Scripting the Moves:

Culture and Control in a “No-excuses” Charter School

Overview

Silent, single-file lines. Detention for putting a head on a desk. Rules for how to dress, how to applaud, how to complete homework. Walk into some of the most acclaimed urban schools today and you will find similar recipes of behavior, designed to support student achievement. But what do these “scripts” accomplish? Immersing readers inside a “no-excuses” charter school, Scripting the Moves offers a telling window into an expanding model of urban education reform. Through interviews with students, teachers, administrators, and parents, and analysis of documents and data, Joanne Golann reveals that such schools actually dictate too rigid a level of social control for both teachers and their predominantly low-income Black and Latino students. Despite good intentions, scripts constrain the development of important interactional skills and reproduce some of the very inequities they mean to disrupt.

Golann presents a fascinating, sometimes painful, account of how no-excuses schools use scripts to regulate students and teachers. She shows why scripts were adopted, what purposes they serve, and where they fall short. What emerges is a complicated story of the benefits of scripts, but also, their limitations in cultivating the tools students need to navigate college and other complex social institutions—tools such as flexibility, initiative, and ease with adults. Contrasting scripts with tools, Golann raises essential questions about what constitutes cultural capital—and how this capital might be effectively taught.

Illuminating and accessible, Scripting the Moves delves into the troubling realities behind current education reform and reenvisions what it takes to prepare students for long-term success.

Additional reviews

"Beautifully written, Scripting the Moves demonstrates how a no-excuses movement advances practices that attempt to control the minds and bodies of young people, their families, and communities. Golann shows us why we must question the ways in which charter schools have been highjacked by a neoliberal agenda designed to mechanize aspects of human experience. An invitation to interrogate educational inequity in the fight for justice, this book challenges as it teaches." —H. Richard Milner IV, author of Start Where You Are, But Don’t Stay There

"In this ethnographic study of a no-excuses charter school, Golann argues that actors at multiple levels of education policy have shifted from a logic of confidence to a logic of control. Filled with important and fascinating data, Scripting the Moves evaluates the costs for teachers and students." —Jennifer L. Jennings, Princeton University

"Showing how well-meaning educators in no-excuses charter schools are constrained by a structure that subjects students of color to strict behavioral controls, Scripting the Moves provides humane alternatives for children who need schools to support them as whole people. This pathbreaking book raises provocative questions about discipline, accountability, and success in the burgeoning charter school movement. An erudite and important addition to work on social control and inequality in education."—Edward W. Morris, author of Learning the Hard Way