Jacqueline Ancess is a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, whose research focuses on urban school reform, performance assessment, small schools, and accountability.
She writes:
Some charters are continually referred to as “successful” without any identification of criteria for a successful school or a successful charter school. Some charters may produce standardized test scores that are higher than “peer” schools, but when examined are not scores that indicate that students are strong readers. Success Academy Charters are regularly referred to as successful, yet their 2014 8th grade graduation rate was 44%! What is successful about a 44% graduation rate? Despite claims of high scores on NY State tests, not one Success Academy Charter school student has made the cut score for admission to NYC’s specialized high schools. Approximately 80% of KIPP students who go to college do NOT graduate. What is successful about that? These test scores are Pyrrhic victories. Furthermore, let’s drop the erroneous idea the charters were supposed to be centers of innovative practice which would be adopted by other schools–there was plenty of innovation before charters and no excuses discipline policies and kindergarten suspension practices are hardly innovative or the kinds of policies and practices we want to scale up in traditional schools!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Speaking of Success – no more political rallies it seems! YAY for no more spectacle.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/12/8584534/shift-pro-charter-group-puts-rally-strategy-hold
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I am a Success Academy parent, but I am also a Progressive, concerned with the quality of public education in this country, and I can tell you that 80% of the criticism of Success Academy has political undertones and is lacking in facts and balance, mostly coming from my fellow Progressives.
For some Progressives, it’s about privatizing of public education – an important national concern, that has little relevance in New York, where all charters are not for profit by law. And some just like to think of Success Academy under the broader rubric of Charters vs Public schools, which I think is an over-generalized, faulty frame (since there is a number of poor charter schools, and I am not pro-charter per se, but I do support great schools of all stripes).
For other Progressives, it’s about the worker concerns about diminishing role of unions, another important national concern, and there is also the anti-test advocacy groups, anti-common core and so on, so the political landscape is complicated and contentious.
What gets lost in these hyper-politicized debates is actual facts about Success Academy, which are as follows:
The school is not for everyone, because it:
– employs strict discipline
– demands active parent involvement
– has a very long school day
– has a strong drive for academic performance
On the upside, it has proven a successful, repeatable model of educating the majority of the kids, particularly (but not exclusively) from the economically devastated neighborhoods and terrible zoned schools. How – through all of the above, plus:
– very rich, custom curriculum (there are easily available details, that I can provide), which include:
— daily science starting in K,
— two teachers in the classroom in K and 1st grade,
— field trips every three weeks,
– rich take-home book library in every classroom,
– caring and intensely invested teachers
– ability for parents to come and sit in during the classroom instruction
– ability to hire teachers from a very large pool of applicants (albeit often less experienced, than in traditional schools)
– ability to pay its teachers above market
– ability to not renew the annual contract with lower-performing teachers
– separation of roles between principals (focused exclusively on education and teacher training) and Business Operation Managers (runs the rest of the school)
– very large amount of dedicated and structured teacher development and training time
and more, all done for same or less money per student, compared to a traditional public school (private donations to the network are used exclusively for start new schools, but not for maintaining existing schools).
As I said, about 80% of the criticism is politically motivated and of poor factual quality, but yes, there is also the 20% of legitimate critique:
– the network’s focus on negative campaigning (emphasizing the failings of other schools, instead of marketing its own accomplishments)
– Eva Moskowitz’s communication style, sometimes dismissive of legitimate criticisms
– high turn-over and sub-optimal work/life balance for teachers in some schools
– … there are a few more
But, as a Progressive, focused on educational issues, I see that many Progressives give Success Academy a short shrift, forgetting that there is a number of problems that plague New York’s traditional public schools, that Success Academy doesn’t have, such as:
– plenty of rigid and detailed classroom and school management rules per the UFT contract, preventing innovation and constraining better teachers and principals
– insufficient pay differentiation and career advancement opportunities between the best and the worst performing teachers, as well as inability to fire bad teachers
– 1 teacher in the classroom
– inability of teachers and principals to prevent disruptive and abusive student behavior from impacting other students in the classroom.
And the biggest thing that Success Academy doesn’t have, is the belief that economic circumstance pre-determines students’ academic outcomes. And that’s a core Progressive value.
Bottom line – there is certainly more than one way to look at Success Academy. But political narratives are cheap, unless they are based in fact and have some semblance of balance. You can write a hundred articles about “what’s wrong with Success Academy” and never understand, what’s right about it.
Politicians and paid pundits often focus on the failings of the other side, a la “speck in your brother’s eye”, just so they don’t have to look and their own shortcomings.
I am neither a politician or a pundit, but I am a parent and a Progressive, and I support all great schools – traditional and charter – and I support Success Academy. And I hope that parents of traditional and charter schools, including some who disagree with me, can listen and talk to each other, leverage each other’s best practices and leave the acrimony to others.
And original, fact-based and balanced journalism will go a long way to help us improve all of our public schools.
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This reads like a marketing brochure from SA. If you’re so enamored of the place, why aren’t you willing to put your name on it?
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Perhaps this parent wants to comment anonymously, just like the ex-Success employees and families who are critical of the school.
Through the people I know who have a child attending Success schools (and not just the “wealthy” ones), I can attest that Success children get far more recess, PE, art, music, and science than my children do at their traditional district NYC DOE schools.
Most of the opponents of Success schools are arguing against a caricature, not reality. Arguing the reality would mean having to take a long look at why families are leaving their district schools, and that could get uncomfortable and messy really quickly.
