Eva Moskowitz told a gathering at Chalkbeat that she plans to expand her charter network to 100 schools.
Her Network is celebrated for high test scores, intensive test prep, strict discipline, a high attrition rate, exclusion of children with disabilities and ELLs, and high teacher turnover.
She has become the darling of the Trump administration and billionaire hedge fund titans. The chair of her board, Daniel Loeb, made a racist remark about the highest ranking Democrat in the State Senate (he said she did more damage to black children than the men wearing hoods, I.e., the KKK) but was never held accountable. This was because State Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins does not support charters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hope Eva goes down with tRump.
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Wow. 100 schools is a big expansion.
She’s lucky though- she can offer her specialized schools because there’s a public school system to take the other students.
Eva is wholly reliant on public schools, whether she admits or not. She could not maintain a specialized charter chain without a public system to back her up.
That’s the system Betsy DeVos sneers at- the back up default schools for the “choice” sector.
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I expect Eva is well aware of the numbers & not looking to topple the apple cart she’s grifting from. Right now she has 16k kids in 42 schools. That’s 381 kids/ school; 100 SA’s of the same size = 31.8k kids. Which is only 3.5% of total NYC publ sch pop. Plenty big enough pubsch budget $’s there for her to continue leeching blood off one ankle & nobody noticing.
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The transparent failure of her “caring” for kids is that she will only care for those who do well in her schools; the most devastating truth is that our entire naton’s educational policies have been mimicking hers.
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Does Eva too hope to eradicate 90% of public schools like the Netflix CEO?
If so, is that information in her book? Seems like it would be important for the public to know.
She seems to have such contempt for public employees I wonder if she realizes she is one? She’s paid by the public. No different than the “self interested” public school employees she sneers at.
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I find it hard to believe that most middle class parents would put up with the narrow curriculum and the no excuses discipiine of a Success Academy. However, if they continue to cut funding in order to get public schools to collapse, some parents may fall for the “new and shiny” appeal of a charter.
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That is the idea.
Success Academy doesn’t try to draw middle class parents into its high poverty charters by touting the test scores to make them want to come to a supposedly top notch charter.
Instead Success Academy opens brand new schools located in neighborhoods that have lots of affluent parents and those schools cater to affluent middle class parents who would never put their child in one of their tough no-excuses schools that have a lot of poor families. Call them Success Academy lite. The teachers are certainly happy to target the unworthy students among the smaller number of at-risk children in those schools, but the kids who perform well are showered with love. As is the case in neighborhood public schools all over the city, most students who have college educated parents and grew up in middle class and affluent homes do well. So when Success Academy has a school that is mostly those students, there is less need for the harsh tactics if some of those affluent kindergarten students unclasp their hands or squirm a bit. But after witnessing the actions of the model teacher on the video, it seems clear that the fewer at-risk students who aren’t performing up to snuff in those schools with few at-risk students are still individually targeted for public humiliation.
It seems obvious to me that Success Academy demanded that the SUNY Charter Institute allow them to drop lottery priority for at-risk children because they obviously believed that the affluent parents they coveted wouldn’t come to a high poverty school. When given a choice between teaching as many at-risk kids as possible or keeping the number down so that affluent parents would feel “comfortable” sending their children there, Success Academy chose to enable the prejudices of affluent parents which they seem to believe outweigh the needs of at-risk children.
Even Eva Moskowitz has said that combating segregated schools should not be the mission of her charter. That is no doubt because if you look at the 3 Success Academy schools in Manhattan’s District 3, you will find that one of the schools has only 25% economically disadvantaged students while the other two have nearly 3 times as many. And almost every white student is in the school that has few poor students.
And Success Academy now has more elementary schools in one of the richest Manhattan districts — District 2, than it does in any single Bronx district.
There are six districts in the Bronx served by only 4 Success Academy elementary schools total.
There is ONE district in Manhattan that covers most of the affluent neighborhoods of Manhattan. There are 3 Success Academy elementary schools for those kids. One just opened! Because prioritizing a 3rd elementary school to serve the single richest Manhattan school district was more important than opening one to serve the students in the poorest borough of NYC.
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Has anyone ever asked what the per pupil SPENDING is for Success students?
Not ” public funding”- total spending. They’re not the same thing.
That’s an absolutely essential number to know if the plans are to replace all public schools with charter schools,because obviously these billionaire backers aren’t going to subsidize 50 million children.
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There are times when I wish she would be chancellor of the whole system so she could show her stuff and save everyone, not just the ones she chooses
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Diane, quickly flesh out this idea before you’re quoted out of context. Right now you sound like the biggest Eva fan and when you give liars a chance to lie, they will.
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Yes, I used to call it “the KIPP Challenge,” years ago: take on an entire low-performing district and include every child.
Now it will be “the Eva Challenge.”
Not to worry. They won’t accept. KIPP defenders said that to take on an entire district would distort their mission, whatever that is.
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It’s not easy to find this info online. An Aug 24 NY Daily News article says NYC charters are getting $5k less than publics per pupil, including private funding– $21k vs $26k (since SA enrollment is 2/3 NYC charter enrollment, probably close). But another article says Eva’s schools are entirely co-located (i.e., free rent)– & non-co-located schools get a $2775 boost per pupil from the city. So add $2775 to $21k & her differential is -$2225.
So how much of that 23,775 per pupil is from private funds? Hard to say, can’t find online. At one point (in 2012) she was reported as having received 28million over 6 yrs. But can’t find enrollment nos for back then to correlate (probably a few hundred per pupil per year). In 2013 an article shows she took in $35million for 32 schools– that’s over $1million per school but don’t know enrollment [if ave 381/school, like today, that’s about $3k per pupil). Last year she got a $25million gift from hedge-funder Julian Robertson, which she said she would use toward xpanding to 100 schools by 2024.
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bethree5,
The first thing you have to understand is that the NY Daily News, and especially reporter Ben Chapman are basically the public relations firm for charter schools and especially Success Academy. Chapman diligently transcribes every charter-issued press release as it if it “news” as opposed to whatever propaganda the charter industry wants to put out that day.
The second thing you have to understand is that the August article – by Ben Chapman, of course — ONLY describes the study that cites those figures as one done “by researchers at the University of Arkansas”.
Here is what he leaves out: The study was done by Patrick J. Wolf, the proud holder of the “21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions.”
Oh yes, there is an “Endowed Chair in School Choice” !!!
And it’s at the “Department of Educational Reform”!!!!
Here’s a little more of his bio: “As principal investigator of the School Choice Demonstration Project he has led or is leading major studies of school choice initiatives including longitudinal evaluations of school voucher programs in Washington, DC; Milwaukee, WI; and the state of Louisiana. Research projects led or co-led by Dr. Wolf have been awarded 34 research grants and contracts totaling nearly $22 million.”
Without doing a bit of research, I am willing to bet you $50 that the Walton Family has something to do with that “Endowed Chair in School Choice” AND the “Department of Education Reform” at U. of Arkansas.
Without doing a bit of research, I am willing to bet you another $50 that quite a bit of the $22 million in “research grants” comes from the privatization movement with some coming via the co opted DOE.
And if you want to understand how truly embarrassing the reporting skills of Ben Chapman are, you only have to look at the quote he includes in his NY Daily News article about the study:
“In spite of heroic efforts by policymakers and implementers to support students in charter schools, we are still left with a situation where students receive less funding,” said co-author Patrick Wolf, a professor of education policy at the university.”
See, Patrick Wolf is just a mere professor of education policy. A disinterested academic, Ben Chapman misleadingly tells readers.
You’d never even know Wolf had the Endowed Chair in School Choice at the Dept. of Educational Reform!
Wolf makes all kinds of assumptions in the report about the ‘value’ of what he calls the “in-kind” contribution. By “in-kind”, he refers to the all those budget lines for buildings and transportation and safety and the myriad of things that charters get for free but are part of the “per pupil” charge that is included whenever people say “NYC spends $26k per student”. In other words, Wolf kind of acknowledges that public school students not only are charged for something that charter students are not, but in addition are charged for the expense of providing them to charter school students. It’s a double whammy! I have to mention that because he is unusual in acknowledging that double whammy.
However, some of the assumptions he uses in the report are quite suspect and he even acknowledges that charters aren’t obligated to provide much about their spending in their financial reports. But here is an example:
Wolf allocates $2,775 per pupil for charter schools as the “in-kind” contribution that public schools make to charter schools for rent because that is what the NY State legislature ordered NYC to pay per pupil if they didn’t provide free space.
However, I doubt the in-kind contribution for rent — as well as all the other freebies — is nearly that small. You have the charter sector throwing extreme temper tantrums and spending all kinds of PR and advertising money because they want the in-kind space and NOT the $2,775 per pupil to get their own space. In addition. Wolf assumes that the children with special needs in charters have needs that are exactly as costly as the special needs of students in public schools — despite the fact that charters do not take the children with the most severe and expensive needs and assuming there is no cost difference is absurd.
I could go on but in short, Wolf’s academic career is to do research to promote charters. His endowed chair is about school choice. The department he is in is to promote privatization. And his report plays down all the information he doesn’t have while making assumptions that he shouldn’t, and ending with wild conclusions about how charters deserve more.
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University of Arkansas Department of Educational Reform is Walton-funded
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Thanks NYCPSP. That explains why I could only find one article on Chiara’s [seemingly straightforward!] Q, what is SA spending per-pupil incl public & private funds, compared to pubsch pp spending. Apparently an unanswerable Q, answered only by one charter-promoter in an article w/incomplete info biased toward an agenda.
Chiara’s Q is toward the position, SA probably spending more per pupil than publics, therefore not an example of a scalable model to replace public schooling. My sense on that (as I said above), Eva doesn’t want to replace pubschs [despite her praise of BDeV]– more likely wants to be a piglet suckling at the teat of the giant failsafe backup NYC public school sys.
What interests me is partly what’s the total private investment in SA– but toward my Q: what are the hedge-funder et al SA backers getting out of SA? What’s the return on their investment & how do they receive it? I get there’s plenty of profit to be made just by taking 85% of the pubsch allotment per pupil & spending only part of it in the classroom thro low-qual non-union teachers, minimal capital expenditures etc. That plus regular priv rev would cover ludicrous admin salaries, adv/ PR. But how does the $ trickle back up to investors? (Or are they just in it to have a [false] ‘successful’ model to push anti-union/ privatization agenda?)
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Yes, the money is to provide a false model of success to justify the privatization of even more public schools.
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Here’s an example of “spending” versus “funding”. My local public school gets about 2k per student from the state and about 4k raised thru tax levies. We don’t have any other revenue. Total spending = 7k.
Is that the same for Moskowtiz? Is her per pupil spending equal to the state and local public funding she receives, or is it higher with the addition of her wealthy backers?
You would want that number because obviously one can’t “scale” a whole public system that is dependent on charitable funding. We don’t have any billionaires in this county.
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