Gary Rubinstein has been following the evolution of Success Academy in New York City for years. it’s the largest charter chain in the state, with the highest test scores. But Gary has documented its high attrition rates and teacher turnover. Others have written about its penchant for pushing out students it doesn’t want. Success Academy is often held up as a model for the accomplishments of charter schools. But other charter chains are dropping the harsh “no excuses” discipline of SA.
In this post, Gary writes about another SA practice that is problematic.
He writes:
About four months ago I received an unusual DM in my Twitter account. Though over the years several different Success Academy parents have reached out to me, this was from someone who claimed to be either a current employee or a former employee. They used an anonymous name and to this day, I have no idea who this person is. But they reached out to me because they had a story to tell and felt, I guess, that I was the best person to tell it to.
Over the months they have provided various internal Success Academy documents, screen shots from internal Success Academy message boards, and so much information about what is truly going on at Success Academy, that I have no reason to doubt their authenticity.
Much of the information was about chaos that is going on behind the scenes at Success Academy. Like how they are struggling to convince elementary students to remain at Success Academy for middle school and to convince middle school students to remain at Success Academy for high school. I even got to see an internal document with talking points to tell families in order to convince they to stay.
The document had the title “Grade 4 Teacher Selling & Persuading Talking Points” and began with the words: “Framing: Unfortunately, over the years we see that after all the hard work of our elementary school teachers and schools, some of our 4th graders leave us and end up attending failing middle schools. We cannot let this happen. And so for the first time really we want to invest our scholars in the “why” behind SA’s magical middle schools. We want our scholars and parents to make truly informed choices about the next leg of their educational journey.”
I had already known based on enrollment numbers that Success Academy was having trouble getting families to continue to trust them after all the years of shady practices, but my source says that things are very dire, especially in the Brooklyn high school, which nearly had to be shut down for low enrollment.
I got a lot of other good insider information from my source. Their description of the morale of the staffs at several of the schools and the extreme turnover definitely made me feel bad for the teachers there but even worse for the students who have to endure such instability. The picture was worse than I had expected. But still I didn’t get what I considered to be a ‘smoking gun’ — something that the school was doing that was illegal.
A topic that this insider kept returning to was something that, at first, I didn’t have much interest in. It is well known that Success Academy used to not have a very high percent of students requiring special education services. My sense was that Success Academy did not want many students requiring special education services because those students would require attention which could take away resources from their test prep gaming system. But my insider often returned to something that really seemed to bother them, and it is about the way that Success Academy identifies students for special education services. The program is called SPRINT.
![](https://garyrubinstein.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/screen-shot-2024-05-13-at-11.18.42-pm.png?w=2044)
The way most schools work, a special education referral is initiated by a parent or sometimes a teacher in consultation with a parent and the school administration which might include guidance counselors and social workers will start the process. As a parent of a student who was diagnosed with various learning issues, I know that this is a very difficult time for a parent when they learn that their child qualifies for special education services.
But the way it works at Success Academy is unlike anything I’ve ever heard of at any school before. And according to the insider, many people who work for SPRINT or who used to work for SPRINT feel that they are working for a corrupt division of a corrupt organization. Whether what the SPRINT team is doing is illegal or just immoral or neither will be up to state investigators to decide if they ever have the desire to check into this, but this is the little that I understand about it.
According to my insider, the SPRINT staff are given quotas of special education referrals that they have to meet each week. It is something like five referrals per week. I don’t have all the details, but this is a big numbers game where referrals are driven by these quotas. If this is true and this team is pressured to find students to refer, this would mean that some students and their families go through the arduous referral process unnecessarily.
I asked the insider why would Success Academy want to inflate their special education numbers. The insider wasn’t sure about the motive. They felt it might have had to do with finances as having more special education students enables them to hire more teachers for ICT classes. But they weren’t certain about the motive, just the fact that special education referrals are done to fulfill quotas and not driven by what parents or teachers are noticing.
I asked the insider what the harm is from over referring for evaluations. Isn’t it better to have too many referrals and some students are denied services than to have too few and have students who would qualify but who never get evaluated? The source admitted that it is hard to pinpoint exactly what the malicious intent is but made it seem like this whole SPRINT quota system was very shady. Like they were gaming the system to get some students to qualify for services even if they really didn’t need them. But even if getting supports for student who might not need, the issue is that Success Academy seems to be doing this from a business point of view and not to truly help struggling students.
I know all this is kind of vague and my insider is going to wonder why I didn’t include more of the specific details of the color coding for the different levels of referrals. But they made it clear that to meet these quotas the staffers on the SPRINT team have to be very aggressive. In order for a team to make five referrals a week, they have to hound the families and if the families are resistant they have to step up the pressure. The insider even says they were encouraged once to call ACS on a family that would not agree to go through the referral process.
For sure there is a lot more detail to be filled in on this story. If you are working for SPRINT right now and are having trouble sleeping at night because of it, feel free to reach out to me, I can help you out.