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“The school is not for everyone, because it:
– employs strict discipline
– demands active parent involvement
– has a very long school day
– has a strong drive for academic performance”
PUBLIC schools MUST BE for EVERYONE. You cannot demand that parents be involved as a condition of enrollment; you cannot demand that students adhere to unreasonable (bordering on abusive) discipline practices as a condition of enrollment; etc
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Your clear and effective writing in this post indicates that your are, in effect, a good teacher for your child. I believe that a child’s parents are her most important teachers. Also, I believe that every student is capable of success, although this success may take many forms.
Success Academy works for you and your child. That’s good.
Also, your satisfaction with Success Academy is one fact to be placed alongside other information about Success Academy.
But if Success Academy is not for everyone for the reasons you say, then this undercuts the Success Academy mission statement that it will prove that “all children” can succeed.
No one says that economic circumstances pre-determine students’ academic outcomes. Parents’ income and children’s academic outcomes are strongly correlated. Yet some students do better than average for their parents’ income, while other do worse.
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Aaron, thank you for the kind words. I am not an expert on the marketing side of Success Academy, so I am not sure how they may have positioned or advertised themselves in the past.
I don’t think there is a school that works for everyone.
I think that Success Academy fills an important niche, that’s been traditionally under-served by public schools – most of the low income kids, that don’t have access to quality schools.
Some of the children with severe behavioral problems might get with the flow at SA, while others will not, and I would guess that educating kids with major behavioral issues is not necessarily Success Academy’s greatest strength.
It would be interesting to come up with the type of students & parents, for whom SA is or is not a great fit, but i am not sure that there is a quick and dirty formula for that, not to mention that the network in evolving and improving.
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Surely, Dienne, my name is Yuri N, and my child is attending Success Academy Bensonhurst. I will take your comment as a compliment of my writing style :-). If you would like to contact me, I will be happy to provide my email.
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psdynpt, I feel sad that parents like you don’t care about the high suspension rate and high attrition rates at the Success Academy schools that really do serve a majority of low-income at-risk students, almost all African-American and Latino. Your own school is mostly white and middle class students and your own kids are treated very nicely. So what? Why did so many of the entering Kindergarten classes disappear over the years at HSA 1 and HSA 2?
I also feel sad that Success Academy dropped priority for at-risk kids when they started to get space in rich neighborhoods like the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Cobble Hill. That sure helped their suspension rates — since those schools may suspend 5% of their 5 year olds versus well over 20% of them when their students are poor and minorities.
I also feel sad that 40% of the economically disadvantaged 2nd graders at SA Bed Stuy 1 were MIA by the time 3rd grade testing came along.
I also feel sad that the child who won a spot at SA Williamsburg for 2nd grade was made to take test and told she couldn’t join the 2nd grade but had to repeat a year and I wonder how many other kids aren’t allowed to join their grade and are thus discouraged from entering SA to replace all the missing Kindergarteners unless they are already working at grade level. You never wonder about those things.
I also feel sad that the SA school in Bensonhurst is located in a community school district that has over 70% low-income students and less than 35% white students and yet more than half the students are white and less than half are poor. Why isn’t your school serving more at-risk kids? You don’t wonder about that either.
I also feel sad that Eva Moskowitz has stated over and over again that you are a liar because you are saying she does NOT educate the exact same children found in failing schools and she insists that she does. One of you is the liar. Who is it?
I feel sad because you are implying that Success Academy should take over KIPP and Achievement First and all the other charter schools that have failed so many more of their kids. If you believe what you just posted, you also believe that there is something wrong with all those other substandard charter schools I just listed because no teachers’ union is preventing them from matching Success Academy’s results so they should be replaced right away with SA schools. Right?
If you disagree with that, you are a hypocrite who is posting here because you are involved with educational consulting and your child is very well-treated at her special middle class, mostly white Success Academy school that specially dropped lottery preference for at-risk kids so they could serve more parents like you! Happy?
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wlecker wrote: “PUBLIC schools MUST BE for EVERYONE. You cannot demand that parents be involved as a condition of enrollment; you cannot demand that students adhere to unreasonable (bordering on abusive) discipline practices as a condition of enrollment; etc”
If your billionaire board members and donors give lots of money to politicians and you have an oversight board like the SUNY Charter Institute, which only cares about the test results of the kids who are left, and attrition rates are to be ignored as much as suspension rates are, then you most certainly CAN demand all those things and get rid of any child who you want to put on your “got to go” list. There is absolutely no oversight by SUNY of attrition and suspension rates — none. As long as that helps you get better results, ALL the charter schools need to start doing that pronto. Soon KIPP and Achievement First can start ridding themselves of low-scoring kids, too, and they will be highly rewarded by SUNY. The more of those kids you get out of your school, the more you can expand! Into wealthy neighborhoods if you want!
Now what kind of self-identified “progressive” would really approve of that?
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Tim and others, if you like to contact me off-line, I will be happy to provide an email. Nothing anonymous, and I just changed my cryptic userid “psdynpt” to “Yuri N”.
wlecker, Success Academy accepts kids by random lottery, but those who apply should know, that the school has a particular culture that may not be a good fit for every child or parent.
This is hardly unusual in public education, that has Gifted schools, magnet schools and all kinds of other school types, and some enroll based on tests, while some others pre-screen based on academic ability.
