Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part VII
The seventh, and final, part of Startup’s podcast series about Success Academy (available here) is titled ‘High School.’
The podcast describes the chaos in their first high school which eventually led to a student revolt. Students were sick of the overly strict rules, the extreme punishments — like getting held back a grade for being late to school too often, the culturally insensitivity of rules like the one not allowing non-religious head scarves, and an epidemic of student depression stemming from all this. They have several interviews with Moskowitz that reveal how tone-deaf she is to these sorts of issues. Still, this section has a happy ending — the school compromised to the student’s demands. Still, most of the staff at the high school quit at the end of the school year.
A big segment of the podcast is about the first graduating class, the colleges they got into, and their graduation ceremony. In the second episode, it mentions that there were 73 students in the first group of Success Academy students when it opened. So when at around the 7:30 mark in this podcast they say “She had only 16 kids in this first senior class,16 to get into college” this would certainly have been a good time to inform the listeners who either haven’t listened to the earlier episode — or who just forgot what didn’t seem like an important detail in episode 2 — that this was 16 out of 73.
Describing the graduation:
The ceremony was held in an elegant concert hall at Lincoln Center. Eva is standing on stage wearing a bright floral dress and black patent leather stilettos. The 16 graduating seniors have blue caps and gowns, with orange tassels, the school colors. School leaders, including the outgoing high school principal Andy Malone, sit on the stage behind her, beaming. The crowd is going wild.
And in the last minute, one of the final things said in the seven part podcast
For these 16 graduating seniors, they’ve beaten the odds, and will be entering a world filled with opportunities that they likely wouldn’t have had without Success Academy.
So there was ample opportunity as, again and again, she talked about these 16 students, for the host to mention that this was 16 out of 73 yet she doesn’t and this is surely a CONTINUE READING: