“What’s going on at Success Academy?” Lots of folks are asking that question, thanks to the eye-popping test scores achieved by students at Eva Moskowitz’s network of New York City charter schools.
Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive officer of Success Academy Charter Schools, visits one of the network’s classrooms
Last year, 29 percent of New York City kids were considered proficient in English and 35 percent in math on the state’s challenging Common Core–aligned exams. For Success students, the proficiency rates were 64 percent in English and an astonishing 94 percent in math. Success students in the city’s poorest communities outperformed kids in the wealthiest suburbs. If the network were a single school, it would rank in the top 1 percent of the state’s 3,560 schools in math and the top 3 percent in English.
Success’s first school opened in 2006. Today, the network has 32 schools serving 9,000 students: 24 elementary schools (K–4), 7 middle schools (grades 5–8), and a new high school. Over the next two years, 13 additional schools will open. Success could soon be educating 21,000 students—about 2 percent of the 1.1 million children in New York City public schools. No other charter network has grown this fast and achieved such stellar results.
I’ve been endeavoring to figure out what is happening at Success for some time. I’ve visited four schools and interviewed two dozen teachers and principals and the network’s directors of literacy and math, as well as Eva Moskowitz. I’ve spoken with parents, critics, and former Success teachers. I’ve exchanged scores of e-mails with the network’s indefatigable communications director, Ann Powell. I read Moskowitz’s 2012 book (coauthored with Arin Lavinia), Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School.
So what’s going on? Outwardly, Success is similar to other “no excuses” (Moskowitz dislikes that term) charter schools: students are called “scholars” and wear uniforms; a longer school day and year allow for about one-third more instruction time than district schools provide; rooms are named after the teacher’s alma mater; a culture of discipline and high expectations reigns. What separates Success, in my opinion, is a laser focus on what is being taught, and how.
As part of the blocks curriculum, kindergarteners at Success work together in small groups on a crude architectural sketch before constructing a project.
As part of the blocks curriculum, kindergarteners at Success work together in small groups
on a crude architectural sketch before constructing a project.
The What: Content Is King
At Success, content is king. Take blocks: kindergartners everywhere play with wooden blocks, but Success has a blocks curriculum. Children work together in small groups on a crude architectural sketch before constructing a project. One child from each group explains what they’ve built to the other students. Bookcases contain wonderful books—13 Buildings Children Should Know, My New York, Architects Make Zigzags, Block City—that expose children to great buildings, past and present, from around the world. (Teachers are quick to tell me that block play should remain fun and kid-driven, so they don’t overuse the books, which are there for inspiration rather than a “blueprint.”)
The thoughtful way Success approaches a simple thing like blocks reflects the ethos that infuses the entire network: everything has a purpose. Moskowitz calls it “joyful rigor”—an apt description of what I saw in every Success classroom I visited.
Success has developed its own English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, THINK Literacy. At first, Success used Success for All reading but felt it wasn’t rich enough. (The network still uses Success for All’s “Reading Roots” program to teach decoding skills in kindergarten and 1st grade.) THINK Literacy is based on the controversial “balanced literacy” Teachers College Reading and Writing Workshop model, which emphasizes independent reading (see “The Lucy Calkins Project,” features, Summer 2007). Research conducted in New York City’s traditional schools indicates that balanced literacy doesn’t build the knowledge and vocabulary that children—especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds—need to move beyond basic literacy, but Success adds tons of content to it.
“THINK Literacy is balanced literacy on steroids,” Moskowitz writes in Mission Possible. She believes that the choice between content and skills is false: “The two approaches are not mutually exclusive,” she tells me. “Kids need to be excellent and avid readers…. For that, you also need to have context and background knowledge.” THINK Literacy includes Reading Workshop (independent reading and small-group direct instruction); Guided Reading (students read more-challenging books, with help from teachers); Read Aloud (teachers read books aloud, and students discuss the major ideas); and Shared Text (close reading of short texts, emphasizing central meaning and liter