Success Academy is hiring!
Of course they are always hiring teachers due to the high rate of teacher turnover. More than 50% leave every year.
Success Academy is looking for a Real Edtate Acquisitions Coordinator, who will report to the Associate Director of Operations, who reports to the Director of Operations. It doesn’t say to whom the Director of Operations reports.
Success Academy is a thriving business with substantial assets, a guarantee that the city will provide free space, or reimburse the business if it rents private space.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Moskowitz is lucky she’s in a huge urban area. The public school where I live could not do this- they could not survive a 50% turnover every year. We simply don’t have an endless supply of college-educated young people to burn out and then discard and we have to compete with 4 surrounding rural counties who also need teachers.
I feel like it has benefits, this “limitation”. We have to make an effort to actually be decent employers who work to improve or support the existing staff. It’s a necessity. Even if we wanted to run a widget system we can’t just pull a new one off the shelf. We’d be recruiting from a hundred miles away. We’d have to bring them in by helicopter to work every day 🙂
Moskowitz spends a lot of time in DC. Congress consults her on all educational issues- they don’t bother with people who run actual public schools- but this Moskowitz Model won’t fly in vast areas of the country. She needs a constant influx of new young people to feed into her charter system. There’s probably ten areas in the country who can do what shes doing, and all of them are huge urban areas.
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Moskowitz’ urban location doesn’t allow her just to churn through teachers – it allows her to churn through students. It does not matter how long her wait lists are in very poor districts nor that wait lists for in- district students in very affluent neighborhoods are non-existent. She tried to open a third school in District 2 – the wealthiest part of Manhattan – while the longest wait lists were in poor districts. She prefers empty seats to serving a student who can’t be easily taught by inexperienced teachers. So that means she prefers long waitlists for at-risk students so she can choose which ones are on got to go lists with a big supply of students to chose from to replace them. It would be a disaster for Success Academy if anyone learned how many of the at-risk kids who win the K lottery remain in her schools.
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^^^to clarify – the 14,000 students now in Success Academy schools are less than 1.5% of the 1.1 million students in NYC public schools. So she can double in size and still be able to churn through students as she will have over one million to choose from. When you only have to teach 3% of a school system’s students and are enabled to rid yourself of any you don’t want to teach, it takes a lot of chutzpah to pretend you have a solution to failing schools. But it does allow you to run a school system larger than many small cities where all students are above average and no students with significant special needs exist.
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I think charters will “solve” this problem by reducing or eliminating requirements to work in the schools but the requirements came about for a reason- they’re a kind of short-cut for employers- a certification helps employers- it means they don’t have to conduct a complete background on each employee.
Ed reformers are ideologically opposed to regulation so it fits in well with the mindset but anti-regulatory people often figure out why we had the regulations in the first place once they recklessly throw them all out.
It’s easier for me to hire a bonded and state-certified electrician because I don’t know how to vet an electrician and it would be hugely time-consuming and impractical for me to do so. Does the state license limit the people who call themselves electricians? Yes, yes it does. That’s a good thing. There would be a lot more electrical fires if any random person decided that. It’s a guarantee that the person has had X training and passed X number of years of qualifying steps. That’s a shortcut the employer needs or they’d be doing nothing but trying to figure out if the people they hire have some base level of competence.
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I just wrote up some thoughts on this and why it’s going to be hard to counter:
http://cestlaz.github.io/posts/dont-self-certify/
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From your cite: “So we should all be extremely concerned with today’s announcement that the deal for mayoral control just brokered in NYC came with strings attached and one of those strings looks to open the doors to give some charter chains the ability to self certify their teachers.”
Which I read in another article, was proposed by SUNY — NYS charter-founders/ monitors– but also the prmomulgators of certification reqts & the educators of certified teachers!? Pls, cynics, explain me this one.
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Mike,
You raise many good points in your post. Although I took a plethora of meaningless Education courses, I remember all the professors who posed questions about societal purposes for education and the role of schools in reproducing the social class structure. It would clearly not be advisable to throw inexperienced young people into classrooms to sink, or swim. The powers that be have no interest in the views of those of us who actually teach.
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Abigail – I agree 100% if I had my druthers I’d like to condense down the non-content parts of ed programs down to between 1/4 to 1/2 their current size. I think you’d be left with the value and not the cruft. I
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Why shouldn’t they self certify their teachers? TFA self Masters Degrees its “teachers.” Nothing surprises me anymore from the reformers. Moskowitz would dig her mother up from the grave to teach if possible, and for free at that. Zombie teachers…why not?
