The teachers who worked with the senior class at W. E. B. Du Bois Public Charter High School met once a week to strategize. Everyone’s laptops came out, collaborating on notes hosted in the school’s cloud-based Google Apps for Education system. Every month or so, this expanded into an all-staff meeting that also drew in Principal Carroll, other high-level administrators, college counselors, and technology specialists. They usually met before the school day began, in the Think Tank.
The windows taking up one side of this large, open room looked out onto the school’s field and its northeastern DC residential neighborhood. About eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, the front half of the Think Tank was an instructional space with furniture and fixtures designed to be moved around for different classes’ needs. The back half was an open workspace with cubicles, but also beanbag chairs, outlets, and study nooks where seniors could work on their own schedule, tucked away with one of their school-issued laptops. It looked like InCrowd’s office or MLK’s Dream Lab.
In December 2014, the senior teaching team was worried. A significant minority of the first senior class was not on course to graduate. Only sixty strong, those seniors were prototypes for the school’s methods, and their success or failure would be a referendum on the school. Du Bois’s mission was to get every student into “the college of their choice.” That mission was operationalized through seniors’ graduation and admission rates and by other grades’ standardized test scores and collective GPAs. Those metrics would prove the school’s success or failure. The mission was supported by an intensive, personalized curriculum that made heavy use of information technology: a laptop for every student; experiments in making video games or robots; and a robust digital infrastructure called SchoolForce, which tracked grades, attendance, and more, shared the information between teachers, and pushed alerts to administrators and parents. Du Bois and other DC charters had agreed to beta test SchoolForce for Acumen Solutions1 as part of a federal grant. It was built from the API for the popular Salesforce customer relationship management software that was used by InCrowd.
But technology wasn’t enough. The school also prided itself on a particular set of racial justice values that supported its mission: an emphasis on racial diversity in curriculum planning, a restorative approach to discipline that avoided suspensions and expulsions, and a general push for the largely White faculty to focus not on solving perceived deficits in their Black and Latinx students, but on empowering them to develop their strengths.2 The different pieces were supposed to work together: technology empowered disadvantaged students to train for success in a hostile world.
School technology and school values were chosen through internal deliberations among teachers and administrators. But the success or failure of Du Bois’s mission—those graduation rates, college admissions, and test scores—was assessed externally by the leadership team, by the DC Public Charter School Board (DCPCSB), and by the philanthropies supporting the school, all of which wanted to see a return on their investment into students’ human capital. This chapter explores how these governance dynamics influence the bootstrapping process, manifesting in simultaneous, intersecting conflicts over the school’s technology and values.
Teachers tried to build a high-performance academic culture, whether by modeling technology use themselves or encouraging constant connectivity in their students. But they stumbled, for reasons largely beyond their control. Failure was not an option, so more direct modes of discipline were eventually pursued through SchoolForce. Ultimately, the school’s digital infrastructure was more responsive to administrators than teachers or students. It was used to subvert the school’s values to its mission. In seeking to fulfill that mission by any means necessary, the school ended up marginalizing many of the students it sought to serve. The access doctrine was meant to serve students, but it necessarily had to serve the school first.
It was easy to see these conflicts in the December senior team meeting. When I walked in, teachers were debating a question on the whiteboard: “Why don’t we have a high-performance academic culture?” They were worried. They had spent years trying to encourage their students to take up good academic habits. Teachers were supported in their efforts by the resources that came with one of the highest per-pupil budgets in the city (almost double that of a typical DC public high school, driven by corporate partnerships, donations, and grants won by a full-time fundraiser). But they weren’t seeing the results they wanted. In that meeting, phones, as usual, were the locus of every faculty complaint, the site at which good students were demarcated from those with “bad academic habits.”
Lead college counselor Byron, who was Black, reprimanded White calculus instructor Ryan for questioning whether teachers’ expectations were skewed because they all went to “top tier colleges.”3 Byron insisted, and the faculty largely agreed, that “we should not be referencing our college experiences” and that a high-performance academic culture—setting and completing goals independently, using technology deliberately, managing multiple demands on one’s time, pushing peers to focus on the same—would serve students just as well at the University of the District of Columbia as at Harvard. That some students might not choose to attend college or might not be able to afford it despite counselors’ best efforts went unsaid.
Faculty decided they would begin encouraging a high-performance academic culture through an intensive data-tracking regime based in SchoolForce. Students would be scored on habits like checking their phone. Teachers would push them to track their scores, change their behavior accordingly, and encourage their friends to do the same.
These proposals were insufficient, or at least they did not assuage administrators’ fears. In January 2015, as the first semester was drawing to a close, an all-staff meeting was called. Everyone met in the Think Tank before first period. The largely White faculty asked the largely Black and Latinx students4 who showed up early to do their homework to please move downstairs. Principal Carroll reiterated the concern: if graduation were today, almost half of the senior class would not have the GPAs necessary to receive their diplomas.
The stakes had been raised. The school’s leadership team—composed of the Board of Trustees; the head of school; middle, elementary, and high school principals; and other administrators in fields like instructional design and fundraising—had reached into the SchoolForce backend, seen the spread of GPAs, and officially raised the alarm. Teachers had been pointing this out for months. Now they complained that they didn’t know who these board members were and that they didn’t understand why students on the ground were struggling to live up to Du Bois’s high standards. Those high standards included enrolling all students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes; providing individualized college application guidance; and training for both national exams (e.g., SATs, AP exams) and, for younger students, local high-stakes tests: the DC-CAS and, beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year, the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) subject area tests. The leadership team’s alarm was exacerbated by year-over-year dips in SAT practice scores and the DC-CAS scores on which every DC school had been judged.
Du Bois was in trouble. The numbers were off. Technology had become a distraction, rather than a tool for academic success. Teachers’ resistance to the leadership team prompted a debate over Du Bois’s methods and values. This included the usual negative comparisons, from both sides, with a DC public school system that most staff agreed could not provide its students the innovations they needed. They saw a more hopeful future in this building—itself a shuttered public middle school, bought by the leadership team years back, renovated, grown out, its walls inside painted with the school’s colors and inspirational slogans.
Principal Carroll promised to bring faculty concerns to the leadership team. But they were all called into a meeting with the board in the gym the next day anyway, to repeat the message that the numbers were off and change was needed. The leadership team wanted teachers to double down on the changes they’d proposed to encourage a high-performance academic culture. SchoolForce surveillance would intensify. This individualized tracking seemed to embrace the sort of deficit thinking the school’s values opposed. Laptop and phone habits would be a major focal point of disciplinary actions in senior classes, which seemed to run counter to the school’s restorative justice principles.
The weight of first-quarter grades would be retroactively lowered. The last day of the second quarter would include several hours of credit recovery. Principal Carroll said that day “was about forgiveness, not justice” and that it gave students precisely targeted opportunities to revise certain assignments or retake certain tests to boost their individual GPAs and get the collective up to a level that would satisfy the leadership team. Some teachers boosted grades regardless of whether the revised assignment was actually completed to a higher standard, or just added a few points to students’ overall grades.5 The mission was that important.
Although these experiments were carried out under duress, they fit a general pattern of a school that prided itself on innovation. The work of Du Bois’s teachers and administrators was marked by constant experimentation: experiments in implementing the one-to-one laptop program, experiments in the content of their homeroom period, and even experiments in the number of seconds available to transition between classes. New pedagogical techniques were rapidly prototyped, and kept if they succeeded or discarded if they failed. Because the stakes for their students were so high, every piece of technology and every piece of the school’s values were subject to revision in service of its mission. New curricula and technologies were constantly tested, tried, and embraced or rejected. It was a school in permanent beta.
