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Friday, April 19, 2019

Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part Two | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part Two | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part Two

In the first episode of Startup’s seven part podcast about Success academy, they presented the case that most schools in New York City are ‘bad’ and how Success Academy’s unique approach to education levels the playing field.
Episode two, The Founder (can be found here) details Eva Moskowitz’s rise to power.  She started as a very self-assured child who had a bad experience with her music teacher.  Her father wrote the music teacher a note that said “(expletive deleted) you” and this becomes a theme throughout Eva’s career in education, according to the podcast — metaphorically writing ‘F You’ letters to various parties who have crossed her.
Moskowitz was elected to the City Council in 1999 and she visited hundreds of schools and found that some had broken toilets.  She aggressively worked to get them fixed and found that it was frustrating dealing with the large bureaucracy of the New York City school system.
When she went to a school where she felt the lunch room was understaffed, she learned that under the teacher’s union contract, teachers are exempt from certain duties, like doing lunch duty.
The narrator, Lisa Chow, then says matter of factly:  “The teachers’ union contract … a document that protects the interests of teachers in traditional public schools. She asked her staff to get a copy of the teachers contract, expecting something that was maybe 20 
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