No matter how many exposés make the newspapers and how many parents and former teachers complain about the way the Success Academy Charter School Network treats children and staff, Andrew Cuomo keeps handing out goodies to Charter Queen Eva Moskowitz and her hedge fund backers, who are also coincidentally Andrew Cuomo campaign donors. Cuomo has spoken at charter school “rallies” in the state capital pledging to get money and facilities for charter schools. Moskowitz describes the Governor as one of the charter school movements “friends and supporters.”
Because Moskowitz’s network can’t hold onto its staff, in October 2017, Cuomo appointees on the Board of Trustees of the State University decided to allow Success Academy to hire uncertified teachers and “train” them themselves. In 2016 Moskowitz brokers a deal between Republicans in control of the State Senate, and Cuomo, nominally a Democrat, to grant the SUNY Trustees this power. The State Board of Regents, the governing body for education in the state, vehemently opposed the certification waiver, but Cuomo has let in stand. In February, the Regents took the issue to court but it has not yet been adjudicated.
Another Cuomo gift to Moskowitz was authorization to run a high school in New York City outside the oversight of the city’s Department of Education and Mayor di Blasio, a political enemy of both Cuomo and Moskowitz. A thrilled Moskowitz recently announced that she and her network were “reinventing the American high school.” The charter network claims it will open eight new high schools by 2033.
The chair of the board of the Success Academy network is hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb, who donated $15 million to Success for its reinvented high school. Carol Burris, executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education, carefully documented Cuomo’s financial connection with Loeb and other hedge fund/charter school operatives. Loeb and his wife contribute directly to Cuomo’s campaigns and to a political action committee, the Great Public Schools PAC, set up by Moskowitz, which also invests heavily in Cuomo. Burris estimated that people associated with the Success Academy network contributed close to $2 million to Cuomo, and that was before he launched his 2018 reelection campaign.
In his last reelection campaign in 2014, Cuomo received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, and Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot. This campaign he has collected donations from charter advocates Ravenel Curry III, founder of Eagle Capital Management, Walmart heir Jim Walton, and financier John Petry, who is on the Success Academy Board.
Diane Ravitch recently posted on the puzzling math at Success. The school’s first graduating class has seventeen students all of whom, as Moskowitz is proud to say, will attend college. But what Ravitch point’s out and Moskowitz neglects to mention, is that the seventeen are the survivors of an original kindergarten entry class of 100. Suddenly a 100% going to college rate becomes an 83% shedding/dropout/attrition rate.”
Maybe when Andrew Cuomo and Eva Moskowitz finish reinventing high schools they plan to reinvent math!
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