Success Academy charter network was directed by a federal district court judge to pay $2.4 million to families whose children with disabilities were pushed out.
Charter school network Success Academy, which touts its commitment to children “from all backgrounds,” has been ordered to pay over $2.4 million on a Judgment in a case brought by families of five young Black students with learning and other disabilities who sued after the children were pushed out of a Success Academy school in Brooklyn. Success Academy’s efforts to oust the children even included the creation of a “Got to Go” list, as reported by the New York Times in October 2015, which singled out the students they wanted to push out, including the five child plaintiffs.
The lawsuit, brought by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Advocates for Justice, and Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, concluded on March 10, 2021 with Senior United States District Judge Frederic Block’s ruling, which included a precedent-setting determination that federal disability discrimination laws authorize reimbursement of expert fees.
The case charged that Success Academy engaged in practices targeting students with disabilities, in order to force them to withdraw. The practices detailed in the suit included regularly removing the children from the classroom and calling the parents multiple times daily.
“This Judgment provides justice to the children and families who suffered so much,” said Christopher Schuyler, a senior attorney in the Disability Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. “It also underscores the need for schools to cease doling out harsh punishments for minor infractions that can interrupt children’s academic progress and divert them into the school-to-prison pipeline.”
“Success Academy’s harsh, inflexible, one-size-fits-all approach to discipline is at odds with its obligation to reasonably accommodate students’ disabilities,” noted Kayley McGrath, an associate in Stroock’s Litigation Group. “These children and their families were forced to withdraw from the Success Academy network not only because their educational needs were not being met, but also because they were explicitly not welcome there. This Judgment recognizes that children with disabilities deserve access to an accommodating learning environment that approaches their needs not with contempt, but with empathy.”
“Success Academy forced these families to withdraw their children by bullying and daily harassment, instead of providing a quality education free from discrimination,” said Laura D. Barbieri, Special Counsel to Advocates for Justice. “New York’s parents and children deserve better, and we are pleased these families achieved justice.”
The litigation centered on five children, then a mere 4 to 5 years old, with diagnosed or perceived disabilities. Success Academy did not provide appropriate accommodations, and frequently dismissed the students prior to the end of the school day – often for behaviors like fidgeting and pouting. Success Academy also threatened to call child welfare authorities to investigate the children’s families, and even sent one child to a hospital psychiatric unit. Each family eventually removed their child from the Success Academy network.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is so meaningful. The DoE may not always do such a great job, but they don’t as a practice torture children until their parents transfer them elsewhere. I hope this decision will somewhat reduce these terrible practices at Success.
I’d guess that it’s not just children with disabilities who are affected, but pretty much any child who is not “up to snuff”.
If there are children who are not up to snuff, it is not a public school. There are other reasons too: Charter schools are not public schools.
Actually they are
How come this is only in an on-line legal journal JDSPURA?
Why isn’t this also being covered by the New York Times? Or the Associated Press, or Time Magazine, or some other prominent news entity?
Biased coverage, same as here in Los Angeles.
You’re asking all the correct questions here.
Why? I suspect the reason is because of the implicit bias of white education reporters.
The reporting of Eliza Shapiro and other white education reporters when it comes to Success Academy demonstrates implicit bias — where a white reporter never questions some of the most outrageous claims about schools teaching primarily African American and Latinx students. And implicit bias is evident because these white reporters have never questioned a false narrative that depends on them embracing a very negative view of many African American and Latinx students and parents.
These reporters have been well aware for many years that the only students who can even enroll in this charter are those whose parents have already jumped through hoops and were motivated and committed to going out of their way to get their child a fine education. It’s hard for me to believe that had those parents all been white, that white education reporters like Eliza Shapiro would have not been loudly questioning the schools if these had been highly committed white parents whose kids were being mistreated to get them to leave.
I am trying to imagine that outrage if Eliza Shapiro had reported that an extraordinarily high numbers of parents were complaining about how their students were being treated at Beacon High School and many were leaving, but Eliza Shapiro reports that there is also significant attrition at the nearby high school for low achieving transient students, so there is clearly no story there!
We all have implicit bias, but I knew that Success Academy had something wrong as soon as I realized that huge numbers of parents were leaving. Unlike implicitly racist white education reporters, I knew that African American parents who had the motivation to seek out a good school for their kids were not turning around and pulling their kids from a high performing lavishly funded charter and enrolling them in an underfunded public school unless something was wrong.
I knew that something was wrong when I saw that a charter school with only Kindergarten and first graders giving OUT OF SCHOOL SUSPENSIONS to 16% of them and sometimes 20% of them!
None of the white reporters at the NYT thought that was odd at all! Clearly they had the implicit bias that African American 5 year olds – especially when they have motivated and committed parents who jump through hoops to get them into good schools — might very well be violent in large numbers. It is reprehensible. This would have been stopped years ago if the education reporters had even noticed. Implicit bias.
