How the Other Half Learns: Cannon Fodder

Consider the case of Elena Ortiz (a pseudonym):

Things are ragged and rough in Ortiz’s classroom, noticeably so compared to the others I’ve seen. She struggles to keep her students focused and engaged, and unlike in nearly every other classroom, there is no full-time assistant teacher to help her maintain order….(emphasis mine)

She walks out in October.

….Ortiz freaked out [and leaves her job permanently]. Whether it was over Adama, the cumulative stress of leading a classroom with a large number of challenging students, the lack of a second teacher in the room, or some other factor, no one is able or willing to say. Nick Carton [an assistant principal] has been pressed into service teaching second grade; a full-time assistant teacher, Brandon Whitaker, has arrived from the network. (emphasis mine)

A bit later:

When the meeting [to discuss the weak second grade reading results] breaks up, [principal] Vandlik and McDermott [Kaitlin McDermott] ask Belkin [Laura Belkin] as to stay behind. Her data is stronger than the rest of the team’s; they enlist her to take the lead in grade-level planning and improve her colleagues’ practice. At the same time, they assure her that they want to support her continued growth as a teacher, not just put the onus on her to get her colleagues up to snuff.

Belkin was, at the time, a five year Success Academy veteran.  Ortiz was a second year teacher who had never taught second grade before. Belkin had Tyrone, who she was allowed to bribe for occasional good behavior, while Elena Ortiz had Adama, a kid the school was determined to eject.  (Tyrone vs Adama).

So Ortiz had the toughest kids, no assistant teacher–but her replacement gets an assistant teacher.

Is it completely irrelevant that Belkin’s alma mater is top 50 Boston University, while Elena Ortiz went to Hudson, a regional teacher’s college?  That when Vandlik chose an AVP to get downgraded to a second grade teacher she chose Nick Carton, from a state New York school, instead of Amy Young, from Columbia, or Kerrie Riley, from a highly ranked liberal arts school?

Long before Ortiz walked out, it was clear from Pondiscio’s reporting that she was cannon fodder. Shoving cannon fodder into the line of fire, giving weaker teachers less support–that’s a practice by no means unique to Success Academy principals. I have seen teachers in this position. I have been in this position. In my second school, I was given a substantial chunk of the weakest, most challenging students, and no one thought it was an accident. It’s how principals often use the least desirable teachers in their school.

Given that Vandlik runs a school for a woman whose entire self-image is based on high test scores, I can see she might prefer to segregate the strongest students with the most valuable and experienced teachers. Use the more disposable teacher with the kids who probably aren’t going to make it to third grade.

Up to here, it’s all properly Macchiavelian. However, the rest of the story is just bad management.  Create a dumping ground, sure. But perhaps it’d be better to be sure the teacher has plenty of support, rather than singling her out for less support. Perhaps come down hard on any assistant principals that snark about her,  calling her “delicate” and asking if “she’s going to go over the edge” without ever acknowledging that she’s given the far more difficult task with less support and less experience.

And if that teacher up and walks out mid-year, then why compound the staffing difficulties by shoving the most dispensable of the assistant principals into the line of fire? “Vandlik thought it would benefit Carton…to gain hands-on experience with curriculum,culture, and classroom”. Ha, ha.

Nick Carton is much smarter than that. He quits Success Academy at Christmas break, realizing that he’s not one of Vandlik’s chosen. So once again, Bronx I is short a second grade teacher and is down to one AVP.  This time, though, Vlandik gets lucky and hires an excessed NYC public school teacher–in fact, she puts two fulltime teachers in the class and give them full support.

Perhaps she should have given that support to Elena Ortiz in the first place.

Later, Pondiscio learns that Ortiz might have left because principal Vandlik wanted her to lie. Adama’s parents have retained Nelson Mar, a lawyer who has often taken on the charter network for its many abuses. He was there to meet with Ortiz and Vandlik on what turned out to be Ortiz’s last day.

“We get there, we’re waiting, and 4:45 comes, 4:50 comes, we see Ms. Vandlik walking back and forth. We’re like, ‘Well, this is strange.’ Usually they’re fairly prompt about starting a meeting,” Mar recalled. Ortiz walked up and told them that she’d just quit her job. “She said, They want me to say that Adama did this and did that and I can’t say that,'” Mar said. “The thing that I remember distinctly was that she said, “They want me to lie, and I’m not going to do that.'”
…

Four different staffers with whom I discussed the matter expressed skepticism, even incredulity, that Vandlik would ask Ortiz to lie…Others noted Ortiz herself had had a rocky tenure at the school and was erratic even before her flameout. One former colleague suggests she was looking for an excuse to quit.

Pondiscio reached out to Ortiz but she refused to interview with him. Given his clear sympathy for Vandlik, who he refers to as “very good at her job”, and his readiness to allow a bunch of Success Academy staffers to stab Ortiz in the back, I don’t blame her in the slightest.

Pondiscio concedes that “the story Adama’s parents tell cannot  be dismissed.” But it’s not the parents, but the parents’ lawyer who told him that story, which is a different matter altogether. And unlike all of Vandlik’s defenders, the lawyer uses his own name. Would a lawyer make such a charge, leaving himself open to a litigious, aggressive charter network, if he couldn’t back it up?

