"In Real Life, You Have to Speak Up": The Civic Significance of No-Excuses Classroom Management Practices

• In Event: 54.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

The neoliberal focus on the “achievement gap” as the sole measure of educational inequity has contributed to the proliferation of “no-excuses” schools and practices based on the belief that they raise test scores for low-income students of color. This study challenges that conception of equity, asking instead how no-excuses classroom management—highly regimented behavior management techniques increasingly common in schools serving urban youth—impact students’ development as citizens who might act to combat the structural inequalities that frame life in their communities. Drawing upon practice theories of identity, I use ethnographic methods to examine how the day-to-day ways teachers restrict, guide and respond to students’ behavior shapes students’ civic development. My findings highlight three major themes: students’ perceptions of institutional authority, relationships to their communities, and sense of self-efficacy or “voice.”

Author

• Eliot Graham, University of Montana - Missoula