Part of the marketing technique of Success Academy is to recruit, recruit, recruit, so that there is overwhelming number of applicants. In my neighborhood–which is upscale–Eva Moskowitz opened a charter and suddenly there were posters advertising for students on every bus stop and available spot in the neighborhood. When she first opened in Harlem, she spent $325,000 on a marketing campaign, which produced demand and enabled her to say that she needed more schools. The other virtue of having 10 applicants for every seat is that the network is able to screen out the students they don’t want.
This year, the number of applications declined, but there was still–SA reported–a large number of applications for every seat.
The network has some legal problems, as well as a year of bad PR:
A series of New York Times reports highlighting controversial discipline policies attracted national attention — much of it negative — to a network that had previously been heralded as a national model by education reform advocates. The first Times report shed light on a school with a “got to go” list of unruly students, a second contains a video showing a teacher ripping up a child’s paper for not understanding a math problem. A PBS News report also documented the network’s practice of suspending children as young as kindergarten.
The investigations soon followed.
Most notably, the federal Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights is looking into a complaint filed by former Success parents alleging that the network discriminates against students with special needs and, in some cases, tries to counsel them out of Success schools.
Public Advocate Letitia James is conducting a similar investigation in New York City, and comptroller Scott Stringer has pledged to audit the network’s finances. Mayor Bill de Blasio, one of Moskowitz’s longtime political foes, has become more emboldened in his public criticism of the network, after losing an early battle with Moskowitz over school space.
The charter industry has played fast and loose with waiting list stories. You have to take their word for how many applicants there are. Often a family will apply to 3 or 4 different charters, and they are on the wait list for all. Others have kept wait lists that include children who applied in earlier years.
There are days when I think that Eva should become chancellor so she can show her ability to work her magic for all children, not just the ones who are accepted into SA.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Does Success Academy pick students by lottery or by some other selective method?
Allegedly by lottery. But there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through before you get to the lottery, including meetings where they lay it on thick about parental obligations, homework, Saturday school, etc.
We can call them lotteries, but in reality they function a whole lot more like prostitution. Do What We Say Or Forget The Financing. http://www.ciedieaech.worpress.com/2015/10/09/love-by-lottery
OOPS. SORRY FOR THE MISSPELLING IN WORDPRESS. http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/love-by-lottery
There are exactly two hoops to jump through to enter the Success lottery: one, the applying child must be a resident of New York State. Two, the parent has to fill out this very short form. That’s it. http://www.successacademies.org/apply/
(The site may take a while to load as the network just released lottery/wait list results.)
Accepted students do have to attend one orientation meeting where parents/guardians sign a letter pledging to read to their child daily, respond to school correspondence within 24 hours (the school makes the same promise to families), and to send the child to school in a uniform.
Success Academy self-selects (cherry picks) using a variety of implicit and explicit techniques.
#1: They require engaged parents who care about their kids education
#2: They restrict this pool of engaged and caring parents by creating a set of demands that isolates the most committed of the group.
#3: A [probably] rigged lottery.
#4: “Got to Go” behaviors/Suspensions
#5: Test score culling
Throw in some creative test proctoring and imaginative test scoring, and voila – a roomful of scholars, none of whom can pass the SHSAT.
NYS Parent:
Please don’t confuse Non Sequitur with facts, logic and reason. This will probably make his head explode and it will be up to me, as the resident TA on this blog, to clean up the resulting me$$.
On the other hand, perhaps you should continue as you have been doing. After all, if he ever (probably unintentionally as happens very occasionally) breaks the $ucce$$ Academy “Code of Silence” and violates that old “loose lips sink ships” adage then we may be in for a treat.
Thank you for helping keep things real.
Not Rheeal.
😎
KTA,
Sometimes the truth hurts.
There are NO miracles in this business. Every previous “miracle” program has proven to be a result of lies, cheating, deception, or torturing data until it reveals the desired outcome.
Hopefully this mess won’t be too messy for you.
Jonathan: Success Academy has to accept every student who wins a lottery for K. The only thing they can do is force their parents to jump through hoops and sign a contract in order to attend. But Success Academy suspends the 5 year olds they don’t like over and over again so that there are plenty of spaces for upper grades except in their schools that have 75% or more affluent students (where the suspension rates of 5 year olds are under 5% versus 20% in some of the low-income schools where too many unwanted 5 year olds managed to get through the lottery and the hoops.)
Once there is a lottery for a 1st grade spot or higher, Success Academy demands that the 1st grader take a pre-enrollment exam. Is this exam appropriate? No one knows. But if Success Academy decides your child is unworthy, you will be told that unless you force your child to repeat one year — or even two years if they really want to discourage you from enrolling — your child is NOT welcome to attend. Because after all, we expect 6 year olds to come in at a high level in order to be “allowed” to enter 1st grade and it turns out that many of the low-income kids don’t meet that standard. Luckily, that leaves lots of room for the more academic 6 year olds.
I just love your final paragraph!!!
