The Case of Eva and the Disappearing Success Academy Clueless Training Videos
....taking down of 430 out of 485 videos is an extreme — even paranoid — response to the analysis of one blogger about four of their videos. I hope they put the videos back up soon but I’m assuming they won’t.
Update: On Thursday September 6th the videos, for a brief while, temporarily reappeared, all of them, but a few hours later every video became password protected. So we went from 485 to 56 to 485 and then to 0 all in 24 hours.....
these videos were posted originally, presumably, to help the public schools learn what they can do to be as high performing as Success Academies. These videos were a public service. If this is true, it seems very harsh, cruel even, to take them down just because some blogger links to four of them and criticizes them. If they’re going to do this, why leave up 56 videos? The truth is that I did not sift through the 485 videos looking for incriminating stuff. Basically, I can pick pretty much any video they have and the issues I had with the other videos I wrote about are all clearly there...
One thing about this video is that the teacher seems to have some warmth while in the videos that were deleted, the teachers were somewhat hostile. The other videos had teachers doing some very bad things, for example, making kids raise their hands to reveal to the entire class that they got a poor score on an assignment. Another deleted video had an assistant teacher putting a sticker on a child’s face as the assistant teacher circulated around the room.
The videos seem to show that Success Academy is a place where students live in fear of their over-controlling teachers. It does not look like a place where kids get the opportunity to be kids. I do think there there is a subset of kids who can do well in this environment, but most, I think, can’t.
........Gary Rubinstein
Success Academy Scrubs Their Public Video Page: Updated
There’s a famous saying, I think it originated with Watergate, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up.”
My last two blog posts have been based on videos I found on Success Academy’s public Ed Notes Online: The Case of Eva and the Disappearing Sucess Academy Clueless Training Videos: