No Excuses : Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools Review

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(More customer reviews)If there's any book that works like a coach in a locker room giving a half-time pep talk, this is it. The tone is inspirational and invigorating and Carter identifies several important points that educators need to tune into in order to be better teachers. Yet....
Yet there is something bothering me. For all the important emphasis on teacher and administrator improvement (a priori knowledge in recent educational debates), there is a heavy reliance on standards. Listen: No teacher is opposed to standards. It would be tantamount to saying I am against breathing. But just what those standards are and who sets them and who measures them--that is the debate.
Maybe it is the emphasis that Carter places on the importance of Direct Instruction as an instructional method that bothers me. DI has been widely advocated in educational certification programs as the standard modus operendi for classrooms instruction and it relies heavily on behavoralistic methods of learning: skill and drill, frequent assessments, highly scripted teacher stimuli and highly structure student response. Carter says that we have built too much into studying how children learn and forgotten to teach them. While this is catchy, I disagree: we must be cognizant of our students abilities when instructing them. It reminds me of one of my favorite teacher jokes. Did you hear about the teacher that went home and taught his dog how to whistle? ....No? She didn't learn, but he taught him.
But I still endorse this book. The 21 different schools are important for someone looking for other schools that have gone ahead with reform programs and that may be beneficial.

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Too many educators make excuses for the failure of mostpublic schools to teach low-income children. But across the nationdozens of high-performing principals have identified those effectivepractices that allow all children to excel regardless of incomelevel. In this new report, Samuel Casey Carter, a Bradley Fellow atThe Heritage Foundation, examines the common practices of twenty oneprincipals of low-income schools who set the standard for highachievement. The lessons uncovered in these case-studies provide aninvaluable resource for anyone interested in providing increasededucational opportunities for low-income children.

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