The Paradox of Teaching Behavioral Norms at a “No Excuses” School

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Across disciplines, there has been a growing interest in the ways in which students’ social and behavioral skills influence their educational and occupational outcomes. These skills, alternatively described as non-cognitive skills, character, and cultural capital, include behaviors such as showing attention in class, having good work habits, and reasoning with adults. Instead of directly teaching these skills, schools presume that students already possess them, thereby favoring middle-class students who have learned these skills at home. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a “No Excuses” charter school and over 100 interviews with students, parents, and teachers, this dissertation examines one school’s concentrated effort to teach new behavioral norms to low-income, minority students.
In the last decade, “No Excuses” schools have emerged as a possible solution to closing the achievement gap. While there is no official list of “No Excuses” schools, the label “No Excuses” has emerged to describe a group of high-performing urban charter schools, such as KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, MATCH, Mastery, Democracy Prep, and the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academies. These schools share several distinguishing features, including an extended school day and school year, frequent student testing to inform instruction, an intensive process of teacher selection and development, and a highly structured disciplinary system that aims to re-socialize students into new behaviors. Evaluations that use lottery strategies and matching techniques have found that “No Excuses” schools significantly increase the academic achievement of low-income and minority students. Yet these schools also have generated controversy because they explicitly and systematically teach kids how to be students, monitoring how they dress, walk down the hallway, show attention in class, and speak with teachers. Through their efforts, they aim to re-socialize students into new behavioral norms like discipline, attention, punctuality, and effort.
In this paper, I argue that the school, in its socialization effort, taught students a limited set of skills, privileging self-control and deference over assertiveness, initiative, and reasoning. As a result, the school inadvertently undermined its own goal of preparing students for college and work by not teaching them the skills that middle-class students use to interact with institutions and increase their learning opportunities. Thus, paradoxically, the hidden curriculum persisted even as the school tried to make behavioral expectations explicit for students.

Author

• Joanne Wang Golann, Princeton University