Gary Rubinstein has been watching the progress of the 83 students who were in Success Academy’s first class.
By the time they reached fourth grade, their number had shrunk to 59.
By ninth grade, there were 26.
A few months ago, it appeared there would be 17 graduates.
But, wait, Eva handed out only 16 diplomas!
Where is the missing scholar?
If you have any clues, please let Gary know or post them here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That doesn’t sound very successful at all. Only 16-17 kids out of 83?! And who has that few kids? I regularly taught almost 200 kids a year when I taught Sophomore English.
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This is a 20% graduation rate. The others probably didn’t move their thumbs on the table fast enough to signify their critical understanding of math facts.
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With their success, maybe they aren’t good at math.
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It’s more of the deception and fraud that is eating away at the foundational core of this country… It’s the times in which we find ourselves living now. Life has been cheapened, made coarse… the Shallow Era™ (In which seemingly everything is trademarked..up for sale…)
I saw an opinion piece on CNN yesterday about Trump’s lack of preparation for the upcoming North Korean summit. “How is Donald Trump preparing for the huge North Korea summit? He’s not.”
Yeah, and the amazing quote is, get this: “I think I’m very well-prepared,” Trump told reporters during a photo op with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday. “I don’t think I have to prepare very much. It’s about attitude.”
IT’S ABOUT ATTITUDE. Facts be damned. To hell with reality.
Eva and her ilk seem to be living in the same Trump-like universe. Numbers to them only matter when they support the attitude and feelings of the powerful.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/07/politics/donald-trump-north-korea-attitude/index.html
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Success Academy is a selective school. They select thru attrition, but they still select.
I don’t know why they deny it- it seems there are plenty of selective public schools in NYC.
If they won’t want to be considered a selective school they should backfill the classes so they don’t lose 80% of their total students by 12th grade. Unless and until they do that I would put them in their own category- a selective school with a different selection method (attrition).
Why not just say that? Why insist they’re the same as an ordinary public school?
The public high school here graduates +/- 300 kids every year. They’re not the same kids who entered in kindergarten, but there’s around 300. If they had shed 240 of them then no one would consider them a success and everyone would admit those 240 had to go to another school. If that happened here I suspect there would be complaints from other districts because obviously those other districts would be picking up those kids.
Imagine a whole district of Success Academies. Where would those 80% Moskowitz lost to attrition go? If she had retained them her test scores would drop dramatically and “the miracle” would unravel.
I don’t mind that she’s created a selective publicly-funded school in NYC- that seems to be fairly common. I mind that she refuses to admit it, although it’s obviously true.
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Public schools do shed and replace students, but even with today’s mobility, I don’t think there is any excellent K – 12 public school where 80% of the first graders are no longer in the school by graduation — with the majority of them missing before 8th grade. (It’s nonsense to compare this to a failing, underfunded public school that serves many transient families and where parents might have extra incentive to leave for a better school.)
Reporters covering NYC charters are some of the laziest bunch of journalists I have ever seen. They basically rewrite press releases each day which probably takes them about an hour or two.
Where are the questions that non-lazy reporters would ask?
How many of these 16 students actually began in 1st grade? (Some could have been added in 2nd or 3rd, after proving their academic abilities to the satisfaction of SA administrators).
How many of the missing students did not leave because their families moved far away, but left to attend a different NYC public school?
Why do the next two classes (11th and 10th grades) have fewer than half the students economically disadvantaged when NYC has over 70% economically disadvantaged students?
Why isn’t the SUNY Charter Institute concerned with how many at-risk kids leave Success Academy? SUNY is obligated by law to establish charters that serve at-risk students and yet the SA attrition rate for the poorest students seems to be much higher than students who are not economically disadvantaged. What oversight has SUNY done about this and where is any evidence that shows SUNY has ever lifted a finger to closely examine attrition rates before breaking protocol and granting Success Academy schools early renewals because they were absolutely positive that no low-performing students were ever, ever forced out?
Why does the staff at the SUNY Charter Institute and Joseph Belluck believe that all the parents who claim their kids were pushed out are liars? And if they don’t believe those parents are liars, where is any evidence that SUNY has investigated their complaints?
Why would Joseph Belluck and SUNY trust the word of the educator who promised America that Betsy DeVos was a terrific choice for Secretary of Education over the words of dozens of Success Academy parents? Because Moskowitz is white and those parents are not?
