From Awareness to Action: Institutional Agents Attempt to (Re)imagine College Readiness and Success at a No-Excuses Charter High School

The “college-for-all” movement has guided education reform efforts over the last few decades. Of college-for-all adopters, the “no-excuses” charter school model is arguably the most successful and controversial. Schools that use this model produce high standardized test scores and four-year college acceptance rates for marginalized students. However, questions regarding whether the ends of college-for-all justify the practices utilized by these schools to achieve such outcomes are prevalant. Few studies have investigated how institutional agents—critical actors in the college preparation process for marginalized youth—seek to reflect on and change potentially problematic college-for-all approaches in a no-excuses charter high school context. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to understand how institutional agents perceive the ways in which the economic, social, and political drivers of the college-for-all ethos have shaped their “no-excuses” charter high school and (2) to uncover how institutional agents are attempting to (re)imagine and transform traditional “no-excuses” beliefs and practices related to college readiness and success in their high school context. This study followed a qualitative case study design bound by a single no-excuses charter high school located in a city on the East Coast. Drawing on interviews with 14 institutional agents, in-person school observations, and document review, this study integrates Perna and Thomas’s (2006) college success model with Stanton-Salazar’s (2011) social capital framework to understand how institutional agents within a no-excuses charter high school context are shaped by, and have the power to shape, their school’s organizational habitus. This study highlights how institutional agents within a “successful” no-excuses charter high school grapple with changing one-size-fits-all college expectations and white and middle-class norms associated with the college-for-all ethos that have been intertwined with the no-excuses model since its inception. Because no-excuses charter schools are shaped by external pressures as well as their own longstanding habitus, findings highlight the tensions, complexity, and tradeoffs that institutional agents encountered when attempting to make change in spaces that they themselves are entrenched in. This study suggests, however, that institutional agents, when acting as empowerment agents, can resist assimilationist college preparation practices and (re)shape their school’s organizational habitus to facilitate marginalized students’ empowerment. Recommendations for policy, practice, and theory are discussed.