Explaining Success Academy

In the summer edition of Education Next, Charles Sahm attempts a response to the recent New York Times look at Success Academy. His article, "What Explains Success at Success Academy," is long and thoughtful, but it ultimately fails to answer its own titular question.

Sahm has taken the time to visit actual Success Academies, and he manages to cheerlead for them without calling their critics a big bunch of staus-quo loving doodyheads, so if nothing else, the article proves that reform apologists can peddle their wares while remaining thoughtful, respectful and reasonable. But his explanations for SA aren't really explanations.

To what does Sahm credit Eva Moskowitz's success?

The What: Content Is King

Moskowitz brags of "balanced literacy on steroids" when she talks about their in-house reading program, and as someone who is not directly familiar with either her program or the programs used by New York public schools, I can't judge. But when Sahm credits her with ideas such as "the choice between content and skills is false," I can't help but see Moskowitz as one more educational amateur who thinks she's a genius because she just "discovered" something that working teachers have known since the dawn of time.

SA middle school students have a required reading list of seven texts, supported by a literature class and independent reading time, and while these are fine ideas, I'm waiting for the part where Moskowitz announces a revolutionary writing program where students use "words" arranged in what she likes to call "sentences." And as we'll see, when it comes to middle school reading, SA does have a secret weapon that they are more reluctant to brag about.

Sahm says that his tours revealed a rich and varied learning environment, not a test prep factory, and Moskowitz swears its true--"You cannot ace these Common Core tests with test prep" he quotes her as saying, which is one of the few times in the article that he captures her in a bald-faced lie. Of course you can; any and all standardized tests can be conquered by test prep.

The How: Quality Conversations

Moskowitz credits her teachers, who are now required to go through in-house training. Once again, we are told about innovations that aren't innovations.

T-school is intense. Instructors place teachers on the hot seat, asking them, for example, to precisely identify the main idea in a college-level text. In Mission Possible, Moskowitz notes that a big part of T-school is “understanding the why”—the purpose behind what’s taught and the way Success handles instruction:“You can’t ask people to do something and take it seriously if they don’t know why they are doing it.” In T-school, teachers learn that “a good lesson flows like a quality conversation.”

Seriously? Do I live in a magical land of awesome innovation and I just don't know it, or does Success Academy owe its success to insights on the order of "When breathing, it is best to draw air in and then exhale before inhaling again."

Sahm goes on to note that SA requires large amounts of work from its teachers. 10-12 hour days are a norm (though when I was a beginning teacher, that was my norm as well). Sahm tackles the churn numbers, and after reading on the subject, I'm prepared to say that although the numbers clearly not low, nobody really knows what they are. He also acknowledges that SA has "teacher-proofed" instruction, requiring teachers to work in lockstep across the system. He suggests this is offset with individual time; I would suggest that simply implementing someone else's lesson plan script is not actually teaching, and anybody who actually needs that script to teach does not belong in a classroom.

It is clear that SA puts plenty of money and resources where its mouth is, and that their content delivery specialists are given tools, equipment, and support.

Caveats

Sahm does acknowledge some of the other standard criticisms of SA. For instance, SA serves a smaller percentage of English language learners and students with special needs than the city's public system.

Sahm also notes the backfill issue. From 3rd through 8th grade, SA loses over half of their students, and it does not fill their seats. You can see a breakdown of the numbers at this report from Democracy Builders, which shows us two things-- that attrition helps keep proficient-score percentages up even when raw numbers are plummeting, and that Success Academy is New York's Queen of off-loading students and filling schools with empty seats. (You can get an overview of the report here and here.)


Sahm also raises some objections in order to dismiss them. He notes that "many say" SA is overly secretive and dismisses that by referencing the many tours given of the school. I don't know who the "many" are, but perhaps they are referencing that time Success Academy went to court in order to block the state from auditing their books.

And he seems to like Moskowitz, calling her salary a bargain from a  ROI standpoint. "But her hands-on style, along with the fundraising juggernaut she has built (last year, Success raised $22 million in private support), does raise questions about replication and equity." Well, yes.

Why Success Academy Sure Doesn't Look Like an Education Bargain To Me

There really aren't any questions about replicating SA's success. It is neither possible nor desirable.

First, SA has defined "success" as "high test scores." This is not how great schools define success. Head up to Philips Exeter Academy and ask them to explain what makes them a great school. They will not tout test scores. We have no reason to believe that high tests scores mean squat, and certainly not educational success-- particularly when so much attention is spent on doing test prep rather than actually educating.

Furthermore, SA's "success" is based on a special blend of Things Every Decent School Already Knows and Things No Decent School Can or Would Do.

In the first category we find the idea of giving teachers support and resources to use long-known and proven educational techniques. This is not even re-inventing the wheel. This is walking out to the street, pointing at a parked car, and declaring, "Look what I invented! I'm a freaking genius!!"

