On Top of the News
How Strict is Too Strict?
11/17/14 | The Atlantic
Behind the Headline
The Softer Side of No Excuses
Winter 2014| Education Next
“Over the past two decades, hundreds of elementary and middle schools across the country have embraced an uncompromisingly stern approach to educating low-income students of color,” writes Sarah Carr in the Atlantic, “but only more recently have some of the charter networks that helped popularize strictness, including the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), opened high schools—an expansion that has tested the model in new, and divisive, ways.”
Is the strictness and attention to detail of these ‘No Excuses’ schools a good fit for high school students, she wonders. Does the rigid focus on rules in the schools “put students at risk in ways that they and their parents, and educators as well, don’t always anticipate”? Carr explores both sides of the argument in her Atlantic article.
In an article in the Winter 2014 issue of Education Next, Alexandra Boyd, Robert Maranto and Caleb Rose show readers “The Softer Side of KIPP.”
David Whitman explained the thinking behind the strictness of these schools in “An Appeal to Authority.”
-Education Next
