Success Academy
Article
Success Academy is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 18, 2021 and February 18, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Success Academy is a chain of New York charter schools with superficially amazing results”; ""Success Academy isn’t just cooking the books”; “Success Academy’s results""; “Success Academy itself claims that they have lots of innovative teaching methods”. It most often appears alongside DeBoer, Freddie, Freddie DeBoer.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 18, 2021
- Last seen: February 18, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- DeBoer (2 shared issues)
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- Freddie (2 shared issues)
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- Freddie DeBoer (2 shared issues)
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- Montessori (2 shared issues)
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- 1957 (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander H (1 shared issues)
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- American (1 shared issues)
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- American education (1 shared issues)
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- Appalachian (1 shared issues)
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- Baby Einstein (1 shared issues)
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- Bell Labs (1 shared issues)
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- Bezoses (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Success Academy is a chain of New York charter schools with superficially amazing results. They take the worst-off students - "76% of students are less advantaged and 94% are minorities" - and achieve results better than the ritziest schools in the best neighborhoods - it ranked "in the top 1% of New York state schools in math, and in the top 3% for reading" - while spending "as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts." Its supporters credit it with showing "what you can accomplish when you are free from the regulations and mindsets that have taken over education, and do things in a different way.”
Inline links: superficially amazing results
I'm not sure I share this perspective. Success Academy isn't just cooking the books - you would test for that using a randomized trial with intention-to-treat analysis. The one that I found is small-n, short timescale, and a little ambiguous, but I think basically supports the contention that there's something there beyond selection bias. Teacher tourism might be a factor, but hardly justifies DeBoer's "charter schools are frauds, shut them down" perspective. Even if Success Academy's results are 100% because of teacher tourism, they found a way to educate thousands of extremely disadvantaged minority kids to a very high standard at low cost, a way public schools had previously failed to exploit. That's not "cheating", it's something exciting that we should celebrate. If it doesn't scale, it doesn't scale, but maybe the same search process that found this particular way can also find other ways? Surely it doesn't seem like the obvious next step is to ban anyone else from even trying?
Inline links: The one that I found is
And we only have DeBoer's assumption that all of this is teacher tourism. Success Academy itself claims that they have lots of innovative teaching methods and a different administrative culture. If this explains even 10% of their results, spreading it to other schools would be enough to make the US rocket up the PISA rankings and become an unparalleled educational powerhouse. I'm not claiming to know for sure that this is true, but not even being curious about this seems sort of weird; wanting to ban stuff like Success Academy so nobody can ever study it again doubly so.
Michael Pershan recommends his own review of a book on Success Academy. A key quote:
Inline links: his own review
The meeting lasts just under an hour, but it opens a portal into the model and culture that explain in no small part the network’s consistent results across its schools. Suddenly it all makes sense: The common criticism leveled at Moskowitz and her schools is that they cherry-pick students, attracting bright children and shedding the poorly behaved and hardest to teach. This misses the mark entirely. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents. Parents who are not put off by uniforms, homework, reading logs and constant demands on their time, but who view those things as evidence that here, at last, is a school that has its act together. Parents who are not upset by tight discipline and suspensions but who are grateful for them, viewing Success Academy as a safe haven from disorderly streets and schools. Charter schools cannot screen parents to ensure culture fit, but the last hour in the auditorium is a close proxy for such an effort, galvanizing disciplines and warning off the indifferent and uncommitted. A the same time, there is something undeniably exclusionary about it. If you don’t have the resources to get your child to school by 7:30 and pick her up at 3:45 — at 12:30 on Wednesdays — Success Academy is not for you. Literally.
Pondiscio makes much of research showing that parental factors make a big difference on the success of low-income students. Parental involvement, two-family homes, strong religious faith are all factors that help. The claim is that Success Academy is essentially selecting for these families in low-income neighborhoods.