Integrated Education and No-Excuses Charter Schools

Desegregation, the great education reform cause of the mid-20th century, never really happened, and not many people even talk about it nowadays, so I was pleasantly surprised last week when Dana Goldstein, a blogger for the Washington Post cited my page on No-Excuses education in an article about race and class integration in charter schools. The writer’s concern was the increasing popularity of the No-Excuses model, whose lengthened school days and rigid behavioral codes she worried would prove distasteful to middle-class and affluent parents, leaving only poor, inner-city kids to populate these rapidly proliferating schools. That is the tip of a very craggy iceberg: dissimilarities in how we educate children from different backgrounds have widened over the past two decades, and unlike in previous eras, the dissimilarities are stated and intentional.^[1]

Original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit.

Matt Yglesias, writing for thinkprogress.org, responded to Ms. Goldstein's article with a version of the standard argument behind many of these dissimilarities: “…kids seem to benefit from picking up certain bourgeois modes of behavior.… Poor kids in a high-poverty school can… receive explicit instruction in bourgeois conduct. That’s the essence of the ‘No Excuses’ model, but it doesn’t make sense in a bourgeois context” (emphasis original.) That explanation resembles the one given by many No-Excuses schools for their strict behavioral codes: Middle-class students, the argument goes, learn school behaviors at home, and arrive in kindergarten already knowing how to sit still, listen to instructions, wait their turn, etc. Students from impoverished homes need to be explicitly taught these behaviors once they get to school.