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Staff at Success Academy Complain about Eva Moskowitz’s Insensitivity to Racism

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2020 //
76

A teacher at the acclaimed Success Academy charter chain in New York City publicly complained about Eva Moskowitz’s silence after the murder of George Floyd.

Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat reported:

Four days after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, a Brooklyn Success Academy teacher emailed her network’s CEO, one of the nation’s most prominent charter school leaders, asking why she hadn’t said anything publicly.

“I am deeply hurt and shocked by your lack of words on the topic that affects so many of your employees, children and families in communities that you serve,” first-year Success Academy Flatbush teacher Fabiola St Hilaire wrote to Eva Moskowitz. “All of your black employees are paying attention to your silence.”

Moskowitz responded about an hour later, thanking St Hilaire for reaching out but also brushing her aside. “I actually opined on this subject early this am. Please take a look,” Moskowitz wrote, referring to a tweet sent the same morning. “I hope you can understand that running remote learning in the middle of a world economic shutdown has kept me focused on [Success Academy’s] immediate needs.”

Upset by the response, St Hilaire posted the email exchange on social media, thrusting New York City’s largest charter network into a wider debate about institutional racism. Some current and former employees were angry that Moskowitz seemed to dismiss the concerns of an educator of color as well as the broader movement to reckon with structural racism in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing.

Eva Moskowitz quickly backtracked when she saw the reaction among her staff to her silence and her brusque dismissal of St Hilaire’s criticism. Moskowitz was interviewed by Donald Trump as a contender for his Secretary of Education. She supported his selection of Betsy DeVos.

The exchange between Moskowitz and a first-year teacher set off a debate about institutional racism in Success Academy and its harsh no-excuses methods. Those draconian disciplinary methods were defended by Robert Pondiscio of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who is white, and by Moskowitz, who is also white. Black children need harsh discipline, they argued.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline, Harlem Success Academy, Racism

Study: Stop-and-Frisk Increased Dropout Rate

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2020 //
37

Matt Barnum and Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat report that a new study of Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy found that it increased the dropout rate, especially for black boys, who were most likely to be stopped and frisked.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Discipline, Education Reform

John Thompson: How Robert Pondiscio’s Book About the Success Academy Charter Chain Reflects Our Edu-Political Culture

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2020 //
14

John Thompson used to be a friend of Robert Pondiscio, who is now a vice-president at the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute. A decade ago, Robert was a good friend of mine; he was one of the early readers of Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. At the time (2010), Robert and I agreed on the importance of public schools and the irrelevance of charters. I recall the publication party at the home of then-NYC Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, where I told Robert how much I appreciated his help and his ideas, which were consonant with mine. I saw him as a professional ally. But since then, Robert has changed his views (as I changed mine in 2008-2010). I never criticize anyone for changing their views, even when I disagree with them.

John Thompson often posts here about what is happening in Oklahoma, where he was a teacher for many years. He also has useful insights on national topics, and I welcome his contributions to our discussion about providing “better education for all,” not just for the strivers or the gifted. The discussion below bears on an extended exchange that I had recently with a Wall Street guy, who has given six-figure donations to Success Academy. He insists that Eva Moskowitz has “cracked the code” and knows how to educate all children, if only the powers-that-be would copy her model. He insists that “every child” would have high scores if they all attended Success Academy charters. Pondiscio helpfully debunks that idea, although nothing I was able to say could change the belief of this donor. John makes the point below that many educators were offended by the claim that Success Academy was for all children; Robert explains that the chain cherry-picks the parents, not the students. I doubt many people would object to Eva or her chain if they openly admitted what Robert demonstrates in his book. Eva’s charters are not for all kids.

John Thompson writes:

This isn’t a review of Robert Pondiscio’s How the Other Half Learns but a review of our edu-political culture using the book review process to understand why we still have to fight education “Disruptors.” A decade ago, Robert and I were long-distance friends, continually sharing thoughts on how we should resist corporate reformers like Michelle Rhee and test-driven accountability, while improving schools like Robert’s in the South Bronx and my mid-high, which was the lowest performing secondary school in Oklahoma.

Now I’m trying to make sense of the aftershocks from the reformers’ previous political victories and the education debacles they prompted.

