Amherst Reads A conversation

- Joanne, it's such a pleasure and a joy to be in conversation with you for this Amherst Reads event. Just a quick introduction for those watching. Joanne Wang Golann is, was an English major at Amherst Class 2004. Dr. Golann received her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. Currently, Joanne is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Education at the Peabody College, which is the education school at Vanderbilt University. She has numerous awards to her name from prestigious organizations, such as the American Sociological Association and the National Academy of Education Spencer Foundation. So I am so looking forward to this conversation. And there are many, we have many overlapping interests, your class of '04, I'm class of '03.

- Thank you so much, Travis, for joining me today in talking about my book. And you're right. We knew each other at Amherst. We were both English majors. We were also both a part of Amherst Christian Fellowship. And I remember we both tutored at El Arco Iris and Youth RAFT. And you also knew my husband who, David Golann, who was also Amherst Class of 2004.

- Yes. And a fun fact, you may or may not know this, but I hosted David. So I probably knew him before you knew him. I suspect. Unless.

- Oh wow. Yes.

- Yeah, I don't know if you guys, I'm assuming you all met at Amherst, not before.

- We did meet at Amherst.

- Okay. So I knew David, I hosted him when I was a freshman and he was a high school senior. So I've known him before you, if you will. So I will not take any credit for that matchmaking. So, so many of our peers in my class, and I suspect maybe in your class as well, have become academics. So I'm currently an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. And I'm always curious about the various routes we have taken into the academy. So maybe if you could, I'd love if you could just talk a bit about what was your route into the academy. How did you end up as an assistant professor at this prestigious institution?

- Yes, we both ended up in academia and in education. And I keep hearing about the good work you're doing on teacher diversity and glad when I see that. But yeah, my path into academia. So probably my senior year of college and like most seniors trying to think about what to do next. And, you know, I was an English major and I thought, I don't think I'm going to continue, you know, setting Virginia Woolf for the next decade. So I was trying to think, what is it that I like to do? And I was really interested in listening to people's stories. I know that sounds so vague now, but I felt like, I feel like I have the ear for people, for people's stories. I can remember how they say them, what they say. And I remember I had a professor in my first year of college who taught the course reading, writing, and teaching. And he was a visiting professor who happened to be an oral historian. So I reached out to him in my senior year, I think it was, to talk to him a little bit about his work. And he mentioned ethnomethodology, which is a subthought of the sociology that's focused on conversation. And he said, oh, do you know Professor DeSart? I actually, I did a Professor DeSart with a sociology professor at Amherst, but I had taken no sociology or anthropology while there. I was really in the liberal arts humanities track. And so I reached out to him. He was very generous with his time and he gave me a list of ethnographies to read. And that was my, that was really my entree into the field of sociology.

- Okay. So we can continue to catch up, but there is this main attraction. There is this book, this really consequential book that you've written that we're here to talk about Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a "No-Excuses" Charter School. And so you talked a bit about, you know, how form of your experience was in Amherst, taking these English courses. And for me, that also held true when I ended up as a classroom teacher. I remember in Professor Rushing, Andrea Rushing's course, she always encouraged us think about and place texts within a larger social context. And so she would say there is no text without context. So what's the context of this book? And specifically you use this terms of no excuses. What do you mean by that?

