Deferring virtue: The new management of students and the civic role of schools

Civic virtue in schools

The common story today about civic virtue is one of decline, and the common story about schools is one of crisis. From MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1984) to Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985) and to contemporary debates on American public values and the state of its youth, the prevailing story is one that laments the loss of civic virtue. Schools are seen by many as one of the culprits of this decline, but they are also charged with reversing it and once again generating a virtuous public who can elevate the level of public engagement and participate in a productive democratic discourse.

In this article I suggest that the expectation that schools resuscitate civic virtues competes with a more powerful demand on schools, namely, that they generate equal opportunity and mobility, especially for poor and minority youth. The effort to improve the educational achievement of youth from underserved communities is increasingly formulated in ways that undermine their opportunity to develop and practice civic virtues. I raise the possibility that our schools teach different kinds of civic virtue to different kinds of children. However, I also consider the fact that civic goals such as participation and engagement are significantly enhanced by educational achievement and attainment, and therefore the equal education opportunity goal is not always so clearly in tension with the goal of developing civic virtues in all children.

I start by discussing some of the key aspects of democratic civic virtue. I then describe the current policy regime and particularly its aspects that clash with implementing civic efforts in schools; I also discuss the differentiated opportunities for civic growth which youth of different classes and races benefit from in school. I then focus on a specific type of school operated by some key Charter Management Organizations, and describe their concerted efforts to close the racial and class-based achievement gap by increasing their students’ academic attainment and achievement. I suggest that civic virtue in a democracy is relational and reflective, and that both these aspects are undermined by this increasingly common type of effort to educate poor and minority youth.

An outline of democratic civic virtue

Civic virtues are not always the focus of the scholarly discussion about democracy and citizenship. Sometimes scholars focus more on civic behavior or on political knowledge, and leave the more ideal or less measurable debate on virtues aside, although it never seems to fully disappear. ‘[I]n a free republic, it is the task of the citizen, whether ruler or ruled, to cultivate civic virtue’ (Bellah et al., 1985: 270). Liberal democratic theorists sometimes focus on the skills and practices through which civic virtues are expressed, suggesting that civic virtue is largely related to communicative style and practices, and linked to the inclination to participate in various public and publicly minded actions. As Galston (1991: 227) asserts, ‘a general liberal political virtue is the disposition, and the developed capacity, to engage in public discourse’. In addition to the ‘evaluation of those in office’, Kymlicka’s first liberal virtue includes engagement in ‘public discourse’. Decisions in a democracy must be subject to ‘free and open discussion’ and citizens must be willing to engage in these discussions (Kymlicka, 2001: 296). While I do not develop here a full list of democratic civic virtues, in much of the literature that discusses, analyzes or measures civic virtue, its components include some combination of political knowledge, efficacy, trust, the capacity to communicate effectively and with an open mind (including tolerance and respect), and preparedness for collective action (or solidarity). Autonomy is sometimes discussed, as well as commitment to justice (Carr, 2006; Collins et al., 2011; Grönlund et al., 2010; Macedo, 1991; Willems et al., 2012). It might be useful for the current discussion to think broadly about civic virtues as consisting of a commitment to justice; solidarity, loyalty or the understanding of the boundaries of the state as supportive of the cause of justice; and relationality. Citizenship is a unique form of relationality: it is political in nature, and in its democratic form it entails that ‘people are committed to resolving their disagreements . . . not by fighting or by the direct application of coercive force’ (Miller, 2013: 232), but through commitment to pursuing justice and other shared goals without coercion.

In this article I discuss civic virtues as inclinations, dispositions, traits and attitudes that are stable over time, and tend to be expressed in sustained, democratically desirable forms of political and social activity. For these desirable forms of activity to be dependably present in a society, civic virtues are required – not just the ability but also the inclination to pursue justice, maintain loyalty or solidarity and persuade without coercion.

Civic virtues as I understand them here have a number of dimensions. First, they have a cognitive dimension, as they rely on a level of knowledge about the broader community the person belongs to, its practices, procedures and social aspects. The cognitive dimension is the first one schools are expected to contribute to, though it is not necessarily the main one. Children are expected to learn in school about some of the key aspects of the political community in which they live, its history, its form of governance and its norms. When gaps in access to such information and limitations of political knowledge are identified, usually schools are expected to fill them, though individuals are also expected to consume news from the media and to access relevant information in other ways (on limited political knowledge, see Delli-Carpini and Keeter (1996); on the role of schools in addressing it, see the Guardians of Democracy report (Jamieson et al., 2011)).

