Gary Rubinstein notes that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain has been a “success” in attracting huge donations from hedge fund managers. Gary was a charter member of Teach for America and a part of the Reform world. But he got woke in 2010 at the TFA 20th anniversary celebration. He just can’t stand lies and boasting; honesty is in his DNA.
In this post, he warns that the big donors are being scammed. They believe what the PR department of Success Academy tells them. It has an obvious interest in putting out information that portrays the chain as a miracle, a miracle that can be easily copied by others. But as he shows, no one has been able to reproduce Success Academy’s test scores, and attention should be paid to how those test scores are generated.
Rubinstein has made a reputation as a miracle-buster. In this post, he does it again.
Dear Seven Digit Success Academy Donor,
Obviously if you have seven (or eight!) figures to donate to Success Academy, you are a person who does not easily fall for scams. But this time, I’m afraid you did.
There are really only two possibilities: Either Success Academy is the greatest miracle in the history of education — or the greatest Hoax…
If Success Academy is hiding some secret methods that could be scaled around the country so that other schools could achieve results even in the same ballpark, these methods would be worth billions of dollars to Eva Moskowitz. If she is for real, she has found the equivalent of Ponce De Leon’s famed fountain of youth…
I assume you were inspired by the mind-blowing statistics from Success Academy’s PR department. I assume you were impressed by the way that their 3rd grade through 8th grade test scores would make them the top district in New York State. You assume that their methods can be replicated, but no other charter school in the state has done so…
Success Academy is built on a foundation of lies and it is only a matter of time before it comes crumbling down.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting angle that Gary has adopted to getting SA donors to reconsider.
The last thing these Wall Street types want to be seen as is dupes, which, as Gary points out, is actually what they are.
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Those donors are not donating because they are dupes. They are buying Eva Moskowitz.
Does anyone REALLY think that Eva Moskowitz believed so strongly that Betsy DeVos was such a fantastic choice for Secretary of Education that she decided to make it her personal mission to write op eds and give numerous interviews and speeches praising Trump’s choice and demanding that the Senate confirm DeVos when her nomination was up in the air?
Moskowitz was obviously spending her time fighting for DeVos to be confirmed in order to please her funders. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Moskowitz is such a poor judge of character and what is good in education that her strong admiration for Betsy DeVos and the “judgement” that led her to her certainty that her time was best spent doing everything she could to insure that DeVos was Secretary of Education was just because that’s the kind of judgement she has.
Moskowitz’ judgement about Betsy DeVos being exactly the leader America needs and Moskowitz’ non-stop demands that every senator who believes in education confirm DeVos either shows terrible judgement or demonstrates her willingness to say and do anything to please those who will make sure her very high salary continues to be subsidized by billionaire donations.
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I doubt that the donors to SA have ever seriously considered/questioned the claims of Eva Moskowitz. They are more than happy to simply take her claims at face value because, as you correctly point out, she does and says what they want to further their privatization agenda.
But regardless of whether they are actually dupes, perception is nonetheless key with these folks.
Like Trump, the type of people funding SA want to be perceived as astute winners, not dupes, especially among their investment buddies.
I think this is a good tack that Gary has taken.
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I have recently had email exchanges with a six-figure donor. Although he is very smart, he believes whatever the PR dept at SA tells him. Some strange KoolAid they have.
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They believe Evas claims because they align with their own ideology and business model.
It’s basically a form of cherry picking.
You also see it with many people who deny that climate change is human caused or that it is serious. There are undoubtedly some (eg, at Exxon Mobil) who know the truth and nonetheless continue to deny it, but I suspect there are also many otherwise smart people who simply never really considered the science because doing so would require that they actually change their ideology and/or business as usual. Far easier to just accept the bogus claims at face value.
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“Although he is very smart, he believes whatever the PR dept at SA tells him.”
That SA donor sounds exactly like Trump voters who say that everything Trump says is true. And that the reasons that SA donors, like Trump voters, accept that version of “truth” is very similar.