- I didn't have the privilege of taking any courses with Professor Rushing, but I like that. No text without context. So the context, you could probably step back and think about school choice more broadly. So that started in the United States in the 1950s with Milton Friedman, who was over at the University of Chicago. And he was really interested in applying business principles to education. In particular, this idea of the educational marketplace. So just like in business, we have a market, he thought of a marketplace where you would have schools competing with each other for students. So parents would have free choice to choose whatever school they wanted to send their children to. And he believed that this competitive force by itself would improve schools. So you wouldn't need all these other kinds of reforms, just these competitive pressures. So charter schools are one type of school choice and they emerged in the 1990s. So charter schools are public schools in that they're publicly funded, but they are independently managed. So charter schools are not typically run by your local school district. They can be run by parents, teachers, non-profit organizations, for-profit organizations and so on. So charter schools were seen as having the potential to be really innovative 'cause they're freed from a lot of regulations that traditional schools have to follow, to be experimental, and also to introduce competition to traditional public schools 'cause parents can choose charter schools instead of the local school. Well, it didn't pan out, you know, necessarily that way. Charter schools on average, on average, don't perform any better than a standard traditional public school. But there is this subset of urban charter schools, which people call no excuses schools that have performed much better. And these schools predominantly serve low-income black and Latinx students. And, you know, policy makers have gotten excited over these schools. They see them as a really promising new reform and foundations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting these kinds of schools. You may have heard of some of them. Most of these schools no longer say they're no excuses schools, but schools like KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon School, Success Academies, YES Prep. There's a bunch. They all kind of fall under this no excuses label. And the term no excuses itself, I should say, it just means that these schools are going to make no excuses for student failure irrespective of student backgrounds. So we're not going to say, you know, these students came to us three grades behind, so we can't get them to college. We're going to, you know, not make excuses.

- Yeah, yeah. No. I'm so fascinated by this book. First from this, personally, because I grew up in a working class section of Brooklyn and I've had many cousins who have attended these sort of no excuses schools. And so I have spent time in these schools advocating for my cousins. And so, but you have spent a great deal of time. And I think that you take us and you bring us into and expose us to this type of school in ways that I personally have not. And I think that it's so incredibly helpful for the field more broadly. And so I'm curious about some of the big questions, right? What were some of the big questions you wanted to answer in this book? And then how did you go about answering them?

- Yeah. So I'd say I came to the book not really with the questions you might think I would be asking around, you know, school discipline or social control or even their success in getting kids to college. I was studying sociology and I was interested more in a theoretical concept, a concept of, called cultural capital, which you can think of as kind of cultural know-how. And it's just this idea that to be successful, you know, you need human capital, social capital, financial capital, all these things can help you but so can cultural capital. But we don't always recognize that. You know, just knowing how to talk with someone or how to interact in a particular situation. And I had heard of a practice called SLANT that some of these no excuses schools used. You may have seen some parody of this, you know, pictures of students all sitting like this. But it stands for sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod for understanding and track the speaker. So it makes very explicit how to show attention and what you might think of as a white middle-class way. So I thought that was very interesting. So I went into these schools to kind of study how they were teaching these non-academic skills. And like you said, I spent, yeah, a lot of time in these school sites. I spent about 18 months inside one of these no excuses middle schools, basically I was there every day four to five hours a day, just hanging out. So this is in the traditional ethnographic research. You just kind of observe and participate to try to understand a culture and its people. So I sat in classrooms, I went to lunch with the students. I went on field trips. I sat in teacher meetings. Just kind of trying to blend in in some way or another.

- Yeah. No, it's, it is a rich ethnographic piece. And the close reader in me got hooked chapter two in some of the first early lines. So you open the book with as you described Munis Anderson, a teacher. And you say that she asked this sort of deceptively simple question to fifth graders. She asked, "What grade are you in?" The students respond and she says, no. But I wonder if you could maybe talk to us a bit about why that particular story at the opening and why, what were you hoping to accomplish by allowing the reader to see as a first window into this world of dream academy?

- Yeah. I should say, yeah. The school I call it dream academy. It's a pseudonym, But it's a middle school, serves about 250 kids, two-thirds black, a third Latinx. And I opened, yeah, I open with this scene during orientation where she's asking these fifth graders what grade they're in. And the answer is not fifth grade. It's, she wants to know that they're the college class of 20-dadada. So she wants them to start thinking of themselves as college students here, you know, as a fifth grader. And I chose to open with that because I wanted to frame these school's practices in this lens of college preparation, because that's really how they were seeing it. So you would, we'll talk about, I will likely talk about these disciplinary practices, which are shocking, you know, to a lot of people. Rightly so. And, but I didn't want to start there. I kind of wanted to first say, well, why are they doing this, right? Why do they think this is important? And they really saw these things as helping students get to college. And that's why they, they bought into them because they saw them working in getting students to college. So yeah, if you go into a school, I mean, there are college reminders everywhere. Not only are teachers constantly talking about college, but the hallways have college banners, the classrooms are named after colleges. So there was a Princeton, there was a Carnegie Mellon. Unfortunately there was no Amherst, but.

