Most of you who have been reading this blog over the past five years know the secrets of Success Academy’s “success.” Careful selection of students. Exclusion of those unlikely to succeed. Lots of outside money.
Jersey Jazzman has done us the favor of documenting these strategies.
He found exactly what you would expect:
“Schools like Success Academy almost always have structural advantages — advantages that have nothing to do with their governance — over the schools against which they compare themselves:
“Different student populations.
“Resource advantages.
“A less-experienced, less-expensive faculty.
“A longer school day/year and/or smaller class sizes and/or tutoring, made possible by #2 & #3 in combination with free-riding on the public district schools.
“Strict disciplinary codes which encourage students who do not thrive in a “no excuses” environment to leave.
“In the minority of cases where “successful” charters out-perform expectations, I have seen no compelling evidence that freedom from teachers unions and public district school regulations, curricular innovations, or parental “choice” are what lead to “success.” Instead, some combination of the five factors above almost always provide the most reasonable explanation for the difference in outcomes.”
Eva Moskowitz pretends that she has cracked some secret code and that her methods could be applied on a large scale.
But what she has done is not replicable for an entire district. If you exclude and kick out the kids you don’t want, where will they go?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“A less-experienced, less-expensive faculty.”
This is an advantage?
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Costs less, easily molded, fired at will
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Moeteef, as I have explained many times on my blog:
A less-experienced faculty is a less-expensive faculty. That allows a charter deploying less-experienced teachers several options not available to public schools employing more experienced teachers but constrained by budgetary pressures:
Lengthen the school day
Lengthen the school year
Decrease class size and student:staff ratios
Hire tutors
Here’s the thing: there is a very good case to be made that charters employing less-expensive faculty “free ride” on public schools. Charter teachers just starting out are willing to work more hours in the hope they will get to transfer out to a public schools with less hours and, therefore, better pay-for-hours-worked.
I actually agree with the NYDN today in one sense: there is a lesson to be learned from charters like Success — MONEY MATTERS. They play a game at the expense of other students and schools, but SA does manage to get more resources to their students. It helps them boos their scores, no question.
But why must we give up democratically controlled schools that employ career teachers and have humane disciplinary practices for them to gain that advantage?
Diane, as always, thanks for reposting my stuff.
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Jazzman may blind people “with science,” but most “reformers” are not seeking truth or evidence. They are brainwashed “children of the corn” zealots like DeVos. At least New York collects some data in order to make some comparisons, which is more than a lot of states that throw caution to the wind.
Resource inequities are a problem. A law reducing the amount of aid from the state equal to the amount of private donations would help restore some of the balance, but I doubt Success would let that happen. Why should one group of students be shown such extreme partiality, even though they do not accept all students?
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Some of charts with data are from the National Center for Education Statistics, not just New York. An important feature of this summary, in addition to others is the big reminder that Eva and Success Academies are swimming in a sea of extra money in addition to not taking in and keeping students who are usually less likely to score high on tests.
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JJ and Diane,
I get that having less experienced, cheaper teachers can boost a district’s resources. I am not convinced, however, that lengthening the school day or the school year in order to cram students’ heads with more and more test prep at the expense of a well rounded education is in any way an “advantage” for students, especially when the teachers are young, inexperienced, and cheap. Standardized test scores in math and english are not a valid proxy for student achievement, yet these bogus scores are endlessly cited as evidence of school and teacher quality.
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Moe,
I think you are making the same point as JJ. With longer hours and more test prep, you can have more time to train students but it is not good education.
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What difference does it make to charter loons whether students are receiving a good education if they think of those students as objects monetized via test scores? They’re not working with humans, as far as they’re concerned; they’re working with monetized data points. To them, people are numbers. I do not look forward to the day they start tattooing test scores on forearms and sewing them onto uniforms.
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My response to JJ:
“In the minority of cases where ‘successful’ charters out-perform expectations, I have seen no compelling evidence that freedom from teachers unions and public district school regulations, curricular innovations, or parental ‘choice’ are what lead to ‘success.’ ”
In respect to impacts of teachers unions, I haven’t seen anything more persuasive than this in Chapter 6, “Are Teachers Unions Good for Students?” by Dan Goldhaber from “Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Today’s Schools”:
“Eberts and Stone find the total (direct and indirect) effect of collecive bargaining agreements is to raise student achievement by about 3 percent over that of districts without such agreements. However, this increase in achievement comes at a cost, as the operating expenses in districts with such agreements are about 15 percent higher per pupil than in comparably achieving districts without such agreements.
“An interesting finding from this study is that the effects of bargaining are not the same for all students. The overall 3 percent increase in student achievement is driven mainly by a large 7 percent increase in the achievement of students whose test performance is close to the mean. Students who are either well below or well above the mean are marginally disadvantaged by the existence of collective bargaining agreements.”
Not being expert in the subject, I’d be interested if you have any different sense of what’s most valid in that respect. I’ve been especially troubled when I’ve seen teachers unions limit use of low-cost tutoring systems.
Your focus on a charter school having fewer students with disabilities or fewer who are proficient in English is unpersuasive. You don’t demonstrate, for example, that an ELL student would be expected to make less rapid progress than a non-ELL student. That would actually seem counter-intuitive to me. And you don’t attend to the fact that a successful school may have a markedly diminishing number ELL students as they progress through school, because the kids become proficient in English, and fewer SWD, because students lose that classification once they start making good progress in a regular classroom.
Elizabeth Setren looked closely at such issues in respect to Boston charter schools:
“At the same time, critics of charter schools not only note that special needs students appear underrepresented in charters, but they also question whether charters serve these students well. Perhaps urban charters’ remarkable achievement gains are generated in part by a tendency to focus on non-special needs students.
“This paper reports new lottery-based evidence of charter effectiveness for special needs students. The results show that special education and ELL students experience large academic gains in charter schools: over 0.26 standard deviations in math and over 0.19 standard deviations on English on the state standardized exams. These gains are similar to those made by non-special needs students in charter schools. Charters also significantly increase the likelihood that special needs students meet a key high school graduation requirement, become eligible for a state merit scholarship, and take an AP exam. Special education students in charters score on average 115.7 points higher on the SAT than their traditional public school counterparts.
“Charters generate academic gains even for the most disadvantaged charter applicants. Special needs students who scored in the bottom third on their state exams in the year of the lottery experience large positive effects of over 0.22 standard deviations in math.English Language Learners with the lowest baseline English exam scores have the largest gains. Students with the most severe needs– special education students who spent the majority of their time in substantially separate classrooms and ELLs with beginning English proficiency at the time of the lottery–perform significantly better in charters than in traditional public schools.
“I also document striking differences in special needs classification practices in Boston charter and traditional public schools. Charter enrollment nearly doubles the likelihood that a student in special education at the time of the lottery loses this classification by the beginning of the following school year. Moreover, charters are three times as likely to remove an ELL classification. Charters are also three times more likely than traditional public schools to move special education students into general education classrooms. Classification practices are weakly correlated to charter gains, suggesting that special needs classification is not essential for special needs students to make progress.”
https://seii.mit.edu/research/study/special-education-and-english-language-learner-students-in-boston-charter-schools-impact-and-classification/
And, of course, JJ, your continuing resort to “cohort attrition” analysis as a substitute for actual attrition analysis is increasingly difficult to explain generously. As you very likely know, in respect to Success Academy, a close look at its actual attrition figures by Beth Fertig/WNYC showed those to be lower than average for NYC district schools, lower than average for NYC charter schools and only 57.4% as high as nearby district schools.
