A Look Inside "No Excuses" Charter Schools

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to episode 105 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Abraham Angel, Sally Orna, and Tim Fox. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Today, we are joined by doctor Joanne Golan. Doctor Joanne is an assistant professor of public policy and education and an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University and focuses on how culture shapes educational policy and practice. Her recently book, Scripting the Culture and Control and a No Excuses Charter School, follows Joanne over eighteen months as she observes a high performing charter school documenting the various regimented structures, student and parent perspectives, what the teachers do, and more, which we're we're talking about in this interview. So, Jannas, nice to see you. I'm glad that you're here. And the the first question I have is really like, why? Like, why do this for such a long period of time? And if you could provide, like, a little bit of context about about the school.

Speaker 2 Sure. So I did observations for about a year and a half in a no excuses charter school that I called Dream Academy. And for a little context of what no excuses charter schools are, charter schools are public schools of choice. So, you may have one in your community, and students, apply to them. So instead of going to their zone neighborhood school, they may, choose a charter school as an alternative. Charter school started in about the nineties, and they now serve, you know, maybe six or 7% of all public school students. They sometimes have a theme. They tend to have a little bit more they they do have more flexibility than traditional public schools in terms of what they can do, what their school day looks like, what their curriculum looks like. So no excuses charter schools are a subset of these, and, they've kind of garnered a lot of policy attention because they've been pretty successful in raising standardized test scores, for the low income black and Latinx students they predominantly serve. So you may have heard of schools like KIPP, Achievement First, Success Academies, Uncommon Schools. These are all classified under what we call the no excuses label. And why did I spend, you know, so long in one of these schools? Well, I was a graduate student at the time, and I had to write a dissertation on something. Something. And I, I happened to hear about these schools. I actually happened to hear about a particular practice, that they had called SLANT. And SLANT is an acronym, and it stands for sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod for understanding, and track the speaker. And it's a way of kind of teaching kids how to show attention in what you might think of as a kind of white middle class way. So, you know, when I talk, I'm not a lot, but, you know, no one ever explicitly taught me, you know, this is how you need to show attention. Well, I was sort of intrigued by this explicit attempt to teach what we in sociology called cultural capital. So I went into the project with this sort of theoretical kind of idea in mind,

Speaker 1 and and learned a lot by sort of immersing myself in the school. And the experiences that you share are I mean, they're fascinating. Just to be like a fly on the wall in a system that is so it's it's odd to be controlled as much as you are in an academy like this. Could you describe just briefly, like, what what does a school day look like for a student that goes through this process? Yeah. So the school days are longer. The school I was at, I think it was 07:30 to four, and

Speaker 2 it has a very rigid, set of kind of behavioral expectations. So if students do not arrive by 07:30 and there's no bus transportation, they receive a same day detention. There was a particular tiled square, a line of tiled square in the school that students had to walk on, and they had to walk in straight single file lines, hands on their you know, by their sides. They couldn't touch the walls. They couldn't talk to each other. The hallways were silent. There was an elaborate set of rules, kind of rewards and consequences system, which lots of schools use. But in this in these schools, it's it's much more elaborate. So, you know, you might get an infraction for putting a head on a desk or, you know, having a side conversation in a classroom or not having a shirt tucked in or rolling your eyes at a teacher. Over the course of the school year, you know, there were 15,000 infractions assigned, to to about 250 students at the school, which amounted to about one infraction assigned every three days. So it was just a very, like you said, tightly controlled,

Speaker 1 system both for students and I would argue for teachers as well. Before we jump into the specifics there, because I I really wanna dive into those discipline statistics because it's it's shocking to me. Just to contextualize kind of the purpose of the book. Because you talk about how it's not necessarily just to demean this one individual school, but to make those connections to the broad work that's being done across a variety of different schools, like, you you talk about, like, broken windows policing being similar to what they call the sweat the small stuff policy. As a teacher, reading this work, what do you hope that folks are taking away?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I appreciate your kind of note noting that in the book because that is what I'm trying to do. I think there are these broader narratives and practices that we can find in all sorts of schools, not just these charter schools. Maybe we see them, you know, to the extreme in in some cases in this school. But I was just talking with a friend yesterday who was complaining about, you know, the bonus bucks that her first grader gets in school for behavior and gets these dollars given and taken away. So, yeah, what I what I'm really hoping teachers and administrators, get from the book is a way to reflect on their own practices and their own assumptions. So I definitely understand that teachers and administrators have a very difficult job and, you know, constantly putting out fires in some cases, making decisions on the fly. So it's not to it's actually not to criticize them and what they're doing, but to say, hey. If you step back and think, you know, when you're saying, you know, this student just has no structure at home or his parents never show up, do you realize that's actually connected to sort of a broader narrative about, poor kids, right, and a narrative that might have racist implications? Or, you know, if you think about your school's disciplinary practice practices, have you ever thought of the ways in which they're tied to racialized social control and what's been happening in the Black Lives Matter movement? Right? So just trying and I've tried to sort of make sociology written in a way that's accessible so that someone can, like a teacher, can sort of make connections and say, oh, I never thought about it that way. Maybe that'll make me rethink something I do or say. It's it's interesting to kinda tease apart the intention

