Gary Rubinstein wishes the Wall Street Journal would stop writing puff pieces about Success Academy. He wishes the reporter Leslie Brody would ask questions.
Given that Success Academy is the darling of Wall Street, that’s not likely to happen.
The most important question, I think, is why anyone thinks Success Academy is a model for public schools when it picks its students, gets rid of those it doesn’t want, and doesn’t accept new enrollments after third grade? What public school operates like this, with a strict winnowing process and high attrition rates as the norm? It’s a business plan, not a model for public schools, which are required by law to accept all students, without regard to their disability or language skills or likely test scores. While it is true that some public schools admit students on the basis of test scores, they do not present themselves as models for the nation or as typical. Even if a student is rejected by a school with selective admissions, the district is required to find a school for the student. Not so the charters. If a student doesn’t make the cut, they are bounced out.
Success Academy improbably claims that its attrition rate is no worse than nearby district schools, but only 17 of the 73 who started in SA survive to graduate.
Gary writes:
”Part of their ‘success’ depends on their decision to not ‘backfill’ when students leave the school. This is quite an advantage for a school seeking to keep its test scores up. What would happen if all schools had this luxury?
“Reformers are known for saying that every child should have the opportunity to a great education regardless of zip code. By not backfilling beyond 3rd grade, Success Academy denies the right to transfer into this school for kids over 10 years old, which is definitely discriminatory. Also this means that any child who moves to New York after 3rd grade and didn’t have the opportunity to ever apply for the Success Academy lottery will never attend a Success Academy.”
He also notes the high teacher turnover, which Success Academy is known for:
“The second article is about some of the problems Success Academy had had in their high schools. According to the article, there was a student protest where 100 out of the 345 students participated. Then later in the article it says about the principal:
Mr. Malone also has had to grapple with high staff turnover. He said almost one third of about 50 teachers last year left, in some cases due to the exhausting nature of the job.
“So a school with 345 students had 50 teachers? If these two numbers are accurate, that is quite the 7 to 1 student teacher ratio.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
WSJ & Wall Street investors would never send their kids to Success Academy.
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Of course not. But they very well might invest their money there, which is why they need to write about it.
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bingo: creating charters of pretty much any kind would be a moot point if there wasn’t big money attached to be drained off into private pockets
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Admission by not being a part of the system from the start is discriminatory, admission based on placement test is less so. Why SA should fix gaps from other schools?
I would like a direct quote where Moskowitz offers SA as a national model for all public schools.
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Do your own research.
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Gruff,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-small-class-size/2011/03/03/AFPGSkkB_story.html?utm_term=.c573ae7dd996
Let’s see why Eva Moskowitz lobbied so hard for what right wing billionaires love so much — not “wasting” money on reducing class size. You have to hand it to a charter CEO not afraid to lobby for exactly what the greedy, selfish, right wing billionaire donors say that poor children deserve — even if their own overprivileged, tutored children to private schools with 15 or fewer students per class.
“Research should guide spending decisions only if it measures the benefits per dollar of spending on all alternatives.
At Harlem Success Academy Charter School, where we’ve gotten some of the best results in New York City, some classes are comparatively large because we believe our money is better spent elsewhere.”
“Overspending on class-size reduction is particularly unconscionable in tough fiscal times. We need to invest in ways that will help teachers be more effective, such as professional development, technology, school leadership and abundant curricular materials”.
Can you imagine the principal of a selective public going to Congress to demand large class sizes by using the fact that the highly selected students who attend their schools do fine with large class sizes?
It doesn’t happen. Some people have ethics. Some people have e a heart. The others spend their time fighting to make sure Betsy DeVos is approve as Secretary of Education and insist that her values are the ones that should be in power “for all kids”.
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Am I reading this correctly, that SA has a 77% attrition for students from 3rd grade to graduation? If that’s correct, then any equivalent public school would be shut down for having so many students flee or be kicked out. Yet the WSJ holds these schools up as some kind of replicable model? That might work if we only chose to educate the “deserving” students at the top end of the scale (as determined by standardized tests), but is a dismal failure if you accept that the mission of public schools is to educate all children. Of course, these elitist Wall Street types are probably fine with the idea of only educating the “deserving” few; they’re all pretty much products of elite private schools and universities anyway, and have no understanding of their privileged birth and position.