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If unions hampered academic progress, then the right to work states in the South would be the highest performing in the nation.
But the highly unionized schools in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey are the highest performing in the nation.
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I’m sure you’d agree that that kind of correlation should not be considered convincing evidence.
One could make a strong case that the non-unionized charter schools in Boston greatly outperform the unionized district schools.
But then again, UP Academy Boston is an example of a superlative unionized charter school here…
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Stephen,
I once spoke to the annual meeting of the conservative Philanthropy Roundtable. The speaker of the moment was Rick Berman, who runs the notorious and obnoxious Center for Union Facts. He is a P.R. man who knows nothing about education but hates teachers’ unions. He described his efforts to smear the union in New Jersey. I posed a question to him and to the room: can you name a public school district or state that is non-union and successful? Dead silence.
Charter schools prove nothing. They choose their students; they have high teacher turnover. They are not a model of American education, and you know it.
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Diane: “I posed a question to him and to the room: can you name a public school district or state that is non-union and successful? Dead silence.”
Lest I also respond too quietly: Arlington, VA?
I’ll try to address the subject more extensively in this thread, where you highlighted the same event:
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Stephen,
The room was full of privatizers and union-haters like you. No one suggested Arlington.
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1) Stephen, as you know from our repeated back-and-forths, the issue in cohort attrition is backfilling. SA does not backfill after Grade 4; Moskowitz herself admits she doesn’t know how to educate children who come into her system that late. Fertig’s 2016 report references this, although not nearly as much as it should.
Comparing the test outcomes of schools that do and do not backfill is, in my opinion, invalid. These are fundamentally different student populations.
2) To be clear: the “freedom” SA has from teachers unions does allow it to churn staff, which keeps staffing costs lower. I contend SA benefits from free-riding (see Martin Carnoy’s EPI report for more) off of unionized wages, and that it will have a difficult time bringing its staffing model to scale.
3) Julie Mead and I reviewed Steren’s report in an NEPC brief:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-expansion
The central issue here — as with all of the Boston lottery charter studies — is that they can only be generalized to the population of students who apply to the lottery. This is a major limitation, as I have explained to you many times.
Also, there is great variation between the charter schools studied in terms of their special education populations. I’ll leave you to read the review and ponder its conclusions.
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Mark JJ Weber,
Thank you for all your research. I also hope you will closely examine cohorts to see how manipulated those passing rates are.
I just randomly looked at one Success Academy school — Crown Heights — and compared the 3rd grade class that just got 100% passing rates with the 2nd grade class the previous year.
The 3rd grade class tested this year was 85 students — down from 97 in 2nd grade. But, there were 52 boys in that 2nd grade class, and ONLY 38 boys left in 3rd grade to take the state tests! 27% of the 2nd grade boys disappeared from the cohort the year before testing! Meanwhile, the number of girls rose from 43 to 45 (most likely new children allowed to join the cohort in 3rd grade after having proven they were at 3rd grade level in the pre-test that Success Academy gives them before allowing them to join a grade.)
What is even more concerning is that we have no way of knowing if there were even more than 27% of the 2nd grade boys who disappeared. Some could very well have been replaced by new boys who are pre-tested before they are allowed to join the class in 3rd grade.
So while we have no idea how many of the original K lottery winners from that cohort disappeared before the cohort achieved miraculous 100% passing rates, we know WITHOUT A DOUBT that at least 27% of the 2nd grade boys did not remain with their class by the time of the 3rd grade exam.
It is shocking to me that Success Academy gets away with this. If anyone ever had access to how many of their original K lottery winners made it to 3rd grade it would be very enlightening. Especially the at-risk children in their schools in very poor districts. There is a good reason that Moskowitz won’t expand elsewhere — there are no cities comparable with the 1.1 million students from which she can choose.
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JJ: “1) Stephen, as you know from our repeated back-and-forths, the issue in cohort attrition is backfilling….”
Your posting never refers to “backfill” but rather states: “Success Academy loses many of its students as the cohort moves from grade to grade. ”
As we have discussed, comparisons of supposed “cohort attrition” between charter and district schools are, all too often, attempts to create the impression that “cohort attrition” is a real reflection of actual attrition as in loss of exiting students. To the extent you wish to separate yourself from such efforts and focus instead on “backfill” issues, I would encourage you to explicitly state that the issue you are addressing is lack of backfill rather than students lost to attrition, and to try to rely on any available reliable backfill data for your research/analyses.
JJ: “Comparing the test outcomes of schools that do and do not backfill is, in my opinion, invalid. These are fundamentally different student populations.”
As you know there are selective district schools that are equally or more disinclined to backfill, with which some comparisons might be attempted.
Here are Massachusetts’ requirement for backfilling at charter schools.
http://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/guidance/2016-3-faq.html?section=Backfilling
If I understand that correctly a 7-12 charter school would be required to backfill grades 7, 8 and 9.
While Boston Latin, a grade 7-12 selective district exam school, only backfills at grades 7 and 9.
The dearth of backfill at schools like Boston Latin, and Stuyvesant H.S. in NYC, don’t seem to be clearly associated with any startling gains for individuals compared to what they might be expected to achieve at less backfill-resistant alternatives:
https://economics.mit.edu/files/9518
For a Boston K-12 system that is required to backfill from grades K-6, might it be appropriate to compare results for grades K-6 with schools that backfill? Should we expect huge advances at such a school system beyond the last grade where a backfill requirement is in effect?
JJ: “2) To be clear: the “freedom” SA has from teachers unions does allow it to churn staff, which keeps staffing costs lower.
The theory that high performing charter schools are achieving strikingly positive results as a result of churning inexperienced relatively low-paid teachers to enable longer hours and smaller classes might be rather more persuasive, if it also imagined the additional requirement of a considerably more stable core group of highly qualified, experienced, extraordinary skillful, dedicated senior staff able to effectively recruit qualified candidates and remarkably swiftly help advance their skills toward maturity.
JJ: “3) Julie Mead and I reviewed Steren’s report in an NEPC brief”
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-expansion
Yes, I had read your ruminations on possibilities, some of them rather far-fetched, that were outside the scope of Setren’s research. None of it effectively undercut her findings.
For example this from your NEPC brief:
“The study also reports that selected lottery students with disabilities are less likely to keep their disability classification than the comparative group of lottery entrants who remained in BPS. As noted above, such a pattern could stem from contextual issues that have little to do with sector differences or even pedagogical approaches. Likewise, no data are provided concerning the frequency for classification changes in BPS as a whole. Therefore, the report provides no evidence that charters change SWD disability classifications any more than BPS.”
“No evidence”? Really? In other words, having read her research you’d be perfectly willing to take either side of the bet on relative incidence of declassification comparing charter schools with BPS as a whole if I gave you slight odds? I certainly know which side of the bet I’d seek, with great confidence of success.
