The Emancipation Of No Expectations

I listen to NPR, on occasion. I do it so you don’t have to. Freedom isn’t free.

And in and among the hours and hours of bald-faced Democrat public relations and PR, you find the occasional nugget of brilliance.

On occasion, that brilliance is utterly in spite of any original intentions.

Such is this hour-long documentary by one DJ Cashmere – which I thought was a hip-hop stage name for a moment, but is in fact the name of a nebbishy-sounding former high school teacher at “Nobles Street School”, a “chain” of Chicago-area “no-nonsense” charter schools. Cashmere went on to become a journnalist…

…under which guise he came back to report on, as “APM Reports” says:

In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.

While I eschew the term “dog whistle” as a way of slighting other points of view, the story is full of terms that both sides have staked out, for and against. The blurb notes “At the time, Noble followed a popular model called “no excuses.” Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college.”

That discipline included uniforms, plus some pretty rigid behavioral expectations; being late, disruptive, or tardy with homework was not tolerated; detentions flew like spitballs for infractions, not only of disciplinary rules, but for being in class late or having uniforms out of spec.

No education model is a panacaea, but Noble Street had good results – good enough that close to 10% of Chicago families, overwhelmingly “of color” and low income (just like Twin Cities charter schools) put their kids in Noble Street schools. There were exceptions. When dealing with human beings, nothing is ever foolproof. But pretty much every objective measure – graduation rates, test scores, college acceptance rates, crime rates – showed the concept worked well for most kids.

And then…

…well, the blurb mentions the dramatic peak; management at Noble Street changed. Noble Street’s “no excuses” values were patriarchal, colonial and, despite the overwhelming approval of the overwhelmingly of-color clientele who’d voted with their and their kids’s feet to get into Noble, “white supremacist”.

And so they changed.

As to the results?

You can listen to the story here (I can’t embed it, unfortunately).

Like all human behavior, there are as many sides to the story as there are people. But it’s a lede that one might suspect public radio would bury, and you’d be at least partly right. The results that parents were looking for – the sort of accomplishment based measures that modern Big Left has called “patriarchal” and “white supremacist” – didn’t fare well.

It’s worth an (occasionally infuriating) listen.

14 thoughts on “The Emancipation Of No Expectations

  1. I am always amazed at the racism of White American liberals who somehow think that having a set of expectations for society, such as promptness, common courtesy, etc, is somehow anti-Black.

  2. The difference between Charter and Public Schools that people need to remember when they try to make a Charter School just like a Public School is that people generally choose the Charter School because it IS different. And more importantly for the people that claim it’s policies are horrible, no good, very bad, racist, patriarchal, etc, no one has to send their children to a Charter School. On the other hand, for people like me that think that current woke, anti racist education model that is completely pervasive in the nation’s public schools is the actual racist set of policies and practices, the Public School is our default, mandatory option, and alternatives like Charter Schools or homeschooling associations cannot expand fast enough to meet the current demand.

  3. “promptness, common courtesy, etc, is somehow anti-Black”

    I don’t know about “anti-black” but it surely goes against the prevailing culture. You can’t “keep it real” if you’re always saying please and thank you.

    I started to listen, but couldn’t get past the vocal fry of the womyn introducing the story…because I’m a misogynist, QED.

  4. A pdf transcript:
    https://files.apmcdn.org/production/a01c8ac34e5c7b57813f60f338e95fc3.pdf
    “Anti-racism” destroys everything that it touches. It is intended to destroy what it touches,
    I put “anti-racism” in quotation marks because no ideology in America today is more racist than “anti-racism.” According to the “anti-racists,” you MUST judge people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. “Anti-racism” is a huge business. there are people and industries that have made millions of dollars off of “anti-racism.” “Anti-racism” has wormed its way into virtually every American institution, from wall street to the military.

    A quote from the podcast:
    Terrence Pruitt is a former Noble employee who has been working for the network as an outside consultant on its antiracist commitment. When I talked to him in March of 2022, he argued that the change was supposed to be messy, and that if Noble had taken 20 years to build and refine its old model, then it would be ridiculous to judge the new model after only a handful of months.

    The “old model” did not work after 20 years, it worked within months.

  5. So, I listened to this last night. What I heard was the no excuses plan worked like a champ. Test scores soared, and violence/behavior issues were nonexistent. Parents loved it.

    Some problems were created by staff that was not capable of separating their egos from their work, resulting in petty abuses of the discipline process.

    This isn’t surprising since the staff were made up of fresh college grads with little to no prior experience.

    When the issue of systemic racism and White supremacy raised its insidious head, the model was tossed into the trash, along with the academic success. Loosening the reigns resulted in violent free for alls, and the worst academic results ever.

    In short, just what you’d expect when leftist reprobates and Negro grifters get involved in anything.

  6. The social contract requires accountability if that society is going to function. You need to expect people to show up when they say they will, or do what they say they will do, so you can do the things you have to do as well (and you should have the same expectations for yourself). You also expect a certain level of education so we can talk to each other and do business, and you also expect people to obey laws both social and statutory – things such as stopping at red lights and stop signs, for example. The lower our expectations become, the worse our society functions, and that is not a black, white, brown, system.

    There is a difference between promoting a system where we are urged to lift those on the bottom up, and one where those on the bottom expect everyone else to come down.

  7. The current administration of Noble-Bulls Prep has discontinued giving its students ACT in favor of the SAT, making direct comparisons of scores before and after the woke changes impossible. Gee, I wonder why they did that?

  8. UMMP;

    Yup. Grifters and race pimps like tax dodger Al Sharpton, left wing commenter Vance Jones, although in fairness, he unabashedly praised Trump for his efforts to reform incarcerations for minor offenses and long term funding for black colleges, Jessie Jackson and ambulance chaser Benny Crump are just a couple of ant-racist millionaires.

    The college testing change was just another move the goalposts action by the DemoCommies.

  9. I noticed all the alumni from the no excuses era he interviewed were very well spoken. The kids attending during the new racist free, be yourself current year, eh, well, not so much.

    Correlation doesn’t mean causation!

  10. Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen

    A slightly different take, left wants a society of needers and when only few are ablers, they control the needers. Hence the intentional dumbing down of society. What can go wrong? (cue REM TITEOTWAWKI).

  11. How many needers are needed to bring an abler his or her wagyu beef?

    As many as abler dictates, because it is good to be the king! Every needer will be a barrista with a PhD in Studies. The most educated peasants EVAH! Of course, they will not be able to hold a candle to constitutional peasants of the Holy Grail lore.

  12. I’ve been pre-occupied with unpacking at my new home in North Carolina (loving it) so I didn’t finish listening to the NPR piece until now. The reporter is fairer than I would’ve given him credit for before now, despite his prog/lib prattle at the end of the piece. My stepdaughter was a teacher at a Nobles school from 2019 until the middle of this past year, when she quit and took a job at Chicago Public Schools. Her thing is special ed and one of her beefs at Noble was that she had to pinch hit as a regular teacher sometimes rather than focus on her real job, which was sort of life coaching for disabled students. She described the culture as pretty toxic, lots of turnover and pettiness. This was after the switch from the no-excuses philosophy. She never experienced the previous regime. From the sounds of it, letting kids run the asylum isn’t working out so well. In Burnsville, which I just departed, kids used their cell phones as they wanted, milled about in the halls, had fights, brought guns to school. This is a suburban high school, mind you, but the demographics of the burbs have changed. My stepson was a minority. African-Americans, Hispanics, and Somalis together comprised a majority. Coming to a school district near you, people. And it makes a difference.

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