Mercedes Schneider describes a great puzzle at Eva Moskowitz’s celebrated Success Academy charter chain.
Moskowitz laid off staff, allegedly because of state budget cuts, which cost her chain $60 million.
At the same time, she is hiring new staff.
And the chain has $60 million in reserves.
And if it is austerity time, why didn’t Eva cut her own compensation of $889,000 a year? You know, as a gesture while firing people.
Another tour de force of forensic investigation by Schneider.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, the (now former) employees are “empowered” Diane. Ed reform doesn’t offer school employees actual benefits in terms of real, mundane things like wages or due process rights in the workplace- they offer them nonsense “progressive” rhetoric about “empowerment”.
Maybe they can pay their rent with it.
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The ed reform “discussion” of the public school response to the virus includes no public schools, but instead consists exclusively of ed reformers interviewing one another:
“The director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Robin Lake, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss a new report published by CRPE which details school district response plans to Covid-19.”
Public schools are always at a disadvantage in ed reform “debates” because they’re actually running public schools, so not available to interview each other.
I figure we’ll hear from some actual public schools sometime in August, in between summer remediation and the start of school. Until that time the entire discussion will exclude them. They need a marketing/public relations team.
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Exactly, Chiara.
I called out the ‘non-profit’ which always books speakers like Geoffrey Canada et al. ONLY during the school day. The response? Well, we have to go with our donors’ hours.
Enough said. Thank you for this really important point. It’s as if we are invisible.
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Sometimes things come in my box from disparate corners of the world, but that scream of beneficial coincidences. Here’s a quote from an “obscure academic book” that relates to this Eva-thread, FWIW:
“Markets . . . tend to wholesale deception, to fraud, to sharp practice, to ruthlessness; they tend to exploit the snobbery of the rich, the ignorance of the masses, the impotence of the poor, the passions of nature, the gullibility of the world’s endless supply of fools.”
(Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan/Collection 21:33) CBK
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“Consider that if the 115 laid-off employees are each paid an average of $200K per year (not likely, but let’s err on the high end of SA payroll, here), then the cost of retaining these employees for one year would be $2.3M, not $18M– and based on SA tax forms, we already know that SA can afford to lose $18M.”
$200,000 x 115 = $23,000,000 Not $2,300,000
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This doesn’t undermine Ms. Schneider’s general point. If those employees got, say, 50K per year, the total would still be considerably less than the Success Academy end-of-year fund balance, 5,750,000, as compared to 60 million. So, retaining those employees, at 50K apiece, would be 10 percent of the company’s reserves. Not enormous. Certainly doable.
I suspect that this is a typo. Ms. Schneider is an AMAZING investigator, but she’s also very busy with many other matters, including being a full-time teacher, and you know what THAT means. To err is human. We all do it. Lord knows I do. To consistently produce the important research that Ms. Schneider does and hold down a full-time teaching job and to write those wonderful books that she’s written–well, that’s Herculean.
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Eva Moskowitz worships at the altar of avarice and greed. Everything she does is linked to that. She has no soul. She has no heart. She is a cruel narcissist who will crush anyone that gets in her way.
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Eva Moskowitz is like Donald Trump and every word out of her mouth is about what is good for herself. Her staff are like the Republican party and enable every action, and if they don’t heavily praise, they are gone. No doubt the missing staff are similar in nature to the assistant teacher who videotaped the Success Academy “model” teacher whom the entire Success Academy family had recognized as demonstrating the perfect characteristics that the network wanted to be rewarded.
Remember, it was the assistant teacher who did not follow orders to shut up and let the model teacher do what got her the most praise from her superiors who left Success Academy. The model teacher caught demonstrating the techniques that Moskowitz highly rewards stayed on. Loyalty to the great leader is what it is all about. Those who remain loyal only get thrown under the bus if it helps the great leader. Clearly having a loyal follower is more important than a sacrificial lamb if the media will still offer over the top praise without a sacrificial lamb. And they do.
The education media covers Moskowitz the way they do Trump’s impeachment, bending over backward to give every utterance by a Republican or Moskowitz – no matter how dishonest – the same weight of truth and fact as the actual facts.
For example, Moskowitz could say that she has to suspend extraordinarily high numbers of 5 year olds and insist that the reason for her extraordinarily high suspension rates for Kindergarten and first grade children is all their own fault due to their violent actions.
And the media would dutifully report whatever she says with the disclaimer “people who hate Moskowitz disagree”.
Moskowitz could spent extraordinarily effort to write op ends and give news interviews to offer her personal endorsement to Betsy DeVos when the DeVos nomination was in doubt. And the media will pretend it never happened and still treat Moskowitz as if she has great judgement about what students need, and not great judgement about what Moskowitz needs. Moskowitz knew DeVos was good for her. It’s hard to believe she truly believed she was good for all children, but if she did that demonstrates the kind of judgement, that should disqualify Modkowitz from being a camp counselor, let alone making decisions impacting tens of thousands of children .
The bottom line is:
Why would Moskowitz need non-teaching staff when it’s much cheaper to simply get rid of students who can’t be taught?
I haven’t seen a single education reporter pick up on what should be one of the biggest news stories in education — the fact that Success Academy had 146 students in their high school junior class last year and yet only 98 students are graduating this year.
Why pay for staff when you can just get rid of the kids who need those staff? And you know that the education reporters are smugly certain that if 1/3 of a class of non-white students are missing, it’s because there is something very wrong with those non-white students and not the charter school that is as perfect as Trump.
If those missing students — nearly 50 juniors who aren’t graduating the next year — were white, middle class students, would Eliza Shapiro who covers education at the NYT have a little more curiosity about why they aren’t graduating? There is a disturbing kind of racism in the fact that no one is asking any questions or shows any curiosity about those missing students. And that includes the white SUNY Charter Institute businessmen and lawyers who have never cared how many students go missing. I can’t help wondering if they would care if those missing students were white and middle class.
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Like a vampire Moskowitz depends on new blood that will not question her motives or authority. In her world teachers are interchangeable widgets so it is out with the old and in with the new.
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scary that her personality makes it likely that she will be consulted by people like Gates as an ‘expert’ to help him/big money ‘re-imagine’ education
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