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the ny parents comment about declining enrollments is not entirely convincing. in some grades, the students who take the test actually went up; i checked other schools and i see similar in enrollments from one cohort to the next, over 10% in the case of ps 29 in cobble hill. i’m not sure the argument really holds.
to be clear,i checked the 3rd graders who took the test in 2015, vs the 4th graders who took the test in 2016, vs the 5th graders who took the test in 2017. pls confirm that’s the correct way of checking whether the enrollment has decreased..
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bklynborn,
That’s a fair question, but until the NYSED puts up enrollment data we have no idea how many students were in the 5th grade at PS 29. Fifth grade is a very popular year for students to opt out of testing so unlike Success Academy, not all PS 29 5th graders took the tests this year.
But you seem to agree with me that this is important data. We know from the one recent IBO study that a group of charter school NETWORKS that included 5 Success Academy schools lost 49.5% of their entering Kindergarten cohort. Given that Beth Fertig “proved” that Success Academy has the 2nd highest attrition rate of any charter network, it is more than likely that they lost more than 49.5% of their entering K class.
Why wouldn’t you be curious as to why? Before a charter should be allowed to expand to cherry pick a disproportionate number of affluent students with public funds while throwing many at-risk struggling students under the bus, we should ALL agree that we should know exactly how many at-risk students get shown the door.
Here is something that you seem to ignore. If Success Academy had a secret sauce that didn’t involve nasty methods, other charter schools would have the same high scores. Certainly the charter NETWORKS would match their scores. KIPP is not intentionally keeping crappy teachers. Uncommon Schools doesn’t tell their administrators “keep those violent children because we like to see other kids getting hurt by them”.
No other charter is using the reprehensible weeding out methods that Success is using. They are complicit by remaining silent when they should speak out. One day Eva Moskowitz will come for them and they will either have to be as ruthless as she is in throwing low-income children under the bus while convincing higher income kids to come for their “free private school”. They will either have to go along or disappear. Which do you think they will choose? I’m betting they go along because at heart, I don’t believe the other charters leaders care about anything as much as they care about their own pocketbook and profile. That’s why they have remained silent for so long. They are complicit and it’s about time they stopped looking the other way so they get thrown the scraps.
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My response to Stephen B Ronan:
He lied. There was no study that said Success Academy’s attrition rates were “lower than average for NYC charter schools.”
The WNYC study showed that shockingly the charter with the most money, the longest wait lists, the highest demand, the BEST results in the state(!) was losing far more students than many charters who served a far more disadvantaged and transient population.
Now if you are like Stephen B Ronan you simply believe that the same poor parents begging for a great school and celebrating their child’s “win” of a Kindergarten lottery spot would voluntarily pull their children from that same high performing charter at a rate much higher than other lower performing charters.
That would make sense if you also believe Eva Moskowitz when she says she gets lots of violent Kindergarten children in her schools serving almost no white students.
A high-performing, rich charter should lose far fewer students than a mediocre charter. But they don’t. And Stephen B Ronan refuses to ask why. Some questions are just too inconvenient to ask when you are trying to promote the racist view that non-white parents just don’t like good schools and their children tend to be far more violent than white children.
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^^Stephen B Ronan, perhaps you didn’t intentionally lie, you just made an error because you did not read Beth Fertig’s WNYC study carefully.
Here is a link:
http://www.wnyc.org/story/nyc-charter-school-attrition-rates/
As you can see from the chart, Success Academy’s “57% of district public school’s attrition” is terrible. For you to brag about it demonstrates a shocking misunderstanding of that chart.
The chart showed eight out of nine NYC charter school networks had LOWER attrition rates than Success Academy. Significantly lower. Shockingly lower.
And none of those charter schools had the reputation, high test scores, nor massive funding and resources that Success Academy did. None of them came close to the 98% passing rates of Success Academy. Next to Success Academy, those other charters that kept most of their students look like failures, with huge cohorts of students failing state tests.
At least be honest about the racist implications you are trying to get us to believe. You want us all to think that at-risk parents just don’t like high performing, rich charters as much as they like underfunded, poorly resourced, low-performing charters. And that is a very ugly and nasty thing to imply. I hope you will apologize.
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NYC PSP: “Stephen B Ronan, perhaps you didn’t intentionally lie, you just made an error because you did not read Beth Fertig’s WNYC study carefully.”
Please be explicit about what I stated that you consider false. Directly quote it. Thanks.
I suspect that your confusion derives from your seeing SA having a higher attrition rate than 7 of the largest charter school networks and your not successfully reconciling that with the fact that SA has a lower attrition rate that is average for all NYC charter schools. If that’s the problem, you may benefit from looking at the WNYC spreadsheet, where it may become especially clear to you that there are many charter schools outside of those 7 charter school networks that had higher than average (and higher than Success Academy), attrition rates.
With a little further research, you may even find persuasive evidence that the charter schools like SA that have below average attrition are significantly more “high performing” than those with above average attrition.
I hope you’ll hang on tight and GoPro yourself as you encounter that dip and turn in your intellectual roller coaster.
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Stephen, if a charter school accepts the students it wants; if it has few students with special needs; if it has few ELLs; if it can push out the kids it doesn’t want; of course it will have higher scores. So what? What is the model that public schools should adopt? Should they also take the kids they want and get rid of the ones they don’t want? Where will those students go? Ideas?
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Diane: “Stephen, if a charter school accepts the students it wants…”
I would encourage you to spend a few minutes reviewing this material:
http://www.matchschool.org/about/annual-letter/
And then consider rephrasing your question to better reflect realities such as what you see there. Perhaps something like: If a charter school accepts students not by choice but by lottery, if it admits students with roughly similar degrees of ELL and special education needs compared to most local district schools, if it has one of the lowest attrition rates in the entire city, and if its students develop considerably greater capacity than their peers in local district schools to do well on tests of academic achievement, and if the success of such students is substantially predicated on intensive assistance by relatively low-cost AmeriCorps tutors (http://www.matcheducation.org/join/match-corps), should you, Diane, speak out clearly and forcefully to try to ensure that the teachers unions are precluded from restricting and blocking similar tutoring programs intended to benefit district school students?
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oops, typo… “the fact that SA has a lower attrition rate that is average for all NYC charter” should be “lower attrition rate than”.
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Stephen B Ronan,
Why are you trying to change the subject. The WNYC study showed that of 9 charter NETWORKS there were 7 who had significantly lower attrition rates than Success Academy. Only one had higher attrition.
Let me repeat that again because you are so desperate to change the subject: The TOP PERFORMING charter network in all of NY State — the one with the “huge demand” and wait lists that are “thousands of children long” had an attrition rate that that significantly higher than 7 other charter networks. Only one was higher. And every single one of those charter NETWORKS that had a lower attrition rate had far more students failing state tests. Why would parents stay in other charter networks and leave Success Academy, the best and richest of them all?
How do you explain that?
Did you even READ the testimony from the Success Academy parent to the NAACP about how his child and 2 others were marked from day 1 for removal?
