'No Excuses Discipline Changes Lives(!)'

Draconianism hiding behind a mask of rhetorical logic is found in its fullest form in Jonathan Porter’s ‘No Excuses Discipline Changes Lives’. Porter is undoubtedly a very clever man: he has an MA in theology from Cambridge and is, at the time of writing, deputy head (academic) at Radley College, the fees for which are a couple of grand south of fifty thousand quid a year. His essay in the follow-up book, ‘The Power of Culture’, is evidence of a serious intellect: the work of an opponent you could learn from and might enjoy grappling with. He spent, I think, seven years at Michaela Free School, and during its early incarnation wrote the ‘No Excuses’ essay. It is a clever piece of work, intellectually a great deal more sophisticated than the usual unwanted, patronising advice from people with little experience of teaching or of having ever been to a state school. At the time of publication, Porter, whose writing contains all the awkward structural devices and self-assurance so beloved of some parts of the independent sector, had been teaching for perhaps as little as two years. If he was privately educated, and it certainly appears so from the imperious nature of his opinions, the cold haughtiness of his prose and the usual conclusions based on entirely false premises, it seems likely that his only experience of state secondary schools at the time of writing was at Michaela. This is not the basis for a balanced view; it is not leavened by any experience at all of the thing it criticises.

In an antiseptic, civilised, yet cold tone, he declares that the situation of behaviour in schools he has never been in is a matter of “moral urgency” and that “the ambient level of behaviour in Britain’s school is poor.”[1] The word ‘ambient’ is doing a lot of lifting here. It serves as a rather intelligent acknowledgement of his own lack of experience at the time. There is no way that Porter would know this from personal experience, so what is this conclusion based on? Hearsay and perhaps a few hand-wringing articles designed to stir up moral panic in the billionaire owned right-wing press. Little else. Porter’s chapter is in possession of both moral certainty and moral absolutism. His use of rhetorical logic errs on being sophisticated, but his drawing on of moral panic in order to call for tighter controls on human behaviour, specifically that of working-class children, feels authoritarian.

His conclusion that “some teachers expect their own children to do their homework or put their hand up before speaking in class, yet they hold other people’s children to different standards”,[2] based on his trembling lack of experience, can be called out for the slightly juvenile supposition that it is. He follows this with, “some of these teachers believe in different standards for different pupils.”[3] If I were in a room with Mr Porter at this point, mentoring an early career teacher, I would take my glasses off, chastise him for his suppositions and tell him why this is in two bare declaratives. Different students have different starting points. What is success for one may not be success for another. Do not express vehement opinions of something you know little about in flimsy, see-through rhetorical logic or you may come a cropper.

He argues with Rosseau’s view of what he calls “the inevitable goodness of children”,[4] and here we go: someone with no experience of the social or educational milieu he is seeking to deconstruct starts arguing against human goodness. We have seen what happens when this worldview of children being inherently flawed takes hold: he writes at one point of the “responsibilities to correct ordinary adolescent behaviour”[5] in a sentence that seems as perverse as it is overbearing. Why? If it’s normal behaviour, leave it alone.[6]

He is of the view that “kindness, gratitude and empathy are not intrinsic and brought down by institutions.”[7] The first part of this is a silly thing to say. Of course, they are. Teachers having high behavioural and academic expectations of students is a defining characteristic of a high-achieving teacher. There is a quasi-spiritual element to it that one might have thought an Oxbridge educated theologian would be able to locate. If you communicate the view that you believe in your students’ intrinsic kindness, gratitude and empathy, it is more than likely to appear. If you communicate the view that the children in front of you are savages to be civilised, you may be in receipt of such savagery. As a student in a tough school once said to me in my fourteenth year of teaching over a decade-and-a-bit ago, “Sir, not all the teachers understand that if you go ‘Rargh!’ in the mirror, it goes ‘Rargh’ back at you.” You might not quite understand this if you are an early career teacher with no experience of the social class of the children you serve.

