard where unwanted lower performing students are expected to meet an impossible standard of behavior that higher performing students do not.
No excuses is “reserved for low-income Black children” not because it works, but because its proponents depend on the implicit racism in our country to have the laughably weak evidence that it works never questioned by reporters like Eliza Shapiro or white-dominated oversight boards like that of the SUNY Charter Institute. Those folks believe it works because they don’t find it at all odd that disproportionately high numbers of Black parents whose families jumped through hoops to enroll in a top performing charter would just turn around and “voluntarily” pull their kids.
No Excuses doesn’t work for charters serving almost exclusively white middle class children because those who report on charters and those who oversee charters would look at the evidence of attrition when huge cohorts of very young white children whose families had jumped through hoops were disappearing. The huge numbers of white students thriving in schools that aren’t no excuses would not be invisible to them.
There are so many red flags in the “no excuses works amazingly for Black children” narrative. The fact that white education reporters and oversight agencies have decided that – contrary to all accepted scientific teaching — that attrition is irrelevant shows how much their unintentional or intentional implicit racism guides their reporting and oversight.
And the only way to stop it might be to force testimony under oath where no excuses proponents reveal their idiocy when they explain how white kids don’t need no excuses and how attrition rates must be kept hidden “for the good of the kids” and anyway, who cares about attrition when those who love no excuses already know that whether 20% of the kids leave or 60% of them leave, the reason is always the same – that those Black parents just don’t value their children’s education like the rest of us do.
Wow! The “dog-barking” style was predominant in the US Army, when I served. It can have a value in training people to fight and kill, but should have little place in schools. Note that our society is saturated with militaristic images and continuous wars–not to mention crazy, war-like TV shows and movies. It also works best in situations where there’s a right and wrong answer and all one has to do is memorize what the leader says.
“the practice of barking out commands to students and demanding unquestioning compliance” is the 18th century Prussian (German) model of education that was introduced to the United States in the early 19th century.
Although the extreme right and critics of K-12 public education for decades have alleged that public schools are still doing that, no they haven’t.
After World War II, the Prussian model of public education started to phase out to be replaced by teaching designed to educate critical thinkers, problem solvers, avid readers and lifelong learners taught to fact check, taught to question, taught to analyse, taught to ask questions, taught to debate by rules, et al.
How can I saw that?
Because that’s how I was taught to teach in 1975-76 when I earned my teaching credential through a year long urban residency program. Classroom management was not barking out commands to students and demanding unquestioning compliance. My master teacher taught me to manage a classroom with a soft voice, not to get angry, not to demand unquestioning compliance. Teachers have to manage their classrooms so pandemonium does not destroy the learning environment because of a few unruly students that disrupt the learning environment. To have discussions, to teach, to ask and answer question required students to pay attention and be part of the process.
The public education system I taught in was not the Prussian model.
“My master teacher taught me to manage a classroom with a soft voice, not to get angry, not to demand unquestioning compliance.”
Yes! I found that when the noise level in the class was rising I would keep lowering my voice. Usually a few students would shout out to the others to be quiet because they couldn’t hear what I was saying. It worked every time.
I also challenged them to challenge me in whatever fashion they wanted. Never had a problem with that either as they knew they’d be listened to and then be shown that what they were saying was either correct or incorrect. If they were correct I’d thank them for correcting me. If not, well they knew that if they were going to challenge me they’d better have their ducks in a row, i’s dotted and t’s crossed.
“The LOOK!”
If on the first day of school and onward…
1. Build relationships with students
2. Encouragement, not demand
3. “You can do this” expectations
Then, misbehavior, all it takes is “the look”
My look was a raised eyebrow, right or left with a quick glance depending on the side. Or sometimes a finger wag to the two on the left while you’re talking with a student on the right.
Or just to prove that teachers do have eyes in the back of their heads.
I had a basketball player, 6’3″ or so who, sat in the far front right of the room, front seat so that he could stretch out his legs. I noticed he was cleaning out a folder and balling up the papers. Didn’t say anything. The trash can was over behind me on the front left wall. As I was looking over to the left talking with a student, our Pistol Pete decided to go for a bucket. . . .
I was still looking at the student on the left as the wadded up paper ball was heading to the bucket. A sure three pointer in his mind. Without looking back I reached up and caught the ball, while still addressing the student and then while still addressing the student I took the paper wad over to the student who threw it and told him to politely put it in the trash can. (I played a little collegiate level ice hockey as a goaltender and I still had good reflexes-now not so much) The whole class was speechless.
I saw that student about 10 years later and he still couldn’t believe I caught that paper ball.
