Gary Rubinstein has wondered about attrition at the Success Academy charter chain. The chain claims its schools are public schools, but public schools don’t hide their data. Finding out about SA data is a detective hunt. He found much of what he was looking for not in city data but in state data.
Gary writes here about what he has learned.
“Success Academy opened in 2006 with 156 students — 83 kindergarteners and 73 first graders. Now, eleven years later, they have their first graduating seniors, though just 17 of them. In my last post I wondered what can be learned about the Success model by examining who exactly those 17 students are.
“A big question, and one that might never be answered, is how many of those 17 students were actually among the original 73 first graders. Since Success allows transfers up until 4th grade it is possible that some of those 17 students transferred in which would make their attrition rate even worse than the 77% that it is at a minimum.
“New York State has a pretty good data site which I used to look at the most recent data from the 2016-2017 school year. I then compared the data about the 10th and 11th grade from 2016-2017 to the data of their kindergarten and 1st grade from 2006-2007…
”For the class of 2018, the 17 who are about to graduate and who have been celebrated in the media, what we can say from the data from last year was that they had 20 students of which 9 qualified as economically disadvantaged. So there are at most 9 out 17 (53%) now or, depending on which three students left, as few as 6 out of 17 (35%). This does not support the claim that the Success survivors have the same demographics as their neighboring schools.
“If the net result of eleven years of Success Academy is to get 9 low-income students into college, that’s a lot of hype and a lot of money to be spent for that, not to mention all the loss of resources to the 1,099,991 other students in New York City schools who had to suffer a loss of resources as Success used their influence and marches and wealthy donors money to stage publicity stunts in Albany and to get the Governor to go to battle with the Mayor about having the city pay charter school rents.”
Read his detective work. He dug deep. It shouldn’t be this hard.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There you have it. The privatization model of “success” is sifting. Success is defined as getting a few students through a series of gates. In this model, it matters not a wit that some students are discarded. It matter not a wit that in many communities charter schools are forced in against the wishes of the community. They claim success because equity is not their goal and democracy is not their value but rather an inconvenience. They view the huge attrition of the many as necessary “collateral damage” to ensure the success of the few.
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“Suvival of the Sift-test”
Survival of “The Fittest”
Survival of “The Best”
Survival of the siftest
The mark of sure Success
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“How do you spell Success?”
Nothing spells Success
Like T-E-S-T test
From Eastern coast to West
It Rheelly is the best
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That’s it, Arthur. Rename the chain. Success of the Fittest Academy.
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So specifically understood: THEY CLAIM SUCCESS BECAUSE EQUITY IS NOT THEIR GOAL.
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Equity is indeed their goal.
Just a different kind of equity:
Value of share
Not value of fair
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Education as a Weapon: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/education-as-a-weapon-of-struggle-rethinking-the-parkland-uprising-in-the-age-of-mass-violence/
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Here’s a quote from the above article by Giroux:
“These anti-democratic tendencies are evident in the ways in which neoliberalism since the 1980s has reshaped formal education at all levels into a site for training, inundating market values, and imposing commercial relations as a template for governing all of social life. Every idea, value, social relationship, institution, and form of knowledge runs the risk of being economized, turned into either a commodity, brand, or source of profits, or all of the latter. Increasingly aligned with market forces, public and higher education are mostly primed for teaching business principles and corporate values, while university administrators are prized as CEOs or bureaucrats in an audit culture. In addition, students are viewed as clients and customers while faculty are treated like service workers. Public education is especially under assault with the appointment of Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education. DeVos hates all things public and believes that beyond privatizing public education, her role is to “advance God’s Kingdom” through the school system.”
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“Public education is especially under assault with the appointment of Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education.”
No, not really. DeVos is just more open about her contempt of all things public, which makes her easier to fight. Duncan, King and all the others had the same contempt, they just masked it in prettier words (except when Duncan would slip up with things like “white suburban moms”).
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While the NY Court of Appeals, has (bizarrely) ruled* that the NY State Human Rights law (which, among other things forbids discrimination based on age) does NOT apply to public schools(!),
(*With one dissenting opinion “It is antithetical to the purpose of the Human Rights Law to exempt public schools from its mandate… Discrimination is “all the more invidious” when practiced by state run entities. The clear and expressed intent of the Human Rights Law is to protect “every individual” in the State from the evils of discrimination.”)
NY City has it’s own human rights law which DOES seem to apply.
“The NYC Commission on Human Rights protects individuals from discrimination in the area of public accommodations. Anyone who provides goods and services to the general public is considered a public accommodation.
It is against the City Human Rights Law for a public accommodation to withhold or refuse to provide full and equal enjoyment of those goods or services based on the following protected classes under the Law:
Age…
Examples of Public Accommodations:
Stores
Banks
….
Schools”
// End quote
Perhaps a lawyer (FLERP!?) can comment on this but it would appear to this nonlawyer that by prohibiting students from transferring into SA after 4th grade, SA is violating NY City’s human rights law.
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Charter schools are elimination tournaments: they produce a few good students by eliminating the low performing children. They create no new value; they simply segregate existing value and retain the top.
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Apt, succinct, painfully accurate.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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It is hard to imagine that SA offers any viable model of “success.” With so few students actually surviving and getting into college. we should be asking if these results add enough “value add” considering the amount of money spent on separate programming and the amount of money lost from the common good. SA is a high profile “niche” school that should be totally private and funded by private funds as it does not provide enough impact on the large numbers of poor students in the NYC system.. Of the nine survivors at SA, the majority were female. Our crisis in education is overwhelmingly minority urban boys, not girls. Black girls do considerably better in society than poor, minority boys. More of them attend and graduate from college than boys. We also have no way of knowing whether these nine survivors would have done just as well or better in a public school. New Yorkers should be asking if SA is worth the disruption and incredible expense for such meager results.
