School Scope: How Do You Spell “Success”? – Part 2
By Norm Scott
Last week I began a series on the 46 NYC Success Academy
schools run by Eva Moskowitz and focused on a New Yorker article written by
Rebecca Meade (https://tinyurl.com/yabebvqx)
which tried to reconcile the harsh discipline at Success with its aim to have a
progressive curriculum. Many maintain that the very idea of a child- centered,
nurturing progressive curriculum and harsh discipline in schools with very high
suspension rates is contradictory. I agree.
In Part 2, I want to draw attention to the Dec. 11 NY Times Sunday book review of the memoir recently written by Eva Moskowitz (The Education of Eva Moskowitz). Reviewer Lisa Miller opens by asking a question:
“How would Eva Moskowitz have fared as an impudent young
girl in one of her own charter schools? This is just one of the many unplumbed
questions prompted by her new memoir. Founder of the extensive Success Academy
charter-school chain, former New York City councilwoman, mother of three,
Moskowitz has famously made a virtue — one might even say a brand — of her
defiance. New York City’s public-school system has been her proving ground, and
she has devoted herself to reforming what she sees as its bureaucratic idiocies
and its codified inefficiencies, refusing to submit to any authority that she
deems insufficiently worthy (except in those instances it serves her to do so).”
Now I and many others have been frustrated by DOE idiocies.
But every bureaucracy has them and the battle should be a public one with
allies, and for all students, not just a little niche.
Miller goes on to list the defiance Moskowitz writes about, some pretty outrageous. Like the fact that every pre-k being run under the de Blasio initiative and using tax payer money, public and charters, come under some rules of behavior. Eva refused to accept any rules and went to court and actually won the right to set up her pre-k without any oversight. There are a lot more – and I know a lot more from people who work in the same buildings.
Miller points to the essential contradiction between Eva’s
moxie and her schools damping down the moxie of the students: Her “impulsive
display of hostility would not, presumably, be tolerated at any of her Success
Academy schools, where discipline and conformity are values of the highest
order.”
Now don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t have taught and survived
in some very tough elementary schools without having discipline. But in all
that time I never had a student suspended, something that happens so often at
Success Academy for even minor infractions, even down to kindergarten kids. I
actually heard Eva defend this policy because “kids can kill each other” – not
an exact quote. The purpose of the suspension is to pressure some parents to
pull their kids from the school so as to wean out poor test takers. As I
reported last week, of a 73 member cohort (I erred in reporting 72) that began
kindergarten only 17 were left to graduate high school.
From the earliest days of Success a decade ago, I was one of
the fiercest opponents, especially after seeing how Eva operated. She was out
to use our money to build her own political empire, with the intention of using
her schools as a political base to run for mayor. I may not be Nostradamus but
I was right on that one.
Eva wants to run a 100 schools in NYC using our tax money to do whatever she wants. And she has an even bigger aim. Miller says, “What, then, is the true aim of this book? A clue is buried in its final chapters. “Part of me would love to be mayor for the simple reason that I love my city.”
Oy Vey! Eva doesn’t get just how much of the city doesn’t
love her.
Read Miller’s review at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/books/review/education-of-eva-moskowitz-memoir.html?_r=0
Norm loves everyone
except Eva Moskowitz at ednotesonline.com.
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