It is a very unusual, rather awkward hybrid of educational styles. The school is relentlessly regimented and micromanaged for both the teachers and the students, and yet there are periods of the day that are (cautiously) dedicated to the kind of unstructured "student-centered learning" that one finds in Montessori schools. It is as if the ancient militarized Spartans had tried to re-create ancient Athenian democracy and philosophy somewhere within the interstices of the harsh Spartan lifestyle, or if Nazi Germany had experimented with anarchism on the weekends.
Success Academy serves underprivileged students, and this hybrid approach seems to be an effort to get such students up to speed with their wealthier counterparts who already enjoy the best of both worlds -- a safe, structured existence that allows them the opportunity relax and be creative.
Success Academy began in 2006, with a single elementary school in Harlem, and now has forty-six schools, in every borough except Staten Island. The overwhelming majority of the students are black or Latino, and in most of the schools at least two-thirds of them come from poor families. More than fifteen thousand children are enrolled, from kindergarten to twelfth grade.But the schools do well by the favored metric of twenty-first-century public education: they get consistently high scores on standardized tests administered by the State of New York. In the most recent available results, ninety-five per cent of Success Academy students achieved proficiency in math, and eighty-four per cent in English Language Arts; citywide, the respective rates were thirty-six and thirty-eight per cent.This year, a Success high school, on Thirty-third Street, will produce the network’s first graduating class: seventeen students. This pioneering class originated with a cohort of seventy-three first graders.
That is a dreadful dropout rate, but it reflects the impoverished, hardscrabble lives of the students combined with the extreme rigor of the school.
Again, the disciplined, regimented nature of the school seems to be a response to the underprivileged lives of the students. Without the constant external discipline that the schools impose, the learning environment would descend into mediocrity or even chaos. This seems to be what happened when Success Academy opened its first high school.
The most unusual aspect of Moskowitz’s experiment is not her “Slam the Exam” sloganeering. Rather, it’s her attempt to combine aspects of a very traditional approach—rigid discipline, tracking, countdowns, rigorous accountability—with elements of a highly progressive curriculum. It can be an awkward straddle. “It is very challenging to have a kind of data-driven performance-oriented culture, and to do progressive pedagogy,” Moskowitz acknowledged. “These things don’t naturally, or easily, go together.” She went on, “One of the biggest reasons that teachers have trouble with student-centered learning is that they have to give over a level of control to the kids. And, when you do that, you can have chaos, or you can have high levels of learning. Often, teachers are afraid of the chaos.” It is as if Moskowitz had looked at the traditional/progressive spectrum and, instead of occupying a space along it, had bent its ends toward each other, to see whether they can meet.
The results of this experiment remain unclear. In 2014, Success opened its first high school, the one on East Thirty-third Street. Moskowitz hoped to create a more relaxed and collegiate environment, with seminars led by experts supplanting classes with pre-formulated lesson plans. There was to be a lot more free time, in which students would be the stewards of their own studies.
“It just didn’t work,” Andrew Malone, the school’s current principal, told me. “There wasn’t an intentional enough gradual release of where they were.” Many of the students slacked off academically, and there was a resurgence of behavioral issues, such as lateness to school, that had been eradicated in the younger grades. “There were a lot of sweatpants,” Malone added. Students accustomed to second-by-second vigilance found it difficult to manage their time when left unsupervised. Malone arrived at the high school in its second year, and decided to “re-set” the culture by instituting stricter and clearer rules.
In college, of course, students have to flourish without constant supervision. Although charter students are admitted to college at higher rates than students from comparable public schools, their graduation rates are dispiritingly low. Seventy per cent of charter-school students who enroll in college fail to complete their degrees within six years. While there are many reasons for this problem—most notably, insufficient money for food and housing—charter-school leaders, including those at Success, are also considering the impact of their own teaching precepts. Malone and his colleagues realize that getting students to succeed at standardized tests isn’t enough; they must prepare students for a future in which their professors—and employers—won’t be providing their parents with weekly updates. “College graduation was always the goal,” Malone said. “But only now that we have a high school do I think we are seriously thinking about what the pedagogy should be through the years.” How can a highly supervised child be transformed into an independent learner? Do you allow students the freedom to fail, or do you continue to provide constant hand-holding? “It’s an incredible design tension,” he said.
There is the dilemma. The school is regimented and highly structured in order to help shepherd underprivileged students through the system so that they can finally make it to college. But the students will then be at a disadvantage when they get to college because they will not be prepared for a wide-open, self-directed educational setting.
There may be a solution of sorts provided by the model of the mid-20th century British school system. In the 1950s, students in British public schools typically graduated when they were 16 years old, and they would then be directed into the world of employment. The junior and senior years of high school were referred to as "college", and reserved for the best students.
What charter schools could do is hire their graduates as school teachers and tutors. These teachers would then take online college courses for credit, and then use this instruction to teach and tutor the high school students. No one learns more than the teacher, and these teachers would still be enmeshed in structured environment even as they transitioned to self-directed learning.
The grand concept is that eventually high schools could become colleges. High school students could graduate and yet remain at the high school for another two years, taking college courses online, but without suffering the disengagement that online learning often entails (IIRC, the attrition for online degree programs is often 90%).
This would be a form of disruptive innovation, in which an inferior, less expensive form of technology finds a niche, improves over time, and becomes the dominant technology.
Online learning by itself would not constitute disruptive innovation. Rather, disruptive innovation in education would happen when online learning was coupled with institutional modification of current secondary education. (Also, rather than paying college tuition and potentially racking up student debt, these college students would be getting paid for teaching and tutoring.)