Moreover, even before Nelson Mar’s story, Pondiscio reports that Elena Ortiz walked out “during a prep meeting with the leadership team prior to the sit-down with Adama’s parents”.  Teachers, even teachers on the edge, don’t storm out before a parent meeting without significant cause.

Pondiscio’s own evidence strongly suggests Ortiz was outraged by something that occurred during the meeting, and it was the last straw for her. I find it entirely believable that Vandlik asked her to lie. It’s consistent with Success Academy practice of dumping students who’ll hurt their test scores.

But leave aside that question and I still wonder why Pondiscio is so admiring of Vandlik, who he consistently presents as competent, assured, and impressive.

My read: Vandlik created the entire second grade staffing fiasco through her own mismanagement and obvious favoritism. She seems to have a ranking system, and treats teachers and staff based on her own priorities, rather than on needed support.  She gave the lead teacher, Belkin, the most resources rather than offer more support to a teacher with more difficult students. Then, when the second grade team confesses they aren’t working together, she not only doesn’t hold the lead teacher responsible, but rather calls Belkin aside to tell her not to feel she’ll be held responsible for the two other losers on the team.

Staffing a school is by far the most important job a principal has. Vandlik seems completely unaware that she created the second grade mess, and is content to let her staff badmouth the teacher struggling to handle difficult kids without support.

Disclosure: I’m a teacher who doesn’t trust principals. (My own admins are gods, naturally). Vandlik is exactly the sort of person I dislike on general principle. I like creative people, not control freaks. There literally isn’t a single moment where I’m not rolling my eyes every time Pondiscio goes ooh-ahh over some impressive Vandlik maneuver, like answering the phone or telling a parent off. But I’d argue the data supports my interpretation.

As always, I want more data. Pondiscio doesn’t seem to have checked for any patterns in which second graders were kept back, and whether these students were disproportionately assigned to particular teachers. He doesn’t appear to wonder if perhaps Belkin’s better results were a product of classroom assignment rather than superior teaching. He doesn’t ask why Elena Ortiz didn’t have an assistant teacher. He seems to share the negative opinion of the struggling teacher, which might explain why he repeats the trash talk to cast doubt upon possibility that Vandlik told a teacher to lie. It may be he knows more than he’s writing, information that would lead to judging Ortiz more harshly, Vandlik less so.

Missed opportunities.

All three of the assistant principals have left Success Academy. Nick Carton is now principal of the school that hired him away. Amy Young is an assistant principal at another charter. Kerrie Riley is in senior management at KIPP.  Meanwhile, Kaitlynn McDermott,  who Pondiscio says is “not unlike the Wolf the character played by Harvey Keitel in the movie Pulp Fiction who shows up to try to clean up”–well, she left as well.  So in the end, favoritism doesn’t seem to pay off. I suspect most staffers see Success Academy as a place to come from, not stay.

But to every rule there is an exception: Laura Belkin is still teaching at Success Academy.

In my last article, I argued that principal education profiles suggest the school is  grooming some teachers for leadership roles and the rest–well, if they returned after one year, that was kind of a surprise. Anyone who wants to work for Success Academy should read How The Other Half Learns to get an inkling of what might await those teachers who aren’t targeted for, er, success.

How the Other Half Learns: The Path to Principal

In How The Other Half Learns, author Robert Pondiscio points out that it’s easy to tell the educational pedigrees of Success Academy teachers, as teachers name their classrooms for their alma maters.

Bronx I classrooms include Marist, Fordham, the University of North Carolina, and Iona.[Two teachers teach] in Hunter College,….one kindergarten classroom is named ‘BMCC’: Borough of Manhattan Community College. However Success Academy is achieving its results, it has little to do with luring the best and brightest with Ivy League pedigrees to inner-city classrooms.

Literally, the next page, he writes of Eva Moskowitz observing at another school.

 …she introduces me to principal Lavinia Mackall, a Vassar grad…

So first, this is a pretty peculiar ranking system he has going there. Maybe it’s that New York thing.  Pondiscio lumps top 30 school UNC-Chapel Hill, a school that admits just 1 in 5 applicants, with Fordham (74) and University of Massachussetts-Amherst (64).  He then he compounds the absurdity by including Marist, Iona, and BMCC, perfectly good schools, I’m sure, but, well, US News stops counting in the 200s and none of them have numbers.

So if his point is that Success Academy isn’t bringing in teachers from top-ranked schools, it would be more convincing if he didn’t dismiss any school out of the top 10.

And then right after celebrating the merely selective schools the teachers attend, off he goes to visit principal who’s a Vassar grad.

Which got me wondering. Where do Success Academy principals come from? Pondiscio makes it clear that teachers aspire to leadership roles and mentions several promotions of that sort. But not all, he says, celebrating Kerri Lynch for being a committed teacher:

She’s not a Teach for America corps member with a two-year obligation to honor and an eye on law school public policy, or Wall Street. Somedeay she might think about school administration, she says, but not yet.