But these frantic winter meetings showed that the power to start or finish an experiment, or declare it successful or unsuccessful, was not evenly distributed throughout the school’s stakeholders. Ultimately, the digital infrastructure—SchoolForce—that supported Du Bois’s experimentation was under the control of these administrators, not staff and students. That infrastructure was used first to revise anything that did not support the school’s local version of the access doctrine and second to directly discipline students’ academic habits. Similar to MLK, the panoply of social problems faced by Du Bois’s students—hunger, homelessness, police and neighborhood violence, disability, segregated labor markets, gentrification—were narrowed into the more tractable problem of academic performance. For individual teachers, this meant disciplining students’ phone use. For the senior team as a whole, this meant a push for higher grades and test scores.
Where MLK became a bootstrapping library over time, Du Bois was born a bootstrapping school. Unlike public libraries, around for more than a century, charters were created for an era of extreme economic uncertainty. Like the startups with which they share an aesthetic, charters’ identities are built on those uncertain conditions and their attempt to master them through technological skill—and to help others do the same. But schools can’t pivot like startups. Du Bois couldn’t remake itself to the degree InCrowd could.
Understanding these dynamics requires first some background on charter schools and their embrace of the access doctrine. I then return to the everyday life of Du Bois’s first senior class. Teachers first experimented with a series of implicit measures to build a high-performance academic culture: modeling correct technology use themselves and encouraging constant connectivity on their students’ part. The leadership team’s alarm made clear these efforts were insufficient. So teachers turned to SchoolForce, an infrastructure ultimately beyond their control, to provide the discipline necessary for a high-performance academic culture. When tensions arose between the school’s racial justice values and its mission to upgrade students’ human capital, the SchoolForce digital infrastructure favored the latter over the former. It had to. The problem of human capital deficits in the information economy was built into the school. As in MLK, the access doctrine had to be preserved for the sake of the organization’s survival, even if that meant neglecting the needs of the people the organization was built to serve.
Each charter school is its own experiment in a particular educational philosophy. As public-private partnerships run in parallel to the DC Public Schools (DCPS) system, they receive city funding equivalent to that of traditional public schools, but generally secure additional funding from outside school-management networks (e.g., KIPP, Rocketship, Success Academy), as well as competitive grants secured by dedicated fundraisers. Admission is theoretically open to any student who wins it through the lottery system (Chandler 2015a). While I was at Du Bois, charter schools educated about 44 percent of DC students, with most of the rest attending traditional public schools in their neighborhood (DCPCSB 2020).
Du Bois prided itself on being the best the charter school movement had to offer. It avoided the exclusionary habits that put some of its peers in the news: English language learners and special education students were always admitted to Du Bois, and they counted toward the test scores against which the school was judged, in contrast to some other schools where the themed curricula could not or would not support these students (Chandler 2015a; for national context, see also Scott 2012; Simon 2013). It hired no new teachers straight out of college. Du Bois also used a variant of the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) framework to inform its disciplinary policy. This meant there were no disciplinary suspensions and expulsions (except in the case of violence); instead teachers used redirections meant to empower disruptive students to make behavior changes and recovery time to help them work through it. This stood in contrast to the “no excuses” model of some prominent charters, which produces high rates of suspension and expulsion and exacting standards for how students sit, stand, and make eye contact with their teachers (e.g., Golan 2015; Green 2016; Lack 2009).
But Du Bois was still firmly within the charter school movement, insofar as it attempted to boost the human capital of urban, working-class Black and Latinx youth through an entrepreneurial approach to education that linked classroom experimentation, digital literacy, STEM knowledge, and data-driven accountability. Charter schools are hallmark institutions of the access doctrine. Charter advocates not only position education as the intervention point for populations left out of the information economy’s riches, they also position public schools themselves as broken, industrial-era institutions that need to be creatively remodeled along the best practices of private industry, especially the agile, creative practices of the tech sector. Public education, charter advocates argue, needs a pivot.
Charter activism is a key part of the neoliberal rethinking of welfare state institutions, wherein they are no longer universal social democratic benefits for all citizens or bulwarks against periodic crises, but sites where the human capital of the citizenry can be enhanced to a level sufficient for competition in the information economy. For example, the Center for Education Reform’s Mandate for Change, a 2009 lobbying document addressing the incoming Obama administration, prominently featured Kevin Chavous, former DC City Council member and founder of Democrats for Education Reform, advocating for charters as a “beacon of hope for parents and students alike” (20). Chavous continued, “We must leave the Industrial Revolution behind and embrace a new model of public education. One single approach no longer works with all children” (23).
The success of this project is typically measured through standardized test scores. Municipal bodies that grant a school’s charter—in DC, this is the DCPCSB—do so for an array of school operators, the bids of which are based on their unique capacity to raise these scores and ensure student success. Charters thus compete with each other and traditional public schools for students, funding, and political approval. Unsuccessful models, the theory goes, will be shut down, while successful ones will be replicated.
There is little evidence that charters outperform traditional public schools on these standardized tests.6 However, there is substantial evidence that they suspend and expel Black and disabled students at a higher rate.7 As Chavous made clear in the mandate, charters in urban school districts are intended to replace what education reform activists see as a broken public schooling system that rewards incompetent teachers with lifelong (unionized) jobs while sacrificing the educational (and thus economic) futures of vulnerable working-class students of color.8
DC was ground zero for the education reform movement generally and charter schools in particular.9 That distinction was earned in the years following the more general crises of underinvestment and depopulation that Anthony Williams managed as mayor. Williams was succeeded in office by Adrian Fenty. Fenty’s tenure was the start of a major growth period for the city, which, owing largely to the presence of the federal government, survived the recession better than most, seeing a boom in population and the eventual loss of Chocolate City’s Black majority.
Seeking solutions to structural poverty and the “achievement gap” between DC public schools and schools in its richer, Whiter suburbs, Fenty installed education reform veteran Michelle Rhee10 as the schools chancellor in 2007, after removing the elected school board’s formal governing powers. A popular documentary promoting charters—Waiting for “Superman”—highlighted Rhee’s reforms. President Obama fêted the children from the film at the White House.
Because of Congress’s special regulatory and legislative powers over DC, the city’s public schools have been a constant site of federal experimentation. Rhee, wielding a broom on the cover of Time in 2008, ready to clean up DC’s schools, reversed this trend and pioneered city-wide changes that added up to “the most aggressive reform effort of any unified urban district in America” (Osborne 2015, ii). DC become the model for education reformers across the country. Rhee closed dozens of schools with low enrollment, initiated a teacher-evaluation system linked to student test scores, fired hundreds of teachers based on that system, used a new tenure contract with the teacher’s union to incentivize millions of dollars in private philanthropic donations (many, like those from the Gates Foundation, for educational technology procurements), and approved dozens of new charters. Many, like Du Bois, took over shuttered public school buildings (Craig and Turque 2010; Leman 2013).
The mass firings of mainly Black teachers and the public fights with the Washington Teachers Union generated mass disapproval for Rhee from black Washingtonians (Turque and Cohen 2010). There were deep, historical reasons for this. Until 1977, the District lacked a comprehensive university. For decades prior, DC’s teachers’ colleges provided the most direct route to professionalization for residents, and so an attack on teachers was seen as an attack on the Black middle class (Schwartzman and Jenkins 2010; Tavernise 2011). The 2010 election became a referendum on Rhee’s tenure, and Fenty was voted out. Rhee left too, but new mayor Vincent Gray retained and promoted her second-in-command, Kaya Henderson, who had previously worked with Rhee at the New Teacher Project and was largely responsible for developing DC’s teacher-assessment system and negotiating the 2010 union contract. Charters are not included in this contract and were, until late 2019, entirely nonunion (Craig and Turque 2010).
DC’s charters differentiate themselves through various themed curricula. These might be experiments in language immersion, arts education, and leadership training—but most often in college preparation, STEM education, and innovative deployments of educational technology. Students win entrance to a particular charter through participation in an annual lottery in which their family ranks a list of choice schools. Participation is open to any family with the time and resources to research schools and fill out the online application.
