Gary Rubinstein has a well established reputation as a careful investigator of miracle schools. On many occasions, he has debunked miracle claims. See his wiki site here.
In this post, he takes a close look at the scores of Success Academy on the new Common Core tests.
I don’t think Gary would classify the Success Academy schools as “miracle schools,” because they don’t have the same demographic profile of nearby public schools, but their scores on the recent Common Core were nonetheless impressive.
Gary notes that some of the schools are K-3 and tested only third grade. Some of the newspapers printed misleading stories about the success of the school based only on one grade.
He also notes a high attrition rate among students and teachers.
But with all those caveats, Success Academy has succeeded in outpacing most of the city schools.
He speculates that this might set off a civil war among the charters because some of the others that boast of their success–notably, KIPP and Democracy Prep–got low scores and performed below the average for public schools.
He writes:
In general, these good test scores, I think, should make the ‘reformers’ more nervous than elated. From my perspective, I don’t think that the scores are devastating to my cause. I don’t think they really prove that there are super teachers out there who can get the ‘same kids’ to excel, even if it is just on standardized tests, since I’m not convinced they are truly the ‘same kids.’ But the ‘reformers’ should be very careful about this. They already had Success as a big success story, as well as a bunch of others like KIPP and Democracy Prep. Now they still have Success, but they have lost some of their schools they used to take credit for. I’m not sure how they can reconcile their idea that test scores are an accurate measure of school quality with the fact that many of the schools they have been touting have lost their luster by that measure.
And what ‘excuse’ is there for these other schools. Surely behind closed doors they are accusing Success of some kind of manipulation, either by extensive test prep or by booting even more kids than they do. I wonder if this could start some kind of charter civil war.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SED has committed to publishing admit/discharge data for all schools, including charters, this fall.
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Of course with the stakes so high, it’s always possible that there is cheating going on.
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“In 2010, Moskowitz’s private not-for-profit took in $12 million in funding, $3 million of it from the state and the rest from private donations.” (refer to http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-01-30/news/Eva-Moskowitz-Bloomberg-Charter-Schools/full/). This is, apparently, how SA pays for those extra teaching assistants Gary mentions. I guess that means we just need to replicate this in all other high poverty schools. Problem solved!
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That means if the city invests roughly 15-20 billion more (almost double what the budget is now) that we could have a system like Success’s.
You can build focused small scale successes with high amounts of concentrated money. Unfortunately it doesn’t scale. And this goes with all the other gimmicks that Success uses to “ensure” parental involvement, total student compliance, and a focus on an ability to “pay attention” – a very sage on the stage approach that almost all education schools have been decrying but that Success imposes relentlessly.
Their numbers are so far out of whack, as I’ve posted earlier, they either manipulated their population or did other things that will come out to bolster those scores.
When you have outliers like this, I don’t believe they have some secret sauce unless they have the ability to hand their playbook to someone and get those same results. Now I can predict what they would say to that very easily and I couldn’t disprove their points (we have excellent teachers, an aligned curriculum, high standards, rigor blahblahblah).
Every “miracle” to date has show to be the result of manipulations – not better teaching that came from high standards and we discover “hey if we only made things harder then things would get better for our most disenfranchised students”. If we had the types of supports Success can afford, maybe we’d do a bit better though I won’t claim it would “close the gap” in this way.
Creaming is almost certainly a large part of it – I do think there’s something else here that hasn’t come to light. Maybe I’m biased, but I find it hard to believe that a school that breaks almost everything we know about vygotskian and piaget’s ideas about cognitive development, and is still delivering a well-rounded education does not sit well with me.
There is something not yet public amiss as conspiracy theory as it sounds…if we dig through the data enough we’ll be able to see exactly what levers they pulled to be able to force the needle that high relative to every other student in the city.
We have been struggling with achievement gaps for decades. I do not find it plausible that the likes of Eva Moskowitz (her wealth) has predisposed her to find some secret about minority children’s education that has eluded generations of teachers and enabled her to provide an equitable education overnight.
And if we find out it’s all in the funding, then it confirms what we’ve been saying all along about what is needed to invest in education.