- We won't hold it against them. Was there a Williams?

- There was no Williams either.

- Okay. All right.

- I think there was Middlebury.

- There was Middlebury, okay. So some NESCA, but not Williams so. So take us more into the school. So there is, there are these presumptions that, that these black and Latinx children. I guess the question is, are there presumptions that these black Latinx children don't know about college? That's why everything is named after college maybe. So take us more into the school. What was it like?

- Yeah. I think there is that presumption that, right, we are trying to kind of re-socialize them into different expectations and different behaviors. So the expectation is to help you start thinking about college and then the behavior is, well, yeah, we'll get into that. But here's some examples. So students had to arrive at school at 7:30. There was no transportation provided, no bus transportation as a charter school. So parents, right, had to be able to drive their students to school or walk their students. And if you did not arrive at school at 7:30, your student got a same day after school detention. My children would have gotten lots of detentions 'cause we are late to school a lot.

- Wow.

- And then when the students came in, there was a requirement, you know, once you enter the hallways, they were, hallways were silent. Students had to follow through the hallways, you know, with their class in what they would always say, silent, straight, forward-facing lines. And they had to walk on actually a particular like tiled square in the hallways. It was not only through hallways, but both into classes, out of classes, even though the hallways were really narrow, even to transition to a classroom across the hallway, you had to keep these, yeah, these lines and move with your class. No recess. No lockers. Even gym began with silent reading. So as you can tell, I mean this school was very structured.

- And same, proctored and discipline, it seemed like discipline was a focus.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, for sure. So these schools, probably what's most distinctive about them is their disciplinary practices. And they follow what's called a sweating the small stuff approach. So this is the idea that you kind of pick on minor behaviors so major misbehaviors don't occur. It's similar to what Giuliani did in New York City in the 1990s. They, you know, they call it order maintenance policing. So I can actually, I can read you some examples of the types of infractions that were monitored in the school from the book. So these are category one infractions. Violation of cafeteria rules, violation of food beverage policy, not tracking the speaker, saying shut up, difficulty unpacking, violation of hallway rules, unprepared for class, difficulty packing, making unnecessary noise, head down on desk, out of seat without permission, minor disrespect. I mean, it goes on for an entire page. That was the school's list of infractions. So you might imagine there were lots of infractions during the school year. I received the school's behavioral data and they recorded over 15,000 infractions over the school year, which averages to one infraction every three days for a student.

- Yeah. So many of our classmates at Amherst. Well, so many of my classmates, folks in my year would say to me that their high schools were just like Amherst. They sat in circles and they didn't ask, their teachers ask them what they thought, not what you think. And so they talked about this seamless transition. Now, if the goal of this school was to get students into, they didn't have Amherst as one of their, but if the goal was to get them into places like Amherst or Middlebury, why are they organized so differently?

- Yeah, I think that's a very, a very good question. And they certainly are. You certainly are organized differently, very much on what you might think of as a rewards and consequences, you know, system. So all those infractions I read, they have something called like a paycheck system or a point system. So if you, you get any of those infractions, you lose points or you lose dollars on your paycheck. And then at the end of the week, if you fall beneath a certain threshold, you might get a detention or even a suspension in some schools. Or you may not qualify for certain privileges at this school. At my school, to earn the school shirt, which was like a polo shirt.

- You earn your polo shirt. You earn--

- You have to earn your navy blue polo shirt. You can wear it. You start off with a white polo shirt. And only until you have a certain point average can you get your navy blue polo shirt. Actually, the first day of school, you had to even earn your seat. So they started on the floor so you don't even get your seat to begin with. You have to earn field trips. You have to earn school socials. You can earn immunity from homework punishment, you know, things like this. So it was definitely this system of earning. And like you said, very different than what college looks like or what affluent suburban schools look like. So, you know, those schools, don't really talk much about classroom management or behavior. They don't talk about making no excuses or showing grit. You know, those schools are talking about design thinking and personalized learning and problem solving and the kinds of skills we think are important for college success. So the question of why I think is, you know, trickier to answer. The head of the school when I spoke with him said, well, these students just don't do what college students do. You know, when he started working at a school like this, he thought they would and he found they didn't. And so he found that you had to be much more assertive about what you wanted to see. You had to script the moves and that's what I call the book. That's kind of where it comes from, this idea. And I think that may be true, you know, to a certain extent. But I think this idea of we need to exert extreme control over students also but, you know, plays into a narrative, a larger narrative. That there are certain kinds of kids that need to be controlled, that needs strict discipline. So I think it's dangerous, you know, to kind of to use that narrative sometimes when actually maybe what these students need is, you know, more care, more resources, more support as some of the research, you know, in our field shows. Thinking about wraparound supports in schools or thinking about how do we address students who have trauma from outside of school, right? It's not necessarily strict discipline that they need. There are other things that cause behavior, behavioral problems that need to be addressed. So yeah. That, I think that's what they would say, but.

- Yeah. No, this is, it. One of the most shocking, shocking things when I would interact with teachers, administrators who work in these kinds of schools was that they had, they came from different, my experience was that they came from different social class, very culturally different experiences than the students that they worked with. But they had no knowledge of the lived experiences of on average black and Latinx children. And so when I would go into schools and teachers would say that this child doesn't know how to sit still, like I remember. And so I come from such community, a working class community. Where there are many of these no excuses schools. And I had to sit in church for two hours. Right. I had to sit still. Right. And so there were all these assumptions that, that were so violent. That really did not take into account my sense was that ways of being that these children may have had before they got to school. But there's this presumption that school had to teach them everything.

- Yes. I, you know Mich Milner has this book called These Kids Are Out of Control. And I think exactly that's the perception. And what you were saying about kids sitting still in church is similar to, to something I observed early on while I was in the school. Which was that no, these kids don't need to learn these things 'cause when they're with this one teacher whom they respect, there are no behavioral problems at all and she is not giving out infractions. So we do see lots of resistance in other classes, but it's not like they don't know how to sit still. They're resisting for a reason in other classes.

- Yeah. We talked a lot about social class. I mean, you know, working class, I think we talked a bit about. And so I'm wondering. If you think that these kinds of schools exist in Appalachia, where predominantly white working class students attend schools. Or maybe let me ask my question maybe a different way. Is the story solely about class or is there something unique about dream academy in an urban center in a school serving children of color from working class families that influence why it's organized in, in what sounds like very harmful ways? Is there something about race to this story? Is it solely about class is my question.

- Absolutely. I would say the, the book has, as you've noted, framings around social class because some of these early sociological thinkers were really Marxists and they were thinking about class differences. So they argued that, you know, working class schools teach working class skills. Like conformity, punctuality, deference to authority in order to prepare kids for working class jobs. Where the manager wants to, you know, wants those workers to show those skills. Whereas middle-class schools emphasize creativity, independence, leadership to prepare middle-class students to be managers. So my work kind of comes out of that, you know, that tradition. But race, I think is a huge part of the story. And these schools, like I said, predominantly serve kids of color. The KIPP Schools, one of the largest of these no excuses schools, I checked their website and only to 2% of their kids are white. I think we've all seen in the past year and a half how racialized social control is. And, and there are numerous studies in school discipline that show black boys in particular are those who receive the harshest school discipline, the most frequent school discipline. They're perceived as threatening. They're perceived as in need of more control. So certainly I think the level of control that is considered acceptable or appropriate is seen through racialized lens. I don't think it would be acceptable if these students were, were majority white.

- Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wonder how these schools, well, you know, the strategic choice by reformers who rush into urban centers versus rural Tennessee or West Virginia or Pennsylvania. Yeah. Why the push and rush to colonize black and brown bodies and the license given to do so? So I think that that's, so it's interesting to hear this racial analysis, right, intersecting with this class one.

- Absolutely. And I think, you know, at least over the past year, year or two, we are seeing some of these large networks begin to recognize that their practice, that many of these disciplinary practices are racist. So KIPP came out with a statement. Their founder apologized to all their alumni for racist disciplinary practice. The Noble Network in Chicago also issued a similar statement in the last year or two.

- And I'm wondering, beyond saying that they have racist practices. I'm wondering if maybe this is book two, right. Then your work to go into these schools to see how ideas or theories translate into changed practices and policies. And so the degree to which the founder may be saying, we have this policy, but schools are loosely coupled organizations. And so if we still have these anti-black, these racist ideas, it might be interesting to see how the degree to which children still need to earn their polo shirts or earn a seat to learn. But maybe that will be book two.

- Yeah. When one of these networks, Achievement First put out a statement, I was very tempted to go and do just what you said. But I, I still may. I still may.

- Okay.

- I certainly think it is the, another book that that needs to be written.

- Yes, yes. Unscripting the moves maybe.

- Unscripting the moves, I like that.

- So my own research, we spent a lot of time talking about students. And we talked a bit about teachers, but, you know, as you know, my own research explores teachers and teaching. I want you to talk a bit about the teachers at dream academy and to what degree that they enact or push back. You started talking about this a bit, but I want you to maybe talk about it some more. They enact or push back on mandates to police and teach. And did you observe differences between white teachers and teachers of color?

- Yeah. I think one of the surprising findings for me was seeing the degree to which teachers work and teacher's complaints reflected those of students. So like the students, teachers work was highly scripted because they had to enforce these very particular disciplinary scripts. And also their instructional work was also kind of monitored. They had very elaborate teacher evaluation rubrics. Their own lesson plans had to be written in a certain way and they were checked by supervisors every weekend. So yeah, many of these teachers also felt the, it's starting to rain here, I don't know if you can hear it on the screen, but also felt the.

- We need rain in California. So, so please just not get all of it. There's no rain here. Okay. It sounds beautiful.

- They felt, yeah. The negative impacts of those scripts. And I think, certainly there were teachers who tried to push back. I mean, I sat in several meetings between teachers and their supervisors. But the school was very explicit. Like they would tell teachers, you have to enforce these policies. Like they didn't say it is our way or the highway, but that's basically what they were saying. They would tell them, you don't have experience, we know this works and you need to do this. So there was not much flexibility in the school for teachers. You know, there were small ways. I categorize teachers into sort of four types and one type I call adapters. So there were some teachers, especially those who didn't teach the core subjects that were tested on state exams, who had a little more flexibility. Or they might be something like, instead of SLANT, they would say silly SLANT, you know. Just something to get, make it a little less militant. But on the whole, I would say, yeah, that they didn't have much room like the students. The other question you asked was about teachers of color. So the teachers were primarily white, primarily young. You know, most just out of college. But there were a couple teachers of color. And I would say to what you were saying before about being familiar with a community or a certain style that they tended to be more effective and more able to accomplish what some researchers have called a warm, strict style or a no nonsense nurturing style. Where they're strict, but they're still able to build these relationships with students. They're not so by the books.

- And just, when you were saying the school, when you, do you mean the principal? Do you mean like instructional? Like who's the school? Who are you naming or terming as the school?

- Yeah. I would say the principal as well as instructional leaders. So they had teachers who part of their responsibilities were to train and supervise other teachers. So they would observe them in their classrooms at least once a week, they would video record them. And they would review these videos with their teachers in their weekly meetings. So unlike many schools where teachers are really not observed, you know, they're kind of free to do what they want. In this school, these teachers were tightly observed by school leaders and principals.

