Gary Rubinstein explores a curious phenomenon at Success Academy. Fully one-seventh of its senior class fail to graduate.
How can this be? They have persisted through 11 years of the school’s harsh discipline, yet are told midway through their senior year that they must repeat the grade or leave.
Public data shows that very few students who begin at Success Academy actually graduate from Success Academy. The class of 2018 started with 72 students and only 16 graduated. The class of 2019 started with 80 students and only 27 graduated. The class of 2020 started with 350 students and only 98 graduated. Success Academy argues that this is normal attrition over 12 years, but one of the most jarring statistics I have ever seen about Success Academy is the attrition rate from students who are in the school at the beginning of their senior year but who do not graduate with their class 10 months later.
For the recent class of 2020 there were 114 seniors in the school in November 2019. But by graduation time in June there were only 98 graduating seniors.
Why?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why seniors aren’t graduating is an excellent question. Would also love to see statistics on whether the very few who do graduate from Success Academy graduate continue their studies and graduate from college….
New York is operating under tremendous fiscal constraints. In fact, without federal assistance, it is estimated that the state will face a $30 billion dollar deficit in the next two years. It seems ridiculous that the state keeps funding private schools that are little more than a niche for a few selected individuals that survive the system. This is neither a thorough nor efficient use of public money. The Success “model” is not scalable, and it wastes an inordinate amount of public money for the few students it produces.
I do not blame Cuomo for being annoyed by the Trump administration. For decades New York, California and other Northern states have been providing a great deal of federal tax dollars to underwrite the poorer Southern states. Now that New York is in crisis mode, the federal government is turning its back on New York because it is a blue state. Shameful! https://nynow.wmht.org/blogs/economy/ny-facing-30-billion-deficit-without-federal-aid-cuomo-says/
Cuomo is not shielding public schools from deep cuts, unlike some governors.
How do you spell “Success”?
A-T-T-R-I-T-I-O-N
Aiyiyi SomeDAM, how do you sustain this? Once again, beautiful work.
YES. And even more exactly, S-E-L-E-C-T-I-V-E attrition
It’s a brilliant system! Get people to leave just before they can fail! Should all public schools imitate “SUCCESS” Academy?
There were 146 students in 11th grade in 2018-2019. All of the 11th graders in 2018-2019 should have been graduating the next year (2020), and yet only 98 of them did.
One third of the juniors did not graduate the next year when they should have.
Even more disturbing is that junior class of 146 students had 191 students when they started 9th grade.
So almost one quarter of the 9th graders were MIA by the time that class even got to junior year. And then another 1/3 of those juniors disappeared before graduation.
One reason I know that Eliza Shapiro and the folks at Chalkbeat NY are such lousy reporters is that none of them think it is at all odd for an entering class of 191 9th graders — all of whom have been Eva Moskowitz certified as well-prepared for high school having been educated at Success Academy elementary and middle schools — to only graduate 98 students 4 years later. 191 9th graders and only 98 graduate 4 years later
I always thought it wasn’t just that Eliza Shapiro and the folks at Chalkbeat NY were such lousy reporters, but that there was a strong element of racism when the white education reporting establishment believes there is absolutely nothing to question when nearly half of an entering class of 9th graders aren’t graduating 4 years later.
I can’t imagine Eliza Shapiro reporting on an affluent, mostly white public high school where nearly half the 9th graders don’t graduate 4 years later and dismiss those missing families as normal because she believes their college educated white parents don’t value good schools. She would ask questions, since there would be a glaring disconnect between a school bragging that it was the best education in the state, and so many middle class white parents who valued education having their kids not graduate.
But when a reporter has a racist assumption that the missing kids have parents who do NOT value education, they see nothing worth questioning when a white charter CEO tells them those kids’ disappearance should be ignored as not important and they should focus on the so-called miracles they are performing with students who those reporters truly seem to believe would otherwise be abject failures in any decent public schools.
Eliza has blocked me on Twitter. She will not read anything posted here.
There is no doubt in my mind that Eliza Shapiro does read posts here.
You are a respected scholar of education and she would have to be derelict in her duty as an education reporter — a firing offense – if she refused to read anything written by a critic of charters. Journalists can’t just “not read” one side of the story because they believe they already know what the story is without hearing from the other side. But I’d love to hear Eliza Shapiro say that in a speech to journalism students! “I only read the people who know I’m a perfect reporter because any criticism of my perfect reporting must be ignored!”
If Shapiro is acting like she is an advocate and not a journalist and refuses to read anything that she doesn’t agree with, then no wonder her reporting has been so complicit. Does Shapiro think that is what they teach at Columbia J School?!! What an insult to journalism!
I’m just glad that Eliza Shapiro isn’t a science reporter, because she doesn’t have any understanding of studies — she accepts whatever pro-charter folks say about them the way bad science reporters (not at the NYT) promoted hydroxychloroquine based on very flawed “studies” that “very important people” told them were “very, very important”. That’s how Shapiro reports on charter studies. She doesn’t seem to be very strong on analytics and accepts all conclusions without question.