Being a former elementary teacher, Robert focused much more on reading instruction and curriculum. We agreed on the need to bring history, science, arts, and music back into the classroom, while opposing high stakes testing. Robert was more confrontational. He characterized Rhee’s value-added teacher evaluation system, IMPACT, as “pure lunacy,” and coined the phrase, “Erase To The Top.”

http://www.livingindialogue.com/5801-2/
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/03/30/the-best-posts-articles-about-erase-to-the-top/

Even after we grew apart, Robert wrote, “It’s long past time to acknowledge that reading tests—especially tests with stakes for individual teachers attached to them—do more harm than good.” Moreover, he said, “if your goal is to boost test scores now, you’re incentivizing bad teaching by encouraging a vacuous skills-and-strategies approach to reading, conspiring against patient investment in knowledge and vocabulary, and sacrificing vast amounts of class time for test prep.”

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/10/26/obamas-school-testing-talk-is-meaningless
https://www.the74million.org/article/pondiscio-its-time-to-end-the-testing-culture-in-americas-schools-and-start-playing-the-long-game-to-produce-better-life-outcomes-for-at-risk-kids/

Conversely, I took an embarrassingly long time before realizing that the Billionaires Boys Club wasn’t going to listen to classroom teachers.

I’ve been intrigued by Pondiscio’s recent writings, especially his critiques of the reforms that failed in the ways that we and so many others predicted. “Ed reform circa 2010 was riding a cresting wave, but in retrospect it was the high-water mark,” Pondiscio explained. And, ten years later, most of the reform victory has been “reversed or is in retreat. Big reform is dead.”

Pondiscio’s own review of his book foreshadowed ambivalence, at least in terms of what it would take to improve the highest challenge schools, “Regardless of where you stand on charter schools, choice, ed reform or education at large, you’re going to be disappointed: My book does not support your preferred views or narrative.” He concluded:

We have become overdependent on pleasing or expedient narratives that we know aren’t quite right, and we have become tribal in our devotions to them. It’s going to be painful and unpleasant, but it’s time to let them go.

So that’s my new book [wrote Pondiscio]. I hope you hate it

Fortunately, Gary Rubinstein has already written a definitive review of How the Other Half Learns. His title, “How the Other 1/300 Learn” spoofs the claim, which once was presented with a straight face, that Eva Moskowitz and company show what could have been accomplished had teachers and unions embraced “No Excuses!,” accountability, and competition.

Rubinstein focuses on the narratives that “will be devastating to the reputation of Success Academy,” concluding “if it is true that reformers do really like this book and are not just pretending to then Pondiscio has really accomplished quite a feat.”

Rubinstein stresses Pondiscio’s statements, such as the following, which implicitly explain why Success Academy isn’t scalable. Pondiscio wrote:

“•       The common criticism leveled at Moskowitz and her schools is that they cherry pick students, … This misses the mark entirely. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents.”
“•       Is Success Academy a proof point that the reform playbook works and that professionally run schools with high standards and even higher expectations can set any child on a path out of poverty?  Or does the rarity of Moskowitz’s accomplishment suggest that however nobly intended it might have been, the reform impulse was doomed from the start?
“•       It would be dishonest to pretend that Success Academy is not a self-selection engine that allows engaged families who happen to be poor or of modest means to get the best available education for their children.”

And that third paragraph brings me back to my review of the process of reviewing How the Other Half Learns. The second half of Pondiscio’s paragraph illustrates the two most salient features of his narrative.

Pondiscio then writes:

“It is equally dishonest and close to cruel to deny such families the ability to self-select in the name of “equity.” Indeed, it is nearly perverse to deny low-income families of color — and only those families — the ability to choose schools that allow their children to thrive, advance, and enjoy the full measure of their abilities.”

First, Pondiscio repeatedly pretends that the issue is how to educate the relatively small number of students who have benefited from Moskowitz et al’s charters. This would be valid if her enemies were elite schools that don’t properly serve poor children. But if that was her obsession, as opposed to a scorched earth crusade against traditional public schools, would educators and patrons have felt the need to resist her agenda?

Second, and most importantly for his book, it created another opportunity for Pondiscio to attack the integrity of his opponents as “dishonest and close to cruel,” and “nearly perverse.”

The following are illustrations of the pattern which reoccurs when Pondiscio is citing journalists’ criticisms of Success Academies:

•       Page 259 is a part of perhaps the best reporting in How the Other Half Learns where Pondiscio digs deeper into the exclusionary nature of Success Academy’s admissions lottery. As Rubinstein explains, the truth is even more upsetting than the story Pondiscio recounts. His narrative, however, creates the opportunity for attacking the New York Times’ Kate Taylor for her “armor-piercing articles” that “have frightened prospective parents away.”   

