The hallmark of no-excuses schools is a frankly paternalistic and unapologetic commitment to acculturating low-income students to the achievement-oriented habits and norms typical of their middle-class and affluent counterparts. That project is motivated by the belief that low-income children will benefit from a stable, highly structured environment in which conventional, bourgeois behaviors are actively endorsed, expected, and demanded.
…Courtesy is expected, and street language and profanity are strictly forbidden, as are fighting, loud talk, boisterous behavior, harsh teasing, and ridicule of other students, both in and out of the classroom. Students are expected to obey teachers and administrators, make eye contact, be punctual, participate in classroom discussions and school activities, work steadily, and study hard.
My thoughts:
1. Fifty years ago, all schools met most of these standards.
2. They also had gym and active recess every day, which I believe is one reason that attention deficit disorder was less prevalent in those days.
3. The null hypothesis may yet hold. She writes,
Evidence for academic improvement comes almost exclusively from scores on statewide tests, which assess relatively basic skills that many no-excuses schools target with intensive drilling. Most score gains are relatively modest and are subject to fade-out with time. Overall, the data is spotty and limited by small samples and short time frames.
4. She also discusses an approach to encouraging better behavior of low-income students by forcibly integrating them with affluent students. She points out a number of problems with this approach.
5. She cites Montgomery County, Maryland, as an example of a school district where income integration has had some success. But this comes from a handful of poor students brought in from outside the county, and Wax points out that the parents who chose to go to the trouble to participate probably were not a random sample of poor parents. Meanwhile, I can say that a resident of Montgomery County that there are large income disparities across high schools, and there are enormous disparities in test scores that go along with that. The overall percentage of students on free and reduced meals is more than one-third, which is too high for an income-integration strategy to work.
Kids are indeed strongly influenced by their peers, but the problem with integration is (1) Influence goes both ways, (2) indeed, it’s asymmetric, “one bad apple. ..”, and while most parents act as if this were true, it signals bad virtue to express concern about it in public, and, (3) one needs a critical mass of high-norm kids for it to work, and there aren’t enough high-norm kids to go around for all the low-norm kids, and the idea of population management to address this issue is abhorrent to mainstream sentiments.
1. Fifty years ago, all schools met most of these standards.
So in 1967 this all schools met most of these standards? I don’t believe that for a second here if we included inner city schools. To be honest, my kids school is better run than my school in the 1980s California suburban. (And I live a more working class Cali and it is majority Hispanic-American.)
4. I tend to believe High School programs tend to fail but there are some natural rich/middle/working class crossover here. For instance, one reason why California should roll back Affirmative Action is the schools are defined by a multicultural students. If you don’t include minorities as potential friends, then you don’t have friends!
5) Again a lot of ‘inner city’ schools are improving but I wonder about the quality of schools for more rural communities. The students more at risk is not in Maryland or CAlifornia but West Virgina and Kentucky.
On (1) I think you’ve exposed some exaggeration from Arnold, but I think it could easily be rephrased in terms of prevailing norms and failure to meet those norms. Today’s attitude seeks to resist and overturn those norms.
Wax mentions a few advantages that affluent suburban schools have compared with other districts: better facilities, more educated teachers. But within the underperforming urban district I live in schools have developed very unequal performance levels even with when these variables are kept equal within a small band of variance. No shock that the high performing schools have considerably higher familial incomes and are a lot whiter in racial make-up. But they do not get more school district resources – that is strictly controlled. I feel like affluent suburban districts overspend and that this is a strategy so that taxes and property values filter the potential residents to a desirable mix. They could spend less and get similar results, but that would risk that the wrong people might attempt to move there.
If we allowed overt discrimination it would lower the need to price discrimination in picking your child’s classmates.
Absolutely. This is why I think that a large federal voucher program is not in the interests of private schools. If you lower the net price and get the DOJ hovering over fundamental decisions for your school. Well with Jeff Sessions maybe that is tolerable, but when President Perez (or similar) takes over in the future the DOJ pretty much just tells you that your formerly private school is nearly indistinguishable from a public school as far as admissions and discipline and disability education.
The main goal of “no-excuses” isn’t to raise IQ or even get these kids in to college. It’s to teach non-intellectual habits that are useful in both work and life. These are the only things you might be able to have some success drilling in, they aren’t as subject to the null hypothesis.
1. Thanks for point me to the article. It’s thoughtful.
2. Great point with your #1…I wonder how things would be different if “No Excuses schools” (a phrase by Abby Thernstrom) were called “1950s schools.”
3. Wax writes: “Moreover, the parents of students who persist and succeed at these schools must pledge to get their children to school every day and on time, and to ensure that homework is done”
Somewhat misleading. Believe me, lots of missing homework at these schools! Among top complaints of middle and high school teachers at KIPP, etc. It’s true these schools distribute parent handbooks which explicitly ask parents to nudge their kids. But typically zero “push” on parents who simply ignore that ask.
3. Wax writes: “All of these factors tend to enhance students’ academic performance independent of school effects.”
Hmm. Angrist/Kane (Boston charters), Mathematica (KIPP) are lottery based studies. To the modest degree there are unusually motivated parents at these schools, they are equally represented in both control and treatment, so they don’t affect student gains.
