Since Eva Moskowitz explained in the Wall Street Journal that the iron discipline at her school was devised by a veteran teacher named Paul Fucaloro, I decided to google him.
The first thing that popped up was this reference to him in an article about the high test scores of Success Academy charter schools:
Because the state’s exams are predictable, they’re deemed easy to game with test prep. But in contrast to their drill-and-kill competition, Moskowitz says her teachers prepped their third-graders a mere ten minutes per day … plus some added time over winter break, she confides upon reflection, when the children had but two days off: Christmas and New Year’s. But the holiday push wasn’t the only extra step that Success took to succeed last year. After some red-flag internal assessments, Paul Fucaloro kept “the bottom 25 percent” an hour past their normal 4:30 p.m. dismissal—four days a week, six weeks before each test. “The real slow ones,” he says, stayed an additional 30 minutes, till six o’clock: a ten-hour-plus day for 8- and 9-year-olds. Meanwhile, much of the class convened on Saturday mornings from September on. Fourth-grader Ashley Wilder thought this “terrible” at first: “I missed Flapjack on the Cartoon Network. But education is more important than sitting back and eating junk food all day.” By working the children off-hours, Moskowitz could boost her numbers without impinging on curricular “specials” like Ashley’s beloved art class.
The day before the scheduled math test, the city got socked with eight inches of snow. Of 1,499 schools in the city, 1,498 were closed. But at Harlem Success Academy 1, 50-odd third-graders trudged through 35-mile-per-hour gusts for a four-hour session over Subway sandwiches. As Moskowitz told the Times, “I was ready to come in this morning and crank the heating boilers myself if I had to.”
“We have a gap to close, so I want the kids on edge, constantly,” Fucaloro adds. “By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.”
Then came Juan Gonzalez’s article in 2014 describing Eva’s move from Central Harlem to Wall Street offices, where the rent will be $31 million over a 15-year period. We learn too that Paul’s salary as director of pedagogy jumped from $100,000 to $246,000.
Then I read an article about the “miraculous” transformation of an elementary school in Queens, financed by Wall Street hedge fund manager Joel Greenblatt, working with the same Paul Fucaloro; the key to the dramatic rise in test scores was adoption of the scripted Success for All curriculum. That was in 2002. I searched some more and found that on the latest state tests, the same school did not do very well. Despite the hype, it was ranked 20th among 36 schools in the same district in New York City. Virtually 100% of the children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is struggling. Greenblatt and Fucaloro have moved on to Success Academy charters.
(The original name of the chain, which is a category on the blog, was Harlem Success Academies; the word “Harlem” was dropped as the chain moved into other neighborhoods across the city, like Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, a solid middle-class community.)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Sickening!
Diane,
Write a letter! They published two in response to it today, but none from our side: ltrs@wsj.com
I am confused about this Eva Moskowitz WSJ op ed (which appeared a week or so ago, fyi).
She gives credit to Paul Fucaloro who was there at the beginning and claims he miraculously transformed the most difficult students by making sure every child sat up straight and showed he was paying attention. But the data sure seems to suggest that his methods didn’t work at all! Why aren’t reporters questioning it?
Here is why:
When the first Success Academy school was in its early years (2007-08), Harlem Success Academy 1 only suspended 2% of its students. And yet as those students grew older under Mr. Fucaloro, they seemed to exhibit far worse behavior. By the time the school had grown from K – 4th grade, the suspension rate was up to 15%. By the time it was K-5, Mr. Fucaloro was finding that 22% of the students were so violent under his system that they needed suspending! What the heck?? And I noticed the same thing happened at Harlem Success Academy 2 under Mr. Fucaloro’s system that Ms. Moskowitz claims worked so well. Only 5% of the children doing violent things and getting suspended when it was a K-1 school, and yet suspension rates rose until they were up to 17% when it was a K-4 school! Again, what the heck? The kids seem to be getting even more violent under this system. And she wrote a whole op ed about how it works so well?
I find it odd that Ms. Moskowitz insists that those methods worked when she and Mr. Fucaloro found that they had to suspend more and more children over the years! If they had worked, Harlem Success Academy 1 would not have more and more of their children doing violent things as the students got older (I use the term “violent” because Ms. Moskowitz often mentions that she only suspends the 5 and 6 year olds who are doing violent things when she justifies her very high suspension rates.)