Kerri Lynch is now principal at the Bensonhurst school, and has been since 2018. Given that most principals spend a year in “leadership training”, odds are decent Lynch was already planning her next move when Pondiscio interviewed her. Of course, it’s also possible they just needed a warm body, given Success Academy’s attrition rates. In any event, committed teacher is now boss woman.

While almost all public school administrators began life as teachers, the percentage of all public school teachers that become administrators is quite small. Principals might make more money,  but we don’t consider it a promotion as opposed to a whole new job. I contend that no great teacher would ever become a principal. It’s a fine job, but it ain’t teaching.

In most states, public school administrators must have credentials. Charter school principals have no such requirement, and at Success Academy at least, teachers who don’t leave seem to want to become principals. Well.  Not so amazing. The people called “teachers” at Success Academy are just the ones standing up in front of a classroom.

The mere existence of a curriculum changes the job of a teacher from instructional designer to instructional deliverer.

Well, no. Real teachers can ignore a curriculum, follow it faithfully, or anything in between. Pondiscio doesn’t like this approach though, and makes it clear that he wants teachers doing other things.

American teachers spend an average of twelve hours per week gathering or generating instructional materials. Those are hours not spent studying student work, developing questioning strategies, anticipating students’ misunderstanding and challenges, working with individual children on their strengths and weaknesses, building relationships with parents, or…staring at an empty plan book and wondering “What should I teach this week?”

So first, Pondiscio’s cite of 12 hours comes from a 42 second youtube video made by a New Hampshire teacher. I think the teacher is referring to this study, which was written by a consultant, and the paper is for sale, not for open review. Not perhaps the best cite. Even assuming it’s a valid study, Pondiscio’s list of things teachers ought to be doing instead is a bit loaded.  For one thing, it’s pretty clear that Success Academy teachers aren’t given the autonomy to develop questioning strategies. And a key point of anticipating student  misunderstanding is to develop materials that help avoid or give students practice at learning why they have these misunderstandings,which is pretty pointless if you have to deliver curriculum that someone else developed.

(Besides, and forgive me for pointing this out, it’s pretty obvious that Success Academy just dumps the students who spend too much time misunderstanding.)

From a real teacher’s vantage point, Success Academy teachers are marionettes: delivering a curriculum they don’t control, constantly under supervision. The only aspect of their day that isn’t nailed down is how many times they have to call a parent to make them come control their kid.  Moreover, Success Academy basically doubles the cost of a classroom by giving most (note the most) teachers an “assistant teacher”. There’s not much intellectual or creative challenge to being a Success Academy teacher.

So it seemed to me likely that Success Academy has very few career teachers and that making it to principal was a primary career path. I decided to see how many principals I could look up. I found 40 some current principals and that many past principals. A few have dropped off the map: Danique Day Loving, well known as the first principal of Harlem 1, Carry Roby, founding principal of Upper West, Christina Danielson of Rosedale. But I could find the alma maters, hiring date, employment history, for every principal except Roby, who went back to Minnesota but has no other footprint. (Danielson might still be at Success Academy; unless they make the papers or have a Linked In page, it’s hard to find SA teachers or other staff.)

Given that Success Academy runs mostly to elementary schools, the female skew isn’t surprising. Black male principals hit way above their weight.

Now here it gets interesting, if still not surprising. Just 1 in 4 men make it to principal from the teacher role, while 75% of female principals came through teaching. Nearly 70% of all SA principals came through the teacher position, but gender clearly plays a role in path to principal. Moreover, while most principals got the job within five years of coming to Success Academy, it’s clear that men got there quicker than women. Still, if you run into a Success Academy principal, it’s even odds she’s an ex-SA teacher who got there in three to five years.

Now we get to the reason I began this research project. Before you mock me for the granularity of the ranking, understand that I used to tutor kids for college admissions and the competition for top 100 schools has increased over the past decade to an extent I find hard to comprehend. Getting into a top 100 school might not be Harvard, but it’s not nothing. Besides, I just went through all the principals in my own very large district and I only found one with a BA from a top 100 school.

(note: grad school rankings were interesting. 9 Teachers College, 2 Harvards, any number of Top 30s, but just as many went to Touro or Relay. Couldn’t find any data about Roby.)

So nearly half of all SA principals ever hired went to a top 50 school, 75% went to a ranked school, and over half of all principals began life as teachers. Incidentally, one of the principals attending a top 10 school was then Bronx I chief Elizabeth Vandlik. Pondiscio was so amazed that she was once a Chicago construction worker that he forgot to mention she probably worked before, during, or after her time at University of  Chicago (#6).

While I’m certain that Pondiscio is correct about the humble alma maters of many teachers, it’s also pretty clear that Success Academy considers teachers a vital source of principals and that SA principals are very likely to have come from selective schools.  So clearly, a good chunk of the teachers are also coming from selective schools–which Pondiscio in no way denies. I’m just exploring the data.

What all this suggests: some teachers are hired with an eye to their future in Success Academy. Some aren’t.

Next up: what happens to at least one teacher who wasn’t.