Moreover, an MIT doctoral student showed that no excuses schools have highest gains among lowest-arriving students…presumably those kids with most struggling parents.
I wonder if it is right to do those things. Suppose lower income parents think it is a waste to spend you youth studying in order to get a higher paying but boring job as an adult, who are we to say that are wrong?
It would be fine if it were simply a matter of different s in preference if the lower income ‘carpe diem’ parents weren’t, at their own insistence, being given handouts at the expense of the well paid boringly employed people.
As it were, as long as we bourgeois people have to finance the lifestyles of the poor, we have every right to take measures to minimize the cost they impose on us, IOW, to make them more self-reliant.
Also:
IMHO there are only an insignificant number of truly bad schools in the US (or good Government run schools for that matter.) What is fooling people is that there are some schools with a very good set of students and other schools with a very bad set of students. The former schools look good and latter look bad. I went for one year to one of the top rated Government high schools in the USA (Classical High school in Providence RI) and the teachers there were not very good. I also went to a school with a very bad reputation for 3 years and if anything the teachers there were a little better. My theory for that is because any teacher could survive with Classical’s students the teachers were worse. My brothers who went to classical 4 years joked that it was the school for the mentally ill (pause) teachers.
Question for Arnold:
As a parent of two girls, age 5 and 4, and assuming the “null hypothesis” is true, how should I think about school choice for my girls?
Should I just ignore school choice altogether, and send them to the local public school without much thought? Should I look for the “best school”, as defined by what criteria? The “null hypothesis” seems to point to the former, but it would be great to hear your opinion of what the practical implications are for the “null hypothesis”.
Peer groups mainly transmit values rather then any kind of academic skills. Do you think your kids will learn similar values at the local public school versus private school? How different do those expectations have to be relative to what price tag?
Personally, I don’t think private school would be all that different from a “good suburban school”. I find it strange for non-rich people to pay $20k+ per kid per year for private school. I’d rather bank that money and buy them a house. In fact I knew a guy whose parents did just that. Instead of sending him to private school they banked it and bought him a fancy house in Columbia, MD upon turning 22, no mortgage. Much more important to quality of life and affordable family formation.
Of course if you worried about the kind of values taught at either a public or private school, like say you want religious education, then you need to do something more specific. That will relate to your unique situation.
If the kid is a true genius then special circumstances can be sought. But for “averagely above average” just about anything leads to the same UMC existence in the end, doesn’t it.
If I take your answer, it just raises a similar question…if one really believes in the null hypothesis, what constitutes a “good suburban school”. Even your answer sort of assumes some minimum quality or peer group standard, but what would that be? Theoretically, I get it, but in a practical sense, it doesn’t really help with the decision.
Use a mix of intuition, real world visits, statistics, etc. There will also be factors unique to yourself like proximity to job/family, many trade offs.
I’ve been looking for a place to settle down and that’s why I use.
The other thing I’d note is that in experience working on the other side (expensive tutoring) the customer is really that parent, not the child. These services are designed to make parents feel good about their spending choices RIGHT NOW. You can brag about and feel good about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private school in the immediate term. Saving that money and buying you kid a house is a one time thing far in the future.
All schools were not like that 50 years ago. I was in a diverse high school 40 years ago, and rest assured the kids were rude and disruptive. That’s why kids like me sought refuge in advanced classes. And books about teaching in difficult schools go back to Up the Down Staircase and Blackboard Jungle, which were both published well over 50 years ago.
Moreover, you’re kidding yourself if you think most suburban schools are models of respect and obedience. They’re quieter, because the kids have more to lose. But they have all sorts of drug problems, kids cut classes, and the cheating in suburban schools, particularly among recent Asian immigrants but also white kids desperate for good grades, is rampant.
PE and recess have jack to do with ADHD rates. For one thing, the big increase in diagnoses isn’t in the H, but in the A–that is, most of the diagnoses are with kids who space out, lose focus, not the jack in the boxes jumping around.
One thing Wax doesn’t mention is that in schools that do have an organic, wide mix of incomes and races (a very normal thing in some states), that required no forced integration, there’s no real difference. I’ve worked in two different Title I schools in which I also teach a number of wealthy and middle class kids. At my current school, we have a near perfect Advanced Placement pass rate in Calculus (less so in the English and APUSH classes, because many low income kids are forced into these classes against their will). I went to one of the top-ranked ed schools in the country, and most of my colleagues have good subject degrees from solid to excellent schools (and then teaching credentials from the state universities).
All the kids went to the same middle schools, with the same teachers. Yet they come into high school with the same racial and class deficits–with, of course, the same exceptions (many bright poor kids of all races).
Wax decides that the “no excuses” model is better because it doesn’t hurt middle class schools. But the no excuses model doesn’t scale. I think a better solution is to “flip” what charters are used for. Put the problem kids in charters. Make charters highly unattractive places so that kids will try to behave to stay out of them.
If we don’t start limiting the growth of charters, you’ll end up with New Orleans–lots of small, expensive schools that will soon become unionized. And their current ability to skate the rules will disappear as parents start to sue. All for achievement that really isn’t that impressive, once you realize that the demographics have changed dramatically. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/charters-the-center-wont-hold/