So, the question to ask Ms. Moskwitz is why would the suspension rate rise from 2% of the students to 22% of the students as they spent more time under Mr. Fucaloro’s system if it was working so well? If more than 1/5 of the students are acting out to that degree the MORE time they spend under this system, it sounds like a complete failure.
Mr. Fucaloro has also been quoted as saying “I’m not a big believer in special ed”, due to the negative impact that learning disabilities can have on test scores. (http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6707)
And I guess that he doesn’t realize that special education is required by federal law, and, even more importantly, that these children are people, too, and deserve the best education that is available.
Even if they cannot pass these ridiculous tests.
Passing tests is not what makes us human. It is not what prepares us to reach our own individual, full potentials, no matter our physical, mental, social, or emotional limitations.
I guess he has not even bothered to talk to a special education teacher, or to watch a child who has never been able to speak learn to say a few words, or learn sign language, or the use of a communication board.
Or see a child when he/she learns to put on their own coat, or learns to use the toilet or feed him or herself. Or the absolute joy in their parents’ eyes when their child reaches another milestone.
Or see the light in a child’s eyes when he or she finally learns to decode the difficult job of reading and can, finally, pick up a book and read it for themselves.
Or just the simple act of accepting even the most profoundly intellectually and physically impacted students, and make them more comfortable, and able to live better lives because they can do even the slightest thing that they could not do before.
Or just “be” human beings, accepted, helped, loved.
Phuque him and all his ilk.
And pardon me while I go pour myself a glass of wine (or something stronger), because I am a retired special education teacher (gee, could you tell?) and I loved my students, and am proud that I helped them in every way that I could.
I hope he goes to a doctor who doesn’t believe in disease.
Can you say “child ause?”
Has anyone done a longitudinal study of how these students have done in the real world? I just don’t see the point of so much emphasis on bubble tests, especially if you narrow the curriculum for test prep. There is so much more to learn about science, social studies and the arts. In fact, if the curriculum is so narrow, students will lack the foundation for the the non-fiction reading that is being touted today. Children need balance in their lives, and a test prep factory is a very narrow sliver of the real world.
“At the last staff orientation, according to one Success teacher, Moskowitz reported telling parents, “Our school is like a marriage, and if you don’t come through with your promises, we will have to divorce.”
I mean, that’s great, that’s she’s ready to “divorce” certain parents but obviously she couldn’t do that without a public school system backing her up.
This seems so blatantly obvious to me that I don’t know why she won’t just admit it.
Her schools couldn’t exist in a universal public system without “safety net” public schools. That’s just fact. She’s not a competitor with public schools- she’s wholly reliant on public schools because if the parents she “divorces” didn’t have a public school to return to or attend all hell would break loose and politicians would have to answer for that. Public schools are systems. What happens in her school impacts the public system, whether she admits it or not.
You are so right, Chiara. In fact I’m sure I’ve read one of Eva’s rebuttals to claims of counseling-out in which she explained that they helped students find a ‘more suitable placement’ w/n the NYC p.s. system, as tho SA were just another NYC primary school.
Her argument makes SA sound like a magnet school– except that there are no NYC K-8 magnets that I know of– & even if there were, the NYC [h.s.] magnets have selective admissions via entry exam. If SA did that they’d be seen for what they are, a selective primary school funded by tax dollars, not comparable to zoned public schools. Instead, they admit via lottery, then counsel-out via multiple suspensions & parent-counseling to winnow out their ‘problem’ [i.e. will-never-be-hi-test-scorers] students. Just like NYC’s hs magnets, SA is not comparable to zone schools.
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
They want the “kids on edge constantly”? They want them to be “test-taking machines”? Ten hour days for children?
This is, plain and simple, child abuse.
Have none of them ever studied child development?
Apparently not. 😦
Zorba,
I agree with your assessment that it is child abuse. It is what Alice Miller was describing and warning of in her book “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”
I found it curious that when I tried to find information about Paul Fucaloro’s experience that would have prepared him to be such a pedagogical wizard, I came up with nothing. Nothing about undergraduate or graduate degrees, publications, experience, prior employment. Reader CaresAboutKids&Teachers did post the following February 15, 2014 on this blog:
“Paul Fucaloro’s MBA in Statistical Marketing Research has afforded him the freedom to wear many hats at Success Charter Network (SCN)”
https://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/15/reader-offers-a-dose-of-common-sense-about-high-test-scores/comment-page-1/
Perhaps someone else might have better success and can find what it is that makes him so willing to demonstrate both his arrogance and ignorance.
