Original EPT Page

Phi Delta Kappan, October 2000, 82(2)

10th Bracey Report On the Condition of Public Education
By Gerald W. Bracey

The No Excuses Report

In the spring of 2000, the Heritage Foundation published No Excuses, a study that deserved neglect but received substantial publicity, including two articles and a column in the Washington Post. Written by Samuel Casey Carter, a theology student studying the phenomenology of Jacob Klein for his doctorate, this study purported to find 21 schools that had high poverty and high achievement. These schools had 75% or more of their students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches and standardized test scores at the 65th percentile or higher. No doubt the report garnered so much media attention (but not nearly enough skepticism) because these findings run counter to the conventional wisdom.

Press releases and the introduction to the report contended that, now that we have found 21 such schools, there is no reason why all low-income schools can't achieve high scores. The report claimed to refute the "liberal view" that demography is destiny. I have never heard a liberal espouse such a simplistic doctrine, but it has become a new attack phrase for the Right. For some, the fact that the study was able to locate only 21 such schools among thousands and thousands says a great deal.

Chief among the report's findings was that all these schools had "strong" principals who exercised their wills on the schools' curricula and teachers. Indeed, so prominent was this message that Geneva Overholser's glowing (and naive) column in the Washington Post was titled simply, "Free the Principal."24

But even the highly unsystematic study itself provided evidence that it takes more than a strong principal to get test scores up in high-poverty schools. For one thing, a quarter of the schools were private, and one wonders what public schools could take away from the experience of such different institutions. These schools charged $4,500 to $6,000 annual tuition, leaving one to wonder about the accuracy of classifying them as low-income schools.

Some schools had 11-month years, and many had test-oriented after-school programs. Some even had Saturday programs. Some of the schools had more money than public schools in the same geographical area. All of them seemed to test their students to death. Most were small. For example, one had 152 children in seven grades, and another had 285 in 14 grades (pre-K12).

Some schools reported implausible test scores -- averages for a grade as high as the 98th percentile in one Detroit school. When I pointed out to Kenneth Cooper, a Washington Post reporter, and Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki, a Detroit Free Press reporter, that not even the most affluent schools score this high on average, their reactions were astonishing. Walsh-Sarnecki said simply, "We must celebrate our victories," while Cooper virtually called me a racist for, in his eyes, denying that black students could score as high as whites. Such naiveté about test scores in education reporters is very disturbing.

The principals described in the report hardly appear "free." "Obsessed" might be a better description. They put in workweeks that most people would not and demand similar commitment from their teachers. One school gives its students cell phones and the teachers' phone numbers. It expects teachers to be accessible at any time.

Indeed, the report itself includes admissions that any attempt to reproduce these schools on a larger scale would face immense difficulties. Two principals told Carter that to replicate their schools on a national scale "would require a pool of educators that does not exist today." In a foreword, Adam Meyerson, vice president for educational affairs at Heritage, declares, "Most of the principals of high-poverty schools do not come close to the standard set by No Excuses principals. They should be replaced." In exasperated response, one can only ask, "By whom?"

It might actually turn out that much of the No Excuses report unravels. At Earhart Elementary School in Chicago, for instance, the highest-scoring students are usually first-graders. This would mean that the schools are selecting high-scoring students, not creating them (Earhart is part of a Chicago program in which selection is permitted). In one extreme example, students who averaged at the 98th percentile as first-graders had fallen to the 47th as third-graders. At Chicago's George Washington Elementary, ethnic trends look like those in Serbian villages. The proportion of black students there fell every year from 15.2% in 1990 to 1.3% in 1999.

Most important, neither school is testing anywhere near all its students. Earhart has about 33 students per grade, but often tests only 21 or 22. Washington has 74 pupils per grade, but only in sixth grade did it test anywhere near that number (66), while in third grade it tested only 48. Limited English might exclude some at Washington, but not at Earhart, which reports zero cases. These considerations are not desperate attempts to make the results disappear. They describe factors that any competent researcher would have examined.

The schools described in No Excuses do appear to have some good qualities, although the report does not extract them as general properties. Reading the vignettes about the schools, though, one senses that they build a sense of community in both the children and their parents and that they instill the idea of "a possible future" in the students. The notion that one has a future and that it has a chance of being good does not come automatically to children. Indeed, according to a number of books, it appears to be completely absent or wholly distorted in children coping with mean streets. (My complete analysis of the report is available from the Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, at http://uwm.edu/Dept/CERAI.)

Phi Delta Kappan - Web edition
October 2000 * Volume 82 * Number 2

From the 10th Bracey Report On the Condition of Public Education
By Gerald W. Bracey

(retrieved on 11/28/00)

Directions: (Reminder)

First, click on the "Lecture" button to the left and watch the videotape entitled "Statistical Falicies". The videotape is about 5 minutes long and should be played only once. While watching the videotape, you should take notes on a piece of paper. In both the Web version and actual version of the EPT your notes will not be graded. After watching the videotape, read the article by clicking on the "Article" button to the left. When you are ready, start writing a 1 to 2 page essay (if this were on paper) in the the space provided below based on the information in the videotape and the reading article. In your writing, you should develop a main idea about the topic and support that idea with information from the videotape and the article.

The following criteria will be used to grade your essay:

a) Your essay should have a clear introduction, body and conclusion.
b) The ideas within your essay should be explicitly connected.
c) Your ideas should be supported with the evidence from both the videotape and the article.
d) Your essay should be written in your own words. Don not reproduce directly the videotape and the article in your essay.
e) Your essay should demonstrate the use of standard grammatical conventions.

You will have 50 minutes to read the article and to write the essay after the video is stopped. The time left will be put down on the blackboard every ten minutes.

Directions:

The following criteria will be used to grade your essay:

You will have 50 minutes to read the article and to write the essay after the video is stopped. The time left will be put down on the blackboard every ten minutes.