Du Bois rejected parts of this political legacy through policies like restorative justice and the hiring of veteran teachers. Still, everything the school did, down to mid-year adjustments to the seconds available for transition time between classes, was meant to build an engine of social mobility for Black and Latinx students. That mission demanded a lot from teachers and students. “Du Bois is super academic. It’s almost rigidly academic. It’s a place that is designed to make kids successful in the systems that we have in the world right now,” teacher Amanda told me. Senior Irene said the “main idea” of Du Bois was “pushing you until you can’t hold it in no more, like you literally have to explode because of this insane workload, right?”
“College of your choice” was the goal for every student. The personalized learning meant to get students to their college of choice was facilitated by the, novel at the time, one-to-one laptop program and an intensive data-tracking regime. Constant experimentation was the norm. Test scores, and to a lesser extent GPAs and graduation rates, remained the make-or-break measure, the thing that prompted bootstrapping. The rigidity Amanda saw was certainly present in their mission and its standards, but the school was, above all else, flexible in meeting those goals, which demanded much from teachers like Amanda and students like Irene.
Flexibility was key to Du Bois’s project and to the charter movement more generally. Like startups, new data prompted new experiments in the shape, strategies, and structure of the organization. This uncertainty about what the future held for the school was embraced in the name of preparing marginalized students for a general environment of economic uncertainty that they would face upon graduation. They would do whatever was necessary, arguing that traditional public schools could not do the same. When Clinton and Gore suggested in 1993 that “schools can themselves become high-performance workplaces” to train the digital professionals of the future, something like Du Bois was probably what they had in mind.
I entered Du Bois suspicious of charters. I found a great school. But the access doctrine motivates charter schools to an even greater degree than it does public libraries, and thus everything great about Du Bois was subject to revision, depending on what the data said. As in MLK, the problem of poverty became a problem of technology—even as every teacher and student knew the problem was far more complex than what skills or tools students lacked. And while the changes to the school’s structure were perhaps not as stark as MLK’s full-scale renovation, they were far more frequent. While circumstances demanded they both bootstrap, Du Bois had a license to experiment that MLK lacked, supported by fine-grained analyses of student and teacher data that had no corollary in the public library. Du Bois’s racial justice values were one experiment, something that could be discarded if it wasn’t enhancing students’ human capital.
The refrain that education reform is “the civil rights movement of today” is a common one among charter advocates (Scott 2011). Even if they didn’t always say it in those terms, Du Bois staff certainly acted as though everything was on the line and that, for their students’ sake, they needed to act with the fierce urgency of now. This prompted constant experimentation. Sam, a senior team leader, likened the process to building a plane while flying it, with summer the only time when teachers and administrators could think in the long term. Irene said that by the end of senior year, she had seen three iterations of the one-to-one laptop program and many other experiments besides. She was tired of being experimented on: “The first class, the students are like little lab rats.”
Nowhere was this experimentation more obvious than in the repeated conflict over student technology use. Staff wanted students to develop a holistic view of their academic performance, connecting different classes with home life, school life, and their future academic and professional goals. The laptop was the tool to do this. The phone was the tool preventing this; it made the wrong kinds of connections. Informed by SchoolForce, and under pressure from the leadership team, staff experimented constantly with new ways to encourage a high-performance academic culture through technology use. Although students were the objects of experimentation, both of these modes of discipline—encouraging laptops and discouraging phones—were also stressful for the teachers who had to carry out the ever-changing tactics deployed in the name of Du Bois’s mission.
Throughout the year, teachers experimented with two different ways of encouraging a high-performance academic culture: by modeling it in their own behavior and by encouraging it through constant connectivity. The leadership team’s January announcement made clear that these were insufficient. So in the second semester, teachers increasingly used the school’s digital infrastructure—chiefly, the SchoolForce student data system—to provide more explicit discipline. Both role modeling and digital discipline provoked a direct confrontation with the racial justice values at the core of the school’s identity. There was much room for debate, except with SchoolForce, which was ultimately out of the control of any individual student or teacher.
Like MLK’s librarians, Du Bois’s teachers worked hard to define and enforce the correct way to use a PC as part of their efforts to build a high-performance academic culture. This pedagogy appeared in two ways. First, implicitly and throughout the year, teachers modeled a high-performance academic culture through their own technology use and encouraged a culture of constant connectivity in their students—similar to InCrowd’s 24-7 workstyle. These experiments in a hidden curriculum were largely under teachers’ control and they are the focus of this section. Second, it appeared through explicit data-driven discipline that used SchoolForce to “penalize phone use other bad academic habits.”
Data-driven discipline picked up pace after the leadership team’s January ultimatum and, because this infrastructure crossed the whole school, it was ultimately under the leadership team’s control. This is the focus of the next section. As in MLK, these efforts to discipline personal computing prompted a debate on the nature and purpose of the institution: What was schooling supposed to accomplish, for whom, and how?
The first class of seniors had been through three distinct implementations of Du Bois’s one-to-one laptop program: from personal Dell netbooks to personal Acer Chromebooks to laptops in carts that rotated through classrooms. In ninth grade, students had received Dell 2120 netbooks.11 They put down a fifty-dollar deposit and signed a rental agreement dictating the rules for responsible use during the school year.
Dell stopped producing 2120s, so the following year, ninth graders were issued Acer Chromebooks, optimized for the Google software most classes already used. Sophomores who had lost their laptops the previous year were issued Chromebooks. Teachers reported having no training or consultation for the new machines. By the time I entered Du Bois, most seniors no longer had their Dells; they’d been lost, stolen, or just broken. Chromebooks still circulated, but at least half the seniors lacked any computer. Those few (five or six) seniors with the family resources to do so brought fully featured laptops or iPads from home.
The school replaced the computer the first time it was lost, stolen, or destroyed, but required a $500 replacement fee the second time. This is what happened with senior Martin, who spent most of his out-of-school hours working at Chipotle or using the camera he had bought with Chipotle wages. He had his netbook for two years, until a friend sat on it and shattered the screen. Many families were unable to come up with $500 on the spot, and some struggled for the initial fifty dollars. Other computers were simply lost on the bus or at the library, stolen, or, enterprising students told me, sold once their serial numbers were scraped off.
Principal Carroll told me Du Bois had absorbed a nearly $35,000 loss on school computers in the 2013–2014 school year. Du Bois was small, but even a traditional public school of similar size would have struggled to bear that loss. Du Bois’s grants, donations, and bond sales helped it to survive.12 Still, Principal Carroll and other administrators knew that change was needed. As part of Du Bois’s empowering approach to education, it had not planned for theft or loss. It had largely let students, many of whom lacked a clear workspace at home, do with their computers as they pleased. There was no equivalent to the Intro to PC Basics class Betsy taught at MLK, which would have helped orient students to their machine and teach them to care for it. There was no time for a subject that would not contribute to local or national standardized tests. By the time I entered Du Bois in the fall of 2014, school computers largely lived in mobile carts. Some seniors retained their older machines, but ninth graders were not issued their own—a relationship that, as we will see, paralleled shifts in Du Bois’s culture and curricula.
Hidden Curricula
Used correctly, school laptops could be the centerpiece of a high-performance academic culture. Students understood that laptops were meant to implement school values in a way that supported the school’s mission. Senior Daniella told me that what made Du Bois Du Bois was “the fact that they use technology a lot” to support a “mission” where “it doesn’t matter where you come from, your background, or your socioeconomic status, or your home life—you all go to college.” Compared to the private religious school she’d attended in ninth and tenth grade, Du Bois was “a really open-minded school. They make their planning around technology and that’s different.” She was inspired by the mission and committed to the school’s values.