CRACK THAT WHIP. All children, should be test-prepped, 24 hours a day. Eva should have her billionaire buds supply ear buds–for the children to wear when they sleep, listening to test-prep audio tapes. Each scholar should be equipped with Depends brand diapers, for pants peeing, so there’s no need to take that pesky trip to the lavatory. Parents, similarly, should be plugged in at night, with a koolaid script about showing up for rallies thrown by Eva.
Ridiculousness, of course.
I cannot imagine sending my sweet 6 y.o. child to Success Academy, to be treated like a silent prisoner, test-taking machine. I cannot imagine Eva would want that for her children either. Or in this case, her grandchildren.
Have these people no consciences left? They are harming children. Lord know what type of humans Eva’s schools is creating. Time will tell, eh?
Moskowitz is a prime example of precisely why states have long required that school leaders, aka, superintendents, principals et al., be experienced educators who have studied child development, teaching and learning and who’ve taught classrooms of children themselves. Not just anyone can do that job, especially a non-educator who admittedly lets two of her own kids suffer through a military style boot camp school despite their protests. I read that she pulled her third child out of SA. Anyone know why?
Her oldest child never attended Success Academy; he was in second or third grade when the first Success school launched with grades K-1. He went to NEST + M, a screened gifted-and-talented K-12 NYC DOE school where entry is effectively controlled by an IQ-lite test taken at age four.
Many NEST students leave after 8th grade for SHSAT and private schools; her child attends Avenues, a $45,000/year private (and for-profit) school.
You did it, Tim. You actually wrote a comment that implicitly criticized Eva. Thank you for surprising me.
There was a point when admission to NEST+m was NOT controlled by an IQ lite test taken at age 4 — that’s a new system. Don’t you remember the founding principal at NEST getting into trouble for allowing in the students she wanted to allow in and weeding out the kids she didn’t want?
http://nymag.com/news/features/31272/index.html
“The resolution alarmed Chévere. For NEST to work as planned, she had no use for students from failing local schools; she needed children who matched her template: dogged workers who thrived on structure and racked up 3’s and 4’s (at or above grade level) on the standardized tests. How could she run a college-prep school without families committed to college? How could she guard her standards without winnowing wheat from chaff?”
Sound familiar???
Wow, Tim.
I never knew you could cross the aisle.
So if states paid for the Common Core testing experiment and a “key goal” (what they paid for) was “comparability between states”, now that so many states have dropped out did they not get what they paid for?
Are we ever going to get any kind of analysis on what this experiment cost and what we got in terms of value to public schools?
No, we’re not going to get any kind of analysis about the actual cost and value, at least, not from them.
Keep reading this blog, and other similar education sites, and we do begin to see the actual costs, both monetarily, and in what it is costing our children and our communities and our society.
Does Avenues teach Common Core? Does it offer any of the Pearson tests? If not, why not?
It appears as though SA enrolls only students who would behave well in a regular public school and perhaps succeed as well there. They would achieve more time on task, however, as those pesky, ill-behaved children would not disturb them. Several of my friends were tracked in academically enriched classes (this would be the 50’s) and went on to CCNY. They admit they have no idea what went on for the other classes.
So I am not too impressed with SA’s scores. I am not sure she is getting the kind of results obtainable in other settings.
When I taught students who were clustered by their behavior (you can do a lot under the radar in a public school), I didn’t have to resort to the kind of rules Ms M seems to need. The kids just do it. Especially, if instruction is interesting.
And when I was testing coordinator at a school that typically scored low over-all, the Advanced ESL students received the highest scores, not due to rules, but to the quality of the instruction they received. No test prep. They read for pleasure, and parents were cooperative.
My answer to the mess that is education today: Convince the public that they can take responsibility for a great public system.
My suspicion: The public does not want a great system, just protection from the outside world. Got to keep up with the Kardashians on TV.
What sick idiots.
This isn’t the purpose of tests at all. They are very crude checks for contact with reality and presence of skills. They are not tools for faking advancement. They are not instruments for tormenting children.
In Georgia, the Division of Family and Children Services (DFACS) is charged, in part, with investigating child abuse. What’s the equivalent in New York?
Is it even legal to work a child at school for 10 hours a day?
Is there any information on how these fare beyond SA?
