Big Demands and High Expectations at Success Academy Schools

Evelyn Gonzalez’s first graders sit cross-legged on the rug, backs straight, hands folded in their laps. They’re focused, quiet, eyes tracking the teacher. 

“Katey had 35 stickers,” Gonzalez reads aloud from the easel pad. Her co-teacher, Sherron Davis, keeps a watchful eye on the group, mouthing no and shooting “the look” when a child wriggles or whispers to a neighbor. “She put five stickers on each page of her sticker book,” Gonzalez continues, approaching the end of the word problem. “How many pages did Katey put stickers on?”

It can be a lot for 6-year-olds to manage, but holding even the youngest kids to high academic standards while strictly enforcing disciplinary policies like maintaining good posture and keeping eyes trained on the teacher is typical of Success Academy schools, where Gonzalez teaches. The New York City–based network of more than 50 public K–12 charter schools is renowned for outperforming students in district schools on typical measures of success such as state tests, graduation rates, and college acceptance. Last year, Success students led the state in math test scores, with 49 percent of Black and 55 percent of Hispanic students earning fours—the highest performance level on the state exams. In New York City’s district schools, comparatively, 8 percent of Black and Hispanic students earned fours, and a plurality of students in those demographic groups—37 percent of Black and 35 percent of Hispanic students—performed at level one, the lowest mark awarded.

Teachers at Success Academy are generally true believers, but some critics say the schools rig the system, manufacturing better performance on state exams by focusing on test prep at the expense of general knowledge and identifying and counseling students out who risk harming the network’s spectacular academic outcomes. Classroom management, they charge, is unduly harsh, compliance-based, and punitive.

Despite the controversies, which recently spilled over into an investigative report from ProPublica about the school's mental health policies, over 16,000 families applied for about 3,200 lottery spots at Success Academy schools this academic year—five applicants per available seat. They apply because the network promises opportunities they feel local district schools cannot deliver: a solid shot at a good college education and a prosperous career. “My daughter now says she wants to be the mayor,” says Nelly Gonzalez, parent of a second grader at Success, with a proud smile. “Just the idea that she now feels the sky’s the limit, it’s because she’s told that at school: She can be whatever she wants.” As a child growing up in Harlem, Nelly Gonzalez remembers district schools as “chaotic,” with damaged, hand-me-down textbooks that were “already written in.” She wanted something else for her daughter.

In a 2019 op-ed, Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews summed up the charter network’s twin narratives: “Success Academy Charter Schools are both the highest-performing and most criticized educational institutions in New York, and probably the country.” 

Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy’s founder and chief executive, remains undeterred by the naysayers. “It’s kind of funny because a lot of the critics, they’ve never actually been to a Success school, despite being invited many, many times,” Moskowitz said when we interviewed her in her downtown Manhattan office. “They don’t understand the level of joy and engagement in our schools. Instead, they create a narrative that we just do test prep. We think it’s our moral obligation not to send children into an exam totally ill-prepared, but you wouldn’t teach a poem a day—or play games in school—if your end goal was test prep. You wouldn’t have art, music, dance, chess, sports if your end goal was the test.”

Success schools aren’t for everyone—and that can feel at odds with the mission of public schooling—but for families who can manage the investment of time and resources, they offer an intense, highly structured, free educational experience. For a particularly engaged, high-achieving number of children and caretakers, often from socioeconomically or racially marginalized communities, the schools might feel like an unparalleled opportunity to open doors that are often closed to them. “What Eva Moskowitz appears to have created is something unprecedented in contemporary education: a mechanism for a critical mass of engaged and invested low-income families of color to self-select into schools where their attitudes, values, and ambitions for their children make them culture keepers and drivers, not outliers,” writes Robert Pondiscio, senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in his 2019 book How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice.

