This letter was sent to me by the person who created the SCAM advertisements in the previous post. i asked to explain why she decided to leave her job as a teacher at Success Academy Charter Schools. She sent the following commentary.
She writes:
When I applied to teach at Success Academy Charter Schools, I was just out of college with little teaching experience, and I was interviewing at every school I could, hoping to get my first real teaching job. As soon as I walked into Success’s Wall Street office for the interview, I knew this was a different kind of school. The space looks and feels like corporate headquarters, complete with glass-walled conference rooms and a minimalist aesthetic.
I was called into a boardroom with five or so other applicants, and someone from the “Talent” team (in charge of hiring) showed us a slick marketing video: we were being seduced. Then, one by one, we were asked to deliver a mini-lesson to everyone present. After each turn, we were given explicit feedback, which the next person was expected to implement immediately. It became clear that this was less of an interview, and more of a practical test to determine how well we could emulate the specific teaching style Success subscribes to. It was also an early introduction to the network’s trademark language and unique demands: we were told that every employee pledges support for the “dual mission,” which is to say that our job description included advocacy for “school choice” in addition to our roles as teachers.
I was placed at Success Academy Cobble Hill, which made news last year after The New York Times released a video of “Labsite teacher” Charlotte Dial berating a first-grader for stumbling during “Number Stories,” before she publicly rips the young girl’s worksheet in half. (This practice is common enough to have a nickname within the network, the “rip and redo.”) Contrary to statements made by Ms. Dial, CEO Eva Moskowitz, and Principal Kerri Tabarcea, this type of interaction is not at all out of the ordinary at Success. Ms. Dial’s harsh classroom management was known – in fact, celebrated – by school leaders. Newer hires were even sent to Ms. Dial so they could learn to model her “no-nonsense” teaching, earning her the “Labsite teacher” title and a higher salary. Perhaps most disturbingly, Charlotte Dial is still employed as a first-grade teacher at Success Academy Cobble Hill, sending a clear message to students, families, and other teachers in the network.
One of the real and valuable benefits to working at Success is that there is remarkable focus on professional development. Teachers are observed often, given feedback almost constantly, and participate in formal professional development sessions at least once a week. The caveat is that this training is entirely geared towards the specific strategies developed by Success for the purposes of social control over “scholars” and high test scores for the network.
“Scholars” are taught to value urgency. Children are expected to complete transitions in a given amount of time, often as short as ten seconds – taking any longer is considered unacceptable. This teaches students that learning is precious. It also teaches that taking one’s time, moving at one’s own pace, is irresponsible. It was heartbreaking to know that I was imparting on my young students the very same constant pressure that I felt from my supervisors.
Teachers’ directions to students must follow a stubborn formula, and are enforced just as strictly. “When I say go, safely and silently walk to your desk, take out your book, and begin reading. You have ten seconds, go.” Once at their desks, students will already know the correct posture for reading; they know that to avoid a “consequence,” their feet need to be flat and still on the floor, with their backs straight against their chairs, and two hands on their books. When I allowed for a more relaxed atmosphere in my classroom, I was reprimanded and lectured about the value of posture while reading. Any wavering from Success philosophy is treated as heresy, and often encourages unwanted attention from administrators – for instance, a teacher who fails to maintain perfect silence while students are on the carpet might be ordered to participate in “live coaching,” wherein a superior stands in the back of the room during the lesson, whispering directions into a microphone, which the teacher hears through an earpiece. In the middle of a sentence, the teacher will hear, “narrate and consequence voice,” and is expected to immediately use pre-practiced language to correct a murmuring student in the corner. Part of the reason I accepted a position at Success was for the professional development, but this was not what I had in mind.