- And then the, on average, the demographics of the leaders and the principal.

- Yeah, the principal, it was white. There was, you know, one of the school leaders was a black woman. So there was some, you know, some variation, but by and large, you do see a mostly white teaching staff and leadership staff.

- Talking about teachers. You talked about Ms. Armstrong, a first year teacher at the school who struggled. And then you, you describe how a correction officer who was considering a career in teaching comes in and observes Ms. Armstrong's class. It's really so descriptive and so rich and really gets at the, this, the true inherent tension in this book. That, so Ms. Armstrong is surprised that the correction officer said that students were being controlled in ways similar to the inmates in the prison. Why do you think Ms. Armstrong, whom you describe as white Ivy League grad was surprised by the correction officer's observation? Were teachers not aware that they were reading black and brown children in such harmful ways?

- Yeah. Your reaction is similar to the one I had when she said that, that's right. Like were you not, were you not aware? And I think they must not have been to that extent. Yeah. I mean, she talked about it as an out of body experience. Like she's watching somebody else out there doing all these things. It doesn't feel like herself because she was very idealistic. She had come into the school not to be a disciplinarian and ended up doing that most of the day. So I think it just, yeah, some kind of dissonance between what she was doing and what she wanted to do and was hoping to do at that school.

- Yeah. And, and so for Ms. Armstrong, I'm curious, did that change after hearing that she was essentially operating as a de facto correctional officer, did that change her behavior?

- Yeah, I'm not sure. That's, that would have been a good thing to try to think about while I was observing. She did end up leaving the school at the end of the year. She really was disillusioned by her time at that school. And I think leaving education altogether, which is also a negative consequence for teachers of experiences like this 'cause she had gone through, you know, gone back to return. She was a little bit older, had gone back to return to do a teachers prep program. You know, had a student taught at a public school, an urban public school where she had a positive experience. So it was really, she actually contrasted herself with Teach For America types, which are kind of students who may go in to teach for two years, but then they want to go into business. She really wanted to be a teacher, but had such a disenchanting experience at this school that she thought this is not for me.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And I know you do a lot of work on yeah, teacher, teacher turnover as well.

- Yeah. No, I mean, yeah. I mean, teachers don't leave their students whether she had great love for the profession of teaching, but teachers leave their administrators. They leave their leaders. And so the degree to which having to teach in a space that's organized in ways that are hostile to how she wants to teach. And I have to believe that children should learn, right, may well have influenced her decision to leave. Let's talk a bit about outcomes. Beyond graduating from high school, which is one promise of organizing schools which there are, quote-unquote, no excuses. No excuses for students, but it sounds like maybe excuses for other people in the organization. No excuses for learning about children's culture, for example. If it could only fall on the children, not the adults. One premise of organized schools in which, in which there are no excuses for students is that graduates not only attend, but they graduate from college. So how are these students faring in higher education?

- Yeah. So these schools emerged in the 1990s, mostly it's middle school. So we don't have too much data yet on how these students are doing in college. But the KIPP network, which I mentioned that as one of the earliest of these networks has been tracking its graduates. And they found that about one third of their students graduate within six years. So, you know, not, much far below what they are hoping. They're hoping for kind of an 80% college graduation rate. There's also been one large study done, again, tracking KIPP students. And they find that differences in persistence after two years are no different between KIPP students and comparable students who attended traditional schools. So those results are not, not entirely promising.

- So the schools are not organized, like for example, or like the kinds of schools that my children attend, who are come from, you know, I would say middle-class to upper middle-class who attend schools the upper middle class and middle class children who the schools are not organized in this way. And then the outcomes are not any better. So I'm, so why then, I mean, so, so does that mean that maybe schools are thinking about new ways of organizing their schools? If it's, if it clearly not producing the outcomes that they want, then yeah. Maybe there may be something more to, so I'm curious. I mean, you know, has there been any, are there folks thinking about changing how they're organizing their schools, given that the outcomes are not what they want?

