Gary Rubinstein finds that his criticism of Success Academy has caused some parents to reach out to him.
If they attended a public school, they could see the principal, the superintendent, or any number of officials who might be able to intervene.
So Success Academy parents have reached out to Gary to see if he can help them.
But at a charter school, if you have a complaint, they may tell you to choose another school. Leave.
This post is about a mother who was not allowed to attend her school’s graduation. It seems there were a couple of incidents. On one occasion, she failed to buy exactly the right pants for him to wear at school. On another, she went to his classroom without permission.
She had to be punished. She was barred from her son’s graduation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
She got off easy. In some places “failure to buy the right pants ” is a crime punishable by execution and/or excommunication.
Excommunication from the Church.
At least she was only excommunicated from the Charter.
Good for the charter school for sticking to its guns. No parent should be allowed to violate the school’s dress code. Success rhymes with proper dress.
It also rhymes with mess and distress. As Gary pointed out — At Success, more is less.
If they had a true dress code, the woman’s son would have been forced to wear a dress and we certainly can’t have that.
So, what they actually have is a “pants and dress” code. Thank goodness Eva Moscowlips has sense enough to recognize the problems a “dress” code would create.
Success’ harsh discipline policies are designed to keep people of color under their collective thumbs. You can call it “broken windows” or “broken spirits,” the result is the same. The emphasis is control, not building a community. You can also call it racist, IMO.
Experience is helpful in education. By hiring such young, minimally trained young people they are bound to make mistakes. Judgment or wisdom come from experience. Most teachers know that it takes time and perhaps maturity to deal with the myriad of problems that arise in a class or a school. I know I was less prepared to deal with these issues in my first few years, although I never sent a child out alone to wander the streets of NYC to look for his mother.
I wonder if anyone has studied the graduates of Success Academy. Do they graduate from college or do they just end up in therapy? Do they get lots scholarship money from all the wealthy donors that make the demeaning experience worthwhile? Somebody should study the impact of these schools on former students.
Great suggestion.
RT….I don’t know if there is an actual “study” on student success post Charter School graduation, but 1-2 yrs ago (?) I read an article that told many stories of these students. It was pretty bleak. Many of those that made it into college were not “success” stories and those that were “counseled out” before graduation were even sadder stories. Sorry, I don’t have a link or even any idea what publication it was posted.
I’d also love to see a study of all the kids who get pushed out of success and how “great” their outcomes are, after they’ve been traumatized by Eva Moskowitz’s horrible soul crushing tactics (for her organization to issue months of detention to a young kid for the wrong pants is really just sick)
Huh. I received a come-on yesterday from a recruiter at Success Academy inviting me to apply. For once, temptation didn’t get the better of me: I declined politely, saying I didn’t think I would “be a good fit in your institution.”
But you know I wanted to excoriate him, right? My guess? With the reputation this operation has garnered, they will have trouble finding teachers.
SA has a 50% turnover rate for teachers every year. Does not seem to be a good work environment.
Eva’s SA is a Heartbreaker and a Spirit Breaker for students and families.
It is called breaking a spirit in order to dominate and bend will/personality/interests/talents to fit the trainer’s paradigm. Coercive and Destructive.
Eventually some students leave or are forced out because they will not submit.
And then there are those who are outwardly compliant but failing. Years of it. Everyone in on it. Passing them along with the implicit understanding that it will continue until it becomes too obvious to disguise. Maybe around the 9th grade?
Achievement data is manipulated over time to sustain a false fundraising philanthropy persona.
By 9th grade that crumbling facade is out there for everyone to see. A student knows SA has failed her and perhaps it is finally time to seek a remedy. Or maybe some of these youth just get fed up with the stunting atmosphere and long to experience a public high school curriculum and life not hobbled by Eva.
Dave Chappelle filmed a speech he gave at his high school, DC’s Duke Ellington School For The Arts. He titled it “ What’s In A Name”. It streams on Netflix and is a portrait of a high school that truly educates and advocates for its kids.
Kids In Prison Programs (KIPP) isn’t much better.
I remember an article in the Miami Herald once about a parent who went to talk to the headmaster. He told her, “this is my school. If you don’t like how I run it, take your child out.” In fairness. I also knew the principal of a private school who, when a parent complained, picked up her phone in the parent’s presence and instructed the bookkeeper to make a check for the balance of the term because the parent was unhappy and would be removing their child. Needless to say, the parent’s tone changed immediately…
Honestly, this story does nothing for me. She and other parents who complain get what they deserve. If you play by their rules willingly, prepare to accept the consequences when you step out of line. She’ll be a step ahead of the rest of us when the shift to fascism is complete.
Greg,
Many parents are ‘suckered’. It’s only partially their fault. A good education (in my opinion) would help them discover the scam. Yet, our ‘rulers’ don’t want that education for the obvious reasons.
I don’t think parents are “suckered”. Let’s assume that this single mother took her child out of the zoned public school after 2 years because of deplorable conditions, over crowding and behavior problems (a plague in inner city schools). What parent doesn’t want their child to attend a clean school with working heat/AC, working toilets/running H2O, shiny new Chrome Books in every classroom and quiet/behaved(tortured IMHO) orderly classroom atmosphere? She likely didn’t realize that she was jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Even if she did realize, she probably would have made the decision anyway considering circumstances.
I wonder how Gary likes his new job as a psychotherapist counseling Success rejects and their families.
