Success Academy's three-card monte: their Fort Greene middle school vanishes & turns into their Sheepshead Bay elementary school, more than 7 miles away

 Note: Gary Rubinstein writes about this issue on his blog as well.

UPDATE, 3/5/24:  Yet another wrinkle to the story below.  A Brooklyn parent sent me the following info:

SA Fort Greene was the infamous "got to go" school and was an elementary school in D13, at 101 Park Avenue, co-located with a public middle school. My guess is that it was sited where it was to draw from some of the low-performing District 13 schools in the general area, as well as others in District 14. But as those neighborhoods have gentrified and local schools have drawn more parents with fundraising capability, SA has looked less appealing to elementary school parents. There are also a couple of charters in the neighborhood, Compass and Community Roots, that have drawn a diverse and more affluent base of families. I have no idea when it closed, but it's not on the SA website. The school's still listed on Inside Schools, however, and the parent comments on that site will give you an idea of the controversy.

So Success Fort Greene was originally an elementary school in D13 with a terrible reputation, that was was somehow transformed onto a middle school in D14, nearly two miles away, and now is magically turned back into an elementary school once again, and transported to Sheepshead Bay, eight miles away -- all without somehow changing its actual identity, according to the State Education Department, or SUNY, its authorizer.  What a shell game!

___

About a month ago, teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein sent me an email, asking if I knew that Success Fort Greene Middle School had closed, and asking me if I knew where to access their test scores and past enrollment.  I sent him some data showing their declining enrollment, and then went on a search myself to try to find out more information about this school, but what I discovered was very confusing and contradictory.

It is true that Success Academy seems to have quietly closed their Success Academy Fort Greene MS last year, located at 700 Park Avenue in Brooklyn in D14, even though they were actively recruiting more students to the school as recently as last March, according to their Facebook page. According to their state report card as of 2022-2023, Fort Greene had a sharply declining population of 5th-8 graders.

But Success is still intent on expanding the number of its schools, despite a cap on charter schools. This year, they opened up a new elementary school in Sheepshead Bay HS complex at 3000 Avenue X,  in Brooklyn.  

Last year, a lawsuit was filed to block this charter co-location, focused primarily on the fact that the DOE's Educational Impact Statement did not even mention the new class size law, and instead its analysis that there was available space in the building for the co-location relied upon an assumption that current class sizes in the existing schools would persist forever, even though many of their classes were far above the levels mandated in the class size law.  I wrote an affidavit in support of the lawsuit. The Judge ruled that this lawsuit should have been filed as an appeal to the Commissioner instead, and now the plaintiffs, including the UFT, intend to appeal his decision to the Appellate court.

But to go back to the journey I embarked on when looking into the mysterious disappearance of Success Fort Greene school:

• Strangely enough, the SED charter school directory still has Success Fort Greene open and located in D13, despite the fact that last year it was in D14 and is now closed anyway. See the Excel spreadsheet of the NYS Charter School Directory (As of October 17, 2023)

•  On the DOE website,  they also  list Success Fort Greene still open, but instead of a middle school, they describe it as including grades K-1, and located at the Sheepshead Bay address in D22 at 3000 Avenue X in Brooklyn. 

•  The DOE charter report from December 2023 similarly  lists Success Fort Greene as still open, but also located at the Sheepshead Bay address at 3000 Avenue X, Brooklyn.  The spreadsheet shows it as enrolling mostly K and 1st graders; but also one 6th grader and one 8th grader – which is very peculiar, unless this is to maintain some sort of fiction that it is still partially a middle school. 

• Its authorizer, the SUNY Charter center, also still lists Success Fort Greene as open, but sited at two different locations: first,  at the now-closed address at 700 Park Ave., with both K-1 grades and 5th-8th grades and in D13.  This is despite that its last location was in D14, and the school enrolled no K or 1^st graders as far as I know, and is now closed. 

Even more weirdly, under the same heading of Success Fort Greene, SUNY also lists it as Success Sheepshead Bay in a subheading, located at the 3000 Avenue X address - and at both locations having the same principal, Shannon Beatty. 