•       On page 53, Pondiscio characterized “no-excuses” as “an optimistic belief that the root cause of educational failure and black-white achievement gaps was adult failures – not poverty …” Two pages later, rather than acknowledge he had just made the argument against the scalability of the reformers’ solutions,  Pondiscio shifts gears and blames educators for “no excuses” going from a “rallying cry to a curse,” after a “sustained attack from political progressives, teachers’ unions, and anti-reform activists,” led by Diane Ravitch, their “Joan of Arc figure.”

•       On page 88, closing the chapter on the hugely important New York Times report on a first grade teacher ripping up a student’s work and “exiling her from the classroom rug,” Pondiscio cites the problem caused by teacher turnover. But, he then explains,  but doesn’t analyze, how Moskowitz suddenly realizes that the problem isn’t overworked and overstressed, inexperienced teachers, but “leadership via BFF.” The problem is that young teacher leaders want to be liked, so they aren’t tough enough!

•       On page 152, Moskowitz acknowledges to charter management organization leaders that she has no idea how to turn around high schools. This previews Success’ failure to run a high school, as well as the admission that “no-excuses” schools haven’t shown much of an ability to produce longterm, life-changing gains. This was an opportunity for Pondiscio to ask for evidence that their behaviorist methods are sustainable, as well as scalable. Instead, he quotes Moskowitz’ description of Success Academy as a “Catholic school on the outside, Bank Street [progressive school] on the inside.” That opens another door to Pondiscio’s attacks on opponents who have “promiscuously used, impressionistically defined” and “fetishized” progressivism.

•       On page 159, just after reporting on the beginning of the high school, Pondiscio seems to inexplicably change the subject to the unsupported claim that “students faced an intense scrutiny from critics.” This weird assertion made sense only after he identified the supposed lead critic – Diane Ravitch, “the longtime ed reform critic and fierce Moskowitz critic.”

•       On 179, Pondiscio addresses the New York Times description of “students in the third grade and above wetting themselves during practice tests.” Pondiscio’s reply is that it is “inaccurate” to blame “’drop everything and test-prep’” because there is “an overtone of test prep” throughout the year!?!?

•       He then changes the subject to the “opt out” movement which is “particularly strident.” And on page 180 Pondiscio seems to defend Success Academy’s test-prep as a part of a new normal which isn’t going away, “”No person in the room … likely ever spent a day in school, as an administrator, a teacher, or even a student, that was not dominated by the imperatives of standardized testing.”

And that, of course, is the real reason why educators across the nation fought back against Moskowitz. As another review of the Other Half by reform-sympathizer Natalie Wexler says, the book’s title is misleading because, “we’re not talking about the other ‘half,’ we’re talking about the other 1%—or less.” Teachers wouldn’t have had to counter-attack if the issue was merely “How the Other One Percent Learns – to Take Tests.”

As Pondiscio used to know, the problem wasn’t just tests; it was the high stakes they were tied to. The problem we fought wasn’t just tests; it’s the teach-to-the-test culture that reform imposed on everyone, whether they chose it or not.  We didn’t resist charters just because we opposed competition; it was the resulting toxic culture of competition. The damage was then multiplied as test scores became the ammunition for this battle for the survival of public schools. The biggest problem wasn’t just the false statements claiming that “no-excuses” charters served the same poor students who attended the highest-poverty schools. It was the well-funded and vicious propaganda campaign using such falsehoods to demonize teachers.

After a decade of failure, corporate reformers have backed off from the “bad teacher” meme. But Pondiscio now exemplifies the quieter ways their anger is revealed. Yes, reformers, we have a problem, he says. Then Pondiscio repeatedly spins and blames the problem on those of us who resisted their failed agenda. His theme is, yes, Success Academy failed its student, Adama. But you defenders of the status quo failed my student, Tiffany, and she might have benefited by being in the 1 percent.

I’m afraid this pattern in his (and his colleagues’) writing shows that Pondiscio is just one of many defeated Disruptors who admit that something went wrong but who habitually change the subject by responding to evidence-based criticism with the children’s defensive meme, “I know you are, but what am I?”

Finally, here’s why I approach Pondiscio’s book as an opportunity for contemplation, not just an education case study. I admit to mistakes rooted in my congenital optimism. I’d thought, however, I’d learned my lesson when realizing why corporate reformers were not about to listen to people who saw the world differently. I belatedly acknowledged that the movement was about more than accountability-driven, competition-driven policy; it was a part of a larger privatization movement. I’m finally understanding how corporate reformers, who couldn’t face facts, became Disruptors.

