Megan Erickson, a journalist and teacher in the New York City public schools, reviews Eva Moskowitz’s memoir in The Nation.
The title: The Miseducation of Eva Moskowitz.
This is a valuable review to share with friends who are not familiar with Eva’s strategies: cherrypicking students, high attrition rates, high teacher turnover, disciplining and suspending those she wants to get rid of, cultivating billionaires, boasting that her methods are scalable when they are not, and so on.
The great lie that Erickson fastens on is that Eva, like others in the charter industry, like to pretend that going to a charter school is an escalator to the middle class, but what they refuse to confront is the social and economic inequality that keeps a few at the top, and a great many at the bottom. Schools can’t fix that, no matter how hard they push “no excuses.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Also, as a correlate, and while holding your nose, you can see Eva talking about HER book below at:
https://www.c-span.org/search/?searchtype=All&query=Eva+Moskowitz
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I, too, have said that education in the macro will not get everyone out of poverty, a few maybe. It is lack of good paying jobs that is the main cause of poverty.They are not in the inner cities and rural America, Nmo amount of education will cure this.
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schiltz3 Have you ever been in a generational poverty situation? As you seem to hint in your note, it’s a downward spiral of interrelated missing pieces, education and jobs being only two of those pieces.
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I am not in New York but I can get the gist of the politicking and chasing of money that set the Eva up for being a franchise queen.
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“Moskowitz urges those who would “try to explain away our results” to consider Bronx 2, a school in the network whose demographics are similar to nearby PS 55. Yet this is a misleading suggestion, because an overall comparison shows that Success still serves fewer students from both groups and therefore can maintain higher scores.”
In my opinion, this is the big lie. Moskowitz’ challenges people to “explain away our results” but critics don’t spend the time to gather the numbers and figures from the NYSED data website that would allow them to debunk this great lie. Bronx 2 doesn’t have “similar demographics to PS 55” and it doesn’t have similar demographics to Bronx District 9 where it is supposed to draw its students.
It is easy to check the data at NYSED. On the state math tests, only 259 of the 413 Success Academy Bronx 2 students taking the state math tests were economically disadvantaged. That’s 63%. It is a shockingly low figure when you consider that Bronx 2 serves the students in Bronx District 9, where over 90% of the students taking the state exams were economically disadvantaged.
And at nearly PS 55, which Moskowitz claims has similar demographics, over 92% of the students taking the state math test were economically disadvantaged! PS 55 serves even MORE of its’ share of the very poorest students while Success Academy Bronx 2 teaches 30% fewer poor students than they should be teaching. It takes a special chutzpah for Eva Moskowitz to claim Bronx 2 serves similar demographics. But she is smug in her knowledge that journalists almost never bother to analyze the data themselves. Instead her critics use unconvincing vague arguments “she doesn’t serve her share of special needs kids” which Moskowitz loves because she can easily dismiss it as “but that doesn’t even begin to explain my 99% passing rates”.
Moskowitz can’t explain away the extraordinarily low number of poor students she serves in districts that have over 90% poor students that easily.
And that very low % of economically disadvantaged students in Bronx 1 should have been a huge red flag whenever a journalist reports on a charter network who justifies its expansion by their claim of wanting to teach at-risk students failed by public schools.
Here is the second red flag that journalists ignore:
Despite Eva Moskowitz convincing lots of affluent white folks that getting 259 poor students in Bronx District 9 to pass a state test is a “miracle”, it turns out that in the District 9 pool from which she draws students there were 2,777 economically disadvantaged students passing state math tests who were taught in underfunded public schools. That is TEN TIMES the number of proficient students in the surrounding District 9 public schools than at Success Academy Bronx 2. There are too many truly ignorant and racist Success Academy cheerleaders who act as if there are no high performing children among the economically disadvantaged so how could Moskowitz cherry pick enough to fill her school? But that is another great lie that she gets away with. There are 10 times as many very poor students doing well in the public schools surrounding her district. It is just that they are not concentrated in a single, very rich charter school.
Now how do we know that Eva Moskowitz cherry picks those few hundred economically disadvantaged students in SA Bronx 2 from among the thousands of proficient students? Because of Moskowitz own actions.
Some of Moskowitz’ longest wait lists are in the Bronx. But in that very poor District 9 where her single Success Academy school has nearly 1/3 fewer poor students than it should have, has she opened a second school to address this great need for good schools?
The answer is, of course, that Moskowitz still has only ONE school in all of District 9. One of the poorest NYC districts, and she has only one school.
