The “no excuses” charter school model is widely regarded in public debate as an effective policy intervention to politically and economically empower historically marginalized student populations. The organizing principle of the “no excuses” model is to do whatever it takes to close the achievement gap and to prepare students for university education and the professional job market. This article seeks to critically evaluate the “no excuses” model through a qualitative research synthesis of an emerging body of qualitative research literature. The findings from this synthesis raise serious questions about the desirability of the “no excuses” charter school model.

This Qualitative Research Synthesis (QRS) explored how K-16 students of color make meaning of their disability labels and negotiate the prevailing dominant ideologies surrounding dis/ability labels, race, gender, and other forms of identity. Scholars in Disability Studies in Education (DSE) have explored critical connections between Disability Studies (DS) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Annamma, Connor & Ferri, 2013; Erevelles, Kanga & Middleton, 2006). This study identified such critical connections by synthesizing 13 qualitative studies from 2006-2018 and explored the lived experiences of students of color labeled with disabilities. Our goal for this QRS was to advance the theoretical work in DSE through a synthesis of qualitative literature within the field. QRS is a methodologically rigorous approach that "uses qualitative methods to analyze, synthesize, and (re)interpret the results from [existing] qualitative studies" (Major & Savin-Baden, 2010, p. 10). We employed a resistance theory of disability at the intersections (Gabel & Peters, 2004; Giroux, 1983a, 1983b), that foregrounded the psycho-emotional disablism model of disability (Thomas, 1999), to recognize that students' acts of resistance directly relate to systematic oppression within the education system. Findings from our second order thematic analysis suggest that students identified disability labels as an assigned identity, which limited their educational opportunities and left a psychological and emotional impact on their well-being. However, students also used multiple strategies and acts of resistance to negotiate the stereotypical master narratives surrounding their intersectional identities. Through a timely methodological and conceptual counter-narrative of its own within educational equity research, our QRS contributes to theory, research, and praxis, with implications for a more humane and just education system for all students.

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This article presents findings from an analysis of the AFC policy network using tools from network ethnography and qualitative content analysis. Specifically, we examined tax forms and carried out extensive web searches to spatialize and map the AFC network, mined text from policy-actors in the AFC network, and analyzed the policy discourse promoted by these network actors to achieve their political goals. The task for this study was to use AFC as a heuristic device to explore the complexity of the education policy field and to understand how network policy-actors work to achieve their policy goals through advocacy and marketing. Findings from the study indicate that the AFC network demonstrates a hierarchical ordering, this hierarchical ordering is reflective of the elite planning and social engineering associated with neoliberal reforms, and that the policy-actors in the AFC network employ discursive strategies to frame an elite political project to advance school choice policies as an anti-elite movement oriented toward political empowerment and educational justice.

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