So no, not every public schools is for everyone, but, unlike Gifted schools or programs, that accept kids based on a single, high stakes G&T test at the tender age of 4, Success Academy accepts every child who passes through a random lottery.
“Unreasonable” discipline practices are in the eye of the beholder – a lot of Success Academy parents would disagree with your characterization. While the discipline is strict, it’s part of the routine that the kids hardly notice, and the incredible richness of the curriculum more than makes up for that. Perhaps thinking of Success Academy as a top notch military academy might illustrate this point, just as a thought exercise 🙂 .
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If Success Academy wants to operate like a private school with selective admissions as you say, then it should not receive public money. That seems so simple a concept. Similarly, any private school that receives public money must answer to the public. That means full transparency, public audits, elected governing boards, and adherence to the same requirements public schools must operate under.
Much of Success Academy’s unwanted attention and problems in the media would go away if they became a private school. If Success Academy is so desirable, the “free market” will support it, right? But it seems like you want taxpayers to pay for your exclusive school, including taxpayers who are denied an education. Otherwise, taxation WITH representation.
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I didn’t say that Success Academy has selective admissions – it does not. i simply suggested that the school culture will not be a fit for everyone, so it’s important to understand it.
Why would a school, that is a pioneer in bringing quality education to the low income communities, become a private school? SA is the opposite of a private school, in that it admits everyone and works for most.
For some parents, a private schools or a gifted program is a way of putting the child into a selective environment. SA is the opposite of that.
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I have been inside public schools in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, and I have ALWAYS seen dedicated science, art, music, dance and yoga classes. The teachers are professionals who are extremely creative in their fields. I worked at Success Academy for a very brief time, where I saw very new, unlicensed young teachers who were not qualified to teach their subjects. Their lack of sophistication in the arts was alarming. Eva even had to have them attend a PD to learn how to interpret a poem. And, how much arts and science do the students get when classes are swept aside for text prep? Once standardized testing is eliminated and becomes out of fashion, Eva and company will have nothing to point at for “proof” of success. The children need social and emotional growth. Eva’s unethical publicity machine is churning away. What about the fake “documentary” The Lottery, which was done for Eva by Jon Sackler’s daughter? The daughter wrote the only letter to respond to the New York Times article on suspensions at Success Academy. That letter was completely bogus; it was like having the advertising agency who produced commercials for Mop & Glow writing a letter to the New York Times about how great Mop & Glow is.
Please respond to me and tell me that The Lottery was unbiased journalism. It’s disgraceful to use the term “documentary” describing it.
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psdynpt, the eloquence and honesty of your original comment and follow-up stand on their own. Any commenter here who is critical of your thoughts or Success uses their wallets to exercise school choice, either by paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to attend private school or to live in a catchment zone intentionally drawn (and with all kinds of racist, segregationist baggage–mortgage discrimination, redlining, steering, and intimidation by private citizens and law enforcement) to eliminate or reduce the numbers of minority children.
Worse than that, these opponents will tolerate everything that they claim to detest about charter schools and Success so long as it occurs at an NYC DOE school and doesn’t threaten UFT jobs. Selective admissions schools and programs don’t let every kid through the door. Progressive schools like the Brooklyn New School, Manhattan School for Children, and Castle Bridge are unzoned and have lotteries for admission just like a charter. Desirable zoned schools like PS 321, PS 107, PS 29, PS 234, PS 6, PS 41, PS 290, PS 87, etc. don’t have to let in unzoned kids, even if there is room for them under the UFT caps. Hell PS 321, PS 107, PS 29, PS 234, PS 6, PS 41, PS 290, and PS 87 don’t admit kids who ARE zoned if they require a self-contained setting; they get redirected to schools where they are a “better fit.”
Charter schools are open to any resident of New York State. Their monthly board meetings and financial statements are open to the public–contrast this to traditional district NYC DOE schools like the ones my kids attend, where School Leadership Teams can only be viewed by non-members upon request (one that the school doesn’t have to honor). Charters are required to undergo an annual financial audit and even more stringent audits for renewal. The enrollment of charter schools in New York City is roughly 92% black or Latino, with approximately 80% of those kids qualifying or free or reduced-price lunch (Success’s 11,000 kids have approximately the same demographics).
However, Success does engage in one practice that violates the spirit if not the letter of the state’s charter school law, and that is not accepting any new students after the first day of fourth grade. I would encourage you to work from the inside to change this practice.
Again, thanks for your comments and I’m happy that you were able to find an alternative to your zoned school.
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Congratulations are due to Tim, who after much declaiming about those evil and hypocritical Pwogwessive parents who apparently are responsible for educational apartheid in the Five Boroughs, has conclusively proved his point by showing that approximately 0.08% of NYC public schools (and that’s giving him the selective high schools) are exclusionary as a matter of policy, something that is central to SA’s identity, culture and very existence.
Deflect and misdirect much?
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Again, Michael, this is just getting boring. I know that literally the last thing in the world you want to talk about is the conditions in these district schools that kids are opting out of in order to attend non-selective, open enrollment charter schools.
And what a lame reach of a critique. Obviously the handful specific schools that I listed were meant to be representative, not comprehensive. A comprehensive discussion of how brutally the residence-based district system stacks and sorts kids in the New York City area would touch upon the many non-integrated suburbs like Hastings-on-Hudson and Rockville Centre, where residents have the fatuous nerve to boast about how their schools serve all comers; the fact that 57% of the NYC DOE’s white student population is housed in just 7% of its schools; and the apartheid schools that its black and Latino students attend. This dynamic significantly pre-dates the introduction of charters or choice; the district model put those kids right where it wants them. It’s a system, as commenter Chiara is fond of saying.