- Yeah, I'm not sure. I think so. I think so. So I shouldn't say some of these schools certainly are, some of it is pushed back from the disciplinary practices. I think that's the primary motivation for changing. So we do have schools saying we're going to get rid of the point system or you know, try to do restorative justice practices instead of the disciplinary practices they do. But I think also, thinking about how much freedom or structure we give students, what kind of skills we're building. I do think these results should be making school leaders rethink their practices. I know as you were talking, I think you were getting to this idea of like, well, why does everyone think these skills are so great then if they're not, you know, not doing these things? I think it's because of the test score results, right? The early test score results.

- Okay.

- But right now we're not seeing these. You know, another study I read showed that basically these charter schools that performed really well in middle school on standardized test scores. I mean, they're just not translating into college results. Yeah. The kinds of skills you're building may not be what these, what these kids need to succeed in the long-term.

- Right. I, yeah. I think that the, I think that we're focused on the wrong outcome. Or I'm wondering, let me be a professor, right. I'm wondering if they're focusing on the right outcome, that the outcome should not be, can you pass the paper and pencil tests? Right. I think one. Another outcome might well be a more important outcome, right, it might be persistence to and through college. And if that's not happening, and I can imagine that, you know, if people tell you to sit up, lean forward, pay attention, nod, track, and you're having to walk in lines, right. That you get to Amherst College and you know, you're not, there's no expectation that you behave or engage or learn in that way. And so how then could you be successful?

- Yeah. And that's a lot of the argument of the book is around are we building the tools that middle-class students use be successful in navigating middle-class institutions? I call them tools of interaction. So things like exactly speaking up in class. I mean, yet ease with authority and going to your professor's office hours. Learning to work as a team, right? These are different kinds of skills. Learning to independently manage your work. So I spoke with a couple students who had completed their first year of college who had gone through this, you know, the school I was at. And they talked about the struggles with adjusting. Or they said, you know, I get to college and there's no more consequences if you don't turn in your homework. There was one, you know, one woman. And she said, she ended up with a C in her English class because she had to submit this portfolio at the end of the year. Well, there were assignments all along the way, but she hadn't done any of them because they weren't, you know, collected. But then when, you know, it came to the end of the semester, she had to quickly do all those assignments. And was disappointed, right, in the grade she got for that class.

- Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So this is, yeah. There's clear implications for reorganizing schools. And so I'm going to ask you about some of that. I know your work has been featured in places like the New York Times, Adweek, at The Atlantic, HuffPost. I'm not sure where else you haven't been featured. But I'm wondering if you could maybe talk more about the impact of this really consequential work and this analysis of a no excuses school.

- Yeah. I think, you know, as a sociologist, as an academic, you don't always see the kind of public impact of your work. So it has been really satisfying to hear from teachers, to hear from parents who find that the book resonated with them, that helped them kind of understand their own experiences in these schools. I've had one New York City network that said they, they refer my work when they talk about changing their disciplinary. They make references to my work when they're talking about why they changed their disciplinary practices to give students more agency. So yeah, that, you know. You know. Sometimes you're just writing and editing and revising and you kind of wonder is this making an impact? So that's, that's been rewarding. And I hope to do more, more of that work as this book is getting out there. I've sent it to a bunch of charter leaders. I don't know if they will respond, but certainly if there's anybody listening to this who's in that world, I really am eager to engage in conversation and try to, yeah, try to be helpful to people on the ground. Because I should say, I know people on the ground are really working so hard. I mean, we can, you know, we can characterize what they're doing. And I think we can rightly criticize a lot of what's happened in many of these schools. But I do think, you know, the people working on the ground work very, very hard and you want to improve opportunity for these students. So yeah, I do hope that they, that they will be open to criticism and willing to change.