SA’s eighth graders didn’t get into select high schools. Someone else here can tell you more than I know, certainly, about this.
Two small classes of eighth graders finished the SA charters, having gone there from kindergarten or first grade. In the first group to leave 8th grade, 32 took the entry exams for the elite high schools. Not one passed.
Nothing has been released about the second group. It would be interesting to know if any were accepted at the exam schools.
If they had, she’d be screaming it to the Heavens, so my guess is no…
The conservative Manhattan Institute published an article in May 2015 where the writer seemed to have special access to kids and parents at the school and some information that didn’t seem to be publicly available.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/what-explains-success-success-academy-6173.html
“Critics point out that none of the few dozen Success Academy 8th graders who took the entrance exam over the past two years did well enough to get into one of the city’s eight selective public high schools. Although the test is difficult, and less than one-fifth of applicants are admitted each year, it is perplexing that no Success students, many of whom scored at the advanced level on the state exams, made the cut.”
So it does sound as if no students scored well on the SHSAT the 2nd year as well.
I read the speech at the conservative Manhattan Institute. I can’t figure out who the speaker is, Charles Upton Sahm. He sure makes SA sound like heaven on earth. It is hard to understand why they lose so many students when the schools are idyllic.
She should save her stupid statements for a federal grand jury.
I agree with Eva Moskowitz about her notion of “the pleasure of accomplishment”, but the means she uses, the teacher and administrator turnover in her schools, the test-prep culture, the narrowing of curriculum, the weeding out of “undesireables”, and the fact that she is attempting to compensate for what parents should already be doing (disguised as “helping and empowering the poor”) is all so darn unacceptable.
Eva’s charters do measure and accomplish something every quantifiable, but the purposefulness and high cost of crowding out all sorts of other types of learning leaves far too many gaps and holes in the backdrop of test scores.
The idea that her charters are monetized is very poor judgment on behalf of policy makers. Bootcamp style education produces focused, disciplined indivuals, but it will never create imaginative, critically thinking activists who can question the status quo. Instead, children from her schools will grow up and go on to obey and serve in the quest for riches and upward mobility, forgetting the collective masses and the powers of collectivism. They will be filled with facts and applicative knowledge, and they will only be able to use it in the realm of employment, being totally crippled when it comes to using it in the glorious kingdom of civic participation and human dignity. The consumer will be first and the citizen will be last. This is a Moskowitzian society.
But America will just have to learn this the hard way . . . .
Die Schüler sitzen gerade.
Die Hände liegen geschlossen auf dem Tisch.
Die Füsse stehen nebeneinander auf dem Boden.
Die Schüler schauen dem Lehrer in die Augen.
Lachen, Flüsteren, Sprechen, Herumrücken and Herumgucken sind verboten.
Die Schüler melden sich mit dem Ziegerfinger der rechten Hand. Die Linke Hand stützt den Ellebogen.
(1908, Berlin)
Paul, that will be posted in a few days.
Yes, and with that kind of schooling, look what it did to the German citizenry and how it got them to support Hitler, without which the atrocities may well never have happened.
First you beat them down. Then you systemically dumb them down. Then you gain their trust because they are not educated enough to question. Then they support you in your meteoric rise to power. Then they support your crimes. And if they don’t, you get to beat them down again.
Is that the trajectory of the USA, ending up in the Hunger Games?
“zeigefinger,” I believe.
Yikes. But, of course, Nazi comparisons are out of bounds, so let’s just get Godwin out of the way and move on. Nothing to see here, folks.
Dr. Gregory Ramey, Executive Director of Dayton Children’s Hospital’s Pediatric Center for Mental Health Resources, recently outlined 6 ways in which children should not be treated as little adults, in an article for the Dayton Daily News. “(1) …When something bad happens, kids are more likely to wonder about the impact on themselves…(2) More trusting…which means parents must be cautious about the impact of others on our kids. (3) More reactive to stress…(4) Shorter attention spans…Most kids don’t have the ability to sustain concentration on a single task for an extended period of time. Kids need lots of time to exercise, do nothing and just give their body and brain rest. (5) Little sense of perspective…Most kids think in terms of extremes…(6) Very needy of attention. Kids need a lot from us to maintain their psychological well-being . They need lots of hugs and affection as young kids…”
Congressional hearings are past due.
I woke up thinking about this guy’s “little test taking machines” comment. Wow. Truth really is stranger than fiction. I’m awake and some human being actually said that about children.