I used to think it was nobody else’s business where somebody sent their own child to school, but I’ve re-thought that stance. If you believe that the buck on choice is going to stop with poor people of color, then it does matter where you send your own kids. Do/did your kids attend Title I-eligible 95%+ black/Latino public schools like the ones New York City charters draw their students from, Michael? If not, why not?
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@Tim– I usually disagree with your posts. However you point out here inequities in the NYC school system which I believe do undermine an anti-charter position for NYC. I am not dogmatic, & was hoping to see countering POVs, but there were none.
Full disclosure: I was a 20yr NYC resident who left Park Slope for NJ during the crack epidemic, w/3 kids whose eldest would have been starting K. I liked the looks of our zoned elementary. Our neighbors across the street were PS 321, we were PS 39 (long before it was forced to co-locate w/a charter). I preferred its middle-class, diverse student body to that of 321. Particularly since I was already aware my hi-intel yet ‘different’ eldest would probably be classified & sent elsewhere by 321.
But the zoned ms looked unsafe, its asphalt littered w/used syringes; our playgroup walked strollers elsewhere. No way we could afford 3 priv-sch ms tuitions, so we moved. That was a clincher for me: I was already unhappy with the prospect of competing for spots in magnet hs. (Our zoned hs was terrible). I had a no of friends w/hs kids & observed their lives were dominated by the sort of stress I’d previously associated only w/college admissions.
NJ in a sense is no different: one must buy one’s way into a good school system via house price & tax level. But that is the U.S. school-funding system.
In NYC, I do not understand why it is OK to use a magnet hs system to siphon off the talented to better schools, while leaving students whose families do not have the wherewithal to negotiate the complex magnet system to suffer in crowded, underfunded, sometimes violent zoned hs. It is not good enough to suggest ‘we have a place for your child in the ps system’ when that place may well be a 2-hr, 3-transport-zone commute away, for folks who obviously do not have a car, nor an at-home Mom for daily commutes. And yet it is not OK to employ a similar system via charters for K-8.
I have serious problems w/barely-regulated K-8 charters siphoning tax $ away from ps in NYC or anyplace else. Tim you claim that SA et al NYC charters are transparent & above-board; I do not believe that. But how do NYC parents feel about the alternate of extending the magnet ps system to K-8? Would that be equitable, or would it simply be another way to rescue some [well-behaving, non-SpEd/ ELL] kids from neglected zoned ps schools?
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Hi, Bethree5,
Are you sure that PS 39 has ever been colocated (speaking of another practice that is tolerated and unremarkable as long as all the schools have UFT employees) with a charter school? The really old and small building on 6th Ave?
Also, not all states fund their schools locally–Vermont, most notably, funnels every dime of school taxes to the state, which in turn disburses funding based on students’ socioeconomic status and educational needs. Such a method would be a political non-starter in New York–the people who have paid painfully high premiums to live in non-integrated districts aren’t anxious to see their school funding cut in half or more, or to have their state income taxes doubled (at least). So we have the system we have now, where NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, etc. receive much more in per-student funding than just about anywhere else on the planet, including the Millburns and Tenaflys and New Canaans and Athertons and Winnetkas, but not as much as a small handful of districts in NY State, which provides for a perpetual rallying cry of inequity. But it isn’t a lack of money that’s the issue (and within New York City itself, schools with higher proportion of at-risk kids get significantly more money than those that don’t); it’s the separation and isolation and general lack of opportunity for black and Latino kids.
I generally support anything that breaks down the connection between street address and school assignment (magnets, sure; “unzoned” schools are good too), and that means not just within districts, but between them: it is appalling that there haven’t been serious challenges mounted against Milliken v. Bradley. But I’m a political realist: we didn’t arrive at where we are today because white people are comfortable with sending their kids to school with more than a PS 321-sized number of poor children of color! But for the same supporters of that system to say that the buck stops when those kids want to attend charter schools? Screw. That. Noise.
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You should have spent 30 years trying to improve PS 39. Then you could send your grown children there today.
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Pardon me. Where are the open enrollment charter schools? Public schools welcome all district students all year long. They may have involved or uninvolved parents. They may arrive with severe special needs or without. They may speak English or they may not. They could have previously attended school or they could not.
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Didn’t fully get your point. Success Academy has open enrollment, with the only difference being that the demand for open spots far exceeds the supply, hence the need for the lottery. Any popular unzoned district school, like, for example, TAOTS PS 20K682 in my neck of the woods, uses essentially the same rules plus the lottery.
And overcrowded zoned schools also have to turn kids elsewhere.
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Yuri, Success Academy gets applicants by expensive marketing. A few years ago, the New York Times ran a story (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/education/10marketing.html) about SA spending $325,000 on advertising and marketing, to make sure they would have more applicants than places. The public school fighting for its life had $500 to spend on flyers. Are you still calling yourself a “progressive”?
Funny thing about that Times story. The focus is on public schools trying to market themselves to compete with Eva. But the fact that Eva spent $325,000 to compete with the public schools doesn’t appear in the story until paragraph 22.
