“Disaster capitalism” may at first blush appear to be hyperbole, ideological manipulation, or so much academic jargon; however, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the education reform that disaster unintentionally created now represents the various components of how those market-based policies both reflect and perpetuate the very educational problems reformers claim to be addressing.
For this post, I am targeted as elements of disaster capitalism education reform the following: dismantling teachers’ unions/tenure, hiring Teach For America (TFA) cadets, converting traditional public schools to charter schools, and creating takeover districts (often called “achievement” or “opportunity” districts).
Before addressing how these disaster capitalism reforms are failing, I want to emphasize that very real and clear problems exist in traditional public schools (TPS), for example:
TPS are increasingly segregated by race and social class.
Vulnerable student populations (poor, black/brown, English Language Learners [ELL], special needs students) are disproportionately attending underfunded schools and school buildings in disrepair; they are funneled into low-tracked courses that are test-prep and/or unchallenging (basic); they are assigned inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers while also sitting in high teacher-student ratios courses; and they are disproportionately subjected to inequitable disciplinary policies and outcomes.
When the education reform movement kicked into high gear, the promises were grand and the evidence was thin, but now we are beginning to have evidence of how the grand claims have wilted on the vine, and the fruit is rotting all around us.
Charter schools are not raising test scores, but they are segregating children by race and class. Charter schools are also intensifying the already inequitable disciplinary practices vulnerable students face in formal schooling (notably for black and brown children).
Takeover school districts (such as the Recovery School District in New orleans) have been unmasked as failures.
But possibly the best example of how disaster capitalism education reform is failing is now being exposed by former TFA participants, specifically the research of Terrenda C. White.
White’s analysis reveals that while TFA makes big claims about addressing diversity (and may have done so within TFA), the consequences of districts and states committing to TFA have had the opposite effect. In an interview, White strikes at this paradox:
What happened in New Orleans, for example, is a microcosm of this larger issue where you have a blunt policy that we know resulted in the displacement of teachers of color, followed by TFA’s expansion in that region. I’ve never heard TFA talk about or address that issue. Or take Chicago, where the number of Black teachers has been cut in half as schools have been closed or turned around. In the lawsuits that teachers filed against the Chicago Board of Education, they used a lot of social science research and tracked that if a school was low performing and was located on the north or the west side and had a higher percentage of white teachers, that school was less likely to be closed. As the teachers pointed out, this wasn’t just about closing low-performing schools, but closing low-performing schools in communities of color, and particularly those schools that had a higher percentage of teachers of color. What bothers me is that we have a national rhetoric about wanting diversity when at the same time we’re actually manufacturing the lack of diversity in the way in which we craft our policies. And we mete them out in a racially discriminatory way. So in many ways we’re creating the problem we say we want to fix (emphasis added).
The evidence is clear, across the elements of disaster capitalism education reform, that these policies are suffering from the same inequities that are at the root of TPS failures.
I have been making this plea for some time now, but the evidence has grown in my favor, and even those from within the disaster capitalism education reform movement, such as White, have begun to admit the crack:
Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease (emphasis added). (Oscar Wilde [1891], The Soul of Man under Socialism)
Let us now admit the larger problems, confront the failures of TPS, and then create policies that address directly and openly the problems, many of which are related to race and social class inequity.
My granddaughter loves Disney Junior, and while she was watching and eating breakfast, a transition commercial announced with excessive glee: “Dream big and never give up!”
And all I can think is: What total and harmful crap.
Because our cultural narrative that normalizes and idealizes “exceptional” has been gnawing at me lately.
I have always bristled a the horse manure sloganification we heap on children: You can be anything you want to be! Reach for the stars!
Part of my concern is that this idealizing of exceptional to the degree that we make it the norm that everyone must aspire to be exceptional (a result impossible since once everyone achieved that, no one would be exceptional) feeds into our cultural ignorance about outliers: Make any generalized claim about a topic people don’t believe despite the evidence or don’t understand, and the typical response will be something like: “O, yea, see this anecdote of mine about an outlier!”
But my direct concern about “Dream big and never give up!” is how this cultural hokum drives our alienation and anxiety, especially among children.
Why can’t we allow people to be happy and content with their mediocrity, their normalcy, their average abilities and aspirations?
George Clooney and I are about the same age, but he has mega-dollars and mega-fame—and, damn it, he is very pretty.
If his exceptionality is the basis for my self-worth, my happiness, I am royally screwed, languishing under the anxiety that I just didn’t dream big enough and I gave up in my quest to be pretty, popular, and wealthy.
So, all you kids out there, and all you languishing adults trapped under the avalanche of “Dream big and never give up!,” let me offer a much healthier dictum: Dream big and never give up? No! Dream appropriate to you and then give it your best effort; and then, feel free to change your mind and levels of effort—and you may want to be OK with not making any of that work.
And feel free to tell all those Dream-Big merchants to kiss off.
In many regions of this planet, humans are gifted the changing seasons, including the drift into hibernation and then the rebirth of spring.
One of my favorite poems has always been [in Just-] by e.e. cummings—in part because I read the “Just” as both “only” and the root of “justice,” wondering if in fact spring is just in the human sense of that justice or more so in the less ethics-grounded justice of natural dynamics.
As we slip into spring, then, I offer a smattering of varied readings, many of which should help in meditating on our human sense of justice.
Doreen Massey recounts her experience with a “customer liaison” at an art exhibition, leading her to note:
This is a crucial part of the way that neoliberalism has become part of our commonsense understanding of life. The vocabulary we use to talk about the economy is in fact a political construction, as Stuart Hall, Michael Rustin and I have argued in our Soundings manifesto.
In other words, the words we use reflect and reinforce the dominant ideologies of a society, a culture, an organization, or a field.
What is troubling about the power of the language we use—often unconsciously and uncritically—is that we are in a constant state of maintaining the status quo, including bigotry and inequity.
If we shift our attention to formal education, what would you consider the primary differences between struggling or failing students (mostly poor and black or brown) and successful or excelling students (mostly financially secure or affluent and white)?
Despite the current jargon of the day and the bombardment of programs, materials, and experts being sold to educators and schools, those primary differences are not a lack of grit, the absence of a growth mindset, a failure of rigor in the curriculum and the teachers’ expectations, or some combination of these.
“Grit,” “growth mindset,” and “rigor”—to name a few—are veneer, marketable veneer, for the truth about what students succeed/excel and what students struggle/fail. These terms force all the attention of educators and education on the student, creating in those students who struggle and fail (and the teachers who teach them, the schools who serve them) a deficit identity—they lack rigor, they lack a growth mindset, they aren’t being exposed to rigorous curriculum or expectations. In short, these terms and practices are about fixing broken children.
The problem with these terms and practices is that veneer masks the existing racism and classism at the root of who fails and who succeeds in our schools and in our society.
The primary reasons some people flourish and some people flounder are not in those people but in the conditions of their lives—often conditions not of their making.
Wealthy white students flourish in the slack provided them because of their privilege, and poor children of color flounder in the scarcity of living under the weight of racism and classism.
As I have noted often, if we use level of educational attainment as a marker of effort (more education equals greater effort), why do two people with the same education, one black and one white, result in the black person earning less?
The evidence is overwhelming that class and race (as well as gender) trump significantly manufactured silver bullets such as grit, a growth mindset, or rigor.
To claim that academic success dominated by white and wealthy students is mostly from their effort is a nasty lie, and to suggest that struggling and failing among student populations dominated by poor and black/brown students is mostly from their lack of effort, their lack of vision for success, and a failure to demand enough of them is even nastier.
“Grit,” “growth mindset,” and “rigor” are coded words for classist and racist ideologies and practices. They work to make the victims of bigotry and inequity turn all their attention and effort inward so that they are too distracted, too frantic to see the unearned fruits of privilege.
“Grit,” “growth mindset,” and “rigor” are about embracing and perpetuating “you must work twice as hard to have half as much.”
If we believe in education that is liberatory and a source of change, we must confront the language, stop using it, and then totally reject the practices that mislabel privilege as achievement and impose deficit identities on our most vulnerable students.
Massey ends her examination of the words we use with a call relevant to education:
Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic “common sense” needs to be challenged root and branch.
We must question the very way we think about, talk about, and practice education. To fail in that regard is to maintain an education system that reflects and reinforces on the backs of other people’s children the bigotry and inequity that still plagues us as a people.
[see original submission with hyperlinks embedded below]
South Carolina has a shameful history regarding vulnerable populations of students being served in our high-poverty, racial minority areas of the state, notably our Corridor of Shame along I-95.
That neglect eventually prompted a court battle in SC over adequately funding high-poverty schools. That case has finally been settled, and now SC political leaders are faced with how to address school funding; low achievement among impoverished students, racial minorities, English language learners, and special needs students; and teacher recruitment and retention in those high-needs schools.
In the Post and Courier, Paul Bowers has reported that some are advocating for charter takeover of these struggling districts, strategies made politically appealing from New Orleans to Tennessee to Michigan. Nearby Georgia and North Carolina are also considering takeover plans.
However, these so-called “opportunity” or “achievement” districts have two serious problems that warrant SC not making such commitments. First, advocacy for takeovers is mostly political cheerleading, and second, a growing body of research has revealed that takeovers have not achieved what advocates claim and often have replicated or even increased the exact problems they were designed to solve, such as race and class segregation and inequitable educational opportunities.
Three important reports on takeovers include the following:
Although media and political claims about the recovery of education in New Orleans post-Katrina have promoted success, Adamson, Cook-Harvey, and Darling-Hammond have concluded:
Based on respondents’ experiences and district data, as well as a review of existing research, policies, and documents, we find that the New Orleans reforms have created a set of schools that are highly stratified by race, class, and educational advantage, operating in a hierarchy that provides very different types of schools serving different “types” of children.
In other words, the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans created by firing the entire public school teacher workforce and forming an all-charter school system has continued to suffer low test scores, while the new school system remains deeply segregated and inequitable.
Further, in Education Week, Kent McGuire, Katherine Dunn, Kate Shaw, and Adam Schott argue:
Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery, but it’s not an appropriate prescription for the challenging work of providing individualized support to schools that need it.
[B]oth Georgia and Pennsylvania are poised to implement sweeping school turnaround plans in the form of state takeovers. These plans draw inspiration from systems operating in very different contexts elsewhere in the country and are based on a fundamental misreading of the evidence on effectiveness of these models. Just as concerning, the proposals double down on unproven governance strategies that reduce community voice in education and apply a cookie-cutter approach to the specific challenges confronting individual schools.
Takeovers in several states—similar to embracing charter schools and Teach For America—have simply shuffled funding, wasted time, and failed to address the root causes of struggling schools: concentrated poverty and social inequity.
Yes, SC must reform our public schools, and we should shift gears to address our vulnerable populations of students first. But charter takeover approaches are yet more political faddism that our state and children cannot afford.
Continuing to double-down on accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing as well as rushing to join the political reform-of-the-moment with clever names is inexcusable since we have decades of evidence about what works, and what hasn’t.
SC must embrace a new way—one committed to social policies addressing food security for the poor, stable work throughout the state, and healthcare for all, and then a new vision for education reform built on equity.
All SC students deserve experienced and certified teachers, access to challenging courses, low class sizes, fully funded schools, safe school buildings and cultures, and equitable disciplinary policies and practices. These are reforms that must be guarantees for every public school student regardless of zip code, and they need not be part of complex but cleverly named programs.
It is well past time for SC to reject falling prey to political advocacy disguised as education reform. Adopting the takeover experiment already discredited across the U.S. would be a calloused choice to continue to neglect our vulnerable students and the schools that serve them.
—
See this reader of research and analyses of that advocacy and evidence:
Out, damned spot! out, I say!… Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Lady Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Gregor’s body was indeed completely dried up and flat, they had not seen it until then, but now he was not lifted up on his little legs, nor did he do anything to make them look away.