The Plan of Attack

Back in her math lesson in room 205, Evelyn Gonzalez is modeling the “plan of attack” for her first graders, a meticulous problem-solving strategy used at elementary, middle, and high school levels at Success schools that involves several read-throughs of tricky word problems, followed by careful dissection of language and details. In Fei Lu’s eighth-grade algebra class at Success Academy Bronx Middle School, students are examining a similarly complicated problem about Pam, Dan, and Sam, who together have $31. Liu starts to break apart the problem on the whiteboard—Dan has $3 less than Pam, and Sam has $1 more than Pam and Dan combined, so how much money does Sam have—before students get to work on their iPads. 

“One of the biggest things I see when a kid sees a math question is: You put a number on the page and you just start doing it,” says Liu. “But math is not just about doing the numbers, it’s about explaining what the numbers mean and coming up with an idea of the story so you can get a result.” The method pushes kids to slow down and conceptualize problems—about 80 percent of the time is allotted to understanding the question being asked—before jumping into solving mode and putting pencils to paper.

The 29 students in Gonzalez and Davis’s classroom keep up with the lesson, appear engaged during independent work, and look proud to share their solutions with the group at the end. A culture of steadfast intellectual seriousness and discipline runs through the system and even creeps into a class celebration after the problem is successfully solved: A 30-second “dance party” in which students are encouraged to shimmy quietly to an animated Go Noodle video, sound muted, feels like a reflection of the school’s carefully controlled atmosphere.

“We have a standardized curriculum and assessments, we have standardized teacher prep, and we have a standardized way of doing classroom management,” Moskowitz says. “I would argue that all of that standardization could, from an outside perspective, appear to be limiting adult creativity. Instead, we find it liberates the adults to focus on the content.”

An Ecosystem of Predictability

Behavioral expectations at Success are intense, but not impossibly so, teachers at the network argue, and routines are modeled for students—often repeatedly. “Every time we start a lesson, we go over the active learning expectations because we do hold scholars accountable for listening and following along,” says Gonzalez. “In the beginning of the year, we practice all the skills. We practice what it looks like to be in line. We practice what it looks like to sit on the rug. We practice what it looks like to sit at our desk and work. Because if we’re not showing them as a teacher, then we can’t expect them to do it.”

Five months into the school year, Gonzalez’s 6-year-olds know what to do when they miss the mark. When one student doesn’t make it to the rug in time for the sticker lesson wrap-up, she quickly heads to a behavior tracker chart to self-report her lapse. The wall chart tracks consequences ranging in degree from a green “reminder” all the way up to a deep-red “upstairs dismissal,” which involves a trip to the main office to discuss “any pressing safety, academic, or behavioral concern,” according to the family handbook. 

Using tools like public wall charts to manage classroom behavior, while shunned by some educators as teaching discipline by shaming, is embraced by Gonzalez, who argues that with 29 kids in the room, it’s a quick way to get students back on track. “I didn’t have to say anything. She didn’t make it to the rug on time, she knows that’s an expectation. So next time, beat that timer,” Gonzalez says.

Part of what makes the system work, Moskowitz says, is that kids thrive when their worlds feel predictable and organized. “They feel safe and successful when they know what is expected of them,” Moskowitz says. “And so we have pretty detailed routines that we teach the children—once they learn and master the routine, it’s very easy for them and it conserves the teacher’s energy.” Snack time, for example, is precisely choreographed—inspired, Moskowitz says, by Michael Linsin’s Smart Classroom Management approach. “Once the teacher says it’s time for a snack, everybody gets up and does their thing because they know exactly what that routine looks like,” Moskowitz says. “In a typical urban school, snack time is chaos, kids are shouting, one kid bumps into another kid, they get into fisticuffs, and then the drink spills. By the time you’re done, everybody is exhausted. In our schools, you’ll see a level of calm and joy and order and predictability.”

Falling in Love with School

The end goal for Moskowitz, who has three children, two of whom attended Success, is to create an environment where “kids fall in love with school.” 

This starts with having warm, loving adults in the school building, she says. “Every principal greets every child by name every day. And that requires learning 500 kids’ names, which is not the easiest thing in the world. But I think that this welcoming warmth is foundational to falling in love with school.”