Here is a post on an internal Success Academy message board from an actual employee:
![](https://garyrubinstein.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/screen-shot-2024-05-13-at-11.34.11-pm.png)
Could it be that success academy wants to show that it doesn’t exclude special ed students by identifying non-special needs students as special ed?
A house built on a faulty foundation will crack and eventually crumble. Success Academy’s model for financial success has always depended on increasing the number of schools and revenue. Eva has saturated the NYC market and is looking for ways to increase revenue, IMO. It is harder to attract students when the formula for so-called success is gaming the system. It is likely that the Sprint quota system is a way to classify more students to access more revenue and IDEA funds.
According to the Empire Center which is operated by the right leaning Manhattan Institute, New York leads the nation in number of special education students including those with costly private placements. Of course, their solution is a pay for success scheme. While I disagree that pay for success is a viable solution, the statistics listed indicate that New York has a tendency to over classify students. https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/perverse-incentives-high-costs-and-poor-outcomes/
From a former Sprint specialist employee, less than a year (Glassdoor): “The position itself was a mess. The management(s) of Special Education lacked organization and respect for the individuals they were training. Training is an entire day (which okay whatever) but they would stuff so much training information in our head that it felt overwhelming. It was a position people constantly went in and out of. You’re better off becoming a teacher if you decide to work there, but even then their workload seems exhausting.” Clearly, this model of SPED recruitment doesn’t exist to benefit kids.
The whole notion of a quota system for classification of students is highly suspect. Classification should be determined by professionals.
Here’s more. It’s about the funding. The more referrals they get, the more $$$. This person names a Mr. Morris at Success Academy that was part of this whole referral scheme. The poster was not able to meet his/her targets and was fired. “I would go to Network training and they would talk about how bad teachers and parents are behind their backs. But then tell us we don’t care about the parents when we don’t refer 5 kiddos a week as they like to say. Yes, refer 5 kids a week!! This means you essentially want every kid under Special Education because the more kids the more funding. Mrs. B who is currently the stand in SL until April told us if we can’t reach a parent after 2 calls, the protocol should be to call CPS. They are money-hungry and will find a way to get you out if you are unwilling to do whatever it takes to grab referrals. If you have morals or integrity this job will be hard for you. Inside conversations with other co-workers say the same thing I’m writing in private conversations. When we didn’t hit our numbers a senior specialist named Mr. Morris came in to help our school he was extremely rude to us but did help a bit, but was so result driven he disrespected your time and felt ok to speak with you however he wants if you failed to meet expectations.”
Diane — here’s an article that everyone should read because it’s a national problem affecting public schools in every state:
“Can a billionaire make North Carolina’s public schools poor?” https://ncnewsline.com/2024/05/20/can-a-billionaire-make-north-carolinas-public-schools-poor/
ROBERTS COURT INFAMY:
Today’s Roberts Court will live in the same odious infamy as the Taney Court whose 1857 Dred Scott ruling declared that human beings are mere property, which lit the fuse to the ruinous Civil War from which America has yet to recover. In its 2010 Citizens United ruling, the infamous odious Roberts Court ruled that mere property is equal to a human being, leading to corporations being given the “human right” to pour unlimited dollars into America’s political system, putting government up for sale to the highest bidder and corrupting the system to the extent that our nation has become an oligarchy.
After researching more than 20 years of government policy, Princeton University researcher Martin Gilens and Northwestern University researcher Benjamin Page documented that the U.S. is no longer a representative republic because the government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by the rich and powerful. The researchers analyzed 1,800 U.S. policies enacted over a period of two decades and compared the laws and regulations that were passed to those favored by average Americans to those favored by wealthy Americans and corporations, and here’s what the research revealed: “EVEN WHEN A MAJORITY OF CITIZENS DISAGREES WITH ECONOMIC ELITES OR WITH ORGANIZED SPECIAL INTERESTS, ORDINARY CITIZENS GENERALLY LOSE.”
Today, America has the best government that money can buy and has become an oligarchy, serving the interests of corporations and billionaires…thanks to the infamous, odious Roberts Court.
We are a kleptocratic oligarchy here in the Land of the Fee and Home of the Knave. And just now people are waking up to this? This happened long before CU, but has increased dramatically/rapidly after CU.
LOL. Perfect
“Land of the Fee and Home of the Knave.”
HAAA! someone has stolen my sense of humor!
Privatization is extractive. We’ve been fed a pack of lies about how more efficient and effective the private sector is. When health and well-being are involved, privatization is predatory. We’ve seen it in private prisons, nursing homes, health care, youth facilities where profit always takes priority over people. We need to defend our socialized services, and we need invest in them. Private companies are unqualified to provide certain professional services, and they ultimately seek to fleece the tax payers.
We have the worst healthcare outcomes in the OECD but pay twice the OECD average. Why? Private healthcare and healthcare insurance that extracts half of our healthcare dollar for waste and profits.
