Another curious fact about Success Academy is the attrition of both students and teachers. For schools that are widely acclaimed, this is surprising indeed. Why do so many students and teachers leave?... What we can learn from Success Academy is that it is possible to winnow out the most intractable students and be left with the best and most compliant ones by selective attrition. But that is no model for public education....The NationMORE people spoke at Monday night's charter school hearings - and I particularly pointed out that this was the plan from Day 1 - to use Success as a battering ram to undermine and ultimately destroy the public school system and the unionized teachers. And it has been working, due in part to the lack of resistance (other than backstage) by the UFT. If the UFT wanted to close down the Brooklyn Bridge with a mass demonstration it could do so - there is enough anti-Eva sentiment amongst UFT members.
Eva Moskowitz (Photo courtesy of House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats, CC 2.0)
This article is adapted from the author’s blog, DianeRavitch.net.
The media have long been in search of a ”miracle” school, a school
that can succeed in turning poor children of color into academic
superstars. Of course, there already are poor children of color
who are academic superstars, but they’re the exception, not the rule
(the same is true for poor white children). The defining characteristic
of low test scores is poverty, not color. The titans of our society are
especially interested in the pursuit of miracle schools because finding
them would relieve those with high incomes of any obligation to
alleviate the poverty that interferes with academic achievement.
Today we have that very school—or chain of schools—in New York City:
Success Academy. It was declared a success almost from the day it
opened, back in 2006, as Harlem Success Academy. Founded by former City
Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz and backed by a team of Wall Street
financiers, Success Academy schools have delivered spectacular results
on state tests. While everyone else lagged behind on the new Common Core
tests, Moskowitz’s schools did well.
Success Academy schools have been consistently delivering high test
performances for several years. And that record has not gone unnoticed.
Madeleine Sackler, daughter of Connecticut multimillionaire Jonathan
Sackler, made a film about Moskowitz and her charter schools in 2010
called The Lottery, which portrayed them as miraculous institutions holding the key to families’ hopes and dreams. The much-hyped documentary Waiting for Superman also featured Moskowitz’s celebrated lottery. Just recently, The New York Times Magazine published a fawning article about her, seeming to position Moskowitz as a future mayoral candidate.
What are the secrets of Eva’s success? To begin with, there’s the lottery itself. As the Times
reported in 2010, Moskowitz spent as much as $325,000 to market her
charter schools in Harlem, while the neighborhood public schools could
afford no more than $500 to advertise their offerings. The goal of
Moskowitz’s marketing was to build her brand and generate excitement
about the lottery. This gave her schools an aura of prestige, with the
lucky winners clutching their tickets. But the very fact of a lottery is
a screening device, since the least functional families—i.e., those who
are homeless—are too busy trying to survive to enter it.
Moskowitz often says that she enrolls exactly the same types of
children as the public schools, but this is not true. Success Academy
has very few of the students with the most severe disabilities (in some
of its schools, the number is zero). In Harlem’s public elementary
schools, by contrast, the average proportion of such children is 14.1
percent. Also, Success Academy has half as many English-language
learners as the neighboring public schools. Whether this is the result
of a screening process at the outset or because these children have been
“counseled out” is unclear; what is undeniable is that Success Academy
has significantly fewer of the children with the highest needs.
Another curious fact about Success Academy is the attrition of both
students and teachers. For schools that are widely acclaimed, this is
surprising indeed. Why do so many students and teachers leave?
The only Success Academy school that offers grades three through
eight (the testing grades) tested 116 third graders but only thirty-two
eighth graders. Three other Success Academy schools have expanded to
sixth grade. One tested 121 third graders but only fifty-five sixth
graders; another, 106 third graders but only sixty-eight sixth graders;
and the last, eighty-three third graders but only fifty-four sixth
graders. Why the shrinking student body? When students leave these
schools (for whatever reason), they are not replaced by other incoming
students. In public schools, students also leave, but they are usually
replaced by new students. Of the thirty-two eighth graders to finish at
Success Academy, twenty-seven took the competitive exam to enter one of
New York City’s prestigious specialized high schools. Despite their
excellent scores on the state test, not one of these students gained
admission to a specialized school like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science.
Teacher attrition at the Success Academy charter schools has also
been unusually high. Journalist Helen Zelon wrote in the magazine City Limits
that in Harlem Success Academies 1 through 4, “more than half of all
teachers left the schools ahead of the 2013–14 school year. In one
school, three out of four teachers departed.” On a website called
Glassdoor, many former teachers expressed their candid views about the
“oppressive” work climate at Success Academy schools.
Also, as the result of “co-locating” a charter school in a
public-school building, the educational climate comes to feel very
separate and unequal. The Success Academy children get spiffy
new facilities and the latest technology, while typically the host
public school loses space, such as its computer room, music room, art
room, science lab or even its library. In PS 149, a school for
special-needs children lost all of these things and will lose even more
space now that Success Academy’s request to expand has been granted.
Last spring, following a public battle between Moskowitz and New York
Mayor Bill de Blasio, the State Legislature required the city to give
charter schools whatever space they requested and to pay their rent if
they needed private space as well.
So even though Moskowitz can raise millions of dollars in a single
night; and even though she is paid more than $500,000 a year to
supervise her schools; and even though Success Academy has a private
board well populated by hedge-fund managers, Moskowitz’s charter schools
do not have to pay rent to use public space.
The fundamental question is this: Are charter schools like Success
Academy a model for public education? The answer is: they are not. If
public schools were able to exclude, one way or another,
English-language learners and students with severe disabilities, the
schools would have higher scores. But they cannot do this because, with
the exception of a small number of exam schools, public schools are
required to accept all students, regardless of their language skills,
learning disabilities or test scores. If public schools could refuse to
accept new enrollees after a certain grade, they could “build a
culture,” as Success Academy’s fans say it does. But public schools must
take all enrollees, even those who show up mid-year.
What we can learn from Success Academy is that it is possible to
winnow out the most intractable students and be left with the best and
most compliant ones by selective attrition. But that is no model for
public education.