The other Captain Obvious innovation is money. I imagine teachers who struggle away in schools without books, heat, light, cleaning and a host of other facilities watching someone like Moskowitz explain that having a clean, well-supplied, well-financed school really helps and thinking, "No shit, Sherlock." It's all the more galling because the bright shiny halls of SA come at the cost of those dim-lit under-funded under-resourced public schools. Moskowitz is like the bully who comes and steals the food off your plate at lunch every day and then on Friday makes fun of you-- "What's wrong with you. You look hungry and weak."

The No Backfills Allowed rule is not so much an innovation as a complete redefining of what a school is and does. It can't be replicated (would we just tell any family that moved with a child older than third grade that their children will never be able to go to school again?) and there's no reason it should be.

In fact, that 56% attrition rate is really just a 56% failure rate; those are students that SA failed to serve, failed to grow, failed to educate-- both the ones who left and the ones who were never allowed to come bask in the shiny glory of SA. There is nothing successful or spectacular about a 56% failure rate.

The SA model is unreplicable, though I'm sure all of us in public ed agree that if we had large resources, constant support, and the power to admit only the students we chose to our classroom, we would all look pretty freakin' awesome-- we just wouldn't be honoring the mission of US public education.

But the SA model is also unsustainable. It has to eat through teachers at a steady rate, adding to the background buzz that teaching is a dull, punishing field that nobody needs enter. It eats through children, creating an ever-enlarging pool of unsatisfied former customers who slowly erode the chirpy PR. And it eats through resources, resources that have to be taken from the public system (both buildings and money) and from well-heeled backers who have to be cozied up to. But a system like SA that has to feed off the public system also slowly destroys the public system. A vampire can only drain the same poor victim so many times before it destroys its own food supply.

One of my measures of a charter school's worth is whether or not it has anything to teach us in public schools. Success Academy offers no educational lessons to anybody; there's nothing new to learn there, nothing that can be replicated, nothing that will still be standing in twenty years.

(Update - I have an inexcusable tendency to misspell Moskowitz's last name. I have fixed it-- at least in this post.)

Fraud and Mismanagement in PA Charters

In September, a report entitled "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools" was released by The Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and Action United. The full report runs twenty pages, but the short conclusion about fraud and financial mismanagement in PA charters is this:

There's a lot of it, and nobody is in any real position to catch it.

The charter bill in PA is expensive enough anyway-- over a billion dollars of taxpayer money is directed away from public schools and into charter treasuries, where they will never see the light of day again. (Remember, one of the rules of operating a modern charter is that you are a public school when it comes to grabbing public tax dollars, but not when it comes to accounting for those dollars.)

The report finds two major flaws with the current oversight system. First, general auditing techniques do not uncover fraud (but they are all we're using). Second, the offices responsible for ferreting out fraud have barely enough staff to ferret out a ferret. The Philadelphia School District, which has run out the red carpet for 86 charters, employed a whopping two auditors to keep an eye on them.

They suggest some repairs for these issues, including audits by people who know fraud stuff, more staff, more transparency and accountability for charters, and better safeguards moving forward. The report would like to see better whistleblower protection and a moratorium on new charters until a decent oversight system is in place. They also include a handy fraud chart, a kind of family tree of the different ways in which charter operators can bilk the taxpayer.

In the meantime, the report figures that the Keystone State has been bilked of at least $30 million by charter operators, including some of these outstanding examples;

* The founder of the Pocono Mountain Charter School used $2.5 million in school money to fix up a church property he ran

* The CEO and founder of New Media Technology Charter School in Philly stole over half a million to help out some other side businesses.

* The founder of Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School has been indicted for stealing a whopping $8 million to provide a lavish lifestyle for himself.

It's worth noting that virtually none of the frauds were discovered by the kinds of auditing checks that the report calls for. Instead, it has been whistleblower tips and journalism that has alerted authorities to move-- and several times, those authorities were federal and not state.

I'm also struck by how amateur hour these shenanigans are. I mean-- why steal the money? Eva Moskowitz just pays herself a huge salary; since there's no penalty for a criminal lack of shame, she can openly and easily enjoy the kind of lifestyle that these guys tried to steal.

At any rate, the report recommends that the state beef up the auditors' force and require charters to institute some real internal checks and balances. Since the state legislature could not be counted on to spend the money on water if the capital building were on fire, I'm not going to hold my breath. On the other hand, if Tom Wolf wanted to add a little juice to his claims that Governor Tom Corbett has cut a billion dollars from state education money, Wolf might also like to observe that another billion is shifted from public to charter schools (oh, don't give me that tired line about charter schools being public-- they aren't) and that some unknown portion of that billion is buying charter operators swimming pools and high end party supplies.