As I posted my previous comment, it dawned on me that the K-12 education system I attended as a child to 1965 and high school graduation, wasn’t the Prussian model either.
I never had a teacher that barked commands and demanded total obedience. NEVER!
I was not a brick in the wall being trained to be an obedient drone. My teachers treated us students like individuals as long as we didn’t disrupt the learning environment.
One such disruption I will never forget happened halfway through a class where teaching and learning was humming along wonderfully in a perfect learning environment (a rare day) and then one boy destroyed it all when he said loudly, “I wonder what it would be like to have sex with an elephant.”
What he said had nothing to do with the story we’d read or the discussion we were having about that story, and that was the end of that perfect learning day as the classroom erupted in chaos.
All I know is it is…if students don’t learn the way we teach, we need to teach the way they learn. In the one Minute Manager, a productivity expert came in to review the business. He said everyone was doing their job except for one man who sat in his chair and stared out the window. The boss said, “Thank you for your observiation. But that man saved the company thousands of dollars last year by doing exactly what he is doing right now.” The point, metacognition doesn’t happen in the first three seconds. Ask an artist. Geez. As a “rogue” but never insubordinate, I went along with ALL the CRAP THEY dished out. I listened. I followed directions. And most of it never worked. My techniques to helping ALL children learn were unorthodox or THEY got rid of it (the Slingerland method worked well for my kids who could not form their “sounds” make make words — got rid of it). I recall they were pushing this “…at 10:27 a.m. if I walk into a room, the teacher will be on the same page, doing the same thing as the other teacher in Room #3…” BS. Kids don’t go to school to be tortured. I always imagined if I were sitting where they were, would I have been helping or a hindrance? It was picture day and one little guy had his hoodie up. I asked what was wrong. His hair was all ratted. So, I took him to the bathroom, combed is hair, pressed out his shirt to create a “Joe Montana” for the photographer”. The other child had no socks and no jacket and it was winter. So yeah, RELAY this! I stated for years, “We are the ears. We are the ones who build the WHOLE CHILD inside and outside the classroom. We develop relationships so the child has a “go to” when they need it. In the book, “Dispatches from Juvenile Hall”, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy seemed to work the best. Build strengths. Work on things they didn’t understand. Be there and most of all LISTEN. Wow, this RELAY thing reminds me of “Jo Jo Rabbit” and the Hitler Youth Movement. I would have been let go the first day. I move too much; one minute I am in one corner of the room; I am sitting right next to a child; I am dancing to explain something (or just dancing because kids like to see their teacher as human); I even posed on top of the desk for my art students to draw me (to learn gesture drawing). We did multiple ways to learning. I quickly found out when one teaches the WHOLE CHILD, what works one day, doesn’t work the next, but when they child and family know you teach from the heart, they keep coming to school. And that’s how they learn, by keep showing up. In the end, the teachers who really make the connection to kids (well in my case and it sounds like here as well) get oppressed by others who “just don’t get it.” I remember working so hard to figure out what would “grow ownership” in the classroom and kids would come to me because no matter what, they were helped and not dismissed. The principal called me into the office to discuss that I shouldn’t be doing that…the principal wanted ALL teachers to have that rapport with students. I paused and said, “So it’s my fault they didn’t put in the time?” In sum, education should be about making magic. A place where when you fall, a hand comes out to pick you up. A place where you can draw purple trees, read good stories, write your own stories, build your own uniqueness and even when times are bad someone says, “It’s going to be okay, but it will never be easy. You, my friend, are going to save the world some day. And I want to make sure you have the right tools do so. The only CRAP we know is : CREATIVE RESPONSES AFTER PROCESSING. Never said I was great, but always did what was right. Another tale from the trenches. Peace out.
Having to be fair and objective even when it is uncomfortable – as a frequent critic of neo-liberalism and reformers etc. on this and other blogs, I have to say my experience with Relay was different than conveyed in the blog story and others.
I attended a Relay training five years ago – kicking and screaming – but went. I was a district administrator and attended the summer session and during the year (it’s a package deal).
My experience from the Relay presenters was that of high expectations for kids, support (yep) and coaching skills for new principals and teachers and all principals and teachers, and giving principals and teachers fair, objective and yes, honest so blunt sometimes feedback they could actually use. Maybe we got lucky in that group compared to others.
Part 1
One session was on classroom management and discipline. The presenter was a principal or someone in the schools who was an all-star I guess because everyone seemed to know her. Her methods and tactics were firm, repetition forms behaviors, and rigid – – but not what is described in the blog here. I bit my tongue the entire time, went out for a walk in fresh air after the session, and felt better. But for all the rigidity – not mean, disrespecting, scream at kids behavior modification.
