Teachers who worked at Chicago’s leading charter chain spoke out to NPR and described their discomfort with the strict disciplinary code. Some called it “dehumanizing.”
“The trend toward school choice has educators across the country looking at Chicago’s Noble Charter Schools — an award-winning network of mostly high schools that specializes in helping inner-city kids achieve the kind of SAT scores that propel them into four-year universities. But despite its prestigious reputation, Noble has a peculiarly high teacher turnover rate.
“And some of those teachers are speaking up about policies they describe as “dehumanizing.”
“Noble’s handbook lists more than 20 behaviors that can elicit demerits. The dress code, for example, requires students to wear light khakis, plain black leather belts,
“Kerease Epps, who taught at Noble’s Hansberry College Prep, made sure to arrive by seven o’clock every day to help students with curved lines in their hair avoid punishment.
”“Every morning, I would color in two of my boys’ parts,” she says. ”I had a hefty amount of eyeliner at my desk, so I’d just color in with black or brown eyeliner.”
“Ann Baltzer taught chemistry at Hansberry. When one of her female students showed up with braids that included strands of maroon — the school color — the girl was told she couldn’t attend class. So she asked Baltzer to use a black marker to obliterate the maroon in each braid. The teacher looks back on that as not only unnecessary, but racist.
“To have a system that results in a white woman having to color on a black woman’s hair, and if I don’t, she’s excluded from education, there’s something wrong with that,” Baltzer says…”
Some teachers like the strict discipline and the culture change it promotes.
But turnover among teachers is high, in part because of the culture of the schools.
“It’s a completely dehumanizing system, both for teachers and students,” Baltzer says.
“One of the policies that made her most uncomfortable was demanding “level zero,” or complete silence, in the hallways during passing period, which she says teachers could activate by yelling “hands up.”
“Teachers were applauded if you had the ability to shut down the hallway,” Baltzer says. “We had no awareness that it would be inappropriate to shout ‘hands up’ at a hallway full of black children. And so we had white teachers shouting ‘Hands up’ and kids putting their hands up and going silent. That is insane.”
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