Success Academy Scrubs Their Public Video Page
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 video site on Vimeo. This is the collection of videos that they promised in The Wall Street Journal back in May after a few very public scandals.
Now Success Academy is very private about what happens in their schools so you’d figure that all their videos contain things that they are proud of. Surely they spent considerable money producing these videos and there were many people involved in what sorts of things would be permitted to be in these videos.
There were 485 videos on the page when I first came across it a few days ago. Randomly clicking on a few of them I found four videos among the nearly 500 that I analyzed, three in the first post and one in the second post. I noticed in a comment today on the most recent post that the video I wrote about was taken down from the site. Then I looked at the first post and found that two of those three videos were also removed from their site. I went back to their site to find that all that remains of the 485 videos that were up just 24 hours ago is now down to just 56 videos.
Now you can go back and read my posts and you will see that I encourage readers to watch the videos and make their own judgements before reading my opinions on them. Surely by posting these videos they should expect that someone might watch them and critique them, you’d figure. But I think it is pretty sure that it isn’t a coincidence that a few days after I posted the links to these videos not only are three out of four of them removed, but over 90% of their videos are removed.
Now 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 Success Academy Scrubs Their Public Video Page | Gary Rubinstein's Blog: