A momentary lapse, or abusive teaching?

[summer]

see video at the link

NY Times

In the video, a first-grade class sits cross-legged in a circle on a brightly colored rug. One of the girls has been asked to explain to the class how she solved a math problem, but she has gotten confused.



She begins to count: “One… two…” Then she pauses and looks at the teacher.



The teacher takes the girl’s paper and rips it in half. “Go to the calm-down chair and sit,” she orders the girl, her voice rising sharply.



“There’s nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper,” she says, as the girl retreats.



The teacher in the video, Charlotte Dial, works at a Success Academy charter school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She has been considered so effective that the network promoted her last year to being a model teacher, who helps train her colleagues.


After sending the girl out of the circle and having another child demonstrate how to solve the problem, Ms. Dial again chastises her, saying, “You’re confusing everybody.” She then proclaims herself “very upset and very disappointed.”


The video was recorded surreptitiously in the fall of 2014 by an assistant teacher who was concerned by what she described as Ms. Dial’s daily harsh treatment of the children. The assistant teacher, who insisted on anonymity because she feared endangering future job prospects, shared the video with The New York Times after she left Success in November.



After being shown the video last month, Ann Powell, a Success spokeswoman, described its contents as shocking and said Ms. Dial had been suspended pending an investigation. But a week and a half later, Ms. Dial returned to her classroom and her role as an exemplar within the network.



Success’s own training materials, provided by the network’s leader, Eva S. Moskowitz, say that teachers should never yell at children, “use a sarcastic, frustrated tone,” “give consequences intended to shame children,” or “speak to a child in a way they wouldn’t in front of the child’s parents.”



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.



Success is known for its students’ high achievement on state tests, and it emphasizes getting — and keeping — scores up. Jessica Reid Sliwerski, 34, worked at Success Academy Harlem 1 and Success Academy Harlem 2 from 2008 to 2011, first as a teacher and then as an assistant principal. She said that, starting in third grade, when children begin taking the state exams, embarrassing or belittling children for work seen as slipshod was a regular occurrence, and in some cases encouraged by network leaders.



“It’s this culture of, ‘If you’ve made them cry, you’ve succeeded in getting your point across,’” she said.


One day, she said, she found herself taking a toy away from a boy who was playing with it in class, and then smashing it underfoot. Shortly after, she resigned.



“I felt sick about the teacher I had become, and I no longer wanted to be part of an organization where adults could so easily demean children under the guise of ‘achievement,’” said Ms. Sliwerski, who subsequently worked as an instructional coach in Department of Education schools.



Some parents had another view. Clayton Harding, whose son, currently in fourth grade, had Ms. Dial as a soccer coach, said: “Was that one teacher over the line for 60 seconds? Yeah. Do I want that teacher removed? Not at all. Not because of that. Now if you tell me that happens every single day, that’s a different thing. But no one is telling me that, and everyone is telling me about all the amazing things that she does all the other days.”



The mother of the girl in the video, in emails to The Times, initially supported the school and asked that the video not be published, citing her daughter’s privacy. After the network said that Ms. Dial would return to the classroom, she said she was unhappy with the school, but declined to talk further.



Ms. Dial did not respond directly to requests for comment, but gave a statement through the school, saying, “I’m deeply committed to the children and families of our school, and I’m sorry for my lapse in emotional control 15 months ago. As I tell my scholars to do, I will learn from this mistake and be a better teacher for it.”



Ms. Moskowitz said in an interview and a subsequent email that Ms. Dial’s behavior did not match Success’s educational philosophy, but she also called her “a wonderful and committed teacher” and said she had lost her cool because she “so desperately wants her kids to succeed and to fulfill their potential.”



She said Ms. Dial had been reprimanded and had received training in how to be more aware of her emotions and manage them.


She said it was possible that some teachers — “I think it’s really a handful of people” — had misinterpreted the network’s philosophy and that, out of an abundance of caution, the network would provide additional training to all its teachers in the importance of tone in speaking to students.