Erica Green’s reporting at the NYT is overall much stronger even when I think she is missing part of the story,
One of the best writers to cover education at the NYT was Nikole Hannah-Jones, who did the 1619 Project.
Hannah-Jones wrote truthfully about wrestling with her own decision about where to send her kids to school, addressing the complicated problems that parents face. Hannah-Jones would never fall for the pro-charter propaganda that if 191 academically above average 9th graders (with the best K-8 education money can buy) start in a charter high school and only 98 students graduate 4 years later, that constitutes a “miracle” because the students who didn’t graduate had parents who didn’t want their children to succeed academically, and the students who did graduate would have been abject failures if they didn’t have a rich white charter CEO telling them (and their parents) exactly what to do and setting out endless rules for them to obey without question.
But Eliza Shapiro sure writes articles that seem to suggest that she believes that there are virtually no high performing African American and Latinx students in NYC public schools, because those not in charters are all abject failures. To them, a charter system that teaches fewer than 2% of the students in a large school system could never find enough high performing students to teach if “only” 40% of a group of over one million students are proficient.
I checked the latest numbers and 46% to 47% of NYC public school students NOT in charters are proficient on the state Math and ELA exams. Notably, the proficiency rates for females is higher, especially in ELA. And, oddly, the “survivors” who make it through Success Academy seem to be more likely to be female!
I found it interesting that the 9th grade class of 191 in 2016-2017 had 98 females and 93 males. But by junior year, when only 146 of those students were left, instead of 93 males there were only 64 (but 82 females left). It is possible that an extraordinarily large percentage of male students at Success Academy decided to identify as females between 9th and 11th grade (which could be what Eliza Shapiro assumes is true, to excuse her deplorable lack of curiosity about missing male students). Or it is also possible that any charter school that wants to teach only students who will give them bragging rights would keep more female students than male.
But mediocre journalists with little understanding of math believe that it is a miracle when a charter school has 20,000 students who are proficient on state tests because even though the public school system of over 1 million that the charter school recruits students from has nearly 500,000 proficient students, those 500,000 proficient students in public schools are absolutely invisible to the mediocre journalists who are certain the public schools that teach them are failures because they don’t simply shed the rest of the students like Success Academy.
It’s similar to Eliza Shapiro believing that a NYC public school with a 60% graduation rate is a failure, but a charter school that is lavished with funding like Success Academy is performing extraordinary miracles with a graduation rate of 51% of its entering 9th graders!
I don’t think it’s mysterious at all. Success Academy is a selective public school. They simply use a different selection that the “exam schools”- their selection process depends on attrition.
If they would simply admit this we could have a real debate about Success Academy as a selective school, but they will never admit because it flies in the face of the incredible hype and marketing around the school and the political agenda of ed reform.
Maybe NYC needed more selective schools, maybe there weren’t enough- I don’t know but since we’ll never have an actual debate about that because doing so would entail Success Academy admitting they’re selective, I guess we’ll never know.
My local public high school, in contrast, does NOT lose 50% of their students, because it’s not selective.
I had a debate offline with a very wealthy supporter of Success Academy who makes large contributions. He is totally convinced that Eva has a model for ALL schools. He refused to believe anything I told him about attrition and turnover. “Not true!” Because that’s what SA told him. They accept every child and turn them into scholars. No exceptions. My word against theirs.
They accept every child and turn them into
$cholar$ for Eva
$cholar$ for Eva
Dollar$ for diva
Caller$ believe her
Fallers will leave her
“My word against theirs”.
You mean your word against the word of Eliza Shapiro at the NYT and against the word of every reporter at Chalkbeat.
The education reporters at the NYT and Chalkbeat have done absolutely nothing to make that wealthy donor doubt the results and that is all you need to know about how poorly and misleading the stories written by those education reporters are.
When every story they write accepts as the starting premise that everyone loves Success Academy except for critics from “the union” and some parents of violent children who are so disturbed that they need special schools, and when every story touts the “miracle” that “all 98 graduates” got into college because those reporters are absolutely certain that attrition of African American and Latinx children is not important, then something is very wrong.
I post this over and over again because it is absolutely true. There is no way that Eliza Shapiro would not ask questions if a supposedly extremely popular and top-performing school that started with 191 middle class white students in 9th grade only graduated 98 of those middle class white students 4 years later — especially if a huge percentage of the boys disappeared. There is no way that Eliza Shapiro would say that as a journalist, she knows that the attrition rate at a school where a high percentage of white 9th grade boys don’t graduate 4 years later is absolutely irrelevant and how dare anyone criticize her when she already knows that parents of white boys don’t want their kids to have good educations and prefer them to be failures?!
I really wish Eliza Shapiro would examine her own racist assumptions about the Success Academy families who leave, and about the students who remain. She accepts without question the ugliest and nastiest innuendos about parents who aren’t white, because she seems to truly believe those parents who aren’t white are different than parents who are white and if their kids are disappearing from a top performing school, it’s always because those parents don’t value education at all.
Success Academy, like all selective schools, could not exist without a group of public schools who are not selective because we have universal public education for K-12 and the kids who leave Success Academy GO somewhere.