But defining correct use was difficult, and enforcing correct use was harder still. And every small struggle over laptop and phone use became a small debate over the purpose of schooling and the place of technology in it. Teachers complained about students carrying their laptops by one corner, tossing them into a Think Tank beanbag chair while they made the rounds to chat up friends. But students were treating computers like they treated their phones. Shattered phone screens were a common sight—but these were interpreted by students as accidents or personal failures. Laptop failures were instead interpreted as a failure of the institution itself. That an app would not load or that the case easily chipped was, for students, an indictment of Du Bois. As with her regular complaint that the school lacked a dedicated art class, Irene said her slow laptop signaled that Du Bois wasn’t a “real school” and could never live up to it stated values.
Teachers were not exactly careful with their laptops either, although that was more out of the necessity forced by a day scheduled down to the minute. Like tech workers, they were constantly shifting tasks and changing their approach to those tasks based on incoming data. Unlike tech workers, they were not judged on their own performance, but on that of their students. Unsurprisingly, an enormous amount of stress resulted from this position, wherein an urgent mission was realized by a group of teenagers for whom you cared but could not ultimately control. Teachers’ own work habits helped to both manage this stress and provide an implicit role model of appropriate computer use.
Teachers walked between classes with their laptops in one hand, screen open, coffee in the other hand, placing them down on a desk when they entered a room so they could immediately start up a PowerPoint presentation, explore a student’s grades with them, or shoot off an email or two as students completed a warm-up activity. Opening the laptop back up and logging back in would take precious seconds, seconds that administrators counted down as students transitioned between classes or between activities within classes. These faculty performances showed that professionals had their work machines glued to their hips and ready to go and that there was always a way to slip a microunit of work—an email, a grade change, a slide adjustment—into any time that did open up.
High-achieving students picked up on this role modeling. Irene and her friends Rochelle and Liu regularly worked over lunch, netbooks open, headphones on, checking SchoolForce or the progress of college applications. Lunches sat next to the laptops, at their elbows, either the school lunch or some chicken wings from a corner take-out spot; off-campus lunch was a privilege granted based on grade level. They embodied a high-performance academic culture: working independently, using technology to reach goals they set themselves, juggling competing demands, and encouraging their peers to do the same.
Education scholars call these sorts of informal messages about personal conduct, delivered outside the normal syllabus, a hidden curriculum (Anyon 1980; Calarco 2018; Giroux and Penna 1979). The hidden curriculum shapes attitudes and behaviors for the working world outside school, teaching students everything from how to sit to how to ask for help. Students were aware of the racial and class implications of the hidden curriculum. Irene described it this way: “They’re so good at trying to prep us to be like preppy White folk. … My thing is, like, we’re in America, right? And I’m Hispanic, so the ideal would be that everyone—it doesn’t even matter what race you are—we all have to be like the White people because apparently it’s assumed that all White people are successful and whatnot. To get far in this country, you have to be like them, if you want to be up there, you have to be like them. I think for me, it’s kind of, like, irritating, because that just takes the fun away and everything.” Irene recognized that the school had the power to impose these hegemonic standards, where a high-performance academic culture was equated with whiteness and professionalization. Her teachers needn’t speak this message for her to hear it.
Like many of her peers, Irene absorbed the hidden curriculum and took pieces of it for her own needs. She worked independently on her computer during lunch and free period, whether typing up a story for a school newspaper or making art for her sister’s quinceañera. But she had also learned email etiquette and used it to contact teachers and request greater representation of Latinx people in the school’s curriculum. And she and everyone else knew the posture—back straight, headphones on, hands on keyboard—that their teachers associated with productivity. Keep that posture and you had a good shot at spending free period on video games or Twitter without teachers noticing, compared to if you were slouched in a beanbag chair in the corner of the Think Tank.
Teachers did not need to make the link between whiteness and professionalism explicit for students. It was just what happened when White professionals sought to use their own workstyles as models for Black and Latinx students. In fact, teacher Clara’s sociology class studied this same process in its unit on inequality and education. However, Black and Latinx students resisted, especially in those moments when the hidden curriculum went beyond role modeling and into direct regulation of the school space.13
The Think Tank was an important site of cultural instruction. Over time, teachers restructured the space to better support the school’s mission. As in MLK, a desire to professionalize personal computing led to restrictions on who could use the space and how. Initially, the cubicles and beanbag chairs in the back of the Think Tank were meant to be independent workspaces for seniors on their free periods, while classes continued in the front.
But teenagers were teenagers, and they turned the workspace into a social space. Ryan and Sam would regularly pause their calculus or physics instruction in the front of the room to walk to the cubicles and beanbag chairs in the back and quiet students playing Flash games or YouTube music videos on their free periods, often telling them that they were not making the best use of their own time or supporting their peers who were trying to apply themselves. Principal Carroll checked in on the Think Tank several times a day, with greater frequency as the year went on. Walkie-talkie in hand, she would give a nudge to a student who was napping, or separate a couple petting each other in the corner and then watch as they took out their homework packets, plugged their headphones into their laptops, and got to work.
This intensified over the course of Du Bois’s academic year, particularly after the leadership team’s January ultimatum. Teachers and administrators only allowed those students who they thought were going to focus on homework into the Think Tank for study hall after school. Students were not creating workspaces independently, so teachers and administrators stepped in and did it for them. This is not to say that students were not putting the Think Tank to good use—study hall was a safe, supervised, after-school space, even if you weren’t studying—but the bootstrapping project demanded one particular, professional use of it. Beginning in the second semester, school security guards began enforcing correct use of the space, kicking out students who weren’t doing homework.
As in MLK, there were limits on this space-making project. At Du Bois, an older public service culture was literally built into the school, placing hard architectural limits on what bootstrapping could accomplish. There was no Think Tank in the traditional public school that had previously occupied the space. It had not been built as a coworking space, and so there were never enough outlets for students who needed to plug in their computers. And the ones that were there were often in locations that did not facilitate the sort of work Irene, Rochelle, and Liu did: sitting down to focus on the laptop. Most outlets were along the walls, naturally drawing students to them to charge their phones and lay in the sun. There were no outlets in the center of the Think Tank, where students collaborated on classwork or were directed to cubicles to focus on their own work—and it was a little too far for extension cords. So when Principal Carroll or anyone else directed a student to sit down and focus on their laptop, there was a good chance they couldn’t comply because their computer was not charged.
Other limits emerged from students who, like library patrons, carved out their own places in the Think Tank. Irene had a place to work on her paintings, for example. Savvy students like Martin figured out how to breach the firewall and play video games with friends when it appeared they were working: using proxy servers, slight changes to URLs, or the creation of new user profiles on the Chromebooks that had teachers’ internet privileges. In response, and as in MLK, teachers and administrators patrolled the Think Tank and directed students away from these distractions and toward schoolwork.
Students also built places in the corners of the Think Tank to buy and sell drugs, mostly pot. It usually went unnoticed, but the walls of that safe place could quickly collapse. A rumor was started that Martin was selling, so Principal Carroll, one of her assistant principals, and school security took him out to search him and his locker. They found nothing. Afterward, they told him he could have exercised his right to object to the search.
Some of these student efforts were stymied by the school, but Du Bois’s values supported others. Clara supported her sociology students as they staged a walkout that began in the Think Tank, in protest of Darren Wilson’s acquittal for the murder of Mike Brown. She also chaperoned students as they went to Black Lives Matter demonstrations downtown. But in the spring, the Think Tank was frequently taken away from seniors to set up workstations for tenth graders taking the PARCC standardized test or for those students taking AP tests. Clara’s sociology class had critiqued these sorts of tests as tools for racial stratification. They might run against Du Bois’s values, but they were essential to the school’s mission.
