Gary Rubinstein writes here about podcasts in which Chris Stewart of Education Post interviews Robert Pondiscio and Eva Moskowitz.
Gary has made a practice of scrutinizing the data that is available from the Success Academy charter chain, noting the high attrition rate from those who enter in the early grades to those who remain to graduate high school. There is attrition even in the final year of high school, which is somewhat surprising. Perhaps even more surprising is the imbalance among the graduates based on gender: there are far more females than males. What happened to the boys?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“What happened to the boys” is one of the great questions about educational achievement (K-12 and beyond) in our era. Occasionally raised, rarely considered very deeply.
I think I can tell you what is happening to the boys and I think it is clear taht this answer gets in the way of high test scores for far too many adolescents.
ANSWER: their adolescent sex drive distracts boys and sabotages their ability to focus on their schoolwork like a girl can.
It was my observation during the almost three decades I taught adolescents from 7th grade to 12th, that girls were calmer and were better students earning better grades than most boys.
And I have not forgotten what it was like for me when I was in 7th through 12th grade.
“the one with the stronger sex drive would presumably think about sex more often; have more fantasies, desire, and actual sex more often; have more partners; masturbate more often; and devote more effort to having sex than the other. …
“And so we searched for studies that compared men and women on these types of behaviors.
“After months of reading and compiling results, the answer was clear. There is a substantial difference, and men have a much stronger sex drive than women. To be sure, there are some women who have frequent, intense desires for sex, and there are some men who don’t, but on average the men want it more. Every marker we could think of pointed to the same conclusion. Men think about sex more often than women do. Men have more sexual fantasies, and these encompass more different acts and more different partners.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cultural-animal/201012/the-reality-the-male-sex-drive
It’s possible that’s part of it. Boys also lag in the earlier years, pre-puberty. And they’re massively over-represented in ADHD diagnoses (and medication).
Males in general have always had a stronger sex drive than females in general. How then do you explain that males used to outperform females in academic settings and now females outperform males? Doesn’t it stand to reason that there must have been changes to the structure and expectations of schooling itself?
“How then do you explain that males used to outperform females in academic settings and now females outperform males? Doesn’t it stand to reason that there must have been changes to the structure and expectations of schooling itself?”
How can anyone discuss your two questions when you don’t provide any links to reputable sources to provide back history for what the questions imply?
The only time I can think of when males allegedly outperformed females was when females were not allowed to go to school or were raised to grow upon and become housewives and mothers. There was a time when most if not all females did not go to college in this country.
FLERP!,
In order to raise the question of “what happened to the boys?” you would have to have honest people who are actually pointing out that there is nothing true about the false narrative that Eva Moskowitz is pushing — which is that all “the boys” need is to have parents who care about their education enough to enroll them in Success Academy, where 99% of them would turn into high performing “scholars”.
In order to “consider very deeply” how to teach boys, you would have to think that the problem hasn’t already been solved by Eva Moskowitz and thus the solution is to expand her charters so all the boys who are being prevented from thriving in their failing public schools can turn into the scholars that Eva Moskowitz’ PR machine has convinced the public that 99% of them would be.
FLERP!, no matter what ideas anyone comes up with about to teach boys, if that idea does not result in turning 99% of them into high performing scholars, then that idea would be a waste of time because Eva Moskowitz has already developed a system that works with 99% of the students!
Why would anyone waste money on any new approaches when Eva Moskowitz has already “proven” that her schools work with 99% of the students and the solution is clearly to expand the charter 100X faster so that 99% of the boys who enroll experience that education achievement!
And if there are some non-emotionally disturbed boys who don’t thrive, then that is because they or their parents do not want to thrive, and why should anyone care about kids and parents who are perfectly content that their boys are failing? After all, everything Eva Moskowitz says certainly confirms that there was something wrong with those children and their parents because there is certainly nothing wrong with the school — proven by the fact that 99% of the children in the school always succeed!
Until Eva Moskowitz and her enablers — and I include Robert Pondiscio among them — actually admit that Success Academy is a complete and utter failure of a school for a vast majority of at-risk students, there is no need to even ask the question “what happened to the boys” because the boys are all thriving at Success Academy!
And if there are a tiny handful of boys who aren’t emotionally disturbed who still aren’t thriving at Success Academy and end up leaving, that’s clearly a sign that neither the parents nor the boys want a school where they can thrive and are content with an education where they don’t.
Again, it’s a simple solution. Expand Success Academy 100x as fast so that every boy can achieve except the ones whose parents don’t want them to achieve anyway. See how easy it is?
Success Academy’s lies have done great harm to the boys and their parents who are demonized and blamed for failing to achieve at Success Academy.