An additional cognitive dimension that borders on the psychological is the capacity to reflect. I think about reflection here in a most basic sense, as the ability to consider one’s decisions and actions in light of one’s preferences and available knowledge. The ability of individuals to reflect is material to a society that relies on decisions and actions its citizens make. Some earlier and classical accounts of democratic virtues expected citizens to be rational in order for society to function properly, but that seems to be both unwarranted and unnecessary as a general expectation. I have argued elsewhere that the common expectation that schools develop or facilitate autonomy, or that all individuals act autonomously for society to be truly democratic is similarly unrealistic as well as unnecessary. The capacity to reflect, in a basic way, on one’s preferences and the relevant available paths for action available, and to reach decisions that can be justified based on this assessment, is suggested here as a minimized substitute for the more extensive requirements of autonomy and rationality.

Beyond these cognitive aspects, psychological dimensions make up the core of civic virtues. Those include first and foremost the motivation to act in democratically desirable ways, including acquiring the knowledge necessary to act as an informed citizen. In addition, the psychological dimensions include self-perception or the sense of efficacy required for action as an equal member of society. These are sometimes referred to in the literature as having a ‘voice’, which I understand as having a sense of oneself as capable of participating (self-efficacy) as well as having the skills to develop a perspective, reflect on it and communicate it.

In addition, civic virtues include dispositions regarding the political sphere, and particularly attitudes toward other members of the political community. As mentioned, many democratic theorists focus on tolerance and respect as bedrock values of democracy, without which a democratic political community cannot survive. The development of respect and tolerance in schools is seen as essential to the preservation of democratic society, particularly in light of internal tensions and various forms of hatred that remain a concern for many democracies. In this sense civic virtues include a relational dimension, encompassing communicative skills of expression and of listening, respect and tolerance and other related forms of treating other members of society with dignity.

Civic virtues thus incorporate psychological, cognitive and relations dimensions. Their achievement is based on at least two contextual assumptions that go beyond the discussion of the virtues themselves. First, for virtues to be properly developed and expressed, we need to assume that individuals are functioning within the accepted boundaries of a given political community (where the boundaries themselves are not a dimension of the virtues but they delimit their anticipated expression). ¹

Second, the development and expression of civic virtues depends on an assumption that others in the political community have access to developing similar civic virtues, as otherwise the individual who develops them cannot participate with others in expressing them in the public sphere. If we assume – as I believe we should – that a democratic public sphere demands certain types of civic virtues be universal, then civic equality of opportunity to express civic virtues is presupposed, or at least equality of opportunity to develop such virtues. While the former assumption about political boundaries will remain at the background of the current discussion, the latter, about equal access to the development of civic virtues, will inform the next sections.

Civic virtues thus go beyond knowledge about politics and civics, and only partly overlap with the development of civic skills. They relate to the dispositions, habits, self-perception and relational dimensions that together constitute the internal or personal conditions of civic virtue. While the development of civic virtues and especially their expression, or practice, in the public sphere may be a lifelong endeavor, their seeds are presumably best sewn in early ages. Schools are expected to help students learn to think, act and even feel as contributing members of a community. Since schools are expected to develop these virtues, and in this way to counter the perceived decline in civic virtue in American society, it is important to consider schooling conditions that make the development of such virtues possible or probable, as well as schooling conditions that inhibit their development.

Civic virtue and education policy – differentiated education for citizenship

While the interest in civic virtues is growing in some academic circles, most education research and policy favor measurable outcomes over other types of variables. As a result, when citizenship is discussed in the context of scholarship and policy making (it disappeared for a while from the latter but has shown some resurgence recently; see, for example, Department of Education (2012)), the common focus is less on virtues and character and more on skills and practices. The overview in this section of current trends in the research about education for citizenship, and some of the inequities in access to such education, will serve as backdrop for the discussion in the next section about novel educational approaches in some contemporary schools and their civic effects.