In support of that mission, every single laptop in every single cart was requisitioned for the month of March so that they could be secured, set up for the PARCC exam, and then issued to a tenth grader to take the test. Teachers only found out two weeks ahead of time. The Think Tank became a testing ground. It stopped being a collaborative workspace, much less a social space, for the duration. Desks were separated out, and students sat down and surrounded themselves with school-issued cardboard walls that kept them from peeking at each other’s screens. Irene had to borrow a counselor’s computer to finish scholarship applications because hers had been confiscated for testing. The hidden curriculum became much less hidden at that point. Like any school, social life in Du Bois was rich and varied. But the Think Tank’s transformation made clear that when the chips were down, mission mattered most, and the horizons of school life were radically narrowed to fit that mission. These social limits appeared as limits on school technology and school space.
Teaching Presence Bleed
Earlier in her career, Melissa had taught at a Houston charter school. There, she was coached to refer to students, teachers, and administrators collectively as “the family.” Students were given her cell phone number, and she was expected to return evening calls requesting homework assistance. To incentivize teachers, bonuses were allocated based on student scores on Texas’s high-stakes standardized tests. The cell phone requirement in Houston was an example of what Gregg (2013) calls presence bleed: the extension of the workspace into nonwork spaces through information technology, increasing work hours overall and dissolving the mental or social barriers workers put into place to separate a person’s identity as, for example, mother or deacon from their identity as employee. Throughout the 2014–2015 school year, Du Bois’s teachers supplemented the hidden curriculum with various ad hoc efforts to encourage presence bleed.
Du Bois didn’t require teachers to hand out cell phone numbers, but efforts to build a high-performance academic culture still led teachers and students to use their PC’s and phones to push the boundaries of the school far beyond its walls. This constant connectivity with her workplace was one reason Melissa quit teaching in February 2015: “There was no privacy.” After her time in Houston, Melissa had tried to build more barriers between home and work, but the urgency of Du Bois’s mission kept knocking those barriers down.
Other teachers embraced Du Bois’s presence bleed. Constant connectivity was a sign of professionalism, and so encouraging students to practice constant connectivity was understood as a route to the sort of educational and career success that would secure a middle-class life for their students. Presence bleed, then, was not just a set of behaviors that encouraged a high-performance academic culture—checking email at night, reviewing one’s grades in SchoolForce to inform the week’s schedule—but also evidence of that culture.
Sam, physics teacher and senior team leader, embraced Du Bois over his old school in Philadelphia where he had taught for Teach for America—the teaching internship program wherein elite college graduates are placed for two years at underprivileged schools—because his previous institution “had little to no culture, no positive culture that was built by the school. It had its own culture, but it was because the kids ran the place and it was a pretty violent place.” He told me Du Bois was engaged in a different, deliberate culture-building process. This meant believing in “the social justice mission of education” and taking pride in his college-bound students because “that’s going to change life outcomes.”
Encouraging this level of commitment in students required a great deal of commitment from teachers. Sam worried about the strain presence bleed placed on teachers, especially older ones, but embraced it himself because he figured, as a young man with no spouse or children of his own, this was the time to commit his whole self to a cause. “I would love to have fifteen emails a night from kids on homework,” he said. And he answered them too, even if he had to correct them on salutations, subject lines, and the like. This commitment was similar to the way employees of InCrowd embraced the death of the nine-to-five workday as a way to fulfill the social mission of the firm and self-actualize in the process. Sam tried to call every one of his students’ parents every three weeks, usually on his walk home from school.
This commitment showed up in other life choices, like Sam’s decision to move to an apartment within walking distance of the school. Clara and Ryan did the same, fully aware that they were representatives of the same postrecession gentrification wave Clara’s students studied in sociology. Ryan moved into Du Bois’s neighborhood not just to minimize his commute or make himself more available to extracurriculars—like the school soccer team he coached—but because he and his wife—also a teacher—wanted to commit to being members of the community they were teaching in.
Some students embraced Du Bois’s presence bleed. It was an example of how Martin said his teachers would “make students push to their limits.” He appreciated teachers’ willingness to connect outside of school because he went to work right after classes let out and was always doing homework at odd hours of the night or over weekends. Ryan said he saw evidence of working students’ dedication in their constant connectivity—because the online platform he used to teach calculus kept a record of students’ time in it.
Teachers estimated that around half of students lacked home internet access, though this number varied as people moved or bills went unpaid. For students without the motivation or support, this meant they simply could not do large portions of their homework at home. But engaged students without home internet access welcomed presence bleed, seeing it as a way to stay on top of their assignments whenever spare time and a Wi-Fi signal became available. Irene’s mother worked nights cleaning offices, so when other students were finishing homework on their laptops, she was getting dinner ready for her younger sisters. That teachers would answer her emails on weekends was a huge help, because that’s when she would bring an old Starbucks cup into the coffee shop, camp out, and use the Wi-Fi to access all the assignments, messages, and grades that were stored in the cloud. Eventually, she became such a regular that the baristas didn’t even mind when she forgot the old cup she had been bringing in to pretend she had bought something. Of course, it wasn’t all homework. Starbucks, especially once she got onto good enough terms with the baristas, was a rest space, like the library was for Mia, Ebony, and Shawn. With all her responsibilities at home and at school, sometimes Irene just wanted to take her school laptop to the coffee shop and get online to watch soap operas or murder mysteries. She was determined to make constant connectivity work on her terms.
At school, constant connectivity raised students’ expectations of when and how teachers would communicate with them. Clara often used her time monitoring study hall14 in the Think Tank at the end of the day to get on her laptop and catch up on grading and lesson planning. During the day, teachers’ free periods were usually taken up by subject-team or grade-team meetings, so they were always desperate for a spare moment in which to work. In study hall, Clara was often approached by students asking when the grade for an assignment submitted earlier in the day—or even just a class activity or behavior grade—would be up on SchoolForce. Clara would sigh, rub her temples, and then, as her RECE training suggested, patiently explain her daily schedule so that students could empathize with her not having had time to grade since this morning.
On days I shadowed Amanda’s Digital Music or Video Game Design classes, she would vent to me about the consumer mentality that she felt constant connectivity encouraged in her students. They demanded quick updates from her at all times and were disappointed when they did not get them. Principal Carroll labeled these students as low-functioning. They reacted to grade postings as though they were an alarm, asking teachers why they scored a 2 instead of a 3 and what they could do to bridge the gap. Students who were high-functioning would use SchoolForce as a prompt to adjust their goals and their strategies to reach them, building timelines for the rest of a project or a quarter.
High- versus low-functioning, in her usage, was less a marker of intelligence than of one’s comfort with the rhythms of academe; unsurprisingly, this was often a marker of privilege, of the habits and knowledge imparted (or not) by middle-class parents (Calarco 2018). The more comfortable students were with SchoolForce, the more they reminded me of how InCrowd used Salesforce, the customer relationship management technology on which SchoolForce was based. Good workers and good students used the data they saw about their own performance and the aggregate performance of their peers to figure out how to match their pace to that of the organization.
But not everyone was keyed into this rhythm. Sam believed that every technology in the school—SchoolForce, laptops, phones, and more—empowered the top-performing third of students to connect more deeply and extensively with their teachers and their material than they could have otherwise. For everyone else, all the data points and communication channels available either distracted them from the task at hand or intimidated them to the point where they shut down.
Because technology worked differently for different students depending on their skills, engagement, and level of privilege, the practice of presence bleed could not fully succeed without the lessons imparted by the hidden curriculum. Constant connectivity mattered little if the connections made didn’t support productivity. To produce a high-performance academic culture, teachers had to model professionalism and encourage constant connectivity. This was a lot of work.
Amanda’s classroom was one of the few places where it all came together. Students in Video Game Design worked in teams throughout the fall semester to build pixelated side-scrollers about a social issue of their choosing: teen pregnancy, homelessness, college admissions, and so on. These issues often hit close to home, even if the structure of the final project did not. That summative assessment was a pitch to guest judges deciding whether to “invest” in their video game. I helped out as a judge. Another judge introduced himself by saying he had done the same thing students were doing on Monday in San Francisco, giving a two-and-a-half-hour pitch for a $1.5 million project. An audience member replied that they had just interviewed at Chipotle. Everyone laughed.