That this is never admitted in ed reform is amazing to me. It’s literally how universal systems work and yet they blithely skip right over it. Eva Moskowitz is much more dependent on public schools than public schools are on Eva Moskowitz. She needs them. They don’t need her.
If ed reformers replaced every public school with a Success Academy the system would no longer be public and it would no longer be universal. It would be privatized and selective.
The Success Academy kids I wonder about are the C students. In a public school if there are A students there are also C students. That’s how it works.
Where are her C students? Down the road at the public schools she denigrates? Wow. That seems unfair to those schools. Shouldn’t she be thanking them for taking the students that would mess up her marketing campaign?
And this is GOING to happen in the privatized system they envision. Children are going to be ranked into schools. They model their privatized systems on higher ed. Is higher ed equitable? No, of course not. In fact, higher ed doesn’t serve the majority of US students AT ALL. It’s wildly expensive and hugely inequitable. Who in their right mind would take a public system and privatize it to make it look more like higher ed when higher ed is not designed at all for equity?
The CERTAINTY with which they are destroying the public system to replace it with their ideological vision is just the most reckless thing I’ve even seen. Not ONE of these people has any clue how their plans will shake out. They are willing to roll the dice with your kids and your schools because they are incredibly arrogant.
When they succeed and get rid of public schools they could end up with a MORE inequitable and worse and more expensive system. Not one of them considers this. That’s how little they value public education.
With all the hundreds of think tanks and lobbies and employees ed reform has, one would think I could find ONE paper or essay that expresses doubt about whether privatization will be better than public schools.
I have never found ONE. These people are supposed to be academics. They do NO risk analysis? It is beyond their imagination that their social engineering could end up with more inequity?
What kind of academic analysis includes NO possible downside analysis? It’s all hearts and flowers over in ed reform! Privatization will be superior and no one will even consider that it might not be. That’s disallowed in the echo chamber.
Apart from a solution to the Mystery of the Vanishing Students, I would be interested to know how many teachers who were at Success Academy when these children began twelve years ago are still teaching at Success Academy and what became of the teachers who left.
I don’t know how much teacher turnover there is at Success Academy. But I do know that almost nothing destroys teacher morale like rapid and massive teacher turnover.
And nothing is better evidence of a good school than the lack of teacher turnover. You want to find a good school? Go find a stable place where teachers come back year after year.
There are places where this is not easy. Back in the 1930s, there was a country school near where I live that was famous for running off the teacher. Bunch of rough kids. Cities have the same reputation today. Same reason: poverty.
All that said, teacher stability is the most reliable evidence of something good going on.
I find it interesting that during the very rare times a genuine journalist actually questions why so few students are graduating, Success Academy implies that most of those students haven’t left but are just taking 5 or 6 years of high school to graduate! Just like so many of them take extra years before 3rd grade.
Of course, Eliza Shapiro wouldn’t be interested in that, since she does not question when a white charter CEO tells her that African-American and Latinx students with the best K-8 education money can buy who are all certified as testing at or above grade level in 8th grade before being allowed to enter 9th grade STILL need to spend at least 5 years to complete a 4-year high school curriculum — and sometimes more!
Eliza Shapiro and the other mediocre reporters at Chalkbeat NY and the Daily News seems to have the lowest expectations for the highest performing 8th graders in the state — even though those 8th graders have already proven their academic proficiency by testing at or above grade level before they are even allowed to enroll in the high school! How could Eliza Shapiro NOT be asking questions about why so many of those high performing 8th grade students allowed to enroll at SA high school either disappear or take at least 5 years to graduate?
If the education reporters weren’t so co-opted, they would blame those students’ poor middle school and elementary school education as the reason so many of them can’t complete high school work in the 4 years that the majority of students can. After all, that is exactly what those very same education reporters do when it is a public high school.
But of course, since those middle and elementary schools are ALSO Success Academy schools, reporters pretend that either there is nothing odd about huge numbers of supposedly well-educated 8th grade students not being able to do high school work in 4 years, or imply it is the fault of their parents who don’t want their child to experience a top performing school because they don’t value education.
Can anyone imagine Eliza Shapiro being told that a virtually all white public school that ONLY accepts 8th grade students who have tested at or above grade level on their standardized tests has an extraordinary number of students who need 5 or more years to finish high school? And her saying, of course, I believe that many, many white students who test at or above grade level in 8th grade frequently need at least 5 years in high school due entirely to their own failings, since I know that high schools that frequently teach ONLY white 8th graders who are at or above grade level are perfect and if so many of those white students need 5 years to do what most students can do in 4, then it’s NOT the fault of their perfect high school or their equally perfect elementary and middle school, but because of their parents and their own failings.
There is so much hypocrisy in the reporting done by NYC education journalists. I don’t know if they are willfully ignorant, or just lazy.
New York City has more than 100,000 homeless students. Cutting off Eva’s grift and closing Success Academy would be a means to direct school funding to these vulnerable children. Moskowitz’s political power allows her to profit at their expense.