No abstract

Urban minority children are increasingly being educated at public schools run by charter management organizations (CMOs) characterized by a highly rule-ordered and regulated environment. These rules, enforced through continuous streams of reinforcements and penalties, while contributing to a tight focus on academics and a safe culture, have associated costs. The article scrutinizes four CMO commonalities, along with their implications: the pervasive adult monitoring of students, targeting behaviors tangential to learning, attributing independent agency to children who deviate, and student derogation by adults. It is concluded that rules can indeed be protective, but if not counterbalanced with opportunities for genuine choice and personal agency, the rules may quell students' desires and shrink their aspirations. A blanketing emphasis on obedience can create conditions for accepting instruction, but alone, it is dangerous, for students will not have developed their own compass to resist negative models.

It is argued in this article that although the original purpose of the Individualized Education Program (IEP) was for it to serve as an accountability device, it has become an instructional as well as evaluative mechanism. A review of the forces that led to the inclusion of the IEP in P.L. 94-142—prior legislation, professional articles, testimony at hearings—indicates that proponents hoped that individualized programming would diminish categorical placements in favor of least restrictive environments, encourage parental participation in establishing and overseeing educational goals, and provide a method to evaluate children's progress on mutually agreed-upon objectives. The IEP was never intended to specify what or how teachers should teach. Given the luxury of hindsight, however, our analysis suggests that the provisions for establishing “short-term objectives” to be evaluated through “objective criteria” made it more likely than not that programs would choose specific skills and attainments as objectives, and rely on teacher directed instructional methods. The IEP regulations make it difficult to pursue a child-directed, highly interactive teaching approach with ends left fluid. Suggestions are made for enlarging the construction of the curriculum and evaluation procedures by establishing multiple alternative objectives, using portfolios or videotapes for assessment, including narrative reviews for evaluation, and substituting as objectives, in some instances, methods rather than outcomes. More important, debate on the IEP is encouraged.

The ‘no-excuses’ model of education has become one of the most prominent educational alternatives for urban youth. Recently, notable no-excuses charter schools have begun a concerted effort to develop students’ character strengths, striving to increase their chances of future success. In this article, we situate the no-excuses approach in the context of two prototypical positions in the history of character education: the ‘Traditional’ approach, stressing habit formation and the inculcation of virtuous character traits, and the ‘Progressive’ approach, dedicated to autonomous reasoning in determining moral codes. We identify two central limitations of the no-excuses approach. First, it combines incompatible components from both positions: the Traditional emphasis on a meticulous management of student conduct, together with the Progressive aspiration to cultivate autonomous decision-making. Second, while both Traditionalists and Progressives strive to develop character in light of moral values or principles, the no-excuses model is characterized by an instrumentalist conceptualization of character strengths as means towards achieving the goal of college completion. Consequently, this approach compromises the two central mechanisms that support the internalization of character strengths – practice in autonomous decision-making, and habituation in the service of principles. These shortcomings are further accentuated by the vast divergences between the no-excuses setting and future contexts in which character strengths are to be applied.

It is argued that current school disciplinary policies are ineffective instruments for delivering moral messages: they are poorly justified; fail to distinguish moral violations -violence, vandalism, deception -from conventional school-limited violations -attendance, dress codes, eating venues -leaving the impression that dress code violations and forgery are equivalent; conflate sanctions, including presumed punishments (detentions and suspensions), with other forms of corrections (conferences, positive and negative reinforcement) and apply them without distinction to moral and non-moral wrong-doing.To be morally instructive school disciplinary codes should separate three types of infractions -moral, derivatively moral, and conventional. The derivatively moral includes rules that while not moral in isolationeating outside the cafeteria -become imbued with moral attributes under particular interpretations; conventional wrongs have no moral valence but are rules designed for orderly school management. Sanctions, too, should be applied differentially according to category of infraction. Punishment, if used, is appropriate only for intentional moral wrong-doing, connected to acknowledgement of culpability, and conditional upon a clear articulation of the school's moral objectives that is persuasive to children and the community. School Discipline in Moral Disarray AbstractIt is argued that current school disciplinary policies are ineffective