Archives for category: Discipline and Suspensions
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Report: Never Say “Please” to Students

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2016 //
46

NPR shared a story about the latest crowd control technique in the classroom: Give orders. Never say “please.”

 
It is called “no-nonsense nurturing,” although it is hard to see the nurture part in this robotic scenario.
This technique is used largely (if not exclusively) in low-income minority schools. As a Vanderbilt professor says in the article, the approach sounds like “colonialism.”

 
Paul Thomas’s blog is subtitled “a pedagogy of kindness.” His posts decry this treatment of students and teachers. Wouldn’t adults want to model the behavior they want students to practice?

 
What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say about “no nonsense nurturing”? What life lessons are the students learning?

Categories Discipline and Suspensions, Education Reform

Mercedes Schneider on That Infamous “Got to Go” List at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2016 //
13

Mercedes Schneider dug into the records of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy in Fort Greene (Brooklyn). This is the school where the principal prepared a “Got to Go” list of the students that would be pushed out one way or another.

 

The school was opened in 2013. Its first principal, Kate Cunningham, had a Teach for America background. She had earned her “master’s degree” at the fake Relay “graduate school of education,” where charter teachers teach other charter teachers and give each other degrees without any reference to scholarship. She ran Success Academy’s special education program, although her resume doesn’t mention any credentials for doing so.

 

She didn’t last long–not even a year.

 

She was succeeded by Candido Brown, who had been with SA since 2009. It was Brown who compiled the “Got to Go” list. As Schneider points out, SA in FG needed to be “turned around” less than two years after it opened. Brown has recently taken a leave of absence.

 

Her post includes the details of a lawsuit filed by parents of some of the children who were pushed out. Their complaint goes into detail about the strict disciplinary policies at Success Academy schools. They are suing the principal, Success Academy Charter Schools, the city Department of Education, and the New York State Education Department.

 

This should be interesting.

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization

Annette Marcus: Why I Stopped Working at Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2015 //
26

This comment was posted today. I don’t usually disclose the names of writers unless they disclose it themselves. I googled the author and she is real.

 

Having worked for Eva from 2006 to 2012* I got to know Paul Fucalaro and saw him in action. I saw him belittle and undercut teachers, and browbeat students with merciless drill. Since Harlem Success was not open in 2002, his methods preceded Eva’s adoption of them. If the Queens School you mention was PS 65, its principal was also brought on board for HSA”s start. Mr. Fucalaro is a large man, not subtle or gentle in his methods, probably significantly scary to young children. Avuncular maybe, but a little sinister too. Early on, ( 2008, 9?) he and I were asked to evaluate a young teacher who was up for re hire. She was one of those young people who genuinely love children and interacted with them intuitively and effectively. She was also knowledgeable in science, the subject she was being hired to teach. We both walked out of our observation agreeing how impressed we were. The next thing I knew, she had been fired. The word in those days when people were let go was that they ” didn’t get the school culture.” We now know that means they wanted to treat children as human beings rather than “test taking machines,” or robots who cannot question, talk, play, laugh, or, God forbid, enjoy learning.
If tests were NOT used as a measure of success, or Success, it is doubtful Eva would have gotten this far. Not until schools, charter or otherwise, are judged by their success as places of learning, creativity and joy, and the scourge of test prep and drill is gone, will real teachers, not taskmasters like Mr. Fucalaro, feel welcome in them.

 
Annette Marcus

 

* I worked on setting up an inquiry based science curriculum for Success Academies. It was fairly free of test prep until 4th grade. When Eva extended HSA into MIddle school and wanted students to take high school regents exams in 6th and 8th grade, I quit.

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Harlem Success Academy, Testing

Paul Fucaloro, Director of Pedagogy At Success Academy Charter Schools, on Children as “Little Test-taking Machines”

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2015 //
58

Since Eva Moskowitz explained in the Wall Street Journal that the iron discipline at her school was devised by a veteran teacher named Paul Fucaloro, I decided to google him.

 

The first thing that popped up was this reference to him in an article about the high test scores of Success Academy charter schools:

 

Because the state’s exams are predictable, they’re deemed easy to game with test prep. But in contrast to their drill-and-kill competition, Moskowitz says her teachers prepped their third-graders a mere ten minutes per day … plus some added time over winter break, she confides upon reflection, when the children had but two days off: Christmas and New Year’s. But the holiday push wasn’t the only extra step that Success took to succeed last year. After some red-flag internal assessments, Paul Fucaloro kept “the bottom 25 percent” an hour past their normal 4:30 p.m. dismissal—four days a week, six weeks before each test. “The real slow ones,” he says, stayed an additional 30 minutes, till six o’clock: a ten-hour-plus day for 8- and 9-year-olds. Meanwhile, much of the class convened on Saturday mornings from September on. Fourth-grader Ashley Wilder thought this “terrible” at first: “I missed Flapjack on the Cartoon Network. But education is more important than sitting back and eating junk food all day.” By working the children off-hours, Moskowitz could boost her numbers without impinging on curricular “specials” like Ashley’s beloved art class.