In contrast to Pondiscio, who also sought more pragmatism among traditional school system leaders, as well as a serious effort to build safe and orderly school cultures, I continued to work within the system. Today, after defeating so many of the worst data-driven experiments, its frustrating when traditional public schools remain terrified that a new Goliath will emerge, again attacking the professional autonomy of educators.

The Disruptors’ politics of destruction may have been beaten back. But Pondiscio illustrates the politics of resentment which remains threatening. How the Other Half Learns provides more evidence how and why their experiment failed. It also personifies their anger, and how they still blame teachers (and Diane Ravitch) for their theories’ defeat.         

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization, Testing

ProPublica Report on Seclusion of Children Gets Results!

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2019 //
5

The expose published by ProPublic and the Chicago Tribune about the isolation of students with disabilities in locked “quiet rooms” got immediate response from the Governor and the State Board of Education in Illinois.

This is known as seclusion.

The governor said he will introduce legislation to end and prohibit the barbaric practice. 

The Illinois State Board of Education announced Wednesday that it will take emergency action to end the seclusion of children alone behind locked doors at schools, saying the practice has been “misused and overused to a shocking extent.”

Responding to a Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois investigation published a day earlier, Gov. J.B. Pritzker called the isolation of children in the state “appalling” and said he directed the education agency to make emergency rules for schools. He will then work with legislators to make the rules into law, he said.

The rules would not totally ban the use of timeout rooms but would end isolation. The state board said children would be put in timeout only if a “trained adult” is in the room and the door is unlocked. Timeouts also must be used only for therapeutic reasons or to protect the safety of students and staff, the board said.

The board also said it will begin collecting data on all instances of timeout and physical restraint in Illinois schools and will investigate “known cases of isolated seclusion to take appropriate disciplinary and corrective action.” State officials had not previously monitored these practices.

H/T to Laura Chapman for alerting me to this important news.

Categories Cruelty, Discipline, Illinois, Special Education

The Shame of Illinois: “Seclusion Rooms” Where Children Are Locked Up

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2019 //
5

ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune collaborated to produce this shocking investigation of the mistreatment and abuse of students with special needs in Illinois.

This is a story of shameful cruelty to children. Read it and weep.

THE SPACES have gentle names: The reflection room. The cool-down room. The calming room. The quiet room.

But shut inside them, in public schools across the state, children as young as 5 wail for their parents, scream in anger and beg to be let out.

The students, most of them with disabilities, scratch the windows or tear at the padded walls. They throw their bodies against locked doors. They wet their pants. Some children spend hours inside these rooms, missing class time. Through it all, adults stay outside the door, writing down what happens.

In Illinois, it’s legal for school employees to seclude students in a separate space — to put them in “isolated timeout” — if the students pose a safety threat to themselves or others. Yet every school day, workers isolate children for reasons that violate the law, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica Illinois has found.

Children were sent to isolation after refusing to do classwork, for swearing, for spilling milk, for throwing Legos. School employees use isolated timeout for convenience, out of frustration or as punishment, sometimes referring to it as “serving time.”

For this investigation, ProPublica Illinois and the Tribune obtained and analyzed thousands of detailed records that state law requires schools to create whenever they use seclusion. The resulting database documents more than 20,000 incidents from the 2017-18 school year and through early December 2018.

Of those, about 12,000 included enough detail to determine what prompted the timeout. In more than a third of these incidents, school workers documented no safety reason for the seclusion…

No federal law regulates the use of seclusion, and Congress has debated off and on for years whether that should change. Last fall, a bill was introduced that would prohibit seclusion in public schools that receive federal funding. A U.S. House committee held a hearing on the issue in January, but there’s been no movement since.

Nineteen states prohibit secluding children in locked rooms; four of them ban any type of seclusion. But Illinois continues to rely on the practice. The last time the U.S. Department of Education calculated state-level seclusion totals, in 2013-14, Illinois ranked No. 1.

The story contains stories of children locked in small rooms, where they urinate on themselves, bang on the walls and doors and scratch them. Some of the children have serious mental or emotional disorders. Some are disobedient. None deserves to be treated with such inhumanity. Experts say that punitive “seclusion” is not only cruel but ineffective.

After reading this report, I asked ProPublica where seclusion has been banned.

This was the answer:

These four states ban any type of seclusion (Georgia, Hawaii, Nevada, Pennsylvania) and that these are the remaining 15 you’re looking for: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming (with varying levels of exceptions).