Most of the students I taught at Success dreaded coming to school, as did most of the teachers. It is a grueling, relentless atmosphere where every second is cherished as potential learning time, and every slip-up garners an immediate consequence. There is a small fraction of people – students and adults alike – who thrive in this extreme environment. More often, the constant pressure makes for tense relationships, high anxiety, and negative affects on health and behavior. During testing season, each Success school is shipped extra pairs of pants to keep on hand, because inevitably several third graders will be so scared to sacrifice test time for a bathroom trip, they’ll have an accident. Some students react to this extreme environment in extreme ways; at the strictest Success locations, it is commonplace to hear screaming and crying in the hallways throughout the day as children as young as five break down for one reason or another. Different Success locations have different ways of dealing with this behavior, ranging from the infamous “got to go” list at Fort Greene to School Safety interventions elsewhere. If there was screaming in the hallway, one of my students would silently get up to close the classroom door. Other students continued working, both because they were unfazed and because they knew they would be held accountable for being on-task regardless of what was happening around them.
Every teacher imparts learning to students outside of their explicit lesson content. Given the tenor of current events, I have been thinking about what priorities and values I want to model in my teaching and embody in my curriculum. I want my students to know the importance of empathy, respect, and generosity. I want them to know that they matter, and that every other human matters too. I want them to feel empowered to speak up to an authority figure – including me – if they feel they are being treated unjustly. These are crucial social-emotional understandings, and though they may not affect test scores, they will surely affect students’ lives. Not only does the curriculum at Success ignore social-emotional learning, but the structure of the day allows for such minimal peer-to-peer interaction that students are unable to learn such skills from each other.
Like so many others, I quit Success because the brand of teaching the network demands prevented me from providing the quality of education my students deserve. When I tried to accommodate a restless student by allowing her to fidget on the carpet, I was told I was doing her a disservice and was ordered to keep her still. When I tried to advocate for under-performing students to undergo psychological testing so that they might receive services they needed, I was ignored or admonished, and in one instance told flat-out that the school was not testing students so as to avoid being legally obligated to provide services to them. I watched coworkers struggle to decide whether to report suspected family abuse when leaders didn’t share their concerns, given that network protocol is for school administration to make such calls. (Legally, teachers and psychologists are mandated reporters and cannot be punished for reporting suspected abuse. But with no union representation, it is difficult for an employee to feel confident that this will hold true in practice.) I was sick of overlooking the profit-driven motivations of the network, and sick of being forced to comply with practices that I believed were damaging my students.
When I use the word scammed, I am not just talking about money, and I am not just talking about those who send their kids to Success. I’m talking about the whole country, because all of us are being scammed by Charter advocates like Betsy DeVos and Success CEO Eva Moskowitz. The changes they seek put public schools at a disadvantage, as they are being forced to fight with Charters for space, funding, and high-engagement/high-resource families. Meanwhile, not all Charters perform like Success. Some are much better, with more emphasis on experiential learning and less emphasis on strict behavioral expectations. Others, like those DeVos lobbied for in Detroit, have test scores similar to or worse than nearby public schools, with the same downsides of Success – no unions, poor treatment of special education students, and high suspension rates, to name a few.
What I want people to know when they see advertisements for Success Academy is that to enroll or apply to a charter chain is to propagate a very specific brand of education. Success is funded in part by private donors like the Koch brothers and the family that owns Wal-Mart, because conservatives and big corporations have a vested interest in chipping away at public education. I call upon all teachers, all parents and caregivers, and all who care about public education to resist this model of teaching and learning. Our students deserve better.
NYT article on Dial vid: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html
“Got to go” list: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html
On DeVos in Detroit: http://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2017/01/18/betsy-devos-charter-schools/96718680/
Teacher turnover at SA: http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teacher-turnover-success-academy-charter-schools
“. . . there is remarkable focus on professional development. Teachers are observed often, given feedback almost constantly, and participate in formal professional development sessions at least once a week.”
That’s not professional development, that is being professionally developed by professionals in developing you to be a clone.
That professional development disorder is also to be found in almost all public schools, as conducted by adminimals that refuse to learn any better.
Professional wrestler development
Wherein you learn about such important moves as the “rip and redo” .
I wonder if the teachers had to take nicknames:
Shameless, The Undertaker (no change required), Nurse Retched, etc
And, in my experience, the endless teacher observations/developments pushed in our inner-city schools with NCLB and then R2T were most often delivered by inexperienced dominant-culture outsiders.