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The “no excuses” narrative, like so many other odious propaganda thrusts since “A Nation at Risk,” had one of its births in Chicago in the Marva Collins Hoax. By the early 1980s, the media presentation of that one had gotten so out of hand that Cecily Tyson played the heroine in a TV special called “Welcome to Success…”
Sadly for those who wanted to believe that all you needed was a firm belief that “All children can learn…” and “a good pair of legs…”, the claims were bogus. A few months after the national publication of the TV “docudrama”, a teacher from “West Side Prep” came to me with stories about how the test scores — and the rest of the “miracle” narrative — were achieved. After a long investigation, I published our findings in Substance under the headline “The Marva Collins Hoax” and all heck broke loose. Marva had refused to answer my questions, of course, but the story got “traction” and soon CBS was revisiting a narrative that they had helped promote (all the way to “60 Minutes”).
The key came when Marva threatened to sue CBS radio (WBBM 780 AM) in Chicago, which had picked up our story and run with it. She invited the reporters to “West Side Prep” to “see the truth.” Things were very intense, with the lawyers looking over the shoulders of the WBBM radio reporters. The morning they were scheduled to go out to the west side to see the miracle, I gave them the script they would be subjected to. The literature lesson would have all the kids raising their hands, but only one would be ready to talk about “Dostoevsky” as his favorite writer. The poetry lesson would be “Who wants to recite Tennyson?”
Again, all the hands would flap, but a selected kid would do the recitation (the only one in the class that actually knew the poem by heart).
Then came the phonics vocabulary lesson, and after the warm up with a couple of tough words, the teacher wrote adiocokenesis (I’m spelling it phonetically) on the blackboard and asked the kids to say it and define it.
Again, there was the selected kid.
The reporters called me later that day and said that the entire three hours they were at West Side Prep had gone as I had predicted, based on my investigations. It was a staged show, down to each kid who had been trained to do one stunt. The trick was to have all the kids raising their hands eagerly wanting to give the “answer.” Only one was really ready, and only the teacher knew that.
The Marva Collins story flapped around for a few more weeks after that, with the Chicago Tribune eventually sending out a veteran reporter to get the whole story. He discovered, as I had, that the same stuff had been repeated over and over and over by the scribes who had dropped into Chicago to visit the miracle, and that much of the reporting was aided and abetted by a well organized clip file. That way of rendering reality was a novelty back in those days, just as a “docudrama” was the forerunner to all the selective memory “Memoirs” that infect the literary world today. The line between fact checked fact and fiction was being blurred regularly, and Marva was able to take advantage of it.
Part of the trick then was to bad mouth regular teachers (“all children can learn…” as if the teachers Marva had worked with in the public schools didn’t believe that, too) and to count on many of the usually white reporters who covered the story to see a miracle because little black kids were performing so well.
Of course, Marva also reported miraculous results year after year on the standardized tests she claimed to use — the CAT back in those days. But as my source told me, the tests were never audited, and the claims — “three years’ gains in one year!!” — were never fact checked. In one case, by the time the story entered its third year one of the kids was “reading” at the 16th or 17th “grade level” (if you assembled the history of the claims).
It was intense at the time, but looking back on it is was merely sad, and a sad forerunner of the “no excuses” nonsense to come. Those of us who taught in the inner city (and during those years I was teaching at high schools on the West Side, including one that Marva Collins denounced as a “failure”, John Marshall High School) were stunned that the fiction could be passed around for so long.
Of course, later, we faced (and debunked) the Heritage Foundation’s “No Excuses” report, and others elsewhere peeled off the claims of similar nonsense.
But it continues because a key part of the legacy is the teacher bashing of regular public school teachers either explicit (as with Marva and “No Excuses”) or implicit (in the case of some of the charter schools, which don’t teacher bash publicly).
I saved a lot of that material for years, but never expected that 30 years later the corporate nonsense would still be peddling it. As everyone is pointing out here, lower class sizes, a competent teacher aide (from the community) in every classroom, and lots of extra stuff can make a difference — over time. Of course “all children can learn.” The tragedy for many of the children I taught during a three decade career in Chicago’s inner city high schools (while I also worked as a reporter and union activist) was that many of them had to learn some very nasty survival skills in order to live out in, for example, the “South Cs” which were claimed by the BPSN…
But that’s another story for another time. Learning to survive amid the horrors of many of the most devastated communities in our inner cities is a true learning, too. Anyone who wants to get a taste for that reality might try all five seasons of “The Wire”, especially since that fifth season brings back memories of the corrupt (or just silly) reporters who create these “no excuses” narratives every time some huckster gooses up some test scores with some tricks for a year or two.