Clearly, a charter spending $325,000 to gin up demand and create a lottery should have been the lead of the story, not an afterthought. This is predatory marketing.
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Diane, thanks for the link. I am not following the logic here (perhaps because it’s late and I am too tired). What is wrong with a startup school, not yet known to parents, spending money on advertising itself, especially when its private backers foot the bill?
It would be predatory if the ads were not true, or perhaps if they intentionally targeted affluent neighborhoods, in order to minimize the number of applicants from low income families. I think mass marketing on buses etc… would directly benefit low income parents, who would have fewer opportunities to learn about a new school, as compared to say, their more affluent neighbors.
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Yuri, on top of what you’ve written, state education law actually requires new and existing charter schools to advertise and market themselves as part of their community outreach. In particular, charters are required to provide evidence that they have advertised their presence to neighborhoods with high concentrations of at-risk kids.
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bethree5, you probably are unaware of the fact that plenty of middle class parents in Park Slope were not afraid to work to improve their public schools and didn’t say “PS321 or bust”. PS 39 is an outstanding public school now, as is PS 107. So is the new Maurice Sendak school. Are they mostly middle class kids now? Yes, but that happened gradually not because of any racist zoning that Tim likes to imply. The middle class parents started using those schools when they had mostly low-income students because they were committed to making the neighborhood school for all kids. They had no idea that in 5 or 10 years the neighborhood would become so expensive and the school would become a high-income school.
That has happened over and over again at neighborhood public schools. PS 261. PS 32. Those schools are used by both affluent and poor families and are very diverse. In fact, far more diverse than the Success Academy schools like Upper West and Union Square.
bethree5, would you be shocked if you knew that Success Academy had 3 schools in the same district (so all parents have priority), but two of them are mostly low-income and nearly 99% minorities, but the 3rd school was only 25% low-income (and dropping) have a majority of white students. Unlike those district schools that Tim criticizes, charter schools are open to all students in the zone, and yet those 3 charter schools in District 3 are segregated.
What is worse is that the one charter school that has the most white kids actually sends their students to middle school in a DIFFERENT school district that is one of the whitest and wealthiest districts in NYC!!! Instead of mixing up their 3 segregated elementary schools for middle school, they are shipping the kids at the whitest one out of district! And now they are asking for a special HIGH SCHOOL for those very same kids!
Tim knows that in District 15, the middle schools are going out of their way to PROMOTE diversity! Those students whose elementary schools may be primarily white are attending much more diverse middle schools. And much more diverse high schools. You moved away a long time back or you would understand that there are all kinds of options now for both middle school and high school and students of ALL backgrounds are using all of them.
I just wish Success Academy had the courage of their convictions and made sure that their richest and whitest schools didn’t stay “separate but equal”. It would be a simple matter to combine the three district 3 SA schools for middle and high school, but only if diversity was actually a goal. If you want to keep all the white and middle class kids in a single school, you’d certainly do exactly what Eva Moskowitz has done and opened a special out of district middle school for those kids and lobby hard for a special high school as well. That way, they never have to mix with the kids at HSA 1, where apparently 20 – 27% of the 5 year olds are constantly doing violent things. (at least according to people who claim that is the only reason those kids would be suspended).
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Tim says: “But I’m a political realist: we didn’t arrive at where we are today because white people are comfortable with sending their kids to school with more than a PS 321-sized number of poor children of color! ”
This is exactly what the administrators at Success Academy seem to believe. I assume that is why they dropped lottery priority for low-income students as soon as they got space in wealthy school districts because they were truly fearful that no white middle class parents would come if there were too many of those poor kids that Tim believes no white people are “comfortable” with.
That is probably why the administrators at Success Academy are trying to open a special high school for the kids in their whitest and wealthiest elementary school.
Compare that to the efforts being made by middle schools in District 15 to give priority to at-risk kids. Those schools are worried about being too white and middle class! They WANT to serve more children from low-income homes, even if they aren’t high-performing “scholars”. And the parents are supporting it! Have you seen the parents at PS 321 demanding their own special middle school and special high school? But the parents at SA Upper West apparently are on track for getting just that! Hmmm……
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“And the biggest thing that Success Academy doesn’t have, is the belief that economic circumstance pre-determines students’ academic outcomes.”
Apparently imbibing what passes for wisdom in Amanda Ripley’s THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD (2014, p. 164):
[start]
What did it mean, then, that respected U.S. education leaders and professors in teacher colleges were indoctrinating young teachers with the mindset that poverty trumped everything? What did it mean if teachers were led to believe that they could only be expected to do so much, and that poverty was usually destiny?
[end]
This is nothing but corporate education reform’s deeply ingrained “soft bigotry of low expectations” of public school staffs and students and parents and associated communities with its reflexive smear, sneer and jeer to defend $tudent $ucce$$.
Whatever the political or philosophical coloration of the rheephormista spouting this nonsense, it’s a shameful and monstrous lie.
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“The school is not for everyone, because it:
– employs strict discipline
– demands active parent involvement
– has a very long school day
– has a strong drive for academic performance”
You could have stopped right there.
That a school like this might exist is nothing new. A charter school approach was not an invention that came out of the blue around the time of the prediction of/and then coming-to-life market crash. The charter idea has been around for quite some time. But that timing of the wave of promotion with the protected piracy of our economy was not a coincidence.
What was new was that suddenly there was a wag-the-dog economic weapon for policy-makers, profiteers, and privatizers to use in order to further capitalize on public resources. “Look how these schools have failed us (“you”, because the wealthy are always insulated from their shenanigans), and how these teachers are an un-sustainable weight on our economy.” And then “look how all these hopefuls suddenly forced into college because of disappearing opportunities can’t perform the same as typical 4 year college students always have…we should begin demanding that level of performance from all children regardless of their background, aptitude, personal goals/talents…”
You can connect the dots to where we are now. The reason all of the supposed charter gurus, magnet school leaders, celebrities-turned-constitutional authorities on how teacher tenure keeps food and security and love out of the homes of the poorest and most challenged students, politicians acting as pushers and promoters of this mindset…the reason they have to do this new brand of charter promotion is because they are unwilling to do the work that really needs to be done.
The most fair and honest thing to do would be to say:
“Hey…we can’t really do all the work that schools do, but we have made this rather exclusive approach to educating that will help some kids who meet this criteria to do better on tests. no life-outcomes promised but in the end it’s all about the money and the numbers, baby.
Yeah, not fair-but keep in mind we can impose some rules and conditions that your regular schools can’t, so if you are a concerned and involved parent who wants your child in an engineered environment-we might be for you!”
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@Yuri N. I agree with @MathVale.
Those of us who have been following the Success Academy scam for years have already heard all of the above propoganda. In particular I would like to educate you on the following:
“Pioneer in bringing quality education to the low income communities” WRONG. First it’s debatable whether a SA education is a quality education, but that said, there were other groups in low income communitiies first. CPE1 and CPE2 were created in East Harlem forty years ago and are stll flourishing schools. SA propaganda would like everyone to believe that they re-invented the wheel, but they didn’t.
SA is not a selective environment. WRONG. Several years ago, a reporter from our local weekly, the West Side Spirit, wrote a story about SA. He attended an open house where Eva Moskowitz spoke and he quoted her as saying, “If you were late to your own wedding, this is not the school for you.” WHAT? Imagine going to your zoned school and the principal saying something like that! The lottery may be random, but there is a significant amount of selection going on prior. Not to mention that if SA takes public money, they should not be discriminating for any reason.
During the last academic year, SA placed full-page advertisements in the West Side Spirit timed with G&T and private school deadlines. One was in October timed to the G&T RFT guideline, another in December timed to the private school admissions/ERB testing deadlines, and another in January timed to the G&T testing month. Coincidence? I think not. Then in the spring, the West Side Rag (our local online paper) published a press release from Upper West “Success” bragging about how many applications they had received from families zoned for the wealthier schools in D3. For all their nonsense about “poor kids trapped in failing schools”, the children SA really wants are from wealthier, educated families.
Last December, we received a flyer from SA with my husband and my younger child’s name on it two weeks before G&T testing was to start. Coincidence? Once again, I think not. To say that I was livid is putting it mildly. I promptly coplained to the Mayor’s Office and the DOE Charter School Office. SA is not a DOE school, so how did they get my child’s information from the DOE? I know they received this information from the DOE, because my husband is the one who signed our child up for kindergarten connect. Do you ever wonder how Eva Moskowitz, who is neither an elected or appointed government official, gets to use public resources to set an educational agenda? It’s so corrupt that it’s sickening.
I would never send my children to SA. Early childhood/elementary school experts do not recomment rigid curruculum, excessive discipline, and inexperienced teachers. You and @Tim like to dismiss criticism as “not having the facts” or “not caring about poor kids”, but any criticism I have about SA comes from what I’ve heard from families who send their children there, and in some cases withdrew them.
SA is nothing but a scam to break the teachers union and to provide tax breaks to wealthy individuals. It is unconsciionable to me that public resources have been squandered on the creation of a corrupt, unethical, and inequitable educational network within the DOE which in itself is bureaucratic and inequitable. Instead, these resources should have been used to level the playing field by providing schools with low income populations reduced class size, assistant teachers, specials, speech therapists, social workers, etc. Obviously, no one making the decisions about these resources really cares, when there is money to be made auctioning off public school seats.
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The SA model is based on student mobility and high teacher turnover. It’s nice that it works for you, but it’s not a humane way of treating workers or children, IMHO. See http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teacher-turnover-success-academy-charter-schools
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Part of your statement is counter-factual, since low student turnover at Success Academy has been well documented by the DOE. There are some charter schools with high student attrition – Success Academy is not of the them.
Source – DOE-provided student attrition data for charters, discussed in this article by Beth Fertig of WNYC: http://www.wnyc.org/story/302728-top-ten-charters-with-high-attrition-rates/ . Raw DOE data used in the article is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e48Jl7bNHk06-6AQb4pt3yiTwfQvI3a1e_Df1nRaveA/edit?pli=1#gid=0
Teacher retention turnover is getting better and has recently been around 83%. I posted a link to that data elsewhere in this thread.
Unfortunately, many people don’t look at the actual data and keep repeating inaccurate information instead, because it fits their political worldview.
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Yuri N. I’m glad you posted that data from 2010-2011. After all, looking at a single year’s data that pro-charter Mayor Bloomberg’s DOE provided is SO useful, after all and tells us so much. In fact, I think no one ever has to look at attrition rates again, because I’m sure whatever happened in 2010-2011 tells us everything we ever need to know. That’s what you desperately want, right? We ONLY use this one year’s data from Mayor Bloomberg’s DOE and we should never ever ever use any other data. That’s the kind of thing people terrified of facts hope.