I have a theory that Success Academy has some rules for some students and some rules for other students. I wonder if this single parents is in the group of parents that Success Academy doesn’t really care about. If their kid is easy to teach and they present no problems, it’s good and those transgressions are correctly considered minor, but if not their administrators bring the hammer down and cite “rules”.
This parent was told her kid “flunked” Success Academy even before he spent a day at the school! “Success Academy said that since her son did not attend Success Academy for kindergarten and first grade, he would not be able to go into second grade at Success Academy, even though he had just passed first grade elsewhere, but would have to repeat first grade at Success Academy.” This seems to happen fairly frequently with less affluent parents — I have never heard a middle class white parent telling a story about how Success Academy barred their kid from attending the grade they won a lottery for and telling them their kid could only attend if they agreed to accept that their kid was actually a kindergarten or first grade failure who needed to repeat the public school grade they just completed or they’d be barred from attending Success Academy. I suspect there is an extreme double standard regarding which 6 or 8 year old students who win lotteries for first, second or third grade get told that.
After a number of years, apparently Success Academy decided that the “thousands” of students on waiting lists in Harlem and the Bronx could rot and Success Academy opened some new schools in affluent neighborhoods AND even dropped their lottery priority for at-risk kids so that the students who lived in those affluent neighborhoods could have the best chance of getting seats.
When those students aged into middle school, they were sent to a new middle school — Hudson Yards – run by an administrator who had been trained in their Harlem middle school. He didn’t realize he wasn’t supposed to treat these students from their disproportionately affluent elementary schools the same way that students in their Harlem middle school were treated. So he treated them like the students in Success’ Harlem middle school.
There was some media coverage about the “stress” these kids were going through due to the harsh treatment.
“HYSA faculty broke our children’s spirit and erased their self confidence in less than 3 weeks. Our children …. now simply no longer want to go to school…..are getting physically sick, experiencing meltdowns, vomiting, having nightmares and/or having sleepless nights and are unable to concentrate etc. Some of our children have even requested to be homeschooled…..”
Did Eva Moskowitz blow off these parents like she does when parents whose kids attend the SA schools with virtually no white students complain?
Nope. She met with those parents and dumped the principal they didn’t like for treating their kids like the kids at the Harlem Success Academy middle school were treated.
I don’t believe for a minute that a college educated white parent would be treated the way this parent and her kid were treated.
Will Eva Moskowitz meet with her and fire the principal of that elementary school? Or is there a double standard at Success Academy depending on the background of their parents?
Interesting information. Why is Moskowitz even allowed to run a school? Her ‘success’ seems to be in duping the State Legislature.
She has been aided and abetted by the SUNY Charter Institute, the agency whose only oversight consists of whether the PR looks good.
Look at Gary Rubinstein’s previous post (which Diane Ravitch linked to earlier) where he noted the extraordinarily high attrition rates.
This has been going on for years and years with the SUNY Charter Institute enabling it by rewarding Moskowitz for high state test passing rates (with whatever percentage of students remain of the original lottery winners).
The oversight of the SUNY Charter Institute borders on criminality.
Imagine you are a trustee given sole responsibility for overseeing a charter school. You believe it is a truly excellent school and yet huge numbers of students are disappearing. Do you look closely at what is going on? Or are you a white lawyer appointed as a political favor who is racist enough to believe that African American parents who jumped through to enroll their kid in the best charter in the state because they were motivated to get their kid the best education possible simply “changed their mind” and took their kid out? In disproportionately high numbers? Even though the far inferior mediocre charters you oversee have lower attrition rates?
Apparently, the white lawyers who sat on the SUNY Charter Institute board for years believed that motivated and caring African American parents don’t like high performing charters as much as they like mediocre charters, and so they didn’t bother to look closely at why so many students disappeared. After all, their disappearance is what gave Success Academy the bragging rights that those white lawyers adored.
In 2012, there was one trustee who wasn’t a white lawyer, Pedro Noguera, who stepped down after seeing the extreme favoritism that the other trustees were giving to Eva Moskowitz.
At the March 2022 meeting a couple months ago, a new addition to the SUNY Charter Institution board was announced — Eunice Lewin — who is an educator from Buffalo who isn’t white! Amazing! Only took 10 years. I hope she does more than cheerlead and fawn over Success Academy administrators during trustee meetings. Watching the chairman of the trustees, Joe Belluck, waste committee time making friendly talk with an attractive young female Success Academy administrator whose school was being given the usual rubber stamp approval said more about SUNY Charter Institute “oversight” than anything I have seen. No hard questions, just fawning. Belluck was an embarrassment. It certainly isn’t surprising that he doesn’t care about attrition at all.
Gary Rubenstein has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that Success Academy is just a fraud — a fraud that should not be receiving a single dime of public money.
Their SAT scores and graduation rate are fraudulent because of the way that Success culls their student population, much as a rancher might cull the herd to eliminate ” weak”, “infected” or otherwise undesirable animals. The net effect is the same as if Success were just cherry picking the students who are allowed to graduate and to take tests like the SAT.
Any fool can produce “success” by essentially being “gifted” with a big herd which is supported for several years on someone else’s dime and then culled. But the biggest fools are the members of the NYC public who continue to fall for the fraud and continue to give public tax dollars to a school that is perpetrating this fraud.
And anyone who thinks the word “cull” is hyperbole, should do a Google search for “Success Academy Got to Go list”
They might as well have called it the “Got to cull list”
Gotta get rid of those undesirable animals, you know.