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I apologize, George for my doubts of your credibility. If that’s how Marva Collins really did it, and your account rings true, I am incredulous at my own credulity.
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That was a very kind statement Harlan and I respect you for making it public. George is a great resource for all of us.
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I appreciate this.
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That’s OK, Harlan. With the massive propaganda machine behind the “no excuses” myths and hoaxes, the Marva Collins Hoax was just the launching of one of those many “entrepreneurial models” that continue to this day. We’ve seen hundreds of them over the 30 years since the Atlas Shrugged zealots began with Marva three decades ago.
This reply actually comes to a bit earlier — Harlan.
The plutocrats’ inability to even think about the difference between public institutions, public service, and a public good and those activities which properly belong in the economic competition sphere — the so-called “private sector — makes them ignorant in a very fundamental and amazing way. They cripple themselves with their own ideologies, like any ossified ruling class of the past. (My brother would probably remind me of the Borgia Popes of the Renaissance, since liturgical studies have lone been part of his art). They are all the same, all very silly, and all dangerous until their power has been taken away.
And they require plausible lies, widely spread, like those that have oozed since The Marva Collins Hoax began the long march through Michelle Rhee right down to today’s stuff from Harlem Success.
Trouble is, their money, greed, power and (sometimes) SAT and ACT scores convince them of their natural superiority over the rest of us. So they preach and fund a kind of eugenics and get away with it for a time. Arne Duncan is not the heir to a major fortune, but just a basketball playing guy from Chicago’s South Side who got to hang with the homies working “teaching” with him Mom. He’s not the only one, just one we can excavate up close and personal here in Chicago, where everyone knows that Hyde Park and the University of Chicago are as far from the South Side of Chicago as our White Sox are from this year’s World Series. But like many of his ilk, the farther Arne gets from the reality of the Chicago he helped destroy, the further his narratives get from reality.
The plutocrats and their loyal servants — from Arne to Marva and beyond — really are dangerous and have to be stopped by greater power. They are too dumb to understand the logic of democracy, and for many of them, the rewards for their services are very lucrative.
One of our brothers here in Chicago (Dr. Tim Black) said Monday night (at a church meeting about the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington), power concedes nothing without a demand — never has and never will. Tim was one of the Chicago organizers of the March on Washington 50 years ago.
Looking back on the origin of that quote Dr. Black recited (Frederick Dougalss during the Civil War), I’m comforted to think that previous generations have had to face more terrifying challenges against the ideologues of inequality, greed, and ruthless power. Their sacrifices were much greater than ours.
One recent conversation I had with a brother in our struggle came about after he said that his fiance was born in Alton, Illinois. That triggered my meandering about the fate of Elijah Lovejoy, one of our many heroes from “the service” (and a guy who operated a newspaper until that generation of Arnes and Marvas destroyed it — and him).
The generation of my parents (who always referred to their military time as “the service”) had to take on a more horrifying task, and it wasn’t easy forever for those who came home from it. My Dad told me that during his “service” with the 44th Division he was one of the first GIs into one of the concentration camps (I believe it was Nachweiler, or something like that; memory fades…). I asked him what he remembered most about it and he said “the silence and the smell.” When I asked him why he hadn’t talked about it before he had reached his eighth decade he just said, “There is some evil for which there aren’t words” (or something like that…).
He didn’t tell me that until he was in his seventies, a few years before his death. He was very parsimonious with his “war stories”, except to remind me that his unit, an infantry division, had been “in the line” for more than 240 days — the most, according to his commanding general’s farewell letter to the troops, of any division in the “ETO.” He also explained to me that some units got the “Hollywood Treatment” but most didn’t.
In a way, it was part of the warning about what we are facing now, but their war (my Mom was a nurse throughout the battle of Okinawa — on the island in a field hospital; she never completely recovered from the nightmares) forced the challenges of “service” on their generation in a much nastier way than anything required of us. That’s important to remember as we continue this struggle, and help elaborate on Diane’s book “The death and life…” and many many other works.
