Offered here is Part 4 of my book, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through "No Excuses" Teaching. This chapter sketches the history of "No Excuses."
Chapter 4
Whence No Excuses?
What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information
about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the
process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things
worth while, of the values to which these things are relative . . . –John Dewey (1938/2007)
In a
1993 commentary that attacked Jonathan Kozol and Gerald Bracey for questioning
the veracity of the dramatic warnings of A
Nation at Risk ten years after its publication, conservative education policymaker,
Denis Doyle (1993) was one of the first policymakers to use the term, “No Excuses,”
in an educational context:
If they [public schools] begin to benchmark seriously, they
will compare themselves to the best of the best, not just in public elementary
and secondary schools, but also in high-performance organizations. The power of
benchmarking is that it does internally what competition is supposed to do externally:
it holds organizations to high standards of performance, measurement, and
reporting. It accepts no excuses. It is continuous. There is no finish line (p.
631).
The
term, “No Excuses,” was used two years later by policymaker, Anne Lewis (1995),
who admonished folks like Denis Doyle for a narrow focus on accountability
outcomes at the expense of adequate resource allocation. Lewis offered a reminder to budget cutters
and efficiency seekers that there was no escape from the ultimate
responsibility to educate all children, without excuse or failure.
Specifically, Lewis took to task the newly-empowered conservative budget hawks
in Washington for their efforts to slash federal funding for welfare and
education programs. She warned in
pointed terms that as “the culpable may get off the hook temporarily, the
responsibility of education to
prepare young people for the legitimate economy cannot be passed off. No matter
what panaceas are offered by the budget cutters, the bottom line for kids is
the classroom. And the work they do there must be demanding, with no failures
and no excuses” (p. 660).
Over
the next five years, however, the conservative targets of Lewis’s castigation
successfully turned the phrase, “No Excuses,” back to Doyle’s original intent,
so that it came to represent a cudgel used against those victimized by the
kinds of budget cutting that Lewis had railed against. By 2000, neoliberals and neoconservatives had
launched a “No Excuses Campaign” (Carter, 2000) sponsored by the Heritage and
Bradley Foundations, which placed the blame for low academic achievement on
schools, educators, and children.
The No
Excuses Campaign was launched with the publication of Samuel Carter’s No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing,
High-Poverty Schools, which includes the following declaration of intent
before readers get to the table of contents page:
The No
Excuses campaign is a national effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to
mobilize public pressure on behalf of better education for the poor. The No Excuses
campaign brings together liberals, centrists, and conservatives who are
committed to high academic achievement among children of all races, ethnic
groups, and family incomes.
Participants
in the No Excuses campaign may hold differing views about vouchers, the federal
role in education, and other policy issues. But we agree that there is no
excuse for the academic failure of most public schools serving poor children.
All children can learn. Hundreds of public, private, and religious schools
serving low-income children have proved it. Help us to shine a spotlight on
their success and join us in demanding that failing schools meet their standard
(p. iv).
In
2003, the No Excuses campaign got a turbo-boost with the publication by Simon
and Schuster of No Excuses: Closing the
Racial Gap in Learning, authored by policy elites, Abigail and Stefan
Thernstrom (2003). Although Stefan
Thernstrom’s previous academic research at Harvard had documented the immovable
roadblocks for the working classes in America to achieve upward social mobility
during prior centuries, the Thernstroms presented a case in their No Excuses to the contrary. They claimed that “the breakdown of racial barriers in America had opened up
limitless horizons for African Americans in the 21st Century to
achieve what the white working classes had been unable to do previously” (p.
112).
And
while the Thernstrom’s No Excuses shared
Carter’s belief that educators’ laziness, indifference, and low expectations
played significantly in maintaining low academic achievement among
African-Americans, the Thernstroms placed the majority of blame for their
plight on “cultural patterns” of African Americans, themselves. The Thernstroms claimed that
“African-American children appear quicker to take offense and more prone to
conflict” (p. 137).
The
Thernstroms (2003) argued that academic achievement and success in life depend
upon deliverance from the bad habits and traits derived from flawed cultural
patterns among non-Asian minorities, for which society has too long offered
excuses. The Thernstroms announced that
these excuses, which range from racial inequality to socioeconomic
disadvantage, would not be acceptable any longer to the tough love advocates of
the No Excuses campaign. The solemn and difficult crusade to educate black
urban children, specifically, is laid out plainly by the Thernstroms:
The process of connecting black students to the world of
academic achievement isn’t easy in the best of educational settings—and such
settings are today few and far between.