Trump voters LIKE what he says — whether it is the racist dog whistles or finding easy scapegoats (“illegal immigrants” “unarmed African-American teens who looked too scary) for them to blame. They want it to be true.
I suspect the SA donor has his own reasons to want Eva’s PR to be true – either deep down he believes that lots of African-American 5 year olds are likely to act out violently due to their violent natures or he likes the anti-public school and pro-Betsy DeVos dog whistles that Eva Moskowitz offers to her supporters.
Trump voters think they are very smart, too. They believe in “alternative facts” — the facts that Trump says are true. That SA donor believes in the “alternative facts” that SA presents to them.
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“If they truly believed that Success Academy is accomplishing the things that encouraged you to donate so much money to them, they would be calling for the banishment of all the other famous charter schools — the KIPPs, the Achievement Firsts, the Green Dots. But they stand by these other schools since they know there is something fishy about Success Academy.”
That’s a good point. Why AREN’T ed reformers calling for all the other charter chains to turn in test scores like Eva’s?
She’s solved the problem, supposedly. Why don’t they all just do exactly what she does? They don’t want the highest test scores in their respective cities?
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This is a great post by Gary Rubenstein who I read all the time. Gary has stripped success academy to their bare bones. Success academy has been exposed for the fake that it is.
I just have one question still and Gary was unable to address it or to explore it a bit further……and my question is how….? How did success academy produce these test scores? Obviously, now we know the scores are a fake but the question remains how did they do it or what did they do? Sort of like the OJ Simpson case in that everyone knows he did it but no one seems to know how he did it.
Eva Moskowitch might be doing the witch laugh right now as the question looms regarding the test scores but I am waiting for the real results to surface.
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Grade your own tests?
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The real results can be seen if you took a close look at the students who win the original Kindergarten lottery, how many of those kids actually enroll in the school after attending one of the pre-enrollment meetings (after which half don’t take this supposedly coveted seat). Then look closely at how many of the students who actually enroll after all that are with the 3rd grade cohort when it takes the test.
The NYC Independent Office did one report that actually included charter school attrition (although they tried to bury the information).
Click to access school-indicators-for-new-york-city-charter-schools-2013-2014-school-year-july-2015.pdf
On page 9 is the charter “backfill” information which (probably mistakenly) includes the % of entering Kindergarten students who left. The “average” attrition rate between K-3 grade was 24.5% and another 22.5% were gone by 5th grade — in all 49.5% of the original lottery winners were MIA in charters “on average”. And a WNYC study showed that Success Academy has one of the very highest attrition rates of any charter network, so no doubt their attrition rate is above average.
Finally, as Gary Rubenstein mentions, there is the forced repeating of grades. Those charter school studies of lottery winner attrition rates include all students still at the charter even if they are repeating 1st or 2nd grade for the 2nd or 3rd time. So if half of the students “on average” are completely gone from the school, and another large number is being held back as many times as necessary, the number of students who won the original K lottery taking state tests with their cohort is much smaller than the number who enrolled the first day of K.
Finally, there are the students who REPLACE the original K lottery winners in first, 2nd or 3rd grade. It is documented that Success Academy gives at least some students a pre-enrollment test and have told parents of kids entering 1st grade that their child has to repeat Kindergarten again. That has dissuaded some parents to give up their child’s seats and insures that the open seats in older grades are filled ONLY with students that Success Academy feels are academically successful enough to be in their school.
Imagine a charter school holds a 2nd grade lottery and tells every parent whose kid is not up to snuff they have to be in first grade. That way, the 2nd grade seats can only be filled with students who are deemed good enough to take it and would remain open until their number is called.
If other charter networks were ruthless enough, they could do this. When your ultimate mission is not teaching as many at-risk students as you can, but teaching only the students who will bring glory to your charter network, your actions are very different.
One additional red flag with Success Academy: Success Academy has 3 elementary schools in very rich District 2 Manhattan (each of those schools has a disproportionately low number of at-risk students compared to the NYC average). Compare the Districts with the longest waiting lists (the poorest ones) with the Districts where Success Academy has 3 elementary schools instead of 0, 1 or 2. It is easy to cherry pick students (and get rid of the ones you don’t want to teach) if you keep the number of seats available to the students in that district small.