Dear white education reporters — whether or not African American kindergarten students with highly motivated parents who enroll them in high performing charters act out so violently that they must be suspended at disproportionately high rates is NOT a “both sides” story. African American kindergarten students whose parents are motivated to enroll them in high performing schools are no more likely to act out so violently that they need to be suspended than any typical white 5 year old..
And if education reporters still believe that the jury is still out on that, and report this as a “one side says those violent African-American children deserved it, the people with a grudge against charters say those children didn’t, then those white reporters should not be covering education.
If the education reporters cover this story like they do the usual ones, they will immediately make the story about how SOME parents are happy. Remember, in the view of education reporters, SOME parents are happy absolves them of reporting on whether or not this is good public policy, or good for the kids who are humiliated and targeted.
Because SOME parents are happy. It is journalism malpractice and the excuse for so much truly lazy journalism.
I think the issue with the NYT is twofold: #1, they are very light on ed coverage, period. The joint is jumpin’ over at WaPo by comparison. #2, their political slant is centrist-Dem neoliberal, period. I question whether this is anymore about race than the blinders inherent in that political stance. Pretty sure I remember being angered by some of Erica Green’s coverage too. And Valerie Strauss is an education reporter – just sayin’.
These Millennial journalists came out of college brainwashed by charter talking points, especially of the white savior variety. Remember TFA recruited some of their classmates to teach.
Jack, excellent question!
the essential question….
Because schools districts work together with media have reciprocal relationships. The districts pay to keep good relationships with certain media outlets. This type of discrimination is consistent with regards to teachers who teach these kids and have disabilities as well.
They are only public if they are dependent on the local school district for support–the public school found this as a way to get some of the charter school money. In other words, if a school is independent then they are not public–if they are dependent that means they get support from the local school district.
This is very important. However, I don’t understand why the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Advocates for Justice and this lawsuit left out the other culprits. Because this is basically a wrist slap for an organization that raises $30 million at fundraising dinners
Where is the SUNY Charter Institute in this lawsuit? When the board of SUNY is held personally liable for their extreme lack of oversight and refusal to require charters with political clout to act morally, ethically and legally, then that oversight board will start doing its job overseeing instead of their “I see nothing” so-called oversight.
It’s not as if this wasn’t brought to the SUNY Charter Institute’s attention for many years, and their reaction was to reward Success Academy with anything they wanted, justified by the great results they got (which were significantly impacted by kicking out kids they didn’t want to teach!)
No wonder this continued so long. The SUNY Charter Institute INCENTIVIZED this behavior because they lavished praise and rewards on Success Academy because of the high percentage of students who passed state tests, and ignored the shockingly low percentage of lottery winners who actually enrolled and were allowed to remain at the school. And they didn’t just ignore it — their actions reinforced the false narrative that attrition rates didn’t matter, which almost every white education reporter believes is true because white people that rich billionaires support told them so.
Leonie — I noted your comment about white education reporters, but I think the fault there lies not with them, but with their phony liberal publications. The NYT has ALWAYS been pro-charter because charters are SO successful and because public schools are, of course, rotten. Chalkbeat is funded by Walton and others of that ilk. And then there’s that Trump-supporting Murdoch who owns the Wall St Journal and what’s left of the NY Post. WNYC also gets funding from Walton and has a long pathetic history of not covering this false charter “success” story properly and in depth.
Dorothy,
I’m not Leonie. I’m sorry because I have identified myself this way years before I knew about Leonie’s organization. I don’t think many people confuse us, but wanted to make it clear that this is not Leonie. Just a humble public school parent who wants an honest discussion about the very complex issues surrounding public education. And I found this blog when Diane Ravitch was one of the few people out there doing this!
I’m not Leonie (sorry). My first comment didn’t post.
Here’s something else that’s not getting reported on:
https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2020/09/student-discontent-and-high-attrition.html
In the link above, Leonie Haimson talks about how, despite Eva having both enough money (WAY more than enough, btw … hundreds of millions in their coffers), and also enough building space, the latest news is that Eva quietly cancelled the planned opening of 3 Success Academy high schools scheduled to open in Brooklyn.
This is in spite of S.A. having 5 middle schools located in Brooklyn which earlier on were supposedly graduating enough satisfied students to populate Eva’s previously-proposed three — count e’m THREE — new Success Academy High Schools, with Eva having been promoting this expansion as proof of her privatized charter school system’s … err … “success.”
However, forget three new high schools. Now, there will be ZERO. Again, Eva can’t attract enough parents of graduating S.A. middle school students to warrant even one new S.A. high school opening, as all three approved and planned Brooklyn S.A. high school openings were quietly cancelled.
Leonie and others have contacted NYC’s D.O.E. for the numbers of Success Academy grads from the five Brooklyn S.A. middle schools who have opted to move to traditional public high schools and not attend a S.A. high school.
Oh, the DOE has those numbers all right, claims Leonie, but — presumably under pressure or direction from Eva — the DOE is stonewalling any release of those numbers.
So what the-hell’s going on?
