Education Reform in the Twenty-First Century

“While much has been written about the education reform movement, few studies offer the view from the inside that Erinn Brooks brings us in this amazing book. And what a view! Brooks’ covert ethnography carefully documents the contradictions between equity and control in a ‘No-Excuses’ charter school and challenges the social justice rhetoric of education reform.”
—Christopher Lubienski, Professor of Education Policy, Indiana University, USA, and author of The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (2013)
“In this ethnography of a ‘No-Excuses’ charter school, Brooks provides a rare glimpse from inside. In this corporate environment, where reputation and career advancement mean everything, student learning suffers. This disturbing book reveals that market-based education is not resolving inequities—it is indisputably compounding them.”
—Kristen Buras, Associate Professor, Georgia State University, USA, and author of Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (2014)

This book explores how, why, and with what consequences one no-excuses charter network marketizes teaching and learning, through the author’s 1000 hours of covert participant observation at a network charter school. In her research, Brooks found that the “AAG” (pseudonym) network re-conceptualized teaching by urging staff to envision their careers in corporate education rather than in classroom teaching. While some employees received a boost up the corporate ladder, others found themselves being pushed out of the organization. Despite AAG’s equity-conscious discourse, administrators emphasized controlling student behavior as a central measure of teaching effectiveness. Brooks develops the concept of creative compliance to describe the most successful teachers’ tactics for adhering to formal policies strategically, bending the rules in order to survive and advance in a workplace fraught with competition and insecurity.