A former teacher at Success Academy charter schools–let’s call her Jane Doe–decided to use her talents as a graphic designer to create advertisements for the school where she had worked. For some reason, there are ads on billboards, in buses, and on subway trains urging students to apply to Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools. This is odd because we have been told that there are long waiting lists. The waiting lists are so long that there must be a lottery. If there are long waiting lists, why are there ads to recruit students to apply? Maybe the purpose of the ads is to create a demand to exceed the supply? A marketing tool?
Jane Doe attached this comment:
I chose to respond to advertisements for Success Academy Charter Schools because every time I see those ads on websites or in subway stations, I wish they told more of the story. It’s not that the ads are based on lies; it’s true that “scholars” at Success in every grade have science class every day, it’s true that Success puts a lot of emphasis on parent/family engagement, and it’s true that the average kid at Success does much better on standardized tests than the average kid in a (non-selective) NYC public school. All of those things make it more likely for those kids to “succeed,” especially if your idea of success includes admission into a liberal arts college.
It’s also true that 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. The high test scores are real, and they matter, but are they worth the pressure Success puts on its employees and its students? During testing season, the Success Network ships each school 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. There are countless tiny examples that illustrate this extreme environment, a few of which I chose for this assignment.
Families don’t pay for a Success Academy education. 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. Neither Moskowitz nor DeVos has any actual experience in education, yet they’ve each made a wealthy career for themselves out of advocating for so-called school choice reform. The changes they seek put public schools at a disadvantage, as they are 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 social-emotional 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.
Ultimately, my goal is for people to see a more complex picture of Success Academy. Education reform is a complex issue, especially when a person has their own kids in mind. But we need to talk about charters for what they are: a scheme to gradually privatize education to further benefit the ruling class. I hope that if and when a person sees my “ads” in conjunction with the original Success ads, it will give them a better picture of the motivations, complications, and realities of Success Academy schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The high test scores are real, and they matter….”
Well, no, they’re not real because if you select for good test takers, you get high test scores, it’s that simple. And, no, they don’t matter because, well, standardized tests don’t matter, especially not at the grammar school level. The only reason any standardized tests ever “matter” is that some colleges are still under the misguided notion that SAT/ACT scores are worth more than the paper they’re printed on, and even then more and more colleges keep switching over to test-optional or no test admissions policies.
Interesting, Dienne, that we both picked out that line. I didn’t see your comment until after I had posted mine.
They’re also not real because the testing companies supply SA with prepping materials that mirror the tests.
@Michael Fiorillo…when I worked at Success, no one supplied us with prepping materials. They bought the same prep books that were available to anyone. To supplement those, some lucky employee had the job of scouring the internet for passages and writing multiple choice questions based on publicly released guidelines.
To be clear, I hate many things about Success, but the high scores are a result of outsized resources and way too much time devoted to test prep, not some secret relationship with the companies.
“The high test scores are real, and they matter. . . ”
Yep, they are real, real bullshit. And they matter only to those to blind and/or ignorant to understand that those test scores are COMPLETELY INVALID and using the results for any decisions in the teaching and learning process is also COMPLETELY INVALID and therefore constitute EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE.
To understand that COMPLETE INVALIDITY that Noel Wilson has proven in his never refuted nor rebutted onto-epistemological takedown of the standards and testing regime please read his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Good ads but I think she should call it “Seduce Academy” because seduction is what it’s all about
Drink the Purple Kool-aid Cafe
“Seduce Academy”
Academy of seduction
Of testing and of drilling
But not of education
And character fulfilling
You gotta watch out for those creatives, including SomeDAM Poet.
I hope that the graphic designer figures out some variants and can get some funding, if needed, to cirtulate these.
Thanks to Jane Doe for coming forward about her experiences as SA. Those of us who are engaged can yell as much as we want that SA is a scam, but having a former teacher saying that carries more weight.
While SA test scores are compared with non-selective school test scores, I think it bears repeating that SA is highly selective, so any comparison is moot. SA has been around for many years and it’s reputation definitely proceeds it, so it only attracts a certain subset of families to apply. Then, there is a lottery. Then, there is the summer reading list and uniform business. Then, there is the suspensions and coerced expulsions. SA starts with a particular group of families at the beginning of the admissions process and just continues to winnow down that population.
Test scores matter to the students and their families. All these criticisms of standardized testing are valid, but many of us, including myself, are coming from a place of privilege. From a student or family’s perspective, higher test scores may increase the options available, especially for the students who suffer most in our segregated public system, (namely poor students and students of color). Test scores may not be a reflection of anything other than test preparation, but they still affect students’ lives.
How do they affect Students’ lives exactly other than prompting teacher turnover and related turmoil? If you are saying they are a crowbar used to separate children from love of learning — well sure! Until you personally apply to middle or high school in a high poverty district in NYC there ought not to be any mention of privilege.