Research has long shown that courses in civics increase civic knowledge (Gimpel et al. (2003) show that taking a government course raised students’ political knowledge by 3%) but their effect on civic practices, skills and dispositions is more tenuous. Until the 1990s, a common view was that civics courses provide little benefit in civic outcomes (Langton and Jennings, 1968). However, in the past two decades or so a few major studies have indicated a correlation between learning civics and developing civic skills and dispositions, as well as exhibiting civic behaviors (Delli-Carpini and Keeter, 1996; Nie et al., 1996; Niemi and Junn, 1998). In addition, a large-scale comparative study of youth in 28 countries found correlations between certain curricular features and civic outcomes such as interest in politics, the ability to apply knowledge accurately, and civic and political commitments (Torney-Purta, 2002; Torney-Purta et al., 2007).

The development of civic virtues and practices is linked not only to direct instruction in the civics or history class, but to a host of additional practices in school. First, formal measures of civic engagement – voting, volunteering and membership in voluntary associations, for example – are positively correlated with educational attainment (Dee, 2004). In addition, there are classroom practices beyond staying in school and taking civics courses that affect the levels of civic engagement. Significantly, many studies have indicated that open-ended classroom discussion about political issues has a positive impact on political knowledge, and in some studies such discussion has been shown to have an effect on civic practices as well (Hess, 2009; Youniss, 2011).

In addition, the authors of a study on Catholic schools argue that religious schools can make a positive and valuable contribution to pupils’ citizenship education by supporting the development of a moral community, and by setting an example and facilitating direct moral conversation (Willems, et al., 2010). Student government and service learning opportunities are additional ways to develop civic skills and virtues, and to exercise civic practices in a supervised and supportive environment (Youniss, 2011).

Many of these important practices have been disappearing from the school day as a result of the increasing pressure to improve measurable outcomes, specifically in literacy, mathematics and science. The narrowed-down curriculum and the hyper-focused school day are more evident in schools that are failing or are at risk of being deemed failing. Thus, educational opportunities to learn good citizenship are increasingly limited to schools serving social groups that, for reasons ranging from cultural capital to neighborhood effects or available time, are already more engaged in the political process.

The differentiated set of learning opportunities available to children and young people in more affluent areas, compared with that available to children in underserved communities has been widely documented. For instance, the course selection in schools serving poor and minority youth is often more limited than in schools serving more affluent youth (Tyson, 2011). In recent Department of Education data it was reported that 29% of high-minority schools offered calculus, compared with 55% of schools with low-minority enrollment (Civil Rights Data Collection, n.d). The gap is greater with respect to Advanced Placement (AP) offerings. These differences have an impact on further learning and employment opportunities, of course, but they also have a clear civic impact. Young people who are college bound or have attended college are more likely to participate in civic activities than those who are not college bound or have not attended college (Flanagan et al., 2009).

In the context of access to learning civics, the civic opportunities afforded by higher level civics courses are not regularly available to students from marginalized groups. While differences in civic outcomes are well documented (Atkins and Hart, 2003; Levinson, 2007; NCES, 2007; Torney-Purta et. al., 2006), less attention has been given to the availability of civic learning opportunities. Nevertheless, available studies indicate a growing gap between minority and poor youth on the one hand, and their white and more affluent counterparts on the other, in the opportunity to develop the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes required for civic participation and the development of civic virtues. For example, students taking AP government classes are exposed to the majority of ‘best practices’ approaches to civic learning, including simulations, meeting with civic leaders and discussions of issues in the local community. Only half the students in college-preparatory courses are afforded similar opportunities (Kahne and Middaugh, 2009). A recent study found that opportunities to participate in student government were unequally distributed across class, with middle class and affluent students much more likely to have student government in their schools (McFarland and Starmanns, 2009). Lower socioeconomic status students who had student government in their school were less likely to have a real voice about school policies. Other extracurricular activities that offer opportunities to engage with school as well as to develop democratic virtues (and which predict political behavior) were similarly unequally available across class and race (Hanks and Eckland, 1978; Rosenblum, 1998). Overall, civic-related courses and extracurricular activities have decreased as schools are pressured to meet the demands of achievement on high-stakes tests in subjects like mathematics and reading (Gunzenhauser 2003; Hess and Brigham 2000), and this effect is clearly more evident in the schooling experience of poor and minority students.

These differences in opportunities affect the levels of civic knowledge, as measured by NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Youth of color and poor youth score lower on the NAEP civic knowledge exams than their white and affluent suburban counterparts (Weiss et al., 2001). Similarly, ‘Recent research shows that low income, African-American, Hispanic, and rural students score lower on tests of civic knowledge and have less optimistic views of their civic potential than their more privileged counterparts’ (Jamieson et al., 2011: 11). The same important recent report states that ‘African-American and Hispanic students are twice as likely as their white counterparts to score below proficient on national civics assessments. A similar civic knowledge gap exists between America’s wealthiest and poorest students’ (13).

While some assume that the differences in civic knowledge are explained by general differences in the quality of education provided to these populations (Hart and Atkins, 2002), others (Kahne and Middaugh, 2009) suggest that the differences result from specific school-based opportunities. A survey study of high-school students in California found that African-American students are less likely than white students to report having courses related to government, discussions about current events and other social issues, or simulations of civic processes; meanwhile, Latino students were found to be less likely to have had opportunities to engage in community service, simulations of civic processes, or discussions in class and an open classroom climate. Overall, students from higher socioeconomic status had a higher likelihood of having civic development opportunities in their schools. The etiology of the differences in civic knowledge is important for the current discussion, because if it relates to the general quality of education, then improving schools in poor and minority neighborhoods can alleviate much of the problem, whereas if – as I assume – the civic gap arises as a result of differences in specific schooling practices, then an improvement in other measures, such as proficiency in mathematics or reading, will not solve the problem of differentiated levels of civic knowledge (which, to reiterate, is an aspect of developing civic virtue).

Finally, another challenge to teaching civic virtue in school has to do not so much with educational policies and practices, but with the growing homogeneity of public schools (Frey and Wilson, 2009). This phenomenon is not generated by schools, but rather reflects the growing homogeneity of neighborhoods in the past few decades (Rothstein and Santow, 2012). When the social environment provides few opportunities to engage with diverse individuals and communities, and when it exposes students and their families to few examples of people who look different or who espouse different norms and ways of life, the school’s capacity to develop civic virtues is significantly limited. What we think of as the first of two Aristotelian virtues entrusted to public schools – civic friendship (or social cohesion) – becomes questionable, ² and more specifically the development of virtues such as tolerance for differences, respect for others, and the inclination to consider different points of view is impeded. True, no community is fully homogenous. There is diversity in every community, and young people can learn to respect others who have special needs or other forms of difference within their own community. However, when forms of diversity that are central to a society’s civic life (such as race in the United States) are missing or limited in many of its communities, the development of related civic virtues such as respect and tolerance, as well as listening skills and anti-racism, is severely limited (Blum, 2002).

Multiple factors thus coalesce to limit the civic opportunities available to youth in marginalized communities, and to minimize the probability that they will develop the civic virtues necessary to participate in democracy and to excel as members of their society to everyone’s benefit. The re-segregation of schools and neighborhoods, the academic and civic achievement gaps, and the growing focus on a limited set of measurable outcomes reshape the experience of schooling that society provides its next generation of citizens. As a result, the shared sense of membership in society erodes, undermining marginalized communities’ sense of belonging, and taxing the public’s commitment to a shared political endeavor. The next section considers one emergent effort to provide equal educational opportunities to youth in underserved schools, and weighs its civic impact.

Totalizing schools and education for citizenship

The effort to close the racial and class-based achievement gap and to improve the educational opportunities afforded to poor and minority youth in underserved communities is seen by some as requiring a radical new approach to their schooling. I focus here on the barriers to developing civic virtues and related practices in an increasingly common type of educational experience, represented here through a particular type of charter school. ³ These are mission-based non-profit charter schools such as those in the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) and other Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) that aim to serve mostly poor and minority students. Their goal is to provide such students with opportunities that arise from high-quality education and from higher educational attainment and achievement than is commonly available in their neighborhood public schools. ⁴ The observations offered below will clarify why I bundle them under the title of totalizing schools. Their rapidly growing networks are concentrated in large urban areas, and they either open new schools or take over existing schools to turn them into a part of their network. While still a sliver of the overall number of schools, they are becoming major providers in the education field in some areas – in New Orleans 80% of the students are educated today in charter schools, most of which are members of national networks of the type I am discussing here; in New York and Philadelphia charter schools are charged with ‘turning around’ dozens of schools in the coming years in a process that blends public and private and moves much of the power in these cities to the hands of city leaders and chief executive officers (CEOs); KIPP now has over 100 schools and is rapidly adding schools to its network; other networks report comparable growth.

