Julia Steiny: The Trouble With ‘No Excuses’ Schools
Thursday, October 25, 2012
I'm standing in the play area of a "no-excuses" school with its Director and his energetic young Principal. The kids have been sprung momentarily from their super-structured environment and are shrieking and bouncing around like other kids would. I'm relieved they can still revert to their little animal selves.
I'm torn. The predominantly urban students at this school are knocking the test scores out of the park. But my tour of the cheerfully-decorated halls showed lots of quiet, though wriggling, kids lined up in the hallways with military precision. The last five minutes of their lunch must be silent. The teaching involves a lot of snapped fingers and "Eyes front!" The adults are perfectly nice. But the command-and-control atmosphere gives me the creeps.
Examples of "no-excuses" schools include the networks of Success Academies and Achievement First charter schools, among others. Their common goal is to prove that student poverty is no excuse for poor academic performance. They do whatever it takes to get the scores.
Virtually all of them are modeled after the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). Their 125 schools dotted around the nation regularly out-score middle-class schools, often big time.
As a group, the "no-excuses" schools differ from regular public schools in two ways. First, they hold their students to impressively high academic expectations (a good thing). To do so, though, they have 8 or 9-hour days -- with predictably high teacher turnover. Secondly, their discipline is highly authoritarian. You make a bad choice; you're punished. Simple. No questions, reasons or excuses.
The late, great Martin Haberman thought and wrote a lot about using authoritarian methods with poor kids. In his " Pedagogy of Poverty" he says, "The clear-cut need to 'make' students learn is so obviously vital to the common good and to the students themselves, that surely (it is believed) there must be a way to force students to work hard enough to vindicate the methodology."
Back out on the playground, the Director and Principal could tell I hadn't been sold on their approach. Of course, their test scores are so good that in this day and age it doesn't matter a whit whether I'd been impressed or not. Still, the Director, whom I admire as a smart, sincerely well-intentioned guy, asks about my hesitations.
I worry, I say, that in exchange for test scores, you're teaching low-income kids to be docile and compliant.
"Oh my God," explodes the exasperated young Principal, "the behavior is just noise. If you can't control the behavior, you can't teach them anything. You have to get rid of the noise." She looks sharply at her boss for confirmation.
The thoughtful Director took a moment. He smiled his support to the Principal, but admitted he also worried about the price of compliance. He mused that as the kids get older and into high school and college, they'll need to know how to perform well on their own. People driven by fear of getting in trouble don't become innovators, intellectual explorers or calculated risk-takers.
The Principal left in a frustrated huff. Her job is to deliver those glowing test results. . And she's dead on the money. Feral behavior is noise. You can't teach anyone when kids are disruptive. It ruins learning and begs to be civilized.
But is authoritarianism truly civilized? Should we double down on teaching compliance to the very kids with the fewest options, the least opportunity to make choices for themselves, and scarce guidance about the consequences of their actions?
Haberman asks, "Who is responsible for seeing that these students derive meaning and apply what they have learned from this fragmented, highly specialized, overly-directive schooling? ... Graduates who possess basic skills but are partially informed, unable to think, and incapable of making moral choices are downright dangerous. Before we can make workers, we must first make people. But people are not made -- they are conserved and grown."
Conserving and growing a child's willing, understanding cooperation takes time and often tons of patience, especially with urban kids who've had little structure at home. If a child bullies or steals or just slacks off, merely punishing her won't get to the bottom of the problem. It won't teach her the social or emotional skills that will help her master her urges or make the sorts of choices that will pay off over the course of her life.
In the 1990s, the KIPP test scores were so good, the organization vowed that 75 percent of their graduates would finish college. A recent report shows that they've done remarkably well, all considering, but fallen woefully short of their ambitious goal. So they're re-thinking their methods.
I hope they look into their command-and-control discipline techniques. Authoritarianism creates followers, not leaders. It would be great if they would model more empathetic techniques for their many imitators.
We'd all love a lot less brutish behavior from under-civilized kids. But while suppressing such behavior is convenient for the adults, muscling poor kids into compliance is morally questionable.
Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at EducationNews.org . She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building demonstration projects in Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.
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Comments:
barnaby morse
6:42am on Thursday, October 25, 2012
and also leaves no room for programs such as Restorative Justice!
Ed Jucation
8:03am on Thursday, October 25, 2012
If the parents would raise their children to have manners and obey authority figures then this practice would not be necessary. However, many children in the inner-city have no respect for anyone. The only way to control these disruptive students is to give them money or harsh discipline. Swearing at teachers, refusing to complete classwork, and fighting is common and not conducive to learning. The government knows how to control adults: fine them or put them in prison for breaking the law. Why are children any different?
Aaron Regunberg
8:32am on Thursday, October 25, 2012
Nice article, Julia.
Gary Arnold
11:46am on Thursday, October 25, 2012
I am from the days of respect of the teacher, the teacher was always right and someone you looked up to. If they told you to do something, you did it without questions.
The teachers were different then, they actually did the class planning, the course preparation and the creative thinking to lead their students through the subject that was being taught. There was much more interactive attention by the teachers, they were rated by how well they performed and their students performed. Many of them had second jobs, after all they only had a little over ½ a year to teach and they needed the additional income. Times have changed, regulations have been imposed, standards are commanded by the school districts as dictated by the state education department who whimper and claw for government money IF they do whatever they are told to do. Teachers now teach by some artificial rating system that keeps changing every 4 or 5 years.
Maybe a more regimented system would at least give us some real measurable results. It would require the regimentation to start at the top which is core to the education system failing in the US.
Wuggly Ump
11:49am on Thursday, October 25, 2012
Julia I look at "no-excuses" as a good thing. If you are responsible for an infraction you will be held accountable. Personal responsibility is a must in a civilized society, or we have anarchy and victims that blame their ills on everyone else.
People don't have patience anymore, this "plugged-in" society always requires distractions, no wonder kids don't learn. How can children read and understand anything if they can't sit still long enough to download (read) information from a book?
There are times and places when it is inappropriate to be running around and making noise. The classroom is such a place, children must be taught this or they won't know.
Informed Parent
2:33pm on Thursday, October 25, 2012
As you say Julia, it's probably best to "let many flowers bloom" (provided they all have high expectations of one sort or another) and let parents decide where they want to enroll their kids. That being said, you've created something of a straw man here -- for instance, by misrepresenting the kids: if I'm right and this is Blackstone Valley Prep (odd that you didn't just name it) half the students are suburban. Would the fact that suburban parents are choosing BVP in droves have complicated your argument? You might also have mentioned that BVP has one of the best -- if not THE best -- elementary school music program in the state. That too would have complicated your argument. At the end of the day you seem to mostly have a problem with the classroom management approach at this school and schools like it. Fair enough, but that's an honest debate, not cause for alarm. I'd bet money that five years from now BVP is leading the way on college-readiness just as it currently is leading the way on NECAP scores.
Julia Steiny
1:06pm on Thursday, November 01, 2012
I totally believe in accountability, high expectations, firm structure and good discipline. But discipline means "to teach" not to control. Kids need to know how to speak for themselves and to EXPECT to be heard learn. They need to know how to listen. Authoritarianism does not have both parties listening to each other. In the learning community I would wish for kids, the authorities -- in this case the teachers --listen to the kids, adjust according to what they hear, but ultimately holds the responsibility and therefore the final decisions. But they are negotiable. Negotiation is a critical life skill. If middle-class people want to send their kids to an authoritarian school, that's their choice. My moral issue is imposing authoritarianism on those kids who most need to learn to believe their voice counts and to listen well in exchange.