BTW….what’s with that German-sounding post just a couple comments up? Is that really German or one of those things that’s actually English but sounding like another language or…..???
Sorry, I’m unilingual -though I did try dearly to learn Spanish in college. (To hell with Donald Trump!)
Copy and paste it into Google translate. German to English. Chilling.
Thanks, Janna. I did put it in Google translate… good idea
Hmmm…I guess I’m still curious about the “Berlin 1908” part… It’s not Berlin 1928 not to mention 1938…. And, hasn’t this sort of schooling existed in other cultures, too.
I don’t know….I was expecting something else when it was translated.. and what’s the source for this quote?
This comment just confused me…..I saw the word “Tisch” and I’m thinking, what, Meryl Tisch. LOL
And, what will be “posted in a few days”, Paul? What’s that??
Contrast this with Dr. Maria Montessori, a real child development expert, who took the poorest and most developmentally challenged inner city children and taught them life skills and produced academic success through love, nurturing, freedom of choice, independent learning, and imagination.
Her system is still working over 100 years later and is favored by the rich and powerful because it produces some of the most successful people in the world.
There is no need nor morally defensible reason to treat poor children as less than and in need of re-education to become something that fits upper middle class white people’s ideals.
“The Walton Family Foundation will pledge $6.5 million over the next three years to research on schools’ efforts to promote and measure character education, social-emotional learning, and grit, the organization will announce Friday.
“The Walton Family Foundation is committed to rigorous accountability standards for schools, teachers, and students,” says a letter to grantees from K-12 giving director Marc Sternberg. “But if it’s true that ‘what gets counted ends up counting,’ it’s also past time to seriously consider the next frontier of student success measures.”
I actually believed someone in ed reform would call for restraint and caution in measuring students, teachers and schools based on “character and grit” but I can see I gave them way too much credit.
This is a bad idea already and they haven’t even ramped up the PR machine yet.
I can’t imagine how they plan to put this measurement system in, but you know state lawmakers will swallow it whole. Look for “character scores” in your state report card. It’s coming.
I’d just like to announce up front that I do not believe my son’s public school or public school teacher is wholly responsible for creating my child’s “character”, nor is the state or the school responsible for listing, defining and then measuring “character”. If this latest example of incredible ed reform over-reach becomes law in Ohio I’ll pull him out of public school. They need to back off and stop treating our kids like lab rats.
Even with the extreme emphasis on test prep and extended school days, SA’s scores are still highly suspect. In Atlanta and D.C., pressure from above pushed many teachers and administrators to find ways to “adjust” the test scores and these scandals were highly publicized. I wonder what kind of oversight takes place in SA schools before, during and after test administrations. I wonder if they are subject tot he same kinds of protocols that district public schools must adhere to. I hope NYC officials investigate this issue.
More reasons to love little Eva Moskowitz. Two hours in the pillory might be overly kind.
When I worked briefly for Harlem Success Academy, I remember Paul Fucularo. My impression was he was a retired New York City Board of Ed teacher, kind of avuncular; he seemed like a product of Catholic schools in Brooklyn in the 1950s by the way he talked about children. I thought he was very old fashioned, and I thought it was curious that he milling around the young, corporate type staff Eva had. I’m surprised he still works there and it’s also surprising that Eva is now mentioning/hiding behind him in the WSJ. It’s like he’s taking the blame/credit for her behavior management policies. His comments in the New York Magazine article are really awful and exhibit a Cathy Black level of cluelessness. If he has an MBA in Statistics, then he surely is Eva’s right hand man in manipulating scores.
Interesting point: Eva, pathological schemer that she is, would likely position someone to take the fall if/when her (likely) cheating is uncovered.
Having worked for Eva from 2006 to 2012* I got to know Paul Fucalaro and saw him in action. I saw him belittle and undercut teachers, and browbeat students with merciless drill. Since Harlem Success was not open in 2002, his methods preceded Eva’s adoption of them. If the Queens School you mention was PS 65, its principal was also brought on board for HSA”s start. Mr. Fucalaro is a large man, not subtle or gentle in his methods, probably significantly scary to young children. Avuncular maybe, but a little sinister too. Early on, ( 2008, 9?) he and I were asked to evaluate a young teacher who was up for re hire. She was one of those young people who genuinely love children and interacted with them intuitively and effectively. She was also knowledgeable in science, the subject she was being hired to teach. We both walked out of our observation agreeing how impressed we were. The next thing I knew, she had been fired. The word in those days when people were let go was that they ” didn’t get the school culture.” We now know that means they wanted to treat children as human beings rather than “test taking machines,” or robots who cannot question, talk, play, laugh, or, God forbid, enjoy learning.
