Edison Is the Symptom, NCLB Is the Disease

In October 2005, a board member took me on a tour of Confluence Academy. Located in the heart of inner-city St. Louis in one of the most economically-disadvantaged areas of the city, Confluence Academy is a charter school run by Edison Schools, Inc., a for-profit educational management organization (EMO) headquartered in New York City.

Edison and Confluence Academy are logical expressions of our contemporary system of education, especially the way that we educate poor minority children. Edison is profiting – literally and metaphorically – from the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law. Confluence and Edison are symptoms of a much larger social disease, a disease that creates the conditions for these companies to exist and thrive and for these schools to be regarded as models for our future.

I visited six classrooms at various grade levels. I did not observe a single white student. Every child I saw was African-American. The students were dominated and controlled in ways that were reminiscent of a trainer working with frightened, caged animals. The children seemed utterly unchildlike, utterly joyless. In one first grade class, students had all of their body movements tightly controlled and responded in automaton-like fashion to instructions from the teacher. Instead of smiles and engaged looks of curiosity, the faces of these six-year-old children expressed a kind of dull affect. The teachers -- mostly white women -- taught at the students, and the students simply responded in parrot fashion to the teacher. The students' role was clear: obey orders, do not do anything that the teacher does not tell you to do, sit and be quiet. This degree of total control over the students affected the way that teachers taught; in only one of the six classrooms I visited did I see a teacher who seemed like she was having fun; the others were very short with the students, quick to pounce on any undesirable, uncontrollable behavior.

In defense of the heavy discipline, the board member said, "Sure, the structure of the Edison schools is a bit tough. Yes, we make the kids walk in lines wherever they go. But it works. You don't have to waste 6 minutes at the beginning of class, telling Johnny to sit down and be quiet. And you don't waste 15 minutes in the middle of every class, trying to get students to be quiet and stay on task. Even the very brightest kids can't learn in an environment like that. No one can."

But being quiet and paying attention to the teacher should not be taken as unquestioned and unqualified virtues in themselves. In a rigid structure such as that imposed by Edison, there is no room for student or teacher creativity or spontaneity. The only room for freedom of expression is either (a) do what the teacher tells you to do or (b) resist what the teacher tells you to do. Given the kind of power and authority structures that already exist in white-dominated society, it's little wonder that students of color are tempted to act out and lash out. If they don't act in this manner, then both the implicit and explicit power relationships and inequities are reproduced in the classroom: docile brown bodies controlled by powerful white bodies. This is even more troubling given the fact that no Edison school exists in a white, wealthy, suburban district. Not one.

Many people have been taken on the same exact tour of Confluence Academy that I was taken on and emerged gushing about how great the school is. "Look how well-behaved they are!" or "They're all so quiet!" I’m told are typical reactions.

But unlike the Hollywood depiction of classrooms, in which "good" classrooms are quiet and arranged in neat rows of desks, effective classrooms tend to be a bit “noisy.”

As a teacher, I seldom led classes that were quiet. Because my classes almost always used group activities and hands-on, project-based work, they were usually pretty loud. So I never thought of the issue of whether the class was quiet or not. Quite honestly, the issue was irrelevant. What concerned me was whether the students were engaged or not. Engagement, in my experience, comes by allowing students to have a say in the manner of what they learn and how they learn it. “Having a say” means that students use their voices.

For voices to be heard, they cannot be quiet.

The literal and metaphorical implications of silenced voices, particularly the silenced voices of historically silenced people, cannot be emphasized enough. Any system that demands that historically oppressed people be silent should be subject to scrutiny and skepticism. But in an educational system that is responsible for educating future citizens, this forced silence and compliance should do more than give us pause. It should make us angry. Unfortunately, the Board members of Confluence Academy have apparently bought into the notion that "noise = chaos," at least for non-white kids. Thus, for non-white kids, there must be rigid "discipline" as seen in the military and prison.

Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, students in these academic settings will be forced out of school and will have nowhere to go but the military or to prison. The one comfort may be that if this fate does befall them, they will have been well-prepared.