Six hundred students leaving in a single year. And that is ONLY in grades K-4. That is an entire school of students made to feel unwelcome or put on got to go lists or sent to the “calm down” chair because one of the most celebrated teachers at the school — the “model” — was taught that humiliation will either get a kid to learn or get him out.
You have a lot of chutzpah trying to change the subject by saying “yes, I realize that Success Academy has one of the highest attrition rates of any charter NETWORK, but let’ talk about “averages” and include some poorly funded random individual charters so I can not address why 600 students in a single year left. You have a lot of chutzpah trying to avoid making an apples to apples comparison of charter networks where the best and richest one is the one more parents run away from. At least, more at-risk parents. Perhaps that explains Moskowitz laser focus on getting more affluent children in her schools.
Seriously, do you care about at-risk kids or not? Is it just a game to you? Quit trying to change the subject. YOU are the one who cited WNYC but when it shows that Success Academy has a TERRIBLE attrition rate compared to lower performing, lower funded charter networks — apples to apples — you can’t change the subject fast enough.
You are dishonest, sir. And it shows. Sadly, your concern for at-risk children is about as deep as Paul Ryan’s when he, too, marveled at how well his policies were helping them.
Can you even address the truth for once? Why would Success Academy’s attrition rate be higher than KIPP, Icahn, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, Ascend, Explore Schools?
Aren’t those charter CEOs as adept at recognizing the violent non-white 5 year olds as Eva Moskowitz is?
Or maybe you have another reason that you’d offer instead of changing the subject? For once, try being honest.
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NYC PSP: “Why are you trying to change the subject.”
Mmm. Let’s see. You had accused me of lying. I had requested that you specify what I had said that was false. You have declined to do so.
From that, I intuit that you may have, at very long last, grasped for the very first time that, according to the WNYC research, Success Academy actually did demonstrate a lower than average attrition rate in comparison to charter schools overall in NYC, as well as only 57.4% as much attrition as a comparison group of local public district schools.
Progress!
I look forward to observing as you radically reconstruct your original chronic argument, and turn it into a paean composed in celebration of Icahn and the Kippsters.
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Where did the public school students go? To another public school.
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Diane: “Where did the public school students go? To another public school.”
Attrition from either charter schools or from traditional public schools includes students moving to local or remote traditional or selective district schools, to charter schools, to parochial schools, to private schools…
Perhaps what you’re trying to get at, in roundabout fashion, is that parents may commonly start out by sending their kids to traditional district schools like they themselves attended, but if problems arise… if kids are struggling academically or socially (e.g., being subject to intolerable teasing/bullying) they may be motivated to examine alternatives like charter schools… and if the kids are lucky in the lottery they’ll then be attrited from the traditional public school…
Perhaps not.
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Stephen,
What part of charters can be transferred to public schools?
Where should profoundly disabled children go? ELLs?
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Stephen,
The subject of the post is Success AcDemy.
Why do you cite charters in Mass. to justify Eva’s draconian policies of discipline and cherry picking of students? Are all charters the same as Eva’s? Are the charrrers in Massachusetts just like Eva’s?
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Stephen B Ronan,
LOL! I was quite sure you would not answer the question directly but thanks for proving it.
So I will ask it again:
Why would Success Academy’s attrition rate be so much HIGHER than all but one of the 9 charter networks in NYC?
Your desperation to avoid the question shows how little regard you have for at-risk kids. No wonder you believe Eva Moskowitz when she tells you how violent so many non-white kids are. Deep down, you believe it must be true.
Why would Success Academy’s attrition rate be so much HIGHER than all but one of the 9 charter networks in NYC?
Your refusal to offer a theory tells me that you likely know your theory would expose your racism. “At-risk families THINK they like high performing charter networks but it turns out many of them don’t but they do like low-performing ones.” “Non-white families have far more violent 5 year olds and Eva is much better at recognizing them than KIPP and Ascend”.
Why would Success Academy’s attrition rate be so much HIGHER than all but one of the 9 charter networks in NYC?
We all know that the best performing richest charter network should have the lowest attrition rate among charter networks, not one of the highest. Only a racist would try to come up with a nasty reason to blame the parents or kids as you do.
Why would Success Academy’s attrition rate be so much HIGHER than all but one of the 9 charter networks in NYC?
Stephen, if you want to be a honest person, at least say “I don’t know and it does seem weird but I’m not at all interested in why because I’m here to promote them not lead anything to question them.”
At least I wouldn’t think you were a racist. Just a man or woman who lost their integrity a long time ago and has the paycheck to prove it.
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^^^I realize I am wasting my breath arguing with a pro-charter troll like Stephen B Ronan who keeps up his innuendo that non-white at-risk kids are very often violent but if you don’t call out liars we get people like Trump. So here I go again:
Ronan REFUSES to compare Success Academy with other charter networks educating the same students (actually most educate more at-risk kids than Success Academy). That is because Success Academy — the highest performing network by far — loses far more students than 7 other charter networks. The best charter in the state also loses more students than other chains. That’s weird no matter how you look at it.
But Stephen insists we only compare to “averages” of charters because like most dishonest reformers, he feels it is MORE appropriate to include: “Others, like Broome Street Academy and the John Lindsay Wildcat Academy, with attrition rates of 25.2 and 40.7 percent, respectively, were created specifically to serve homeless students, high school dropouts and other teenagers who have struggled in traditional public school settings.”
Stephen, you got me! Success Academy KEEPS more kids than Broome Street Academy and the John Lindsay Wildcat Academy! it’s a far better comparison to include those because after all, there’s no difference between a very motivated parent sending their child to the top performing charter school chain in the state and a charter designed for homeless students and high school drop outs.
Stephen from now on we will be sure never to do what Beth Fertig did and compare apples to apples because I understand you don’t like it because it makes Success Academy look particularly bad and probably another charter chain whose supporters don’t bankroll you look especially good despite their crappy test scores.
Instead I will acknowledge what you just proved! Success Academy loses FEWER students than Broome Academy, a high school for drop outs and former drug addicts at seriously risk. Congratulations! Success Academy must be doing SOMETHING right by keeping more students than Broome Academy. So the fact they lose twice as much as most other charters that serve the same kids as they do is IRRELEVANT! Because they are better than Broome Academy! I promise never to compare Success Academy to anything but an average that includes lots of schools that are the last resort of kids, okay? Will that make you happy?
Why do an apples to apples comparison when you can do an apples to oranges and make a charter that excels in recognizing violent non-white children at age 5 look really good, says Stephen B Ronan.
I defer to your judgement, Stephen. I get it. I just hope you get paid a lot to justify how much of an unprincipled PR hack you really are.
Keep bashing the NAACP. Keep bashing families who talk about their kids being drummed out by saying you know they were violent because Eva Moskowitz said they were. Keep defending Daniel Loeb as a wonderful person who just can’t help attacking all the African-American politicians who don’t believe him when he says lots of African-American 5 year olds are violent.
Keep telling me comparisons to other charter networks are irrelevant because you need to include Broome Street Academy and other charters to see how LOW Success Academy’s attrition rates really are.
Over 600 kids missing. You could not wait to throw them under a bus fast enough. Because Broome Street Academy’s attrition rate is higher.