But what’s worse is that since so many people believe those lies, there is no need for anyone to ask the question “what happened to the boys?”
As we have seen with the way Donald Trump runs the country, dishonesty doesn’t help anyone but the people who are lying.
No reason to look for treatments for COVID-19 when Trump has already found a new medicine that has 99% success!
Fortunately for our country, science reporters generally understand how to recognized overhyped “solutions” and they also recognize that a solution being hyped to that extent usually means that the people hyping it have a very corrupt agenda that has nothing to do with helping cure a disease. Education reporters, on the contrary, immediately believe that the person who has hyped a 99% cure rate must be a miracle-worker whose devotion to students and making their lives better drives every action.
“Who are we, he asks, to prevent families from self-selecting themselves by using their resources, in this case the organizational resources to do all the application steps, to attend a school with similarly advantaged families?”
I think it’s a good question, but it wouldn’t be an issue if Success Academy and its boosters would simply admit that’s what’s going on and stop comparing Success to public schools that don’t use this selective process.
If Moskowitz simply said “I run a version of a magnet school” that would be an honest comparison and we could evaluate her in that context.
But she won’t do that. She insists her schools are not selective and the attrition rate shows that they ARE, in fact, selective, she just uses a different selection method than admission.
Stop comparing Success to schools that don’t have this huge attrition rate. It’s not a valid comparison and it’s dishonest. Further, RECOGNIZE that in order for their to be selective public schools there needs to be NON selective public schools. Moskowitiz is in fact relying on the public schools to provide a safety net for the students she pushes out. Public schools don’t need Success- Success needs public schools.
The fact that NYC has a public school system makes it possible for a selective charter like Success to exist. A system composed of Eva Moskowitz schools would exclude 50% of children and would no longer be “public” in any real way because it wouldn’t be universal.
That they refuse to recognize this or admit this makes me doubt if they’ve given any thought at all to how systems work.
Moskowitz needs public schools a heck of a lot more than they need her. Without them she can’t have her selective schools.
Moskowitz doesn’t just need public schools. She needs a vast public school system of over 1 MILLION students so that she can teach fewer than 2% of them and have the gullible journalists believe that a charter with vast resources could never cherry pick enough students to account for their miraculous success.
A typical suburban school system might have 200 student per grade.
If Eva Moskowitz opened a charter that had only 4 students in each grade, would journalists read a press release about how “100%” of them passed state tests and marvel that this charter school with 4 students per grade must be performing a miracle and no cherry picking could ever account for the miracle of finding 4 students who could pass the state exams?
How many suburban journalists would say “it is just way too impossible that Eva Moskowitz, even accounting for attrition, could ever find 4 students who could do well on state tests via cherry picking. ”
How absurd and dull-witted would those suburban journalists seem? Well, that’s exactly as dull-witted as the NYC education reporters are.
NYC education reporters marvel at “100% passing rates” because NYC has over 1 MILLION students and their understanding of numbers is so lacking that those gullible journalists are certain there is no possible way that “miracle” could be because of cherry-picking. Even though it has been reported that the charter uses reprehensible ways to get rid of students they didn’t want to teach, those journalists still believe that cherry picking is impossible. Would cherry picking be impossible in a suburban charter that had 4 students per grade when they had 200 students per grade to choose from? Of course not!
It’s no coincidence that Moskowitz hasn’t tried to expand into other NYC urban areas, like Albany, where the public schools are arguably much worse performing than in NYC!!!
The entire city of Albany has 9300 students, or about 715 per grade in K-12.
If Eva Moskowitz had a single school that taught 15 students per grade, she would already be teaching a higher percentage of the students in Albany than in NYC! A single Success Academy Charter School for the city of Albany that limited itself to only 15 students a grade would be teaching a higher % of Albany’s students than the % of NYC public school students who are taught in SA’s vast network of NYC charters.
Would the Albany education reporters be as gullible as the NYC education reporters and believe it was virtually impossible that a charter teaching 15 students per grade could ever be cherry picking?
I doubt it.
The education reporters in NYC need a remedial class in math and statistics. They are very poor representatives of their own K-12 schools.
You know what would be an interesting study out of ed reform? Follow the students who drop out of the elite charter chains and see where they land.
If they were genuinely interested in “public school systems” and “all children” they would do that study. They’re not, so they don’t. We’re all just supposed to pretend those students disappeared in a puff of smoke. They are never mentioned again.
They ARE mentioned again. They are mentioned again when Eva Moskowitz demonizes those young children during the very rare times a parent publicly complains about their child’s treatment and a half decent journalist asks questions.
Then that missing student’s private records are released, and those private records are filled with ugly innuendo and curated to characterize that young student as far too dangerous and violent to be in any school except one designed for severely emotionally disturbed and dangerous children.
