The pro-charter media, especially anything owned by Rupert Murdoch (e.g. The New York Post), continually boasts about the long waiting lists of students hoping to enroll in charter schools.
New York City’s Success Academy charter chain, which posts extraordinarily high test scores, supposedly has a long waiting list. The tale was first told in a movie called “The Lottery,” which showed hundreds of parents entering their child’s name in a lottery in hopes of winning a coveted seat in the school. The documentary was made by Madeline Sackler, yes, of the same billionaire family that marketed opioids to the nation and became insanely rich.
Leonie Haimson reveals in a recent blog post that Success Academy has an enormous operation to market its schools, augmented by a division whose job is recruitment of students.
She writes:
One of the political weapons that charter chains & their hypesters in the media like the NY Post repeat like a mantra to support the push to expand their schools and eliminate the NYC cap on charters is their dubious claim that there are thousands of kids on their waiting lists.
For many reasons one should doubt the reality and relevance of these claims. As Chalkbeat points out, 58% of NYC charter schools lost enrollment over the past three years; and 45% lost enrollment in the last year. This includes the most aggressively expansionist charter chain in NYC, Success Academy, whose enrollment has fallen by 7.7% in the last year.
Moreover, as our charter school presentation and draft resolution explain, the claims of high demand and long waiting lists at charter schools are unconfirmed by any independent audits and likely include many duplicates.
As to Success Academy, a research study revealed that only about 50 percent of the students who win the lottery to attend one of their schools choose to enroll, making the significance of what it means to be on one of their waiting lists even more dubious.
In addition, the network was still desperately urging more families to apply to their schools through October of the current school year, revealing a shortage of students. They also recruit students outside the city for their charter schools, suggesting a lack of demand in NYC.
Perhaps one of Success’ biggest problems in keeping their seats full is their high rates of attrition, with 75% of students leaving from Kindergarten on; and about 50% of those students who even make it to high school departing before graduation, according to analyses done by Gary Rubinstein.
In any case, in their determined effort to persuade as many families as possible to apply, whether or not they really intend to enroll, Success Academy has a whole team focused on recruitment. See this job posting for a “Scholar Recruiter” to join the “Scholar Recruitment Team,” managed by the “Lead of Scholar Recruitment” and “reporting to a Senior Scholar Recruiter”.:
…. the Scholar Recruiter will execute field outreach programs and promotional activities in individually assigned New York City regional markets. A Scholar Recruiter will often be the first touchpoint to Success Academy for prospective families, making this team a critical contributor toward reaching our enrollment goals.
One of the many responsibilities of this “Scholar Recruiter” is to ” Identify, initiate, and maintain relationships with community based organizations (CBO’s) to develop CBO-to-Success Academy pipelines, identify Success Academy as the premier educational choice in the community, and cement Success Academy as a member of the community.”
The following metrics will be used to evaluate their performance:
Scholar Recruiters will be measured against individual performance indicators including but not limited to:
- Gross application volume generated among families who reside in their regional markets
- Gross application volume generated to schools in their regional markets.
- Yield of regional applicant pool that is converted to enrolled status.
- Retention of enrolled families through the first 60 days of each academic year.
- Volume of applicant leads generated in their market.
- Number of new and continuing community-based contacts established and maintained, segmented by type (e.g. social service, faith-based, childcare, business, etc)
- Conversion rate of event attendees into applicants or long-lead applicants.
- Regular submission of performance and market data reporting.
Success Academy also spends millions on advertising and marketing efforts to lure more applicants onto their waiting lists, with ads running on TV, bus shelters, YouTube and Facebook concurrently. They send repeated mailings to families, sometimes as many as 10-12 times per year, after being given free access to DOE mailing lists despite vehement parent protests. (DOE is the only district in the nation to share this info voluntarily.)
As evidence of their huge marketing efforts, they also have an internal marketing firm, called the Success Academy Creative Agency:
The SA Creative Agency is a full service brand strategy, marketing, and creative division within Success Academy Charter Schools (SACS). Aligning business goals and creative and cultural trends, we partner with internal clients to define the value proposition, develop strategic insights and create marketing campaigns and other creative content to help redefine what’s possible in K-12 public education.
SA Creative Agency itself advertises many openings, including senior copywriter, creative director, and Leader of Growth Marketing, “responsible for the design and execution of integrated demand strategies across our paid and organic channels.”
