This is the last of the podcasts that Gary Rubinstein reviews. There’s dissent in the high school. The students rebel against the discipline. Most teachers bail out.
But graduation comes at last. Of the 73 students who started, 16 graduates made it. It annoys Gary that the interviewer tiptoes around the issue of attrition. Senior year started with 17 students. One mysteriously disappeared. 16 survived the Success Academy boot camp.
The 2019 graduating class consists of 26 students. The president of Harvard University will deliver the commencement address to this tiny cohort, a sign of Eva’s power, money, and connections.
These 26 students are the survivors of a class that originally included 83 students. Eighty percent of the graduates are females.
But there is progress: the first graduating class was 16 of 73. The second was 26 of 83.
No one seems to wonder what happened to those that didn’t make it to graduation.
Has Eva created a template for American public education?
To see all of Gary’s posts on this topic, here they are.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hi Diane!
Have you seen this?
http://laschoolreport.com/3-california-naacp-chapters-break-with-state-and-national-leaders-calling-for-charter-moratorium-to-be-overturned/
Claudia Briggs
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I heard about that earlier. I Stand with the national NAACP, which appointed a task force to review issues about equity. It held hearings around the country. After due deliberation, the national NAACP called for a moratorium on charters until they agreed transparency and accountability, until they stopped pushing out students who were difficult to educate, until they stopped diverting money from public schools.
I agree with national.
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Wow, the NAACP’s moratorium just asked for accountability and transparency!
It is amazing that 3 local California chapters are upset about having accountability and transparency for charters. I find it hard to believe that these chapters represent the average parent in their community’s charter schools.
Parents in charters like transparency and accountability. The administrators do not.
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The real scandal is that this high school graduating class of 26 students began with 46 students in 9th grade. This is a high school that started with a freshmen class of 46 and just a few more than half are left.
And the graduation rate for the 9th grade boys is atrocious! There were 19 boys in the 9th grade class. How many are left? 6? 5?
Is the Harvard president really speaking at the graduation of a high school where 70% of the 9th grade boys are missing? That is truly shameful.
Where are all the boys who were in the 9th grade class with this group of 26 students? Moskowitz can’t say their parents preferred other high schools since they obviously chose Success Academy for 9th grade. Where did they go?
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We need schools that can serve most students. We do not need a niche experiment that relies on survival of the fittest few. This model is not a good use of public dollars as it is highly inefficient. The rate of attrition of Success demonstrates how out of touch the school is with students’ needs. These results look like an expensive failed experiment instead of the success this organization claims. Any metric would consider these numbers a “poor rate of return.”
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“Is the Harvard president really speaking at the graduation of a high school where 70% of the 9th grade boys are missing? That is truly shameful.” The scam feels so very TRANSPARENT to any who wish to see.
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It may be a first in the modern history of Harvard University that the President is giving a commencement address to a high school graduating class of 26.
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It strikes me that the Harvard guy sees nothing wrong with weeding out those who are weaker. The schools that see themselves as serving the best like to see their students as having come through the storm of adversity intrepid in the face of academic pressure. That is why the revelation concerning the buying of places in big name colleges is such a damning piece of news. It pulls the sheet off the dusty room.
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The idea that the Harvard guy sees no problem with celebrating a graduation with a handful of students able to crawl from the wreckage, is testament to how much gaslighting is going on in public education. The obvious comparison is the thousands of graduates in NY public schools who have gone on to college or other accomplishments and who are systematically ignored, as so many have pointed out. Anyone with this much power and $$$ available to shower upon so few students, resulting in this pitiful excuse of an outcome would have been fired long ago.
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“. . . black patent leather stilettos.”
When Eva came to St. Louis to speak (courtesy of Rex Sinequefield’s libertarian reactionary Show Me Institute) I noticed that she had on stilettos while wearing a very tight medium weight fabric skirt which left nothing to the imagination. I happened to follow her up to the reception area after her speech (which was a joke) with the obligatory questions written on a card to be answered.
Now I don’t know what that sort of outfit means in NYC, but Rubenstein mentioned it more than once in the reports. For this midwestern sensible man, I thought the outfit was outlandish, certainly not fit for an “educational” venue. But hey, what’s a Show Me Stater know anyway, eh!
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“The weed whackers”
Eva loves to weed
To separate the seed
From all the failing “chaff”
A harvest cut by half
And Harvard’s president
It’s very evident
Enjoys the weeding too
And celebrates the few
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“The 2019 graduating class consists of 26 students. The president of Harvard University will deliver the commencement address to this tiny cohort, a sign of Eva’s power, money, and connections.”
It’s fitting though. Harvard reaches only a tiny cohort and gets insanely outsized attention, to the detriment of every public college and community college in the country who educate the VAST majority of people and are utterly ignored by politicians and other powerful people. It’s a good fit.
Compare the attention given the elite college admissions scandals to public university funding, or, even worse, community colleges. These scandals are completely irrelevant to 99.9% of the people in the country, who don’t spend their entire lives trying to get into Stanford, yet that’s all we get.
I wish Success students well and they should be proud for getting thru Eva’s selection process and I’m glad they got a prestigious speaker. I just wish someone in power would do some work on behalf of the public school students who didn’t go to a selective school and aren’t going to Harvard. Because that’s most of us, although NOT most of the people in power.
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The thing I would ask ed reform and Betsy DeVos specifically, is if they can’t support or advocate on behalf of public school students- and they don’t- could they at least not actively work against them?
DeVos is travelling the country lobbying against public school funding. This is not fair to our students. For one thing school funding is local and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about with her ridiculous national graphs, and for another it is wildly inappropriate for her to promote the schools she prefers by attacking our schools.
I get that she has nothing to offer to public schools, students, or families. Maybe she could see her way clear to NOT harming us. Since I’m paying thousands of ed reformers in government I really have to insist they stop working against our students.
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I’m open to the idea that NYC needed more selective public schools or a process that is different than an entrance exam to select, but why present this as a non-selective school when it’s not?
That hardly seems like an accurate comparison. What are public schools supposed to learn from this? That we, too, can lose 3/4’s of the class from entrance to graduation?
Where will the 3/4’s go? Ed reformers are just hoping that markets create a universal system? In what other sector has that happened? What if privatizing DOESN’T create a universal system? Then what? They reinvent public schools?
DeVos takes this insanity even further. With DeVos’ ideological vision we could end up with a system composed entirely of private schools. That is completely possible.
They’ll have to redefine “system” and “universal” like they redefined “public”. This thing is snowballing. It was never coherent and now the cracks are really showing.
Ed reform doesn’t hang together. They keep attempting to patch it up but we are going to end up with a fragmented mess that isn’t “more equitable” and certainly isn’t less expensive, and is also chaotic and full of gaps.
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