| Civil rights attorney Arthur Schwartz is running for City Council in District 3, Manhattan, which includes SoHo-Hudson Square, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Theater District, and Hell’s Kitchen. Arthur has spent his career as a warrior for justice. He was the lead attorney in the successful lawsuit on behalf of parents against the powerful Success Academy charter chain. I donated to his campaign. I hope you will too. Arthur Schwartz & His Legal Team Win Multimillion Lawsuit Against Success Academy’s Unethical “Got To Go” Policy Singling Out Students With Learning Disabilities On March 10, 2021 District 3 City Council candidate Arthur Schwartz was part of a team of attorneys representing parents who sued and won a $2.3 million settlement against the Fort Greene Success Academy. In the long awaited decision for a 2017 filed Discriminatory Harassment suit, Judge Fredric Block approved $1.1 million in damages to the 5 families of plaintiffs.https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.htmlThis victory highlights an ethical standard for academic administration at the highest levels of education across America and helps to protect families and students from learning disability-related discrimination and prejudice. In this case it involved 5-year olds. The source of the suit was the internally code-named “Got to Go” list. The lawsuit accused the Fort Greene Academy principal and its parent Success Academy of creating lists of 5 year old students with possible learning disabilities that they wanted to push out because they were ‘not right’ for the school. These children, most in kindergarten, got suspended 20 times or more per year. One parent was told that her 5 year old was going to be arrested for having a tantrum. The lawsuit took 4.5 years to litigate and settle — as the most successful scoring charter school system in America refused to turn over the paperwork and records requested by the plaintiffs’ legal team in an effort to protect Success Academy higher-ups. Success Academy Fort Greene (SAFG) opened in the 2013-14 school year as an elementary school with grades K-1, with the intention of adding a grade each year until the school served grades K-4. Known as the largest and most controversial charter multi-school chain in the country, Success Academy has been plagued by scandals from the beginning. After 2 years, it was determined that the Fort Greene school needed “turning around,” and newly hired principal Candido Brown was tasked with doing that. Thus began the infamous “Got to Go” list. The lawsuit alleged that the list reflected Success Academy policy. In an October 30, 2015 press conference, Brown attempted to explain that his list of children to focus on for removal from SAFG was an effort to “fix” the school. On that same date Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz said she did not plan to fire Brown. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 by 5 parents whose kids had been tortured by Success. The legal team included Arthur Schwartz and the foundation he heads, Advocates for Justice, NY Lawyers for the Public interest, and Skadden and Arps. The parents were initially referred to Arthur by the Alliance for Quality Education. This is the first in a series of important legal victories I will be highlighting weekly moving forward that City Council candidate and veteran civil rights attorney Arthur Schwartz has achieved in his more than four decades of leadership. This is what leadership looks like. – Bruce Poli |
Archives for category: Harlem Success Academy
Reema Amin, a reporter for Chalkbeat in New York, wrote on Twitter that the Success Academy charter chain will not administer the state tests this year. Do you think that any public school superintendents or principals will make the same decision and get away with it? Nah, we won’t take the state tests this year.
Leonie Haimson is host of a weekly radio program on WBAI, a Pacifica radio station.
In this podcast, she discusses “How Success Academy Charters Violate Their Students’ Civil, Educational, and Privacy Rights.”
The show focused on Success Academy charters, NYC’s largest charter school chain, which has repeatedly violated students’ civil rights while becoming known for high test scores and high suspension rates. Leonie interviewed Laura Barbieri of Advocates for Justice and Nelson Mar of Bronx Legal Services, two attorneys who’ve successfully sued Success Academy charter schools on behalf of students who have been mistreated at the school.
Then she spoke to Fatima Geidi, a former Success parent whose son’s special education, due process, and privacy rights were violated, the last after PBS News Hour interviewed Fatima and her son about the school’s abusive disciplinary practices. Dany Mangrove also related her experiences as a former operations assistant and teacher at Success Academy High School.
Leonie Haimson reports that Success Academy is dropping plans to open three new high schools because it doesn’t have enough students.
Parent activist Brooke Parker wrote the report as a guest blogger.
No waiting lists. Not enough students.
Gary Rubinstein explores a curious phenomenon at Success Academy. Fully one-seventh of its senior class fail to graduate.
How can this be? They have persisted through 11 years of the school’s harsh discipline, yet are told midway through their senior year that they must repeat the grade or leave.
Public data shows that very few students who begin at Success Academy actually graduate from Success Academy. The class of 2018 started with 72 students and only 16 graduated. The class of 2019 started with 80 students and only 27 graduated. The class of 2020 started with 350 students and only 98 graduated. Success Academy argues that this is normal attrition over 12 years, but one of the most jarring statistics I have ever seen about Success Academy is the attrition rate from students who are in the school at the beginning of their senior year but who do not graduate with their class 10 months later.
For the recent class of 2020 there were 114 seniors in the school in November 2019. But by graduation time in June there were only 98 graduating seniors.
Why?
New York City’s vaunted Success Academy, which boasts the highest test scores in the state, the highest teacher turnover rate, and very likely the highest student attrition rate (unsure because unreleased by city authorities), has announced that it will be all-remote until at least January.
Success Academy is famed for its strict no-excuses policy and its readiness to eject any student who does not comply.
Problems, as the New York Daily News reports.
Under the plan, kids as young as 5 have to log on by 8:50 a.m. wearing their checkered orange and blue uniforms, and sit still with their hands clasped for nearly seven hours of live video instruction.