These schools attempt to break new ground in the schooling of poor and minority youth. Many of their features represent a significant change from the common style of schooling available in contemporary public schools. Most relevant for the current discussion are these schools’ detailed control of daily, minute activities, and their overarching supervision of all actions during the school day. Totalizing CMOs have extended school days, sometimes going from 7:30am to 5:30pm, when study period and extracurricular activities begin. Many of them require students to attend a full or shortened day on Saturdays as well. Most CMO schools have a longer school year, with summer vacation lasting a few weeks at most. Extending the time students spend in school is meant to increase instructional time, reduce time spent in (what is assumed to be) unproductive after-school contexts, and to immerse the students in an environment that expects and demands the most of them. Students thus experience strong external control over their actions for a significant part of their lives.

These schools are important to look at in the context of the development of civic virtue because they are explicitly meant to serve students who are underserved academically and civically by current public institutions, including schools. They are also important because public schools that serve similar populations – mostly urban poor and minority students – increasingly endorse similar practices as a way to tackle persistent safety and climate problems (McIntosh et. al., 2010). ⁵ It is therefore central to the discussion of education for citizenship, especially when considering equal opportunity to develop civic virtues, to consider civic preparation in the totalizing environments that are typical to these schools.

Many have seen charter schools of this sort as potential remedies for the barriers that minority and poor youth face in their typical public schools. ⁶ Charters are meant to be innovative, nimble institutions that can leap over bureaucratic and other limitations that traditional schools face and develop new, effective practices to address persistent educational problems. The civic dimension is one of many such problems that charters are expected to solve, and some have high hopes from them in this regard: ‘Charters have a potentially powerful role to play as trendsetters for civic learning’ (Miller and Lake, 2012: 2). However, while one small charter network focuses directly and heavily on democratic and civic dimensions of learning (Andrews, 2011), most charter networks – including the ones I focus on here – are committed first and foremost to improving their students’ achievement as measured by standardized tests as well as by attainment and college acceptance.

Although there is considerable variation among charter operators, over half subscribe to the proposition that students’ academic success, always the primary goal, is dependent upon a highly rule-ordered and regulated environment (Lake et al., 2012; Miron et al., 2010). The climate in many of these charters is focused so urgently on academic achievement in required topics and on maintaining safety by minimizing expression and interaction that the opportunity for developing civic virtues is mostly missed, I argue.

CMOs start new schools or take on existing, failing or persistently dangerous schools and ‘turn them around’, using behavioral practices and teaching methods that sometimes improve both safety and levels of academic achievement. To do that, they create totalizing environments through systematic behavioral engineering that includes detailed expectations of behavior throughout the school day. This overarching use of behavior modification practices is vastly different even from traditional schools avowing behavioral methodologies, since in those the use of reinforcement is largely limited to achieving specific targeted behaviors, and is mostly used with specific children rather than the whole student body. ⁷ In this narrower form a teacher, often with the cooperation of a student, works out contingent consequences to follow occurrences of specified desired and unwanted behaviors. Frequently these plans are embedded in token economies (students collect tokens that are redeemed for privileges or items). The single-minded focus of CMOs on improving standardized test results and preparing students for college, with every activity geared to that end, also differentiates them from schools with strong missions (cultures) whose codes of behavior are characterized more by a set of normative expectations and aspirations than by a complex set of detailed rules enforced throughout the day.

The school mission expressed by these charter operators is targeted fervently at the academic success of their students. Mastery, a charter operator in the Philadelphia area, states that it is ‘relentlessly committed to student achievement’; KIPP’s first of five pillars is high expectations for academic achievement leading to college enrollment. Young Scholars expects that a student ‘will work incredibly hard to achieve success in becoming a young professional and an academic scholar’. Uncommon Schools ‘share the following key attributes: a college preparatory mission; high standards for academics and character; a highly structured learning environment; a longer school day and a longer school year; a focus on accountability and data-driven instruction; and a faculty of committed and talented leaders and teachers’ (as stated on the networks’ websites).

The commitment of these CMOs to success, as measured by outcomes on state exams as well as by graduation and college admittance rates, is evident in the language they use in their handbooks. For Mastery teachers and students there should be no excuses for failure, and in pursuing success ‘every second counts’ (Mastery, n.d.: 19). The ‘no excuses’ premise is explicit in all these networks’ handbooks. In order to meet high achievement goals, it is the school’s task ‘to maximize every second of our school day to provide our students with the knowledge and skills required to grant them access to limitless opportunity’ (Young Scholars, n.d.: 15). Learning should be engaged in ‘with a sense of urgency’ (KIPP Philadelphia Charter, n.d.: 5).

Compounding the emphasis on using time productively is the division of academic instruction into tiny sub-units of behavior and time management. Thus a teacher may give students three minutes to copy instructions from the board, another three minutes to read a passage. If children are caught mumbling, that reduces their allotted time to two and a half minutes. A couple of minutes may be devoted to ‘discussion’, meaning an opportunity for students to answer teacher questions – ‘What was the major theme?’ ‘Who was the major character?’ ‘Who felt hurt?’ (observation). Often, the content of the reading is secondary to the lesson’s goals, which can include the ability to discern the main and secondary points in the text, recognizing supporting evidence etc. Partitioning the day into fractionated bits has been called ‘defensive teaching’ by Linda McNeil (1986, 2000), a device by which the teacher retains control. For the teachers, however, it is understood and justified as insuring continual and effective learning. A teacher who is observed by his superior to waste time on finding out why a student is crying is reprimanded and recommended to attend additional professional development on time management (teacher interview).

To preserve the regulations and train the children to comply with the expectation that they devote their time entirely to focused learning, rewards and sanctions are constantly administered. At Mastery, for example, behavior of younger students is monitored, in real time, on a five tiered color system: green and blue are good, purple is a warning, yellow is a privilege denied, and red is a phone call home. The class is monitored as a group, and each child is monitored individually, with clear and constant consequences to any and all infractions. Infractions may include turning around in your chair, not looking at the teacher, speaking to your neighbor, not having your materials on your desk on time, or arguing about a consequence given for an infraction.

In middle schools children tend to be tracked through merit/demerit cards. At Mastery they receive blank merit and demerit cards every week to be carried on their person, prepared to be marked by a teacher at any moment. After six offenses the student receives a three-hour in-school detention. During detention, which is carried out in a group setting after school, complete silence is enforced and the children are expected to sit at their desk without performing any tasks. In addition, the teacher maintains a cohort behavior clipboard to monitor the class. During each lesson the class is graded on a 1–5 point scale based on ‘participation, body language, and adherence to the classroom rules’. Ratings may be given throughout the lesson with the final entry summing up the class score. The last period teacher averages the day’s ratings for possible reward eligibility.

At KIPP (DuBois) ‘character cards’ are given to students every two weeks with a list of possible infractions on their back. Demerits can be given for school uniform infractions, chewing gum, coming unprepared for class, using a cell phone, or not having the card in one’s possession. The accumulation of four demerits results in a Saturday detention. Teachers become accustomed to giving out individual and class sanctions without interrupting instruction, an amazing feat of multi-tasking to observe. Depending on the school, they keep records by writing student names on the blackboard, their own clipboards, a student’s merit card, or by moving students’ markers along the color-coded strips, all the while not interrupting the lesson.

Several CMOs use their own monetary system to encourage rule obedience (KIPP Philadelphia Charters, Young Scholars). Students at Young Scholars Middle School, for example, receive a weekly paycheck of $50.00. Deductions are made for violations of core values or PATH (Professional, Attentive, Thoughtful and Hardworking) as well as for violating the behavioral codes or SMARTS (Stand and sit straight, Make good choices, Always 100% on task and engaged, Respect, Track the speaker, Shine). Additional earnings for good behavior are also possible. One week with a balance below $30.00 results in an after-school detention, and maintaining a proper balance enables the students in some schools to use the fund for buying small goods in the school store.