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You’re suggesting that the point may be strengthened with a little rephrasing? Mmm, you may have a good point…
Perhaps something like:
While attrition at Success Academy schools in NYC would have to soar by about 75% in order to be as high as local district schools, there are some charter schools that amazingly have even lower attrition rates. Still Success Academy has lower than average attrition for all charter schools citywide, and that would still be true even if one eliminated from consideration students from John Lindsay Wildcat Academy, and Broome Street Academy, schools with particular high attrition that were designed to serve teenagers who had especially struggled in traditional public school settings. Not surprisingly, in NYC (as is also the case in other areas like Boston) lower than average attrition seems to be generally correlated with above average success of students in measures of academic achievement.
How’s that? Better?
If so, thanks!
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Stephen,
Your logic escapes me. You defend Success Academy by referring to Boston charters. Are Boston charters as controversial (to say it politely) as SA? Do they also impose no-excuses discipline on children of color?
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Diane: “Your logic escapes me. You defend Success Academy by referring to Boston charters.”
One crucial piece you’re missing is the fact that Jazzman’s piece sought to extrapolate far beyond Success Academy. He wrote:
“In the minority of cases where ‘successful’ charters out-perform expectations… some combination of the five factors above almost always provide the most reasonable explanation for the difference in outcomes.”
In respect to my supposed defense of Success Academy, I have on occasion been dismissive of relatively weak, or demonstrably specious, accusations against aspects of SA, while at the same time I have been encouraging (with little visible impact) attempts to develop a rather more comprehensive, credible critique, e.g., see my comment here: https://dianeravitch.net/2017/08/04/steven-singer-pity-the-corporate-reform-crybabies/#comment-2715462
I appreciate the reverential attitude with which NYC PSP assumes that because I have demonstrated a relatively decent understanding of some Boston charter schools, I must be ready to pronounce with expert authority on whatever charter school attracts her attention anywhere in the hinterlands, but am more modest about my abilities in such respect. And would prefer to build a considerably more comprehensive understanding.
Diane: “Are Boston charters as controversial (to say it politely) as SA?”
At my front door downstairs one of the unions’ door knockers told me last fall that our Boston charter schools don’t accept kids with disabilities. And then, when I went to vote, someone with a bullhorn for hours told everyone in line that charter schools can admit a student, take the full tuition for schooling him or her, and then dump the kid to the streets keeping all that tuition, leaving the kid without funding for continued education. I could give you many more examples of deceptions that created controversy here.
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Stephen Ronan,
Are you know agreeing that Success Academy’s attrition rates are unusually high?
Why would you not compare them directly to the charters that are most like them?
Saying they are better than “average” public schools (which DO include in their average all those schools serving high concentrations of kids who are transient, newly arrived, special needs, etc.) is nonsense. The fact that you are relegated to using that to excuse attrition rates that are higher than almost every other charter chain shows that “reformers” believe in excuses all the time as long as rich charter chains and the billionaires who fund them want excuses.
Truly, grow up. Be a mensch. This is children’s LIVES and you can’t honestly ackbowledge that a huge number of at-risk kids are leaving Success Academy — the best charter school in the state — while other charters manage to keep their students despite not having anywhere near the resources nor the high test scores.
What is YOUR theory about why that would be? If you can’t answer the question — if you are reduced to saying “but they are better than average” when their test scores are not “better than average” — they are outrageously high to the point of being unbelievable — then you are just here to change the subject. I will not let you.
Repeat: Out of 9 charter chains serving the same types of students, ONE charter chains gets outsize results that not one of those schools can match. It also have millions to offer an education no other charter school can match. But it loses more students than all but one. Why?
If you don’t want to answer, I get it. It’s embarrassing to admit why. It’s because so many children are not welcome. Even the parents in the school admit that it demands a lot from the parents. It demands MORE than other charter chains and therefore more parents leave despite giving up a seat in the top charter school in the state.
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Too many of the kids pushed out by the each-year-more-powerful “selective” small/new schools game in our district end up just where the prison industrial complex wants them to be: bumping around inside the criminal justice system.
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I respect you a ton Diane but I’ve always found myself asking one question. Why can’t you work WITH someone like Eva Moskowitz instead of always fighting her. Wouldn’t ALL of the kids benefit from two of the best educational minds working collectively for the greater good? Obviously, I know it’s not as cut and dry as I make it out to be but wouldn’t be nice to all get along to see if a difference could be made? I’d sure bet on both of you!
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Jerry,
Eva’s schools are not replicable. I am concerned about improving education for all kids, not creating boutique schools that siphon off the most malleable kids. Eva pretends that her methods are scalable to an entire district. I wish she would try it. With one caveat: I detest her harsh disciplinary methods. I would not subject my grandchildren to “no excuses” treatment. Why inflict it on other people’s children?
Please let me know where you see a fruitful ground for collaboration.
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Success schools educate nearly 15,000 students–more than all traditional districts in the state other than NYC, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, and Brentwood, and it won’t be long before they surpass all but NYC. They passed the “boutique” stage a while ago!
Would you allow your grandchildren to be enrolled in the typical NYC DOE neighborhood school that NYC charter students are zoned for?
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Tim,
If you enroll 15,000 kids in a district of 1.1 million students, that is boutique. Let’s see, 10% would be 110,000. 1% would be 11,000. So, what do you call 1-2%?
Let Eva take charge of an entire poor district–for example, Camden, NJ–including the kids with disabilities and the ELLs, and let me know how that works out.
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I don’t think your friends at the Camden Education Association would go for that, but let’s establish some ground rules!
–would she be able to establish an entirely separate “public” district to educate the most challenging kids, like District 75 in NYC or the BOCES special act districts? And to pay private special education providers (with uncertified, nonunionized faculties) to take kids off the district’s hands?
–would she be able to operate schools that academically screen children by administering IQ-type tests to 4-year-olds? Or that administer admissions tests to older children that have a clear bias against blacks and Latinos?
–would she be able to sort children on the basis of race and wealth, overloading lots of “neighborhood schools” with self-contained students, homeless students, and English language learners while at the same time allowing neighboring schools to serve literally or virtually none of those populations (PS 321, for example)?
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Camden might not want Eva but maybe she could find another desperate District that would allow her to take responsibility for every child, excluding none.
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Tim,
Why does Eva open schools in affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods like Cobble Hill in Brooklyn and District 2 in Manhattan?
Just wondering.
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Diane,
You nailed Tim on the problem with Success Academy’s latest boasts about being the 7th biggest school system NYC. And why Moskowitz refuses to expand to other cities.
This year NYC had 148,000 students who scored 3s and 4s on state tests just like the 10,000 or so at Success Academy schools. (Remember, many students at Success Academy are in Kindergarten – 2nd grades so not all 15,000 took state tests).
There are 148,000 proficient students in the NYC public school system.
There are 87,000 economically disadvantaged students in the NYC public school system who are proficient.
There are 60,000 African-American and Latino students in the NYC public school system who are proficient.
Success Academy is as big as cities that ALSO have to teach their special needs children, their newly arrived non-English speaking children, their severely handicapped children.
Success Academy is a system that simply rids itself of those kids. Just as Betsy DeVos seems to think is okay. It is not surprising that Eva Moskowitz admires Betsy DeVos and fought so very hard to make sure she was in charge of all children’s education. Two of a kind.
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Tim says:
“would she be able to sort children on the basis of race and wealth”
Eva Moskowitz already does this. And you know it, Tim.
Anyone who looks at the demographics of the 5 (soon to be 6) Success Academy schools in District 2 and 3 sees the sorting taking place. Virtually ALL the white students attend 3 Success Academy schools that serve a disproportionately very low number of at-risk children while the other two schools have almost no white students at all and high numbers of poor students.
And Tim, it is entirely dishonest of you to mention gifted programs which do NOT absolve the city of teaching ALL students. It is that kind of dishonesty which is typical of Eva Moskowitz (and Trump) which is why right-thinnking people know there is something very very wrong with them. When you so blatantly deceive and are happy to throw young children under the bus to promote something, then maybe what you are promoting is more about you then it is about the children.
It doesn’t matter if 50% of the students in NYC public schools were in gifted programs. Do you know why? Because EVERY child is the responsibility of the NYC school system whether he goes to a gifted school or not.
In a single year — 2013-14 — 609 Kindergarten through 4th grade students left Success Academy schools. That’s what Beth Fertig’s WNYC study showed. Success Academy has washed their hands of any responsibility for them as soon as they can convince their parents to pull them out.
And that doesn’t even include all the kids who leave the first few weeks of school as the father of the Success Academy dad testifies happens all the time.
I don’t understand why you, Eva Moskowitz and Donald Trump have to be so dishonest but there is obviously something very wrong with the people who cannot tell the truth because making a “sale” means far more to them than honesty.
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Yes, Tim falls back on the typical charter school “what about G&T,” while conveniently failing to mention that because of all the attrition, Success Academy students get a selective environment without having to take a test. How is that fair to students whether in a G&T program or not or whether they took the G&T test or not?
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Charter school attrition is comparable to attrition at TPS that serve demographically comparable students, and in some cases it is better: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.html
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When students are kicked out of Eva’s schools, they go to public schools. When they leave public schools, they certainly don’t go to charter schools. They may go to other public schools or move out of the city. Does Eva take even one such student?
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“Would you allow your grandchildren to be enrolled in the typical NYC DOE neighborhood school that NYC charter students are zoned for?”
Isn’t that why the NAACP called for a moratorium on charter schools? Why is it that charter schools generally only open in neighborhoods of poor people of color in NYC? Why is the education of these children being outsourced to private management companies? What is a “typical” neighborhood anyway, when Eva Moskowitz has been able to open several schools in neighborhoods with significant white populations, even going so far as to spend $70 million on commercial real estate near the luxury Hudson yards development? You can rephrase the question any way you want, Tim, but you’ll never have the moral high ground.
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Since neither Diane nor anyone else has answered the question, I think it is very safe to assume that few if any of the people who regularly engage on this blog in defense of the unquestioned supremacy of traditional public schools would even briefly consider sending a child to the schools 99% of NYC charter-going students are zoned for. I’ll consider the matter settled.
On the facilities issue, I’m not sure what you want charters to do. Asking for space in half-empty DOE buildings is unacceptable. Using donated money to underwrite long-term loans for private space is unacceptable?
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A decent and caring human being, Tim, would fight to improve the public schools attended by more than 1 million children, instead of sucking resources away from them for a favored few. As I recall, Eva engaged in a lengthy fight to take space away from the Mickey Mantle School for Children with profound disabilities, trying to push them out and make way for her charter. That was very nasty, mean-spirited, and selfish. Did you care about the harm that would be done to the most vulnerable children?
Please answer my question: Why has Eva opened charter schools in affluent neighborhoods (Cobble Hill, District 2 in Manhattan, and the Upper West Side)?
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I’ve answered this question on at least two occasions.
NYS charter school law requires charters to open in districts where there are concentrations of students at risk of academic failure. The vast majority of Success schools operate in districts that are more than 90% black and Latino and more than 80% low income.
There are many thousands of at-risk elementary school-aged students in Districts 2, 3, and 15–about 15,000 low-income children alone, or 1.5 times as many children as there students in all of the Albany public schools, period. 2/3/15are the most stratified and unequal districts, with poor and rich kids living in shocking proximity but on the other side of painstakingly drawn zone lines. The poor kids have a infinitely better chance of getting into Dalton than they they do PS 321, PS 199, or PS 41.
Districts 2, 3, and 15 are appropriate sites for charters under state law. Similarly, nothing in the charter law prohibits affluent families from applying to charter schools.
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District 2 is the most affluent district in NYC.
District 15 (where Cobble Hill is located) is a highly affluent district as well.
I don’t live in District 15, but nearby. Despite the claims of “waiting lists,” the district was plastered with posters recruiting students for SA Cobble Hill. If there was a waiting list (which I doubt), why so many posters on bus stop shelters and in supermarkets and everywhere else?
This mendacity is sickening.
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State charter school law requires documented outreach–ads in papers, community websites, flyers, etc–in the district where the school is sited.
Districts 2 and 15 have large numbers of both affluent and at-risk kids. Though they live very close they don’t attend the same schools. They are an appropriate place to site a charter school.
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We had a dual school system in the past. It was evil.
We don’t need to recreate it for the fun and profit of people like Dan Loeb and other hedge fund managers who have done nothing to help the public schools that enroll over 1 million children.
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The 107,000 (and climbing fast) predominately black, Latino, and poor families who have chosen to send their children to an NYC charter did so because theyare in the very best position to judge what’s best for their child. It’s sad how you respect parent choice when it is white-flighters opting out of tests but not when it’s black and brown parents desperate for something better.
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There are so many dishonest things in the comments Tim posted that I have to go through them 1 by 1 to call them out. It’s like trying to keep Trump honest — it’s impossible to keep up with the lies but you have to try.
“Charter school attrition is comparable to attrition at TPS that serve demographically comparable students, and in some cases it is better”
The WNYC study proved that Success Academy had one of the highest attrition rates of any other charter network in NYC, despite serving “demographically comparable students”. Tim has yet to explain why the highest performing and best funded charter network would lose so many more students than much lower performing charter chains. He says he has NOTHING to do with got to go lists or teachers trained to punish and humiliate at-risk kids when they don’t know the answer, or Eva Moskowitz’ claims that she “MUST” suspend the many violent non-white 5 year olds who win her lottery because they are so dangerous. Anyone with integrity who looked at those attrition numbers would say Eva Moskowitz better get KIPP and Uncommon Schools to teach HER some “best practices” as to how to teach the kids who so often are failed by her inexperienced teachers.
Tim says “There are many thousands of at-risk elementary school-aged students in Districts 2, 3, and 15”
That truly takes chutzpah. Do you know how many at-risk kids took state tests in Eva’s District 2 schools? 92. Do you know how many were NOT at risk? 228. Do you know WHY that is? Because Eva Moskowitz told SUNY Charter Institute it no longer wanted to give at-risk kids a priority in their lottery now that they had schools in rich districts where their presence might be a hindrance to her recruitment of high income children whose parents had college degrees.