His evangelistic praise for the ‘catching children doing good’ is a base level of understanding and reminds one of the Orwell quote, “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it,”[8] and might be taken to be evidence of the school he worked in having a collective messianic complex so substantial that they will claim credit for the invention of the wheel. The level of experiential sophistication is fully revealed as Porter, while not knowing he is doing so, reveals himself to be that bluntest of all tools – a behaviourist: “this mixture of carrot and stick is enough to change their behaviours.”[9] Punishments and rewards, the way you might treat a dog you are training: it is an unsophisticated, spiritually unkind and intellectually spindly way of treating and viewing human children, and training and punishment can tend towards mistaking each for the other. 

There are very few teachers of seasoned experience who hold this thin and fraying piece of dilapidated string as being useful in a classroom. This is generally because they have a thing called ‘skill’. The fact that Michaela uses a behaviourist approach is further evidenced in another chapter, “we teach them … the consequences that follow from making wise choices [carrot], and the consequences that follow from making unwise choices [stick].”[10] It is further evidenced by this clanging certainty which, unbeknown to its author, reads as little more than an involuntary expression of lack of experience: “At Michaela, we believe that reprimands are a genuine incentive to behave.”[11]

Porter writes the dread and dull cliché beloved of the punishment fetishising dominator, “discipline is not a dirty word.”[12] In truth, there is a modifier missing here: that of ‘self’. Self-discipline is a good thing, and it is the role of the teacher to help students to locate it; externally imposed discipline, while sometimes necessary, can err on being ugly, there can be extremities and a human who educates children does not like employing it. We take no joy in sanctions and reverse the ugly maxim as we know that, if you use the rod, you spoil the child. Sometimes, it is a necessary evil (and isn’t that an interesting combination of words?), but there are experienced teachers who do not have cause to use it at all.

In an approach that is characteristic of the ‘evidence-led’, he’s perfectly happy to ignore evidence when it suits him. His claim that “when it comes for the evidence for the ‘no excuses’ approach the best we can say is that solid conclusions are hard to draw.”[13] This claim is either mendacious or ignorant. The expert professionals at the American Psychological Association are emphatic: zero tolerance approaches are deeply damaging to the children that suffer them and the society that hosts them.[14] Calling ‘zero tolerance’ ‘no excuses’ doesn’t cut it.

Ultimately, this chapter, like all of those masquerading professional expertise they did not have at that point, whilst not as widely read nor as influential as ‘Teach Like a Champion’, is evidence of a sweeping darkness infesting the moral heart of education: an early career teacher from a private school who’s never taught in a normal state school paints the voices of experience as being wrong from a position of no knowledge, decides that behaviour in schools that he has never seen is poor and prescribes a hearty dose of punishment for minor infractions. 

Zero tolerance is a suffocating blanket of illogic and brutishness. It isn’t appropriate for students who bring aspirin into school having forgotten to seek permission or who forgot their pen. Sheldon Wein, who is an expert, writes of the recent period: “we are now in a time where the tolerance of intolerance is less and less attractive.”[15] We are surely at that time. No twisted carnival goes on forever. 

 

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[1] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p68

[2] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p67.

[3] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p69.

[4] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p67.

[5] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p67.

[6] Recall here his head teacher’s view of original sin.

[7] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p68.

[8] George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 

[9] Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p72.

[10] Joe Kirby, Bootcamp Breaks Bad Habits in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p82. Think about the word ‘stick’ and what it implies.

[11] Jake Plastow-Chason, Rethinking Initial Teacher Training in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p164.

[12]Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p68.

[13]Jonathan Porter, No-Excuses Discipline Changes Lives in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p75.

[14] American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force. (2008). Are zero tolerance policies effective in schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. American Psychologist, 63, 852–862.

[15]Sheldon Wein, Exploring the Virtues (and Vices) of Zero Tolerance Arguments (2013) Ossa Conference Archive, 171. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/ p9.