This New York Charter School Is Helping Low-Income Students. But the City Is Holding It Back.

Government school advocates say competition "takes money away" from government schools. That is a lie.

Government-run schools keep failing.

It shouldn't surprise us. Monopolies rarely serve customers well.

People call them "public schools," but "government-run" is more accurate. After all, charter schools are available to the public. Privately-run supermarkets are open to the public for more hours than "public" schools are.

International tests show American kids don't learn as much as kids in other countries. During the pandemic, they did even worse because our teachers unions kept schools closed.

It's even worse in my state, New York, where big government and unions thrive. Here, kids' tests scores are well below the national average. In New York City, scores are even lower.

But here's one dramatic exception: The aptly named Success Academy succeeds where government-run schools fail.

The chain, led by former Democratic City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, now runs more than 50 schools.

On math tests, they outperform every school in New York state. Yet Success Academy kids mostly come from low-income families.

"That is redefining American public education," says Success' LaMae de Jongh in my new video. "Our black and Hispanic students outperformed their peers by double, triple percent in their math."

How? By trying new things.

At Success schools, principals spend time in every classroom, giving tips to teachers.

One teacher told us, "They're telling me things that I don't see."

"Some teachers don't like being watched and criticized," I say to Jongh.

"But they're getting better!" she replies. "When they get better, their scholars do better and the educators feel more successful. That's what you want!"

Success Academy's school day is longer. Kids typically stay until 4:30 p.m. Some stay later.

Some parents pull kids out because of the extra demands. "That's why their test scores are so high!" complain critics. "Dropouts raise average test scores for kids who remain."

Maybe they do. But for the thousands of kids at Success charters, the high expectations are a good thing.

Talking with children there, I was surprised when 7-year-olds told me they "look forward" to school! I never did. One told me that learning reading is "rockin' awesome!"

It's why lots of parents are desperate to get their kids into Success Academy. Almost 13,000 more families apply than the school has space for. So the school holds a lottery to determine who gets in.

The chain would like to offer its magic to more kids, but they aren't allowed to! "Progressive" politicians limit the number they can serve.

"I hate the privatizers. I want to stop them," said former Mayor Bill de Blasio. He closed Harlem's most successful charter school.

The current mayor isn't as awful, but New York's cap on charter schools remains.

The education establishment just doesn't like competition.

Government school advocates say competition "takes money away" from government schools.

That is a lie.

It's true that enrollment at government-run schools is falling. More parents now homeschool and send kids to charters and private schools. But spending at government schools continues to increase. Government always spends more!

Also, as students leave, government schools are left with more money per pupil. That's because the government gives charters like Success $18,000 per student. Government-run schools get almost $36,000!

With half the money, Success Academy does better.

Most high school students never take Advanced Placement tests. Of those who take them in my state, roughly half pass.

But at Success Academy, all kids take the tests. And 80 percent pass!

"These kids must be miserable!" I tell Jongh. "They're working all the time."

"Why?" She laughs. "They're having fun learning."

Also, it's not schoolwork all the time. Success offers "chess, debate, theater, music," she points out. "Those aren't add-ons; they are part of our day."

Success does make teachers work harder. Teacher turnover is high.

But so what? The goal is for the kids to succeed. At Success Academy, they do!

One student tells me, "It's unfair that not everybody gets this opportunity."

He's right. It is unfair.

All kids should have that choice.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

Comments

[Don't look at me!]

Unions ruin everything.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Is marriage a type of union?

[jimc5499]

Unions prefer low performers. These low performers know that if it wasn't for the Union, they wouldn't have a job. That makes them the most dedicated members.
When I was in the Navy, I knew guys who were just keeping their heads above water. Their goal was to complete their enlistments and get jobs with the Postal Service. Well they did and look at how the Postal Service is run.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I had a PO1 lifer who had zero people skills, one of the most obnoxious jerks on the boat. His dream was to retire in 20 and run a package store in San Diego.

[Chumby]

Neither type of school should get any money coerced away from the taxpayers.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Do car washes run by cute high school girls count as coercion?

[Chumby]

I wouldn’t let a kid wash my vehicle. Pressure wash first, foam cannon second, long broad stroke hand wash using a two bucket method with grit discs, rinse with the pressure washer, leaf blower to mostly dry, clean microfiber towel to dry. Dirty water with particles all over a dirty sponge will be bad for the finish.

