Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter chain has won national plaudits for its extraordinarily high test scores. SA is a fundraising dynamo, attracting the support of leading figures on Wall Street and the financial sector. She and her chain were the subject of a hagiographic film called “The Lottery,” made by Madeline Sackler of the infamous opioid Sackler family,who are big supporters of the charter industry. The implication was that all students were chosen at random and were exactly the same as those in local public schools.
Over the years, critics have noted the high attrition rate of kids who start at SA schools, as well as an extraordinarily high teacher attrition rate.
Gary Rubinstein, high school math teacher and blogger, has followed the progress of SA in many posts on his blog.
In this post, he explores the effects of SA’s “backfill” policy, meaning that the schools seldom accept new students after fourth grade.
Using public data, Rubinstein explores the chain’s admissions and placement policies.
He writes:
I’ve learned through a lot of first hand stories that one of the biggest factors in the ‘success’ of Success Academy is the way they weaponize the school’s ability to force students to repeat grades or to voluntarily leave the school to avoid having to repeat a grade. When they have a student who they think is not fitting into their system enough, even if that student is on grade level and passing the state test, they sometimes arbitrarily tell the family at the end of the school year that if the student returns to Success Academy the next year they will have either repeat the grade they just completed or they can transfer to a different school and then they won’t have to repeat the grade.
So one way that holding a student back can improve the school’s test scores is that the weaker students leave the school ‘voluntarily.’ But maybe the family will decide that they want to keep their child at Success Academy and then the student will be more likely to do well on the state test when they have just repeated the year in that grade. But there is another way that Success Academy wields the power to arbitrarily make a student repeat a grade. Each year there are many students who leave the school for all kinds of reasons. While most schools give students on a waiting list a chance to be ‘backfilled’ and transfer from another school, it is known that Success Academy only allows backfilling in grades 1 through 4. So students from the waiting list are offered a slot at the school, but sometimes Success Academy will tell these families who just got a position off the waitlist that because Success Academy is so rigorous, the student will have to repeat the grade they just completed at their other school. They say this to the families whose children, Success Academy thinks, will struggle at the school. So these families who are told this will either take the deal and have their children repeat the grade or they will choose to go to a different school. Either way, Success Academy improves their test scores this way either by denying the student a chance to go to Success or by having them retake the same grade where they will likely do better on the state test the second time around than they would if they were in their proper grade.
I have heard about families having to grapple with this choice after getting into the school as a ‘backfill’ student, but I had no idea how common of a thing this was. So I did a freedom of information request to the NYC Department Of Education. Much to my surprise, the data was just emailed to me today and what it reveals is shocking, even by Success Academy abuse of families standards.
Read what he learned.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Nothing shocks me any more in terms of how these schools are able to churn and purge the “undesirables” in order to boost scores and outcomes. Backfill, or the lack of it, is the oldest trick in the book, particularly for 100% (!) grad rates. Whenever our school has an incoming student midyear, the joke is always about whether they came from Aspire. Sadly, no joke. Aspire kicks students out of their school all the time. And, as a real public school, we happily open our doors to them.
and this entire strategy is done so transparently, but not a peep from local or state news “journalists”
“journalists”
What a joke. but there is very little investigative journalism anymore, so people take claims made by Ed Deformers and charter and private school charlatans at face value. And they are often paid by folks who are themselves ideologically committed ed deformers–folks who want to break teachers’ unions and privatize everything.
And not a peep from politicians who polish their civil rights bona fides using black kids as backdrops for their election campaigns.
When you start in kindergarten with 100 students and 12-13 later you have 16 graduates, all are likely to be college bound.
Black parents might be reluctant to transfer students to Success Academy if they knew it could mean their child may graduate at age nineteen or twenty.
I’ve made the case several times that Success Academy is not financially sustainable, because far too many of its schools run at a loss. But now, thanks to Gary, we learn that Success Academy is wasting an astounding amount of taxpayer dollars by having 426 students – who were promoted by their traditional public schools – unnecessarily repeat a grade (just to up SA’s test scores). The cost of this? Each charter school student costs $16,000, which must be paid to Success Academy – 426 times 16K = $6.8 million! On an unneeded extra repeated year of school – Please call Moskowitz out on this!
Trying to solve inequality by creating more inequality, Success Academy makes the very success in its name an impossibility. Exacerbating suffering is what unregulated market capitalism does. Privatization is simply a misguided, losing strategy. Can we pivot? No. The lords of charter management organizations, Sackler, Gates, Ford… are too big to fail and too engorged to change directions.
Those test scores do not mean a thing. Instead I think all children that attended Success Academy’s ruthless, bullying Charter Schools should be tested for psychological and physical damage caused by the psychological damage.
When troops come back from combat in today’s army (not when I served back in the 1960s), they go through counseling to determine if they have PTSD and/or other physiological trauma.
And former troops like me go through a battery of physical and psychological tests and talks with counselors, when we first signed up for VA medical support, to determine if we have PTSD and how severe it is. When I was going through that process, I didn’t know that was why they were doing it. No one explained to me what all those tests and counseling was for. I found out later after being accepted by the VA medical system.
So, what am I getting at: Well, since Success Academy and many other publicly funded private sector Charter Schools use harsh, military, boot camp style tactics to scare children into being compliant, obedient, silent drones, I think every one of those children and their families may have a future class action lawsuit against the states, federal government and those charter schools for any physical and psychological damage caused by abusive, ruthless disciplinary methods of many of those Charter Schools.
One of the Specials Forces guys in one of the two PTSD support groups thinks his PTSD started during his year of training to quality for Special Forces, after being in the Marines for four years, because SF training required him to be tortured (water boarded – not the kind of torture that leaves physical scars) to find out what his limits were before he broke.
Forcing any child forced through harsh, military, boot camp style discipline is going to end up with some lasting psychological scars. I just hope Success Academy isn’t waterboarding any of their victims.
The thing is that some parents LIKE Success Academy because their kids are not being treated harshly. Quite the opposite. If your kid is a good student, well-behaved, then they aren’t going to be targeted with certain reprehensible actions designed to get a parent to “voluntarily” remove their kid. I don’t think most critics understand that.
Success Academy isn’t really best comparable to a military boot camp. To understand what is really going on, it is best comparable to a Little League with dozens of teams to which players are randomly assigned, where every coach is required to give equal playing time to every kid on the team, but where a coach with no scruples designs practices and workouts that target the least proficient players for humiliation. It’s actually not hard if you don’t have an ounce of morality or integrity. Design practice activities where kids who aren’t already good at baseball will struggle, and say that by making them do 500 push ups and then run 50 laps, you are “teaching” them to be better players. While those kids suffer, the better players get attention. When most of the less athletic kids doing 500 push ups don’t get better, make sure they understand it is their own fault and have them do another 500 and be sure to let the “better” athletes know these kids deserve nothing but contempt from them. It is highly likely that most of those children will “voluntarily” drop off the team, while the parents of the better athletes who remain are thrilled that a team that has shed all players who aren’t already quite skilled or very fast learners is “winning” when they play all the other teams in the league that are following the rules and giving all their players equal playing time and concentrating on teaching ALL players to get better, not concentrating on how to get rid of the players who aren’t already good players or who quickly become good players with the most basic coaching.
Most military boot camps have a goal to train soldiers. I assume that if the officer running the boot camps ended up with a fraction of the enlistees he began with, his superiors would not be impressed when he says “sure there are only a handful of enlistees left, but 100% of them are well trained by my wonderful program that turns 100% of the enlistees into soldiers, and how can I help it that so many of them refused to be the soldiers my perfect training would have made them if they had really wanted to be good soldiers. Reward me now!!!”
I doubt that the military would be like Joseph Belluck and Susie Miller Carello (who thankfully just left) at the SUNY Charter Institute who actually have the chutzpah and gall to claim that ‘quality’ charters are best identified by the percentage of students who pass state tests and not by the percentage of students that the charters are successfully teaching. They DO believe in rewarding those who are ruthless at weeding out the “undesirables” and they do seem to believe that a sign of a good charter is that so many students disappear! Or what’s worse, they just insist that attrition is so irrelevant that they must never mention that their favorite “high performing” charter loses a lot more students than most other decent or even mediocre charters.
It take chutzpah to brag that your Little League team where the martinet coach got all the worst players to quit is so superior because they are able to win against the teams where the coach teaches and play ALL kids, even if they aren’t all able to be athletes who bring their team victories.
A Little League coach couldn’t shed huge numbers of less athletic coaches without being enabled by those whose job it is to oversee the league. The SUNY Charter Institute has failed on all fronts to make sure Success Academy taught all their lottery winners instead of sorting and shedding the ones they weren’t able to teach. Pedro Noguero left as a trustee many years ago because of the favoritism shown to Success Academy. Maybe with Susie Miller Carello’s leaving, the SUNY Charter Institute will become an oversight agency instead of an organization that measures quality as “we don’t care how many students you drum out as long as you and we can brag about 100% passing or graduation rates”. The fact that education journalists bought into the “attrition doesn’t matter because those kids weren’t worthy” shocks me. If those kids were middle class white kids, they would certainly not have been so quick to deem their disappearance to be no big deal.
In short, it is understandable that the parents whose kids have value to Success Academy — giving their school bragging rights — are pleased with the school. Success Academy wants those students to remain. But a public school that is unwilling to teach students that don’t learn quickly should be identified as such because all they are doing is teaching the same kids who also do well in public schools.
It is always gratifying to see Gary doing the reporting that journalists like Eliza Shapiro and the entire crew of journalists at Chalkbeat NY (who are likely worried about their Moskowitz-admiring CEO Elizabeth Green’s wrath) are too cowardly or ignorant to do. Let’s recall that Elizabeth Green wrote “Moskowitz has created the most impressive education system I’ve ever seen” without ONCE demonstrating the least bit of curiosity about what happens to all the missing children or the methods which UNQUESTIONABLY are designed to cream top students. So I can only surmise that the “education reporters” who answer to Green understand that her wrath would be turned on them if they dared to report on anything that challenged her belief that the kids who disappear from Success Academy are not worthy enough to care about and should never be mentioned when talking about how “impressive” Eva Moskowitz’ miracle charter school is. The implicit racism of these journalists is truly sickening — if those missing kids were white, they would not be invisible to Elizabeth Green.
If Eva Moskowitz had forbidden 67 middle class white students and 3 African American students who won lottery seats for first grade from enrolling in first grade but told them they had to repeat Kindergarten to couldn’t attend her charter, you can bet that Elizabeth Green and Eliza Shapiro would take notice. But since somehow the Success Academy “judgers of whether a 6 year old is worthy of Kindergarten” seem to find so many more very unworthy African American students than white students, Elizabeth Green and Eliza Shapiro accept this without question. What exactly MUST a Kindergarten graduate know to be proven worthy of a 1st grade seat in Success Academy? Eliza Shapiro and Elizabeth Green trust that Eva Moskowitz knows and that’s enough for them.
I am not an education reporter, but I have known for years just from the limited data on the NYSED website that something stinks at Success Academy. It isn’t just how small the classes get each year — it is the “failing” students over and over.
I can’t help wondering how many of those students who are held back a year actually do remain over the next few years once they have been identified via the secret Success Academy process of not being worthy of a seat in the next grade. Because it isn’t just new students who are deemed as having “flunked” a grade — it is just as likely to be current Success Academy students.
The math has always been suspect. When Success Academy claims the “average” attrition rate is 10%/year, they make a point of averaging lower grades — that likely have the highest attrition — with higher grades where many of the students have ALREADY been replaced by “acceptable” backfilled students and likely have much lower attrition.
The real failure/corruption has been with the board of the SUNY Charter Institute which spends it’s time making excuses for the high attrition and allowing Success Academy to have rules that no other charter would dare to use. Success Academy likes to scapegoat the public schools for the fact thjat so many of lottery winners filling backfill seats don’t meet theior suppopsedly high standards,. but the fact5 is that Succe4ss Academy itself refgularly flunks the students theuy hafe3 ‘taught since Kindergarten.
It would probably be shocking to NYC residents to learn how many of the students who enter in Kindergarten are deemed by Eva Moskowitz to need AT LEAST one extra year (and sometimes two or more) because her special sauce and “highly trained” teachers need a lot more time to teach them that material.
This is why I despise Eva Moskowitz and her administrators so much. They don’t care about kids. If they did, they would have been shouting from the rooftops that so many of the students who win their kindergarten lotteries need a year of two of extra time DESPITE having parents who are the MOST MOTIVATED in NYC and willing to jump through hoops and do anything asked to supplement what SA teachers do in the classroom.
Imagine if Success Academy or any of its fawning enablers like Elizabeth Green or those at the SUNY Charter Institute had actually pointed out the obvious: public schools DON’T get the kids whose parents are willing to do everything and anything to help their kids learn. Success Academy is EXCLUSIVELY for those students and yet Success Academy still finds that a huge percentage need at least one extra year (and perhaps more) to learn what schools are now required to teach.
How would knowing that impact how schools are funded? How schools are teaching?
Instead, Success Academy and their enablers push a false narrative that HURTS kids — a false narrative that Success Academy is able to have great success with the same kids found in failing public schools simply because of their wonderful education and teachers. No mention of how they drum out kids. No mention of how they flunk kids. Why is that left out by Elizabeth Green? By Eliza Shapiro? Why do they push the false narrative instead of a true one?
Thank you, Gary Rubinstein. And Gary, I hope you will ask yourself HOW the determination about whether kids who win a lottery seat for a grade get to enroll in that grade or not is made? Are they giving 6 year olds a “test” that hasn’t been vetted? And is the way this mysterious test is given the same for African American students (who seem to fail in high percentages) and white students (where only 3 of 67 students “failed”)?
And are those “mysterious test to prove you are worthy of first grade” failure rates different depending on the SA school?