And is that propensity of Joseph Belluck and SUNY to trust the word of Eva Moskowitz (no investigation or evidence necessary if Eva says it is true) over non-white parents the reason that Belluck and SUNY are so certain that lots and lots of little kindergarten and 1st graders are violent when they get to Success Academy? Is that why Belluck and SUNY have never questioned an 18% suspension rate for a Success Academy with virtually no white students and no students older than 1st grade?
Why do students being interviewed keep talking about how the missing students can’t handle the work and discipline without the SUNY Charter Institute being at all concerned as to what that says about who is being pushed out of a charter which is legally obligated to teach — not cull — all at-risk students who win their lottery?
“The graduates said Thursday that a lot of former classmates and their parents bristled at Success Academy’s demanding culture and left.” (NY Post)
What happened to the journalistic skills of education reporters?
Are they lazy, ignorant, or complicit?
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I posted this on your earlier post on the SA graduating class noting that the actual test results would mean fewer graduates:
This also means that only 15 out of the 16 survivors are actually graduating and only 13 out of the 16 with a NY State Regents Diploma which could call in to question some of the college acceptances.
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The whole ECOT story is coming out:
“When ECOT was shut down in January, leaving roughly 12,000 students searching for a new school, Federal Hocking Superintendent George Wood said the 15 students that came from his district fell into one of three categories.
Some students told the district they didn’t know why they were on ECOT’s list, because they weren’t attending school there, he said. Some had credit deficiencies putting them a good two grades behind. And some, he said, couldn’t be found because addresses or phone numbers were bad.
“Not a single student that came back from ECOT was on track to graduate with the appropriate number of credits,” Wood said, questioning why it took so long for the state to crack down on the school.
With the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, formerly the state’s largest charter school, being auctioned off in pieces, some schools and longtime ECOT critics are taking stock in how much state money was diverted to the online charter. ”
It’s the largest scandal in Ohio history, in terms of dollars, by a mile. Nothing else comes close. But to get a real investigation we’re going to need to replace many, many lawmakers and elected officials, because the corruption goes all the way down to the county prosecutor level. They will fight tooth and nail to bury it.
http://www.the-review.com/news/20180606/study-shows-ecot-diverted-591m-from-public-schools-in-6-years
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The students who make it to senior year seem very bright. Maybe one of them – or his/her parents — decided it was time to stop being exploited. Eva Moskowitz takes full credit for every one of their accomplishments with help from her massive PR machine and embarrassing sycophantic writers at the NY Daily News and NY Post. And after presenting herself as a miracle worker, Moskowitz uses the attention she gets to demand that the Senate confirm Betsy DeVos, insisting that DeVos was exactly the person to help the students like the ones in her school. She has never retracted her admiration and support for DeVos nor has she admitted she was wrong. (Moskowitz’ sole criticism of DeVos was her lack of media savvy, not her policies.) So maybe one of the seniors was tired of being used to support the right wing agenda and decided that the luxuries those donors provided to his school and the higher salaries the complicit administrators got was not worth it. Maybe one of the seniors got tired of hearing that sole credit for his accomplishments should be given to Moskowitz because without her the student would have been mediocre or a failure.
Apparently there is a homework rebellion in the high school, too. Moskowitz is forcing her students to complete 15 SAT prep assignments EACH WEEK over the summer as well as 8 separate math tests over the summer.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/ny-success-academy-homework-20180606-story.html
Maybe it’s another way to discourage some kids from coming back. What better way to get rid of the least motivated students than to tell them they do these assignments or else? I wonder if the students who spoke out are on got to go lists?
I will put money on the high school changing this policy right when the large cohort of affluent students who are now in middle school are in high school. When those affluent students left their sheltered SA elementary schools for mostly affluent students, they came to a larger middle school that treated them just like the poorest non-white students at SA were always treated — with humiliation and militant strictness. When those children had the same reactions as the poor students had — stressing out, melting down — and their parents complained, Moskowitz immediately catered to their desires and ordered the principal to stop treating them the way he was taught to treat the poor kids at the Harlem Middle schools where he had been trained.
No doubt this will happen when those kids are old enough for high school, too.
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^^^One more thing:
At the beginning of their junior year, this class of graduating students was 20 students. And only 9 of those twenty students were economically disadvantaged.
Four students from that cohort of 20 that had only 9 poor students have left.
How many of those 4 were economically disadvantaged?
If Moskowitz has only graduated 6 or 7 economically disadvantaged students in a city where more than 70% of the students are economically disadvantaged, the celebration of her “accomplishments” is severely premature.
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