Gary Rubinstein is a high school math teacher and blogger. He has been following Success Academy charter chain, which has been nationally acclaimed for its high test scores. In his latest post, Rubinstein examines the case of a student who thrived at Success Academy until the pandemic, but struggled when the school switched to remote learning. Read the story and answer the question, was she treated fairly by her school?
He begins:
A few months ago I published the first part of this series where parents of current or former Success Academy students can share their stories. As I hoped would happen, another frustrated parent found that post and contacted me with his own disturbing story to tell.
Success Academy is known for its high 3-8 standardized test scores and its extreme rigidity. In a way, the rigidity is part of what causes them to have such high test scores. They demand compliance from their students and from the families of those students. When a student or the family of a student is not conforming to the expectations of the school, that student or family are going to be harassed, humiliated, and punished until they either fall into line or ‘voluntarily’ transfer to another school.
The heartbreaking saga of a girl I will call ‘Carla’ began pleasantly enough eight years ago when she was accepted into Success Academy Springfield Gardens as a kindergartener. From kindergarten through fourth grade, she thrived at the school. Her fourth grade report card grades were mostly the highest or second highest category, except for writing where she was struggling….
In fifth grade, she started having problems academically, though not catastrophically, and then as we all know, the pandemic hit and schools in New York went remote for the next year and a half. For the end part of fifth grade and all of sixth grade, Carla struggled to learn remotely. She had various connection issues and would wait in zoom waiting rooms endlessly. She was really traumatized by the pandemic year and was eager to return to in person classes for her seventh grade year.
But she was still suffering the effects of the 18 months of remote learning. She was having mental health issues and was seeing a therapist about them. At school she was failing several classes. Carla is a very hard working student and someone who really tries her best and her parents work very hard to support her needs and to keep on top of what assignments Carla was missing. Everyone knows that Success Academy has one trick in their playbook which is to make students repeat grades for failing courses. So Carla managed to improve most of her grades but she still failed two subjects, writing and science and was told that she would have to pass those two courses in summer school or she would have to repeat the entire seventh grade.
How Success Academy can make such a threat is incomprehensible to me. For elementary school grades it makes more sense, but in a secondary school setting, why not just retake the courses that you failed? But that wasn’t the threat, it was that she had to pass both courses with a 70 or higher or she would be repeating the entire seventh grade, including all the classes that she had passed.
Please read the rest of the post to learn what happened to Carla? Was it fair? Was it just? What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If Success Academy officials were doing this to children on their own dime, that would be their prerogative.
And if parents choose to subject their children to this stuff, that is their prerogative as well.
But why are the public funding this stuff?
Something is clearly going on behind the scenes that most people are not privy to. No other explanation makes sense.
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Success Academy is like the Republicans. The more they realize that the so-called “liberal” media will allow them to get away with anything, the more they feel empowered to act as they will, with their goal of “winning” far surpassing anything else (like democracy, or the well-being of children).
The reporting on Success Academy by the so-called “liberal” media has been worse than abysmal since Kate Taylor was handed a video by a still-anonymous SA assistant teacher, reported on its’ contents, and was moved to another beat, and after so-called liberal PBS threw John Merrow under the bus for a completely truthful report about Success Academy that mildly challenged Eva Moskowitz’ narrative. Now what you get is reporters like Eliza Shapiro who seem to specialize in “both siderism” reporting on Success Academy – as in Success Academy has miraculous results with all students thriving academically and all graduates going to college and those achievements are absolutely impossible to achieve by cherry picking – although a few anti-charter pro-union folks disagree – (followed by more soundbites from more delighted parents put in front of her by Success Academy’s PR folks.)
It’s not hard for a reporter with real journalistic skills to do what Gary Rubinstein does and look at the anomalies that are clearly newsworthy (hello mysteriously shrinking high school graduating class??) unless that reporter either doesn’t understand math (very possible) or is concerned about powerful people being too critical if they don’t reinforce Success Academy’s dishonest narrative (also very possible). I have no idea whether it is ignorance or cowardice that drives the pro-Success Academy media coverage despite so many clear questions being raised about their “success”. But the education reporting has been a total embarrassment to the journalism schools where they trained. I am just grateful that those education reporters weren’t covering science during the pandemic, because they would likely have written numerous articles praising the 99% cure rates of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin while defensively and angrily citing their single sentence that “a Trump-hating scientist disagreed” as evidence of their brilliant and “fair and unbiased” reporting.