Guess what? SUNY was so pleased with the small number of at-risk kids that are being taught at District 2 that they begged Eva Moskowitz to open a THIRD school there! And she is!
Tim, if Eva Moskowitz was in this to serve at-risk kids, she would have kept the priority she dropped as soon as Joseph Belluck became her acolyte. Just think, she would ALREADY be serving hundreds more at-risk kids children!
Tim says: “nothing in the charter law prohibits affluent families from applying to charter schools.”
Nothing in the charter law prohibits charters from giving lottery priority to at-risk kids. If a charter opens in a rich district and only has a fraction of the number of at-risk kids it should have because it demanded to be allowed to drop priority for those kids, that charter’s purpose is NOT to serve at-risk kids anymore. It is to undermine all of public education. Anyone who watched a leader endorsing Betsy DeVos and praising Donald Trump and Paul Ryan understands exactly how “deep” their concern for at-risk kids really is. Truly, shame on you. You have chutzpah.
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Jerry Hannison,
Do you know how ALL kids benefit?
By honesty. By telling the truth. By not making claims that the only reason so many children are suspended at age 5 is their violent nature and that the only reason that so many kids leave is that their parents didn’t want their children to have the best education in the state.
The fact that the education reformers are unwilling to call out these lies tells you a lot about what they really care about. It is not helping ALL children. It is promoting charters.
And as long as you enable the lies, you are no different from the Republicans in Congress who enabled Trump’s lies. And you are no different than the right wingers telling Democrats they should work with the lying Trump if they really cared about this country.
I’m still waiting for reformers to start being honest. I’m sick and tired of their racist claims that lots of non-white 5 year olds are violent when they get to the highest performing charter schools.
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I’m just trying to help here…I’m a fan of BOTH Diane and Eva and think they’re both great. I despise Trump so please don’t put me in that category…I just think maybe you can do something positive with 2 great educational minds even though they have differences…it could actually lead to some extraordinary ideas…also don’t believe everything you read and hear…if I’m not mistaken, the charter rallies up in Albany were fighting for ALL public school kids right?
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“’I’m a fan of BOTH Diane and Eva and think they’re both great.”
That is like saying “I’m a fan of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump and think they’re both great”.
It’s fine to say that but it is meaningless because one of those people tries to tell the truth and offer facts and the other one says anything that will help them sell their product and themselves.
What you SHOULD be saying is “why can’t Eva Moskowitz start telling the truth instead of lying about how many violent 5 year olds are in her schools that have almost no white children”?
What you SHOULD be saying is “why can’t Eva Moskowitz start telling the truth about how many students she flunks over and over again and how many parents are told THE FIRST WEEK OF KINDERGARTEN that their child is not right for the school”?
What you SHOULD be saying is “why can’t Eva Moskowitz start telling the truth about how many at-risk kids just aren’t worthy enough for her to teach?”
Why do you think she can’t be truthful? I suspect it is the same reason that Trump cannot tell the truth. Some people are hard wired that way.
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“Two of the best educational minds.”
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there is only ONE great educational mind (Diane Ravitch) and it definitely is NOT Moskowitz!!! She is a shill for Hedge funders.
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Thanks for the quick response Diane. Obviously, you both have differences in philosophy but don’t you think meeting and seeing if there could possibly be common ground would be worth it? With both of your minds working collaboratively, ALL NYC school kids could reap the benefits now and in the future. Why not at least give it a try right?
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And why don’t Democrats work collaboratively with Trump? It is impossible to work with people who are not honest.
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ok listen I get your frustration again I’m just trying to help…I also don’t think that everything you’re saying is true but I don’t want you to get upset again…the Trump/Obama analogy is also a bit much no?
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Jerry,
You have yet to address the fact that Eva Moskowitz isn’t honest.
Of course, if you believe that it is remotely possible that as many as 25% of the 5 year old children in some Success Academy schools that had almost no white students were so violent that the only way to deal with them was suspending them over and over again, then we have nothing to discuss. Your racism is showing.
You “admire” Eva Moskowitz for recognizing the violent nature of so many non-white children in her charters. I think she is using the fact that racists believe her when she characterizes so many non-white children as violent to cover up how many at-risk kids are MIA from her schools by the testing grades. She has no interest in teaching any but the easiest to teach at-risk children. Which is why she has made no move to expand beyond NYC, whose vast school system provides plenty of students for her to choose from.
Don’t forget, there were 87,000 economically disadvantaged children in NYC public schools who were proficient on state tests this year.
Why, you could make 8 more “small cities” of Success Academy schools if they’d all leave their public schools to enroll!
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@Jerry I am also a New York City public school parent. Eva Moskowitz is not someone to admire. She screws over New York City public school families for her own personal benefit. I don’t think she gives a damn about the kids in her own schools either. If you read any of the communications coming out of that organization, it’s all about her. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing about that self-serving wench. The only thing keeping her failing schools in business is hedge fund money, which they donate for their own purposes, not the benefit of children.
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Eva’s made it clear that she wants to harm public schools, not collaborate. She demands space, even if it means driving out kids with profound disabilities from their school. She is very cold and calculating.
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Eva Moskowitz, like Donald Trump, does what benefits her first and foremost. Everything else is secondary.
There are other charter schools getting decent results, although you rarely hear it. There are other charter schools that do a good job with the students that win the lottery and truly try to keep every one.
Success Academy COULD have been one of those. There was absolutely nothing stopping Eva Moskowitz except her own greedy and grasping nature. I confess I truly do not understand people who can convince themselves that their dishonesty and selfishness and greed is all about helping others. I see that in Trump and Moskowitz.
Her actions — endorsing DeVos, intentionally undermining Bill de Blasio’s push for universal pre-k, fighting AGAINST small class sizes — it’s all about pleasing the right wing billionaires who fund her. It has never been about the children – there are plenty of charters who don’t do what she does.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Learn what makes a corporate charter school like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies different from public schools. If you love dictators and fascists, you will love Eva’s money machine.
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I looked at the state math test data at data.nysed.gov for the 24 Success Academy elementary schools that had been around long enough to have students old enough to take state tests. (Disclaimer – my numbers may be off due to a typo so I’m happy to be corrected here).
There were about 5,807 students total in those SA schools taking the state math test. The numbers ranged from nearly 600 students at Harlem 1 — which has been around the longest — to only 55 students at Success Academy/Springfield – one of the newest whose oldest class were 3rd graders.
Of those 5,807 students, ONLY 3,621 were economically disadvantaged. That’s only 62% of all the SA students who took the state tests which is shocking because 71% of the public school students who took the state tests were poor. It’s also shocking because the mandate from SUNY is to have charters to serve at-risk kids and yet there are significantly fewer at Success Academy than there should be.
In 7 of the 24 schools — most of them new — there were significantly fewer economically disadvantaged students than middle class ones. Once those schools expand so that there are more than one or two grades taking the state exams, the percentage of at-risk kids served by Success Academy will drop even lower.
This is a charter school that is supposed to be serving MORE than its share of at-risk students and it serves far fewer once it gets to the testing grades. (It’s very likely that more at-risk students start who are drummed out long before they ever take a state test).