What this writer mistakenly calls professional development is in fact indoctrination.
And a very nasty, destructive doctrine it is, for those inside and outside these sweatshops.
Agreed
“Children are expected to complete transitions in a given amount of time, often as short as ten seconds – taking any longer is considered unacceptable. This teaches students that learning is precious. It also teaches that taking one’s time, moving at one’s own pace, is irresponsible. It was heartbreaking to know that I was imparting on my young students the very same constant pressure that I felt from my supervisors.”
No, it doesn’t teach students “that learning is precious”. It teaches them subservience and unquestioned obedience to authority. It teaches them to be dependent on a god-like authority, not to be an independent human being.
As far as that constant pressure, well there is an old saying about that sort of thing “Shit flows downhill.”
Educational malpractices abound in Evita’s Authoritarian Academies!
It took Einstein ten years to develop general relativity.
He could barely have written down the name in ten seconds.
Although my son can stretch the act of putting on his shoes into a 15 minute affair. Probably driving his teacher bonkers with his transition skills.
Or maybe his teacher has experience with kids who are easily distracted and daydreamers. And knows how to channel all that imagination into something amazing instead of discipline it out of him.
I don’t think there is a public school in NYC where a teacher would wait 15 minutes for a kid. But there are plenty of great public school teachers who know how to get them going without criminalizing normal children’s behavior. And I know for a fact that there are many public school teachers who know how to teach without criminalizing the behavior of children who struggle to learn concepts or sit still or any of the myriad of things that some kids can easily adapt to and some kids need time (and sometimes just a few more years of development) to learn.
“Or maybe his teacher has experience with kids who are easily distracted and daydreamers. And knows how to channel all that imagination into something amazing instead of discipline it out of him.”
I like his teacher this year. An old vet — usually a good sign in my experience. His teacher last year, she definitely was not channeling any imagination into anything amazing. Just awful.
Señor Swacker: just a small quibble.
Given the overall tone and thrust of the posting, I think you will agree that at a few points ‘teacher anonymous’ falls back into the mental straightjacket with which she was bound during her incarceration at $ucce$$ Academy.
Just to be clear, I do not think she would disagree with your comments.
That’s the way I see it…
😎
My daughter would have died a thousand deaths in that school. There is nothing she hated more than being rushed. She has her own timeline and it’s…longer than yours.
It turned out well for her. She works in hospice. She’s incredibly patient 🙂
They pretty much indulged her in school. They showed me one of her math assignments once. It was 4 stapled pages. EVERY. STEP. Like the longest possible way she could get there. If it’s on time they shouldn’t care, right?
I would like to take a second to congratulate this woman; she not only had the courage to change her unfortunate situation, but she is using her platform to speak out about the importance of education, which is admirable and courageous. Although the tense environment of a charter school caters towards a very specific student, there are too many varieties of students for this system to successfully work. It is important that education reaches all students in a way that is beneficial for each and every one, but charter schools hinder learning for a great deal of students and then refuse to help those fallen soldiers. A school should not be run like a factory or a daycare, the child should be given responsibility otherwise they will not feel comfortable having a voice or critically thinking about the world in which they live. Another big problem I see is that charter school teachers are not protected by the union, which means they are scared not to comply with the strict regulations. We must remember that every child needs education and every child is not going to learn the way a “charter school child” is expected to learn, so the answer must simply be not to produce more charter schools.
It is a shame that young people who are interested in teaching are exposed to such a negative environment. I hate to think we have lost young people who could have potentially developed into great teachers, because they were turned off by their experience at Success Academy.
I am curious about the soccer program at Upper West Success Academy. I don’t understand the need for their own soccer program complete with a soccer kit, when there is a good, affordable soccer program in the neighborhood – West Side Soccer League. I wonder if it is to reinforce the cult-like atmosphere of the school, which isolates the SA families from their neighbors. They also run this program on the weekends. Are they paying rent for this space like any other group who uses public school space on the weekends or are they including this in the rent the city and state pay?