But still, that data you linked to is alarming!!!:
Yuri, in that data you so kindly provided, 15.2% of the children at Harlem Success Academy 4 withdrew from the school. OVER 15% of the kids disappeared in one year. Compare that with the 26(!) charter schools that lose UNDER 7% of their kids! MANY charter schools lost only 3 – 5% of their students!!!
Yuri, if you really care about kids, you will demand that Eva Moskowitz follow the “best practices” of all those charter schools that lose far less than HALF the number of students that HSA 4 does each year. So many parents are voting with their feet and LEAVING??? While at 26 other charter schools the parents are STAYING? And you think that is admirable when you keep bragging about the kids at SA given luxuries that no other school can afford? Weird that you think so many very stupid parents win the lottery for K and then “voluntarily” leave the school. Of course, we both know that if you target a child for misery the parent will usually pull them out. I just feel shocked over and over again that it doesn’t bother you.
Remember Yuri, you ONLY want to look at the 2010-2011 data for one year. You aren’t really interested in facts — if you did you would actually encourage audits so you had better facts about attrition. Pretending no more audits are necessary pretty much speaks for itself. But even that one year shows that there are an inordinate number of low-income parents who leave Success Academy in numbers far beyond what they leave other charter schools. Given that Success has already admitted to having “got to go” lists and not giving renewal forms to the kids NOT on any ‘got to go’ list but who they just don’t want back is why this alarming 15%+ attrition rate is terrible. Just think — by 4th grade they can replace all those unwanted 5 year olds with 6 and 7 year olds who are pre-tested to make sure they won’t be too hard for their inexperienced teachers to teach! Why you don’t object to that is truly beyond my understanding.
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“Robert Gilliam, whose 10-year-old son attended Success Academy Bed-Stuy 1 a block away on Tompkins Avenue, said his son was “broken” and “devastated” by his time at the charter school.
His son, Jordan, was in need of an Individualized Education Program (IEP) and did not receive the services he needed at Success, Gilliam said.
“For about six months, everything was fine. Once his reading comprehension went down and he had to get an IEP, everything changed,” Gilliam said. “He got disregarded like a piece of rag.”
Yuri N., here’s another child the people you admire so much threw out with the garbage. I don’t understand how you can look the other way and CELEBRATE and PRAISE the school that does this kind of thing. Unfortunately, too many people in this country are perfectly fine with having far more vulnerable children pay the price for their child’s “free private school” education. I guess I understand why parents whose own children are benefitting won’t criticize when another child suffers, since it means far more resources for their own well-behaved and middle class child. But I don’t understand how they can actually PROMOTE that kind of reprehensible behavior by posting on boards to defend it. I guess that’s something I just can’t understand. I know my posts won’t stop you from continuing to deny the truth and promoting more weeding out of the undesirables who just happen to be young and vulnerable children. But I guess I still have enough faith in human nature to hope that it might.
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As for Pyrrhic victories, these are not victories at all. The successes are few and the stuff of urban legends promulgated by spin doctors, conservative blogs and media outlets. Then, the myth and cherry picked data are repeated long and loud enough so that the weak minded politicians, media and citizens buy the lie and sell it. Facts are an inconvenience for those that want to destroy democratic public education.
The people should use the facts above to demand accountability of our political system. Why are the federal and state governments continuing to expand the number of charters as well as throwing millions at charters when they are not serving our students well? Taxpayers should unite against wasting more money, time and students’ education on failed charter experiments. Our children must stop being corporate guinea pigs.
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Are there citations/references for these numbers please?
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Is their a source for the data she mentions?
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The author’s name: Jacqueline Ancess.
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Darn that auto-correct! I typed Ancess. It got changed to Access. Try it.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Prof. Jacqueline Access, have you had a chance to look at the July 2015 IBO Report that includes information about attrition rates for the entering Kindergarten classes in 53 NYC charter schools? That IBO Report looked at all the students who entered Kindergarten in those 53 charter schools in the 2008-2009 school year to see how many made it to 5th grade in 2013-14. Only 49.5% of those students remained by 5th grade, and that included students who were held back and still in earlier grades (so even fewer than the 50% remaining actually stayed at their grade level in their charter school during those years).
Click to access school-indicators-for-new-york-city-charter-schools-2013-2014-school-year-july-2015.pdf
The attrition data for those 53 charter schools is on page 9. Four of those schools are Success Academy schools, which also had far higher test scores than any of the other charter schools examined. Remarkably higher! It would be fascinating for a researcher like yourself to get the disaggregated attrition data of those 53 schools from the IBO to see whether certain charter chains are losing more of their entering Kindergarten cohort over the years (and whether or not they are replaced with higher-performing students in older grades) has any impact on their test scores compared to the charter schools that have far lower attrition rates. If the charter schools losing some of the highest % of their Kindergarten students also have the highest test scores, while the charter schools keeping the highest number of students have much lower test scores, that would say a lot about why some charter schools are so rabid about their “got to go” lists and “encouraging” certain students to leave.
I hope you will take a look at the IBO report. There is data at the state website, but the attrition rate of that starting Kindergarten cohort may be hidden by new students coming in who are only allowed to join their class if they are already at grade level. So that IBO report is the only recent report to actually track the entering Kindergarten cohort to see if they remained or disappeared from the charter schools.