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^^sorry, typo in above:
The average charter attrition rate for the students who won the original K lottery — 26.5% (not 24.5%) were gone by 3rd grade and 49.5% were gone by 5th grade.
And gone means gone. An additional unknown number were still there in some lower grade after being flunked as many times as necessary until their academic performance was satisfactory.
And the 49.5% is an AVERAGE charter attrition rate. Since Success Academy’s attrition rate seems to be at the higher end for charters, it is possible that far more of the original lottery winners are gone.
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Here is the “recipe” for the “secret sauce” that produces test score miracles. It was used in Houston, Atlanta, DC, and probably at SA. The ratio of “ingredients” can vary, but it is not that hard, all you have to do is be willing to skate on some very thin ethical/legal ice.
1) Nothing beats talent – in coaching or teaching! Cherry pick your test takers. This is made possible at SA by starting with self-selected parents who are generally engaged and supportive – and had the wherewithal to jump through all of Eva’s hoops. This narrows the selection process even further. Combine this with no-excuses compliancy, hyper-suspension rates, expulsions, and “counseling” parents out further selects for the best (most compliant and smartest) “scholars” (i.e test takers). Year to year attrition produces smaller and smaller cohorts of top test takers. Trolling or recruiting “ringers” might have been used surreptitiously.
2) Excessive/obsessive/intensive test-prep works. Some have suggested that Eva was privy to a higher degree of test item transparency that may have helped.
3) Test day “coaching” of proctors. “You know Suzy, you may want to re-read and re-think number 17.” Sometimes a facial gesture, a wink, a nod or a head shake work equally as well.
3) In-house test scoring. Scoring both math and ELA has a very subjective slant. Public school teachers are not allowed to score their students exams, or even the exams of students from their district.
4) Erasers! Just ask Michelle or the Atlanta teachers trying to produce their own test score miracle while under intense administrative pressure to improve test scores.
5) Perception is reality; per cents are deceptive when the pool of student test takers is small. When Eva touts her success rates with percentages, she is often talking about a small handful of students.
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This is one of the more interesting user names I’ve seen here in a while.
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One other ingredient:
Make sure that you only expand your charter chain in a school system of 1.1 million students to pick from. Make sure that you never have to teach more than a tiny % of all the at-risk students and make sure to make all sorts of racist innuendoes about how violent the non-white students are to excuse your high suspension rates for 5 – 7 year olds. And make sure to ignore the fact that in NYC public schools there are over 161,000 3rd through 8th graders (more than 20,000 per grade) who are proficient in state tests, and more than 70,000 of those 161,000 students are African-American and Latino.
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Agreed. Eva could never expand into other geographic markets and pull off her scam. She also has a very unique ingredient that is very hard to cultivate: political protection.
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How did She do it OJ,
Why did you say “Sort of like the OJ Simpson case in that everyone knows he did it but no one seems to know how he did it.”
There is no mystery in how OJ did it. The timeline was clear. Perhaps he didn’t do it, but there was certainly plenty of evidence as to how he did it if he did. That’s why the car was parked erratically and OJ did not answer the phone calls of the limo driver who was waiting for him and he did not come out. OJ could have had a solid alibi just by coming out to meet his limo when it arrived. Instead, the limo driver made two calls to his boss because OJ was not responding and did not seem to be home. OJ may be the unluckiest man alive who just happened to oversleep the one time he could have had the perfect alibi.
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” Yet we see no charter school showing the test scores anywhere near Success Academy. Even the famed KIPP charter chain gets results that are only marginally better than average. And this is not just in New York City, but around the country. The only charter schools with such high test scores are the Arizona BASIS schools, which serves a low number of Black and Hispanic students.”
Amazing that people who love data and science so much missed this obvious question- what makes Success Academy different from all the other no excuses charter chains?