If tests were NOT used as a measure of success, or Success, it is doubtful Eva would have gotten this far. Not until schools, charter or otherwise, are judged by their success as places of learning, creativity and joy, and the scourge of test prep and drill is gone, will real teachers, not taskmasters like Mr. Fucalaro, feel welcome in them.
Annette Marcus
* I worked on setting up an inquiry based science curriculum for Success Academies. It was fairly free of test prep until 4th grade. When Eva extended HSA into MIddle school and wanted students to take high school regents exams in 6th and 8th grade, I quit.
Thanks for your comments, Annette. You’ve given me a fuller picture of Fucalaro. I didn’t mean that he is really avuncular, but that was my first impression. He seemed old fashioned and out of the loop regarding contemporary educational practices. I left after 3 weeks because I was horrified at what I was seeing being done to the children, but I didn’t have much contact with him. I was unimpressed by the principals, especially the novice who I thought was going to ruin us all. She was the principal who made the kindergarten boy walk up and down the halls on the first day of school (Michael Winerip wrote about it in the NY Times before they banished him).
Thank you for posting this insider’s perspective.
I posted above about the growing suspension rate of kids at that first Harlem Success Academy where Mr. Fucaloro’s methods were supposedly getting amazing results. At Harlem SA 1, they suspended 8% of the students that first year, when it only served Kindergarten and 1st graders, and it went down to 2% the next year when there were Kindergarten through 2nd graders. But the next year started testing years and suspensions started to quadruple. As a Kindergarten to 3rd grade school the following year, 12% of the students were suspended. The next year, with 4th grade added, the suspension rate rose to 15%. And I guess they knew when they had a good thing going because the next year, as a K-5 school, the suspension rate jumped to the sky high 22%!
The LONGER the students were in school under Mr. Fucaloro’s supposedly wonderful methods, the MORE violent they became! (since of course, Success Academy only suspends kids for doing violent things and not because their inexperienced teachers can’t figure out how to teach most of the students who can’t learn the one way they know how to teach.) After 5 years of being in school under his tutelage, 22% of the kids were doing violent things? How the heck is THAT supposed to be something that impresses anyone?
I should have added that as a K-6th grade school the next year the suspension rate was up to 27% !
CBS’ morning programming, known for right-wing corporate spin, again today, praised NYC charter schools, while showing a clip of minority kids in blazers and ties, chanting memorized lines. If the narrative was taken out, the little people were most similar to suited prisoners.
Linda, the CBS segment must be part of the all-out PR splash that the hedge funders are doing to salvage SA’s reputation after John Merrow segment on PBS
Rhetorically, are Charlie Rose and his co-hosts, so far removed from their fellow human beings that they can view the regimentation of children and feel no compassion? How is it possible for them, to see other people’s children and not think about the children, who they care about, if they were in that same situation?
Is it similar to the historical prison role-playing experiment, in a university’s basement, that spiraled out of control to abuse? But, we’re watching sideline facilitators, in real time on network television?
It strikes me that the methods described here are not sustainable over any reasonable period of time. Like heavy industry , the result might look good for a time, but soon reality sets in and pollution of men’s lungs and souls makes the machine rot and rust. The real test of any system is its ability to sustain its effort over a long period of time.
A friend of mine recently suggested that three things are necessary for education to occur: interested students, passionate teachers, and concerned parents. Rob one of these components, and failure will result, but no system can corrupt the triangle if all three vertices are intact.
Success for All was mentioned in the original blog – it was one of the earliest reform programs pushed onto minority low income students. It is a truly narrow, scripted, and yucky program. (sorry for the yucky- how else can I describe it?) It was cumbersome and confusing – time consuming prep-truly awful. They wanted you to teach only with their program and bring nothing else in to add for understanding – very rigid. I only taught it for a year – thank goodness – those poor kids had to sit through it.