Still, Ms. Moskowitz said the video was not indicative of any wider problem, and she questioned the motives of the assistant teacher who recorded it.



“This video proves utterly nothing but that a teacher in one of our 700 classrooms, on a day more than a year ago, got frustrated and spoke harshly to her students,” she wrote in her email.



But Joseph P. McDonald, a professor of teaching and learning at New York University’s school of education, who viewed the video at The New York Times’s request, described Ms. Dial’s behavior as “abusive teaching.”



“We don’t see enough here to know for sure that this classroom is typically full of fear, but I bet that it is,” he wrote in an email. “The fear is likely not only about whether my teacher may at any time erupt with anger and punish me dramatically, but also whether I can ever be safe making mistakes.”




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.

In one instance, the lead kindergarten teacher in her classroom made a girl who had stumbled reciting a math problem cry so hard that she vomited. Ms. Ginsberg resigned in December because she was so uncomfortable with the school’s approach. “It felt like I was witnessing child abuse,” she said, adding, “If this were my kindergarten experience, I would be traumatized.” She is now teaching in Los Angeles.

Five of the teachers interviewed, including Ms. Sliwerski, described leaders at multiple Success schools and a Success supervisor in the teacher training program that the network runs with Touro College endorsing the practice of ripping up work if it was deemed not to reflect sufficient effort. The purpose, they said, was to get students’ attention and demonstrate urgency.



At some schools, there was even a term for it. “It was ‘rip and redo,’” Ayanna Legros, who taught at Success Academy Harlem 1 for about seven months in the 2013-14 school year, said. “It’s embarrassing” for students, she said, “so the idea is that you won’t want to ever have that moment again in the classroom.” She is now teaching part time while in graduate school.



Ms. Powell, the Success spokeswoman, pointed out that Ms. Sliwerski had left the network five years ago, midyear, and that both Ms. Ginsberg and Ms. Legros had also left midyear after only about six months. Ms. Powell also said that the principal of the Prospect Heights school could not respond on short notice to Ms. Ginsberg’s allegations.



Ms. Moskowitz insisted that she had never seen a Success teacher rip up a child’s paper, though she was in schools “3-5 hours a week.”



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.”



Ms. Moskowitz repeatedly described the former assistant teacher as “unethical” for not sharing the video with the school’s principal, Kerri Nicholls, at the time she took it. Ms. Moskowitz said that the network had shown itself to be “very quick to investigate” when such matters were brought to its attention, as when a principal at one of its schools created a “Got to Go” list of difficult children whom he wanted to leave the school.



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But the assistant teacher said that, because Ms. Nicholls had made it clear that Ms. Dial was a favorite of hers, she did not think raising her concerns would have any effect other than to possibly imperil her own job. Success teachers are not unionized and can be fired at will.



Around the same time that she took the video, the assistant teacher said, she saw Ms. Dial become frustrated with a girl who was playing with her hair. She said Ms. Dial proceeded to pull the girl’s hair into a ponytail in a manner that she perceived as rough. She shared her concerns with another staff member, who in turn told Ms. Nicholls. Ms. Nicholls called the assistant teacher in for a meeting, but seemed more annoyed at her than concerned about Ms. Dial’s behavior, the assistant teacher said.


Ms. Nicholls said in an interview that after investigating the incident she had found “nothing inappropriate aside from” the assistant teacher’s “lack of reporting her concerns.”



Dr. McDonald, the N.Y.U. professor, who also sits on the board of the Great Oaks Charter School on the Lower East Side, said that the behavior in the video violated an important principle of schooling.



“Because the child’s learning was still a little fragile — as learning always is initially — she made an error,” he said in his email. “Good classrooms (and schools) are places where error is regarded as a necessary byproduct of learning, and an opportunity for growth. But not here. Making an error here is a social offense. It confuses others — as if deliberately.”

[oliviapope]

Momentary lapse or not (which it doesn't sound like since the assistant was recording specifically because she noticed a pattern in her behavior) that child will remember that forever. She should be really glad it wasn't my kid because I'd march up that school and embarrass the fuck out of her with some profound fucking speech that knocks her down a few pegs.

[cville]

This is very interesting. My friend worked at the Brooklyn Success Academy for ONE semester.* She was lured by the philosophy and her desire to make a difference at a school that had a reputation for doing so. She found it rigid, unkind, and so top-down hierarchical that it discouraged the very sort of creativity in teaching that they SAY they're focused on.



*she's not in the article

[mouse]

This is tragic.

Should I make some guesses about the races involved here and what it says about how we view certain children as needing control and punishment to succeed?

[kershnic]

I'll copy and paste my response to the same article over on MMM.

One of my good friends was a teacher at one of the Harlem locations of that charter chain for a few years, and at the time I worked with families in the same neighborhood. Those schools are well known for being very intense and are extremely focused on test results. Nothing in this story surprises me. I would hate for my children to be treated this way in the classroom. But I also think that the teachers and parents are desperate, because they see all of the local failing public schools, the intergenerational poverty, violence, and all the related problems. I think they figure that some yelling, ripping up papers, and a calm down chair are a reasonable price to pay for a possible ticket out. I don't know what the answers are.

EDIT: I will add, the same friend eventually left Success Academy because she was fed up with the stressful work environment.  After a stint at a different disorganized charter school she got frustrated and decided instead to take a teaching job at an extremely privileged private school where she has endless support from administration and coworkers, kids who come in primed and ready to learn, and every resource in the world at her fingertips.

EDIT 2: I'm not even entertaining the possibility that this was a momentary one time lapse.  Of course it wasn't.  I have a hard time believing that anyone really believes that, they just don't want to talk about it.

[meshaliuknits]

One time lapses are very rarely captured surreptitiously on video.

[btdt]

I think someone needed to go sit down in the "calm-down" chair, but it certainly wasn't the first grader.

[ttt]

SST is a first-grader now and I don't even want to THINK about what I would do if a teacher did this to her. Someone would have to hold. me. back.

[2curlydogs]

Feb 12, 2016 15:07:57 GMT -5 ttt said:

SST is a first-grader now and I don't even want to THINK about what I would do if a teacher did this to her. Someone would have to hold. me. back.

This is what I was thinking. I don't need to watch the video. Inappropriate. Period. Full Stop.

[cookiemdough]

I can't see the link

[dropitlikeitshott]

This is what happens when schools are forced to focus on having good test scores. Is it right? absolutely not, does it happen everyday in "failing" schools, of course.

It's one of the reasons I'm looking to leave teaching. I have been fighting against this very thing for so long, and I am so tired. I am now looked at as the odd man out, and those teachers have better test scores, which according to the state means they are better teachers. I would rather have my happier kids who have a love for learning but that is not what is deemed important.

[orriskitten]

Never ever okay to demean and belittle a student. A teacher can sometimes be the ONLY present role model to a child. If that child sees the teacher belittle another? Naturally, it'll continue a cycle, so now the kid who was targeted by bully teacher is now getting it on both sides and probably hating life.

If someone humiliated my child from a place of power, there would be problems. Serious problems. I would have to bring DH to make sure I didn't physically harm someone who would do that. Then again, maybe I'd have to hold him back.

No fucking test score is worth this kind of damage. There are ways to nurture and help without scarring children.

[mrsukyankee]

Feb 12, 2016 16:40:26 GMT -5 1234FIF! said:

I think you'd be fine because almost every mom I know would be going in full throttle to throttle that teacher.

[underwaterrhymes]

If any teacher treated either of my kids like this for struggling to figure something out on his own, I would lose my damn mind.

[sugarglider]

Maybe it's because I'm not a parent, but I don't think that warrants a termination.

It's not necessarily how I would want my children to be taught, and if I had a teacher speak that way to me, I would have cried (even/especially as an adult). But I also would have made sure I never did anything to make the teacher speak to me like that.