Sorry for typos above. I wanted to emphasize that statistically speaking, it is incredibly skewed if EVERY SINGLE ONE of the students who fill the “10% of the class” attrition seats each year are pre-tested to meet Success Academy’s high standards before being allowed to enroll in that grade.
Consider a relatively (by SA standards) random class of 100 Kindergarten lottery winners. They continue onto first grade with 90 “random” students and 10 “performing at our high standards” backfill students.
They continue onto second grade losing another 10%, which are most likely to be the struggling students, replaced with another 10 “performing at our high standards” backfill students. They continue onto 3rd grade and now as many as 30 of the students could be backfill students who entered after Kindergarten and were ONLY allowed to enroll in that grade if they were proven to be academically successful enough for SA to believe them worthy of being in that grade.
But to top it off, the grades at SA often shrink, and the 3rd and 4th grade classes are smaller than previous years. So the 30 backfill students who did not begin in Kindergarten might even comprise 40 or 50% of the students who remain to take the 3rd grade state exams. Maybe another 10% or 20% of that 3rd grade class are students who entered in Kindergarten but repeated a year. Maybe SA only manages to get half or even fewer of their original “random” Kindergarten lottery winners to 3rd grade without failing them at least once. We don’t know because Success Academy works so hard NOT to be transparent.
But why not be transparent? Why hide this? Because having bragging rights for your school and convincing the public of a falsehood that enriches SA administrators (look at this charter that can turn any kid into a scholar with less money and non-union teachers) is more important than the truth?
Success Academy notoriously uses methods that results in high percentages of students who win their Kindergarten lotteries NOT enrolling. Their own study that they don’t like to talk about suggested as many as half the winners fall off during the period when all sorts of pre-enrollment meetings are required, leaving behind only the families willing to jump through hoops to get their kid a good education.
In other words, SA starts with a Kindergarten class that is ALREADY cherry picked to exclude all but the MOST MOTIVATED families.
The fact that SA isn’t satisfied with this enormous benefit — the fact that they value bragging about passing rates over teaching students WHERE THEY ARE instead of where Success Academy can best monetize their performance — is truly beyond my understanding. I don’t understand greedy folks who justify this by saying that they need to hurt and lie about some kids in order to help the others. They don’t. They could help kids and tell the truth. But they can only help THEMSELVES by lying and pretending that they really want to teach the kids who don’t give them bragging rights, when they do everything they can to discourage those kids from enrolling at all. That’s all about helping the adults at the school, not the kids.
OMG!!! Great job, Gary, Others: read his whole article. It gets worse. It’s exactly what he says it is: “staggering.”
But then, that’s what Ed Deformers do. They insist upon “applying rigorous data-based decision-making to schooling”; then they completely fake the data.
What a shame. Terms like “data” and “rigor” used to have quite acceptable and clear meanings, and I’m not referring to “After a few hours, the body was in a state of rigor.” I mean as in, “She presented a rigorous proof, one in which each step in the process was justified by given information, definitions, postulates, and properties.” One of the bitter, tragic, infuriating ironies of Ed Reform is that these people insist that they are being scientific about educational decision making but are actually being pseudoscientific, and people let the Deformers get away with this. Examples abound: they use data from tests that don’t validly measure what they purport to measure; they make conclusions from changes in outcomes that don’t meet an acceptable threshold of statistical significance; they set cut scores arbitrarily based on what outcomes they want to see this carnival seasons, etc.
And they fake their test results in lots and lots of ways, including the ones identified here by Mr. Rubinstein.
Marketing is, of course, typically, these days, bald, boldfaced lying. Of course, there’s a grand tradition of that going back to traveling medicine shows and carnivals, to P.T. Barnum’s “This way to the Egress!” signs through R. J. Reynolds’s “More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette!” But in recent years, scams have become ubiquitous, and we’ve become really used to this stuff–to Donald Trump saying that he had no business in Russia or that he started with a “small loan” from his father and built it into a multi-billion-dollar business, to there being no chunks of Blue Cheese in the Chunky Blue Cheese Dressing, to the bag of potato chips being half or more nothing but nitrogen gas and the company lying about this deception by claiming that they have to do that–make most of the bag gas–in order to preserve freshness and flavor (this is, of course, BS because many of us are old enough to remember full bags of potato chips that, yes, had the some gas in them as well–full bags in which some nitrogen was present but not half the freaking bag). Here’s the thing: the lying about the product is NEVER OK. And when it’s about something as significant to well-being as one’s child’s education is and the lying is harmfully and intentionally deceptive, it’s the type of fraud known legally, I think, as harmful deceit.
And when Donald Trump finally croaks, one day, I suggest this for his tombstone:
Here lies Donald Trump,
but that’s nothing new.