“There are days when I think that Eva should become chancellor so she can show her ability to work her magic for all children, not just the ones who are accepted into SA.
Fantastic idea! Chancellor Farina of the NYCDOE makes $275,000/yr; would Eva ($475,000/yr) be willing to take a $200,000 pay cut?
Diane, your first paragraph is a gem. It’s a concise summary of why competition cannot provide equal access to quality education. School-choicers like to say, let the free market compete to provide what consumers want: they’ll ‘vote with their feet’; sub-par ‘businesses’ will be forced to close, and overall quality will improve. Which completely ignores the element of marketing. In fact, those businesses with big start-up budgets will aggressively advertise to a targeted market, creating inflated demand, which allows them to cherry-pick enrollment, then use the cherry-picked test scores as ‘results’ enhancing the next round of marketing, & so on… Meanwhile, the ‘product’ is public education. Public schools have no marketing budget so they’re automatically excluded from the running. Their job is to ‘be there’ for the overflow demand– & to take budget hits for the enrollees they lose to the ‘marketplace’. Charter marketers can say anything they want in their ads– how are their bait-&-switched consumers going to ‘walk’ when depleted publics are closed, or can only offer huge classes full of ‘rejects’?
You are absolutely correct. Public schools were designed as a public service, not a capitalist enterprise. Our leaders forced schools into an unfair game. Public schools have no budget for advertising, no PR staff, and no marketeers. Imagine if the police had to compete with “Rent a Cop” or our fire fighters had to compete with “Extinguish Fires for Hire” services without any tools to do it. The whole scenario is ridiculous, but here we are, because our leaders decided to monetize our schools.
“Eva dense based solutions”
Eva dense based solutions
Are really something swell
They’re based on Eva’s notions
About a school from Hell
Where children say no word
Unless they’re spoken to
If ever they are heard
It’s “out the door with you”
Where children are berated
For getting something wrong
For many years they’re fated,
To never sing a song
Where score on standard test
Equates with student value
The “smartest” are the “best”
And pampered, let me tell you
But “dumbest” just get booted
By artificial means
‘Your Johnny wasn’t rooted”
In classroom seat, it seems”
Eva dense based solutions
Are based in Rhee-ality
Eva dense based delusions
As anyone can see
Eva dense based solutions,
A harsh Rhee-ality,
Are based on grand delusions
As anyone can see
I really wish the false number of “applicants per seat” was put to rest already. In NYC, public school parents are allowed to rank many schools on their application for Kindergarten, middle school, and high school. It is misleading to say that when a school only has 120 seats and 3,000 students ranked them somewhere among their 14 choices, there are now 2,880 students on the “wait list” for that public school. Many of those students are happily at other schools which they prefer. That’s why public schools never mislead the public by claiming there are mythical students on wait lists when there are not. That’s an honesty that some charter schools — and their defenders who post here — just cannot grasp because they believe that honesty is for the little people and if you can get away with misleading the public, do it. But in fact, there is far more demand for PUBLIC school Kindergarten spots and far more 5 year olds on REAL public school “wait lists” then you find on Success Academy wait lists. But those students are invisible to gullible reporters who don’t ask questions when they hear braggarts making claims.
With charter schools — especially ones who market themselves as desperately as Success Academy does — a parent can sign up for a lottery without even visiting or committing to the school. So their wait lists are even more mythical than public school ones because if a parent GETS a spot, they know they have no obligation to take it! It doesn’t mean they actually have to send their kids there. Charter schools with class sizes of 100 admit students who are #300+ on their “wait list” because 200 of the kids on their wait list don’t actually want to go to their school. Are charter schools issuing press releases that “hundreds of students rejected our charter school offers in favor of public schools”? Not a chance.
Notice that no education reporter has ever asked Ms. Moskowitz how far on the wait list she had to go to fill each Success Academy school. Where is the reporting? What if the reporting was about how many of the lottery winners turned down the Success Academy spot and #400 on this wait list got a spot? Why are out of district families getting spots if there is such a “demand” when they get the last priority after every other in-district student get spot? Is that because they jump the line because they are more desirable students? How many parents sign up for 10 Success academy schools and suddenly one student becomes “10 students on the wait list”?
If there is even ONE student from out of district attending a Success Academy school — and we know from the press conferences that parents claim to travel hours to get to those schools — then the waiting list is false. There aren’t even enough in-district kids who want spots in the SA school and they have to go far afield to fill them. Or maybe they have to go far afield after kicking out the district kids who they don’t want. In either case, it is astonishing that any reporter simply accept the word of a charter school who has been caught out in dishonest practices over and over again. The press and reporters should know better. Journalism 101 – when someone claims that their product is popular with millions, don’t just accept their word for it. Ask questions. Be a journalist.
Too true. Not much press these days adheres to the credo of the Society of Professional Journalists, who “believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy”.
Another example of why Corporations can’t be in charge of anything.
I get occasional e-mails from them, inviting me to apply for a job. Exchange my union-protected job for a chance to be an educational minion of Moscowitz? No thanks.