I have come to recognize that bookstores are a sort of polar opposite of a Trump rally, a sanctuary, a place where you are surrounded by books and lovers of books—except bookstores have also become havens for WiFi vampires and coffee fiends (although these can be gentle souls as well).
I am one of those triple-sinners—book lover, WiFi vampire, and coffee fiend—but I am in my bones a book lover who walks the aisles of bookstores, ravenously gazing at book spines and covers, occasionally allowing myself simply to take a book in hand to stroke the cover without its consent.
And then there are days that rise above the simple and perverse rituals of worshipping in a bookstores. Days when a book reaches out and demands I read it.
There on the shelf of new hardback fiction was Han Kang’s The Vegetarian—a slim volume designed to enflame us like a bullfighter’s cape:
At first, I simply had to hold and caress this book—the texture as inviting as the colors and graphics—but then I read the inner jacket blurb.
“Nightmare” hooked me, and then “Kafkaesque” reeled me in.
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The Vegetarian delivers on aesthetics inside the beautiful and haunting cover, its silhouette hinting at the macabre nightmare that entangles the titular character, Yeong-hye, whose life is unraveled by and entangled in a violent dream that drives her to become the vegetarian.
Originally published as three novellas, Yeong-hye’s story is revealed by a masterful use of shifting point-of-view and verb tense. One of the most powerful elements in this novel is narration: Part I: The Vegetarian narrated in first-person by Yeong-hye’s husband; Part II: Mongolian Mark narrated in third-person limited omniscient, focusing on Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law; and Part III: Flaming Trees narrated in third-person limited omnicient, focusing on Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.
Han Kang’s craft is a testament to the power of that craft to create and reinforce meaning: Yeong-hye’s story is absent her voice, except for brief italicized glimpses of her dreams in Part I.
The narrative decisions keep Yeong-hye behind the voices of two men, in fact, before her sister—the person possibly closest to her biologically and psychologically—closes the novel; although even then, In-hye, as the men have, turns Yeong-hye’s story into her own.
Like the Kafkan emaciation of Gregor in The Metamorphosis, a work many scholars have come to admit is about the family more so than Gregor, Yeong-hye’s decent into vegetarianism metamorphoses into a suicidal eating disorder and surreal longing to become a tree—vegetarian to vegetation—and exposes through this nightmare-journey the essential nature of her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister along with her parents at a somewhat greater narrative distance but no less important.
Yeong-hye’s terrors manifested by, reflected by, or both, her recurring dream result in those closest to her slipping themselves into not recognizing Yeong-hye, acts of violence, sexual obsession, and the existential vertigo of self-awareness/self-doubt.
“Life is such a strange thing, [In-hye] thinks,” we read near the end:
Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves—living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they’d briefly managed to forget. (pp. 173-174)
There is a dark, dark beauty to Han Kang’s existential nightmare that offers nothing simple or clean while raising essential questions about human nature, human autonomy, human sexuality, and the very human urge to create and destroy.
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About a week before I wrote about raising my daughter without the threat of physical violence, The Vegetarian reached out to me while I scanned new hardback novels.
As a former English teacher who spent much of his career helping students learn the evil art of literary analysis, I am well aware of both the skepticism by many that literary analysis is too often imposing meaning onto text and the reality that human beings see what they want to see, or possibly more fairly, what they are primed or equipped to see.
The latter, I feel, is the great human gift of being able to revisit texts again and again in order to have new and different experiences—even though the words on the pages have not changed. The change is in us.
And although I was clearly primed to read The Vegetarian as an allegory about the world’s violence against women, I am trained sufficiently in New Criticism’s cult of textual evidence to trust Han Kang weaves this motif with great purpose and intent throughout the disturbing atrophy of Yeong-hye.
The Vegetarian, for me, speaks in some ways to cultural norms as they echo so-called universals—reminding me of Haruki Murakami’s work, which offers a tangled thicket of reflecting paternalism and misogyny while not-so-clearly confronting or challenging either.
Han Kang, however, seems more purposefully handing the reader on a gothic plate a very clear condemnation of the eviscerating of women by that paternalism and misogyny.
Part I being narrated in first person by her husband strips and dehumanizes Yeong-hye immediately in the reader’s mind. He is cold, superficial, and merciless as our only conduit to Yeong-hye’s sleeping and lived nightmare seemingly linked to some guilt about or fear of all-encompassing violence:
Dark woods. No people. The sharp-pointed leaves on the trees, my torn feet. This place, almost remembered, but I’m lost now….
But the fear. My clothes still wet with blood. Hide, hide behind the trees. Crouch down, don’t let anybody see. My bloody hands. My bloody mouth….
Chewing on something that felt so real, but couldn’t have been, it couldn’t….Familiar and yet not…that vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling [original in italics]. (pp. 19-20)
Yeong-hye’s husband sees his wife’s transformation as it impacts his life, and his response is sort of a passive-aggressive violence which appears little different than his perception of her before her commitment to being a vegetarian—his disdain for her not wearing a bra, for example, that offers a twisted commentary on objectifying women through the motif of Yeong-hye’s breasts throughout the novel.
It is in this first section that we witness the violence first-hand of Yeong-hye’s father, who attempts to force Yeong-hye to eat meat, spurring Yeong-hye’s dramatic slicing of her wrists and then her being committed by Part II.
Switching to limited third-person, the narration of Part II remains through the eyes and lust of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist.
His life as an artist is resurrected by a disturbing combination of Yeong-hye’s suicide attempt, his discovering Yeong-hye’s lingering Mongolian mark on her buttocks, and the sexual/pseudo-artistic compulsion that culminates in what can be viewed as the violence inherent in human sexuality.
Yet, it is the brother-in-law who bears witness to the absurd violence of Yeong-hye’s father:
But that her father, the Vietnam War hero, had actually struck his rebellious daughter in the face and physically forced a lump of meat into her mouth, that was something else. However much he thought back on it, he couldn’t convince himself that it had actually happened—it was more like a scene from some bizarre play. (pp. 73-74)
In Part II, Han Kang investigates art through art while wrapping a meditation on art inside Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law’s fetishizing the Mongolian mark and the need to document on film his sexual coupling with Yeong-hye—a video discovered by In-hye.
And then, in Part III, Yeong-hye is institutionalized and her story is handed to her sister. In-hye must navigate a world dominated by their father, Yeong-hye’s huband, and In-hye’s now ex-husband.
This last section will not allow us, I think, to ignore the violence, the paternalism, the misogyny.
This last section is about women as sisters, literally and figuratively:
Yeong-hye was four years younger than her, enough of an age gap for them not to have been in competition with each other growing up. As small children their young cheeks were frequently left throbbing by their heavy-handed father, and Yeong-hye had provoked in In-hye a sense of responsibility that resembled maternal affection, a need to expend all her energy in looking out for this younger sister. (p. 135)
However, we learn eventually that the violence of their home had a primary target:
Only after all this time was she able to understand why Yeong-hye had said what she did. Yeong-hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings….Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their afther’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. (pp. 162-163)
Again, not so different than with Yeong-hye’s husband and brother-in-law, In-hye adopts Yeong-hye’s story as her own: “Could I have prevented it? Could I have prevented those unimaginable things from sinking so deep inside of Yeong-hye and holding her in their grip?” (p. 163).
The violence of the father seems to have destroyed Yeong-hye and hardened In-hye: “The feeling that she [In-hye] had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure” (p. 167).
There is an existential absurdism to Jeong-hye and then an existential realism to In-hye—each a side of In-hye’s realization that “[l]ife is such a strange thing.”
The Vegetarian builds to a parallel existential/Kafkan depiction of human existence as a mental ward:
Perhaps it is because the patients here are not free to leave….
They’re trapped here, In-hye thinks. Just like this woman, Hee-joo is bound up with the guilt she feels over having had Yeong-hye incarcerated here. (pp. 177, 183)
Has In-hye acted in conjunction with her familial and cultural paternalism and misogyny to determine her sister’s fate?
At least feeling complicit leaves In-hye contemplating female agency:
It’s your body, you can treat it any way you please. The only area where you’re free to do as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted. (p. 182)
Like Yeong-hye, In-hye also becomes consumed by dreams:
When she lifts her head, the face she sees reflected in the mirror is wet. Eyes from which so much blood has spilled in her dreams. Eyes from which that blood always refused to be wiped away, no matter how fiercely she scrubbed it with her hands. But the woman’s face is not crying, not now. It’s only staring wordlessly back at her, like always, betraying not even the faintest hint of emotion. (p. 182)
The Vegetarian starts and ends in dreams—and these are nightmares of the sort we associate with Kafka but also the blurring of alternate realities found in Murakami.
The real world, however, remains rapacious and violent, especially for women—some of whom wilt while others harden.
This is a poem I wrote in 2012, mostly out of a growing cynicism about mainstream politics. However, it appears that this presidential season has proven me to be far more prescient than I intended:
I could write blog after blog about my failures as a parent, failures that my child has apparently mostly decided to ignore.
But I want to take a moment to write about some things I did well, some things that created a new family tradition that will be a legacy about which I can be proud.
Even in our dark periods, my daughter was very quick to let people know two things: we allow no racism and we do not hit children. Her adamant defense of my commitment in these areas always rose above the other failures of mine plaguing us at any moment.
And she made it clear we have no tolerance for racism or violence of any kind toward children in other people. These moments were always judgmental—the sort of daily moments of activism that go mostly unnoticed because they are spontaneous.
My granddaughter is a marvelous biracial child who, like my daughter, will be raised without the threat of physical intimidation in her home and among her family. We, of course, cannot make her that same promise about her community, her state, or her country.
These glorious humans and the legacy we have joined together in creating help me navigate all my failures.
However, that familial promise is not the case for many children—and that is nearly unbearable because this legacy isn’t about only my family.
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
As long as one human suffers under the plague of racism, as long as one child lives under the fear of physical violence, we are not safe or free despite the gifts we may have in our daily lives.
Coming to any personal conclusion requires understanding a deep and very active debate about discipline, race, and the conditions that brought Charlotte Dial, the teacher in the video, to the moment that was caught on camera. Chief among those conditions: an educational philosophy known as “no excuses” that advocates for strict discipline as a critical foundation for learning.
What follows is a long and detailed examination of “no excuses” approaches to education reform, but Green’s analysis is also yet another example of how mainstream “both sides” journalism continues to ignore a critical third way.
Before examining Green’s challenge to “no excuses,” let me offer some context.
Because of high-profile incidences connected with NFL players, public debates about domestic violence toward women and corporal punishment have played out in the mainstream media.
While both topics are important, here I want to stress how mainstream media covered the two topics.
Domestic violence toward women was universally condemned without creating panels or “both sides” debates—although some in the U.S. and throughout the world still hold to men using physical force against women, often citing religious texts to justify their behaviors.
However, corporal punishment received the “both sides treatment”; those advocating for corporal punishment were treated as credible and allowed to argue, again often on religious grounds, for spanking children.
The media took an informed stance against domestic violence, but deferred to “both sides” journalism for corporal punishment. We need far more of the former, and far less of the latter.
I have participated in a similar situation with mainstream media coverage of education policy concerning grade retention. Even though the research is strongly against grade retention, the media tends to lead with advocates of grade retention, directly and indirectly making that stance credible, and then giving a slight nod to “critics” of grade retention—marginalizing the only warranted position.
So let me return here to Green’s very well developed and ambitious work on “no excuses.” And let me emphasize once again—without any snark here—that Green’s work is high-quality mainstream journalism, and she is a very good journalist with good intentions—but that is the problem.
First, what constitutes “complicated” in mainstream journalism?
Green reduces the controversy over discipline and “no excuses” practices to two sides (which really isn’t even complicated as it is the standard approach to nearly all topics in journalism [see corporal punishment]), and then builds to three reasons to abandon and three reasons not to abandon “no excuses.”
This template and her premise about “complicated” highlight why mainstream journalism is doomed to reinforcing social inequity because of the practices that are embraced for the pursuit of objectivity and balance.
The great irony is that the “both sides” approach is a veneer of objectivity, but isn’t objective or informed at all.
Green follows a similar pattern I have examined about NPR’s coverage of “grit”: start with a perspective that is not credible, but by opening with it, making it the default “right” position; and then framing the more credible position as the “critics.”
Even as a confrontation of many of the problems with “no excuses,” Green maintains “no excuses” approaches can be reformed, and then by grounding her polar three reasons to abandon/not to abandon in “no excuses,” she effectively builds to an endorsement of “no excuses.”
This “both sides” tactic of very professional journalism always fails a third critical way; in this case, what is ignored is that both traditional public schools (TPS) and “no excuses” charter schools (NECS) mistreat and shortchange high-poverty children of color—TPS have done this historically and NECS have simply intensified the very worst of those TPS failures.
In short, “no excuses” practices are essentially inexcusable, and cannot be reformed. But that doesn’t mean tossing up our hands and simply ignoring the failures of traditional public schools.
“No excuses” practices and narratives must be entirely rejected for the following reasons:
The slogan itself is nasty and misleading since it implies anyone who highlights the impact of poverty on school/teacher quality and measurable student achievement is making an “excuse.” While those people may exist, the vast majority of education activists concerned with poverty are calling for alleviating the impact of poverty on the lives of children so that education reform can work.
“No excuses” focuses all the “blame” for learning on the child—directly stating that children must simply set aside their lives when they walk in the doors of schools and suck it up. This is a calloused and ugly thing to say to a child—and something that most adults themselves do not do. Many who advocate for “grit” in children are living in privilege and casting their privilege as “grit.” “No excuses” speaks to and reinforces the rugged individualism ideology in the U.S. that refuses to acknowledge or address systemic inequity (an ideology voiced by the privileged and one that benefits mostly those in privilege).
“No excuses” practices all are grounded in deficit views of children and education: The children from poverty or so-called minority races and the teachers/schools dealing with those children are deficient and must be “fixed.” However, a strong body of research suggests that individual behavior is often a reflection of the context; people living in scarcity behave differently than people living in slack. Affluent children have high test scores as a result of their lives in slack; impoverished children have low test scores as a result of their lives in scarcity. The problem is how to insure all children the slack they deserve—not how to harden children doomed to scarcity. TPS and NECS are both complicit in failing that directive.
“No excuses” feeds and builds on racism and classism—the exact racism and classism that have plagued traditional public schools and the U.S. for decades. Segregated schools, tracked class assignments, inequitable teacher assignments, inequitable and harsh discipline policies, and a misguided emphasis on high-stakes testing (itself race/class/gender biased)—these are the failures of both traditional public schools and “no excuses” charter schools.
The critical third way is about admitting social inequity in the U.S.—inequity grounded in racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, etc.—and admitting as well that our institutions mostly reflect that inequity, including out public schools and the so-called reform approaches such as “no excuses” charters.
“No excuses” practices cannot be reformed because they are essentially exaggerated versions of the greatest failures of the public school system they are designed to reform.
The critical third way is about social and educational equity, seeking schools that serve the most vulnerable students first with the opportunities that affluent children have (small classes, experienced teachers, challenging curriculum, supportive discipline, safe and well funded facilities).
The critical third way is about admitting we have broken systems, not broken children.
The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) has been documenting the rise of advocacy for charter takeover of public schools in South Carolina, paralleling a similar pattern in nearby states such as Georgia and North Carolina.
The problem with takeover models is that advocacy for the model is being strongly refuted by a growing research base showing that takeovers have not achieved the claims of success voiced by advocates and have often replicated the exact problems faced by traditional public schools, such as segregation and inequitable access to high-quality opportunities.
See this reader of research and analyses of that advocacy and evidence:
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 