Clicking on the original proposal as listed at the bottom of the list above, one can see that Success Academy Fort Greene  as originally approved by SUNY was for an elementary school in either District 2,4, 13, 16 or 17 ---to open in 2013-2014.  No middle school is mentioned, and no school in either D14 where it was last year, or D22 where it is supposedly now.
 
Even more confusingly, I cannot find any authorization by SUNY or the Regents of a Success Academy Sheepshead Bay, after doing a search on their websites. However, in October  2023, SUNY authorized a revision to Success Fort Greene charter, to lower its enrollment at the address where it no longer existed by that point: at 700 Park Ave. Brooklyn.  

This revision says the school was originally chartered to serve both grades K and 5-8  and can now expand to a K-4 school but with a lower enrollment, to serve 126 students in K-1.  It mentions no new Success Academy at Sheepshead Bay, even though that school had already opened in September, the previous month:

Success Academy Charter School – Fort Greene is located at 700 Park Avenue, Brooklyn, New
York 11206 in CSD 14 and is chartered to serve 296 students in grades K and 5-8 for the 2023-
24 school year growing to serve 552 students in grades K-8 for the 2026-27 school year, the
final year of the current charter term. The school requests an enrollment decrease to serve
126 students in grades K-1 for the 2023-24 school year and 538 students in grades K-4 for the
2026-27 school year.

Now, if one takes a look at the Success Academy website instead, there is no longer any listing for Success Fort Greene, but it does list Success Sheepshead Bay , an elementary school with K-1 students at 3000 Avenue X  in the Sheepshead Bay complex, which is far more accurate than the other fictional listings on the DOE, NYSED and SUNY websites.  

This new elementary school, Success Academy Sheepshead Bay is also cited in their Federal replication grant application, as one of four new elementary schools that Success was planning to open  this year with 180 seats.

So on its own website, and in order to get a funding through a federal grant, Success  portrays this as a new elementary school.  But to DOE, SED, and SUNY, its authorizer, it is a but a branch of an already defunct middle school.

What is the explanation for this confusing three-card monte game? I suspect that Success is trying to maintain the fiction to New York authorities that their new Success Academy elementary school in Sheepshead Bay is the very same school as their now-defunct Middle school more than seven miles away, because they are bumping up against the charter cap and do not want to use up one of their valuable  slots– and SUNY is actively involved in helping them participate in this scam. 

 

A short history of Seth Andrews after he pleads guilty to embezzlement in federal court

Bank surveillance photo of Seth Andrew from DOJ indictment

Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep charters and former Advisor to Arne Duncan and the White House on the use of education technology has pleaded guilty to stealing more more than $200K from the charter network he founded, in order to receive lower interest rate on a mortgage for an apartment he had purchased in NYC.  

Seth started Democracy Prep in 2005 when he was only 28 years old.  The charter school's curriculum was portrayed as focused on instilling "civic values", and the network was encouraged to expand rapidly by then-Chancellor Joel Klein, who gave his charters space in NYC public schools.  I met Seth a few years later, when he reached out to me and gave me a tour of one of his co-located charter schools in Harlem.  

I found him an intriguing character, obsessively throwing a rubber ball against the wall while we walked through the halls of the school, and never taking off his baseball hat though the network had a rigid dress code for students, who were forbidden to wear hats, wear the wrong color socks or the wrong kind of belt.  When we were touring the school, he stopped one student in the hall and berated her for having her Uggs showing. I wondered how long he would last at his own charter school before being suspended or pushed out.  I later learned that his baseball hat was something of a calling card for Seth, and it is even mentioned in the indictment document.

Democracy Prep  is a "no excuses" charter chain, known for its strict disciplinary practices and high attrition rates.  I questioned him about their demerit system which called for keeping students after school for small lapses of behavior, to sit in a room silently, without being able to read or do homework. We discussed Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, and when I asked him if she didn't give a bad reputation to the charter school movement, he said he thought she was useful because she kept negative attention off other NYC charters like his.

