In terms of student outcomes, charter schools have only achieved a local maximum.

I've been listening to season 2 of the excellent podcast StartUp, which follows the founders of online matchmaking service Dating Ring as they launch their business. The founders faced a classic Silicon Valley decision while participating in the famed startup incubator Y Combinator — pivot or persevere — and this conundrum has a lot of relevance to education, particularly "no excuses" charter networks.

Dating Ring was based on the idea of group dating, which is that meeting people in a group is less stressful and more favorable to meeting the perfect person for you. This idea had carried the founders all the way to YC and small profitability, but their user growth and income had began to plateau. Should Dating Ring abandon the group dating concept in favor of a new business model?

The data is pretty strong that, on average, public charter schools outperform regular public schools in terms of academic achievements. A 2013 CREDO at Stanford study found that charters outperform traditional public schools in reading and tie in math nationally, and a 2011 meta-analysis from the University of California, San Diego found that charters outperform traditional public schools in a variety of areas, including elementary reading and math, middle school math, and urban high school reading (Separating Fact & Fiction: What You Need to Know About Charter Schools, pg. 8). If the data is limited to no-excuses charter networks such as KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon, the results are much more encouraging.

All of these facts point to these schools being on the correct route, with the main issue being the need to extend this approach even more. A glance at the real kids at these institutions, on the other hand, offers a totally different tale. According to the New York Times, these are pupils lining up at Harlem Success Academy 4:

The Harlem Success network achieves exceptional New York state test results, with 94 percent of children passing the arithmetic test compared to 35 percent overall. But the children's eyes tell a different story: shattered and resigned to their fate, to spend their days SLANTing and following commands and working their buttocks out to pass a paper test. Stepping out of line, either physically or metaphorically, will result in harsh punishment.

While I may be reading too much into one photograph, charter school officials are becoming increasingly aware that "no excuses" may have reached its limit. Elizabeth Green devotes numerous chapters on charter school discipline in Building a Better Teacher, and she praises educators who recognized that the approach may be taken too far. And Katherine Reynolds Lewis recently wrote a great essay for Mother Jones about how negative penalties for children only make poor behavior worse.

While I may be reading too much into a single snapshot, charter school administrators are increasingly realizing that "no excuses" may have reached its limit. In Building a Better Teacher, Elizabeth Green devoted many chapters on charter school discipline and praises educators who understood that the method may be carried too far. And Katherine Reynolds Lewis recently published an excellent piece for Mother Jones about how harsh punishments for children often make bad behavior worse.

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