Marva was a sad example of a type. Once we had exposed her lies, with facts and a growing body of testimony from the victims of the hype (many families sent their children to that “school” believing — after all, it was on “60 Minutes”! — that the school would save those children), she faded into a kind of obscurity. For a long time, mainstream reporters, even from the corporate hack groups, couldn’t be made to reprise those fictions she had peddled. The script that I had exposed (with the help of inside sources, as I noted) was too fixed to be revised once it had been outed. She remained an icon of a small group of fanatical zealots, but no longer had CBS to circulate her scripts.
And that’s been true since. “No Excuses!!!…” “No excuses…” “…no excuses…… zzzzz…..”
Whether it’s “Waiting for Superman,” “Won’t Back Down” or the Harlem Children’s Zone “miracles, all this stuff crashes against the need for public service (and a well paid and professional public sector, which includes the military, police, fire protection, and, despite all their human failings, politicians…) in a well organized society.
I think I’ll spend some time this evening with one of my favorite books, “The War Against the Weak.” Every time a new version of “Race To The Top” takes over the thinking of some people with power, we need to remind ourselves of the ugly historical roots these eugenicists have.
Each generation faces its own responsibilities, and one of those is to demand accuracy and to refute the liars, whether they are publishing the Dearborn Independent in the 1920s or those crazy propaganda films today. Here in Chicago, it’s sad to watch how much they are getting away with, but heartening to be part of that same work begun so long ago.
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George,
You really should write a book. People have been used and manipulated for so many years. It’s heartbreaking.
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Wow, you must know Steven Adamowski and his spectacular reforms in Cincinnati and Hartford, CT–the latter praised to the skies by Governor Dannel Malloy!
And thanks to that adulation, Connecticut is now home to Paul Vallas, Nicholas Fischer (a smaller fish, but on the make like crazy in New London, CT) and–drum roll, please–neo-liberal wizard extraordinaire, Stefan Pryor.
By the way, I think TFA has helped the latest “no excuses” nonsense and allowed for a new riff on teacher bashing.
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I scored for the DOE some of the Charters. We noticed two things. Most had class size in the teens and many classes contained classes in which the short and extended responses were amazing similar among individual students. Draw your own conclusions.
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They are being trained to spew forth the acceptable response based on a Pearson produced rubric. Stepford newbies train robotic children to perform and this is what they call education reform. So so so sad.
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Is this in NYC?
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But isn’t it necessary to report fraud?
There are hotlines for whistle blowers, or just list the names of the charters and mail it somewhere–everywhere.
No one can draw any conclusions if this is kept under wraps, and, although it may seem to be minor, cheating is cheating.
Incessant test prep and drilling is, from an educational and moral standpoint, academically bankrupt, if not a form of cheating. The sanctions against poor schools and failing, low-achieving schools are harsh and devastating enough, but the children are being robbed of real learning and of the mental resources that they would develop if they were being truly stimulated by literature, art, music, math, etc. They are also learning how cynical the adults around them are, who are warping their education merely to attain a score on a test.
I hope you can score no more!
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That is why high stakes testing needs to be gotten rid of.
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Of course we reported any suspected improprieties. And I know that the supervisors probably sent our suspicions to the state. However, I am sure the likes of commissioner King made sure it went nowhere. Let me also add that if you saw the marking rubric, you would laugh. Let me just say that if students would write key words from the right text based detail, they got partial credit even if their mechanical writing ability was weak. We marked these kids carefully and liberally, but with a rigged grading system they were doomed from the start. by the way, security was high and all rubric books had to be destroyed for secure destruction. No evidence!!!
P
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To Arthur,
wow, it is such a massive fraud. I wish we could dump these tests and their rubrics.
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Diane: You might want to cruise the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate. (2theadvocate.com) There have been a lot of education articles this week including one editorial that needs a professional touch. It talks about how Louisianians should support TFA. (Tuesday). The Advocate really drank the Kool-Aid. Also there is a letter by Holly Boffy on Wednesday about her “support” for the public schools. That is the “former teacher” (her words) whose campaign for BESE was largely funded by Gov. Jindal. Of course she does exactly what Jindal and White tell her to. We are on it, but it is getting a little big to handle alone. Also some new charter schools run by out-of-state entities were given licenses.
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It is crazy that so many people get upset about what school someone send their kids too. These parents have to go through hoops to get their kid out of a school and into these. It should be no one’s business after that. No one here would have liked to be forced to go to the college in their zone. I suspect most of the anti charter people are in the education establishment and are worried about their pay and not about parents making the best educational choices they can for their children.
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