Speaker 1 versus the practice. If we were to take this at face value and not be cynical about it, the idea behind this is equity minded. I I was reading something, like so slant Doug Lemoff's Teach Like a Champion, and Teach Like a Champion three point o is coming out pretty soon, and they're talking about how it's gonna shift to more equity driven language. And I think they're rebranding Slant to something else so it doesn't sound as harsh, but it's still ostensibly the same thing. You know, in your read of this, is the work that's being done actually accomplishing the thing that it's set out to do?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Is it promoting equity? I think that's a tough question because I I guess it depends what line lens you put on it. Right? So I think a lot of people think about equity in terms of individual outcomes. You know, I think that's how schools think about it a lot. Are we getting this particular kid? Are we giving them more opportunities than they would have had had they not been in our school? As a sociologist, we think more about systems and, society. So are these schools actually making a positive impact, you know, on society, on public education? Are they, helping students develop a critical consciousness that's gonna lead them to feel empowered and make social change in their communities and in the world. You know, so there are different metrics. You know, you can say they're very successful on a standardized test scale, but, you know, they're what about, you know, career outcomes? What about health outcomes? What about you know, did they feel respected and affirmed or you know, to your own podcast, do they feel human you know, treated like human beings, at school? So all of those things I think are related to thinking about equity. So I would say it it depends, yeah, it depends what viewpoint you're taking.

Speaker 1 It's very intriguing because it has like almost like a a utopian element to it where it's it's all at what cost. And it seems like we've created, like, this heavily regimen regimented dystopia in our attempt to improve schools. I I wanted to list off some of these discipline statistics because this was the page like, had read I was reading through the stories and I was like, this is bad. This is bad. Like, this seems a little bit too controlled for me. And then you listed the actual stats and I'm like, my my god. Like, this this is insane. In this one school, over the course of eight hundred or one hundred and eighty eight days, there were 15,423 infractions for 250 students. And only six students did not receive one of those infractions. And three fourths of the infractions resulted in detention, which was something like, I got 12,000 detentions. And all of this work is meant to, quote, prepare students for a better future. And that concept, it seems like everyone slowly, teachers and students maybe started to internalize. And a lot of that's related to that pulling her up by your bootstraps. It's very meritocracy style language, which looking into those things, you begin to realize that that they're not true. There's no such thing as a meritocracy. There are systems at place that hold certain people back and not others. It it doesn't acknowledge those systemic structures. And it seems like as a result, schools then are ignoring, that are minimizing those structural problems and focused entirely on the individual. And while I was reading this entire book, I couldn't help but note that the same folks that tend to support these inner city charter schools are the same folks who, at a much wider angle, are looking at things like critical race theory, counteracting the concept of systemic racism, Very, very individually, like, Americana focused of this, like, old, like, John Wayne type figure who can, you know, that can accomplish anything with the right mindset. But do you see connections between the modern culture of Wharton schools