Thanks to ProPublica for shedding light on this horrible practice.

 

Categories Cruelty, Discipline, Education Reform, Illinois, Special Education

Rhode Island: A Frightening Tour of an Achievement First Charter School

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2019 //
43

State Senator Sam Bell has been concerned about the punitive discipline in the no-excuses Achievement First charter schools, which is primed for a major expansion in Providence.

He toured an Achievement First charter school, and his worst fears were confirmed.

Please read the entire post, which I condensed.

Senator Bell writes:

On Friday, October 18, I toured Achievement First. It was a chilling experience, an experience I’m still processing.

They wouldn’t let me take any pictures or video.

The start time was 7am. I got there at 6:59. I expected a mob of kids rushing to class, but they must have all already gotten there early. I only saw one or two kids, each of them sprinting. Kids, apparently, fear being late so much that they really aren’t late, despite being forced to wake up at what is an ungodly hour for a middle schooler. My guide, though, was late.

As we started the tour, I noticed black and yellow lines taped on the floor of the hallway. The children, my guide informed me, are all required to walk only on these lines. Several times, I saw adults chastising students for not walking on the lines. Quite literally, students were not allowed to set a toe out of line.

The bathroom doors, I noticed, were all propped open. I asked if it was for cleaning. No, I was told, it was so that the kids in the bathrooms could be watched. They didn’t prop open the toilet stalls, but it still struck me as intensely creepy, a twisted invasion of privacy.

In the classrooms, it was constant discipline. The teachers spewed a stream of punishments, and I often couldn’t even see what the students were doing wrong. The students kept losing points or getting yelled at for things like not looking attentive enough. I can’t imagine what it would be like as a child to be berated constantly, to be forced to never even think of challenging authority. It was, of course, overwhelmingly white teachers berating students of color. (The walls, of course, were plastered with slogans of racial justice.)

The education, if you can call it that, was the most shameless teaching to the test. I was shown what I think was a social studies class, where the children were being drilled to respond to a passage about Rosa Parks like it was a passage on a RICAS ELA test. They were being asked to interpret the passage, not to think critically about what Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott meant for American history and what we can still learn from that act of heroism today.

I was shown another class, where the students were just straight-up practicing to respond to what looked to me exactly like a RICAS short answer question. The teacher went around looking over the kids’ shoulders, basically praising them for checking the boxes of a RICAS grading rubric. (The RICAS grading rubric primarily emphasizes a rigid organizational structure with a single central idea and lots of specific pieces of evidence to support it.) This was far and away the best of the classrooms I saw. It was teaching to the test, yes, but with a teacher who at least showed compassion to the students and focused on building them up instead of tearing them down.

I also saw something they call “IR.” I think it stands for “individual reading,” but I’m not sure. Basically, it was kids sitting quietly and working through exercises in a book. It was the kind of rigid, formulaic make-work that drills kids for taking tests well but does not teach creativity, critical thinking, or passion for learning. It also looked miserable.

Not once did I see a lecture, a group discussion, or a seminar…

And this was what they chose to show me, this was what they showed a critic, this was a hand-picked tour to promote what they do. Although I asked to see one of the computerized teaching classrooms, my guide was unwilling to show me one. I did see posters telling kids to put on their noise-cancelling headphones, open their computer, be quiet, and work through their exercises. To her credit, my guide did basically admit to me that the computerized teaching system was kind of a mess. She said that kids are allowed to opt out of it to do book exercises instead and are no longer forced to wear noise-cancelling headphones if they don’t want to.

I did see several classrooms where the students were taking quizzes on laptops. This of course would be great preparation for taking a computerized standardized test. It struck me how often I saw this, and I wondered how much of the time must have been taken up by practicing taking tests.

Despite the policing of facial expressions, I saw some of the most jarringly sad faces I have seen in a very long time. I remember the look on one young woman’s face. She had been sent out of the classroom. I’m not sure why. I think she was a rebel. She was one of the very few I ever saw not walk on the lines taped into the floor. Her face was contorted into a shockingly intense frown. It almost looked like a caricature of a frown, the sort of frown one might see on an overly dramatic actor on TV but not in real life. My guide saw something different, raving about “faces of joy.”

At one point, rounding a corner, I heard a child scream. I don’t know what was happening, and my guide quickly rushed me away.