Those of us in our 50-70s age range grew up with normal schooling, where there were few to none AP classes in high school. We worked and studied hard in our classes, had decent GPAs and SAT scores. We were ready for college and became successful and productive citizens because of the inputs of our families and schools. We were not “conditioned” to become “scholars” by high-levels of reward and punishment, as Success Academies use.
We had time for interdisciplinary collaborations; in science classes we did lots of labs and fieldtrips. The overall curriculum was diverse, stimulating and enriching. It was NOT geared toward producing high test scores on multiple choice tests, which have little correlation to future achievements
We were taught “how to think” not “what to think”. Teaching how to think is a messy and dynamic job; teaching what to think can be done with a static script and high levels of conditioning, like training dogs, not educating humans.
Yes, same with me.
And as well, we had opportunities to take art, music, drama, etc, which helped make us well-rounded individuals. Not little robots.
Just sad.
How does Eva Moskowitz have any credibility at all after her embrace and enthusiastic endorsement of Betsy DeVos?
How do the parents at her school — especially the affluent ones who have other options — not understand that they and their children are being used to promote Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos brand of “reform” in which their kids might be treated well, but they look the other way when other kids aren’t? How do they just sit there and say “well it’s not my kid being treated that way so I don’t care?”
Notice the complete silence of the parents? They are either cowed or they actually embrace the DeVos philosophy. As long as their kid is happy, they cannot muster even an ounce of empathy for any other child who is abused in this system. After all, those children are unworthy to be in their kids’ classes and cost money, so why not look the other way if they disappear.
How can they remain silent?
But are their kids actually “happy” or are they, too cowed?
In truth, I suspect that the affluent kids — who are clustered in only a few of the Success Academy schools where they comprise as high as 75% of the kids — get the “Success Academy lite” treatment. As long as they can do the work (which most can as it’s elementary school and at gen ed publics that teach the same kids they get similar scores) they are treated with the respect that the struggling learners don’t get. In fact, those kids are probably celebrated. I think Success likes to tell their parents how “gifted” their children are and offer to have them skip grades and anything to make the parents feel special.
Yes I suspect you are correct.
I am not surprised by their lack of empathy. I know several current and former SA families and frankly, they are all weird. Whether they are currently at the school or left after three months, anyone who considers a rigid environment which downplays the social-emotional development of their young children is a little strange. Based on what I have seen of UWSA children in my own children’s afterschool and weekend activities, I do not think those children are immune from the negative repercussions of the SA operating method. It’s a little chicken or egg though – is it because the parents are weird or is it because the school is weird?
That said, as much as I enjoy decrying the scam that is Success Academy, I don’t think those parents are particularly unique in their lack of empathy. Considering the recent rezoning of District 3 in Manhattan, it’s obvious that many 199 families similarly lacked empathy for those families at 191. In effect 199 families fought for decades to segregate the nearby housing projects into the 191 catchment zone. Throughout the rezoning process there was talk from those zoned for 199 about who “belonged” there or who had the “right” to be there. As much as I dislike SA, those parents are not alone their lack of empathy towards those who are disadvantaged.
I disagree.
The parents at Success Academy remained silent while their CEO endorsed Betsy DeVos and showered her with lavish praise over and over again.
Not one word. I contrast that with public school parents who have protests and objected when the DOE or their school has done something that they felt was wrong.
Just look at what is happening at Townsend Harris for example. Public school kids and parents aren’t terrified of speaking out when they feel the need.
Not so with the SA parents who must present the united face of adoring Eva Moskowitz fans to the public. And in exchange, the billionaire donations keep flowing it.
My thought about Moskowitz and the SA parents: sounds like a cult.
They are the followers, and Moskowitz is David Koresh.
Success Charter Academy Schools: SCAM. Has a nice ring to it.
Sorry, SCAMS.
10 fucking seconds! These people obviously have no experience with children whatsoever!
True. They don’t recognize the students as children. The students are little educational units to be brainwashed and turned into robots. 😔