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Colonialism to the MAX.
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Not just from 3rd to graduation.
That class of seniors lost nearly 35% of the students who started in 9th grade! And remember those were the chosen few who had made it to 9th.
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That’s like asking Why Do Pirates Like Parrots?
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Or why parrots like pirates
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“Why parrots like Pirates”
Parrot likes pirate
Cuz Polly gets crackers
Crackers inspire it
To parrot the hackers
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It’s a mutually parrotsitic relationship …
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Parrotsitic
Ha ha ha
Piratesitic too
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“Why pirates like Parrots”
Pirates like parrots
Cuz parrots repeat ’em
Better than ferrets
Cuz ferrets would eat ’em
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“Parrotsitic Piratesitism”
Piratesitic parrots
Like parrotsitic pirates
Synergistic merits
Mutualist admirists
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The answer to the question is simple: Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp and the Fox network, now owns The Wall Street Journal. He bought it in 2007 for $5 billion.
The 105-year old Wall Street Journal of the Bancroft family is no more. Today it is another cog in Murdoch’s lying, manipulating, misleading, fake-news generating, global media machine.
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I read this article in the WSJ online, and the comments almost exclusively praised Success Academy, criticized teachers union, or both.
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The TWJ, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdock, probably cherry-picked the comments it accepted to stage a fake approval with the goal of manipulating what other people might think. They are used to staging everything. They’ve been doing it with deliberate, biased, impunity ever since Reagon got rid of the Fairness Doctrine.
Burying the voice that represents the other side so only their voice is heard becomes a HUGE reverberating echo chamber.
This isn’t anything new. Cambridge Analytica, with help from Facebook, did the same thing to help Trump get elected and to defeat Hillary Clinton.
And the Nazi’s did it too.
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I’m waiting for the day where someone criticizes this moskowitch character and shows her how well educated the public school kids are from Marjory Stoneman HS a public school. The kids there are not test prep goonies but rather free thinking spirits who were educated to think for themselves. For way too long Moskowitch has been getting the baby treatment which first started with Mike Bloomberg and his assassin Joel Klein who had the title of chancellor but he was a lawyer.
Klein gave Moskowitch the key to the city and then Cuomo let her into the Lions den taking over space into our NYC public schools. Now that the lawyer Klein is out and the billionaire bumble head Bloomberg is gone, Moskowitch still receives treatment as if she is the second coming of Martin Luther King. No, Moskowtich is a fake and her schools with their test prep brain washing have run a muck as not one single student from Success charter schools was admitted to the prestigious NYC public specialized High Schools…notta one!
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“Moskowitch still receives treatment as if she is the second coming of Martin Luther King.” – Nah, she is just the second coming of Martin Luther.
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Eva is the second coming of Stalin, of Mao, of Tito, of Hitler, of every want-to-be tin-pot dictator/tyrant that ever lived.
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There was nothing in the Wall Street Journal article about how this cohort of 17 had 26 students in 9th grade. That is nearly 35% of the 9th graders who apparently dropped out before they got to graduation.
And if some of those 35% of the 9th graders who are now MIA were flunked because after 9 years of Success Academy education they couldn’t keep up in high school, then what does that say about how poorly those kids were educating that after so many years of an exclusive Success Academy education, Moskowitz was still flunking so many of them?
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Gary is only scratching the surface regarding HSA 1’s attrition rate because as he points out, the final annual enrollment numbers don’t account for kids who left or were forced out but were then replaced/backfilled before 4th grade. While the state reports show 73 students in the original first grade class of 2006/2007 and then 73 students in the same second grade class in 2007/2008 (https://data.nysed.gov/archive.php?instid=800000059316) clearly these were not all the same students as many students in the original class left and were then replaced. How many? We don’t know but even Eva could not claim that there was zero attrition between the first and second years, although she tries to do so. I believe the gross number of students enrolled at one time or another during the year used to be reported but no longer is and the reports seem to have been purged. I further recall that the gross number of students including backfills was 110+ –
not 73 as reported – which would mean an overall attrition rate of some 85%, with only 1 in 7 of the original class enrollees staying to graduate.