Compare that to District 2, Manhattan, one of the very richest districts where Moskowitz’ first two schools served MORE middle class and affluent students than economically disadvantaged ones. Guess where Moskowitz just located a 3rd school? District 2. What about all those poor kids stuck in failing schools in the Bronx where she challenged critics to prove that she could have possibly have cherry picked her students?
But Moskowitz could very easily could and did cherry pick students in Bronx 2 and the fact that she has 3 times as many schools that give priority to the students who live in one of the richest NYC school districts than schools that give priority to the students who live in one of the poorest demonstrates exactly how ridiculous her claims that she doesn’t cherry pick really are. If she didn’t cherry pick and believed her own lies that she is doing this for poor kids trapped in failing schools, she would have 3 times as many schools in Bronx District 9 than she has in Manhattan District 2. Not the other way around.
I wish a journalist would ask her to her face why she keeps opening new schools in rich districts where her wait lists are shortest.
The very few times that a journalist does their research and asks a follow-up question — as John Merrow did in that PBS report — Eva Moskowitz sputters and shifts and looks like a liar. That should be happening every time she is interviewed by a journalist. Instead they just let her get away with her dishonest premises as she did here when she claims Bronx 2 shows that she is a miracle worker! Without her schools not a single poor kid in the entire district would ever get a good education. The fact that there are 10x as many District 9 public school students doing as well as her far less disadvantaged cherry picked group is never ever mentioned and she gets away with that very big lie. Without the need to squirm and prevaricate and look like the dishonest person she is during the John Merrow interview.
It’s nice to have everyone accept your dishonest premise when you are promoting yourself as the savior. Eva Moskowitz feels very good because she knows that very few journalists ever bother to do their homework. They read the press releases and ask a question and write down her “response to critics” without including the data that shows just how much of an outright lie her claims were. It’s similar to the reporting we saw during the campaign where Trump would say so many outright lies and the reporters would say “but the other side says this” and leaves the public to think that the truth is a matter of opinion and not fact.
There are reams of data that prove that Success Academy cherry picks. I didn’t even mention Success Academy’s own commissioned 2017 MDRC study that buried a few very inconvenient facts in footnotes. Do you know that in this charter school that parents are supposedly desperate to send their children, half the lottery winners don’t enroll their kids? “Of the lottery winners in the sample (both kindergarten and first-grade entrants), about 82 percent attended a welcome meeting. Approximately 61 percent of lottery winners attended student registration, 54 percent attended a uniform fitting, and 50 percent attended a dress rehearsal. With few exceptions, lottery winners who did not attend an activity did not attend subsequent activities. Ultimately, about 50 percent of lottery winners enrolled in Success Academy schools in the 2010-2011 school year.”
Mysteriously – throughout all those “pre-enrollment” meetings – Success loses an extraordinarily number of students. 82% of those parents desperate for the great SA education attended an enrollment meeting but only 61% attend student registration. And then Success loses another chunk of students who registered and only 50% make it to the first day of school.
The fact that Success Academy’s documented attrition rate — which includes ONLY those 50% of lottery winning students whose parents didn’t give out their supposedly coveted spots after attending during those pre-enrollment meetings — is STILL higher than almost every other charter network in NYC should also be a huge red flag. Even among the most motivated families who stick it out through all the pre-enrollment meetings, Success still rids themselves of a number that SHOULD make every journalist and certainly their oversight agency ask questions.
The data shows exactly how Success Academy cherry picks. The fact that Moskowitz gets away with that challenge shows how little journalists understand the data.
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You made a compelling case dispelling the Moskowitz mystic.
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It’s incredible she gets away with her claims when there is so much data that debunks them. But she is never confronted with the data because too many journalists are afraid of numbers. But I suspect that is just journalists being ignorant.
The REAL corruption is in the SUNY Charter Institute because there is no excuse except pure corruption for them to completely ignore basic data.
They have a charter school network that gives out of school suspensions at a rate that is often 10x higher than similar charter networks that is also losing students at a rate that is significantly higher than charter networks serving similar students and the SUNY Charter Institute has absolutely refused to closely examine attrition or suspension rates and instead demand that a charter only be judged on the test scores of students who are still in the school in 3rd grade.
SUNY is given oversight of a charter school network that says it wants to serve at-risk kids but SUNY gives them their 3rd school in the richest Manhattan district while never questioning why Success Academy has far fewer schools in Districts that have most of the at-risk students living in them.
The fact that the SUNY Charter Institute changed its rules at Eva Moskowitz’ behest so she can hire and train more inexperienced teachers in how to target the lowest performing kids and get them out is not a surprise. SUNY has changed its rules many times specifically to benefit Eva Moskowitz. I hope the parents suing Success Academy name their enablers at the SUNY Charter Institute as well. Eva Moskowitz could not get away with half the things she gets away with if the SUNY Charter Institute wasn’t intentionally looking the other way and rewarding her for high test scores of however few students remain after she’s drummed out the unwanted ones.
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This idea that, if only teachers did their jobs right — i.e. weren’t so lazy and incompetent and … yeah… so unionized — those teachers efforts could have led to — or, in the future, will lead to — more social mobility where lower income people join the middle class in great masses …
.. well, that’s just nonsense propaganda that school privatizers also use to their advantage so they can privatize schools and bust unions, and again, of course, it’s also a way for Wall Street and the right wing can duck blame.
In the movie THE BIG SHORT, Ryan Gosling’s NARRATOR / character explains in the film’s finale about how, in 2008, after causing the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression — and the second worst ever in U..S. history — corrupt Wall Street folks. and their legislative / right-wing allies not only got off scot-free, and then bailed out Wall Street.
They then did the INCREDIBLE:
they blamed the two usual scapegoats (plus a new and third scapegoat) for the resulting devastation hitting the middle and working classes, and, implicitly, for the lack of social mobility where folks are able move up from one class to the next.
Gosling’s NARRATOR lists Wall Street’s / the right-wing’s scapegoats:
1) “immigrants”
2) “poor people” (Yeah, it’s your fault, for being so poor!)
and
3) “this (first) time (ever), even teachers.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x
SEQUENCE:
First, there’s Steve Carrel’s character MARK and his friend talking about how those responsible for the 2008 crash need to be held accountable. Carrel’s MARK is skeptical, saying that, instead of those folks being punished, people will again blame two scapegoats:
… immigrants & poor people.
Next, Gosling’s NARRATOR does a brief mislead — a parody of what should / could / might have happened, had the real culprits actually been held to account …
Finally, this is followed by a … just kidding … then the narration of what REALLY happened, which includes the third scapegoat just added to the list … that’s right folks …. “teachers.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x
( 01:14 – )
( 01:14 – )
CARREL’S FRIEND: “… but, at least, we’re going to see some of them go to jail … right? I mean, we’re going to have to break up the banks. I mean, the party’s over.”
STEVE CARREL’s character MARK: “Ehhh, I don’t know. … I don’t know …. I have a feeling … that in a few years, people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks: they will be blaming immigrants and poor people.”
NARRATOR: “But Mark was wrong.”
— (MONTAGE of arrests, handcuffs, triumphant imagery & music — Neil Young’s anti-establishment anthem “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World”)
NARRATOR: “In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and ratings agency executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice to break up the big banks, and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries … ”
— (CRASHING GLASS sound effect as the screen FADES TO BLACK)
NARRATOR: “Just kidding. The banks took the (billions in bailout) money that the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform, and then the blamed immigrants and poor people (for the 2008 Crash) and this (first) time (ever), even teachers.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x
In November 2015., I attended the World Premiere of this at the 2015 AFI Festival in Los Angeles with two fellow LAUSD teachers who were not expecting this.
When Gosling’s narrator said those five words — “and this time, even teachers.” — we all jerked our heads sideways at each other, with our mouths agape as if to say to each other …
“Holy sh–! Someone FINALLY said it. They told the truth.”
Of course, not everyone liked this film, or thought it told “the truth.”
William F. Buckley’s THE NATIONAL REVIEW ran disinformation for Wall Street and Wall Street’s right wing with articles like this:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432287/big-short-government-was-responsible-financial-crash-not-just-wall-street
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
NATIONAL REVIEW:
“‘The Big Short should be re-titled The Big Lie,‘ says Brian Wesbury, chief economist with suburban-Chicago-based First Trust Advisors and a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank near the Windy City.
” ‘The Left never lets a crisis go to waste, and just like with the Great Depression, it has created a narrative that blames Wall Street and praises Washington. It is true that a few people made gobs of money shorting the housing market. It’s absolutely not true that this crisis was created by capitalism and fixed by D.C.’ ”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Oh yeah, Brian. That’s right. I forgot. The 2008 Crash was the fault of those “immigrants and poor people, and this (first) time (ever), even teachers.”
Mind you, these Wall Street types that made a killing in the housing / mortgage crisis that they created, are now trying to do the same with with school privatization — and will likely do the same damage to public schools that they did to the housing / mortgage industry.
Even though those same Wall Street folks pumped in $20 million or so into a ballot initiative to lift the charter school cap in Massachusetts, voters there were thankfully smart enough to catch on to this and send this down to a resounding 63%-37% defeat.
More disinformation on the NEXT POST.
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Here’s some more pro-Wall-Street disinformation regarding school privatization.
If anyone EVER doubts that people like Peter Cunningham and Erika Sanzi — and organizations such as EDUCATION POST and THE 74 — are in cahoots with Wall Street privatizers, that they are, in large part, funded by them, and are doing their bidding, check out this amazing written-to-order screed from EDUCATION POST‘s second-in-command:
http://educationpost.org/are-black-parents-sheep-how-to-gin-up-charter-school-fears-with-subprime-mortgage-analogies/
It all began when University of Connecticut professor Preston Green III put out a meticulous and thoroughly researched report comparing and illustrating how charter school expansion/school privatization is shaping up to work the same way Wall Street’s rape-and-pillage of the housing industry did, and how it will lead to the same catastrophic “bubble.”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2704305
Green even did interviews with people such as Jennifer (formerly “Edushyster”) Berkshire:
http://haveyouheardblog.com/are-charter-schools-the-new-subprime-mortgages/
You want to know how threatening Green’s paper was to the privatization industry, and its Wall Street backers?
Peter Cunningham cut loose and sicced his henchwoman on it. By comparison, this piece from her makes Breitbart.com or Ann Coulter seem the height of civility.
http://educationpost.org/are-black-parents-sheep-how-to-gin-up-charter-school-fears-with-subprime-mortgage-analogies/
Again, it’s written by the then-second-in-command over at Peter Cunningham’s Education Post — a corporate ed. reform propaganda org founded and edited by Peter Cunningham, with funding from the usual suspects:
Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Walton’s … and yeah, Wall Street folks.
The author’s name is Traci D’Angela Barber, and as her Education Post bio indicates, she did a 12-year stint at the Chicago Tribune — presumably not with writing like the one being cited here… it’s horribly written, quite apart from its content.
Since leaving the Trib, she’s been employed by the corporate reform industry in a variety of positions at numerous corporate reform orgs, including
— Education Post
— Chicago Public Education Fund
— Consortium on Chicago School Research
Hmmm … in her screed, Tracy gleefully derides Preston’s / his co-writers’ work and their “subprime mortgate castrophe = charters” analogy as …
— “an obscure paper”
— “a tiresome and misleading anti-charter narrative”
— an “unfortunate metaphor”
— “an absurd predatory lending analogy”
— a “troublesome analogy” that “doesn’t fit, not at all”
— a ”gem of hyperbole”
(Uhh … so which is it? A “metaphor” or an “analogy” or
“hyperbole”? All three, I suppose. JACK)
— “kind of sensational outrage”
— “an assumption” that “lacks academic rigor”
— “ominous, half-baked conjecture”
— “a glorified lit review”
— has not one “shred of original research in the paper”
— a work that “doesn’t become ‘academic’ simply because
four Ph.D.s put their name on it”
— “an irresponsible and condescending argument from
four professors”
— written by authors who “cherry picked every charter
scandal and nefarious for-profit operator to make their
shaky case.”
— “rests on shaky ground when it sprinkles in anti-charter
dogma published in blogs and by ideologues”
No really, Tracy. Don’t hold back. Tell us how you REALLY feel.
Of course, Tracy herself is an objective non-ideologue, blessedly free of any “dogma” favoring the corporate ed. reform version of reality. (COUGH! COUGH!)
And then she even throws in a cheap shot at Jennifer Berkshire’s choice to give Preston a forum, because previously, Jennifer “actually edited a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers,” implying anything Jen writes or posts must be dismissed as the biased hack work of a teachers union shill. (Oh, if only that were true 😉 )
Indeed, according to Tracy, Jennifer “never met a charter she didn’t hate.” (Not true, actually… because of tight regulations not present in other states, Massachusetts charters perform well, and Jennifer has noted this approvingly in the past.)
Tracy then tosses in some cover for charter operators.
Unlike those “for profit” predatory lenders responsible for either the Enron or subprime mortgage catastrophes, Tracy argues that … I kid you NOT … charter operators “are motivated by a far different (dare I say nobler?) cause: to give our most vulnerable children a shot at a better education, a safer school, a middle-class life.”