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Eva Moskowitz is paid something north of $500,000 to run Success Academy charters, which enroll about 15,000 students in 40 or so “schools.” As one of her employees said to me, some are just a few classrooms, not really a school. It is impossible to know how many millions the charter chain gets annually between public and private funding. Eva holds an annual fundraiser that typically raises many millions. As Gary wrote, all to produce 9 low-income high school graduates.
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$500,000 per year to Eva?
Sounds like $ucce$$ to me.
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“Surviving Success”
Surviving Success
Means racing the rest
And acing the test
Arriving with “Best”
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I’m glad Gary Rubinstein is using the only data that Success Academy can’t hide — the statistics of who is in each grade each public and charter school must report at the NYSED website.
It astonishes me that most education reporters are far too lazy to use that data to inform the questions they ask Eva Moskowitz when they are interviewing her. That data shows extraordinarily high suspension rates at some of her charters when the OLDEST grades were first and second grade. Imagine a school of 5, 6 and 7 year old children — all from the most motivated families looking for the best school. But because those families are not white and because many of them are low-income Eva Moskowitz gets away with insisting that her suspension rates of 18% at SA Springfield Gardens is only because all those non-white children her school suspends act out violently. And imagine not one white education reporter thinks “I will question that because despite being white, I am not a racist who accepts without question a white CEO who tells me her schools just happen to attract extraordinarily high numbers of African-American families whose 5 year old children are naturally violent.”
If reporters would do more reporting using data and ask more questions, Joseph Belluck at the SUNY Charter Institute and his group of white “overseers” might be forced to confront their own racist acceptance of Success Academy’s high suspension rates for African-American and Latino 5 and 6 year olds. Their racist acceptance of that would be held out as appalling and they would be removed from their jobs with Cuomo being shamed for appointing a board of white racists who have never once questioned a charter leader who insists that suspending 18% of a group of African-American 5 and 6 year olds with the most motivated families is only due to their violent actions in school.
If reporters would do more reporting and ask more questions, Joseph Belluck would be asked why he is giving the right to train teachers to the charter CEO whose model teacher was caught on video demonstrating techniques to humiliate and punish very young children for not knowing the right answer. Belluck would be asked why Success Academy Springfield Gardens — a charter with virtually no white students — suspended 18% of their entering Kindergarten and first grade class without SUNY asking any questions about whether untrained teachers might be a problem.
If reporters would look at the numbers, they would understand that because NYC has 1.1 million students, the size of each grade is enormous. When you have 80,000 students in a grade and have a “low” proficiency rate of 17%, that still means that there are more than 13,000 students in every grade who are working at or above standards. Thirteen thousand. When we see white reporters treating the education of 17 students — or even 170 students — per grade as anything but cherry picking among 13,000 students in public schools who are achieving the same — it is clear that their understanding of basic math and statistics is truly flawed.
I wish Cynthia Nixon would make this an issue with Cuomo. She should publicly question Cuomo in every public appearance about why he believes Eva Moskowitz when she insists that 18% of the first class of lottery winning 5 and 6 year olds at Success Academy Springfield Gardens were so violent that they needed suspending? Was it because those children weren’t white that Cuomo believes that the woman who endorsed Betsy DeVos is telling the truth?
There is something incredibly condescending about white reporters acting like every African-American child is so violent and academically sub-par that a charter leader who can find a small number of African-American students and turn them into scholars is performing miracles.
The statistics are at the NY State website. There are thousands and thousands of African-American and Latino students in NYC who are academically strong in public schools all over NYC. Moskowitz educates a very minuscule % of them — and not many of the most economically disadvantaged ones — and those white reporters hail her as a miracle worker. Their racism is shocking. They only see the African-American students that white charter CEOs present to them and not all the others who are among the 1.1 million students in NYC public schools. And when the charter CEO tells them that the reason so many aren’t there is their violent natures and their ignorant parents running in droves from the best charter school in the state, those racist white reporters dutifully write it down as if it were the truth.
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Once Eva and her wealthy supporters that also worship at the altar of avarice discover that the data (facts) is out there and can be found, they will work hard to plug that leak of truth too — for the truth based on facts will bury them.
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The charter high schools in Oakland follow a similar pattern of attrition. I’ve looked at 2015 data from 10 charter high schools and compared it to 10 traditional Oakland public schools, keeping in mind the differences in FRPL, college prep, etc. With all the sorting and sifting that goes on with charter schools, their retention rates between grades 9 and 12 are abysmal. Only 4 charters out of 10 had attrition rates below 20%, and 4 schools had attrition rates between 30-50%; the traditional schools had 8 out of 10 below 20% (one school was 20%). Two of them had a net gain of students during that same time period.
What I noticed is that because of this common pattern or model of pushing students out before graduation, and knowing the cohort is adjusted at 12th grade to determine graduation rates, the data shows that the dropout rate for traditional schools is higher. What I would like to know is if the high attrition rates of charters are actually contributing to the higher dropout rates in the regular schools. I have not seen any study that has been done on the effects of churn on dropout rates. I’m betting that it does, and that the charters continue to embrace this “school is not right for you” model for all the usual reasons, including avoiding higher dropout rates, which the school would have to report. It’s unconscionable that the charter model is allowed to be used in this way; charter school “quality” isn’t real when students are pushed out, return to their public school, can’t cope with the frustration/rejection/disruption, and quit.
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When charters publish their results, they often conveniently neglect to account for all the attrition. These high rates of attrition constitute a failure on the part of the school to retain students. Taxpayers need to know this.
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