If a group member didn’t show up to the final presentation, Amanda would remind the rest of them that “these are real life experiences, and if you missed a presentation in front of a major company” your career would be over. A professional dress code was rigorously enforced, and high-scoring groups were invited into a section of the room Amanda labeled the Executive Lounge, where they could enjoy the snacks judges were sampling.
There were surely elements of the hidden curriculum here, raced and classed visions of what technology professionals looked like; Amanda awarded extra points to students who wore sports coats, for example. But students bought into it in large part because they adored Amanda, a middle-aged former punk they nicknamed OWL (Old White Lady). They came to her riotously decorated room after school for advice, they bought into her cheerleading, they loved the subject. And this buy-in meant that they and their parents responded to her after-hours texts and emails, pushing themselves to get deliverables in on time and coordinate with their teammates. But this extra work took a toll on her.
After the last Video Game Design class had finished their presentations and left the room, Amanda collapsed into a chair next to me. She put her hands over her mouth to stifle a tired scream. She was exhausted and talked about quitting at the end of the year to try something new, somewhere she would feel appreciated and get more positive feedback from superiors. She believed deeply in Du Bois’s values, but she was tired of all those after-hours texts and emails, drained from all the work that had gone into planning and executing the video game pitch. What Melissa had experienced as an invasion of privacy—work reaching into home—Amanda experienced as overextension: the labor of keeping students constantly connected. Amanda’s students kept interrupting our conversation, popping in to hug her. She didn’t blame them for her stress. She blamed the school’s relentless focus on student grades and scores. The final presentations came right after the leadership team’s ultimatum to senior teachers to boost seniors’ scores. It weighed heavily on her.
Amanda’s classes were far more focused on technology than any other teacher’s. Her classes succeeded, in the terms of Du Bois’s mission, because she deployed the hidden curriculum in a way most students bought into and because she encouraged the sort of presence bleed that kept students focused on the real curriculum. But it took a tremendous toll on her. That the pitch session made her want to quit teaching was a clear sign that Amanda’s success couldn’t easily be replicated. Not everyone was Amanda, and not every class was Video Game Design. And most students, like Sam said, did not have the privilege or motivation to manage constant connectivity in a productive way.
Throughout the fall semester, teachers had tried to build a high-performance academic culture through the implicit lessons of the hidden curriculum and the practice of presence bleed. But this was not enough. The numbers were still off, and new experiments were needed. Things changed for the spring semester, after the leadership team’s ultimatum. To build a high-performance academic culture for the first senior class and reach the goals the school had to reach, Du Bois increasingly turned to SchoolForce and a practice of data-driven discipline. As a system covering the entire school, SchoolForce belonged more to administrators than individual teachers. This new discipline seemed to contradict the school’s values. But the mission was at stake. One of the biggest obstacles to that mission, the thing teachers tried to challenge through SchoolForce, was the smartphone almost every student had in their pocket.
Systems administrator Manuel quit working at Du Bois in February 2015 and moved on to the same role at another charter school. Teachers had repeatedly complained to him that the school intranet—built on a network supplied by the municipal broadband initiatives celebrated at the OCTO event in chapter 1—was unusable during the three periods when students were at lunch. In those periods, dozens of students whipped out their phones to stream videos or music, and the school Wi-Fi network would suddenly have twice as many clients as there were computers in the building. Manuel had offered a simple solution over and over: throttle bandwidth on mobile and/or unregistered devices. But he was shot down every time because that sort of top-down disciplinary measure did not fit Du Bois’s values. His work kept running into that conflict, and it was one reason he quit.
If he had stayed on through the spring, Manuel would probably have found those sorts of solutions embraced by his superiors. In the second semester, after the leadership team’s ultimatum, teachers increasingly sought to realize the school’s mission by disciplining student phone use. This discipline was largely carried out through the behavior-tracking features within SchoolForce. These practices often conflicted with Du Bois’s values, but SchoolForce, like the school’s mission as a whole, was beyond the control of any one student or teacher. When push came to shove, the system was used to satisfy the leadership team’s demands for measurable progress.
“We gave you [students] a laptop for free and you treat it like it doesn’t matter, but if I take your phone because you’re texting in class you act like I just ripped your heart out of your chest!” Sam told me. And it was true. The work machine was never valued as closely as the machine that could be used for work but was usually used for something else. There were good reasons for this. Students often spent a large portion of their own income or their parents’ income on their phone and their phone plan, whereas the laptop incurred a one-time, fifty-dollar deposit almost always paid for by parents. Du Bois also lacked a deliberate instructional space for computer use—partly because of an assumption that teachers would holistically integrate that subject into their curriculum, partly because something like digital literacy was never a subject covered by standardized tests, either the evaluative ones mandated by the state or the SATs, ACTs, and APs so crucial to students’ college admissions prospects. As with the question of whether sleeping was permitted at MLK, Du Bois’s mission clarified teachers’ positions on phone use: snapchatting in class was unprofessional and thus forbidden.
What porn was for the library, phones were for the school: a small thing that threw doubt on the big project. Eventually, school infrastructure forced the issue. The SchoolForce student data system on which the leadership team depended for its bird’s-eye view of student progress was used to create a new set of disciplinary measures that nudged students away from the phone and toward the laptop. New disciplinary measures resolved the ambiguous place of students’ phones in teachers’ work.
Every student had a smartphone, even students like Irene who spent some nights in a shelter. Phones surfaced class divides. iPhones were common but more expensive than Androids. Pay-as-you-go plans like the one Martin bought were a sign of living more paycheck to paycheck and/or without parental support. Irene’s mother bought her a prepaid Android TracFone so she could check her school email at home and report in on her and her sisters’ doings. In this way, phones stretched students’ home lives and social lives into their school lives. Of course, most use cases were more playful than Irene’s—these were teenagers, after all—especially so for students like Martin who figured out how to use proxies or other work-arounds for the Du Bois firewall.
For teachers, phones were the locus of in-class disciplinary struggles. They were distractions in the moment, and teachers’ reminders to put them away could end up taking up large chunks of classroom time. Phones also symbolized a focus on technology not for academic gain or long-term professionalization but for momentary pleasure. The difficulty was that the school’s values precluded a wide-scale confiscation program or other crackdowns on phone use.
Calculus teacher Ryan had happily left a traditional public school for Du Bois. The only time he missed his old DCPS job was when he could not persuade students to put phones away and he had no option to escalate. There was no option for confiscation or detention at Du Bois because that sort of discipline ran counter to the school’s racial justice values. Ryan accepted it, working hard to build relationships with individual students so that they would respond to him and designating appropriate times for phones in class—googling definitions, looking up video demonstrations—so that students would understand that phone use was inappropriate the rest of the time.
But it was an uphill slog. He appreciated that many students “used [the phone] effectively when they’ve needed to” but knew it was “stressful [to be] a kid with a phone in school, trying to maintain a relationship or a presence online.” And it was difficult for him to tell when the phone in the lap was being used to text message or check grades, whether they were checking out or, in Sam’s words, “using their technology as a way to better themselves.” Ryan kept the model of office work in his head as a way to work through this ambiguity: “I feel like at this point it’s accepted, you have it out, and I’m going to try to teach you, like when you’re a professional, to not have it out. And in most cases, the professionals that I work with don’t have it out.”
And so, the reminders to put phones away continued, but this forced a conflict with Du Bois’s values. For two months in the fall, I tracked how often Melissa asked students to put phones away in her fifty-minute AP English Literature class at the end of the day. She averaged about ten reminders per class. This was a challenge within the RECE curriculum because each negative reprimand to a student was supposed to be balanced by three positive encouragements. Student phone use meant Melissa was constantly fighting to balance her disciplinary ledger.