In 2012, the network received $9.1 million from the US Department of Education to expand to states outside New York, and then another $12.7 million in 2016, aided by recommendations from former NYC Chancellor Joel Klein, former DOE "Chief Equity Officer" and scandal-plagued Harvard professor Roland Fryer, and former Louisiana State Superintendent John White.

In 2013,  Andrew was appointed senior advisor to Arne Duncan and  superintendent-in-residence at the U.S. Department of Education; you can see the cast of characters who congratulated him on Twitter. He later served under Obama at the White House Office of Educational Technology, while continuing to be on the payroll of Democracy Prep, according to this CNBC article. 

In 2016, he helped start a charter school in DC, the Washington Leadership Academy. based on virtual reality.  The school won the $10 million XQ prize from Laurene Powell Jobs'  Emerson Collective.  He explained the benefits of having an imaginary science lab to a reporter:

“During that time, no child will be burned, no child will have a chemical spill, and it will cost the school a fraction of what building a lab would require.” said Andrew.

After leaving the Department of Education, he served as Global Director of Policy & Partnerships at Bridge International Academies from 2017 to 2018, which runs for-profit schools in India and Africa, and which I have critiqued on this blog here and here. 

Andrew left BIA to run an organization called Democracy Builders, and in 2020, he announced that they would buy the campus of the now-defunct Marlboro College in Vermont to start a hybrid college program for low-income students, dependent on federal funding. 

But later that year, in April 2020, he was arrested and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements.  Through complex maneuvers taking place over several months between March and November 2019, as described in the Justice Dept. indictment, he had transferred over $218,000 from three Democracy Prep's escrow accounts that they are required to retain, and deposited these funds into his own accounts.  His goal was to qualify for a lower mortgage rate for a Manhattan apartment on Central Park West that he and his wife had purchased in August 2019 for $2.37 million.

According to Chalkbeat, the embezzlement was first noted by the SUNY Charter Institute, in a renewal report dated February 2020 for two Democracy Prep schools.  As  the report states:  

The 2018-19 audited financial statements ... continued to identify concerns regarding the internal control structure of the merged education corporation and network. ...Recently, a network contractor discovered a theft of approximately $142,000 in two of the education corporations dissolution reserve fund bank accounts during the 2018-19 fiscal year. The auditor deemed these amounts to be uncollectible and wrote them off in the financial statements....

The most recent audit report for June 30, 2019 reported material weaknesses in record keeping of general ledger accounts and transactions, lack of reconciliations, and overall lack of timely analysis of the financial records and accurate reporting. This, in turn, put the board in a position of not having accurate and up to date information for fiscal decision making. In addition, a cash theft from inactive bank accounts went undetected for months during 2018-19.

Nevertheless, SUNY recommended the renewal of these two charter schools.

Andrew's indictment was first announced April 27, 2021.  After pleading guilty last week, his defense attorneys have now released a  statement that for over two decades, Andrew "has worked tirelessly to expand educational, democratic, and technological opportunity to disenfranchised communities around the world."  His sentencing is scheduled for April 14.  Though the maximum charge is 20 years in prison, the prosecutors and his defense lawyers agreed in a written plea deal that a sentence of 21 to 27 months would be appropriate.

After his departure from Democracy Prep, its expansion has not gone easily. In 2018, its DC charter school in  DC announced it would close , for poor performance as well as "suspension and expulsion rates...drastically higher than citywide averages." Other members of the chain have also experienced serious financial and management problems, as reported here.

More recently, Democracy Prep has been accused of racist practices by former and current students and staff. Seth Andrew subsequently wrote a somewhat ambivalent apology on Medium in June 2020, that he later deleted but is archived here. 

Is this the end of Seth Andrew on the corporate education stage?  Who knows. He seems to have an infinite capacity to re-invent himself and acquire powerful patrons. I wouldn't put it past him to bounce back after prison to launch some other trendy edu-company or product.

A video of his Ted Talk from 2012 is below.