The former leader of the chess team of the Succcess Academy charter chain sued the corporation for $64 million for racism.
NEW YORK CITY — A national chess master accuses the city’s largest charter school network of systemic racial discrimination in a $64 million lawsuit, court records show.
Former Success Academy chess director Jerald Times tells Patch he believes he was fired for speaking out against a “separate but equal” doctrine that saw Black educators sidelined to the benefit of less-qualified white employees.
“Success Academy was in essence operating under a color line,” Times told Patch. “I challenged the color line and was dismissed.”
Times’ lawsuit, filed last week in New York Federal court, details nearly two years of service during which the chess master saw a Black guest speaker with a Ph.D. fingerprinted and himself replaced by a white worker without a college degree.
A Success Academies representative declined to directly respond to the lawsuit but noted 69 percent of staff and 55 percent of teachers are not white….
The chess master began almost immediately to disapprove of Success Academy’s game.
Times joined Success Academies in 2019 with an impressive resume, accolades that included a glowing New York Times profileand a strong desire to teach the game he loved to New York City kids of all colors.
But as Times taught students to master the board, Success Academy began making moves he couldn’t condone.
The lawsuit contends the following:
- Success Academy appointed a white job applicant over five more-qualified people of color, as well as directing Times to demote three Black teachers, the lawsuit contends.
- Internal chess competitions were held in Cobble Hill and the Upper West Side and none in Black and brown communities, despite the fact that more than 80 percent of students are of color.
- Success Academy’s chess manager routinely gave Black chess coaches lower evaluations than their white counterparts and denied them promotions.
- The school system furloughed its basketball coaches, who were mostly Black, but didn’t do the same for its white soccer coaches.
- Success Academy demanded a Black man with a Physics Ph.D. first be fingerprinted, submit to an intensive background check and be tested for drugs before speaking at an online chess tournament. Two other white guest speakers did not go through the same process and only one was fingerprinted.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have no knowledge about this lawsuit and the incidents of Success Academy’s implicit racism that the lawsuit charges, but it is an absolute fact that Eva Moskowitz said THIS to John Merrow in a PBS interview:
“I OFTEN have parents say to me my child never punched the teacher. I say, well but you weren’t there.”
Eva Moskowitz was asked about the extraordinarily high suspension rates in some of her elementary schools that have almost no white students in a national broadcast. And her defense was to imply that an extraordinarily high percentage of young elementary school students who won her lottery AND had parents willing to jump through all the hoops to enroll them just happened to act out violently toward their Success Academy teacher. Moskowitz claimed she OFTEN had to explain to their parents that these very young children punched their teacher.
Neither Joseph Belluck nor any of the other white trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute at that time expressed any doubts about the truthfulness of Eva Moskowitz’ justification of her high suspension rates – shockingly the SUNY trustees never seemed to doubt that the population of Success Academy students OFTEN included violent young children whose parents were in denial of their violent natures. Which makes one wonder about those trustees’ own implicit racism.
One other part of this lawsuit referred to an instance of a double standard in how Success Academy parents’ concerns were treated that seemed very similar to a past incident: which parents at Success Academy get heard and which do not.
On page 19, paragraph 86, the complaint mentions that Bedford-Stuyvesant Middle School parents were ignored, while the year before Eva Moskowitz met with parents at Hudson Yards Middle School when they had concerns and complaints about the chess program. It reminded me about how in 2017 Eva Moskowitz met with Hudson Yards Middle School parents who had issues with the first principal there and the way their kids were treated. That principal had been trained at a Harlem Success Academy Middle School and it seemed to me that the overall more affluent parents at Hudson Yards were unhappy with their kids having to endure what the students at the Harlem Middle school did. That principal was replaced.
The lawsuit documents what is most pernicious about implicit racism. That those who are implicitly racist have a double standard that is never called out. It was evident in the way that Nikole Hannah-Jones was virulently attacked by white historians whose own works – and works of historian colleagues they praised – was full of the same supposed “errors” they cited to completely discredit her work.
I have no doubt that Success Academy will cite some reason why the demoted African American staff weren’t up to snuff while never having to address why the staff members who never spoke out didn’t have to meet the same high standards. Lucky for them, education “journalists” are unlikely to care. I recall Elizabeth Green at Chalkbeat writing a long fawning article about Eva Moskowitz without even ONCE questioning Eva Moskowitz’ implicitly racist defense of Success Academy’s extraordinarily high suspension rates of elementary school students. I could only conclude from her article that Elizabeth Green accepted without question that an extraordinarily high number of young Success Academy students were violent and punched their teachers. Why journalists like Elizabeth Green and the white trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute accepted these kinds of implicitly racist innuendo as legitimate explanations was always beyond my understanding.
But I expect that even if every fact in the lawsuit is documented, the trustees and journalists will still believe that the Black chess staff deserved their treatment.
What is the difference between the brutal re-education camps in North Korea and Success Academy?
North Korea’s brutal re-education camps are fenced in like prisons and the inmates are not allowed to go home.
The word has been out for a while now so why is anyone interested in working for SA or sending their kids there?? If no one shows up they’ll have to close. It’s time to let SA, and all charters, die.