 

The day before the scheduled math test, the city got socked with eight inches of snow. Of 1,499 schools in the city, 1,498 were closed. But at Harlem Success Academy 1, 50-odd third-graders trudged through 35-mile-per-hour gusts for a four-hour session over Subway sandwiches. As Moskowitz told the Times, “I was ready to come in this morning and crank the heating boilers myself if I had to.”

 

“We have a gap to close, so I want the kids on edge, constantly,” Fucaloro adds. “By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.”

 

 

Then came Juan Gonzalez’s article in 2014 describing Eva’s move from Central Harlem to Wall Street offices, where the rent will be $31 million over a 15-year period. We learn too that Paul’s salary as director of pedagogy jumped from $100,000 to $246,000.

 

Then I read an article about the “miraculous” transformation of an elementary school in Queens, financed by Wall Street hedge fund manager Joel Greenblatt, working with the same Paul Fucaloro; the key to the dramatic rise in test scores was adoption of the scripted Success for All curriculum. That was in 2002. I searched some more and found that on the latest state tests, the same school did not do very well. Despite the hype, it was ranked 20th among 36 schools in the same district in New York City. Virtually 100% of the children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The school is struggling. Greenblatt and Fucaloro have moved on to Success Academy charters.

 

(The original name of the chain, which is a category on the blog, was Harlem Success Academies; the word “Harlem” was dropped as the chain moved into other neighborhoods across the city, like Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, a solid middle-class community.)

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Standardized Testing

Eva Moskowitz: Why Children Must Not Daydream in Class

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2015 //
65

Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Success Academy charter schools, the uber-“No Excuses” chain, explained in the Wall Street Journal why her schools do not tolerate daydreaming in class.

 

Even five-year-olds must learn to sit quietly, “track” the teacher, pay strict attention to the teacher at all times, and follow every rule. We learned from John Merrow’s recent report on PBS that children of five or six may be suspended from school repeatedly for breaking the rules of strict order and obedience.

 

She also makes the claim, off-handedly, that the attrition rates in her schools are lower than those of district schools, but this is doubtful.

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Harlem Success Academy

Pelto Vs. Sowell: Should Schools Exclude Disruptive Students?

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2015 //
118

Here is a debate that is germane to our times.

Recently a video was widely distributed showing a police officer in South Carolina dragging a student out of her chair when she refused to obey orders. This incident, so vividly portrayed, generated much discussion about whether the police officer acted appropriately and whether schools should be patrolled by police.

Then came the heated discussion about suspending kindergarten children for breaking rules. This occurred after John Merrow interviewed charter founder Eva Moskowitz on PBS, and she defended the practice.

Now comes conservative economist Thomas Sowell, who argues in his syndicated column that schools are correct to use whatever discipline is needed to enable other children to learn.

Sowell writes:

“If the critics are right, and getting rid of the influence of uncooperative or disruptive students contributes to better educational results, then the answer is not to prevent charter schools from expelling such students, but to allow other public schools to remove such students, when other students can benefit from getting a better education without them around.

“This is especially important in low-income schools, where education is for many their only chance for a better life.”

Jonathan Pelto takes the opposite view. He argues that it is immoral and unethical for charters to “dump” students who might lower the school’s test scores.

Pelto writes:

“The undeniable truth is that while gobbling up massive amounts of scarce public funds, the vast majority of Charter Schools refuse to accept their fair share of students who need special education services and children who aren’t proficient in the English Language (So-called ELL students.)

“And when “the unwanted” do get into Charter Schools, the companies running the schools use immoral and unethical tactics to push out students that don’t fit their corporate profile.

“No real public school could ever engage in the abusive and unfair dumping practices that have become the norm in the Charter School Industry.

“In Connecticut, a leading example of a push-out strategy was the one utilized by the Achievement First Inc. Charter School chain. (See The “Shocking Numbers Of Kindergarten, First Grade Suspensions” at Achievement First Schools.)”

If charters continue to dump or exclude the students they don’t want, then they should be forbidden from comparing their scores to those of public schools that accept the students they reject.

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Reform

Jeb Bush Supports Corporal Punishment

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2015 //
56

If anyone hit my child, I would have them arrested.

Thanks to reader FLERP! for bringing this to our attention:

From Jeb Bush’s “Profiles in Character.”

“It’s not just our inner city streets that are in dire need of sense of shame. We have also lost our shame in our schools, too. Specifically, there is little shame in poor academic performance or classroom misconduct. We now see many students who do not care if the teacher yells at them or if their test results are less than stellar. In many of Florida’s largest school districts, there is little that the teacher can do to make students feel some sense of shame. In some school districts, such as Walton County, one of the oldest forms of shame, corporal punishment, is alive and well, and despite protests by some parents and Florida’s PTAs, the students have actually found that this doling out of shame is very effective. The students of these schools will tell you, as will anybody who experienced corporal punishment in school, that it is not the brief spanking that hurts, but the accompanying shame. A senior valedictorian of one high school in Walton County told a reporter ‘We feel ashamed when it happens to us, but when you’re in that classroom and you want to learn and somebody else won’t let you learn, well, they are dealt with.’ To date, Walton County has never experienced a shooting in any of its schools.”

So, this is how we solve urban problems: bring back a sense of shame (how?) and whip children. That requires no new taxes. Just a lot of hickory sticks.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Discipline and Suspensions

Myra Blackmon: Zero Tolerance Makes Matters Worse

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2015 //
17

Myra Blackmon writes for Athens Online in Athens, Georgia. This column was posted on Maureen Downey’s “Get Schooled” blog in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Blackmon says that punishment doesn’t work when students lose control and act out.

She writes:

“What works best with these most challenging students is not punishment, but extra support, according to the research. Extra counselors, tutors to help them catch up with their school work and coaching to develop ways to cope with their personal challenges have been shown to make a difference.
With most school guidance counselors expected to support up to 500 students, there is little time to work one-on-one with a troubled student. Growing class sizes make it more difficult for teachers to identify and work with kids who need intervention or extra support.

“As a nation, we are facing a perfect storm created by confluence of three trends, none of which on its own was particularly positive, but which combined generate an explosive atmosphere: zero tolerance, letting rules trump common sense and the militarization of our police forces.
Our communities, and particularly our schools, have gone overboard with zero tolerance policies. A child with a one-inch plastic pistol attached to a backpack zipper gets the same treatment and punishment as one who brings a loaded pistol to school. We all know other instances zero-tolerance has backfired.

“Often, our response to one negative incident is to make a rule that will prevent that same thing from happening again. In a school setting, that trumps a teachers’ judgement, and frequently prescribes a response guaranteed to escalate rather than resolve a situation….

“This over reliance on rules and zero tolerance has also led to the criminalization of what used to be just bad teenage behavior. When I was in high school, every couple of years some idiot would put a cherry bomb in a toilet, or steal a turkey and put it in the school courtyard over a weekend.

“They were caught and punished. They worked to make restitution to the school, or the farmer who was wronged. There were consequences. Most of them learned their lessons and became productive adult citizens. Now our zero tolerance for breaking any rules means that a kid caught doing one stupid thing may have a criminal record. It also takes a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to the discipline of teenagers.

“Finally, much has been written about the militarization of our police forces. Not only are most forces now equipped with far more powerful equipment than is required for ordinary community protection, there are more police officers with combat experience—and the issues that come from that—as a result of our years of war. Of necessity, military training teaches aggressive responses necessary for survival in a combat setting. But it takes more than a few weeks of police training to unlearn those responses, so officers may overreact to situations that could be defused.

“Combine those three, and we have a perfect formula for unnecessary violence in our schools and in our streets.”

Categories Discipline and Suspensions

John Thompson: Do Not Treat Difficult Students Like Criminals

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2015 //
23

Categories Discipline and Suspensions, Education Reform

Norm Scott: Eva Moskowitz as Nurse Ratched?

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2015 //
13

Norm Scott is an education activist and retired teacher who was the cameraman and producer of “The Inconvenient Truth about ‘Waiting for Superman.'” He blogs regularly. In this post, he writes about his personal theory that Eva Moskowitz is the Nurse Ratched of American education.

He writes:

For those not aware, Nurse Ratched, as Wikipedia states, “is the head administrative nurse at… a mental institution where she exercises near-absolute power over the patients’ access to medications, privileges, and basic necessities such as food and toiletries. She capriciously revokes these privileges whenever a patient displeases her. Her superiors turn blind eyes because she maintains order, keeping the patients from acting out, either through antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs or her own brand of psychotherapy, which consists mostly of humiliating patients into doing her bidding.” Nurse Ratched engages in an epic battle with rebel inmate Randall McMurphy (Jack Nicholson in the movie). In polls, Nurse Ratched came in 2nd to The Wicked Witch of the North as the most evil female character in movie history.

I saw a Halloween photo of a teacher dressed as the Wicked Witch of the North wearing an Eva Moskowitz mask. This was not an exaggeration. People have termed conditions for some children at Eva’s schools as verging on child abuse.

Moskowitz has staunchly denies that students were pushed out, counseled out, or pressured to withdraw.

But Scott adds this point:

A comment left on my blog by an anonymous parent stated: “They decided to start with younger and younger kids, so the communication of abuses would be harder to decipher. They decided to tell the parents one thing, and do another to the child. I once stood in the hall and listened to a dean yell so violently at a student (behind closed doors) that I couldn’t even discern the infraction. The child was thoroughly convinced he had committed a sin so unspeakable based on her threats, that he was too afraid to report the incident to his parents, hoping that she wouldn’t either. When you get detention for squeaking the rubber soles on the floor, or coughing. or sneezing in a disingenuous way; when you are taught that asking for help when you are told not to talk, is a level 4 “disrespect of a teacher” your world begins to change. Twilight Zone comes to mind.”

Twilight Zone or asylum?

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, Harlem Success Academy
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