We understand that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charters in New York City have a hard time holding on to teachers. We understand that in some of the charters the teacher attrition rate is as high as 50-60% annually. We know some of the reviews on Glass Door by former teachers at SA are scathing. That explains why the SUNY charter committee wants to lower standards for charter teachers and let the charters certify their own teachers, to speed up recruitment.
What we didn’t know is that Success Academy in New York City has sent recruiters to Seattle in search of teachers.
The working conditions for teachers in many states are bad and getting worse. But the answer to teacher shortages is to improve working conditions, not to poach from other cities.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Poaching– just like hedge fund owners/mangers/investors who seek nothing but profit.
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Poaching White and Asian teachers in Washington, that is.
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I cannot see anyone living in Seattle (libs or consv) willing to give that up to go to New York! The number of charters in WA have doubled as well. There are jobs up here and plenty of teachers counting the days to retirement thanks to common core.
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Obviously if Eva & co. , is flying all the way across the country to find low priced help with a college degree in Seattle. There must be a market. There is a whole lot of country between here and there .
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To the teachers in Seattle (and elsewhere) who are being recruited by Success Academy, please … please .. PLEASE first read this link BELOW:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2014/08/citizen-jacks-compendium-of-teacher.html
Yes, Eva treats you like sh#% when you work for her as a teacher, and that’s part of the problem, but equally problemmatic — according to many in the above link — is being forced, in turn, to treat children like sh#%.
Read those reviews (this was back when Success Academy went by the name “Harlem Success Academy” or “HSA” for short).
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One other thing for you prospective Success Academy teachers:
Eva doesn’t just treat you like sh%#.
She also pays you like sh%# … relative to the cost of living in NYC:
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MERCEDES SCHNEIDER:
Regarding the cost of Moskowitz’s very high SA test scores: I first notice that her teachers and other employees are not paid much when one considers the cost of living in New York. Based on input from 41 SA “lead teachers,” the average salary is $63,000.
This salary might initially sound good to someone in my circumstance (a teacher from Louisiana); I have 21 full time years in and hold a Ph.D., and my annual salary is $59,000 (the state stopped my annual step raises in 2012 when I was at 15 full time years, but I have received a little more money since then).
However, when one converts that SA $63,000 to its LA cost-of-living equivalent, $63,000 per year to live in Manhattan, NY, is the same as making approximately $29,000 and living in St. Tammany Parish, LA (where I live). Thus, that SA $63,000 in Manhattan is as hard to live on as it would be for me to live on $29,000 in St. Tammany.
I live on $59,000 in St. Tammany, LA. In order to experience the same quality of living in Manhattan as I do in St. Tammany, an SA teacher would need to make around $138,000 per year.
For the same quality of living in Brooklyn, NY, the SA teacher would need to make $105,000. (Source: CNN Money Cost of Living Calculator.)
Two additional points about salary:
First, not all SA teachers are “lead teachers.” Those classed as SA “associate teacher” report average salaries of $48,500. Their purchase power gets them as far in Manhattan as approximately $20,000 would get me in St. Tammany. Their purchase power in Brooklyn equals roughly $26,500 in St. Tammany, LA.
The second important piece is that SA teachers work much longer hours than I do. My contracted teaching day is 7 hours at school. (Note: Most teachers also bring work home or arrive early or stay late, but they are not required to do so by contract.)
My week is 5 days; my year is 190 days.
In contrast, SA teachers are literally driven until they burn out. Their average day is 12 hours at school. Moreover, they are expected to be on call after school hours. SA provides each teacher with a Macbook and iPhone, which a number list as a positive feature of the job.
However, the purpose behind this seeming benevolence is to assure that SA teachers are equipped with the technological shackles necessary to have them at the school and parent beck and call at all hours.
Even though Moskowitz is shortening the SA school day beginning in 2016-17, a number of employees do not think it will be enough to alleviate their stress. They think the same toxic, work-till-you-drop atmosphere will prevail. (“Toxic” is a commonly used word in the Glassdoor SA reviews.)
One teacher noted that he/she has been at his/her school for four years– longer than any other employee except the principal.
Teachers do not necessarily wait until the school year ends to quit– or to be fired.
Others have written in their reviews for prospective teachers to think seriously before teaching at SA, or to run away as fast as they can, or to only take an SA teaching job if they are desperate.
According to a number of employees, SA cultivates an atmosphere of fear, guilt, and shame among its teachers.
There will be no personal life. None. This is a recurrent theme even in neutral and positive reviews.
And there will be no sick days. And only a single personal day. And no leaving early for personal commitments.
Also, there will likely be no lunch break, and no planning time that is not already filled with meetings/ professional development. If one wants free time, one must carve it out in the form of a bathroom break.