Speaker 2 and what these charter schools are doing? I'll touch on a couple things you said, before I jump in there because I think they're they're also relevant, this idea of the ends justifying the means. Right? So, yes, if anyone were to take a clear look at the rigid discipline and the consequences, they would see, like you said, this is crazy. Right? But, you know, how is it then that you have, you know, intelligent, hardworking, caring teachers and principals justifying implementing, you know, systems like these. And I think there is a a mindset that, like, hey. Think about the counterfactual. Like, you know, we know we've been in schools where there's no learning, you know, where there are fights going on every day. And so here's a system where at least, hey. It works. We can get students in their seat. We have some evidence, you know, that our students are learning. I think you can't, though, justify, the means by the end. You know? I think you need to think, about are there limits to the means? You know? What what are sort of really acceptable means? What what do we think is appropriate for schools to do? Can they do anything in the name of equity and, boosting standardized test scores? Right? So I think that's really important to consider. You also said there's no such thing as a meritocracy. I appreciate that, because, yeah, I think it is connected with sort of CRT, in in that way. So I think that pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality is very much embedded in American culture, and education is deeply tied to that American dream. So lots of parents, you know, lots of immigrant parents, lots of probably low income parents, lots of parents in general will say, like, schooling, you know, is your ticket to upward mobility. Schooling is your ticket to success. And and there's something to be said for that as well. But I think what CRT is is pushing is to ask us to carefully and critically think about, you know, who's included, in that American dream and who's excluded both historically and currently. And I think part of, you know, the pushback against CRT as well, oh, you know, if we talk if we say racism is endemic, then people are gonna feel, you know, like there's nothing they can do. But I think thinking about structural problems doesn't take away agency, right, of students or teachers. It doesn't make you powerless. In fact, I would argue the opposite. Right? If I were a principal and I recognize that, you know, there are racial inequities and discipline in my school, that empowers me to really make significant changes to my school's disciplinary practices that can change, you know, the trajectory of my students. You know? Maybe I'm not aware of that, right, that, there are so many implications, but there are. There's so much work on sort of the school to prison pipeline and how these these disciplinary practices in school can impact, you know, consent students on sort of the wrong pathway. You know? So you know? And I think students themselves too. If if they recognize the structural problems in society, they can start to brainstorm ways to sort of dismantle those. So, yeah, I think I think there's I I see the worry, you know, like, oh, this is not American. This is sort of gonna make people, you know, feel hopeless, helpless, but I guess I I see it differently.

Speaker 1 Hey there. I hope you're enjoying the podcast so far. I wanna take a brief moment and promote something that may interest our listeners, which is our upcoming conference to restore humanity. Our inaugural virtual conference is from July 25 to July 28, featuring amazing keynotes including founding theorist of critical pedagogy, Doctor. Henry Giroux, and organizer and co author of Black Lives Matter at School, Doctor. Denisha Jones. Further, we have fantastic and intriguing learning tracks on anticarceral pedagogy, designing for neurodivergence, disrupting discriminatory linguistics, and promoting childism in the classroom. And our virtual conference is designed to be a virtual As in, we use Flip Keynotes, which focuses on conversation rather than staring at a Zoom screen. And our courses are interactive, asynchronous explorations. Learn more on our website at humanrestorationproject.org/conference. Tickets are discounted right now at $150 for all four days, with discounts available for underrepresented communities. Now back to the podcast. Do you think that for students who are going through this schooling experience from a very young age, folks that have enrolled in this charter school industry for, you know, ten plus years over their life, that they internalize that message? Like, do you think it it takes away power in a sense? I think so to an extent. Right? I think it you know, there's

Speaker 2 I give I give people a lot of agency, so I think there are certain it it's not like you've been socialized into a system and students have room to resist, and they do all the time. And I saw that all the time in the school. But I think it certainly doesn't encourage students to think, I think, in a structural way, about change. And, you know, I remember having a conversation with someone about, you know, why haven't students organized more in these schools? And I was like, that's interesting. And it really has happened more so in light of social movements in society. Right? So with Black Lives Matter and Me Too, you know, seeing that activism in the community has motivated some students within these schools, right, to take action and to start forming these kind of Instagram groups and whatnot. But why not before? Right? And I think I think that that is part of it. Right? If you're if what you're told is, hey. Following these rules, following these policies, these are gonna get you to college. If, you know, if that if that is you keep hearing that, then you kind of maybe resign yourself to, okay. I don't like being here, but if I do this, it's gonna help me be successful. And so I'll just keep going,