The teaching practices in these schools, as much as we were able to observe them, focus on the development of measurable behavior and academic skills. Beyond the ongoing behavior modification, pedagogical attention is given to the development of specific skills. In a high-school lesson on Genghis Khan, the substance of the lesson was secondary to the goal of learning to identify primary and secondary points in the text. As in other schools attempting to overcome the achievement gap, the focus on curricular excellence understood as the development of measurable, testable skills limits the scope of activities available to students in totalizing schools and other schools serving disadvantaged students. Even civics courses, when offered, tend to be limited to recitation and offer little by way of discussion or other opportunities for active engagement (see also Kahne and Middaugh, 2009).

The cause of this singular focus on test scores is not rooted in some narrow-minded vision of education espoused by these practitioners. Rather it reflects the priorities set by society through its legislators and leaders in the past decade or so, to close the achievement gap as is it expressed by standardized test scores and other measures (most notably NAEP: National Assessment of Educational Progress). The prioritizing of this constricted vision of equal educational opportunity contributes to the development of these imbalanced efforts, where devoted young teachers and committed young leadership are pouring all their time and attention into a program that aims to improve scores on tests, while at the same time negatively affecting what should be the end goal of this equal opportunity, namely, equal civic membership in society.

In response to questions about their students’ ability to develop self-control and personal initiative, to develop and express opinions and to be able to function positively as community members, the leaders of these schools explain their approach in one of two ways. The first response is that they view civic development as a luxury. They see their business as exclusively focused on closing the achievement gap as measured by standardized tests, and thus offer their students an opportunity to go to college. Anything else is seen as a distraction, a waste of time, an excuse for not working. Another response that some leaders offer is that they too view the development of self-control, mutual respect, deliberation skills and other civic dimensions as part of their mission. However, they suggest that these are impossible to achieve or even to strive for when the students lack the basic academic and behavioral capacity to participate. These in turn, it is suggested, can only be developed through the strict practices they employ. Some school leaders expressed the hope that, once behavior practices have been internalized, civic virtues can be promoted or will flourish on their own in the school community; however, the need for ongoing strict control practices into high school represent a challenge to this possibility, suggesting that strict controls become a feature of the environment rather than a crutch to lose after some practice.

Clearly, many of the skills developed through these behavioral and other pedagogic practices are necessary for civic participation as well. The ability to read a text well, discern the views and facts in it and analyze it is a necessary first step to engaging with others’ written opinions. The ability to contain my urge to punch someone who voices a view that is different from mine and may be offensive to me is a necessary first step to having a productive discussion. However, the common approach in these CMOs, proclaiming the urgency of teaching that has not a second to waste, and employing tough measures to ensure full compliance with a clear set of acceptable behaviors and a limited set of goals, might leave students with these necessary habits but without sufficient tools, including civic virtues (capacities and motivations) to realize their academic and civic goals. ⁸ In these totalizing schools, where open-ended discussion is often discouraged and the free exchange of views is seen as disruptive to teaching and learning, the opportunity to develop the forms of civic engagement and civic virtues associated with open discussion is limited. Specifically, the ability to listen, to take in another person’s opinion, to shape a response or reconsider one’s views, and to deliberate or negotiate on a given point of interest, are all lost when most or all speech in the classroom is moderated, structured and supervised. Facilitating autonomy (if this is something that educators should do) and promoting tolerance for diverse views is hard when children and young people are not allowed to speak during the school day, unless answering a specific question addressed to them.

Clearly, there are more generous ways to describe the work done by totalizing charter schools. Their stated missions and observed practices can be interpreted as innovative pathways to overcoming the violence and mediocrity that plague some public schools, including many of the ones that serve the same children. They are organized around a strong mission, and invite all – parents, children, teachers and staff – to recognize the value of the mission and to participate in its pursuit. They set a moral example by expecting their staff to be as committed, as disciplined and as hard working as the students. Moreover, by making their goals and practices explicit, they allow and encourage conversations about them within the community. Teachers and administrators in these schools are immensely devoted to their students, and to the ideal of equal educational opportunity. Many of them believe that the levels of authority and control they exert, and the near total limitation on personal freedom, self-expression, relationship and creativity are necessary for the functioning of the school, and thus for the success of the children. As this success, measured by results on standardized tests, is deemed by society to be crucial to overcoming persistent social ills, it is hard to blame the devoted staff in these schools for accepting ‘no excuses’ and for doing ‘whatever it takes’ to support their students’ learning.

