Joanne W. Golann. Scripting the Moves: Culture & Control in a “No-Excuses” Charter School. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2021. Cloth, 299pp. ISBN: 9780691168876
This review examines Joanne Golann’s ethnography of a “no-excuses” charter school, where highly scripted behavioral codes – designed to make middle-class cultural capital explicit and accessible to low-income students of color – prove to be a double-edged instrument. While the school’s disciplinary apparatus delivers on its promise of classroom order and college-readiness signals, it simultaneously crowds out the very interactional skills (assertiveness, negotiation, self-directed initiative) that define success beyond the school gates. Drawing on comparisons with similarly examination-driven schools in China, the review raises three open questions about Golann’s framework: whether schools can meaningfully teach cultural capital at all; what a “beneficial” mix of interactional tools would even look like; and whether the value of any such toolkit is too life-course-dependent and context-sensitive to be institutionalized. The review concludes that, whatever its limits, Golann’s book is a lucid reminder that high-control schooling is best understood as a symptom – a desperate lesser-evil – rather than a cause of educational inequality.