They also have to ask permission to use the bathroom — and can get a virtual boot and be suspended if they act up, which would turn off their cameras and microphones for a day or more.
“I don’t think it’s right for a 6-year-old … they have to sit there like a robot with their hands folded,” said one mom of a Success first-grader in Far Rockaway, Queens, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation from the school.
“Every day she cries and says she doesn’t want to go to school,” the frustrated mom told The News.
The article includes the news that Fabiola St. Hilaire, a teacher at Success Academy who sparked a controversy over racism at Success Academy last year, has resigned, saying she could no longer be complicit.
“Working for this organization has truly showed me that as long as I stand with the inaction and blatant disregard for child morality and healthy development it in turn will make me complicit, which I will never be,” she wrote in her resignation letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The News.
This morning I posted Gary Rubenstein’s post revealing that Success Academy agreed—after five years of litigation—to pay $1.1 million to parents whose children with disabilities were on the SA “got to go” list.
Leonie Haimson has more on the story.
SA never produced the documents demanded by parents. They never paid the attorneys’ fees.
Here is the August 2018 decision by the US District Court Judge, Fredrick Block, who refused Success’ request to dismiss the case, and instead described the horrific treatment that these five children with disabilities were subjected to starting at the age of four and five, including repeatedly being removed from class early, dismissed, suspended and denied their mandated services.
Here is the February 2020 acceptance by the families of Success’ Offer of Judgement of $1.1 million plus reasonable attorney fees; which the charter chain chose to provide before going to trial, rather than release the full documentation ordered by the Court, which would further detail the abusive treatment of these children.
To this day, Success has refused to pay the attorneys’ reasonable fees, so here is the most recent court filing by the families’ attorneys from Advocates for Justice, NY Lawyers for Public Interest, and Stroock Stroock and Lavan, detailing all the hours and work they put into the case over nearly five years, along with fees for the various experts who validated the fact that these children’s civil rights were repeatedly violated.
Gary Rubinstein writes here about a lawsuit filed by parents of children on Success Academy’s “got to go” list. The celebrated charter chain settled for $1.1 million. The corporate chain fought the lawsuit for 4.5 years, refused to turn over documents but finally settled.
Gary writes:
Success Academy is the largest and most controversial charter chain in New York. By one measure — state test scores — it is the most successful. But over the years they have been embroiled in several significant scandals. The two most prominent was the ‘rip and redo’ incident, where a teacher was caught on tape screaming at and ripping up a paper of a very well behaved young child, and the ‘got to go’ list where a principal created a list of students he planned to either expel or otherwise compel to leave.
But beyond these two high profile scandals, there are thousands of unreported mini-scandals that are just as harmful to the students who suffer them. Over the years hundreds, if not thousands, of families have suffered from the way that Success Academy gets those families to transfer their children out of the school. One trick they use a lot is threatening to leave back — or actually leaving back — students who are passing their classes and the state tests. This was documented nicely in a podcast about them last year. But the most heartless way they get parents to ‘voluntarily’ switch to another school is through coordinated harassment. When Success Academy has students who do not respond to their strict disciplinary code, what they do is start calling the parents day after day and demand that the parents come get their children. Sometimes the phone calls start at 8:00 AM. If the parents are at work and they are not able to come and get the child, Success Academy threatens to call Administration for Child Services (ACS) on them and, in some cases, actually does call ACS or the police or has the child picked up by an ambulance and brought to the emergency room. Even with all this, Success Academy is still the darling of the education reform movement since, I guess, the ends (high state test scores) justify the means (abusing — in my opinion — families and children).
In December 2015, five families of Success Academy students filed a civil suit against them. The five families had similar complaints about how Success Academy created what the lawsuit called a ‘hostile learning environment.’ Many of the children had various disabilities, like ADHD. Some of the court filings that I have read describe how Success Academy did not modify their protocols to address these disabilities. Also in the documents the families filed, we learn that Success Academy was not cooperative during the five year trial.
Gary wonders whether other families treated shabbily by Success Academy be encouraged to sue by this precedent?
A parent of two children at the Success Academy charter chain in New York City reaches out to Mercedes Schneider in Louisiana to spill the beans about the chain’s efforts to kick her children out.
The teachers and administrators made it clear that her children should find another school, but she stubbornly hung on. They weren’t problem children, but the older child was “average,” and the younger one needed extra attention.
That was enough to cause the chain to try to shed them, but their mother ignored all the efforts to push them out.
When the pandemic struck and school went virtual, SA was no more nimble than the public schools. The mother realized that SA is all about grading students, not teaching them.
Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat wrote today that a spokesperson for Success Academy, New Tork City’s largest charter chain, resigned to protest “abusive” practices at the schools.
A spokesperson for New York City’s largest charter network resigned in protest, stating she can no longer defend Success Academy’s “racist and abusive practices” that are “detrimental to the emotional well being” of its students.
“I am resigning because I can no longer continue working for an organization that allows and rewards the systemic abuse of students, parents, and employees,” wrote Liz Baker, a Success spokesperson, in a resignation letter Tuesday.
“As the organization’s press associate, I no longer wish to defend Success Academy in response to any media inquiries,” she continued in the letter, which was obtained by Chalkbeat. “I do not believe that Success Academy has scholars’ best interests at heart, and I strongly believe that attending any Success Academy school is detrimental to the emotional wellbeing of children.”
The stunning resignation letter comes as the network has been besieged by complaints from employees, parents, and students about a culture that some argue is racist. Baker, who has worked at Success for about a year and four months, is one of the network’s most visible employees and was responsible for responding to reporters’ questions about the network.