We waste tons of public money on unscrupulous military contractors, but it is rarely scrutinized. My husband used to do taxes for them. I am happy to pay taxes, but it is wrong to make the public to pay for corrupt privatized profit.
I read recently that the VA is farming out PTSD decisions to a for profit private sector company that may be incompetent or …
How the VA Fails Veterans on Mental Health — ProPublica
Warren Calls Out Ineffectiveness of VA’s Privatized Disability Rating Exams, Pushes for Review of Private Contractors’ Service Quality | U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (senate.gov)
Reports of Mediocre Disability Exams by VA Contractors Prompts Senator’s Demand for Answers | Military.com
I ended up dropping out of one-on-one mental health care through the VA (not private shrinks) because I ended up not trusting most of them.
The one I have now is in private practice and she was referred to me by another combat vet who served in the Marines four years and the Special Forces for nine.
At our last hour-long meetup, I brought this issue up and Dr. G (what us vets call her) said,
Yes, she sees this problem a lot with the vets that end up coming to her. To correct the problem requires a lot of documentation and patience. (I don’t remember her exact words so no quotation marks)
Still, compared to the private, insurance-controlled health care I had when I was a teacher, I prefer the VA.
The VA medical system isn’t perfect but there is no insurance company between the patent and the medical care.
The goal is to shift public funds into private pockets and squeeze the golden goose dry. That is what is happening with Medicare Advantage. Once public money becomes the property of profiteers, it becomes unaccountable, and they invent another embellished scheme to keep public dollars flowing in their direction. Disgusting! Wake up politicians. You are supposed to be stewards of the public trust.
We don’t have “healthcare”….we have sick care! Sick care which leads to a mostly Pharmaceutical “fix” which really doesn’t fix and then leads to more pharmaceuticals.
If anyone needs clear proof of why American-style Capitalism does not work, he or she need look no further than our sickcare system. It’s a horror, but bizarrely, millions of Americans think it the best in the world.
And they continue thinking that until someone in the family develops a catastrophic illness or they get old and don’t have their company insurance anymore.
It gets better. They are essentially forcing parents to get IEPS if their test scores aren’t high enough. Wow. “if you do not get an IEP for children who are failing your score goes down. Mind you, kids with IEPs already are ALSO failing…along with other kids with lots of absences, kids who don’t have support perhaps to do the hours of homework at home, etc. All of this to say..if you truly understand the need for special services and what constitutes the need for something so LEGALLY BOUND (don’t forget these are legal documents but not that SA cares because of course they have well paid legal counsel to defend them!) if you understand that failing at this school means failing assignments that are created by god knows who at the elusive network office, you know that this does not EQUATE TO A DISABILITY.”
Let’s face it. The privatization of public education is a way to access public money to generate profit. This particular scheme is reprehensible. Classification is a legal designation that will follow young people for their entire lives. It is intended for those that actually need it. False classifications many keep young people from becoming pilots, air traffic comptrollers, joining the military and other career options. These actions may have long range consequences. Those that need the service should be able to get it, but classification should not be a money making scheme.
Sounds to me as though a lot of parents are going to have a lot of reason to bring lawsuits.
So, in summary, here’s the playbook of Success Academy’s SPED scheme: 1) Come up with SPED quotas 2) get extra $$$ for those quotas, 3) force families to SPED up or leave and 3) likely pull those newly referred SPED kids from testing, thus eliminating low-testers. New York has opt-out laws. It’s the secret sauce of the new brand of “success” at SA.
Sounds right
You have aptly described the whole immoral process of hoodwinking vulnerable children and their families so that corporate America can profit, and SA can continue to have highly curated test takers. When is the FBI going to raid them?
Call the FBI with your reasons for them to start an investigation.
The irony is that they then pressure the families of SPED students to leave SA if their state test scores are low. So my question is about why they would have a quota and then turn around to dump the kids down the road?
Some years ago, it was often said that a local school system over-identified students as Special ed in order to get higher funding from the state. Must be some gamut. Who said: Follow the money?
In the NYC suburbs where the schools are competitive, some parents hound administrators to try to get classification or 504 designation so their child would be entitled to extra time or other testing modifications. This would not be a factor if we did not have punitive, high stakes testing.
I had a few parents who did precisely that. Working the angles.
It doesn’t just happen in NYC. It happens everywhere. The rise in ADD/ADHD diagnoses and the pharmaceuticals that follow is the biggest indication that the entire system is being horribly gamed. Boys especially, need to be run like greyhounds in order for them to learn (or want to learn), but yet we take away recess and PE and then expect them to sit for hours at a desk doing common bore drivel. None of this will go away until the testing and bad curriculum gets tossed into the dumpster of bad ideas. I can’t believe that parents KNOWINGLY go along with this (my SIL is one of them!) and actually want their kids medicated so that they can “concentrate” for hours at a time ……it’s SICK! And these (mostly boys) report feeling numb and disconnected while on these meds. We live in a very SICK society that we would do this to children!