For all its bragging and the many millions of dollars in donations it spends on the students who are allowed to remain in their charter school network, Success Academy managed to get 3,621 at-risk kids to pass state exams.
Meanwhile more than 87,000 economically disadvantaged 3rd- 8th grade students in the NYC DOE were proficient on those very same tests. 87,000 versus 3,621.
All that money so that 3,621 at-risk children could benefit while the 1.1 million students in the NYC school system have to hear Eva Moskowitz claiming that she deserves MORE resources and they deserve less because she has discovered a magic formula that works for her chosen few.
What extra resources do public schools get to reward them for their fantastic work in making sure 87,000 at-risk kids did as well as the 3,621 at-risk students at 24 Success Academy schools? (Even better, since a few hundred of those SA students did not pass the state tests.) Or are public schools supposed to be the minor leagues so that Success Academy can woo away enough of their top performing students to fill the spots of the many hundreds of poor Success Academy students who seem to go missing each year after getting a taste of Success Academy’s celebrated “best practices” in how to make a low-performing child feel so much misery that their parent will pull him from their school?
87,000 economically disadvantaged students in public schools did as well as 3,621 similar students at Success Academy. You’d think that would give Eva Moskowitz, Daniel Loeb, and the minions who answer to them some humility.
Expecting humility and honesty from them is like expecting it from Trump. It is not gonna happen.
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I have not heard of any gov’t agency auditing how standardized tests are administered and graded in the charter schools. During testing, NYC DOE schools have many independent officials in the school buildings overseeing the administration of the tests. Teachers and administrators must strictly adhere to many regulations to ensure honest test results. Charters do not have this type of oversight from the DOE. Charters can (and have) hired their own companies to grade their exams-opening the door to all kinds of cheating. Charter schools do not adhere to the kinds of test security measures DOE schools must follow. When you see such highly unexpected test results, especially for Success Academy schools, one should also wonder if there are any improprieties involved in the administration and grading of the tests. One official at NYC Charter Association said that he could not explain the unexpectedly high test results of Success Academy and that other charter schools also wonder how they achieved such good results. They should be investigated, just like in DC and Atlanta, where unusually high test results triggered investigations and prosecutions.
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When Success Academy hired an independent researcher, he talked to the staff and wrote a report about the pressure to achieve high scores could potentially lead to cheating (he was not investigating whether there was cheating and did not say there was).
Success Academy immediately fired him and quashed his report.
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It’s a shame that you are all so stuck in your thinking that you wouldn’t even consider a meeting between Diane and Eva. I know that you’re not fans but comparing Eva to Trump? Come on…Are all of those stories (i.e. Mickey Mantle school) true? Did you ever get Eva’s side of the story? I’ve heard her say numerous times that she’d love to work with ALL kids here in NYC…why not AT THE VERY LEAST sit down with her. Because if you don’t even try this, what is that saying? The 1978 World Series Champion New York Yankees had players that didn’t like each other but you know what? They won…maybe ALL OF THE KIDS could benefit from Diane and Eva being teammates. I know I know here come the negative replies with “Eva is a crook and she doesn’t care and is all about money.” Well at least I’m trying…
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Jerry,
I have met Eva on more than one occasion.
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I have also met Duncan.
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Jerry Hannison,
Your ignorance is astonishing! It’s revealing that you take everything Eva Moskowitz says as the gospel truth “I have so many violent 5 year olds I have to suspend 20% or sometimes even 25% of them”, but you question Diane Ravitch when she mentions the Mickey Mantle school because you doubt her veracity.
YOU are the one who said “Eva is crook”. Diane never said that. I never said that.
What we have said it Eva lies. Just like Donald Trump. Now if you believe her when she says that so many non-white 5 year olds were so violent she had no choice to suspend them, then you are demonstrating a very nasty view of non-white children that reveals a lot about you. You can characterize it however you want, but if you keep insisting that Eva is telling the truth about that while you question Diane’s veracity and pretend that Mickey Mantle school was NOT going to be moved or shuttered to accommodate Eva, then you are as truthful as Trump and Eva are.
You don’t have to be crook to be a liar. Some people just lie because they know it will get them what they want and please the people who give them money. Unless they are under oath, it isn’t a crime. It just a reprehensible action performed by a person who has no moral compass.
You have chutzpah asking Diane to work with such a person. And your unquestioning belief in all Eva says while you keep acting as if Diane Ravitch is the liar tells us exactly who you are. I suspect you are not who you seem and are as dishonest as Eva Moskowitz herself.
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Yes but when was the last time you sat down? Probably many years ago correct? Diane I don’t want to come across as a pain because I truly respect you very much but I’m also a big believer in when people sit down and have a discussion great things can happen…
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Jerry,
I am open to meeting with anyone anytime.
Do you think I can persuade Eva to stop promoting herself as the great savior of American education? Can I persuade her to accept kids with disabilities of all kinds? Can I persuade her to collaborate with public schools and to stop defaming them?
Love to try,
I tried with Duncan, I tried with Peter Cunningham, it didn’t work.
I tried to meet Bill Gates but he avoided me when I came to Seattle.
I spent two hours with Jerry Brown but he didn’t listen.
But I am always ready to try again.
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Jerry,
Arrange the meeting and I will be there.
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I’m so glad you called his bluff.
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Listen I’d love to but I’m a NOBODY and wouldn’t be able to facilitate it. Cheer up “NYC public school parent” I was only trying to bring good thoughts in not to be negative…it wasn’t about a “bluff”…but try to get rid of some of your anger as I think that’s been one of the issues…life is too short!
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That’s what Trump apologists say when they try to shut down legitimate criticism of his lies.
“We just want to bring “good thoughts” so shut up and quit criticizing our beloved President Trump”.
Sorry, Jerry. Dishonesty should be called out whether it is Eva Moskowitz and her minions or Trump.
And life is never “too short” to give liars a pass. That’s why I keep calling out your claims to be a disinterested person who just knows Eva is honest when she talks about the many violent non-white kindergarten children in her charters. I doubt you are who you claim to be but if you are, your opinions are ill-informed. Unless you believe in all the violent non-white children in Eva’s charters. And if so, your opinions are racist.
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To “NYC public school parent”…As indicated previously, I despise Trump and I’m not the least bit racist. You are not worth my time or energy so I’ll stop here…To Diane Ravitch: Thank you for your replies and I wish you the very best in the future! Again, I hope one day everyone can be on the same page to make school great for EVERYBODY!!!
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“I am not the least bit racist”
“I believe a white charter CEO is absolutely telling the truth when she tells me that the only reason her schools with almost no white students suspend so many 5 and 6 year olds is because they are all violent.”
Sorry, but if you insist that the second statement is true, that makes the first statement false.
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NYC PSP: “because they are all violent”
I think your argument might be strengthened if you were able to provide a quotation that precisely matched what you suggest there.
BTW, It’s been a while since I have been personally implicated, but my impression is that most of us Caucasian lads back in the day were capable of using force to injure someone or something. Is that no longer the case? I’ve been reading stuff about declining male this and declining male that, but hadn’t been aware of the potential full breadth of the phenomena….
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