[Michael P]

It sounds like Success Academy could use a more numerate spokesperson. I can't figure out what "outperformed their peers by double, triple percent in their math" is supposed to mean. I assume it's not what it literally says: 2% or 3%, because that's not worth bragging about. Maybe two or three times as many pass or perform at grade level? It's not triple digit percentage (100+%) differences in those rates, unless it's 100% vs 0% -- which would be a sad indictment of how bad the city-run schools are.

[Spiritus Mundi]

Baltimore says hold my beer.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-results-23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-jovani-patterson-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-maryland-governor-wes-moore

[mad.casual]

Their scores were three-digit percentages higher in two of several areas of mathematics. A double-triple. Duh.

[EdG]

So if the average score is 1%, a triple digit increase kicks it up to 2%?

[Spiritus Mundi]

Poor kids are just as smart as white kids.
- Joe Biden

[Chumby]

Biden conducted a comprehensive sniff test to come to that conclusion.

[Don't look at me!]

No kidding.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

'Government-run schools keep failing.'

Nuh-uh.

Teacher and admin employment is still up, as are union dues and school-based political activism. Politicians still depend on and use teacher and student support. And students still get their dosage of local and national propaganda.

Sounds like success to me.

[Earth-based Human Skeptic]

Leftists like to cite US health care, with claims that we spend more than any other "smart" country for measurably worse outcomes, and thus claim the solution is state-funded and provided medicine. I like to ask them if state-funded and provided education, where we spend more than any other country for measurably worse outcomes, is a good model for health care.

[Panhandle]

John, I have always liked you and your columns but how the hell are you still living in the State of New York?

[TJJ2000]

What makes ‘government’ different?
The legal use of ‘Guns’ to Force.

The ‘Guns’ only purpose to ensure competent schools (EARNING) doesn’t “takes money away” from (STEALING) government-schools otherwise there would be no need for ‘Gov-Guns’ in the equation.

What? Did anyone really believe 'Guns' taught kids?

[JasonT20]

What? Did anyone really believe ‘Guns’ taught kids?

Brevard County in Florida just approved allowing teachers to be armed, so that might actually start happening there.

[TJJ2000]

Do you think they'll be used to STEAL all their lunch money?

[JasonT20]

https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/new-book-tells-secrets-and-surprises-of-success-academys-winning-academics/

Stossel is giving his usual cherry-picked snapshot of a particular charter school network and telling us that it represents the whole movement. Things in that article that Stossel doesn't mention about Success Academy schools:

“It’s not Burger King. You can’t have it your way,” one principal, Shea Reeder, told moms and dads in the first meeting before kids enroll. “It’s all or nothing. Nothing is optional!”

Parents sign a “contract” pledging to abide by all Success Academy policies and values. They must get their kids to school at 7:30 a.m. — busing is not provided — in the right uniform from head to toe.

Parents are expected to read six books aloud to their children each week through second grade, and monitor and log their kids’ reading assignments through high school.

Staffers speak with parents on a regular basis. When testing season gets underway, teachers may call home “every night, every night,” to discuss a child’s progress and “strategy,” one dad told Pondisicio. If the parents didn’t answer the house phone, the cellphone rang, followed by a text, an email and another call.

Among the most surprising things Pondiscio learned, he said, is that many families who win admission in the lottery wind up not enrolling. - Robert Pondiscio is the author of “How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle over School Choice” - He was a 5th grade teacher in a Bronx public school before entering journalism and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

“The conventional wisdom is that Success Academy has six applicants for every seat. It’s closer to 50/50,” he told The Post.

“They’ve got to show up, show up and show up again to ensure they remain active in the enrollment process,” he said. “By the time August rolls around, parents are walking in with both eyes open– 100% down with the program. If they aren’t, they fell away.”

“The myth is that Eva Moskowitz [Success Academy founder] is creaming students,” Pondiscio said.

“I don’t think that’s true, but she certainly is creaming parents.”

Some students leave, move or transfer along the way. Pondiscio says low-income Success Academy families move less than similar families in DOE schools, but leave at a higher rate than kids at competing charters.

Supervisors heavily critique the staff. “Success Academy teachers get more feedback in their first week on the job than I got in five years teaching in the DOE,” said Pondiscio, who worked at PS 277 in the Bronx.

But teacher turnover is very high, Pondiscio says. “I don’t think I could teach there. They make extraordinary demands. There’s no pussyfooting around. You live and die by the data. It’s an intense, aggressive, performance culture.”

“It will take a decade or more before we can say if this brand of education helps people of color become upwardly mobile and leaders in their fields, closing the ultimate achievement gap in American life.”

