The latest issue of Fortune magazine includes Nina Easton‘s report on successful New York charter schools.
If you’ve heard of charter school founder Eva Moskowitz, odds are it’s because of her pitched, front-page battles with teachers’ unions and their powerful ally, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But whatever your politics, it’s hard to deny her results. In New York, where dozens of public schools failed to pass a single black or Hispanic student on last year’s state math and reading exams, Moskowitz’s 32 Success Academy Charter Schools rank in the top 1% of all the state’s programs in math—and in the top 3% for English.
Daniel Loeb, CEO of the hedge fund Third Point and Success Academy board chair, likens it to an Internet startup: “The intensity of focus that leads to outstanding results, the use of data, the recruitment and cultivation of talent—it feels like you are on a mini-Google campus.”
On a tour of Success Academy’s flagship school in Harlem, Moskowitz shared her philosophy on disrupting education.
Kids should struggle. “There’s this sense in public education that kids are fragile, that their self-esteem will be hurt,” she says. “We believe self-esteem comes from mastery.” Moskowitz doesn’t worry about kids’ being stressed about test taking; Olympic athletes get stressed too. Too often schools aim low for children in poverty. “We have to reverse that thinking,” she says. Success Academy’s South Bronx school—in the nation’s poorest congressional district—is one of its top performers. …
… No coddling for teachers either. They are expected to work long days and longer school years and attend far more training sessions than regular city teachers. For that, they get paid 30% more than their unionized counterparts. Says Nina Rees, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: “Her secret sauce is definitely in the teacher training.”
