Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat wrote today that a spokesperson for Success Academy, New Tork City’s largest charter chain, resigned to protest “abusive” practices at the schools.
A spokesperson for New York City’s largest charter network resigned in protest, stating she can no longer defend Success Academy’s “racist and abusive practices” that are “detrimental to the emotional well being” of its students.
“I am resigning because I can no longer continue working for an organization that allows and rewards the systemic abuse of students, parents, and employees,” wrote Liz Baker, a Success spokesperson, in a resignation letter Tuesday.
“As the organization’s press associate, I no longer wish to defend Success Academy in response to any media inquiries,” she continued in the letter, which was obtained by Chalkbeat. “I do not believe that Success Academy has scholars’ best interests at heart, and I strongly believe that attending any Success Academy school is detrimental to the emotional wellbeing of children.”
The stunning resignation letter comes as the network has been besieged by complaints from employees, parents, and students about a culture that some argue is racist. Baker, who has worked at Success for about a year and four months, is one of the network’s most visible employees and was responsible for responding to reporters’ questions about the network.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I choose to no longer rationalize the nonsense I’ve been rationalizing all these years. I will soon move on to a more prestigious gig in which I rationalize different nonsense that appears marginally more socially acceptable.
Her resume hardly reads like that of a hardened ideologue searching for beaucoup bucks.
Sorry if I was too tough on her. I read Moskowitz Academy and get instantly cynical.
Arthur,
I think employees at Success Academy have to be very, very brave to say anything even the least bit negative about Success Academy, and this employee wrote one of the strongest indictments of the charter that I have ever read.
I have no doubt that if her letter gets any traction, she will be publicly destroyed by Eva Moskowitz and her highly paid propaganda arms.
I have to admit, Arthur, I have a similar cynical reaction to any mention of Success Academy. These days it is hard to not be cynical given the typical news cycle.
No apologies for this due, in my not especially humble opinion. Those of us who have watched Moskowitz and Success Academy all these years have earned the right to be skeptical of anyone like this who gets so deeply involved with this institution.
NYC PPParent is right in pointing out Eva’s power to destroy dissenters. Rather than quietly resigning, I think this young woman deserves credit for going public about the abuse at SA. It’s plausible she was snowed by Eva’s white savior rhetoric. After seeing SA’s practices in its essential form was she able to strip away any pretense about the school’s toxic climate.
Ok, fair enough.
I have had sit-down meetings and phone conversations and email exchanges with numerous former employees of Success Academy, mostly teachers but one from the central office. They all stipulated that the exchange was confidential and that I could not mention their name. They were all terrified of Eva. If she found out that they talked to me, they all said, they would never be able to work in a charter again.
Eva must be Trump’s hidden half-sister, another malignant narcissist, and psychopath that inherited the same genes Trump got from his racist, fraud of a father.
that would make a good t-shirt or bumper sticker slogan: I choose to no longer rationalize nonsense 🙂
Will Evil Eva borrow two words from Trump’s tiny, dirty-tricks playbook and claim this is just “fake news”.
I think that Eva the troll is too savy for any tRumpian garbage spewing, especially at this point in history. I think it far more likely that a fake, window dressing solution will be deployed, but that has a whole lot of risk since people are just not putting up with such crap anymore. The telltale will be if this 1st resignation leads to others following suit and in so doing opens the floodgates of criticism and whistle blowers. The first person to stand up leads by telling the truth against power, the second leads by confirming the truth and gives “permission” to the rest to join in. Let’s hope for an avalanche.
The best thing that can happen is for the school for Success Academy to completely close all its doors so that the Students can move to a school that really actually has their best interest in mind. Closing the school would be better for the Teachers, Administrators, and Parents. Life would be better for everyone except “Evil Eva” but who really cares about this low life.
It is time once and for all to stop referring to little children as “scholars.” Unless they are prodigies working on their doctoral dissertation, the right word is “children.” There is no shame in being a child.
THANKYOU! But what else would you expect from a school who views its students as a commodity to be used in its marketing campaigns? They aren’t treated like human beings so why not brand them as a product?
Thank you Liz for your service and incisive focus on our children.
You have formalized my deepest concern, as someone looking from the outside in, and given credence to my anxiety, witnessing the same from the inside.
