Yet another legal complaint vs Success for violating students' civil rights - & this time, it's clear that DOE is culpable as well

Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy CEO, with her family

Advocates for Children filed a new complaint with the State Education Department about Success Academy’s failure to provide five special needs students with their mandated services and their right to a hearing before their placement is unilaterally changed, as required by state and federal law.  

This is yet one more example of many lawsuits and legal complaints against the charter network.

See the Chalkbeat summary here:

Success Academy officials violated civil rights laws when changing students’ special education services according to a complaint filed Thursday, resulting in some students suddenly changing classrooms and losing months of required instruction.

The complaint, filed with the state’s education department, alleges a pattern of school officials unilaterally changing special education placements without holding meetings with parents, moving students to lower grade levels, and even ignoring hearing officers’ rulings. In some cases, students were removed from classrooms that integrate special and general education students and sent to classrooms that only serve students with disabilities.

The complaint also targets the NYC Department of Education which, as AFC notes, is responsible for ensuring that Success abides by the law when it comes to providing special needs kids with their mandated services:

As the LEA, the DOE is responsible for ensuring that all procedural safeguards for students with disabilities at charter schools are followed, including implementation of pendency orders. [meaning they cannot change placements or services to special needs kids without due process].

In one case, the complaint outlines, “the DOE stated that the decisions to change M.L.’s placement were internal school matters over which the DOE had no control” and if the parent wanted to stop the illegal actions of Success, she would have to file a lawsuit in federal court to ask for a temporary restraining order.

...As a result of this lengthened process of first obtaining the pendency order at an impartial hearing and then needing to enforce the order in federal court, students with disabilities are losing ordered instruction time, solely because they attend a charter school…

Even when a hearing is held, the Success charter officials ignore the demands of the hearing officer. When the hearing officer ordered them to restore the previous placement to the student, "counsel for Success Academy replied, refusing to comply with M.L.’s Pendency Order and stating that: (1) M.L.’s Pendency Order was “legally erroneous” and (2) the impartial hearing officer did not have the authority to order M.L.’s return to her prior placement."

At no time the DOE defend the rights of the students involved, according to the complaint:

As the LEA for students with disabilities attending charter schools in New York City, the DOE is responsible for ensuring that all procedural safeguards for students with disabilities at charter schools are followed, including making sure that changes in placements occur only after duly constituted IEP meetings and prior written notice to the parent. The DOE, however, has not been holding IEP meetings prior to these changes in placements. Indeed, the DOE defended at hearing the unilateral changes of M.L.’s and K.B.’s placements without IEP meetings, and at M.J.’s IEP meeting, the DOE representative stated that these unilateral changes in placement by Success Academy schools were out of the DOE’s control.

Among the demands made by AFC to DOE in the case:

AFC requests that NYSED order the DOE to:

a. develop an accountability structure to ensure that all charter schools, including SA schools and all other schools within the Success Academy network, comply with all procedural safeguards for students with disabilities under the IDEA and New York law;

b. identify those SA schools and all other schools within the Success Academy network that are not providing the procedural safeguards required by the IDEA and New York Education Law and develop a plan to ensure that those schools provide procedural safeguards when required.

The complaint also cites in passing the example of Success Academy eliminating one of their 12-1-1 classes at Bed Stuy middle school last year, and essentially ejecting all these special needs students, as reported in Politico.  Yet as I previously wrote about here, after analyzing the available data, Success actually got rid of one fourth of its 12-1-1 classes last year.   When a parent advocate contacted the DOE's  special ed office on behalf of these parents, the DOE knew nothing about this and utterly failed in its oversight of Success.  

What's bizarre is in the cases described in the complaint, Success managers insisting on removing  students from inclusion classes and put them in 12-1-1 classes -- but then at the end of the year decided to eliminate many of these classes instead.  

The chaotic nature of these actions further suggests that Success just doesn't know what to do with students who for whatever reason aren't responding to their test-prep culture with super-high test scores.   As is clear, they have hard time hiring teachers because of their terrible treatment of both teachers and kids; see the overwhelming negative reviews in Glassdoor. They find it especially difficult to hire teachers who are certified in special education, which explains why a former store clerk was hired to teach the 12-1-1 class at Success Academy Bed Stuy Middle school  without any experience, with the principal telling parents that they didn't know how to reach kids with learning problems.

While apparently unsure or unwilling to provide students with their mandated services, it is apparent that the network demands its teachers fulfill a quota of kids identified as having disabilities, apparently to get more funding from the state, as explained by in a Glassdoor review by a teacher this fall:

Sadly, this new complaint was filed the day after Success was allowed via a vote of the Panel for Education Policy to co-locate a new middle school within PS 25 in Brooklyn next year -- in which they will able to abuse yet more students. So that the DOE (and the Mayor) are enablers of this abuse in several ways - first, by not exerting any oversight to ensure that Success respects of its students, and then giving them space to expand the number of kids they will mistreat.

Because I helped parents bring a lawsuit to keep PS 25 open (which this co-location vote doesn't directly affect), I was quoted in Chalkbeat about this vote last night:

“As usual the Success steamroller pushes on,” wrote Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy group Class Size Matters. “Hopefully the new Senate majority will stand up to [Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz] with more guts than the Mayor has done.”

Let's hope the new year brings more accountability to delinquent charter schools like Success through Legislative action. 

The growing storm around Success Academy

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.