'Dismantling oppression' meant destroying effective schools

"No excuses" charter schools were closing achievement gaps, writes Robert Pondiscio in Commentary. "And then education reformers "lost our nerve."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pondiscio writes, "a new breed of inner-city school emerged: unapologetically rigorous, laser-focused on results, and built on the insistence that poverty need not be destiny."

Founders like Steven Wilson, author of The Lost Decade, sweated the small stuff. "There were crisp school uniforms, homework assignments every night, students sitting up straight with eyes tracking the teacher, along with carefully crafted lessons and an ambitious curriculum," Pondiscio writes. "No more hand-wringing and no more alibis."

Studies found strong academic gains for disadvantaged students in urban "no excuses" charters. It was working. But critics thought it was too strict, too demanding, writes Pondiscio. "The very things that had made the no-excuses approach work — its insistence on order and high standards — were recast as flaws or, worse, racist. Imposing middle-class norms on children of color was condemned as white supremacy."

The structure of no-excuses charter schools wasn’t the problem -- it was the point. Kids in chaotic neighborhoods and failing schools didn’t need more freedom; they needed guardrails. They needed adults who believed in them and cared about them enough to demand more of them.

Anti-intellectual ideas lowered academic and behavioral expectations in charters and district schools, Wilson writes. The preachers of "equity" didn't want close achievement gaps between black and white students. That would be "centering whiteness." They wanted "culturally responsive" teaching tailored to students' racial and ethnic identities.

Progressive pedagogy, dubious of adult authority, put students in charge of their own learning. It didn't work very well.

Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion (2010) and former leader of Uncommon Schools, a no-excuses network, told Pondiscio he'd visited a once-excellent schools that had devolved to "utter chaos." Nobody was learning.

School leaders were “dismantling systems of oppression,” which "Lemov understood to mean orderly, teacher-led classrooms, students lining up for silent hallway transitions, and other standard features of no-excuses schools, and well-run schools in general," writes Pondiscio.

Lemov was dismayed. “My take was, whatever systems of oppression you think you’re dismantling, they’re a lot less oppressive than the chaos that is going on in this school right now. And you should reassemble them as quickly as you can.”