Egregious distortions in NYT article on Success Charters, say parents, teachers & journalist
This Sunday’s NY Times featured an outrageously one-sided article on Success charters. It is not the first. One remembers the Steve Brill article from 2010 on Harlem Success Academy which was so similar in tone that I had to keep checking to see that this was not the exact same piece.
The Brill article was replete with many factual errors – claiming that the high-performing students at Success charters were exactly like those as the public schools with which it shared space, even though that was a clear falsehood that any reporter or editor could have checked if they had bothered to look at the data. This time, the reporter Daniel Bergner admitted that the type of students enrolled may be different, writing in an offhand manner:
On the topic of scores, the U.F.T. and Ravitch insist that Moskowitz’s numbers don’t hold up under scrutiny. Success Academy (like all charters), they say, possesses a demographic advantage over regular public schools, by serving somewhat fewer students with special needs, by teaching fewer students from the city’s most severely dysfunctional families and by using suspensions to push out underperforming students (an accusation that Success Academy vehemently denies). …. But even taking these differences into account probably doesn’t come close to explaining away Success Academy’s results.
Though he mentions that critics cite demographic differences, he doesn’t bother to report the data himself and discounts their impact. He completely brushes off the higher suspension rates, by saying that Success denies it, but these are well-documented and a Legal Aid attorney argues their practice is illegal. Even the SUNY charter institute, a creature of the charter lobby, has criticized Success Academy suspensions in documents available online – none of which the reporter mentions, because it is only “critics” who claim their reality.
Bergner only quotes two critics: UFT head Michael Mulgrew (who he depicts as self-interested) and Diane Ravitch, though he left out most of what she said. At the Huffington Post, Diane Ravitch points out that she told him the following – all left out of his article:
“The only Success Academy school that has fully grown to grades 3-8 tested 116 3rd graders but only 32 8th graders. Three other Success Academy schools have grown to 6th grade. One tested 121 3rd graders but only 55 6th graders, another 106 3rd graders but only 68 6th graders, and the last 83 3rd graders but only 54 6th graders. Why the shrinking student body? When students left the school, they were not replaced by other incoming students. When the eighth grade students who scored well on the state test took the admissions test for the specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, not one of them passed the test.
I also told Bergner that Success Academy charters have among the highest rates of teacher turnover every year, which would not happen if teachers enjoyed the work. Helen Zelon wrote in "City Limits": "In Harlem Success Academies 1-4, the only schools for which the state posted turnover data, more than half of all NYC Public School Parents: Egregious distortions in NYT article on Success Charters, say parents, teachers & journalist:
