Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part One
Of all the charter school networks in the country, there is none that is more controversial or more secretive than Success Academy. If ‘success’ is defined as high 3-8 state test scores, then Success Academy has earned its name. But critics charge that this ‘success’ comes at the expense of other, more important measures of success.
This past November, a seven part podcast was published by a production company called startup. Soon after it was released, there were some excerpts of some of the most negative parts of the podcast printed on some blogs, but generally it seems to have came and went.
I was very interested in this podcast for a lot of reasons. I’ve been following Success Academy for years and have been piecing together evidence about all the different wrongdoings that this network engages in. Over the years I’ve probably written twenty different blog posts with my findings. I was also interested because last summer I was interviewed by one of the producers of this podcast while they were gathering material. Besides an hour or two of interviews, I also had several follow-up emails with this producer where he asked me to clarify certain arguments. I was curious to see how balanced the eventual product would be.
The podcast runs about seven hours and I listened to it a few months ago for the first time. What I found was a bizarre mix of about six hours of puff piece and one hour of devastating expose. Throughout the episodes the producers generally gave Success Academy the benefit of the doubt any time they could — until eventually even they couldn’t CONTINUE READING: Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part One | Gary Rubinstein's Blog