But that only means that in order to “counter and transform”
African-American “cultural patterns,” . . . fundamental change in American
education will be necessary—change much more radical than that contemplated by
the most visionary of today’s public school officials. Recognizing the problem is the first step
down that long and difficult road (p. 147).
Cultural
characteristics, according to the new No Excuses creed, are racial
characteristics, and they can be separated out from economic or class
characteristics that shape behaviors. The Thernstroms (2003) argued that race
is defined by culture, which, by some unexplained formula, exert twice the
influence on academic achievement than do family income, accumulated wealth,
and skin color. The Thernstroms announced that two-thirds of the achievement
gap between black and white children is attributable to culture, whereas
one-third may be determined by poverty, parental education, and the environment
(p. 147).
Richard
Rothstein (2004) has challenged the No Excuses argument by pointing out that
social class, rather than flawed culture, functions as the primary contributor
to school achievement differences.
According to Rothstein, family income, accumulated wealth, skin color,
and culture define social class. In his
critique of the Thernstroms’ framing of the achievement discussion by
separating out influences into percentages, Rothstein claimed “the debate about
whether the low achievement of black students is rooted in culture or economics
is largely fruitless because socioeconomic status and culture cannot be
separated” (p. 51).
Rothstein
argued that the neat separation of influences that the Thernstroms (2003)
devised, with culture constituting the weightier chunk on the achievement
scale, missed the larger point that cultures cannot escape the systemic
influence of poverty or economic privilege in the formation and activity of
culture. Aside from the dubious moral
stance of altering other cultures to suit the values of those who are providing
the cultural improvement plans, any attempt, Rothstein claimed, to alter
cultural values without taking into account family income, wealth/poverty, and
ethnicity will always remain blind to the essential elements of culture.
The
interventions that the Thernstroms label “cultural” may yield results if enough
control, force, and leverage are exerted at the most vulnerable points. This requires the imposition of unwavering demands,
unalterable routines, and the use of punitive pedagogies aimed at altering, over
time, children’s neurological pathways and, thus, their culture and character.
Skeptics of No Excuses Labeled as
Bigots with Low Expectations
The
Thernstroms’ book came at a time when skepticism and resistance to the No
Excuses ideology triggered harsh rhetoric from the highest levels of
government. George W. Bush (2000)
declared his candidacy for President on June 12, 1999, and in his announcement,
he reminded the Cedar Rapids, Iowa audience of his belief that disorder
in school, drug abuse, and out-of-wedlock children represented an ominous
cultural drift that required society to re-draw moral lines of engagement for
combatting cultural mutations:
Some
people think it’s inappropriate to draw a moral line. Not me. For our children
to have the lives we want for them, they must learn to say yes to
responsibility, yes to family, yes to honesty and work. I have seen our culture
change once in my lifetime, so I know it can change again.
. . . . We can write laws to give schools
and principals more authority to discipline children and protect the peace of
classrooms. We must encourage states to reform their juvenile justice laws. We
must say to our children, "We love you, but discipline and love go hand in
hand, and there will be bad consequences for bad behavior."
In
September 1999, Bush spoke to the Latin Business Association in Texas and
offered this preview of the direction that his Presidency would take, when
elected. It was the first of many
opportunities for labeling any belief regarding socioeconomic status and
achievement as an excuse that bordered on racism, or at least the “bigotry of
low expectations:”
In coming weeks, I plan
to talk about safety in our schools, the character of our children, education
standards we should set and the accountability we should expect. But I want to start where educational failure
has had its highest price. I want to begin with disadvantaged children in
struggling schools, and the Federal role in helping them. . . . No child in
America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy,
abandoned to frustration and darkness of self-doubt. . . . Now some say it is
unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is
discrimination to require anything less -- the soft bigotry of low expectations.
. . . (New York Times, 1999, para 2-4).
Bush’s
first “bigotry of low expectations” speech and his subsequent policies
represented a clear shift in education policy talk and implementation. Despite the escalating re-separation of
whites and minority children in schools, a trend that had begun afresh in 1988
(Orfield & Yun, 1999; Orfield, 2001), Bush signaled that segregation or
resegregation had, in effect, become a literacy issue.
According
the Bush Administration, adults with low expectation who make excuses for
children and their parents were responsible for children “imprisoned by
illiteracy,” rather than segregation.
Under Bush and No Child Left Behind, the crusade for ending segregation
of children based on race or class as a condition for achieving equal
educational opportunity would take a back seat to the goal of equalizing test
expectations.
As a
result, calling attention to segregated schools and economic disadvantage
became just another excuse for not closing the literacy gaps among black,
brown, and white children in reading and math.
Challenging inequality among test scores, then, was advertised and
accepted by many as the next civil rights crusade. Unfortunately, it was a goal made impossible
to reach by the act of disregarding the importance of socioeconomic influences.
With
Bush’s election and the quick passage of the No Child Left Behind Act following
the national disaster on September 11, 2001, the struggle for educational
equality that began with Brown in the
1950s fell victim once more to a new generation of testing accountability
expectations. As a result, the demand
for equality in measurable test results replaced older urgencies aimed at
achieving social and racial equality, school desegregation, and equitable
resource allocation.
It did
not take long for education policy elites to accept the No Excuses mission as
the centerpiece for a new educational crusade that would become the purported
civil rights issue of a generation.
Educational equality for the poor became concretized in a stringent,
total compliance pedagogy that looked very different from the types of
schooling enjoyed by middle class children not labeled as culturally
deficient.
No one
seemed concerned that the unearned disadvantages of race and culture suddenly
required interventions that would appear more penal than educational within the
urban pockets of poverty where they came to be applied with strict corporate
efficiency. Those committed to this new
middle class version of imposed civil rights found no irony in the fact that the
new equality would be achieved through oppressive educational interventions
that brought huge financial benefit to
corporate reform school operators.
Not only would these new No Excuses schools
be untethered from public oversight and protections of children and workers,
but new tax structures would incentivize lavish financial support for the
creation and spread of intensely-segregated and publicly funded charter schools.
The new charter schools would be staffed by teachers recruited and trained to
believe that increasing test results and altering child behavior and character
provided the raisons d'être for
their new vocation, temporary though it be.
The No
Excuses campaign, then, became a central interlocking element in the emerging
educational ideology that included 1) a culture alteration program to instill
middle-class “free market” values, 2) testing accountability based on fanciful
expectations, 3) paternalistic and authoritarian educational interventions
demanding total compliance and unending sacrifice, and 4) market-based
educational solutions funded by public monies and venture philanthropists.
The new
ideology represented a modern day Children’s Crusade, whereby hard work,
delayed gratification, behavioral docility, and soldierly commitment to KIPP
Model goals would lead to the human liberation that 150 years of civil rights
struggle could not. For policy elites
long unwilling to risk political disfavor for suggesting disruptive structural
alterations to social arrangements that favored the resegregation of schools,
Bush’s recasting of segregation as a literacy issue that resulted from low
expectations offered an affordable and even lucrative moral uplift.
Additionally,
Bush policies provided an opportunity to impose psychological and
character remediation to those whose academic and cultural shortcomings would,
otherwise, exclude them from economic opportunity. For those embracing the Bush reform agenda
and the No Excuses mantra, the imposition of the most stringent
behavior-and-character-altering interventions became equated with cultural and
character improvement to enhance equal educational opportunity for the
poor.
Schools
that promised to close the test score gaps between rich and poor without the
need for disruptive sociological interventions or economic restructuring came
to be viewed as the proper vehicle to carry forward the civil rights struggle. The
equalizing of high achievement expectations during the Bush Era made possible,
at least rhetorically, what hard facts had otherwise disallowed. For in
declaring that no children would be left behind, issues of segregation and
economic inequality were simply added to the list of unacceptable excuses that
could be berated like trouble-making students.
In doing
so, civil rights and social justice advocates that could be intimidated were
silenced, and any remaining argument against the official Washington delusion
of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading was labeled as an expression of
bigotry. Closing the test score gaps
suddenly became the civil rights issue of another accountability era,
even though the continuing blindness to economic inequality and segregation
made it as likely to fail as former efforts focused only on what could be
changed within the school walls.
The
power and appeal of the new ideology for those with the least to lose and the
most to gain was made clear by President Barack Obama’s continued animated
embrace of No Excuses in his keynote speech (Sweet, 2009) at the 100th
NAACP Convention in 2009:
We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African
American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you
live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a
wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades
— (applause) — that’s not a reason to cut class — (applause) — that’s not a
reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. (Applause.) No one
has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands — you cannot
forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses.
(Applause.) No excuses (para 40).
President
Obama’s new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, (Change.gov, 2008) formally
declared in 2008 the shared conviction that education “is the civil rights
issue of our generation.” The depth of policy elites’ rhetorical linkage of
civil rights with No Excuses schooling was most apparent, perhaps, in Duncan’s
reaction to the Hollywood documentary, Waiting
for Superman, which had been
financed by venture philanthropists and fashioned to inspire public support for
No Excuses charter schools as the urban education solution (PR Newswire, 2010).
Following the gala opening of the film in Washington, DC, Duncan described the film
as “a Rosa Parks moment” (Fernandez, 2010).
That statement, alone, made it clear that corporate education reform had
moved to the front of the bus.
Higher Expectations and Downward Mobility
KIPP
and the other No Excuses charter schools argue that if teachers and children
work hard enough, and if parents are
supportive of those efforts, then the KIPP Model can clearly demonstrate that
economic disadvantage, race, or geography present no barriers to academic
achievement as measured by standardized tests.
In 2010, President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, declared
that “poverty is not destiny,” and if policymakers
“get the students the support they need, get them the best principals, get them
the great teachers, I promise you those students would do extraordinarily well.
I have seen it all my life” (PBS News Hour, 2010).
Across
the Atlantic in 2012, Britain’s education secretary, Michael Gove, shared the
same conclusion that “deprivation is [not] destiny,” and that with “the right
teachers and the right values,” the economically deprived can outperform public
expectations (GOV.UK, 2012). Even if
doing “extraordinarily well” or outperforming public expectations is limited to
mean higher performance on standardized tests, that conclusion must come with
qualifiers, caveats, or skepticism, as we will show later in this book.
If
“to do extraordinarily well” is to mean upward social mobility or
economic sustainability, then empirical research shows us that
the most rigorous, rigid, or behaviorally “militant” schools offer little help
or hope for the disadvantaged and economically segregated to get ahead
economically or “do extraordinarily well.” In a series of reports by the Brookings
Institution and Pew Charitable Trust (Isaacs, 2007a; Isaacs, 2007b; Isaacs
& Sawhill, 2008; Pew, 2012; Pew, 2013a, 2013b), the simplistic nature of
education policymakers’ claims regarding student achievement scores and
socioeconomic mobility become ever clearer.
Using
four decades of data from black and white families in the Panel Study of Income
Dynamics (PSID), Pew and Brookings researchers (Isaacs, 2007b; Isaacs &
Sawhill, 2008) found disturbing trends when examining questions related to 1),
how children fare economically when compared to their parents, and 2) how race,
class, and gender affect mobility. As summed up in the The Washington Post,
Nearly
half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s
plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults, according to a new study -- a
perplexing finding that analysts say highlights the fragile nature of
middle-class life for many African Americans.
Overall,
family incomes have risen for both blacks and whites over the past three
decades. But in a society where the privileges of class and income most often
perpetuate themselves from generation to generation, black Americans have had
more difficulty than whites in transmitting those benefits to their children.
Forty-five percent of black children whose
parents were solidly middle class in 1968 -- a stratum with a median income of
$55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars -- grew up to be among the lowest fifth
of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,100. Only 16
percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48
percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a
median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group (Fletcher,
2007).
In an
analysis of research that included the data from the Isaacs (2007) report
above, researchers (Sawhill & Morton, 2007) examined the implications of
these findings for the American dream of upward mobility based on the long-held
belief in hard work, skill, and knowledge.
The researchers found the American Dream remains a viable concept in
terms of “absolute mobility,” which is measured by how economic growth, or the
overall standard of living, changes from one generation to the next.
The
current generation, as of 2007, remained above the last in terms of living
standard. However, the American
meritocracy becomes more mythical and less reality based when viewed through
the lens of “relative mobility,” as
defined by how individuals or groups change “relative to others, moving up or
down in the ranks as one would expect in a true meritocracy” (p. 8).
Despite
their high expectations, Secretary Duncan or Secretary Gove might have been
surprised to learn that Great Britain and the United States, respectively, have
the lowest upward mobility among other Western nations that include France, Germany,
Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark.
According to OECD figures (Desilver, 2013), the U.S. ranked second highest
among Western nations in after-taxes income inequality. Interestingly, none of these other countries have
put so much pressure on schools to provide solutions to inequality and lack of
economic opportunity.
The
belief, however, that hard work, ambition, and access to education are the
primary determinants in a person’s economic well-being is widely shared among
the American public, and it is one that underpins many of the assumptions guiding
the No Excuses KIPP Model. In 2013, Pew researchers
(Sharkey & Graham, 2013) found, for instance, that 80 percent of Americans
viewed
. . . factors such as hard work, ambition, and access to
education as key drivers of upward mobility, while less than half viewed
growing up in a good neighborhood as an important factor. On the contrary,
respondents strongly agreed that a young person with drive, ambition, and
creativity growing up in a poor neighborhood is more likely to get ahead
economically than someone growing up in a more affluent neighborhood who lacks
those attributes (p. 1).