All I can say is thank you and continue to be mindful of these circumstances. We are all striving to provide the best for our students.
My comment is about all charter schools and not directed at Jon. Thank you Liz for your service and incisive focus on our children.
You have formalized my deepest concern, as someone looking from the outside in, and given credence to my anxiety, witnessing the same from the inside.
All I can say is thank you and continue to be mindful of these circumstances. We are all striving to provide the best for our students.
Neil, the practice of calling children “scholars” is very irritating. A third grader is not a scholar. Using the word this way cheapens it.
Yes–and thanks. When I interview with principals who call elementary and secondary students “scholars,” I instantly know I don’t want to work in their schools.
I am too old now for anyone to want to hire me, but I like to imagine how I would respond now that I have no need to rejoin the workforce. Calling kids “scholars” would be a nonstarter for me as well among other things. It would be so nice not to have to dutifully fill out those endless online questionnaires that are supposed to tell them who would make a good candidate but probably only tells them who knows all the current buzz words and their accompanying memes. Of course, being brutally honest generally gets you nowhere but, oh, for the chance!
Agreed. Using the term “scholars” seems to be a common marketing tool across the charter school ecosystem. Did its use start at Success or was it used by one of the early charter start-ups, like KIPP? I think Arne used the term when he was “CEO” .(another obnoxious term) of Chicago Public Schools.
Liz Baker is a TRAITOR !!! … or so Eva thinks.
The San Jose University Human Rights Institute published a Silicon Valley Pain Index. The research shows 10 large Silicon Valley tech firms employ zero black women.
When charter (contractor) schools get funding from tech moguls, everybody should expect their “philanthropy” to fund places like the one that Liz Baker describes.
Wow, just wow.
It has always been a particularly unsolvable mystery to me why so many seemingly good people who came to Success Academy have either swallowed the kool-aid and benefitted or quietly slunk off when they realized what was really going on.
I actually place a lot of the blame on the media. I can think of a number of times that a Success Academy employee or parent has been willing to speak up. There was that guy doing the research who warned about the pressure the system put on teachers to get high test scores and the detrimental effects of that. He was summarily dismissed and left. There was the former teacher who spoke to Kate Taylor whose complaint would have been ignored by the NYT except that she had been gaslighted by her Success Academy superiors for so long that she decided to take a video so she could get a second opinion from an outside educator (her mother, I believe!) to see if she was really as crazy for complaining as Success Academy wanted her to believe.
There was the administrator who obviously leaked the Success Academy e-mails documented the “got to go” lists to the press. There were the parents — oh the many parents – who complained and complained and complained and were ignored or marginalized as unimportant because “look over here, 99% of the students are thriving and this charter school is performing miracles and the parents who matter all adore it so who cares about the parents who don’t.
There was the endless evidence that Eva Moskowitz had the same relationship with the truth that Donald Trump did and seemed to embrace the Trump philosophy that anything she said in service to promoting herself and her schools was – by definition – perfectly fine.
And yet the overriding narrative played out in the media was the same: A few bad apples. The students who suffered in the system did something to make them deserve it. A few more bad apples. A disgruntled employee. Another violent student. And always — every single time – the journalist would write exactly what Alex Zimmerman wrote in his article last week: that Success Academy’s test scores were truly miraculous as these low-income students “outperformed” every high performing school due entirely because Eva Moskowitz had found a secret sauce that turned the very same students found in NYC public schools into high performing scholars.
High attrition rates were ignored, with the reporter dutifully excusing them by writing whatever cockamamie reason that Moskowitz’ spokespeople came up with. High suspension rates – especially of the very youngest students – were ignored with the reporter dutifully writing whatever cockamamie reason that Moskowitz came up with to justify them. Unfortunately, those reasons often involved blaming the students and mischaracterizing them in a way that would have made the Minneapolis Police Department proud. I thought the smears that Moskowitz and her staff made about students should have made reporters question every word out of her mouth. I thought the ridiculously and completely dishonest praise that Moskowitz heaped on Betsy DeVos should have made reporters question every word out of her mouth. But no matter what, reporters always gave Moskowitz and the parents who were presented to them to praise her glory were always given complete credibility. While those who complained were the ones scrutinized.
