[Note: This post draws from an interview I conducted with an anonymous source who identifies as a KIPP alum from the late 1990s. I consider this person credible based on the evidence they provided. Additionally, the post relies on publicly available legal documents supplied by the same anonymous source. (https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/Login) It’s important to note that I am not a lawyer or, technically, a journalist and that my access to legal documents related to these cases may be limited. I welcome input from anyone, including KIPP officials, former KIPP students, or readers who ha ..read more

Success Academy is the largest charter school network in New York State. Starting in 2006 with one school, there are now around 40 Success Academy schools with around 20,000 students. And with a recent $100 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, it might seem that Success Academy will continue to grow at an exponential rate. But there is some evidence that growth at Success Academy is slowing down. In one case it seems that one of their schools, Fort Greene Middle School has shut down completely. According the New York State public data site, in 2022-2023, Success Academy Fort Greene was ..read more

Success Academy is a charter network with about 40 schools in the New York City area. They are known for their high standardized 3-8 test scores. Though it has been proved that their test scores are somewhat inflated by their practices of shedding their low performing students over the year and also by, at some schools, focusing exclusively on test prep in the months leading up to the tests, they still have these test scores to show their funders and the various charter school cheerleaders. In June there was an article on the website of something called Albany Strategic Advisors, some kind of ..read more

Success Academy is the infamous charter network of New York. Founded in 2006, and featured in Waiting For Superman, its growth was fueled by high standardized test scores. But as people, like me, looked more closely at the publicly available datapproa we found that there are some shady ways to achieve high standardized test scores. The biggest factor inflating their test scores is student attrition. By putting pressure on the families of struggling students and by threatening to force those students to repeat a grade or two, Success Academy ends up only graduating about 25% of the students who ..read more

There is exactly one KIPP high school in New York City. KIPP NYC College Prep High School was started in 2009 to serve students graduating from KIPP middle schools. In 2013 they moved into a new facility that was part of a $100 million project. While KIPP was once the ‘gold standard’ of charter schools, they do seem to have lost their luster. Once featured in the Waiting For Superman ‘documentary,’ KIPP does seem to have failed to live up to the original expectations. Between 1995 and 2010 they grew steadily but over the years there have been so many KIPPs that have not performed well and hav ..read more

In the latest U.S. News & World Report Best High School Ranking 2023-2024, the Success Academy High School was ranked the 102nd best high school in the country and the 12th best high school in New York State. Here is the list of the top 13 New York High schools on the list: 1 High School Math Science and Engineering at CCNY 2 Townsend Harris High School 3 Queens High School for the Sciences at York College 4 Stuyvesant High School 5 Staten Island Technical High School 6 Bronx High School of Science 7 High School of American Studies at Lehman College 8 Brooklyn Technical Hi ..read more

Life is short. Over the past 11 years, since I entered the education reform debate on social media, I have had a lot of ‘debate opponents.’ The first was actually business tycoon Whitney Tilson, but others have come and gone, they are a blur to me. Joel Klein, John White, Cami Anderson, the list goes on. There was once even a TFA communications director named Juice Fong, if I remember correctly. Generally these opponents run out of steam or interest and they fade away. The thing that causes them to run out of energy is also the reason that I’ve been able to basically destroy them in all the de ..read more

Teach For America’s teacher training has always been the weakest spot of an organization that has no shortage of weak spots. Ask any teacher what the most useful part of their training was and they will tell you that it was their student teaching experience. You can read about and discuss the theory of teaching and about how what students do and don’t respond to, but until you are standing in front of an actual class, it is all just theory. Back in the early 1990s when TFA was a new organization, they had the sense to know the value of student teaching so in the seven weeks of training, they t ..read more

With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States.  For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023.  The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees.  Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent.  While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get ..read more

If you’ve read parts 1 to 4 of this series, you may be confused. I the first part I said that not much of the school math is useful. In the second part I listed a few of those useful topics. In the third part I listed some topics that I don’t consider so useful. If I ended it there, it would seem like the best course of action would be to cut the amount of math we teach by at least half. But in the fourth part I wrote about something that seems to negate the point of the first three posts. I said that some of that ‘useless’ math was just as important as the useful math because it is engaging i ..read more