Gary Rubinstein is a mathematics teacher but also a close observer of boasting about miracle schools. He watches the charter sector closely and has exposed many hoaxes. He was first to report that Tennessee’s highly praised Achievement School District never achieved any of its goals. Here, he reviews the attrition rate at Success Academy, which has attained high test scores by curating its students. Success Academy has received national acclaim for its “miraculous” scores. Rubenstein explains what is behind the curtain.
Rubenstein writes:
Success Academy is the largest charter network in New York City. With 40 schools and 20,000 students, Success Academy is known for its high 3-8 standardized test scores and their rigid rules. Success Academy also celebrates the annual 100% college acceptance rate among its graduates.
Success Academy is a K-12 program and, until recently, the only time that you could enter the school was either in kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade. The size of the first graduating cohort in 2018 was 16 students. The answer to the natural question of how many students started that cohort originally was 73 which meant that approximately 25% of the students who started with Success Academy eventually graduated from there. I say ‘approximately’ because it isn’t fully accurate to just divide 16/73=22% and conclude that 78% of the cohort left the school for one reason or another. Not counted in the 16 is the students who were still in the school but had been left back one or more years. It seems that about 6 more of the students from that cohort graduated a year later so maybe the true number is 22/73=30% is more accurate. But there’s another factor that, until now, has been impossible to factor in. Some of those 22 students are students who transferred into the school after the first year so you would have to subtract those students from the 22 to get the actual attrition rate. The only way to get that kind of data is to do a FOIL request which is exactly what I did.
Success Academy had 315 Kindergarteners in 2008. The graduating class of 2021 had 110 students. Without this new data, it would seem that their persistence rate is about 35%. But this new data I received shows that only 69 of the graduating class had started with the school as kindergarteners. So a more accurate estimate is 69/315=22% which is a little lower than the 25% I had originally estimated.
It is also interesting that 41/110=37% of the graduating class were from the backfills even though the backfills were from a pool of about 100 students. So about 41% of the backfills graduated vs 22% of the original cohort. A reason for this discrepancy could be explained by the way that Success Academy manipulates their backfill students to guarantee that the backfilled students are ‘better’ than the students they replaced. As I reported previously, lower performing students applying to be backfill students are often told that they have to repeat the grade they just graduated from which surely discourages some of them from accepting their backfill offer while higher performing students are not required to repeat the grade.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Would interesting to compare with public schools in the same geographic area, while high school cohorts are closely monitored I’ve never seen K-5 or 6-8 cohort retention data, anecdotally high poverty schools have high mobility rates, discharges and admissions… and, who are the charter discharges? and, of course no data on discharge test scores
Forcing students to repeat a grade is a heinous act of abuse. I wish corporate interests would stop interfering in education and causing people to believe that mastery of industry-standard skills is necessary to progress toward a diploma. Education is not linear. Especially with all the Common Core based curricula, content has been eliminated and reduced down to test taking skills.
Those “skills” are repeated every year. In English class, there are the same four units all throughout secondary school, at least in big city Los Angeles Unified: informational, argumentative, narrative (still informational), and literary text. In the science class I’m teaching because the superintendent is a corporate cheapskate, I’m covering the same four units in 6th grade as they do in 7th and 8th: tech engineering, biology, physics, climate change. It’s likely the same in high school. In both subjects, it’s the same stuff with more vocabulary added to the tests each year. The only thing holding students back does is wreak havoc on them socially and psychologically.
Success Academy are a bunch of corporate child abusers.
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By design, of course. Gotta keep those deprofessionalized McCubicles filled with analphabetics.
This was in response to LeftCoastTeachers line that “Common Core based curricula, content has been eliminated and reduced down to test taking skills”
We are not teaching them anything anymore. And Cardona is talking about micro credentials. The students will be getting badges for playing skills video games and learning nothing except how to wear uniforms and walk in line like Success Academy prisoners.
Don’t be so cynical – there are jobs in health care thant require 18 or 24 credits, a “badge,” much less than 64 credits required for an associate degree, and the kids walks into a job …the world, she is a ‘changing
And most of those jobs in healthcare that are high in demand are also terrible in pay. Home health care aides and other high demand field is often pay less than $15 an hour. No one can live on that.
The jobs that require “certfication” (ex, cardiac stenographer, phlebotomy technican, etc) and there are many of these jobs pay well … and are in demand
Don’t fall for the standardized testing trap. Education happens when students take classes, not when they pass standardized tests. We want students to be educated, not tested. We don’t need no stinking badges!
Why on earth is Success allowed to continue operating? It’s clear how Success cooks its numbers, as Gary has shown time and time again. Also a huge number of their schools operate at a financial loss —- and what causes the loss? The mandatory payment of thousands of dollars per child to Success private management company, which already is flush with funds. Time for the Comptroller to study Success again perhaps?
Success’s authorizer is the SUNY Board of Trustees, almost all of whom were appointed by Cuomo and president of the SUNY Board is Merryl Tisch, they love Success, the Comptroller’s auditing powers are limited, as the terms expire and Governor makes appointments, maybe, a big maybe, SUNY no longer will love Success and it’s extremely well-paid Success CEO Eva Moskowitz
The SUNY Charter Institute Board of Trustees will continue to be cheerleaders instead of doing oversight until a big investigative article highlighting all the time they condoned the red flags and bad behavior at Success Academy instead of demanding it stop.
