Critiquing the corporeal curriculum: body pedagogies in ‘no excuses’ charter schools

ABSTRACT

Descriptions of charter schools as militaristic ‘boot camps’ continue to animate popular discourses. Recently, the upper echelons of the charter school sector, commonly known as Charter School Management Organizations (CMOs), have come under intense scrutiny for their controversial ‘no excuses’ disciplinary practices. These socialization practices are regarded as investments whereby students are expected to become both adept test takers and ‘good’, ‘disciplined’ aspirational citizens. As most ‘no excuses’ (NE) charter schools operate within segregated, low-income urban communities in the U.S., it can be argued that these schools function as vehicles for behavioral scrutiny and bodily surveillance shaping the lives and subjectivities of economically disadvantaged students of color. A curriculum focused on body control raises significant ethical questions regarding the educative practices for low-income children of color in the United States’ divided society. Drawing on discourse analysis, this paper focuses on bodily control portrayed in key texts (handbooks, videos, etc) used by some charter schools before drawing on Bourdieu’s tool of habitus to show how a codified corporeal curriculum may work in CMOs, where bodily control is deemed a prerequisite for academic excellence.

KEYWORDS:

• Body pedagogies
• the corporeal curriculum
• habitus
• ‘no excuses’ (NE) charter schools
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and useful suggestions which led to an improvement of this paper. I would also like to thank Derron Wallace and Dominiek Neall.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Technically, a Charter School Management Organization (CMO) refers to an organization that operates and holds the charter for a network of charter schools.

2 Typically, charter schools do not receive taxpayer funds to cover capital costs during the school start-up process. Successful attainment of start-up funds becomes a major leverage point.

3 Psychologist Angela Duckworth’s (2016) recent scholarship on ‘grit’ and resilience has, unsurprisingly, resonated widely in the cultures of CMOs (Stahl 2017). For Duckworth, she defines grit as a combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal and supplies evidence that it is not only the hallmark of high achievers but supplies evidence that ‘grit can grow’.

4 AP means Advanced Placement, a program in the United States created by the College Board which offers college-level curricula and examinations to high school students.

5 As a variation of SLANT, the STAR position refers to (sit upright, track the speaker, actively listen, rest hands) and HALL (hallway heads and eyes forward, arms with finger on silent lips, a hand at the side, legs straight and lips sealed)’ (Goodman 2013, 92). Other renditions of SLANT include: ‘PATH (professional, including being on time, following all procedures and directions; attentive, including good listening, eye contact, and posture; thoughtful and hardworking, including having high goals, perseverance, and demanding excellence) … or SMARTS (stand and sit straight, make good choices, always 100% on task and engaged, respect, track the speaker, shine)’ (Goodman 2013, 91).

6 How students enter and are dismissed from a charter school varies depending on the policies and laws of particular states in the United States. Many CMOs have faced accusations of dramatically skewing the characteristics of the student population in order to ensure test score remain consistently high.