For What It's Worth: Argumentation, Persuasion, and Propaganda in the No Excuses Charter School Debate

• In Event: 16.031 - The Pursuit of Equal Educational Opportunity for Students of Color and the Competing Purposes of Schooling in the United States: Colonial Times to Today

Abstract

The education reform debate around issues of achievement, access, choice and equity is characterized by a continuous point-counterpoint among several key stakeholders. One highly polarized aspect of this larger debate manifests in the controversy that persists around “No Excuses” charter schools. These schools employ pedagogical and instructional methods hailed on the one end of the debate spectrum as the only proven solution to the achievement gap and vilified on the other end as masking systemic racism and classism behind catchy slogans and questionable data. As the controversy swirls, pockets of public opinion are influenced by the announcements, publications, media releases, interviews, tweets and blog posts of key stakeholders who use these platforms to maintain the legitimacy of the “No Excuses” charter school movement. Drawing on Boltanski and Thevenot’s (1999) theory of justification, and Patriotta et al’s (2011) process model of institutional repair, this paper analyzes one controversy, a moment critique within the larger debate. The focus: a clandestinely recorded video of a teacher in a “No excuses” charter school harshly disciplining a student and the ensuing public response.
I analyze this moment critique to reveal how proponents defend the teachers’ actions around achievement data and accountability, but do not engage larger issues of educational equity beyond this limited framing. While the tendency to frame educational equity around achievement data and teacher accountability is pervasive and compelling, it is ultimately insidious in its dismissal of the social and historical forces that have contributed to the current state of educational inequity.
Primary data sources are the video tape of the classroom incident and Internet blogs and news articles surrounding it. Drawing on pragmatic sociology, the paper documents how proponents of the “No Excuses” model inflect civic discourses with notions of deservingness and racial stereotypes of African American and Latino children to conflate equal opportunity with social efficiency. Detractors enter the debate finding that it has already been framed (by proponents) around data and accountability. They tend to employ, civic, inspired and domestic arguments to generate counter-points to proponents’ claims. Though the mainstream media took up proponent’s justification of the video, opponents’ arguments gained significantly less traction in the mainstream media. Issues of equity, racism and classism at the core of many critiques of “No Excuses” policies were thus largely absent from the public discourse in the broader media arena.
This paper offers a unique contribution to the present discourse on policies that seek to reduce the racial and economic disparities in academic achievement. By stepping back from the debate to identify the types of arguments mobilized by distinct groups and then analyzing which ones dominate the discourse in the news and social media realms, the paper documents how arguments can be crafted to expand or constrain the definition of educational quality and equity beyond test scores and college acceptance.

Author

• Sian Charles-Harris, University of Connecticut