“They” won’t be happy until a clerk walks the aisles to ensure the room of 200 “scholars” are plugged in and being tracked. Its the wave of the future. Perhaps, like the proposals for air traffic controllers, there will be no “clerk” in the room at all. Just someone remotely watching on screens the scholars plugged into screens. Ain’t it the truth?
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If it is true that SUNY brokered this it is just another example of how the SUNY Charter Institute is a wholly owned subsidiary of Success Academy. It is heartbreaking because SUNY is the only means to bring any accountability to them but they will not.
How is that investigation into all the empty seats you claimed you would do more than 2 years ago, SUNY? What about all those parents of kids with special needs who complained to you? You promised to look into attrition of the entering at- risk kids but then refused claiming the only important measure of a charter school is how many of the students allowed to remain in the school passed state tests.
The SUNY Charter Institute is deserving of a real investigative report on their misdeeds surrounding Success Academy. Including their most recent attempt to renew Success’s charters for some schools before they were legally supposed to and before they could possibly have the information to do real oversight.
Coupled with the fiasco 3 years ago where SUNY approved a 3rd District 2 Success Academy until the local press got wind of it – it is obvious there is a lot of funny business going on with the only entity allowed to do oversight. Instead, they act as the bought and paid for PR firm of Success Academy and I hope a journalist starts investigating and reporting on this extreme favoritism given by what should be an independent agency doing oversight.
Eva Moskowitz is like Donald Trump. She could not be where she is today without a lot of complicit people who looked the other way. And SUNY is like the Republican Congress enabling her instead of doing their job. Valuing their own careers over doing the moral and ethical job they are supposed to be doing.
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Success Academy is an OXYMORON.
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This has been posted before, but bears repeating:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Success-Academy-Charter-Schools-Reviews-E381408.htm
I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to work there. It sounds like a soul-sucking, shape-shifting hell hole. And that’s just for the adults. The classic perky review from a current employee (not a teacher in the trenches BTW) is from April 12 of this year. Its! Just! So! Awesome!
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When someone first discovered the reviews of SA on Glass Doors–uniformly horrible–Glass Door suddenly got a flood of positive reviews. I wonder why?
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Success Academy is looking for a “Real Estate Acquisitions Coordinator”: do we need to know anything else? What else could draw more piquantly the contrast between charters feeding at the public-private trough, vs traditional public schools sans fancy RE-tax-abatement measures, who are merely ‘looking for’ teachers, librarians, counselors, nurses, but haven’t the budget to pay for them?
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This is hysterical. The students don’t like online classes so ed tech decided…there must be something wrong with the students:
“As Alexandra Pickett worked to bring new technology and teaching styles to New York State University, she faced an unexpected challenge. Pickett, who directs the Center for Online Teaching Excellence, said one of the biggest barriers to innovation has been student resistance.
“Most of my students come in with a lot of trepidation and a lot of anxiety,” says Pickett, speaking about her graduates at SUNY. “They don’t want to fail publicly; they are very concerned about their grades, and some are concerned with privacy.” For Pickett, it is a struggle to implement new digital learning styles with adult students as many of them are accustomed to traditional lecture models and are dismayed when they don’t get what they expect.”
Why is so important to push online learning? If students don’t like it, then who DOES like it and why is everyone in the world pushing it?
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-06-19-what-if-students-are-the-biggest-barrier-to-innovation
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I worked in software development for a long time and the “the software works, it’s just that customers dont!” Mentality is prevalent among masny software engineers.
Instead of asking people ahead of time what they want and need, many software development companies (including Microsoft) produce stuff and then force customers to change their habits to use it.
Many software engineers assume they know better than anyone else and think that if you are having a problem using — or just don’t like — their “beautiful creation”, it must be your own damned fault
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“More than 50% leave every year.”
Remember that rheephorm mantra when it comes to sticking it to public schools: numbers don’t lie.
So when the shoe is on the other foot, hmmmm…
😎
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“Teacher Half-life”
Teacher half life, at Success
Just a single year
School disruption, at its best
That is very clear
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Oooh!!! I always dreamt of being a real estate acquirerer something or other. Teaching young people to analyze and dream is really my fallback, as my real goal was always to acquire land for a company that provides excessively harsh discipline and marketing assistance obligations. Oooh! Where do I sign?!?!?
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