Unfortunately and inconveniently for Tracy, the first comment under
the article lists the incredible annual salaries of the top charter operators in just one city — New York City — effectively undermining her portrayal of today’s charter edu-preneurs as the current equivalents of Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa of Calcutta.
Peter Cunningham pulls down $368,138 at Education Post,
with the org itself operating on a multi-million dollar budget. Therefore,
it’s likely that Tracy did not pen this screed for free.
(Mercedes Schneider found Peter Cunningham’s salary in *Ed Post’s tax forms, after much on-line cyber-sleuthing.*
Read about this at:
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More of us need to be like Steve Carell’s character – hands up and brashly shout “EXCUSE ME!” when you hear something that’s outrageously wrong.
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Ah, when those who believe their own hype let us in on what they really think, the cat literally jumps out of the bag.
From the linked article, quoting Eva “Her Own Bad Self” Moskowitz: “Success isn’t ideal for every child. If we think a child would do better in a different school, whether it’s a specialized program or just a school with a different approach, we’ll tell a parent that, as we should.””
That’s the old charter refrain of “not a good fit” when advising/ordering/demanding that a parent send her/his child elsewhere.
As Chiara reminds us, we need to think in systemic terms. That is, you can’t just tinker with, or disrupt, or change, one part of an interconnected system without affecting many other moving parts.
So when charters displace and eliminate public schools, or cripple and limit them in various ways by co-locating, or increasingly rob them of vital resources, just where is that child, and those children, supposed to go?
That is, when she advantages her select group of students and parents how can she not realize that at the same time she is putting a great many other students and parents at a disadvantage?
No problem. People have been inflicting Rheeallity Distortion Fields on themselves for millennial. Just ask an very old and very dead and very Greek guy:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
Current version: buying into one’s own “truthful hyperbole.”
😎
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I saw that, too.
It makes you wonder why DFER hasn’t embraced the voucher movement since that is exactly what charter schools have become.
Every single charter school is a private school with absolutely no obligation to teach any child except the ones that they want to teach. None. It is exactly the same as having a voucher system. Give all the charter parents their “voucher” to enroll in a charter that — like any good private school — will demand that the students leave the school if they decide they just can’t stand the sight of the child anymore.
It is almost Shakespearean in its nastiness and corruption.
“Who will rid my charter school of these troublesome students” says Eva Moskowitz? Joseph Belluck at the SUNY Charter Institute says “We grant your wish to train anyone you want to rid your charter of those troublesome students.”
Shocking.
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Sounds like LA under Deasy with Baltimore’s own hideous version!!!
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I love this line from Eva’s husband in the memoir: “If I trusted private industry to make food, why not schools?”
Schools are not hot dog carts. Teaching is quite a bit more complex than making hot dogs.
If hot dog cart customers can’t afford extra hours each night to read about hot dogs at home, hot dog carts don’t turn them away like Succeggs Academy does to its students and their families.
If customers have special needs like diets or food allergies, meat and/or condiment accommodations are made, unlike at Succeggs Academy. (Public schools make accommodations for special needs too.)
Schools need to be stable for neighborhoods to be stable. Apologies if any of you own a hot dog cart, but your hot dogs are not required to be served. Sorry.
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The problem here is that there are many private schools that appear to do an excellent job of the complex tasks of teaching. Many posters here have had enough confidence in private schools to send their children and grandchildren to private schools.
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Private schools do an excellent job of teaching rich kids.
They don’t take the kids with cognitive disabilities or ELLs.
Is this your model for US education.
Pretty stupid.
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You are correct at how an absurd that comment was.
The cost of providing a hotdog to a customer doesn’t change if a customer is underweight or overweight. Handing a hotdog to a customer in a wheelchair costs the same as handing a hotdog to a customer who is an Olympic sprinter.
The same cannot be said of education. And the fact that someone who calls themselves an educator and is in charge of public schools has demonstrated that she believes that education is just like hotdogs should tell us how frightening it is that she gives the SUNY Charter Institute their marching orders and Joseph Belluck says “how fast do you want us to march?”
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You notice how none of the main news org’s — print, TV, on-line — in NYC has jumped in to cover the parent uprising at Success Academy’s Hudson Yards Middle School?
It was covered here:
And then the protest letter from the parents was posted as well:
And then … NOTHING …
Nobody else wants to touch it. Hmmm … ?
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There is also rotten food, food with salmonella, produced by private corporations
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That’s what regulation is for. Remember the Food and Drug Administration? No one else does.
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“Success isn’t ideal for every child. For some, failure is a better fit” — Eva Moskowitz
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Failure is obviously a better fit for Eva herself.
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