What was most missing was social interaction. When were the students supposed to talk to each other? To form meaningful friendships? To flirt and begin exploring romance? And it wasn’t just the lack of small group discussion in the classes or the strict discipline that stopped the students from talking in class. Even in the pep rally I witnessed, the kids weren’t talking to each other. If they tried to, a teacher would appear immediately to discipline them. I saw one kid quickly whisper to another and get away with it once. That was it. Even in the hallway, they weren’t talking. They just marched through the halls on the lines taped into the floor, enduring a stream of rebukes for minor offenses like leaving too large a gap between students.

On a human level, it was hard for me to take. When people tell stories about Providence school tours so bad they are moved to tears, I usually think they’re exaggerating. But I couldn’t stop tearing up at Achievement First, and I had to keep dabbing my eyes with a tissue. Now, I did have the ducts that drain my tears plugged to treat dry eye, so I do cry quite easily. But still….

After what I saw, I can easily see how this approach is great at producing amazing test scores. If you focus solely on test-prep and brutal discipline, yes you will boost test scores. Learning how to do well on a RICAS ELA test is learning how to think the way the test wants you to think. It’s learning not to think different. It’s learning to take the least challenging answer. It’s learning to sit still and robotically churn through boring and pointless questions.

But the human cost is so high. At what point is it worth subjecting kids to such misery? Even if the “achievement” were real learning, would it be worth the misery it takes to achieve it? Putting kids under that kind of stress dramatically increases the risk of lasting mental health damage.

Achievement should not come first. Children should come first.

Achievement First is planning on expanding. They’re asking to open a high school, and now they’re asking for a new elementary school, too. Some politicians, parents, student advocates, teachers, and unions have timidly objected to the funding Achievement First rips away from the already suffering public schools. But for me, the money pales in comparison to the raw human pain. Cruelty towards children is just plain wrong. It’s about people, not numbers in a spreadsheet.

Sometimes, overly mild rhetoric is irresponsible. We have to think carefully about the language we use. Words matter. If we water down Achievement First to a budgetary issue, then the Mayor of Providence will feel justified in letting them expand as long as better charter schools are prevented from opening or expanding in Providence. Instead, we must condemn Achievement First as a fundamentally immoral institution.

Half measures are not enough. No expansion is acceptable. Instead, we must talk about a turnaround plan to revamp and fundamentally reform these schools, returning actual learning to the classrooms, ending cruel discipline, and respecting the human rights of the students. And no turnaround plan will be real, no reforms will be lasting, without replacing the toxic administrators currently in charge with turnaround leaders who have true compassion for the students.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Providence, Rhode Island, Students

Gary Rubinstein: How the Other 1/300th Learn

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2019 //
42

 

Gary Rubenstein enjoyed reading Robert Pondiscio’s book about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy. He recommends it. What Pondiscio reveals is that SA does not cherrypick students, as critics charge: It cherrypicks parents.

One premise of the book is that the fundamental secret to Success Academy’s amazing standardized test scores, mentioned throughout the work is the filtering of the right families.  On page 266 he writes “The common criticism leveled at Moskowitz and her schools is that they cherry pick students, attracting bright children and shedding the poorly behaved and hardest to teach  This misses the mark entirely. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents.” Parents must go through a series of tests and hoops to jump through for their children to get into and to stay in a Success Academy school.  First there is, of course, the lottery. But winning the lottery is just the first step. Described in great — and frightening — detail in chapter 20 “The Lottery”, lottery winners have to attend a mandatory informational session where they are told how much work it is to be a parent of a child at the school — how lateness is not tolerated and there is a 7:30 AM start time.  How there is no transportation provided. How every Wednesday is a half day and there is no after school program. How absences require a doctor’s note. Many prospective lottery winners give up after that meeting. Then there are several other steps like extensive paperwork and uniform fittings and a dress rehearsal. Even Pondiscio is shocked to watch how a student who is deep on the waitlist eventually get admitted to the school.  But having families who are this willing and able to comply with the demands made by Success Academy leads, predictably, to high standardized test scores. He doesn’t say this so bluntly, but let’s face it — this is a kind of cheating.

But if you look at the back of the book, you see that it was well reviewed by various reformers including former NYC schools Chancellor Joel Klein.  How can this be? Well even though Pondiscio says the test scores need to be seen in the context of the family selection process, he also argues, several times throughout the book, that it is OK that they do this.  The argument is that wealthy families use their resources to get their child into a school that is a good fit for them so why shouldn’t poor families who have the resource of being highly functional use that to get their child into a school that is a good fit for them too?…

My first response to this would be that only 16 out of the inaugural 73 students even endured to graduate Success Academy.  If a higher percentage were actually served by Success Academy, then this argument of ‘shouldn’t they also get to choose a school that is good for them?’ would be more compelling.  Since for the vast majority, they did not choose a school that was good for them, even after going through all those steps, and they did ultimately choose to leave, so what kind of choice did they really get?  For the small number of families and children that turn out to be a good fit after all, there are at least double that number who regretted that choice and surely feel duped by the false promise that Success Academy actually cares about their children.

