Success Academy: Not Quite Ready For Primetime

Eva Moskowitz sells her Success Academy prison school network as the solution for all that ills public education and has plans to expand her network from 34 schools serving 11,000 students to 100 schools serving 50,000 students in the next few years.

There are some problems with that plan, however, as Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY foundthrough Success' own risk management assessment:

Before the network can seek to replicate its model elsewhere, Success is seeking to demonstrate that it can operate at scale in New York City.

The internal documents cited in this article illustrate some of the challenges that have already resulted from its early growth spurt to 30 schools, including considerable staff churn and uneven quality among schools within the network.

“Our network has mushroomed with giant departments, and yet we are always out of breath and can barely do the work to support 11,000 kids,” reads an internal memo on Success’s departmental goals for the 2015-2016 school year. “We certainly will not be able to support 50,000 kids in 100 schools unless we make dramatic changes and improvements.”

And in the risk assessment, a member of the senior management team expressed concern about at least the perception of a widening distance between management and teachers in the course of expansion.

“It is perceived that there is a lack of humanistic connections between upper management and employees,” said one of the interviewees.

“My colleagues and I would benefit from a better understanding of the rationale behind our strategic expansion,” a departing employee said in an exit interview, also obtained by POLITICO New York. “Do we want to prove that our model works across demographics? That there is high parent demand? That we are the solution for NYC? Knowing this will give authentic purpose to our work.”
But the risk most often cited by senior managers was the network’s ability to recruit and retain its existing staff, including school principals and top executives.

“We don’t have a qualified talent pool to fill the spots left by the departing school leaders,” said one executive in the risk assessment. “We are already in the territory of putting people in leadership role[s] who are not quite ready yet.”

“We are growing so quickly that it’s almost impossible to come up with a robust leader pipeline in order to ensure high-quality leadership for every new school,” said another.

It's interesting, at the very time Moskowitz should be taking full advantage of her nemesis, Bill de Blasio, and his corruption scandal woes, Eva finds herself on the defense with the leak of these internal documents to Shapiro at Capital NY.

Two consecutive negative stories about Success - here was yesterday's on the allegations that Success cheats its way to high test scores - and Success' problems put out for all to see.

I wonder, is Eva having a nice day?