However, the morality – or the attendant values – of the ensuing community are such that they prohibit the development of an active moral (or other) community, and thus they fail to contribute to the education of students as citizens and in particular to their ability to develop the kind of agency, self-perception and relationships that support the development of civic virtues. Specifically, the prevention or punishment of spontaneous speech by students teaches them that their words are either worthless or dangerous, that they are not to be trusted unless they act according to strict rules under threat of penalty, that whatever comes from within them, without external direction, is meaningless or frightening to society and its institutions. As a result, self-reflection is hardly possible, and personal or social relations are minimized. Self-reflection is limited to asking, ‘have I made a good choice?’, which directly translates to ‘have I followed the rules?’ There is therefore little opportunity for children and young people to develop interests, views, perceptions of self and others, or ideas about desired and desirable actions. In addition, the strict limits on spontaneous exchanges with other students, often including free times (such as transition between classrooms, or lunchtime), curbs the ability of students to see themselves as part of a learning community or a moral community with their peers.

The civic consequences of such total control, particularly in comparison to typical middle-class public schools (and many private schools), are significant. The opportunity to develop agency, to learn to see oneself as a contributing member of society, to understand oneself relationally in positive terms, these are all minimized by the strict controls and limited, structured interaction and forms of expression in totalizing schools. The assumption that the children are wild – possibly because of prior educational neglect – and that they need to be subdued through strict control mechanisms sets the mission, and the community created by the mission, apart from others. Like other schools, except perhaps the most progressive ones, there is an underlying structural assumption that children in the school need to be led by adults. However, the view that the children are in some inherent way dangerous, and the subsequent practices intended to discipline them, seem to be uniquely developed in this type of school (though this has been rapidly adopted as a model for other charters as well as for public schools; see Lake et al. (2012)). The fact that these schools serve mostly poor and minority youth signals a view of this group that does not coincide with democratic values, even as it aims to provide equal academic opportunities to underserved children.

There are other reasons to worry about these types of practices, in particular the indignities that they impose on children and to some extent on teachers as well, the limitations on personal expression for both students and teachers, and other concerns that relate not so much to the future effects of behavior management practices but more to the environment they create at the present time. I focus here on civic concerns both as a way to draw attention to potential drawbacks that can outweigh the possible academic success they enable, and to point to the need to account for a broader range of successes in schools, and particularly in schools that serve marginalized populations.

Even as the key goal of these schools is to promote equal opportunity, their focus on these particular measures shows little promise of improving civic equality. While my argument hinges to some extent on empirical evidence about the civic participation and motivation of graduates from these CMOs, data that to the best of my knowledge does not exist yet because of their relatively short history, the potential for problematic civic outcomes should not be ignored. As Meira Levinson (2012) recently argued, civic outcomes will not follow educational outcomes naturally, just by virtue of improved attainment or test grades. Civic outcomes must be directly addressed, if they are to be achieved. In addition, some measurable forms of success in both college and certain types of employment require the development of skills and virtues that relate directly to the relational and reflective capacities that were defended here as foundational dimensions of civic virtue.

In the particular context of the CMOs discussed here, the potentially devastating civic impact of their totalizing practices can only be countered if the centrality of civic virtues to the health of the community is recognized. The need to expand the curriculum that contracted around the most easily measurable dimensions of learning has been recognized at various levels, from practitioners to federal-level administrators. The current policy regime runs counter to both theoretical conceptions of civic education and to empirical studies on education for citizenship. Education policy is currently in flux, and the structure of the education system is rapidly changing (or as rapidly as such a large, diverse system can change). As a society we are considering new directions in the struggle to support equality of opportunity both in and through education. We must in this process take into account the ways in which school mission, culture and climate develops, or impedes, equal access to the development of civic virtues.