Midwest Administrator,
Do you think the successful principal of an all-black school in DC should be fired for refusing to accept Relay’s “no excuses” style?
As a teacher who was often called on and volunteered to look into new and innovative modes of delivering education (aka: I attended a lot of workshops and reported back to admins on my thoughts), I have to say that some of them delivered on their promises. And some did not.
The biggest stumbling block to the latter always came in the area of implementation. Especially with the large scale purveyors. There are so many cultural and economic variables between towns, cities, and states which can’t help but affect students, teachers, and administrators in differing ways. So what I might see as a positive experience in a controlled workshop model isn’t necessarily going to pan out the same when it’s put into actual practice in the school system.
Brings to mind a post I read last year. An actively involved parent was saying that the tech based reform package that had been bought by his district was perfect. It’s just that those pesky teachers weren’t very good at delivering it. That’s a pretty broad statement with implications that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.
I respect your slant and experience, Midwest administrator. I wasn’t there and I see they you were surprised and impressed. It’s just that the situation in DC isn’t an isolated one. Both in terms of the firings and in imposing a model that might not be optimal for the schools involved.
Part 2 of experience in a Relay one-year program for administrator supervisors
And, in fairness, on the coaching side, their methods were – – – sorry – – – good, practical, and professional. The first time I experienced supervisor skill development was with Madeline Hunter! Yes. Similar in “moves” supervisors take to provide feedback on observations and on-the-spot practice (role play) of re-doing the interaction of principal coaching to teacher or supervisor coaching to principal.
It was all based on short visits in rooms or observing a principal-teacher post observation meeting – not sit for an hour, take notes, and fill out the obligatory twice a year form.
The emphasis was to focus on skills (of principal and teacher) and practice it – role play – over and over. For supervisors working especially with new principals and stuck in old ways (meaning meaningless observations of teachers) – it was good.
It was not rigid nor – it was all based on practice, practice, and more practice.
Because they draw mostly charter people, the supervisors are inexperienced in education or thrown into the role too soon and it was helpful to them.
Maybe I was lucky and got some good facilitators.
How do you know it works if you aren’t a teacher?
Do you agree that any classroom where a teacher is strongly incentivized to identify the lowest performing students and get them to leave the school by any method possible, where “no excuses” is embraced, is a very problematic classroom?
Or as a charter administrator does your ideal teacher use no excuses to target the unwanted students so they leave?
The reason that no-excuses can’t work in public schools is that public schools can’t simply dump kids and blame the kids for their failures. Charters can.
Relay is for charters to certify inexperienced teachers and administrators. Private school don’t hire Relay to train their teachers because parents with means would not put up with an inexperienced administrator proud of how much they are certain they now know because of their role-playing time.
If Relay was so good, charters that heavily promote Relay would welcome the kids who struggle to learn, not drum them out.
I read into the “Relay” program that there are mostly “right” and “wrong’ answers–learn their way of educating kids, etc. But the big, analogue world we live in is not digital–right and wrong. I taught English and History. In English, some teachers in the old way had spelling tests every Friday; had mostly true and false tests; had multiple choice tests, and yes, there’s a place for them, but the world is way more complex. (Shakespear wasn’t a great speller; neither were the authors of the Mayflower Compact). In history class, what’s the answer to the question, who was the best President, Washington or Jefferson? What’s the answer in today’s world–Who should I vote for: Bernie, Biden, or Trump? Etc. Kids need to be helped to learn to think: Gather data (evaluating it as they go); analyze data; act on data–also maybe feelings, hunches, etc.
It’s a big complex world and universe. Let’s teach our kids how to think and ways they can act. It can’t be just true or false, A, B, or C. It certainly can’t be just Do it my way or else! (That sounds more like the authoritarianism of 1930’s Germany–or a convent).
As a teacher union guy, we worked to shelve the “shut up and sit down” mentality that administrators used on teachers in the bad old days. Browbeaten teachers tend to browbeat students. Sounds like the Relay program wants to bring it back the rote learning, authoritarianism of the past.
Let’s don’t let them!
Wow, Jackson/King and Ray appear to be true administrators. I applaud their resistance. But did they refuse to play the standards and testing game?
Now what to do about all the other, the 99.99% who are true adminimals?
This sounds like a mashup of Teach For America and Michelle Rhee: two somehow-proclaimed education experts who actually proved they knew absolutely nothing. Mix in a bit of DeSantis’ “Troops to Teachers” barking and what could possibly go right?
That’s a confusing response. The two educators had years of experience. Who “proved they knew absolutely nothing”?
I think the reference is to TFA and Rhee, Diane, if that’s your point. Not the two who were fired.
Got it.