On Friday morning, the
NY Times ran a story and posted the video above, a minute and 16 seconds of a teacher berating a first grade child at the Cobble Hill Success charter school in Brooklyn, ripping up her page of math work, and sending her to sit on the “calm down” chair.
This video has gone viral, with an apparently greater impact than all the news articles, complaints, and lawsuits filed against Success charters in the past few years.
There have been so many documented instances of students unfairly treated and pushed out of Success charter schools that it is difficult to know where to start.
One of the first parents to tell her story of how her special needs son was pushed out of a Success charter school in Kindergarten within a few weeks of the beginning of the school year was
Karen Sprowal, in a Michael Winerip column in the NY Times in July 2011 – nearly five years ago.
We followed up with Karen’s own account
on our blog here.
Over the years, Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News has repeatedly chronicled the
many documented instances of
young children repeatedly suspended and ejected from Success Charters.
For the first time, the NY Times started critically covering the school last spring, describing their high-pressured test prep tactics and severe
disciplinary practices for the purpose of achieving high scores on the state exams.
This fall, PBS ran a segment about the suspensions of young children at the Success Academy Charter Schools. You can
see the segment here.
Fatima Geidi spoke about the way the school had repeatedly suspended her first grade son for minor infractions, and refused to provide him with the special education services he was entitled to.
While the reporter, John Merrow, attested to the fact that many other parents and teachers confirmed these system-wide practices, they told him they were afraid to appear on camera.
Eva Moskowitz subsequently retaliated against Fatima and her son, by posting a falsified record of his disciplinary infractions, and sharing it with the media. Fatima filed a FERPA complaint to the federal government, pointing out how this violated his federal privacy rights. Months later, this falsified list of infractions was taken down from the Success website.
Shortly after the PBS program ran, the NY Times published
an
October 29 article on the “Got to Go list,” composed by the principal at the Fort Greene Success charter school targeting certain students, and explaining that their parents had to be persuaded to take them out of the school.
After that, a petition to the US Department of Education was posted online by
Alliance for Quality Education and Color of Change, asking for a federal investigation and that the US Department of Education withhold any more federal funds from the school until the investigation was complete.
The petition pointed out that the US Department of Education had given Success Academy charters more than $37 million dollars since 2010, and nearly three million dollars in 2015 alone.
The petition received over 35,000 signatures.
On December 10, 2015, four parents whose children were on the “Got to Go list” at the Fort Greene Success Academy filed
a 27-page lawsuit in federal court, seeking $2 million in damages. On January 4, the NY Times reported that the principal of that school had taken a “personal leave of absence” (though it was
later revealed that he is now teaching at another Success charter school in Harlem.)
On January 18, the
NY Post wrote that SUNY Charter Institute, the main authorizer of Success charters, was finally launching its own investigation into the practices of these schools.
In a longer story published January 20
, Schoolbook revealed that the SUNY Charter Institute had sent a letter five days before to the board chairman of Success Academy, noting “
allegations of improper use of student discipline practices to encourage students to dis-enroll, especially at the Fort Greene school.”
On the same date, January 20, a
class action complaint to the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education was brought by thirteen parents on behalf of their children with disabilities at eight different Success Academy charter schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Bronx.
The complaint highlighted “systemic policies” that violated these students’ federal rights, including harassing and publicly shaming them, refusing to provide them with appropriate services, calling 911 to take them to the hospital when they allegedly misbehaved, and repeatedly suspending them without reporting these actions as suspensions, and without providing them with due process or alternative instruction as required by law.
This class action complaint was joined by City Council Education Danny Dromm and Letitia James, the New York City Public Advocate. You can read the
full complaint here.
More recently, another
lawsuit was filed by NY Lawyers for Public Interest on behalf of a parent of a former Kindergarten student with disabilities at Fort Greene Success Academy charter school, who was successfully pushed out of the school.
Yet none of these documented news accounts or lawsuits has had the same impact on the public consciousness as this minute and sixteen second video. Is it the power of video in the digital age? The ability to see with your own eyes and viscerally experience the abusive treatment that these young children were forced to suffer through, week after week, year after year? Whatever the reason, let’s hope that this brings a wider public awareness not only about the practices of this particular chain of charters, but about all the “no excuses” charters that may produce better test scores, but at a very large human cost.
