Carrots and sticks

It’s a rare pleasure, though also a bit unsettling, to find a book that’s so close to your own experiences that reading it feels like looking into a mirror. Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope will likely feel like that for anyone who has worked in a New Orleans charter school.

The book is a deep-dive exploration of the culture of three New Orleans charter high schools, or more accurately, an exploration of how these schools try to establish their culture. Two of the schools (Sci Academy and KIPP Renaissance) take the approach that’s trending within most urban charters: technocratic, results-oriented, and data-driven, with a workforce that’s imported from outside the city and then trained in classroom management techniques from manuals like Teach Like A Champion. The third school (O. Perry Walker, which is now Landry-Walker High) had a principal who embraced tradition, took motherly concern in her students’ home lives, and tried to make her school stand out by providing social services like a health clinic and longer hours so students would have a safe place to go in the evenings.*

The book, while honest about each school’s shortcomings, portrays all of the educators in the book in a sympathetic light and refrains from passing judgments on which approach is better. The charter school I’m serving in as part of City Year, however, would undoubtedly say that Sci Academy and KIPP are the model schools here.

My school has named two middle school homerooms “KIPP” and “Sci Academy,” the same way other schools have homerooms named “Harvard” or “Yale”; both schools are thus enshrined in the pantheon of “top-performing high schools” that its students ought to aspire to attend.

So it’s particularly interesting to me that I see certain shortcomings portrayed in the book play out daily in the hallways of my school as well. Carr details how both schools struggle to control, or some might say micro-manage, student behavior. Teachers fling out demerit after demerit on the students for minor infractions, and yet there always seems to be an undercurrent of minor rebellion and disorder.

Certainly, this situation is far from disastrous: both Sci Academy and KIPP are, by data-based standards, very successful. KIPP received an ‘A’ in the latest school rankings (based mostly on test scores) and Sci Academy received a B. The book was written in 2010, so some problems were no doubt attributable to the normal growing pains of two recently-opened schools.

Yet I worry about how, in my own school, leaders appear to believe that students can be controlled exclusively through carrots and sticks (a philosophy known as “behaviorism”.) I’ve seen both an escalation of rewards for good student behavior – there’s a “Fun Friday” activity every week for students who earn enough positive points in our behavioral incentive system, and tons of field trips and parties for students who reach certain GPA goals – but also an escalating series of consequences for misbehavior.

Take for example the issue of disrespect towards adults. Believe it or not, middle schoolers can sometimes have quite the attitude. When disrespectful behaviors like talking back to adults became too widespread, the administration decided to clamp down on it by decreeing that any act of disrespect towards an adult would result in an automatic send-out from class. When that didn’t work, the punishment was raised to suspension. A student can therefore be suspended just for exclaiming something rude like “you’re blowin’ me!”** in a moment of frustration.

The logic behind behaviorism is that students are like lab mice who will learn exactly what to do and what not to do based on treats and electric shocks. This works to a certain extent; I would certainly say that the school I work in now is a lot more functional and orderly than schools I worked in in Chicago, and students learn more as a result.

However, there are certain students who simply will not respond to this student of carrots and sticks because they don’t know how. Impulse control and emotional self-regulation is not something that all students know how to do instinctively. They are social-emotional skills that need to be explicitly taught, like any other subject.*** No amount of punishments and rewards will stop a kid from disrupting class with outbursts and immature behavior if he or she doesn’t learn healthy replacement behaviors.

The school did have a period every day that was theoretically supposed to be used for social-emotional learning and culture-building, but it’s being used now for academic tutoring instead.

Overall, the carrot-and-stick approach does work for a lot of students, even the majority of students. But for a really healthy school culture, social-emotional learning has to be more than just a buzzword. It has to be a part of the core curriculum, just as important as science or math.

*The sentence is in past tense because that principal, Mary Laurie, was fired last year in the midst of an ongoing investigation into a cheating scandal at her school. She claims that she was kicked out without due process.
**This is a common phrase in New Orleans meaning “you’re pissing me off.” I think a lot of the younger students who use it are unaware of its sexual connotation, the same way most don’t realize the origin of the phrase “you suck.”
***Some educators argue that social-emotional skills cannot be explicitly taught like math or science, but they can be taught indirectly through activities that challenge students and promote their autonomy and sense of self-worth. See this excellent Paul Tough article in the Atlantic for more.