I have no doubt that the SUNY Charter Institute board will do what it has always done when any complaints about Success Academy come up. Put on their Susan Collins outfit, throw out a few “tut tuts”, write an e-mail to the draft file, and then vote to give her 50 more charters and force NYC taxpayers to pay for them.
It’s possible that the Black Lives Matters movement might have woken up one or two journalists who start to question the false narrative of violent students who deserved their suspensions. It’s possible that those reporters might start to wonder how there could have been 146 students in 11th grade, and yet only 99 students are graduating. But I won’t hold my breath.
Maybe a news organization will assign a science reporter to this story instead of education reporter. I suspect a science reporter would immediately notice the flaws in the education reporters’ breathless acceptance of the myth of the charter that is working miracles. It would be nice to see a journalist covering education who understand the problems with reporting only on the students who remain at Success Academy instead of closely examining ALL of the students given this once in a lifetime chance at receiving the best education in state, and what happened to them. I always marveled that no journalist had any curiosity as to why so many of them turned down their seats and why so many others pulled their kids from the school. Their interest was always in the parents of students who liked the school and remained.
But it certainly won’t surprise me if the media once again dismisses this as one bad apple. I expect many quotes about how this is just an anomaly and look over here at how Success Academy “outperforms” every other school in NY state.
But good for this woman for doing something that will likely lead to Eva Moskowitz or one or her spokespeople demonizing her in 3…2….1….
I think that her hedge fund friends, the other highly placed backers and wealthy “elites” that have managed her propaganda campaigns & her pushback against all critics and politicians might have something to do with it. She has a well oiled/funded machine behind her efforts that often has unseen access to & influence upon the media and the political sphere.
Is there still anyone around that is not fully aware that the “put-your-questions-on-cards” tactic is a transparent attempt to well .. not be transparent, and to disseminate propaganda while quelling any real problems — again problems that, by design, are effectively dismissed and never dealt with via this quesitons-on-cards format … in lieu of people standing in line at microphones, waiting to get their turn to ask a question.
I’ve attended the astroturf teacher group events (Educators for Excellence, Teach Plus), etc.) where they had John Deasy or Green Dot’s Marco Petruzzi, or whomever and there were no questions from a mic, or after putting one’s hands up, getting called on (if the room / attendance is small enough.
Predictably, all the questions were total softballs and/or ass-kiss-y questions that served the interests of the union-busters and privatizers bankrolling the astroturf groups.
Every teacher there who hadn’t drunk the Kool-aid could see right through this, and commented on this afterwards on the way out.
I’m thinking of Michelle Rhee’s Teacher Town Hall,, held in L.A.’s Downtown Library, back in 2013, where Rhee ostensibly was allowing teachers to share their concerns. The whole thing was orchestrated beforehand to do anything but allow teachers to have a voice.
So which teachers did get to talk?
There was one — exactly ONE — teacher who was allowed to make a comment and ask a question. This “voice of teachers” then went on a rant about how evil teacher unions are. and how must be eradicated, and tenure must be eradicated if education is ever to improve. How did show know? Well she said, that she “just saw WAITING FOR SUPERMAN.”*
This teacher was an obvious plant— the equivalent of a shill in a snake oil salesman’s, back-of-the-wagon faux-demonstration. Rhee & co. knew exactly what this union-hating, tenure-hating teacher was doing to say.
Go to 36:47 to hear this supposed spokesperson for all teachers, relating the typical or general view that most teachers hold:
(she’s referred to as “neither fish nor fowl” as he was formerly a teacher, but currently a newly-minted administrator at a Compton charter school)
at 36:47
I haven’t seen any video of last week’s SUCCESS ACADEMY forums, but my guess is that Rhee ally Eva orchestrated the events to play out much like the one in the video above.
If you’ve got the time, watch the whole thing. It’s a total farce.
If you don’t have the time, then just read Gary Rubinstein’s excellent summary and takedown of this Michelle Rhee event: (again, the video just above)
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/10/04/super-rhee-go/
I respect that the only thing former Success Academy spokesperson Liz Baker tweeted today was:
“anyone need a PR person?”
Should be called “NO Success Whatsoever Academy.”