The Show Me Institute, a free-market think tank in Missouri, has invited Eva Moskowitz to share the story of her ability to produce high test scores at her Success Academy charter schools on November 3.
Will she tell them about excluding students with disabilities and students who can’t read English? Will she tell them about booting out students who are behavior problems? Will she explain what it means when a school doesn’t “backfill”? Will she explain how her policy of not backfilling produces a steadily shrinking cohort? Will she talk about the high teacher turnover? Or the harsh disciplinary methods that produce compliant students? Will she ridicule public schools, which accept the students she excludes or kicks out? Will she tell them that her schools receive tens of millions of dollars of subsidies from hedge fund managers and other financiers?
Of course, Missouri has Rex Sinquefeld, the billionaire who hates public schools, so maybe Missouri charters will get the extra money they need to set up no-excuses charters that employ Eva’s secrets. Sinquefeld manages more than $300 billion in funds and is a co-founder of the Show Me Institute. He wants the state to abolish the income tax and replace it with a regressive sales tax.
Note that Eva’s bio in the announcement says that she “has returned to her roots in teaching,” but the only time she ever taught was in higher education, not exactly a model for no-excuses charters.

And surprise, surprise, Rex supports Trump. Don’t you just love these billionaires/multimillionaires. From yahoo finance: Multimillionaire financier Rex Sinquefield, a pioneer in index fund investing, says there’s one reason to vote for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump—his tax policy.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rex-sinquefield-trump-endorsement-comes-down-to-one-thing-155224931.html
What is it with billionaires and charter schools and regressive tax policies?
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Question: why does a billionaire want lower taxes? He and the other billionaires already have more money than they could ever spend. I suppose that money means power and they can never get enough of that.
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Diane, for a lot of these billionaires, money indeed means power. And status. The more money they have, the more they think they are worth as people.
And the more they think they are worth as people, the more they think that, in their eyes, everything they want is obviously “right,” and it doesn’t matter to them whether this is best for the country and its citizens as a whole.
Because they “know better.” And they “know better” because they have lots of money. So obviously, they’re smarter and more competent than anyone else.
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Maybe they can play this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2e39Ybn2XI
Charlotte Dial, the teacher in the video, was not only NOT fired. She was put in charge of training Success Academy teachers system-wide. The New York Times piece covering this interviewed dozes of former and current Success Academy teachers who states this this was not “an anomaly”, in Eva’s words, but something that was a regular thing. The practice even had a name they used for it: “rip-‘n-redo” was the name for it
The homeless-shelter-dwelling mother of the child being abused in the video reports how badly she was treated by Eva after this story broke:
(you would think that if Eva had any sense, she and her folks would have been kissing up to that mom fifteen-ways-from-Sunday, but no, she just didn’t have it in her… “We’ve heard enough from you!’ Eva publicly rebuked this woman at a Success Academy meeting with parents, causing her to leave in disgust):
When Eva had a disastrous press conference — showing no sympathy for the child or mother, then playing victim and going t after the Times for “biased, witch-hunt, gotcha reporting” — the Times’ Metro Editor Wendell Jamieson then blasted back at Eva here (to Erik Wemple at the Washington Post):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/02/12/success-academy-hammers-new-york-times-for-excellent-viral-story/?utm_term=.e760f425b53a
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OK! Taking a bullet for all who can’t go. Signed up, at least it’s free. Will let you all know the outcome afterword.
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Duane, we eagerly anticipate your report! Ask her about the “got-to-go” list and about Ms. Charlotte Dial, the teacher who ripped up the paper of a first-grader and sent her to the calm-down corner, when it was the teacher who needed to calm down. And ask her about the high rate of teacher turnover and student attrition. And how many Wall Street hedge funders on her board?
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I really would like to comment on this post but I’m not sure that what I have to say would be very nice and Diane covered it pretty well.
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I can’t “like” anything linked to Eva unless it reveals the evil she is.
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The difference between Bill Gates and Sinquefield/Waltons/Koch is Gates has better P.R.
He is the 800 lb. gorilla in the state, with the most regressive state tax system in the nation. One way Gates creates his good P.R. is, he funds the falsely named Center for American Progress. CAP is the lipstick on a pig, branch of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. David Koch was on the Aspen Institute board until recently and, Gates funds Aspen’s education programs.
Trump bragged he’s smart because he doesn’t pay taxes. Men like him and Gates are predators that offload their costs of production to the middle class and poor, while gorging on business profits- impatient opportunists and users (IOU). Their organization which stands for, I Own You.
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In looking up where I need to go it hit me that this presentation is sponsored by SLU’s School of Business and not by it’s School of Education.
Makes sense, eh, since Success (sic) Academy is mainly a business that specializes in indoctrination and training, not in teaching and learning.
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Duane, thank you in advance for going. You represent all of us who support our public schools, and our children.
And it figures that the School of Business is the sponsor.
It never seems to get through to their heads (never mind their hearts- they don’t appear to have any) that children are not pizzas, or cars, or anything else made and sold by businesses. Children are human beings and should be nurtured and taught in humane and caring ways, while allowing them to be children. Rather than treating them as items on a spread sheet that need to make money for already wealthy companies and individuals, and oh, by the way, become “trained” (not “educated”) to become as identical as possible.
They are not robots. They are our children. All of our children.
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Well stated, Zorba!
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Duane,
So how was The Eva Show?
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