“No Excuses” Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement

Abstract

While charter schools differ widely in philosophy and pedagogical views, the United States's most famous urban charter schools typically use the No Excuses approach. Enrolling mainly poor and minority students, these schools feature high academic standards, strict disciplinary codes, extended instructional time, and targeted supports for low-performing students. The strenuous and regimented style is controversial amongst some scholars, but others contend that the No Excuses approach is needed to rapidly close the achievement gap. We conduct the first meta-analysis of the achievement impacts of No Excuses charter schools. Focusing on experimental studies, we find that No Excuses charter schools significantly improve math scores and reading scores. We estimate gains of 0.25 and 0.16 standard deviations on math and literacy achievement, respectively, as the effect of attending a No Excuses charter school for one year. Though the effect is large and meaningful, we offer some caveats to this finding and discuss policy implications for the United States as well as other countries.

No-excuses for character: A critique of character education in no-excuses charter schools

“…The no-excuses (NE) pedagogical model has become the most prominent and fastest growing educational alternative for urban youth in the United States in the past 20 years, and is expected to keep expanding in the United States and beyond (Cheng et al, 2015). The main goal guiding these schools is to close the pernicious achievement gap and to increase college completion rates among the schools’ disadvantaged populations.…”

Getting Developmental Science Back Into Schools: Can What We Know About Self-Regulation Help Change How We Think About “No Excuses”?

“…Success and achievement are measured through student growth on frequent assessments, and indeed natural experiments (i.e., lottery-based studies) have found that urban charter schools subscribing to the “no excuses” model have shown positive and statistically significant impacts on standardized test scores (Angrist et al, 2013; Cohodes, 2018). A recent meta-analysis estimates that “no excuses” charter schools increase student math and literacy achievement by 0.25 and 0.17 standard deviations, respectively, compared to students in traditional public schools, for each year of attendance (Cheng et al, 2017). Such findings are likely responsible in part for the expansion of “no excuses” schools through millions of dollars in corporate and federal grants, though there is no evidence to suggest that it is the disciplinary policies and practices of these schools that lead to increases in academic achievement (Dobbie and Fryer, 2013; Torres and Golann, 2018).…”

Are instructivist pedagogies more appropriate for learning the sciences in South African low-quintile schools than western literature suggests?

“…However, it is also dishonest to compare poor instructivist teaching with idealised constructivist teaching, the apparent fallacy underlying the argument that the underachievement of learners in South African low-quintile schools results from the prevalence of instructivist, and the absence of constructivist pedagogy. Such a view is clearly fallacious given evidence of high achievement associated with skilful instructivist pedagogy in the South African low-quintile context (Christie, Butler, & Potterton, 2007;Jansen & Blank, 2014;Malcolm, Keane, Hoohlo, Kgaka, & Ovens, 2000), as well as in other contexts, such as the highly instructivist Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools in the USA (Cheng, Hitt, Kisida, & Mills, 2017).…”