The phone was where these racial justice values came into conflict with the charter’s mission of human capital growth. High-achieving students, often from more privileged households, understood the technological distinctions teachers were trying to make. “I think that’s why they gave us the laptops, to use it for good stuff and work and not use our phones—because we have social media on there,” Daniella told me. But the majority of students, in Sam’s reckoning, did not see this distinction and did not ditch their phones for their laptops during the school day. There were many reasons for this, ranging from stress to romance to disengagement.
Teachers tried to promote the laptop and the high-performance academic culture it represented through the hidden curriculum and presence bleed. But this failed to reach everybody. Students pushed back against the professionalization of their routines, seeking to reclaim spaces like the Think Tank as a safe space that provided the care they needed—whether that meant rest, socializing, or something else. Other students were just unengaged in this informal technological pedagogy, whether because of lack of interest, because they couldn’t get online at home, or just because there was no room in the formal curriculum for digital literacy instruction. Teachers themselves had a hard time encouraging a high-performance academic culture and discouraging phone use: constant connectivity sapped their time and energy, and Du Bois’s values prevented most disciplinary measures. Sam understood this as their failure, not students’. He feared the consequences they’d suffer “in a professional setting” for checking their phone under the table because “if you’re a non-White person, the world is just dying to write you off.”
In January, the leadership team made it clear that change was needed and that teachers needed to focus on changing students’ habits to support a high-performance academic culture and get more seniors to graduate. So the faculty turned to SchoolForce, where a new set of Work Hard Grades was created. Work Hard Grades bridged subjects and thus made a student’s habits visible to all their teachers, their parents, and interested administrators. Students were asked to designate a particular area they wanted to improve and be assessed on in their Work Hard Grades. With faculty’s encouragement, phone use was easily the favorite choice.
In the second semester, individual teachers made SchoolForce data, Work Hard Grades and beyond, an increased focus of class time, training students to attend and react to their scores—disciplining themselves. At the beginning of the third quarter, Principal Carroll framed the changes as an opportunity for peers in homeroom to track each other’s data and encourage each other to reach new targets. Before she quit, Melissa objected in a senior teachers’ meeting—“That’s a lot of SchoolForce tracking!”—but most of her colleagues were on board. Teachers approved of the plan in large part because it meant fewer disciplinary actions on their part. SchoolForce data would demonstrate the need for phone discipline, and students would carry it out on their own—rather than dealing, faculty hoped, with constant reminders from teachers. Phones had always been an obstacle to their mission, but their values prevented a firm stand on it. The leadership team stressed the importance of mission over values, and SchoolForce supported that move; not just because it put a hard number—the Work Hard Grades—on the ambiguous question of phones’ place in the classroom, but because SchoolForce provided a mode of discipline that was both more comprehensive and more impersonal than teachers’ individual efforts.
SchoolForce was an important piece of Du Bois’s infrastructure. Pushed by the leadership team that won the grant for it and now kept a close eye on its use, it became the means to build a high-performance academic culture, overriding individual teachers’ pedagogies and, to an extent, Du Bois’s holistic approach to students’ lives. Teachers never thought of their students as just a grade or a test score, but mid-year bootstrapping meant that those data points became increasingly more important parts of their pedagogy as the second semester started and seniors rocketed toward graduation.
Clara’s sociology class was always the clearest example of Du Bois’s values in action, engaging students in research on gentrification in their neighborhoods and, in the second semester, frank conversations about tracking, class reproduction, and systemic racism in education—including case studies of Du Bois! But by mid-March, just before spring break, even Clara had capitulated to the SchoolForce system for data discipline. One day she stood in front of a matrix on the whiteboard, each cell holding the passing rate for a given class. She highlighted the sociology classes and then showed the numbers dipping over time. Students whispered and whistled, surprised.
“We can do better than 57 percent,” Clara said, and walked them through SchoolForce’s presentation of their academic and Work Hard Grades once more. She encouraged them to look at this data and their upcoming assignments individually and with friends. They needed to ask themselves, “What is the thing I can do that can lift my grade?” Irene, sitting with me in the Think Tank’s beanbag chairs during her free period, watched and whispered through gritted teeth: “I hate this school.” Not every student agreed with her. Martin embraced the data-driven pedagogy, reasoning that students would of course resist direct instructions to put phones away because it just made the phones more attractive. Instead, “they should make it a game,” giving students small rewards to shape their behavior.
Martin’s observation was prescient. At the leadership team’s encouragement, the data-driven discipline only intensified as graduation approached. Increased emphasis on presence bleed supported this approach: more emails, texts, and phone calls to students and their parents, reminding them of important deadlines or data points threatening their graduation. Data-driven discipline made clear that some forms of constant connectivity were verboten. Unprofessional phone use was penalized and trained away with some success; students got the message that their social media selves were not welcome in school. The increased reliance on SchoolForce meant that the students’ school selves were increasingly visible, salient, and accessible to them and their parents at home and to other teachers and administrators who were not physically present when students delivered a particular presentation or committed a particular behavioral infraction. The system helped accomplish what the the hidden curriculum and the practice of presence bleed could not: producing a high-performance academic culture that looked a lot like the workstyles of the White professionals these Black and Latinx students saw at the front of their classrooms.
Sam believed there was a better way to teach digital literacy. “Right now, we are too much ‘either you use it or don’t use it at all,’ and that’s not adult either.” He loved the moments when he went to reprimand a student for looking at their phone under the table but found they were googling a physics problem. To make more of those moments, he and other teachers were taking a much more prescriptive approach with their ninth graders. His ninth graders were told from day one when it was OK to have a phone or a laptop out, laptops that now lived in carts, and were rewarded or penalized accordingly. The sort of free rein the seniors had enjoyed in the Think Tank would not happen again; Du Bois had learned from those experiments. “They learned what to do with the younger kids by experimenting on us,” senior Corrinne told me.
The experience of Sam’s ninth graders would be the norm going forward. But there had been no time to waste for seniors, and ad hoc efforts like the hidden curriculum, itself often more of a reflex than a deliberate attempt, had proved insufficient. So the leadership team encouraged a series of technological and behavioral experiments that would help them reach their goals for the first graduating class. SchoolForce infrastructure nudged students away from phones and distractions and toward laptops and a high-performance academic culture. These were big changes. This focus on bad habits seemed to run against the values that made Du Bois Du Bois: restorative justice, a resistance to deficit thinking, a belief in student empowerment based on an explicitly political view of the needs of marginalized youth.
But change was necessary because the stakes were high. Anything short of sustained year-over-year improvements in test scores, GPAs, and graduation rates was harshly scrutinized by the municipal government, funders, and the leadership team. Du Bois bootstrapped because there was, quite literally, no room for failure. Sam, for example, had approached the leadership team to ask about plans for students who would need a fifth year of high school and was told to stay focused on the fourth year. Ironically, Ryan noted in one senior team meeting that the fifth-year plan was one place where DCPS shined. For all his criticism of the local public schools, he knew that they knew that there was no single path to success for their students.
Teachers told me they had no way to let students fail, reflect on that failure, and learn to live with failure as a regular part of the professional world. There were at least three reasons why failure was not on the educational menu. First, teachers expected students would pick up on their modeling of professional behaviors. Second, the staff’s dedication to Du Bois’s values meant they had a political and personal stake in pushing students to the finish line. And finally, the time and resources to practice certain types of professional failure just were not there. Digital literacy was not a testable subject, after all, so a PC basics class like MLK’s was never going to happen.
The bootstrapping process brooks no failure. Too much depends on its success, for both the organization and the people it serves. Constant reconfigurations of habits and technology put everything up for grabs at Du Bois. Ryan said of his seniors, “They’ve always been guinea pigs and they know that.” Irene said she and her friends were “little lab rats.” As the rare senior who had attended Du Bois’s elementary, middle, and high schools, she recognized that the school worked hard to make its values a reality. She would rattle off the school’s mission—to get every student, regardless of their background, into the college of their choice—and she praised the way Du Bois’s staff “do a really great job of giving you this support system.”
