No Excuses: Race and reckoning at a Chicago charter school

A high-performing charter school with a strict approach is reinventing itself after reassessing its own policies as being racist.

Coming up at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, MPR News with Angela Davis presents an award-winning documentary by producer DJ Cashmere for APM Reports.

Cashmere spent seven years teaching Black and brown students at a Noble Street charter high school in Chicago. At the time, Noble followed a popular model called “no excuses.” Its schools required strict discipline and promised low-income students a better shot at college.

After Cashmere left the classroom to become a journalist, Noble disavowed its own policies, calling them “assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist and anti-Black.”

Cashmere, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. He also seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.

No Excuses is one of two audio documentaries released in 2022 though American Public Media's Educate podcast — stories about education, opportunity and how people learn. It won a national award in June from the Education Writers Association.

This program was created by DJ Cashmere, Catherine Winter, Anna Canny, Alden Loury, Chris Julin, Craig Thorson and Andy Kruse for APM Reports.

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