That will never happen at the NYT where reporters who challenge the truly laughably dishonest myth of success spewed by Success Academy promoters are soon ushered off the beat.
Maybe if the Charter Institute board was replaced by people who cared about students more than promoting charters. And caring about students means caring about the students that charters don’t want to teach.
Just because Success Academy doesn’t care about the kids they make feel like garbage until they leave, doesn’t mean that the trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute should do the same. The determination NOT to look at why more students leave than stay incriminates those Charter Institute trustees even more than the sickening video of chair Joseph Belluck fawning over a pretty young Success Academy administrator while discussing idiocies instead of why so many parents would supposedly “voluntarily” pull their kid from this miracle-working school.
While I am in total agreement on the moral bankruptcy of Success Academy, I think We need to admit that testing has made number cooks of us all. Ever since we started to hear the phrase “data driven,” we have been twisting test data to put the best face on our particular school.
We need to quit worrying over numbers and start teaching again
Here is a fact that people who are NOT implicitly racist know: NYC has a school system with more than one MILLION students. That means that even with “only” passing rates of 40% on state tests, more than 400,000 students in public schools in NYC perform at or above grade level. And yes, more than half of those 400,000 students performing at or above grade level are African American or Latinx (pre-pandemic numbers).
Here is something that people who are implicitly racist believe: That outside of Success Academy and a few other no excuses charters, there are almost no Black or Latinx students at or above grade level in NYC, so it would be virtually impossible for a charter that has grown to 20,000 students to cherry pick students.
Even with no resources, large class sizes, falling apart building, etc., there are still hundreds of thousands of Black and Latinx students in NYC public schools who are doing well.
Success Academy has excessive resources and no moral compass, and it is very easy to replace the lottery-winning students whose academic performance Success Academy can’t use to promote themselves with students whose academic performance makes Success Academy look good.
And anyone who isn’t implicitly racist would take a look at a public school system of ONE MILLION students and see not only the “failing” kids that Eva Moskowitz constantly cites (but clearly doesn’t want to teach), but would also see the hundreds of thousands of students who do well. And understand how easy it is to cherry pick them when your school has unlimited funding and marketing and desperately wants to teach students who are academically strong.
But there are a lot of implicitly racist white folks in education media, and at the SUNY Charter Institute, and the hundreds of thousands of students who do well in public schools are invisible to them. So their oversight and reporting is guided by one truth — is it absolutely impossible for Success Academy to cherry pick students. And once sycophantic reporters are empowered to say something is impossible because they know it in their heart of hearts, they get to excuse their own shoddy reporting in having absolutely no curiosity about whether what they report as true actually is true!
Gary Rubinstein does this research in his spare time. But is a BASIC REQUIREMENT for any journalist who cites self-serving statistics with no meaning. A medical reporter who cited a miracle cure for a children’s cancer without bothering to notice that 75% of the young patients mysteriously disappeared from the study before it was hyped as having a “99% cure rate” would be fired. But education journalists hype charters with 99% passing rates and have absolutely no curiosity about why highly motivated parents who jumped through hoops and promised to do anything asked of them to get their kid a top notch education would then turn their back on that opportunity. I doubt very much those many students who LEAVE Success Academy – which seems to be an even HIGHER number than the kids who remain! – would be invisible to the trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute and Elizabeth Green if they were white and middle class. Eliza Shapiro wrote a number of articles when some affluent parents at Beacon High School complained – they weren’t ignored because Beacon High School presented Eliza Shapiro with some happy parents who loved the school to exclusively quote. But when it comes to reporting on Success Academy — where huge numbers of far less privileged kids simply disappear — those sycophantic journalists believe the only parents worth quoting are those who kept their kid in the school. Their reporting is as shoddy as that done by right wing reporters who wrote stories only quoting the covid patients who were certain they were cured by hydroxychloroquine. That isn’t reporting. It is misleading hype.
Success Academy is encouraged to continue their most reprehensible behavior by the truly appalling and criminally negligent oversight of the trustees of the SUNY Charter Institute and the lazy reporting of sycophantic education journalists like Eliza Shapiro and Chalkbeat founder Elizabeth Green. Green herself wrote about Eva Moskowitz without any indication that it mattered one iota to her that so many kids disappeared. It could have been 10% or it could have been 75% — Elizabeth Green had no curiosity because the ONLY students that mattered to her were whatever small percentage Eva Moskowitz believed mattered — the ones who remained and whose academic performance gave her bragging rights.
My message to Elizabeth Green, to Eliza Shapiro, and to the trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute is this:
ALL the highly motivated parents who won lottery seats and enrolled their kid in Success Academy’s Kindergarten class wanted what was best for their kid. Remember that HALF of the lottery winning parents choose NOT to even enroll their kids. The ones that do enroll — the ones that are 100% of EVERY entering Kindergarten class – are exclusively the parents who were willing to jump through all the hoops that Eva Moskowitz required.
It’s the kind of starting class that any public school would love to have — one compromised EXCLUSIVELY of the most motivated parents willing to do anything.
And yet the attrition rate of the entering Kindergarten class just to get to 5th grade in the usual amount of time is so high that it seems to be the most closely guarded ingredient in Success Academy’s “secret recipe” for success.
Which should make any decent journalist take notice instead of acting complicitly to keep it hidden.
Which should have made the SUNY Charter Institute trustees take notice, instead of acting complicitly to keep it hidden.