Speaker 1 with it. Yeah. Yeah. It's they are teaching a mindset of perseverance in a sense. It's kind of an odd approach to it. You always have to be like a go getter. If you're if you're staying behind, life is basically passing you by, which is a strong mindset to have, but it just seems so odd when juxtaposed next to slight like, if anyone hasn't seen the uncommon school's YouTube videos, like the training videos, where they show an example of a quote unquote good class. And when you see what these students are subjected to, it's it's so it's really weird. Like, you'll see a group of usually about 25, almost entirely black or Latinx students with one white teacher, and they are led almost military style. Second grade, they are all, like, moving in a regimented like, everybody stands up completely silently, walks out of the room. Look at how great this transition is. It just it's so odd to me that those two different ideas are juxtaposed. You have this idea of extreme control next to a go getter society.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I I don't I don't know. Yeah. No. That is interesting. And I I actually show so teach like a champion comes with a set of video clips as well. I think many yeah. Maybe some from uncommon schools of those teachers. And I I also show a couple of those clips to my own undergraduate students, and they are also quite taken aback by the level of kind of conformity and compliance, you know, emphasized there. But, yeah, I I think the school also you know, I I've read this and or heard this in other schools too, not just the one I was at. You know, they'll say things like, there are three other students, you know, who want your spot. So, like, if you can't handle this, you know, you can go somewhere else. They'll kinda say that. It's your choice. Or things like, you know, we are the best school in this city and show their their statistics, you know, their test scores compared to others, you know, other schools. So there is this, yeah, this push of, like, we're better, you know you know? I yeah. I I do see it. I you know? They might not say it that explicitly, but it is sort of telling students, we're doing things differently. We're better. So you, you know, you need to follow kind of what what we're doing here and show good and get through. Because they are explicit about sort of teaching character as well. A lot of these schools kind of embrace positive character, and the idea of, yeah, we're gonna show grit. We're gonna show self control. I think that kind of builds into to understanding

Speaker 1 how this relates to the family. So your parents, family members, extended family members, who at many times throughout the book, they're they're upset with how the school is managing their kids. Like, they'll get a phone call and be like, you know, how dare you? That's racist. Like, you shouldn't be doing this. But at the exact same time, they tended to, mostly, accept those circumstances. They kept their kids in the school because at the end of the day, they're seeing this as their ticket, their ticket to get, into college or have a good career. How do we balance that? Because there's an argument to be made that you're taking away family agency by arguing against this because the alternative is not so great either. And criticizing this and and perhaps even dismantling those schools doesn't leave a a solid structure. Does criticizing the practices and and and documenting the school have that counterintuitive effect of being, you know, this is not what the parents actually want. They they want this. Yeah. I think that's a a very interesting tension that you raise.

Speaker 2 And I would say supporters of charter schools often often will say that. Like, well, this is what these parents want. So, you know, it's their choice to to put their students into these schools. And I would say, yes. It is their choice, but in kind of my own research as well as other research, it, you know, finds that low income families really have fewer choices, you know, when it comes to school choice than middle class parents who are tend to be sort of more empowered, and have more resources and time and networks to find the school they really want. In the case of low income parents, there's often constraints like transportation. Like, a lot of these schools don't offer transportation, so it's gotta be a school you can get to. You know? Or or they have other issues like that. Child you know, they're thinking about child care needs, and what school fits those needs. So I found yeah. When I was interviewing or just talking to parents at the school lottery day, I was surprised to find, like, they knew very little about this school. And they were actually asking me, like, oh, yeah. Tell us, you know, what are the practices like? They'd heard it was a good school. They'd heard it was a strict school, and they like that, but they didn't know what really strict meant. And you're right. When they started hearing, you know, from their students or seeing I mean, from their children or seeing their children's own anxiety, from being in the school or hearing that their students were disrespected. That's something I felt parents really got in arms with, you know, if they felt the teacher a white teacher had disrespected their black, you know, child. Yeah. They they would get very upset. And, you know, in my, right, in my taking a critical lens of the school, does that, right, reduce the choices these families have? Well, my hope is, of course, that these schools will modify their practices. So, you know, the schools I don't think my book is gonna shut down any school. It's not not gonna have, unfortunately, that much of an impact. But if it can help, you know, someone in KIPP, uncommon, success, whether that be a teacher, whether that be an administrator, you know, rethink their their practices or policies to be sort of more affirming of students, to be more humanizing, to really consider, you know, the racial implications, the class implications of their practices, then I think, then I think I would have done my job. And I think parents would also appreciate that. Right? They're they they want what all parents want, schools where their students are learning, schools that are safe, schools where their kids are cared for and respected. So

Speaker 1 that that is what I'm hoping the the book, you know, moves someone to towards or some schools towards. There's a bit of like a chicken and the egg component here because it seems like for many of the families, their argument for why they were willing to accept these disciplinary structures is because the workplaces, especially for working class families, tend to also be incredibly regimented and dehumanizing. And it's difficult to navigate those waters because that's also a problem. So do you prepare students for the fact that life is gonna suck? Or do you try to teach them a critical angle to that while simultaneously recognizing, like, you have to make money? So it's pairing those two things together to me, it seems so incredibly difficult. As you're reflecting on this experience of being in this school for for so long, do you see a solution where the public school, just like the the typical public school like, where do they fit into the equation?

