But one educator who watched my YouTube video on Success Academy emailed me with Criticism No. 3: "Only certain parents enter lotteries. You don't have the homeless kids, foster kids, kids whose parents are in jail."
Fair point. I asked Moskowitz about that.>/i>
"Most of our kids are from very poor families," she replied. "Yet they significantly outperform kids from suburbs ... where the average household income is eight or nine times what our families earn."
And even some homeless kids flourish at her schools, she says. "About 1 in 10 of our scholars are homeless, yet 97 percent of them passed the state math exams and 84 percent passed reading."
The fact that she takes 10% homeless isn't a complete response to the claim that only "certain parents" enter lotteries. It is entirely possible that some kids who are homeless do have better parent/parents than some of the kids in public schools. Maybe they're poor, but they may still care about education at some level.
But in a sense, that doesn't matter to the point. Because even if part of the reason she's doing so much better is that she's not getting the "worst of the worst" students, that just proves that a major part of the problem is the students themselves, and/or their parents. Not a lack of funding.
I have no problem whatsoever with parents who care about their kid’s education actually getting better educations for their kids. No problem at all.
One HUGE factor in this success is not so much the longer hours, but the fact that the kids are away from dysfunctional parents during those hours.
Other studies have shown that it is more cost effective in terms of academic success to invest money in teaching parents how to parent rather than pouring it into more teachers, smaller classes, better school equipment, or anything else that the liberals/NEA claims will improve performance.
I think these 2 are closely related issues.