Intellectual engagement is another piece of the Success model. Students are expected, for example, to read in school every day—elementary students read nearly two hours per day during school, across subject areas, and 30 minutes at home; middle and high school students read 30 minutes in English language arts classes each day and 45 to 60 minutes per day at home.

“I think it’s one of the most important design elements: Every child reads in school,” Moskowitz says, noting that they’re also expected to read at home. “We read great books that the children choose based on their interests. And there’s no reason that every school in America couldn’t make the same decision tomorrow to have kids read in school every day.”

The rigorous academic demands at Success schools are a by-product of Moskowitz’s conviction that adults underestimate kids’ abilities. “American society has confused height with intelligence, thinking that a 5-year-old couldn’t be that much of a learner,” she says. “At Success, we think that we don’t know what the ceiling is, and we’ve got to test it out. I’ve never met a kindergartner who doesn’t understand fractions when you’re talking about sharing chocolate chip cookies. If you don’t cut that cookie exactly in half, they notice.” 

Every teacher we interviewed at the school referenced accountability and the importance of holding the bar high for Success students, who are 50 percent Black and 30 percent Hispanic, with 71 percent eligible for free and reduced lunch. 

“At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is for them to be whatever they want to be, and to achieve that, they have to go to college,” says Stephany Neptune, a third-grade teacher. “So I’m going to hold them accountable, just like somebody would do in the real world.”

The Parent Piece

Children must arrive on time, fastidiously uniformed. Homework completion must be signed off on by parents, though they’re not expected to be able to help with homework. Parents commit to responding to phone calls from school within 24 hours, and the school commits to doing the same. Wednesdays are half days, meaning parents must pick up their children in the middle of the workday so that teachers can attend weekly professional training sessions. 

“The ask of parents can be large, it can seem like a lot when you’re not a part of it, especially if you’re a single parent or working full-time,” says Nelly Gonzalez, the parent of a second-grader. “But it’s worth leaving work early. Everything isn’t for everyone; this isn’t a cookie-cutter world. You have to find what works best for you and your family.” The level of parental expectations, Moskowitz argues, isn’t outsized. And while Success Academy reports that 6 percent of its students are homeless (compared with 10 percent in New York City schools generally), the school makes accommodations, supplying extra uniforms, laundry, and eyeglasses for kids in need, as well as offering free online tutoring resources for its students who need extra help. “If an accommodation is necessary, we will make it,” she says, but there are limits.

Parents’ taking a greater part in the duties of educating their child—compared with parent expectations in district schools—isn’t and shouldn’t be negotiable, according to Moskowitz. “We do not believe you can educate children by doing bypass surgery. In fact, it’s quite disrespectful to parents to behave like you can do all this without them,” she says. “We think that it’s really hard for us to educate a child if our phone calls aren’t returned and if the child isn’t in school every day.” 

In fact, while schools nationwide deal with the disruptions of chronic absenteeism, Moskowitz says that’s not a factor at Success Academy. “We don’t have chronic absenteeism; we insist that children are in school. It’s not fair to the educators to ask them to deliver for children and families and then for the child to be absent every other day.” Bending the rules on things like attendance, Moskowitz contends, does a disservice to students.

“I would argue that a homeless child or a child living in foster care needs the level of consistency that this school provides. So unless there’s an overwhelming reason to accommodate, we believe in being consistent, and we think that’s better for the child and their caregiver.”

Ultimately, with its reliance on diligent, committed families, the school is both inaccessible—or even undesirable—to many and, at the same time, uniquely powerful for those who are willing and able to bend the family structure to accommodate it. 

“The things that I didn’t have, I want my kids to have. We migrated to this country because we wanted to give our children the benefit of a quality education, with no loans attached to their names,” says Godspower Izeghe, a Nigerian immigrant whose three children attend Success Academy—two in fifth grade, one in eighth grade. “As a parent, you see your children growing, they are happy. My goodness, you can’t pay for that, it’s priceless.”