Scripting the moves: culture and control at a no-excuses charter school

In her first book, Joanne W. Golann takes on the challenge of examining America’s most celebrated franchise of charter schools, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). While many academics have penned concern about KIPP’s approach to schooling low-income children of color, Golann is among the first to provide an ethnographic account that details the nature and consequences of this model. Further, her work extends beyond the realm of education policy and practice, exploring whether the cultural capital key to facilitating social reproduction can be explicitly taught.

Beginning in 2012, Golann spent 18 months at a KIPP school she calls Dream Academy (a pseudonym). As a network charter school, Dream Academy is publicly funded but privately run. The school, like its peers, overwhelmingly enrolls low-income children of color. Those families whose lottery numbers are called sign contracts promising to abide by KIPP’s no-excuses philosophy. Golann found that administrators and teachers make good on many of their promises, implementing a behavioral script with militaristic precision. Students learn how to wear a uniform, enter a classroom, occupy a seat, and track a speaker, each according to the school’s exceptionally detailed method. While this approach to schooling low-income children of color might sound immediate alarm bells in earlier eras, the no-excuses model is couched in a narrative that many families, practitioners, and policymakers find compelling – one that promises college and mobility. As Golann insightfully conveys, those involved believe passionately in educational equity and work tirelessly toward this end.

Scholars have been rightfully critical of the role that teachers play in implementing a no-excuses model that – at best – has harmful unintended consequences. Scripting the Moves brilliantly captures the complexity of teacher labor. Dream Academy’s leadership and staff approach their work with admirable intentions, insightful reflections, and relentless effort. The no-excuses script, however, eliminates any opportunities for adults to grapple with complexities of children'’s lives and to build on the strengths demonstrated in students' lived experiences. Golann writes, ‘If “no excuses” is supposed to be about the school making no excuses for student failure, it ends up being about the school accepting no excuses from students for deviating from the school’s rigid behavioral script’ (p. 40). Staff face immense pressure to single-handedly close achievement gaps with heroic teaching alone. As Golann reminds us, even the most relentless scripting cannot address the underlying systems of oppression that produce educational inequity in the first place.

Golann critiques administrators’ and reformers’ measures of success, which are limited to test scores and college acceptance rates. As she aptly demonstrates, these measures of success, in combination with the means employed to achieve them, push out many no-excuses students and leave the survivors to flounder in the realities of college life. Part of the story of social reproduction, though, centers on the processes of social closure and credentialism. A more explicit critique of the college-for-all ethos might add to an already powerful argument by calling attention to an important reality of capitalism. That is, there are only so many good spots available, and those who already occupy them have long demonstrated a willingness to hold onto their positions at any cost. Work by scholars like McMillan Cottom (2017) and Ray (2017) illustrates that a college-for-all ethos does little to improve mobility prospects for marginalized youth and can instead cement their entrapment with mountains of debt and messages of self-blame. As Golann hints in the concluding chapter, the remedy is not a better system for teaching the cultural capital that elites value at some fleeting moment. Love (2019) posits that, instead, an abolitionist approach would center social justice itself, harnessing students’ strength, imagination, and resilience and prioritizing critical consciousness over college acceptance.

Ultimately, Scripting the Moves reveals that the rigid, no-excuses script falls far short of achieving aims loftier than the test score gains so rigorously documented and debated in scholarly literature. Golann’s work delivers the analytical generalizability that remains elusive in some case studies. Scripting the Moves offers rich, ethnographic accounts that not only provide insight into the innerworkings of a pseudo-private charter franchise, but also answer important intellectual questions about the nature and transmission of cultural capital. In the footsteps of Annette Lareau and Elliot Weininger, Golann defines cultural capital as, ‘tools of interaction that allow certain groups to effectively navigate complex institutions and shifting expectations’ (p. 10). Her analyses clearly demonstrate that Dream Academy students develop social and academic survival skills that make for an orderly school environment but transfer poorly to elite colleges and workplaces. Rather than learning to embody the sense of ease that Khan (2011) documents at an elite boarding school, Dream students develop a sense of antagonism. In short, the no-excuses environment produces adult-child relationships imbued with resentment, distrust, and resistance. Meanwhile, white, middle-class students, who rarely attend no-excuses schools, learn very different lessons from the hidden curriculum – namely, how to bend the rules in their favor.

What remains to be seen is whether the organizational scripts allow any room to implement the changes for which Golann calls. She finds, for example, that KIPP schools create teacher-proof systems, purposefully hiring teachers who are willing to follow the network’s tight scripts. Predictably, these hires are often inexperienced, securing entry through non-traditional avenues like Teach For America. My ethnography of another no-excuses school (Brooks, 2020) confirms Golann’s hunch that networks catalyze teacher turnover by design, boosting what she calls conformers into ever-growing administrative positions and pushing rejectors out of their at-will jobs. Nearly all franchise charters claim to revolutionize education through market-centered practices. But for students and teachers alike, the very scripts designed to challenge inequality ultimately reproduce it.