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Do / did Dr. Ancess’s children all attend their local zoned schools? If not, why not?
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Tim, do you mean “did Dr. Ancess’s children attend schools that suspended 20% – 27% of their 5 and 6 year olds?”
Do you think her kids attended a school that suspends over 20% of their 5 year olds? Do you know any middle class white parents who send their children to schools where 15% – 20% of the 5 year olds are doing such violent things that the school has no choice whatsoever but to suspend them (sometimes over and over again)? Do you actually think that you can take a random group of low-income minority 5 year old children with the MOST MOTIVATED parents who sought out the best school for them, and find out that so many of them are violent – some of them over and over again?
Nobody but a racist would ever believe that was the case. But a non-racist might pretend to believe it despite the great harm it does to the most vulnerable children. Still, I guess when the ends justifies the means, sometimes a little dishonesty — or a lot — is what you need to do, right?
I can’t figure out if you are a racist or just dishonest. But I suspect we both believe that there is no way that the 20% or 27% of the children who win the lottery for K are violent. They just don’t “fit” and making them so miserable they act out is apparently something you have no problem with. As long as their spots are “backfilled” by students who are much more compliant and academic, right?
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You’re really hit your stride recently with the calling people racist. This could be your new thing.
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FLERP!, I am truly curious:
When someone goes on national television and insists that the reason that over 20% of the Kindergarten and first grade students are getting suspended is not because they are committing the kinds of minor infractions that are pretty common among the 5 year old set, but because they acted out so violently that the school had no choice but to suspend them over and over again, what exactly are your thoughts?
Do you just assume that of course it must be true, because most of those kids just happen to be low-income minority children? Or do you assume the person is lying because the chances of so many violent 5 year olds being in the same small school that serves ONLY the most motivated families (not dysfunctional families, but families whose parents CARE very much about education despite being poor) is pretty slim?
Why doesn’t Tim question the notion that so many children of color are violent? Constantly throwing chairs and hitting teachers and who knows what else? It’s always about the kid being violent, not because the inexperienced teachers have no idea how to handle any child who feels terrible about not learning fast enough.
So, do you believe that 20% (at one school 27%!) of the very youngest students at a single school could be acting in such a violent manner? Not high school students, but 5 or 7 year olds? I find it shocking that you would believe such a thing. And I find it shocking that Tim would believe such a thing, too.
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Too many words, too many question marks.
Here’s one question mark: Are you racist? You directly accuse others of being racist, often with exclamation points. So I would assume you’re not racist, but please confirm, thx.
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There weren’t too many question marks. You just don’t want to answer the question.
Eva Moskowitz has gone on national television to tell us that 20 – 25% of the 5 and 6 year olds in some of her charter schools are doing such violent things that a charter school has no choice but to suspend them.
The children who get suspended are primarily low-income African-American and Latino children with very motivated parents who are committed to doing all that was asked to get their child a better education.
Is it racist to believe that so many of those 5 year olds are doing such violent things? And not just in one school, but in quite a few, where the majority of kids just happen to be low-income and minorities.
Maybe you don’t think that is racist, FLERP!. But I do.
But I certainly understand why you prefer to avoid the question. Or maybe you simply believe that all those 5 year olds ARE violent.
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Again, are you racist?
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FLERP!, I find it truly sad that you are unwilling to call out racist beliefs. I’m sure every white person (myself included) in this country has at some point not realized their own casual racism. It’s how they react when it is pointed out that demonstrates their true beliefs. The ball is in your court, but if you prefer not to answer, that also speaks volumes.
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FLERP and NYC public school parent, please stop calling one another racist. It is not edifying to anyone and is a distraction from the central issues facing all of us today. I will delete any further comments on this exchange between you.
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Tim’s comments are always intended to misdirect, using straw men (public school parents as the purported cause of school segregation) and red herrings (where the cited author sends her children to school) to shift discussion from where it it’s intended.
In this instance, he uses (as he did in this comment thread previously with me) the logical fallacy of “Tu Quoque” (“You, too!”) in order to troll this site and push charter schools.
All in the name of equality and equal access, of course, just like Eva.
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There’s no “tu quoque” here. When you insist that a particular subset of children must be educated in isolated and segregated conditions; when there is no evidence that this is good for children and plenty of evidence that it isn’t; and when you would never in a million years submit your own child to the same conditions, you are arguing for a double standard.
I will take your non-answer as a no, that your children did not/do not attend the sorts of high-poverty, high-isolation schools that the vast majority of New York City charter school students are zoned for.
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Tim,
I oppose segregated schools. You say you do, yet you aggressively support segregated charters. Charters never apologize for being 100% black. I don’t get your logic
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Dr. Ravitch, I apologize for implying anyone on this board is racist.
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Tim says: “When you insist that a particular subset of children must be educated in isolated and segregated conditions..”
No one is suggesting that. What an offensive statement to make.
Criticizing a charter school that weeds out kids they don’t want (who happen to be more likely to be low-income minorities) has nothing to do with whether you believe in diversifying schools. In fact, it is just the opposite. Segregating only the well-behaved and easy to educate kids with no learning issues in one charter school while sending away the ones who don’t “fit” to far more segregated public schools? How that promotes diversity in your mind is beyond my understanding.
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Tim is quite a piece of work.
He denies using the logical fallacy of Tu Quoque, and then proceeds to repeat it.
Like the privatizers he shills for, his intellectual dishonesty is off the charts.
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