Control as Care: How Teachers in “No Excuses” Charter Schools Position Their Students and Themselves

Training, Technique, and Automaticity: Teacher Preparation at the Charles Sposato Graduate School of Education

“…Sposato's values are inherited from Match Education's roots, which, by design, were built on the ideals of "No Excuses" charters (Goldstein, 2012), an initiative of the 20th-century neoliberal education reform movement, which is arguably the most controversial model to emerge from the charter movement (Pondiscio, 2019). "No Excuses" charters were founded on the notion that there can be "no excuses" for the achievement gap between low income, historically minoritized students and their more affluent, white counterparts, and are defined by an extended-day, extended year college-preparatory model with high academic expectations and a widely scrutinized discipline/behavior code (Bailey, Meland, Brion-Meisels, & Jones, 2019;Golann, 2015Golann, , 2018Lopez Kershen, Weiner, & Torres, 2018). The "No Excuses" model first defined Match Education, and its instructional models became a vision for how teacher preparation should be organized at Sposato GSE and by extension for those teaching in urban schools in the United States.…”

Paternalistic aims and (mis)attributions of agency: What the over-punishment of Black girls in US classrooms teaches us about just school discipline

“…Data support this conclusion, especially in the context of low-income, majority non-White ‘no excuses’-style schools in the United States. 10 As Lopez Kershen et al (2018) find in their qualitative study of teachers’ perceptions of punishment in these school settings, teachers may understand their punitive behavior as ‘exemplifying caring behavior’, yet ‘[p]articipants’ words indicated they believed they showed “caring” through surveillance of student behavior and enforcing compliance to discipline systems’. The authors argue that these justifications exemplify ‘soft caring’ (Antrop-González and De Jesús, 2006) and ‘aesthetic caring’ (Valenzuela, 1999):in which teachers often pull on discourses of social justice and care to rearticulate and enact market-based reforms [e.g.…”

“…Moreover, teachers’ emphasis on compliance may serve to further mitigate teachers’ development of trusting interpersonal relationships with students, even as teachers explicitly work to establish such relationships. (Lopez Kershen et al, 2018)…”

“…This is not necessarily problematic, but becomes especially fraught when teachers are educating children subject to the deeply unjust circumstances that we described in earlier sections. In these cases, many teachers believe it is their task to ‘train’ their students for the real and mightily unjust world, and this can lead teachers to over-punish students in schools who they deem likely to be over-punished ‘on the outside’, in order to help them internalize this reality (Lopez Kershen et al, 2018). Let’s consider the case of Lily, who was a kindergarten teacher in Newark, NJ.…”

“…Moreover, teachers' emphasis on compliance may serve to further mitigate teachers' development of trusting interpersonal relationships with students, even as teachers explicitly work to establish such relationships. (Lopez Kershen et al, 2018) These encounters with school discipline are presented as just, with the implied claim that the criteria for punishment are fairly applied to all persons under the jurisdiction of the school. Yet as the data above show, this claim does not go through.…”