Maybe an analogy will make this more clear:  On airplanes, only wealthy people have the choice of flying first class while people who can’t afford that must fly in coach.  So now Success Airlines comes along and they have something they give people the choice of flying in something like first class except the seats are outside the plane on the wings and you have to get to the seats on your own and there’s a 2/3 chance that you’re going to be jettisoned from that seat before the flight is over anyway.  Should we say that having a choice like that is something that poor people deserve to have?

If Pondiscio is making the case here that Success Academy should have the right to exist, I’ve never said that they shouldn’t exist.  But their existence should not be to just benefit the few that are a good fit at the expense of not only the students at the neighboring schools but also the students who left Success Academy before graduating.  To do this, I think that they need more oversight and regulations and transparency about what goes on inside their schools.  And I’m glad that this book does a nice job about showing the sorts of abuse that occur in the school which I’ll get to next.

Categories Accountability, Discipline, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Parents

What Happened to the Students Who Began KIPP-Philly in 2003?

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2019 //
22

Marc Mannella opened the first KIPP middle school in Philadelphia in 2003.

He started with 90 students in fifth grade.

KIPP promised that students who stuck with the “no-excuses” regimen would go to college.

Avi Wolfman-Arent of WHYY in Philadelphia tracked down 33 of those students to find out what happened to them.

The former KIPPsters are now about 25.

Of the 90, 25 dropped out in the first year of middle school.

The students entered a world of incentives and punishments, of strict rules administered strictly.

It wasn’t right for everyone.

Of the 90 students who enrolled in KIPP Philly’s first middle school class, about half were boys. By the time 8th grade graduation arrived, enrollment was whittled down to 34 students — and only 11 boys remained….

Almost none of the KIPP alumni we interviewed did four years at one high school followed by four years at one college. All of them seemed to flounder or grow restless or get sidetracked somewhere along the journey up that mountain.

KIPP propelled them to high school — usually a Catholic school or a private school or a magnet school — but they didn’t stick there. KIPP’s lessons didn’t always follow them out the door…

Here’s what the numbers say.

Six years after high school graduation, 35 percent of the original KIPP Philly class had an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. At the seven-year mark, that number was 44 percent.

What does that mean?

In Philadelphia, about a quarter of students who graduate high school earn a college degree by the six-year mark. That overall Philly number would be lower if you tracked students back to eighth grade, like KIPP does.

There’s a prominent nationwide study that tracked students starting in 10th grade.

It found that eight years after high school graduation, about 14 percent of students from the lowest income quartile had a degree.

KIPP Philly students almost all came from poor neighborhoods, and the results suggest that they earned degrees at much higher rates — rates that are about the same as middle-income students.

“And that feels like we did something that was real,” said Mannella, the school’s founder.

There are serious caveats, though.

KIPP’s number doesn’t count all the kids who left over those four years. Some of those kids did graduate college. Some didn’t. It’s quite possible that the 34 who made it through KIPP were more likely to have long-term academic success for a whole host of reasons, no matter what school they attended.
Frankly this project is incomplete, too.

We talked with 24 of the 34 alum from the original class — as well as nine students who attended KIPP Philadelphia but didn’t finish. The ten graduates who chose not to talk may have very different experiences than the 24 who did

The author wonders what is the best way to evaluate KIPP. Graduation rates? College entry? College persistence? Employment?

KIPP is now the largest charter chain in the nation.

One thing we learn from this piece is that its strict discipline code helps some students, turns off others.

Its methods are not a panacea. Most kids who enter do not persist. For some, it is a lifesaver.

Perhaps the same might be said of the public schools that were closed to make way for KIPP and the public schools that accepted the KIPP dropouts and pushouts.

Categories Accountability, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, High School Graduation, KIPP Charter Schools, Philadelphia, Privatization

Rhode Island: State Senator Demands Ousting of Achievement First Because of Abusive Behavior Towards Students

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2019 //
9

Democratic State Senator Sam Bell called for the removal of Achievement First management after news spread about a pattern of abusive behavior towards students.