- Yeah. Continuous improvement. I mean yeah, absolutely. I believe that all teacher enter the profession wanting to do good, they wanted to really change the world. And texts like this, right, I think will be really important and necessary for them to think about how to push back against a very damaging idea. And I think particularly under president Tony Marx, you know, many of our, I mean, President Marx came the year after I got, after I left, but I know that many of our peers went into education and/or entered the charter sector. So I suspect that there are lots of folks who will, Amherst alums who are listening to this, who are working in leadership positions and will heed some of the great advice that you're giving us. To re-imagine schools that, that look like the kinds of schools we want for our own children, not for somebody else's child. Two more questions. I know the hour's going. But if you would allow me. I'd love to put on my Andy Parker, Andrew Parker, literary theory hat for a second. Andy Parker, as some of you may know, was a English professor at Amherst. Did you, by chance, ever take any classes with?

- I also missed Andy Parker.

- We took like different classes!

- Yeah. What was I doing at Amherst?

- But I think one question that Andy Parker may want to entertain is how do you show up in this book? Are there experiences that you shared or that you tried to make sense of or grapple with as you were clearly as, as a trained sociologist, right, want to say your points of distance, but how did you show up in this book? I'm curious. Now that it's done, maybe you reflected on that.

- Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. And one a lot of ethnographers juggle with because they are, they're in the field, they are participating in the action. I don't show up, you know, that much in the book. So, my initial interest in the book came from personal experience. I think as sometimes people call it me search not research. You know, those personal interests and values often drive our research. So as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, I've always been interested in kind of the subtle ways that culture shapes experience, shapes comfort levels. So this idea of, can you learn this cultural capital, right? Even if you weren't raised in it. Can you learn these subtle ways of being, of speaking that help other people succeed? That really drove my interest into the project. Although of course the book itself has morphed, you know, in different ways. I ended up arguing that these schools are not teaching what we would call middle class cultural capital at all. They're really just teaching conformity. But, but yeah, I think at the school, I think I need to reflect on it more. But because it was, you know, it was difficult to be in the school. I was most like those teachers in the sense, I'm most aligned with them in the sense that I was young. I was well educated, I'm middle-class. So I could very well have been one of those teachers in the school. And I actually had applied to Teach For America and gotten in right after, right after Amherst. So yeah, I really could have been one of those teachers. And I think maybe not, not recognize things I recognize now as a sociologist. But one decision I did make when I was in the school was not to discipline any students. And I told the administration that. I said, I don't want to do that because I don't want to take on that role of the teacher. And I think that actually helped me gain access to the students so that, you know, they certainly didn't see me as a peer, but they didn't see me, they put me in a different category than the teachers. They put me as this odd person writing a book about their school. So I think that helps try to understand the experience that that was very different from the experience that I had as a student growing up in a kind of a suburban public school.

- Yeah, yeah. No, it's, yeah. Well, I'm happy to hear that you're accepting the invitation to think more about that.

- Yeah, for sure. And engaging with you as well. I think your own experience probably offer a very interesting perspective into these schools as well. And yeah. And their practices.

- Yes. Well, any final words? Any, anything that you, maybe something that I haven't asked that you think would be important. Or those in the Amherst community know about the book?

- Yeah, no. I think you covered.

- Or what's up next?

- You covered it well. What's up next?

- But what's next? What's next?

- What's next?

- What's the second book?

- A vacation. No.

- Okay.

- I'm working on a project that seems very different, but it is also related to this idea of teaching sort of these social and behavioral skills, teaching this cultural capital. So shifting the lens from schools to families. So looking at a diverse set of families. We have video. We've actually videotaped them in their homes for two weeks and they all have young children. So trying to understand what kind of values and behaviors and skills that these families are teaching their young children. So that is, so I spent a lot of my days watching, watching videos of parenting.

- Okay. Yeah, yes. Well, Joanne, it was such a pleasure to talk, to reconnect. Yeah. To have a selfish reason to seal my stuff away and read a good book. So thank you for the invitation to have this conversation with you and the rest of the Amherst community.

- I really appreciate your taking the time to engage with the book and with me in this conversation. So great to see you again, Travis.

- Yes, you are most welcome.