She and some of her peers recognized that charters like Du Bois were, like startups, in permanent beta. The difference is that schools, like libraries, have political and economic limits placed on their experimentation because they cannot choose their clients but must serve the polity as a whole. Where InCrowd could shift from serving consumers to serving businesses, a public school in DC cannot choose to start serving, say, adults in Delaware. Charter schools, native to the neoliberal political turn, are further away from this democratic ideal than public libraries; indeed, limited regulatory oversight and greater flexibility in choosing their constituents (and vice versa) is part of their appeal—it’s how they innovate. But even public-private partnerships are public to an extent, and the school’s charter authorization hinges on a specific promise made to regulators: human capital growth, measured in test scores.
Du Bois went beyond this, casting the promise in racial justice terms and including any student who won admission through the lottery. All this meant that there were limits to how much experimentation could really change how the school worked and what it could accomplish. To the latter point, it has long been a stubborn fact of US education that out-of-school factors, such as family income and child nutrition, account for the majority of variance in student test scores (Goldhader, Brewer, and Anderson 1999; Sirin 2005; Tienken et al. 2017).
Still, experimentation continued. Their mission demanded it. School values, like everything else, were subject to revision based on incoming data. And teachers and administrators were constantly being presented with new data that showed the need for further bootstrapping. Such calls for organizational restructuring emerged not just from student performance data, but from outside assessments of the school’s progress in its mission.
In late March 2015, the largely White leadership team and Board of Trustees met to hear an outside consulting firm’s report on exactly why Du Bois’s scores on practice SATs and the DC-CAS (the standardized test preceding PARCC) had fallen year over year. The consultants’ presentation began with the dramatic announcement that this was a “turnaround school” in desperate need of big changes, despite one of the highest per-pupil funding rates in the city and high internal measures of teacher effectiveness and student satisfaction. Staff were resigned to the news. They pushed back a bit but recognized that those test scores and an anticipated 54 percent graduation rate were unacceptable.
The leadership team largely agreed with the consultants’ observation that Du Bois lacked priorities because everything was a priority and that a “culture of nice,” an implicit denunciation of RECE, lead to continued excuses for both students and staff. A new five-year strategic plan was rolled out. Everything would be fitted to this plan, or else it wouldn’t be funded—staff and technology included. The board had confidence it could turn things around. The school would keep bootstrapping. Everything, including those prized values, was up for negotiation if it meant—as Amanda, the OWL, had put it to me—that they “make kids successful in the systems that we have in the world right now.”
1. Acumen Solutions is based in Northern Virginia and provides cloud-based analytics, storage, and customer relationship management services to firms in health, finance, media, and other fields. SchoolForce represented an important new push for them into enterprise-level services in public education. It stored, tracked, and analyzed standards-based gradebooks, homework data, behavioral data, attendance data, and even meals data.
2. These ideas emerge from the broad rubric of the reconceptualist movement in education. Reconceptualism shifts educators from the top-down implementation of universal curricula to the bottom-up implementation of curricula fitted to children’s social context. Reconceptualism embraces feminist, antiracist, and democratic modes of education (Kessler and Swaddner 1992).
3. For example, Ryan attended Haverford College, whereas senior team leader Sam attended Harvard. Both entered the profession through Teach for America.
4. The senior class included two students who identified as Asian American and none who identified as White.
5. I did not witness the latter firsthand but had it confirmed to me in separate interviews. English teacher Melissa cited this, and more generally the stress that led teachers to this, as a major reason for her quitting mid-year.
6. Nationally, charters test about as well as traditional public schools (CREDO 2009; Gleason et al. 2010). Locally, the Rhee-era gains in test scores were largely discredited by what appeared to be widespread cheating by under-pressure teachers (Gillum and Bello 2011; Toppo 2013). In the first year of the new PARCC test, “7 percent of charter school students who took the high school Math test and 23 percent of those who took the high school English test scored proficient, compared with 12 and 27 percent of DC Public School students respectively” (Chandler 2015b).
7. In terms of disciplinary practices and racial climate, nationally, charters disproportionately suspend Black and disabled students and do so at a rate 16 percent higher than traditional public schools (Losen et al. 2016). To be fair, these patterns didn’t hold in DC. There, the disparity between Black and disabled students and the median was maintained across the school system, but students in traditional public schools were 1.58 times more likely than charter school students to be suspended or expelled (OSSE 2013).
8. As evidence of this broken system, charter activists often cite DC’s high per-pupil funding levels and middling standardized test scores relative to other states (see US Census Bureau 2019), though of course the comparison falls short because, unlike any state, DC is an entirely urban school district, the educational environment and student population of which looks more like, say, Chicago than Illinois (i.e., higher staff salaries and capital costs and poorer, more diverse students with higher needs).
9. Since then, DC has been superseded by cities such as New Orleans, which, in 2019, became an all-charter city with no traditional public schools (Hasselle 2018). The change is widely viewed as part of many neoliberal reforms instituted in the city following the shock of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent redevelopment, including the elimination of public housing (Klein 2007).
10. Rhee was a Teach for America veteran tightly connected with that internship and advocacy organization. She founded the New Teacher Project (NTP) and, based on that work, was recommended to Fenty by New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
11. Netbooks are smaller and cheaper than traditional laptops, with less storage space, and are optimized for cloud-based software like Google Apps for Education.
12. Charters receive per-pupil funding from the state or county, but cannot raise taxes to support new capital expenditures like normal public school systems do through state and local governments. So they have pursued entrepreneurial fundraising strategies, facilitated by looser governance structures and the heavy involvement of the financial services sector in lobbying for, funding, and, in individual cases, administering charters. Chief among these are (1) independent grant-writing efforts through dedicated fundraising offices and (2) bond offerings specific to the school and its special features, as distinct from the bond offerings conducted by whole public school systems. This financial creativity supports charter growth independent of student demand. Through 2014, nonprofits had donated $2.1 billion to charters, and charters gained $10 billion from the tax-exempt bond market. Charters’ bond offerings assume constant growth for individual schools and are most often used to service existing debt (Teresa and Good 2018).
In Du Bois’s case, the school formed separate nonprofit ventures to secure financing for each school building (the middle school was separate from the high school in which I spent my time) and floated tax-exempt DC revenue bonds to support capital improvements and the refinancing of existing debt. Du Bois’s per-student spending, one of the highest in the city and double a typical DCPS school, was boosted not just by these bond sales but also by grants and donations sought through a dedicated fundraising office. For example, in the summer of 2014, they were one of several schools awarded a $100,000 “transformational school” grant from the CityBridge Foundation to plan experiments in blended in-person and online learning, with up to $300,000 in additional funds available to support implementation. In DC, philanthropic donations are very unevenly distributed. In 2015, six charters, out of sixty total, received 75 percent of all donations to charter schools (Chandler 2015c).
13. The process of defining what academic success looks like and delimiting the good work habits that will get you there from the bad ones that will not has obvious racial and class overtones. For critics, this is a much remarked-on feature of the charter movement. A former dean of students at a New Orleans charter wrote: “My daily routine consisted of running around chasing young Black ladies to see if their nails were polished, or if they added a different color streak to their hair or following young men to make sure that their hair wasn’t styled naturally as students were not able to wear their hair in uncombed afro styles. None of which had anything to do with teaching and learning, but administration was keen on making sure that before Black students entered the classroom that they looked ‘appropriate’ for learning” (Griffin 2014; for a broader critique of respectability politics in education reform, see also Vasquez-Heilig, Khalifa, and Tillman 2014).
14. Study hall was at first an after-school catch-up program running at the same time as other extracurriculars like Robotics Club, open to anyone who could not or preferred not to work at home. Later, in another Du Bois experiment, it was required for struggling students. Attendance, however, was difficult to enforce.