Eva Moskowitz - Success Through Attrition

Juan Gonzalez the Daily News:

There was Eva Moskowitz, head of this city’s fastest-growing and most controversial charter school network, giving a fiery commencement speech Friday morning at the first graduation of her chain’s flagship school, Harlem Success Academy 1.

“As the founding parents of the founding school, you have made history,” she told the audience of beaming eighth-graders in their caps and gowns and their cheering relatives.

Days earlier, Moskowitz had stunned many in this town by asking the state to grant her 14 new charter schools, thus potentially catapulting her network to 46 schools.

The first Success graduating class, for example, had just 32 students. When they started first grade in August 2006, those pupils were among 73 enrolled at the school. That means less than half the original group reached the eighth grade. And just 22 of Friday’s grads will be moving on to the new Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts, which is set to open this fall, while 10 opted for other high schools.

The first Harlem Success 1 class had 73 students enrolled in the first grade but graduated just 32 this month.

 

Where did the other 41 students go?

 

What happened that 57% of the students from that first grade class left the school by eighth grade?

 

I have a tag here at Perdido Street School blog called "Success Through Attrition" - the numbers from Moskowitz's first graduating class really bear out how accurate that tag is.

 

She keeps her test scores up by ensuring that any student who drags on the stats goes elsewhere.

 

She kept only 32 of 73 students from that first grade class.

 

41 went somewhere else.

 

Success through attrition indeed.