Oh, something else that Stossel glosses over. The government may provide charters with less than is spent per student in regular public schools, but the "high-performing charters" like Success Academy are supported by big money. From 2022: "Bloomberg invests $200M in NYC’s high-profile charter school networks" Success Academy got about half of that gift. It would be interesting to see what the actual cost per pupil is at these schools, not just the government portion of the funding.

My take away is that Success Academy's model is not a solution to the larger problem. It may be a solution for a small, but significant fraction of students that have highly engaged and demanding parents, even though they live in impoverished urban areas. Parents that are also able and willing to make the extraordinary amount of time available that the schools demand from them.

John Stossel is a weird case study in journalism. He got his start in investigative journalism, and I remember seeing him on 20/20 way back when. But as he got more and more ideological, he lost any semblance of trying to dig into the details of his subjects, so that he could present the issue with all of the nuances and caveats that a complex problem will have. He just seems to lack the curiosity to actually find out what the problems in education really are. "The Invisible Hand will fix it" is the solution, so what else does he need to know?

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Seems like you're picking your own cherries, especially with that 6:1 50/50 "correction". If the parents and students are happy, what's your beef?

[JasonT20]

I was quoting the article I linked. The article, if you didn't read it, is about a book written by a journalist and former NYC school teacher that got permission from Success Academy to "embed" in one of their schools for a year. He was making an observation of what he had seen in regards to the demand for its seats. The usual claim is that Success Academies is turning away huge numbers of parents. Stossel does as well - "It's why lots of parents are desperate to get their kids into Success Academy. Almost 13,000 more families apply than the school has space for. So the school holds a lottery to determine who gets in." (Aside, this is poorly phrased. Success Academy is not one school, it is a network of charters. Stossel should have been clear about how many spaces those 13,000 families were vying for.) It is a direct answer to that claim to point out that many parents will drop out of the process after getting in through that lottery.

If the parents and students are happy, what’s your beef?

My beef is not with the school, the parents or their children that are happy in a Success school. My beef is with Stossel and other school choice advocates that present Success Academy as if it represents a typical charter school, thus we should have lots more of them. It is far from typical. It is an exceptional example of a charter school system, at least in terms of test results.

Someone actually curious about problems in education and looking for solutions would not stop at one particular charter network and say, "More of this, now!" without also discussing the limitations of that networks model. They would not give thin overviews of what makes those schools different that is causing them to get superior results.

That last part was originally the point of charter schools. They would get freedom from the uniform standards and curriculum and management structures of the regular public schools in order to experiment with new and alternate ideas. Those that worked could then be adopted more widely, if possible. Some charters could serve particular groups of students instead, and those innovative ideas could be shared with similar populations in other districts instead of all schools in the same district.

What happened instead of this laboratory for innovation model of charters is that people with political and ideological goals got involved and started using charters to compete with regular public schools. It wasn't about finding innovations that could be applied broadly. The competition was the innovation, in their minds.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

More bafflegarb. How you can write so many words without actually saying anything useful is beyond me.

All you have said is that you don't like charter schools because they compete with government schools.

All you don't like about Stossel is that he didn't write a book or PhD dissertation on the subject, therefore he is not A Serious Scholar and his opinions don't matter.

[CE]

It's called discipline. It's a life lesson, and probably more important than reading and writing and mathematics.

[markm23]

Jason: If by "creaming parents" you mean "attracting parents that care about their kids learning in school and helping them achieve this, successful charter schools do this. DO YOU THINK THAT IS WRONG? DO YOU PREFER THE PUBLIC SCHOOL MODEL THAT FAILS TO TEACH ANY KID?

[Uncle Jay]

"Government school advocates say competition "takes money away" from government schools. That is a lie."

It's time to take away money away from a lot of public schools since most of them have failed miserably for a myriad of reasons.
But the public school unions won't tolerate this because most sane parents want school choice...and choice is not an option by any progressive in power.

[CE]

The sign should black out the word “Don’t”.
Fully private schools would be more cost effective and produce better educational outcomes.
Kids do better when their parents care about their education. Paying tuition makes the parents care more.
Private companies providing education services would care about making their customers (i.e. the kids’ parents) happy, and would want to turn a profit, so they would avoid wasting money on administrators who advance agendas rather than educate children.

Lots of people would say "but what about the parents who can't afford tuition?" The fact that lots of people say it means there are lots of people who should be willing to donate to charitable scholarship funds for kids from poor families. And they never ask "what about poor adults who don't have kids, why do they still have to pay property taxes for schools?"