One of the most academically accomplished (& nicest) people I know was raised like that by his father. If he got a math problem wrong, he had to run laps around the house. Look at the Tiger Mom daughters--they have by all accounts turned out wonderfully and have come out expressing gratitude to their mother.

I think the reason this does not come across as abusive to me per se is that the teacher doesn't tie the mistake to that child's person. She says what not to do, that it disappoints her when kids do "x." Verbal abuse, imo, would be to relate that mistake to a character flaw in the child. Like, "you are so stupid" or "you are so bad."

I don't know. Like I said, I would not prefer that type of teacher or to be that type of parent. I wouldn't want that type of teaching for my kids. But nothing I saw in that video, even if every day, makes me think this teacher must be fired. It's just a very harsh/strict methodology.

[AJL]

This isn't a momentary lapse. At one point it was, but I think this is what happens when you over-stress the importance of test scores and put undue pressure on teachers to get students to perform instead of allowing your teacher to teach her students in the way they are able to learn best.

I doubt this teacher came into the profession like this. She needs to leave it at this point.

[cookiemdough]

Where is the link people!?

[orriskitten]

Feb 12, 2016 17:07:52 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Maybe it's because I'm not a parent, but I don't think that warrants a termination.

It's not necessarily how I would want my children to be taught, and if I had a teacher speak that way to me, I would have cried (even/especially as an adult). But I also would have made sure I never did anything to make the teacher speak to me like that.

One of the most academically accomplished (& nicest) people I know was raised like that by his father. If he got a math problem wrong, he had to run laps around the house. Look at the Tiger Mom daughters--they have by all accounts turned out wonderfully and have come out expressing gratitude to their mother.

I think the reason this does not come across as abusive to me per se is that the teacher doesn't tie the mistake to that child's person. She says what not to do, that it disappoints her when kids do "x." Verbal abuse, imo, would be to relate that mistake to a character flaw in the child. Like, "you are so stupid" or "you are so bad."

I don't know. Like I said, I would not prefer that type of teacher or to be that type of parent. I wouldn't want that type of teaching for my kids. But nothing I saw in that video, even if every day, makes me think this teacher must be fired. It's just a very harsh/strict methodology.

I think one of the larger issues with her behavior is that it goes so totally against what these schools are supposed to stress and represent. My understanding is that they say they use a lot of creativity and nurturing but achieve the scores they need.

If this is the norm, and if a number of former teachers are coming out and saying it is so, then the branding of the school is off.

If you (general) want to send your children to a Tiger Mom, fine that's your choice and never one I would make. If I send my child to a school to be nurtured and cared for in a different way than Tiger Mom style, then this absolutely does not fly in any way. I think this is the bigger issue re: level of strictness.

[cookiemdough]

::tap tap::

Is this thing on??

[meshaliuknits]

Feb 12, 2016 17:17:35 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

Where is the link people!?

www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html?_r=1

[summer]

Feb 12, 2016 17:32:38 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

::tap tap::

Is this thing on??

I'm sorry. It was in my OP! But I see someone re-posted.

[chedifuen]

I would burn shit down if someone did this to my child. I absolutely think this person shouldn't be teaching. School should be a safe place to make mistakes and learn from them. No child deserves to be humiliated for making an error.

[cookiemdough]

Feb 12, 2016 17:48:22 GMT -5 meshaliuknits said:

Feb 12, 2016 17:17:35 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

Where is the link people!?

www.nytimes.com/2016/02/13/nyregion/success-academy-teacher-rips-up-student-paper.html?_r=1

Thanks lol!!

[cookiemdough]

So now I have seen it. Yeah not okay. My son beats himself up when he messes up. I am the one telling him that it is okay and that is how you learn...when you make mistakes. If he had a teacher like this he would probably have anxiety. Interesting that none of the comments in support of her that it was a temporary lapse indicate that she is typically nurturing with the kids. Just that she doesn't go this far.