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What makes Success Academy different than other no excuses charter chains is their ruthlessness in identifying the students who they don’t want.
There is testimony in the NAACP report on charters by a dad who explained how it works at Success Academy. His child and a number of other children were identified the first day of school and put in the back. There seemed to be specially trained staff designed to identify the unworthy students that Eva Moskowitz feels are far too unworthy to have in her schools and she hires people who have no moral center who are willing — for their high salary — to identify them and talk their parents into pulling them from their school. Within 10 days, all those children Eva’s specially trained minions identified as not worthy were gone, according to the testimony.
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They are borderline child abusers.. I am shocked they have not been sued for it yet.
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I have a student this year who had a very bad experience at SA.
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The Fountain of Youths
Evas found dollar$
In Fountain of Youth$
Referred to as Scholars
To pull off the ruse
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Oh, thank you, SomeDAM. Once again, pitch perfect.
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Some of those seven digit donors are in a position that they are happy to unload some money that will allow them to avoid some taxes. Some of the predatory elites are glad that they get to undermine a public institution and a public union at the same time.
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Ed reformers got the records on how many NYC teachers had been disciplined or fired for misconduct or incompetence:
https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried-to-fire-154-teachers-for-incompetence-or-misconduct-75-were/
But they have no records on this at all with charter teachers, correct?
It’s just amusing how they are so vigilant about transparency in public schools while charter schools remain completely opaque and it doesn’t even occur to them to look.
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“Seventy-five tenured teachers found guilty of abuse or incompetence — many of them male, veteran educators assigned to struggling New York City schools — were fired over 16 months in 2015 and 2016, an analysis of disciplinary records obtained by The 74 has found.”
So how many complaints were there on charter teachers and what happened to them as a result of the complaint? How many were fired? How many were not fired? Is there any centralized collection of that at all?
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Clear message: Have the audacity to work with our nation’s poorest children and we WILL eliminate your position.
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Do non-union teachers even have “disciplinary records” to review?
If not, ed reformers will never know how many were fired or not fired, right?
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Suggested rule of thumb. It it seems too good to be true, it is most likely false.
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Either that or Success
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I worked at Success and taught a testing grade in the elementary school for 3 years. Many of the practices mentioned in previous comments are true from my experience and some are not. True: 1) huge focus on test prep and ideal conditions for test taking from December – April. Many practice materials are created in-house and are very similar to past tests (I don’t think they actually had inside info because admin was often surprised by changes or differences in the test.) Test taking strategies are taught, many small groups are conducted, and there is even a “dress rehearsal” of what the day of the test will look like. There are also lots of rewards for effort and scores. 2) Attrition at many of the schools (mine didn’t have much) and holdovers. One thing I haven’t heard mentioned much is Success’ fondness for skipping students to higher grades. They do this a lot in elementary. 3) They use good quality curriculum in general. Workshop and balanced literacy, PBL units (3 in each grade) lots of books in classrooms, a combo of CGI math, Contexts for Learning math and a bit of TERC materials, lots of close reading and shared texts. The only part of the curriculum I didn’t like was their writing curriculum. False (from my experience): 1) I saw absolutely no cheating. Teachers were watched like hawks and they had insane rules and regulations for testing so that there couldnt even be an appearance of wrong-doing. We had to keep our arms behind our backs when going to students if they raised their hands, couldn’t lean over too much, couldn’t touch their papers. Our classrooms were stripped so that no letters or numbers were visible anywhere (even logos and student names on coat hooks were covered). 2) We didn’t grade our own tests. One or two teachers went to a citywide location to grade large batches of tests anonymously.
I’d be more than happy add more details of people are interested.
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“admin was often surprised by changes or differences in the test.”
?? You mean that real test was changed or different from the practice tests they used and that “surprised” them? That certainly suggests that they expected to know exactly what would be on the test.
I have never heard public school principals or teachers talking about being “surprised” at the tests. They would point out the flaws in the actual tests and the problems with the actual tests, but they were not “surprised” that there would be “changes or differences” from the practice tests.