I can’t imagine why more parents of the students who leave don’t go public, can you? Especially when the SUNY Charter Institute always seems to believe that the charter CEO who said “Betsy DeVos has the talent, commitment, and leadership capacity to revitalize our public schools and deliver the promise of opportunity” should always be trusted. They always believe it is Eva Moskowitz who speaks the truth – whether it is expressing her admiration when demanding that Betsy DeVos be confirmed, or when she is public smearing a child as being violent and dangerous.
I would suggest that girls generally respond better to the dictatorship of the very few. When I was young and there were textile mills around here, it was the women who worked I them, not because the men would not do the work but because the owners found it easier to dominate the women. Perhaps this is pretty solid evidence that the girls are raised to be more passive I the face of authoritarianism in a traditional society. Success seems to rest on authoritarianism.
Eva is like the OPIOID Crisis. She uses the SAME tactics as the pushers of Opioids
Have any of you seen the 60 Minute special on Opioid Crisis in America. OY!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-opioid-epidemic-who-is-to-blame-60-minutes-2020-06-21/
There was such a stunning disconnect between the perceptive Citizen Stewart who had an enlightening and insightful conversation with Pondiscio and the Citizen Stewart who interviewed Eva Moskowitz. Citizen Stewart’s conversation with Pondiscio was particularly well-informed, but he acted like a celebrity journalist/fan with Moskowitz.
I would have thought, after hearing the Pondiscio conversation, that Citizen Stewart would not have been so credulous when Moskowitz’ response to criticism about her charters’ discipline was to once again call out the violent students who do things like throw metal chairs at their teachers’ head. I would have thought, especially in the midst of the Black Lives Matters protests, that Citizen Stewart might say something like “Surely you are not suggesting that the 34 kindergarten and first graders at Success Academy Springfield Gardens who were given out of school suspensions were all acting out so violently that their teacher and classmates were in danger.”
But instead, Citizen Stewart made a sarcastic remark about how “I need a school where you can throw a chair at a teacher’s head”, which only reinforced the narrative that Moskowitz has always pushed about how her extraordinarily high suspension rates merely reflect the many violent actions committed by the students who win her kindergarten lotteries and enroll in the charter. I found Eva Moskowitz’ alluding to a young child being a danger to his teacher as a response to criticism to be particularly tone deaf when the country was reckoning with aggressive policing tactics and the mischaracterization of the victims of aggressive policing tactics being at fault because they acted out in a way that was “dangerous” during police encounters.
Although Citizen Stewart didn’t seem to object to Eva Moskowitz’ making her usual allusion to the student throwing the metal chair at a teacher’s head, I did suspect that Moskowitz herself could have realized that the Black Lives Matters protests might have made listeners other than Citizen Stewart much more skeptical when she did her usual allusion to violent actions committed by students. I noticed that Moskowitz immediately pivoted to a new excuse that I had never heard her use before — she went into a rant about how her charter’s suspension rates are disproportionately high because of plagiarism.
Citizen Stewart, in his role of a fan, didn’t even question that absurd notion. Clearly none of the 5 and 6 year olds at Success Academy Springfield Gardens who were given out of school suspensions could have legitimately committed the sin of “plagiarism” and in the highly unlikely event that one or two students had committed such a sin, an out of school suspension is a truly absurd way of teaching a 6 year old not to plagiarize.
Even if Citizen Stewart did believe that Success Academy truly had a serious plagiarism problem, it seemed odd to me that he simply accepted Moskowitz’ explanation that out of school suspensions were a great way to address it. Moskowitz was allowed to spew absurdities like that to respond to critics, with Citizen Stewart seeming to accept those explanations as believable.
Gary Rubinstein does a great job of noting how little of what Eva Moskowitz wanted Citizen Stewart to believe really stands up to close scrutiny. Rubinstein does a great job of demonstrating that Pondiscio was right in his view that Success Academy is offering a good education to the most motivated students– the “Tiffanys” in Pondiscio’s book — but it is not producing miracles for the others who keep disappearing from the cohort.