[bernsteincat]

A colleague of my husband liked and respected by precisely no one because he teaches his bands and kids in this manner. He made the mistake of bragging on FB about making 2 kids (high school age!) cry before 9:00 am a couple weeks ago, and parents went to the principal and he was justly reprimanded.

[katfco]

Feb 12, 2016 17:04:11 GMT -5 @kirkette said:

This is awful, no child should be subject to this treatment. This woman needs to go.

It also makes me sick that this wouldn't even be on the radar for bad teaching, threatening or wrong in most failing districts around here.
How is a teacher and a principal going to punch or get into a brawl with a middle schooler, and be back on campus a few months later?
My heart breaks when I recall things from inner city schools. It was "okay" because it was other people's children.
It's fucking depressing.

I teach in an inner city school that is 90& African-American/mixed race. There is so much I wish I could say about it, but I'm too afraid of it affecting my career if somehow someone from work identifies me. It's horrible, disheartening and trauma-inducing, for both students and teachers. Our school is truly one of the forgotten schools. 

[hopecounts]

Feb 12, 2016 17:07:52 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Maybe it's because I'm not a parent, but I don't think that warrants a termination.

It's not necessarily how I would want my children to be taught, and if I had a teacher speak that way to me, I would have cried (even/especially as an adult). But I also would have made sure I never did anything to make the teacher speak to me like that.

One of the most academically accomplished (& nicest) people I know was raised like that by his father. If he got a math problem wrong, he had to run laps around the house. Look at the Tiger Mom daughters--they have by all accounts turned out wonderfully and have come out expressing gratitude to their mother.

I think the reason this does not come across as abusive to me per se is that the teacher doesn't tie the mistake to that child's person. She says what not to do, that it disappoints her when kids do "x." Verbal abuse, imo, would be to relate that mistake to a character flaw in the child. Like, "you are so stupid" or "you are so bad."

I don't know. Like I said, I would not prefer that type of teacher or to be that type of parent. I wouldn't want that type of teaching for my kids. But nothing I saw in that video, even if every day, makes me think this teacher must be fired. It's just a very harsh/strict methodology.

This is a 7 yr old (at most possibly just 6)
Most kids can not take this kind of treatment and come out unscarred (Andre Agassi, George VI/Edward VIII, etc are some famous examples of how the damage is done even if they are technically successful) it is NEVER ok for a teacher to treat a student in this manner.
If a parent chooses to do so that is on them but no adult has the right to make that choice for a parent.

[StrawberryBlondie]

I'd need bail money.

ETA: I had a professor in law school that took pride in making students look like an idiot during class. Adults. The youngest of us was probably 21-22. It took me a really long time to get over it. I'm positive this kind will remember this incident forever.

[katfco]

Feb 12, 2016 20:53:26 GMT -5 @kirkette said:

Feb 12, 2016 19:03:01 GMT -5 katfco said:

I teach in an inner city school that is 90& African-American/mixed race. There is so much I wish I could say about it, but I'm too afraid of it affecting my career if somehow someone from work identifies me. It's horrible, disheartening and trauma-inducing, for both students and teachers. Our school is truly one of the forgotten schools. 

Liking because I understand life at a forgotten school. 
The police stopped reporting the true monthly murder numbers because no one, who had the power to do anything, really gave a fuck anymore. So students would have to step over dead bodies on their way to school. One student (7th grader) got hit by a car, on his way home. When we asked his "sibling" if they were going to press charges or anything, he said "Why? They don't care about us here".

Yeah. Our school, an elementary school, *deleted specifics* . And yet, the response has not been, "Let's throw all our support behind this school to turn it around," but rather, "Lower your referral rates." 

I don't even worry about test scores; I just want to get through the days without being injured again. 

[bronxgirl]

I couldn't finish the article because I was getting so angry. My daughter is in first grade, has some performance anxiety and is hard on herself of she thinks she made a mistake or someone is mad at her. She would be pretty affected by something like this happening to her. @kirkette and katfco, my heart breaks for what you described at your schools. I wish I could say something more.