Pew
research (Sharkey, 2009; Pew, 2013b) shows, too, that zip code is a central
element in shaping social and economic outcomes of residents, with neighborhood
poverty increasing the likelihood of moving down the income ladder. The following data clearly suggest that
poverty-reduction efforts, neighborhood
investment projects, fair housing policies, and ending segregation may prove to
be more effective education reform strategies
to raise test scores and to breed attitudes of hope than devising total
compliance schools with psychological treatment regimen and character remediation
programs:
· For
children whose family income is in the top three quintiles, spending childhood
in a high-poverty neighborhood versus a low-poverty neighborhood (say,
experiencing a poverty rate of 25 percent compared to a rate of 5 percent)
raises the chances of downward mobility by 52 percent;
· Over
the course of childhood, two out of three black children (66 percent) born from
1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent
poverty rate, compared to just 6 percent of white children;
· Four in
five black children who started in the top three quintiles experienced downward
mobility, compared with just two in five white children. Three in five white
children who started in the bottom two quintiles experienced upward mobility,
versus just one in four black children;
· Neighborhood
poverty alone accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward
mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force
participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined;
· Black
children who lived in neighborhoods that saw a decline in poverty of 10
percentage points in the 1980s had annual adult incomes almost $7,000 greater
than those who grew up in neighborhoods where the poverty rate was stable
(Sharkey, 2009, pp. 2-3).
In 2012, another Pew study (Pew
Charitable Trusts, 2012) added more evidence of low relative mobility among those born at the top and bottom of the
income ladder: “Sixty-six percent of those raised
in the bottom of the wealth ladder remain on the bottom two rungs, and 66
percent of the those raised in the top of the wealth ladder remain on the top
two rungs”(p. 2). Even more troubling, for
poor and middle class black families, upward relative mobility is even less likely:
Half of blacks (50 percent) raised in the bottom of the family
wealth ladder remain stuck in the bottom as adults, compared with only a third
(33 percent) of whites. More than
two-thirds of blacks (68 percent) raised in the middle fall to the bottom two
rungs of the ladder as adults compared with just under a third of whites (30
percent) (p. 3).
More recent Pew research (2013b) focused on the linkage between economic
segregation in U. S. cities and economic mobility. Almost fifty years after James Coleman (1966)
found that school segregation has a negative impact on school achievement, Pew
researchers found that economic achievement is similarly affected by
segregation. In more integrated urban
communities, the descendants of poor families living in highly-segregated
communities can expect to take four generations to reach the area’s mean
income, while poor families in more integrated communities can expect to take
three generations to reach median income levels (p. 12):
. . .
the most economically segregated U.S. metro areas—those where the very rich and
the very poor live far from each other—are also the least economically mobile,
and vice versa. Moreover, neighborhood economic segregation has risen across
U.S. metro areas for more than 30 years, suggesting that climbing the economic
ladder is more challenging in some places than in others (p. 12).
With this kind of data available to policymakers and to
corporate foundations that remain fixated on funding for total compliance
charter schools, it is difficult to calmly accept philanthrocapitalists’
stubborn insistence that even the poorest children can become prosperous adults
by becoming more disciplined and dedicated test takers in school. Given the slim odds that school interventions
alone, even good ones, can accomplish such formidable results, the “no excuses’
ideology takes on an aspect of dangerous fantasy when set alongside the
empirical evidence: “Only 4 percent of
those raised in the bottom quintile make it all the way to the top as adults,
confirming that the “rags-to-riches” story is more often found in Hollywood
than in reality. Similarly, just 8 percent of those raised in the top quintile
fall all the way to the bottom” (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2013a, p. 12).
Admitting
reality would be a first step toward social, economic, and educational changes
that are consistent with our human rights and constitutional guarantees. By depending
upon
more flawed educational fixes for deeply
rooted social and economic problems, not only does a grittier Horatio Alger
myth become further perpetuated by those who have never known lack of
privilege, but the more expensive and politically-risky
structural changes such as fair housing enforcement, job
creation, and economic livability
standards get shoved
to the bottom of the policy priority list (Rose, 2014)
for another generation.
Is it
worth asking, then: can entrepreneurial imagination and organizationally-disruptive
practices be used to address entrenched and systemic
problems in urban communities, rather than as a mad method to
replace public community schools with corporate reform
schools that claim the ability to
scrub the effects of poverty from children’s behavior and psyches? Will
venture philanthropists find reasons to invest in ending the
entrenched and inequitable systems of urban housing, economic deprivation,
child neglect, food deserts, and crumbling public services that continue to
feed the poverty monster now consuming large swaths of our population? Or will philanthrocapitalists continue to
promote an unending parade of miseducative,
though lucrative, acts that represent a minstrel
version of educational justice?
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