I understood much more about where Citizen Stewart is coming from after watching those interviews. He is absolutely right to be concerned and frustrated that many students, especially many African American and Latinx students, have been left behind and that public schools have not been able to solve that problem. And it seemed to me that Citizen Stewart desperately wants to believe that Moskowitz has made serious headway in solving the problem. That’s why he was so dismissive of what Pondiscio wrote in his book. Citizen Stewart wants very much to believe that Moskowitz has discovered some incredible new pedagogy that truly does turn students who would otherwise be failing in public schools into high performing scholars. So Citizen Stewart rejects all the evidence that makes the false narrative that Moskowitz is pushing look false. Citizen Stewart makes a number of mentions of how Moskowitz has already proven her results can scale, which made me wonder if one reason he is so accepting of Moskowitz’ self-promotion as a miracle worker is because he does not realize that Moskowitz’ charters draw from a universe of students that is 300 times larger than the “average” public school district. It seems likely that Citizen Stewart doesn’t realize that what he is marveling at is the equivalent of one of those “average” public school districts with 3,000 students having a charter that teaches only 60 of them. Fewer than 5 students per grade.
Citizen Stewart seemed so impressed with seeing Moskowitz’ high school graduating class of 99 students. And I wondered whether Citizen Stewart made the same mistake many people do and assumed that there are just a handful of African American and Latinx students who do well in NYC public schools. There are not. There are many tens of thousands.
The NY State Regents exam in ELA is generally taken by 11th grade students (a small percentage might be in other grades). It is great that last year, 160 African American students at Success Academy scored at one of the two highest levels. But isn’t it also impressive that 12,000 African American students who attended NYC public schools also scored at one of the two highest levels? Why were 12,000 African American students who attended NYC public schools that didn’t subject them to harsh discipline and “no excuses” teaching able to perform at the same high level as the 160 African American students at Success Academy?
In 2018-2019, there were nearly 1,300 African American students in NYC public schools who scored at the very highest level on the NY State Regents exam in Algebra 1. At Success Academy, there were 26 African American students who scored at the very highest level. If you include African American students who scored at the two highest levels on the Algebra 1 Regents, that is 4,500 high scoring African American students in NYC public schools, and 67 at Success Academy. The fact that 67 African American students at Success Academy made the same academic achievement as 4,500 African American students in NYC public schools does not look like evidence of successful “scaling” anymore. Once people understand the massive scale of the NYC public school system, it no longer appears certain that Eva Moskowitz has a singular ability to teach African American students and the NYC public schools where those 4,500 high scoring African American students attended need her to teach them how to do it. I hope those 4,500 African American students who excelled in Algebra last year aren’t invisible to Citizen Stewart because they attended NYC public schools.
I think that in the near future, Citizen Stewart is going to take a closer look at the numbers and perhaps reconsider how quickly he rejected what Pondiscio was saying and how quickly he embraced all of Moskowitz various attempt to demonize her students in service to the false myth that she had successfully scaled her charter. I think that Eva Moskowitz’ lack of interest in opening charters in communities where she would have a much smaller number of students to draw from, along with her absurd excuses to justify her high suspension and attrition rates, will start to resonate with Citizen Stewart.
Citizen Stewart is absolutely right not to be satisfied with the status quo. I can understand that he feels that the people who call out the false solutions offered by charters don’t really want to change things. And perhaps some don’t, but many more do. And there can never be a solution when charter CEOs like Eva Moskowitz are pushing false narratives.
And I wish Citizen Stewart recognized that the false narratives Moskowitz is pushing includes a lot of ugly innuendo about young African American students acting out violently and otherwise acting in such a way that makes them entirely responsible for why Success Academy is failing them or harshly disciplining them or treating them in ways that make it evident to parents their child needs to go to a different school. I wish Citizen Stewart realized that it is charters like Success Academy who are selling snake-oil schools that demand full credit for every success and blame the student for every failure. And to sell that snake-oil miracle cure, Success Academy has to demonize the students who don’t respond to their harsh tactics. Eva Moskowitz hasn’t really scaled her schools. But she has successfully convinced people like Citizen Stewart that she has, by expanding in the one school district in all of America where what seems like many students is actually a very small percentage of the student population. That is what cherry picking is.
I think one day Citizen Stewart will realize that if Eva Moskowitz really wanted to scale her schools, she would have opened far more schools in the Bronx school districts where poverty is concentrated instead of opening so many in the richest Manhattan school district. Moskowitz seems to lose interest in expanding in the poorest districts where the demand for her charters is highest, but she will spend money in advertising and PR to create new demand in other districts. Perhaps Citizen Stewart will read Pondiscio’s book again and consider that perhaps Moskowitz really doesn’t want to teach more than a tiny percentage of the at-risk students in a poverty-stricken school district. I hope Citizen Stewart understands that a “tiny percentage” of students in a school district that has over one million students seems like a very big number. But it is still cherry picking and not “scaling”. Pondiscio’s book makes that clear, but it seems that Citizen Stewart believes that Eva Moskowitz is a much more trustworthy and believable person than Pondiscio, I truly don’t understand how that could be, but I also don’t understand how Trump supporters put so much faith in him. In both cases, personality and propaganda seems more important than evidence.