The appendix of the report includes some more fun fraud stories and an explanation (with charts) of how fraud auditing is supposed to work. And footnotes. Grab a cup of hot chocolate and curl up on a cool autumn day.

Joe Klein's Non-comprehension

There are lots of things Joe Klein doesn't get, and many of them are related to education. In the process of railing last week about a de Blasio "giveback" of 150 minutes of special student tutoring time in New York schools, Klein managed to trot out a whole raft of misconceptions and complaints. Here he gets himself all lathered up.

He said that the program had been “inflexible” and “one size fits all.” That it was not “workable to the purpose.” Translation: it didn’t work. But how do we know that? No studies or evaluations were done. At his press conference announcing the new union deal, the mayor and his schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, gave several foggy reasons for the change: the time would be used for additional parent conferences and for “professional development” so the teachers could learn how to teach the new core curriculum. A lot of unspecific wiggle room was negotiated on both counts–part of the mayor’s drive toward “flexibility.”

I particularly like the sass-quotes around professional development. You know, teachers and their so-called professional development where they sit around pretending to learn stuff about their jobs when they're really getting foot massages and eating bon-bons. What possible benefit to students could there be in training teachers to better do their jobs?

And "flexibility"? Pshaw, says Klein. The AFT sucks at flexibility. And then he's off to the races.

The American Federation of Teachers, which Weingarten now heads, calls itself “a union of professionals,” but it negotiates as if it were a union of assembly-line workers. 

In fairness to Klein, teachers have been known to level this complaint about unionism. But something invariably happens to remind them that it's not just about how they act, but how they are treated.

I'm not going to take Klein to task for slamming assembly-line workers as if they are a bad thing. I know what he means-- teachers should act like salaried workers instead of workers paid by the hour. Of course, if he tried to get his doctor or his lawyer to put in extra unbilled hours and be "paid in professional satisfaction," I think he'd have another complaint to make. So I'm not sure exactly which profession he wants us to act like. Hell, even the oldest profession (I mean, of course, plumbing) charges by the hour.

It bothers Klein that the union negotiates things down to the half-minute, but he seems to forget that for every teacher union not saying, "We'll work long extra hours just out of professional pride," there's a school board not saying, "You know what? We'll just pay you what the work is worth and trust you to give us the hours needed." Teachers could easily put in every single hour of the week doing the work, and many districts would let them do it, for free. "Wow, you're working so hard and long we're going to pay you more. really, we insist," said no school district ever. Nor do they say, "We'll trust you to do what's right and never clock you in and out so we're sure we get every hour you owe us." A line has to be drawn somewhere; professionals also do not regularly give away their work for free. I agree that the half-minute is a little silly, but the line still has to be drawn.

Klein also throws into the pot his assertion that real professionals don't resist evaluation. This is partly almost true. Real professionals do not resist evaluation by qualified, knowledgeable fellow professionals who are using a fair and accurate measuring instrument. But if Klein's editor announced "the guys in the mailroom have decided that you will be evaluated on how thick your hair grows in and how much garbage is in your wastebasket," I don't think Klein's reply would be, "I'm a professional. That's fine."

Teachers and our unions are not opposed to evaluation. We are opposed to bad evaluations conducted unfairly using invalid methods developed by amateurs who don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Klein also asserts a bedrock principle for systems that are not working in schools-- you don't scrap them, but you fix them. I was going to hunt down a column in which Klein uses this same argument to vehemently oppose things like, say, letting Eva Moskowitz shove aside public schools to make room for charters. Because, if a public school is struggling, Joe Klein will apparently be there to argue fiercely that you don't close public schools-- you fix them. But my googler seems to be broken. Can somebody help me with that? Kthanks.

But Klein saves the worst for last. You see, there's a struggle going on in this country and it's time to pick sides-- either the unions or the students.

That's an interesting choice, particularly since these days many teachers are wishing that teacher unions would choose the side of teachers. But really-- is that it? The biggest obstacle standing in the path of educating students is teachers' unions? Teachers unions are out there saying, "We've got to smack down those damn students and get them out of our way"?

I think not. I think in many districts, particularly big messy urban districts, the only adults around to stand up for the interests of the students are the teachers (whose working conditions are the very same as the students' learning conditions), and the only hope the teachers have of being heard at all is to band together into a group, a union. Consequently, much of what good has happened for students is there not because of some school board largesse but because a teachers' union (or a group of parents, or both) stood up and demanded it.

It's ironic I'm writing this, because I have plenty of beefs with the union. But to assert that making the unions shut up and go away would usher in an era of student greatness and success is just silly.

Of course, I could be wrong. I would do a search for states that hamstrung or abolished teacher unions and which now lead the nation in school and student excellence. Perhaps there are such places. Unfortunately, my googler is busted.