Huge red flag.
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I meant that they expected things to be similar to previous years and if the format or question types were drastically different, they would discuss how to change preparations for the following year. It didn’t seem to me that they knew what would be on the test I’m any given year based on my observations.
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Thanks, Sam, very interesting.
Are you willing to say which Success school you taught at?
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I was at one of the original few Harlem elementary schools.
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Thanks. A couple other questions “while I have you on the line.”
What is your response to the assertion (not uncommon in the comment threads on this blog) that Success Academy is about “segregation and strict minority oppression”? Did it seem to you that the students at your school were oppressed? Did it seem that the school subjected students to disciplinary measures that were racist?
Did Success (at your school, based on your experience and what you saw) sometimes encourage families to withdraw their children from the school? If so, what was the reason for that encouragement — e.g., the student’s academic performance, disciplinary issues, other?
And generally, do you think your school was a good place for the students there? Were they happy and growing?
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Sam,
Are you still teaching at Success? If not, why not? If you are, why is turnover so high? Are you comfortable with the extreme discipline?
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Man, FLERP!, This isn’t a deposition, now is it? 🙂
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Not at all!
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I initially left Success because I moved out of Ny state. Looking back though, I do wish that some things had been done differently in terms of discipline. A lot of the differences in discipline styles depend on your principal and on the individual teacher. Some classes and schools were more “fun-loving” and gentler than others. All classes used versions of clip charts and/or class Dojo for behaviors, etc. One of my biggest regrets now is how little opportunity was given to students to practice independence and self-regulation. Every second is planned and controlled by adults (transition patterns, how to sit, when to start your work,etc.) I believe this is one of the reasons why the high school is struggling so much. These kids didn’t learn how to be independent and responsible for themselves in the lower grades. As far as segregation, my school was mostly black and Hispanic. I taught fewer than 5 white or Asian children in my time there. I think there were many factors that contributed to this, one of which is white and Asian families not wanting to send their kids to schools in Harlem if they didn’t live there themselves. I never spent a full day at UWS , Union Square, etc to see if there were big differences in discipline. I visited each school only very briefly and things seemed very similar. At my school, I didn’t see any children asked directly to leave and I taught in ICT classes with some children with high needs. I did, however, see many children held back a grade. If the student had an IEP, Success offered an ICT placement in the next grade. If they still struggled there, they tried to place them into a 12:1:1 but not all Success schools have these in everybgrade so this required a longer commute for many families. For children without IEPs who were behind, the school was very keen to hold them back. I had students who the school decided should be held back based on internal assessments (with very little teacher input) who passed the state tests which was sad and maddening.
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Thanks for your responses, Sam.
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Sam,
Did you ever read the testimony of the Success Academy dad before the NAACP? Because it was specifically about one of the Success Academy charters in Harlem like the one where you taught for 3 years.
“My son, with great fanfare, got accepted into Harlem Success Academy. Within his first day of school, I was told that he was unfocused and he needed to be disciplined. I was like, “Okay. They have high standards. This is good.” I didn’t see anything wrong with it…within days, people were coming into the classroom. They didn’t identify themselves. They were sitting in the back and they had papers and pads and they immediately, systematically, with these systems in place, identified children that they knew were going to be problematic and my son was among them, along with four other kids. Within three days, they had placed him in the back of the class in a table together and one by one, as every day went by, one of those kids were missing and they were gone. I was the hold out and I only lasted twelve days…”
According to this former Success Academy dad (“former” not by his own choice but because his child was not wanted), 5 students from a single class were gone in the first few weeks of school.
Was it helpful to teachers like you knowing that there was a SA team who would get rid of “problem” children that they felt would be too difficult for you to teach?
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What is this “Success Academy” thing everyone keeps mentioning? Never heard of it. Must be talking about Eva Moskowitz’s Segregation Academy. It’s Segregation, folks, segregation and strict minority oppression. And if we’re talking about Segregation Academy, yes, it is a failing business model from a business, a moral, as well as an academic standpoint.
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