Success Academy Charter Schools

src: www.successacademies.org

Success Academy Charter Schools, originally Harlem Success Academy, is a charter school operator in New York City. Eva Moskowitz, a former city council member for the Upper East Side, is its founder. According to the New York Post, Success Academy had 17,000 applicants for 3,000 available seats, which resulted in a wait list of more than 10,000 families for the 2017-2018 school year. It has 46 schools in the New York area and 15,500 students. Two documentary films, The Lottery and Waiting for "Superman", record the intense desire of parents to enroll their children in Success Academy and charter schools like Success Academy.

Video Success Academy Charter Schools

History

Eva Moskowitz opened the first Success Academy charter, then Harlem Success Academy, in 2006 with 157 students chosen by lottery. She subsequently opened more schools in Harlem, and then schools in other New York City neighborhoods. The charter schools are funded by taxpayers and philanthropic donations. Since its opening in 2006, Success has received more than 110,000 student applications.

In February 2014, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio revoked a number of previously approved charter school co-locations, which are publicly funded but privately run, including those for three Success Academy schools. The decision was reversed in April after New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo stepped into the controversy. The city ended up finding space for three Success Academy schools.

Hedge fund managers Joel Greenblatt and John Petry were founders who helped to recruit Moskowitz as CEO. John Paulson donated $8.5 million to Success Academy in July 2015 to help open middle schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Success Academy Education Institute was formed in Summer 2016, to distribute the network's curriculum and teacher training resources online to educators across the country.

In 2014, New York City charter schools won the right to provide pre-kindergarten, and Success Academy opened its first pre-kindergarten in fall 2015. In 2015, New York City issued a mandatory contract granting its Department of Education oversight over all pre-kindergarten providers. Success Academy did not sign the contract, citing that the city does not have authority to regulate its charter schools. In June 2016, Success Academy canceled its pre-kindergarten program and filed a suit in the State Supreme Court. The appeals court ruled in favor of Success Academy in June 2017, stating that the city could not regulate a charter school's pre-kindergarten programs, while also awarding $720K in back payments to Success.

Maps Success Academy Charter Schools

Academics

Success Academy gives four weeks of training to teachers in the summer and regular weekly training in the school year. Principals in the charter network spend most of their time coaching teachers. The State University of New York's Board of Trustees has voted to approve regulations that allow Success Academy to certify its own teachers.

Academics are measured by standardized test scores, and the mostly black and Hispanic students at Success Academy outscore contemporaries in both urban public schools and wealthy suburban schools in the New York City area. According to The Education of Eva Moskowitz, "four times as many African American and Hispanic students pass tests at our schools as in city schools." In New York City, 41% percent of public school students passed state reading tests, and 38% passed math tests. At Success schools, corresponding percentages were 84% and 95%. These scores come from a student group made up of 95% children of color, with families having a median income of $32,000. No new students above the fourth grade are accepted at Success.

The schools emphasize testing, including giving prizes to students, and publicly ranking how well each student does on the practice tests. As of October 2017, Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that Harlem Success Academy students received approximately 137 extra days of learning in reading and approximately 239 additional days of learning in math.

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Schools

Success has 46 schools with 15,500 students from kindergarten through high school, which would make it the seventh largest school district in the New York if it were its own district.

The Bronx

Brooklyn

Manhattan

Queens

src: www.successacademies.org

Reception

In 2014, an assistant teacher made a video recording of a colleague publicly scolding a student who failed to answer a question correctly, and tearing up the student's paper. Education experts stated that the teacher's behavior was inappropriate and discouraged learning. A 2015 article in The New York Times reported that discipline, social pressure, positive reinforcement, and suspension are applied to students, as teachers are rewarded for better behavior and performance. Former teachers claimed that they quit because they disagreed with Success' punitive approach to students.

Some parents of special-needs students at Success Academy schools have complained of overly strict disciplinary policies which have resulted in high rates of suspension and attempts to pressure the parents to transfer their special-needs children out of the schools. State records and interviews with two dozen parents indicate that the schools failed at times to adhere to federal and state laws in disciplining special-education students.

Statistics gathered by the New York State Education Department show much higher rates of suspension at most Success Academy schools than at neighborhood public schools. School spokesmen have denied improper treatment of any student, and founder Eva Moskowitz has defended school practices as promoting "order and civility in the classroom".

The selection method for admission has come under fire for an "abdication of responsibility" to educate all children within a geographic area. Moskowitz responds by noting that traditional neighborhood schools can "institutionalize housing segregation, making a child's zip code his educational destiny" while charter schools are tools for "social justice" by allowing parents to choose schools beyond geographic constraints.

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Awards and recognition

In 2012, Harlem Success Academy Charter School 1 became the first city charter school to be awarded a National Blue Ribbon. Harlem Success Academy Charter School 3 was awarded a National Blue Ribbon by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015. In 2016, both Harlem Success Academy Charter School 4 and Bronx Success Academy Charter School 1 were awarded National Blue Ribbons.

Success Academy received the 2017 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, an award recognizing the best academic outcomes in the nation for low-income students and students of color. A grant for $250K to support college-readiness programs was also awarded to Success Academy at the National Charter School Conference in Washington, D.C. In September 2017, Success Academy was one of the recipients of the Department of Education's charter grants.

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References

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External links

• Success Academy Charter Schools website
• New York Daily News op-ed by founder

Source of article : Wikipedia