Let me begin by saying that a very high percentage of the people in my family are either teachers or work in the public education field to some degree or another. Teaching young kids, from various economic, social, and emotional backgrounds is tough at best, and absolutely noble work when you consider how little support the teaching profession is given in our society. The New York Times was able to get this video, shot in 2014, from a teaching assistant. It shows Charlotte Dial, a teacher at a charter school in New York, under the Success Academy schools. In the video she is going over a math lesson with the students sitting around in a circle, on a rug. Dial is clearly already annoyed when the video picks up—a sign that this teaching assistant, shooting this video surreptitiously, knew from repetition when things were going to get bad in class with Ms. Dial. Dial is asking a student to answer a counting question, the student is clearly unable to at that time, and Dial rips up her worksheet in front of the young girl’s face and in front of the class and tells her to leave.
Charlotte Dial: Go to the calm-down chair and sit! There is nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper.
Eva S. Moskowitz is the head of the Success Academy network of privatized schools. She tells the Times:
Ms. Moskowitz dismissed the video as an anomaly. A group of parents gathered by the Cobble Hill school’s principal defended Ms. Dial and said the video did not reflect their experience of the school.
But interviews with 20 current and former Success teachers suggest that while Ms. Dial’s behavior might be extreme, much of it is not uncommon within the network.
Listen, people make mistakes, but there is no chance that someone can call a teacher like Dial out on her mistakes because there is no union for charter school teachers. Dial is considered an excellent teacher by Academy Success standards. The parent of the student said she supported the school but was disappointed with the punishment, or lack thereof, of Charlotte Dial—she didn’t elaborate.
Indeed, several of the current and former staff members interviewed said that the network’s culture encouraged teachers to make students fear them in order to motivate them. Carly Ginsberg, 22, who taught for about six months last year at Success Academy Prospect Heights, said teachers ripped up the papers of children as young as kindergarten as the principal or assistant principal watched. She once witnessed a girl’s humiliation as the principal mocked her low test score to another adult in front of the child.
Success Academy’s Ms. Moskowitz attacked the assistant that sat on the video for a year as “unethical.” Of course, Moskowitz’s investigation of teacher Dial shows the possible reason for this anonymous person’s trepidation—Dial is right back to teaching a week later and without labor protections, this anonymous person would probably become someone that didn’t quite work out at Success Academy.
As to making children cry, Ms. Moskowitz said that no one at Success purposefully reduced children to tears, but that “children cry a lot” and a child crying did not necessarily mean that a teacher had done something wrong. “Olympic athletes, when they don’t do well, they sometimes cry,” she said in a talk at New York Law School last month. “It’s not the end of the world.”
Olympic athletes sometimes cry? Are you an educator or just someone watching too many corporate motivational videos staring Vince Lombardi?