Achievement First is based in Connecticut and practices “no excuses” discipline.

“Dismantling the Achievement First Rhode Island network needs to begin with removal of the Achievement First Corporation from any managerial involvement with the schools. Closure would be too disruptive to the students, and converting the schools into public schools is a better approach,” Bell told GoLocal.

Bell sites a range of issues, including physical abuse of students. in Rhode Island, Achievement First operates under the names Achievement First Iluminar Mayoral Academy and Achievement First Providence Mayoral Academy.

Bell’s demand comes at the same time that the Mayor of Providence is trying to expand the Achievement First chain in his city.

In January of this year, the head of Achievement First Amistad High School in New Haven was caught on video shoving a student. This was one of a number of episodes linking faculty to physical contact with students.

The defenders of the chain say that Achievement First gets high test scores, and it appears that those scores matter more than abusive adults manhandling students.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Discipline, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhode Island

Robert Pondiscio: Why Poor Children of Color Need No-Excuses Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2019 //
174

 

Robert Pondiscio works at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which authorizes charter schools in Ohio. He left a career in journalism to teach, then worked for E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation, and is soon to publish a book explaining the success of Eva Moskowitz’s controversial Success Academy charter chain. In this article called “No Apologies for No-Excuses Charter Schools,” Pondiscio explains his view that such schools are highly successful and should be celebrated.

He notes with dismay that even spokespersons for the charter industry are backing away from the no-excuses model.

He writes:

The phrase “no excuses” was coined 20 years ago to describe an optimistic movement and mindset that insisted there must be no excuses for adult failure. This coincided with the charter movement’s highest level of moral authority and public prestige, but that was no coincidence. When it first gained traction as a brand, a school model, and a rallying cry, “no excuses” signaled the non-negotiable belief that the root cause of educational failure and black-white achievement gaps was not poverty, not parents, not children, and above all not race. It was the belief that failing schools were the source of the problem and that great schools could be the solution—provided, of course, that everyone associated with them refused to tolerate or excuse failure.

Schools that embraced the “no excuses” mantra and mindset shared standard features such as longer instructional days, data-driven instruction, school uniforms, insistence on proper classroom behavior, an embrace of testing and accountability, and an unshakable commitment to get all students to and through college—features that remain in place in many charters (and other successful schools) today…

The sight of black and brown children required to “track the speaker” in class, or passing through hallways in straight lines, routinely brings complaints from both progressive educators and political progressives that high-performing schools teach only compliance and perpetuate the “school to prison pipeline”—a critique that deserves the strongest rebuke. Students in high-performing charters are not on their way to prison. They’re on their way to college. If all you see is teachers imposing their will on children, compliance for compliance sake, rather than a determined effort to create the school culture and classroom conditions—attention, focus, and affirmation—that make learning possible, you’ve missed the point entirely. 

The reluctance to defend the no excuses culture validates the common criticism that these schools are harsh and militaristic. Yet caring support for students is essential to the success of no excuses schools.  “One thing I consistently found was that no-excuses discipline failed if it was not combined with the sure knowledge on a student’s part that teachers cared deeply about them and their education,” said David Whitman, who wrote a seminal book in 2008 on no excuses schools, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. “There had to be a caring connection between teacher and student for strict discipline to work, or what I described as a kind of benign paternalism,” he told me. SEL enthusiasts take note: tough love is not an oxymoron. 

Wonks may love research and data, but narrative wins hearts and minds. The general impulse—that a safe, well-run, and orderly school is a precondition to academic excellence—has not changed in a generation and remains very popular with parents who continue to swell urban charter waitlists. The mindset that it is (or ought to be) morally unacceptable to allow low-income kids and children of color to be failed by adults and the institutions we build for their ostensible benefit, is no less valid or resonant today than it was two decades ago. What “no excuses” got right—and it’s still right—is that learning cannot occur in chaos. High expectations are essential and non-negotiable. “No excuses” meant exactly that: If kids are failing, we are failing. These are ideals that don’t need an apology.

They need a revival. 

Questions: are no-excuses charters a rebirth, as David Whitman put it, of paternalism? Are they a form of colonialism? How do the young white TFA teachers learn to administer discipline that they themselves never experienced? Do black and brown students require a different kind of discipline than white students? If every black and brown child went to a school run by Eva Moskowitz would that solve the huge economic gaps between the races? What happens to the majority of students (“scholars”) who don’t make it through the 12th year of no-excuses schooling?

 

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline, Education Reform
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