I received the following request:
A former charter school teacher,who was a strong advocate for the students, currently is working on her PHD.
She’s wants to speak with former, “No Excuses” students to learn their point view from being constantly suspended and asked to leave (if that was their experience, course).
The target population would be former students of KIPP, AF, Success, Uncommon, or any of those types of schools. They don’t have to be adjudicated or a part of the criminal justice system, just former students who were “counseled out.”
She wants to focus on the former student’s voices because there is not enough research on their experiences and when they go to the media, they tend to be dismissed. So far, she has been able to uncover the inherent racism in their ideology (She will be presenting that this fall) but to put it all together, she needs to talk to kids and see if they recognized their schooling as discriminatory. It’s ok if they didn’t; she just want to talk to some kids or young adults to gain their insights.
The email address to reach out to Ms. Williams at rkp5@illnois.edu, please share this with other education advocacy groups.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is interesting that we don’t hear from the seemingly high number of departures from these schools. Do they have non-disclosure contracts? Forgive me for my thinking back to Theranos.
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Researching this issue is a challenge when we have sent public money to parts unknown to a patchwork of private schools. Who keeps track of these students once they leave the public rolls? If taxpayers are paying the bills, they should have a right to know. How can anyone conduct a serious look at the impact of privatization without information?
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I think those charters are insidiously brilliant at making parents of counseled out students feel embarrassed since all the blame for the student not thriving in a school where they believe (because of the propaganda) that 99.9% of the students thrive is placed on the student and that student’s deficient parents who raised such a non-scholar unworthy of being in their charter school.
It is interesting that the students whose parents are college educated and affluent are rarely treated that way. Recall that at Success Academy Hudson Yards Middle School — to which students from some of SA’s more affluent elementary schools were sent — some parents had a problem with the way their children were treated. If those parents had been poor, no doubt they would have been shown the door because those children were being treated exactly like the poor students in other SA schools were treated! Instead Moskowitz had a special meeting with those parents and told the principal (trained in one of those low-income SA schools and no doubt copying all the “best practices” he learned there) was told to stop treating those privileged students in the manner in which only poor struggling children are treated.
Don’t forget what Eva Moskowitz did to a 10 year old whose mother dared to make the very lightest (and truthful) criticism of her charters. She destroyed him intentionally as a warning. She released the notes of the obviously untrained SA teachers who didn’t recognize anxiety and tried to make a frightened kid even more frightened until he acted out and they could label this poor 6 year old as a violent child to get him out of their school. It was one of the most reprehensible things any person had ever done and Moskowitz should have been drummed out of education. But it was a warning shot to all parents that no holds are barred when it comes to protecting her reputation which allows her to rake in her outsize salary.
I believe that more educated parents would not put up with that and Moskowitz knows it which is why her suspension rates at schools with a majority of affluent students are a fraction of the suspension rates at schools with a majority of very poor and usually African-American students. No doubt Moskowitz and her defenders of this huge disparity in her suspension rates when comparing at-risk African-American Kindergarten and first graders to middle class white Kindergarten and first graders is simply because the middle class white kids are just less violent. It’s not at all surprising that Moskowitz fought so hard for Betsy DeVos because their values are very similar.
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I look forward to reading Ms.Williams’ work! Bravo!
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