A good part of the answer to that question is in the margins of Leonie’s article, where she scanned and embedded blistering posts written by disaffected Success Academy students and their parents, posts that she gathered from the Instagram site “Survivors of Success Academy.”
The problem with Success Academy is that they want to expand, but only with the “right” students. They don’t want to expand to teach more students, they want to expand to teach more of the “right” students.
They are enabled to do this by the SUNY Charter Institute and the white education reporters who provide the same oversight to charters that the Republican Senate and Fox News provided to Trump. In other words, none, except to occasionally “tut tut” when something was so flagrant they couldn’t just ignore it and had to “tut tut” it while pushing their false narrative about how many truly wonderful and perfect accomplishments Trump and charters have provided!
The fact that no white education reporter thinks it is odd that 1/3 of a class of Success Academy 11th graders did not graduate the next year is exactly what implicit racial bias is. It is similar to the NYT all but endorsing the idea that there is nothing odd about 20% of a class of primarily African American 5 year olds getting out of school suspensions because Eva Moskowitz said they all deserved it due to the incredibly violent actions those 5 year olds did (which white education reporters seem to believe is because those children were either born violent or were raised poorly because not one of them even considers it has anything to do with inexperienced teachers or bad policies at the school.)
I expect the charter billionaires to hire someone to do a study showing that a group of underfunded failing high schools with an extremely high population of highly disadvantaged,high needs students also didn’t graduate all of their students. They can show that study to reporters so reporters can tell themselves their job is done — they can report on Success Academy’s “miracles” confident that it is true.
If SA wants to build elite schools for Black and brown students, they should have to use the millions from the wealthy donors instead of pilfering the public schools that do the heavy lifting. Most public schools take everyone including so many poor and vulnerable students. It is obscene that SA sits on a mountain of cash, and they still get to raid the public school coffers.
I think Eva Moskowitz is paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $900,000 for running Success Academy charter schools.
When a reporter confronted her about this salary, Eva was totally unembarrassed and unashamed, firing back:
“I make a good living. So what?!”
(which is also the Peter Cunningham reply when the high salaries of charter school operators is brought up)
I make a good kill…er, living. So what?” – Evil Moskowitch
Off topic: I caught part of Diane’s interview on CSPAN2, Book TV, for A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire. Well done, hope it informs more people about what is really going on in education in the US and the whole privatization scam.
I hope the interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider gets rerun. It is excellent. So is their book “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.”
I believe you are so very right. I watched St. Louis elect a good school board to start taking charge, after Roberti, a businessman, was paid 5 million dollars to be superintendent for one year, and set destruction in motion…..voters put a stop to it…..the mayor and john danforth kicked the voters out of the way (2007-8) takeover by an all white state board, headed by a duckboat owning “family entertainment” racist from branson Missouri, (the republicans reinstated him at the age of 83 even after he had plead the case of a pornographic photo promoter), and after the takeover, ill-defined charter schools pulled 12 thousand of 31 thousand students away…..The post dispatch and kmox radio refuse to deal the the sickening racial aspects of what has happened…..journalism malpractice has the protection of the first amendment, which is not an excuse for its existence.
Eva is likely to view the $2.4 million fine as pocket change. The lawsuit deserves national coverage.
She undoubtedly already has a promise from a billionaire to cover the fine.
I’m reminded of something that Derek Black said at an NPE conference: the father kids get from public schools, the less we can protect them. True for charters, but also for vouchers, where kids’ or even parents’ sexual orientation is used to bar them from schools.
From an interview about his book: The Schoolhouse is Burning
Derek W. Black: Yeah, I think so. They dress it up with a lot of technicality and a lot of tax cuts and tax credits and things of this sort. But at the end of the day, what their policies are doing is saying we have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars that we spend in public schools for any kid who wants to attend. And we want to take more and more of that money and put it in the private sector and give it to people to attend private schools. And that’s where they stop, because some people go, oh, the private school district, that might be a really nice place for my kids.
What they fail to tell us is that none of those private schools are obligated to take any children they don’t want. They can have admission standards. They don’t have to meet the needs of students with disability. They can discriminate based upon religion. They can treat LGBTQ children differently. They can even have, to be quite honest, racially hostile environments. Now, there are laws that prohibit them from excluding African Americans, but they don’t have to be nice to them once they’re there, so why would you go to such a school? There is no protection for any of our disadvantaged children once they leave that public schoolhouse. And that is not part of the narrative they’re selling.
https://lithub.com/the-schoolhouse-is-burning-whats-happening-to-public-education/
*farther, obvs
I’d like to comment on this, but I have a full plate of schadenfreude in front of me, as a result of reading this, which I will now tuck into with considerable gusto. I try not to talk with my mouth full.
It’s not a blog if you copy and paste the article from another website. It’s not terrible if you want to share word-for-word someone else’s article. But the least you could do is cite your source and give credit to the one who actually wrote it.
MMB,
I always cite sources.