Speaker 2 I I don't know. Part of it is you know, you always come back to resources, but I think you know, I visited a a private school, but it was a private school for low income students, you know, endowed by someone, you know, who was very wealthy. And walking in there and visiting there, it felt like a private school. You know? Like, it felt like a school, you know, my my kids would go to. You know? Progressive, open, lots of attention and care, not at all, you know, like like the school I've been observe observing. And I should say there was also, of course, care in the school I was at. I don't wanna say that, you know, certainly teachers and administrators were caring of students, but it was a very different kind of environment. And that made me think, like, you know, they they come to this what works model because it's like the last resort, you know, like things that weren't working in many of these traditional public schools where you have just yeah. Like, a a lack of control. And they said, okay. This is the only thing given what we have, novice teachers, given kind of, yeah, the conditions, this is what we can make work. So I think, you know, there are some studies about school funding. Does it matter? Does it not matter? But in reality, I think it's like you need so these schools need so much more funding than, you know, sort of a typical school because there are just so many more things that come with that that environment. You know? So I feel to support students, you just need so many more student support staff, counselors, wraparound services, smaller classroom sizes. I mean, that's when you can start imagining something that will work that's not maybe so rigid. Right? But but it takes a lot to get there. Right? So in the meantime, what do you do? I I I don't know if I have the answer for that.

Speaker 1 Based off the experiences that you had at the school, what was kind of an assumption going in you had about either students or teachers, administrators, kind of like from, like, the research you did and what you read about the school? What was an assumption that you had that kinda surprised you that it wasn't true? The big assumption of going into the project was where I started with with with this idea of teaching cultural capital, that what this school was trying to do was to teach cultural capital.

Speaker 2 They were trying to teach, like, middle class norms to these kids, and that was helping them to be successful. Like, how to tuck in your shirt, like, how to show attention, you know, be respectable. What I found that it it was partly that that was more justification, you know, for it helped them make sense of these really rigid practices that they that they took on not to teach any of these skills, but they took on because they needed to establish order. And, basically, the school said, oh, here's a model that here's an orderly school. Let's copy it. You know? And that's what they did. They just copied the practices of another school. So, really, it became a justification and an interesting justification because one that that they would use to, to say, yeah. This is why we're doing what we're doing. What we're really doing here is teaching these skills they're gonna need, say, in the workplace. But it's kind of a contradiction, and that's what a lot of the work of of the the book is sort of about because the school is a college preparatory school, and it's really thinking about setting these kids on a different trajectory. So not to work at McDonald's where, yes, you need a clock on in on time. You don't have room to express yourselves. So in their mindset, we're sort of preparing students for that avenue, yet we're using these really rigid practices that actually don't develop any of these kinds of skills, right, that middle class kids learn, like how to be assertive, how to be creative, how to take initiative. So it becomes, yeah, this sort of weird contrast. And it took me sort of a a while to kind of sort that out. I kept asking, are they teaching cultural Are they not? Do they think they are? What is cultural capital? So that was one of the big things I kind of wrestled with in the book. Yeah. There are extreme

Speaker 1 contradictions of control because I believe you you note this in the book. I mean, if if you're gonna go to college, that's the exact opposite of what a college environment is. Like, it's not controlled. And I I think there's an argument to be made. Like, I I would argue that the vast majority of very rich people do not send their kids to schools that look like that. In fact, they send them to the they send them to those progressive $50,000 a year schools where kids just play all day and read books, and there there is no control. And kids break rules at those schools and do things that might get you in a lot of trouble, if you were at a school with not as much funding that had stricter disciplinary policies, etcetera. There there's so many different things as you're reading through this book that you wonder to yourself how it reflects society at large and the assumptions that we have about the working class and assumptions we have about even things like race and gender, and how that plays out to a t in how the school's policies are enacted. The entire time I was reading the book, felt like it wasn't real. Like, it's hard for me to imagine that that is actually a real thing that's going through. But I think you're right. By analyzing that at a typical school, it makes you critically reflect on, things like, you know, three strike discipline policies, telling kids they don't belong there, policing, language or how loud people are. There's there's so many different discussion topics.

Speaker 2 Yeah. For sure. And I and I feel there has been an influence of books like teach like a champion. Right? It's a bestseller, millions of copies sold that began in the charter world. I mean, that book was written by No Excuses Schools founders, but now are are everywhere, right, in in traditional public schools. So those methods are spreading. I think, yeah, I think you one can sort of step back and think about them. To what extent did these rights stigmatize students or make relationships between students and teachers more antagonistic than they need to be or, you know, a host of other questions.

Speaker 1 Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.