According to her Linked in profile, the Success marketing office is headed by someone named Amanda Cabreira da Silva, who came from Revlon, and as of Success Academy’s 2017 IRS 990 was paid over $200,000 per year.
Open the link to continue reading.
Does this sound like a school or a consumer product?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would change the word “laments” to “boasts about” the supposed long waiting lists, and honestly it isn’t just the openly pro-charter media that touts them. Journalists who haven’t paid close attention assume the alleged long waiting lists are somehow verified and verifiable, and don’t add that there’s no proof that they even exist.
I have no doubt that some charter schools DO have “long waiting lists” due to all that hype, and due to positive press coverage by insufficiently skeptical journalists. But over the years we’ve definitely seen charter schools tout their “long waiting lists” while actually scrambling desperately to fill seats. A chain that’s been around for years, Envision, posted minutes of its board meetings online for a while, where you could see the discussion of the open seats they were desperate to fill even as they boasted to the press of their “long waiting lists.”
Changed it.
Ha! It wasn’t really an editing suggestion, but glad you agreed!
“Retention of enrolled families through the first 60 days of each academic year.”
Does that time frame have anything to do with when the state counts enrollments for per student payments?
NY Charter schools are supposed to report on projected enrollment no later than 30 days prior to the first business day of July, September, November, January, March and May, to be reimbursed no later than the first business day of July, September, November, January, March and May of the current school year. http://www.nysed.gov/charter-schools/charter-school-regulations-1191 Success Academy schools start about August. 15 generally. 60 days later would be Oct 14. 30 days prior to first business day in Nov is Nov 1, so 30 days prior about Oct. 1. So they want to keep students till at least Oct. 14, so they can report them on Oct 1? Pl check my math! All this is to assume that they don’t lie about their enrollment on any of those dates.
This is exhibit A showing that there is NOT this clamoring for spots in charters, contrary to what the privatization pushers claim. No one would have to spend $13 million a year to market a good product.
Here is one of the biggest red flags above: The “scholar recruiters” — and NOT the teachers or SA school Administrators — are apparently judged on: “Retention of enrolled families through the first 60 days of each academic year.” WTH?? As usual, Success Academy always incentivizes the very worst behavior. Their teachers identify the kids who they hope leave and act in ways to insure that parents and kids both know the school doesn’t want that kid. If you want to see a good example of that, one only has to watch the video recorded when one of Success Academy’s most honored teachers – a teacher who SA knew so exemplified the traits that they wanted all teachers to exhibit that they designated her a “model teacher” – was caught on video demonstrating the techniques she was so highly rewarded for doing — demonizing and publicly humiliating a 6 year old child who the teacher perhaps believed would hurt her “stats” which made her treat that 6 year old like a pariah in front of the other kids so they could learn from their beloved teacher that some kids were simply worthless and it’s okay to treat them that way. Anyone who wonders why so many SA kids disappear has only to see exactly what kind of teacher behavior Success Academy highly rewarded (until it was caught on video).
It is quite incriminating that Success Academy does NOT want the teachers or administrators to be responsible for retention which makes it seem as if Success Academy STILL wants those folks to act like the model teacher and aggressively identify the kids who they want gone. Instead, SA incentivizes the “scholar recruiters” to only recruit the “right” students and perhaps discourage the rest, since their job performance will be judged as a failure if the teachers and administrators are identifying too many of the students they recruit as those who they do NOT want to retain.
Note: If SA cared about “retention”, the administrators would be responsible, not the “recruiters”.
It seems that SA does not want to fire administrators or teachers for not retaining kids since their entire public relations effort depends on them acting like the model teacher and getting the students who don’t give them bragging rights to leave. So why not punish the “recruiters” for failing to recruit the kids that the teachers and administrators deem worthy of remaining in their school because their test scores will be “brag-worthy”? Very incriminating.
Also, the $16 million to “market” Success Academy is an outrageous waste of money and seems like a slush fund. Success Academy ONLY has to market to fill empty seats. If Success Academy needs to spend over $500,000 per school each year to fill 80 or 90 Kindergarten seats in each of their 34 elementary schools, that’s a waste of money. If it needs to pay recruiters a lot of money to get the “right” student to fill dozens or hundreds of empty seats left vacant after the “wrong” kids are drummed out, that suggests that perhaps far too many kids are disappearing from the older grades. Which is it? It’s a shame that the SUNY Charter Institute board has performed such shoddy oversight that no one knows.