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SomeDAM Poet,
if you are a parent with a well-behaved, high performing kid at Success Academy, I have no doubt your kid is treated very well, lavished with all the extras that aren’t available with underfunded public school budgets that can’t simply dump kids who are too expensive to teach. I can certainly understand why parents WHOSE KIDS ARE WANTED would choose them. And parents of the kids that aren’t were fooled by the lousy reporting by the NYT and other places and believed the false narrative that Success Academy wanted to teach ALL kids whose parents were highly motivated and willing to jump through hoops to get them a good education. It turns out that Success Academy only wanted to teach the ones who THEY chose to teach.
What kind of reporter would not think it odd that all these highly motivated parents would jump through hoops to enroll their kid, only to then unenroll them a week, a month, a year, or a couple years later?
If those missing students were white and affluent, Success Academy would never have been able to get away with their false narrative in which the education reporters help reinforce their nasty narrative of how it is the uncaring, awful PARENTS who voluntarily rejected their once in a lifetime chance to get their children the best education possible because they just didn’t care enough about their kids. Since the missing students were primarily African American, Success Academy was never really called out on what their ugly innuendo that scapegoated them and their parents implied.
And it never occurred to the laziest of reporters to consider that in a school system of over 1 million students, a charter school with vast wealth that educated fewer than 1% of those students could easily cherry pick who they wanted to teach. Unless those lazy reporters intentionally ignored the huge red flags right in front of them.
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This is very stupid behavior on the part of the school.
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Needlessly, intentionally evil.
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Never assume stupidity or ignorance when profit is more plausible.
The schools get funding based largely on their test scores.
And school officials are profiting as a result.
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Success is needlessly punitive, and it has no interest in promoting a healthy social-emotional well-being in the young people in the schools. Success Academy is more interested in building a “brand” than serving the needs of students. This is a feature of market based education. Young people attending the schools are there to protect the excellence mythos of their uncompromising brand.
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Right. From the perspective of caring about students and the fabric of democratic civilization in which they are interwoven threads, Suckseggs Academy’s actions were not fair, not just, and not smart. Our job as educators is nurture, not nature. From the perspective of ignorant millionaires and billionaires who view students as little more than work animals, the actions of Suckseggs were fair, just, and smart like the pure — cough — “genius” — choke — of tech billionaires like — gag — Elon and Bill. Their view is that students are human capital who need to prove their value to the market or die, miserably impoverished because they have no value to the merito-techno-cratic oligarchy: survival of the fittest, nature not nurture. It’s Hobbes versus Locke and Rousseau, yet again.
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Our job as educators is to see the and build upon the value of every student regardless of his or her background, i.e.: performance level on biased standardized tests, and the foster each ones growth instead of sifting and sorting them as privatization-crazed corporatists would have us do.
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After reading that jabberwocky, I now understand that the “Success” in “Academy” has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with indoctrination and obedience.
Keiner hat das Recht zu gehorchen. (No one has the right to obey.) — Hannah Arendt
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..and $ucce$$ for the owner, who has made millions of dollars over the years, and undoubtedly others as well.
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Think about it.
How else — other than the owner/operator of a charter school or as president of a big-name university – can one make so much money in education?
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I quit looking at the K-12 salaries years ago. They just make me queasy and want to punch holes in walls with my head.
A few years ago I tried to the the local media and U. of Akron law schools to task for taking a million dollar plus grant in the memory of Dave Brennan. No one wanted to hear that it was basically public funds that he swindled from the state to “reinvest” a pittance to the school in return for a washing of his reputation and a name on a building.
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Dave Brennan was a for-profit pioneer in the charter biz.
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Monseigneur Bienvenu (Les Miserables)
“If the soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one
is not who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.”
Nelson Mandela
“Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
Ralph Nader
“All societies perpetuate lavish myths that enable the few to rule over the many, repress critical thinking and camouflage the grim realities.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“The ordinary method is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.”
Ivan Illich
“School prepares for the alienated institutionalization of life by
teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people
lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find
relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises
which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional
definition. And school directly or indirectly employs a major part of
the population. School either keeps people for life or makes sure that
they will fit into some institution.”
John Dewey
“Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper
social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the
prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.”
Carl Sagan
“…The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
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The non-public, private-and-profitable, private sector, brutal, toxic Success Academy Charter schools that are supported by public money is a preview of what what will happen to education in the US, at all levels (emphasis “all levels”), if the Koch/ALEC, Walton, DeVos, et al, criminal subversives achieve their end goals to destroy OUR real public schools and gain the power to decide what OUR children learn, how they learn, and what and how teachers teach.
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