Our thread rightly castigates the Moskowitz/ Fucaloro behavior-control methods of SA [& by implication, those of other ‘no-excuses’ charter chains] as (a)old-school [like, 100yrs out of date], (b)disrespectful, bordering on abusive, to students & their parents using shaming as motivation, (c)squelching of natural individual differences w/their emphasis on conformity, (d)opposite to 21st-c.-ed need for developing innovative, creative grads, & (e)clearly ineffective, as evidenced by stats showing that %age of behavior-linked suspensions increase dramatically, the longer students attend the SA schools (which use these methods).
However, for the non-educator &/or parents-w/o-kids-now-in-school reading here: we’re not throwing the baby out w/the bathwater.
An amazing number of commenters on ed-related articles seem to buy into the ‘US public schools are terrible’ mantra propagated by our privatizing folks– & most of these commenters, when pressed, think it’s all about terrible behavior induced by negligent parenting & coddled by inclusive DOEd policies. Trending: a call for the return to ‘tracking’, wherein degree of poor behavior [/lower SES students] should predicate lower track, w/the worst being banished to the juvenile reformatories of yore. The common-folk seem to believe the choice is between über-control and chaos.
For the record: public schools have been dealing successfully for many decades with kids at all points on the attention & impulsive-behavior spectrum. It isn’t all about the genetically short on attention span vs the innately-natural focusers. There is a wide and naturally-occurring span of attention at all ages; short attention-span does not inherently require IEP, diagnosis, treatment. Some outliers will need the minimum distraction of small classes & tutoring to compensate. Ditto for the impulsives: some– especially those coming from a chaotic home environment– will need extra structure, perhaps uniforms & reward/punishment incentives.
But in general, focusing/ listening-&-responding behavior- and respect for classmates– can be taught from a very young age if done sensitively and with age-appropriate expectations. Much of this can be accomplished at ages 2.5-5, so that kids from any background are ready to learn in the more-demanding environment of p.s. K.
OK, I’m just a freelancer, & I pull my observations from– one school! So I hope all you w/heavy-duty experience will chime in & correct me.
Most of my gigs are pull-out enrichments, but I have one client where I’ve provided weekly in-class Spanish to the 2.5’s- 6y.o.’s for yrs, so I see what a well-run school can accomplish. It’s a commercial pre-K/K chain on the outskirts of Newark. The parents are working-class 1-&-2-parent families, about 60% Afro-American, 25% Chinese/ Indian/ Hispanic, 15% white. Class sizes range from 8-25; student-to-teacher ratio is dictated by the state (roughly 9-1). [the school also has infant & toddler groups who graduate into the group’s I teach]
Teaching group behavior– creating an environment for group learning: it’s a gentle process. Teachers are often strict & use regimental methods during the first 6 wks of the year. They back off as soon as there’s a group grasp of classroom rules, so that more & deeper learning can commence. This is necessary every year, even tho there are many repeating students: the kids themselves change, & it takes a while for them to accommodate those changes, & re-form a cooperating group. Hi-focus [circle-time] periods are used sparingly, interspersed with exercise, outdoor play, arts, & free-choice activity. ‘Focal’ (circle) time & frequency is increased incrementally, as kids mature.
I have seen kids w/an autistic dg mature thro this system: between 2.5 & 4.5 they progress from alternatively withdrawing/ acting out (at 2.5) to expressing their talents fully (while suppressing their idiosyncratic behaviors) at 4.5. I’ve seen those w/innate focusing abilities maintain hi learning/response while simultaneously developing social skills during the same 2 yrs. There is another cohort (both boys & girls) who start following rules & wanting to please, move thro rebellious phases where their focus is social, barely learning anything academic, then return to the fold, accelerating rapidly until they catch up & excel. In any 3-yr period of teaching 80 (mostly repeat) students, I see maybe 2 kids who never really adapted to the school culture & thus didn’t learn much from me.
This particular franchise of a commercial daycare/PreK/K does not as far as I know pay its teachers more than the usual just-above-poverty-level wage. The key, I believe, is a visionary owner [she believes in teaching a 2nd Lang (Spanish) to every student! which is not normal in my region… She supports other great policies like celebrating every ethnic group’s holiday as opposed to being PC-secular..]
… and also, the incredibly competent present director chosen by the owner. My tenure encompasses a previous director who was adequate in curriculum but lacking in developing subordinates. The present director managed to keep many of the [granted, no doubt poorly-paid] teachers onboard, while tactfully training and improving them to the point where they excel in the finer points of classroom management and teaching.
Perhaps the bottom line is: we need to support universal PreK.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.