Success charters and Eva Moskowitz continue to violate children's rights as the US Department of Education rewards them with another ten million dollars

Today yet another lawsuit was filed against Success Academy charter schools today by Tanwa Omolade, a Brooklyn mom whose special needs son was repeatedly suspended, sent to the police station for misbehavior and who herself had the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) called on her by Success administrators in a “campaign of harassment” to convince her to pull her child out of the school. More on the lawsuit and the filings at Chalkbeat here.  As Chalkbeat writes,

The lawsuit makes a number of allegations that have popped up against Success and other charter networks before: that they have threatened parents with child welfare investigations, held students back from advancing to the next grade level for disciplinary reasons, and generally use harsh discipline practices that have a disproportionate effect on students with disabilities.

Success Academy has been repeatedly sued for abusing its students and violating their rights, as well as calling ACS on parents who complain;  here are just some of the previous and ongoing lawsuits against this chain of charter schools.  

Yet in its wisdom, the US Department of Education just awarded this serial violator of civil rights ten million dollars to add to the $43.4 million they had already given the Success chain. 

In addition, Tufts has announced they will provide Eva Moskowitz an honorary degree, the head of Success Academy and a defendant in these lawsuits.  The former president of Tufts, Lawrence Bacow, who is the current president of Harvard is scheduled to speak at the Success high school's graduation, which last year only graduated 16 out of the 73 students who entered the school in Kindergarten  or first grade.  No doubt both occurrences were influenced by the fact that the head of the Success board, hedge funder Steve Galbreath, is also on the Tufts board of trustees and heads its investment committee.


The chaotic and abusive treatment suffered by her high school students and which caused most of the teaching staff to quit in disgust last year was extensively chronicled, including by this radio podcast. 

Meanwhile, at the end of February NYSED also sustained a complaint filed by Advocates for Children against Success for violating the due process rights of special needs students and failing to provide them with their mandated services; NYSED confirmed that NYC DOE had also done a lousy job in ensuring Success complied with the law.  

The State Education Department ordered Success Academy by March 29 to take the following steps, among others: to submit a list of students with disabilities whose mandated Individual Education Programs are not being implemented, evidence that Success has informed the DoE's Committee for Special Education that they have not implemented those IEPs, what actions they've taken as a result to address this failure, and who is responsible at Success for monitoring their implementation.  

In addition, the DOE was  ordered to implement a variety of "procedural safeguards" to ensure that parents and students are provided with their rights. The full NYSED decision and consent decree is below. 

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.

Our schools are held hostage by an outlaw

So let’s get this straight:

Chancellor Joel Klein violates state law by ordering 19 school closures and countless co-locations, without going through the mandated public process and preparing adequate educational impact statements.

When Justice Joan B. Lobis of State Supreme Court in Manhattan blocks the closures, finding “significant violations of law,” Klein ignores the court order by refusing to assign students to these schools.

When the city is sued by the UFT, Class Size Matters and others, charging that Klein failed to comply with the law requiring them to reduce class size, despite taking nearly a billion dollars in state funds in exchange for a promise to do so, the city argues that the courts have no jurisdiction over this matter.

When Justice John A. Barone of the State Supreme Court says the courts indeed have jurisdiction over this issue, Klein says he will appeal Barone's decision, and insists that only the NY State Education Commissioner has the authority to determine whether he is following the law.

When the same NY State Education Commissioner David Steiner forbids him from moving autistic kids out of PS 94 on the Lower East Side, so that Girls Prep charter can expand within the building, saying that the city failed to carry out the mandated public process for significant changes in school utilization, Klein ignores the ruling, invoking “emergency” powers, and goes ahead anyway.

1.1 million schoolchildren (and their parents) are being held hostage by this outlaw. Are there any limits to Klein's open contempt for the rule of law?

More importantly, what can be done? Are state legislators listening? Is anyone?