Other fun and unreported facts: between 2009/2010 when the class was starting 4th grade and 2010/2011 when the class was starting 5th grade, a full 20% of the students (12 of 59) left HSA 1. 4th grade also corresponds to the first year of recorded testing in New York State. Was this high attrition rate simply a coincidence or was it a planned to ensure high test scores for the class?
Lastly, if you look at the state reports, self reported teacher attrition rates were above 50%, a problem which continues to plague Success Academy. We also know that most of her schools have had consistently high principal turnover. This would seem to confirm the hypothesis that that the winnowing out of any student with low test scores – rather than superior staffing – as well as non-stop test prep, accounts for Success’ “superior performance.”
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Yes, thank you. It would be very simple for any education reporter to ask this simple question of the 17 students: How many of you started at Success Academy in first grade? I think there was a story at WNYC a few years ago that interviewed “lifers” and it didn’t seem to include very many students. For this question NOT to be asked shows that the education reporters at the NY Times, NY Daily News, Wall Street Journal, Chalkbeat, and other publications are so lazy that they can’t be bothered to do any real statistical analysis when they have the press release from SA to use instead. This WSJ reporter wrote that all 17 started in first grade “together”. I suspect she wrote something factually incorrect but since no one will call her on it, it will be repeated by other lazy reporters following her lead. The ability of education journalists to do real reporting has been shockingly poor. I suppose asking inconvenient questions might harm their access and that’s what they care about most.
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^^^and I want to add that when “attrition” is not the same each year but certain years have significantly higher than average attrition, then it looks nothing like public schools.
And finally, there also seems to be an extraordinary number of students who get held back each year. No one knows that number either. When a school is hiding those numbers, it is because their goal is PR and promoting themselves instead of trying to figure out what works for at-risk students.
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MEDIA MALPRACTICE: I would ask the same of The NY Times, Daily News and even Chalkbeat —!almost every corporate outlet covering education avoids pressing SA (or their authorizers at the SUNY charter committee) how they can possibly defend the blatant cherrypicking, which appears to violate the law that created them.
I remember The NY Times finally covered the cherrypicking question a few years ago, giving Carol Burris and Mike Petrilli equal space in a he said/she said format. Famously, Petrilli then owned then that charters are not for kids who misbehave, admitting it was a feature, not a bug. This is not allowed under NY law though.
Susan Arbetter of Capital Pressroom once tried to nail down Jeremiah Kittredge on this, asking about excluding high need kids. His answer revealed how charters violate statute, by deeming students “at risk of failure” just because they are impoverished kids of color. Science and statistics disagree but it also sounds a little racist, doesn’t it?
We could name names all day in education reporting. Other than Valerie Strauss and Diane’s loose network of indie bloggers, almost all reporting on charters, Common Core and standardized testing has been kiboshed.
Even worse than not covering it, outlets like the Journal, the NY Post and even the Times feature provably wrong, pro-testing advertorials. And sometimes we pay for this – like the 20 page pro-Common Core insert that once ran right before testing season in the Sunday Daily News, sponsored by “SUNY”.
The whole reason we come to this blog for news and analysis is because the professional media has been falling down on the job (or taking a dive) for years. We need an informed public, but the current media buries reporting vital to informing decision making in the public interest.
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Thanks, Jake.
I couldn’t agree more. I wish my Blog were not necessary. But the mainstream media repeats the talking points of the privatization and testing crowd.
As someone asked here yesterday, how is it even legal for Success Academy to close enrollment at the end of third grade and call itself a “public school”?
How is it legal for SA to close school and bus students to political demonstrations? Public s hook principals would be fired if they did that.
Who will blow the whistle?
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Thank you for posting about this issue, and allowing myself and others to become more educated on this topic. While I have seen these “puff pieces” on the Success Academy, I must admit I never thought critically about the information I was receiving, nor do I do any further investigation. I, like many people, believed that this school had the best interest of children at heart. However, any school that places a higher importance on test scores than actually educating young people is not serving our students. Education is a journey and a right that all children should be granted equal access to. By not allowing students to enroll after third grade, and by placing heavy emphasis on testing, this academy had shown that they believe education to be a commodity, and do not truly have an interest in serving our students.
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