Apparently those teacher bathroom breaks are a slice of time when SA teachers quietly cry.
Students are discouraged from taking bathroom breaks. One employee notes that younger students’ using the bathroom on themselves is related to students not being allowed to use the bathroom when needed.
As for “feedback”: At SA, the term means incessant micromanagement. No behavior is too small to be overlooked by constant review. SA has a way that its schools are to be run; it doesn’t matter if one has no teaching experience; one can be a lead teacher with zero teaching background if one trains well in the SA teaching protocol. In fact, it might be better for one to not have a professional teaching background because that means one is less likely to have to defy one’s professional judgment/ sense of creative, independent professional personality in order to conform to prescribed, rigid, SA teacher demands.
Some SA teachers lament the rigid behavioral expectations foisted upon younger students, such has having to sit still with folded hands for hours.
Test prep begins in January and is the center of SA activity for half of the school year. Fine arts and other creative classes come to a halt. Some teachers become babysitters of students not involved in testing because test drill is what matters.
As for leadership, there is really only one leader, and that is Eva Moskowitz. Some SA employees note that their experience with fellow teachers is one of camaraderie; others note that there are cliques, and clique acceptance makes or breaks one’s experience. Still others note that even the SA leaders are young and lack experience and that there is a true leadership void at SA schools. Others have noted that SA is growing too fast for its leadership structure.
More than one review indicated that SA teachers are overwhelmingly white.
Others note the SA dependence on burning out and constantly replacing its teachers. One notes that as long as there are young people willing to apply to SA to teach (whether out of naiveté or desperation), SA will be able to continue its churn-out-and burn-out mode of operation.
But there are problems with this churn-burn model. First of all, Moskowitz wants to expand and brand the SA model. A model built upon intentionally working employees into the ground is not expandable. It will collapse, which leads to a second problem: As the school years pass, the number of SA teaching casualties increases– and so does the likelihood of powerful, first-hand, negative press associated with the dysfunctional inner workings of SA.
Moskowitz tries hard to shield SA daily reality from the public eye.
She wants the SA very high test scores to be all that matters.
We’ll see how long SA can carry it off. But its days are numbered. One cannot put human beings under such professional pressure and not have it somehow blow up– as in, say, a possible cheating scandal….
explosion
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I lived in NYC as an adult for 17 yrs (5yrs Manhattan 12 yrs Bkln, mid-’70’s-early ’90’s) & even then a teacher could only afford to live there on WSide w/3 roommates doubled up in a 2-br, on ESide in a 1-br w/a hi-salary partner. Hubby & I could afford to buy a home in Bkln w/50% dn pmt & both working hi-salary jobs. Housing there now is [rough guess] proportionally 1/3 more expensive.
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bethree5
Perhaps by the 90’s, but in the 70’s into the 80’s that teacher would have done just fine in the up and coming West Side . But the important thing to remember is that Teachers salary in NYC has dropped in the last 30 years inflation adjusted. With NYC Teachers making a third less than some of the surrounding suburban districts. Which is a reversal from the 70’s . A lot of the drop had to do with the Cities financial crisis. Which was never about its operating budget or pensions or any other labor related issues. Although the crises was resolved on the backs of workers.
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Is that the school where they shame 5-year olds for not knowing the answer?
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They do worse. They scream at 5 year olds and rip up their papers:
Yes, check out Eva’s cutting edge techniques for getting kinders to learn how to count to ten:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jAmlU-ug2E
And this woman, Charlotte Dial, was not only not fired. As if to give the middle finger to all, Eva put her in charge of training Success Academy teachers — the same training the Eva wants to replace NY state credentialing and traditional teacher education with.
Eva was sending a message to her teachers that THIS IS EXACTLY HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO TREAT CHILDREN UNDER YOUR CARE.
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The SUNY Charter Institute is about to approve letting these “model” teachers train anyone they want to be charter school teacher.
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goodbye professional respect, goodbye professional pay
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How will these transplanted teachers be able to afford New York City housing? Maybe on Eva’s salary they can….
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Eva, darling, have you tried recruiting from the state prisons and psychiatric wards? Cheaper labor = higher executive pay.
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Dear Eva,
You go girl! You scrumptious, stylish colonizer, you!
Pay them minimum way and then I’ll meet you at the Plaza for lunch, and afterward we can have girls’ night out at Bergdorf Goodman!
Love,
Me
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Please, never, ever, use Eva and scrumptious in the same post again. I’m getting queasy.
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I’ve followed Eva for years in the media. When called on her nearly $600,000 / year salary, Eva has three basic replies:
1) “I make a good living. So what?!”
2) “This criticism is just coming from people who are envious.”
3) “In the private sector, you’d have to pay a lot more for someone with my brilliance and leadership abilities, so I’m actually UNDERPAID.”
Success Academy Board Member Campbell Brown enthusiastically defends Eva’s nearly $600,000 / year salary:
“She’s worth every penny. What’s wrong with rewarding Eva’s high performance?”
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Eva’s salary is essential. Slave holders must have all that money; if not, their living properties will rebel and burn down the academic plantation. Then what?
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Teachers are beat up in other ways at regular urban public schools. I just talked to a shell-shocked young 2nd year teacher at a nearby middle school. He said award-winning teachers with 20 years’ experience are made to cry (by the students) there. What keeps these veteran teachers from escaping their daily psychological assault? Probably decent pay, pension and other benefits, which are the fruit of union-representation. Thus unions may be helping public schools in their competition with the likes of Success Academy.
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But unions are on the decline, and the pension system in NY is diddly squat for teachers who are in tiers 5 an 6, assuming they even lat long enough to become vested in the pension system.
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No sane person would work for you, Eva!
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This post reminds me of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etx-nDCZzLo
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Success Academy schools are periodically prone to have massive numbers of teachers quitting mid-year, leaving Eva in the lurch.
A few years ago, when this happened, Eva put out an angry letter to her remaining teachers lashing out at the quitters, saying, “This is not a gig!”
(Interesting strategy: a bunch of your teachers leave, in large part because you were abusing them, so to solve the problem, you respond by abusing those who have chosen to remain. … hmmm …. )
She called those teachers who quit “unethical.” ( pot – kettle – black)
https://citylimits.org/2014/08/20/why-charter-schools-have-high-teacher-turnover/
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CITY LIMITS:
“Moskowitz famously expressed frustration about exiting faculty in 2011, when about a third of school staff left her school network for other jobs—midyear, after the school year had commenced. (Some even sent midnight emails resigning their positions, according to The New York Times.)
“ ‘It’s hard for kids and families when you have an exodus,’ Moscowitz wrote in a newsletter to the school community. She also wrote to staff members, ‘This is not a ‘gig,’ ”charging that the midyear exits were unethical.”
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It’s not that Eva pays and treats them like sh#% that ‘s the problem.
Or that she makes almost $600,000 / year at the same time those teacher sget paid peanuts.
It’s your departing teachers who are scum.
I mean, really, How dare you do this to the children?
Here’s the New York Times piece referenced above: (mysteriously removed from the internet, so only this fragment survives … maybe somebody can use the Wayback Machine on this)
http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/2012/01/harlem-success-academy-3.html
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NEW YORK TIMES:
“More than a third of the staff members at a Harlem charter school run by the Success Charter Network have left the school within the last several months, challenging an organization that prides itself on the training and support it offers its teachers.
“The unusually high turnover at Harlem Success Academy 3 and the network-wide issue of teachers quitting mid-year led the founder and chief executive of the Success Charter Network, Eva S. Moskowitz, to express concern in an October newsletter.
“ ‘This is not a ‘gig’ she wrote, informing staff members that by breaking their commitment to the schools and families midyear, they were acting unethically.
“At Harlem Success Academy 3, 22 of the school’s 59 administrators, teachers and classroom aides left between the end of the last school year and the beginning of this one, according to the school’s records. Some took jobs at other schools, some moved to new cities and some said they quit out of frustration with the school’s tightly regulated environment…
“Few of the teachers who left Harlem Success Academy 3 would speak about why they quit, and those who did refused to be named, citing fear of retribution or concern that they could lose their new teaching positions.
“Morty Ballen, the founder and chief executive of Explore Schools, said he had not intentionally poached Success Academy’s teachers.
“One former Harlem Success Academy 3 teacher who quit at the end of last school year said she had left because she felt ‘micromanaged.’
“ ‘You couldn’t teach in the way you wanted to teach,’ she said. ‘If your kids weren’t sitting perfectly, looking straight at the teacher, not saying a single word, then you weren’t doing your job.’… ”
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“This is not a gig.”
That’s a good one: the Director of a notorious school, where the explicit policy is to churn through teachers, expresses surprise when people flee her plantation/sweatshop.
Of course it’s a gig, Eva; you and the other so-called reformers have done everything in your power to make it so.
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A “gig” describes EXACTLY what teaching at Success Academy or any charter school truly is. In fact, Eva and others like her intentionally designed it to be that way.
But, like the man currently occupying the White House—who she shamelessly flirted with working for—-Eva will say whatever sounds good and/or defends her position at that particular moment. Talk about “situational ethics”! Does this person have any decency or integrity left within her?
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I walked by a charter school yesterday while they were having recess. I knew it was SA because of the uniforms, but also the teachers, walking around with their little orange backpacks. Part of feels this is demoralizing, then again maybe they buy into the rhetoric. I know this is the least of their problems, still…
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