A

Foreign.

B

Welcome to the Report Card with Nat Malkus, the education policy podcast from the American Enterprise Institute. My guest today is Eva Moskowitz. Eva Moskowitz is The founder and CEO of Success Academy, a network of 57 schools in New York City. Educating 22,000 students. Success Academy is known for its strong results. Despite 72% of its students being economically disadvantaged. Success ranked first on the 2024 New York State grade three to eight math exam. A decade ago, when charter schools were at the peak of their popularity, I heard a lot about Success Academy. But recently, as the energy around choice has shifted elsewhere, I've heard much less about Success Academy and about schools like it. Accordingly, I invited Eva onto the podcast to hear how Success Academy has handled learning loss and chronic absenteeism, to hear about Success's curriculum overhaul and future plans, and to hear Eva's thoughts on the state of the charter sector more generally. Eva Moskowitz, welcome to the Report Card.

A

Thanks for having me.

B

So, Eva, I'm going to assume most of our audience has some familiarity with Success Academy and the results that it got before COVID Have those results held up since the pandemic?

A

Well, when we came back from remote, and we did remote as well as we possibly could, but we do not believe remote is the way to educate children. I did not want to close, but the authorities made me close. And when we came back, we were down 30% in math and about 20% in reading. Obviously, in high school is where the learning loss was great. Greatest when kids are taking AP chemistry and their AP bio is not that strong. There's kind of a Venn diagram of biology knowledge and chemical understanding. But we got about 75% of the way back to where we were Precoc in year one, and in year two we were 100% of the way back. And finally now our results with bigger scale are outperforming pre Covid.

B

Eva, I'm curious about how you catch students up from something like pandemic learning loss. I mean, some might think, well, you're going to prioritize some subjects over others. Maybe, maybe you just push them to work harder. And of course, you were pushing your kids pretty hard before the pandemic. It's not like you had some slack resources. How do you catch kids up?

A

Well, first I might just reframe a little bit learning loss because I think people think that it's just a kid sort of deficit, but actually teachers sort of forgot how to teach and principals forgot how to lead and superintendents forgot how to superintendent. You know, What I'm saying, there was 18 months of everything occurring on Zoom. And so everybody was rusty, parents were rusty in terms of bringing their kids to school. We've always had super low chronic absenteeism, like ridiculously low. When we returned from pandemic, we kind of looked like a district school. I mean, we had 25% of our kids showing up late, not coming to school regularly, and we had to sort of really tackle the adults capacity to get kids in school. So obviously there was a strategy there in terms of learning loss. But I really think you have to see it as a broader. We almost lost the ability to be a high performance organization. But in terms of learning loss as you have defined it, one just competitive advantage that we had is that we assessed kids through the pandemic. So we actually knew where every kid was along every dimension that we usually assess for in kindergarten and first grade. We knew the letter sounds that kids did not know for their phonemic awareness. With mathematics, we knew the extent to which the weakness was in geometry or mathematical fluency or in sixth grade probability. So it's a lot easier to make a mitigation strategy if you know what the problem is. If I were flying blind, that would be challenging. But we didn't go back. We accelerated and caught up. I mean, if you go back, then you lose the year that the kids are in. So you kind of had to figure out what was the Learning loss in 5th grade math and how do you weave it in without losing 6th grade math, if that makes sense.

B

Eva, one thing that I worry about in this context, and not with success, but just generally, is that during the pandemic, standards and expectations for students and schools sort of fell for a while and have not been kind of brought back up to the standards they were before. Maybe the culture of schooling weakened over the pandemic. Now, if you weren't Eva Moskowitz, but you were, you know, the median district superintendent who may have less poll less control over the schools that you're overseeing. How, how do you raise standards up? What would you recommend superintendents do, you know, out there in the wild?

A

Yeah. And I think you're right that the, the muscle for holding high standards was pretty weak pre pandemic. And then it just completely atrophied. And I think everybody was turned around and superintendents really have to recommit to fundamentals. So I would recommend that you must tackle chronic absenteeism and chronic tardiness. It's very hard to run a great school if kids are showing up whenever or not Showing up at all. And that's really, there are no, like, fancy tactics. It's really a matter of leadership and conviction. You know, we really galvanized everyone, parents, kids, teachers, principals, superintendents, around what we call learning readiness data points. And that is being in school on time every day. You're not too sick. It's coming to school with a charged Chromebook and your stylus. It is, you know, your level of preparedness to do the learning and everyone's got to kind of lock arms, but you've got to quickly get there and get this right so that you can get to the more formal learning.

B

So I, I've done a lot of work on chronic absenteeism and, and you, you jumped down my question sheet because it was definitely on there. So let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, I'm curious because oftentimes I hear a response about what should we do for. About chronic absenteeism? And the answers are often, well, we want to engage students, we want to make school sort of more compelling, we want to make it more inviting to come back. And I think those things are fine. But I think that sometimes that's half the sort of conception of what we need to do to get chronic absenteeism. But let me turn that into a question. What is the thing that schools need to do in order to ameliorate chronic absenteeism, to address it and to get kids back on track?

A

Well, of course, you know, schools should be engaging places. You do need art, music, dance, sports, chess. You need, kids need to be engaged, teachers need to be engaging, the content needs to be engaging. But even if you have all that, which success does, there's also just an insistence that you must be in school. You must be in school, on time, in uniform, with your Chromebook charged. And everyone's got to believe that it's not that there's some tactic. I mean, sure, you can celebrate, you know, we have the Zero Heroes Club. Those are the kids who've been absent zero times. You know, we, we have little hoopla, if you will, to celebrate growth and achievement, etc. But I think what success has is we just have a community of learners that is unapologetic and very clear eyed about why we are here on this earth as educators. And we know we cannot educate students if they are not present. And so we lock arms and we insist. Does that mean that we have 100% attendance every day? No, but it means we have 98% on average every day. And if you were to stand outside of Success Academy schools. And we're in four out of the five boroughs. You would see kids and families running to be on time because we've created a culture where everybody understands that that's the expectation and everyone understands why that's important. You know, we do our community meetings first thing in the morning, so if your kid is not there on time, you're going to miss that community circle, which is actually a really special time of the day where you want everybody present. So we've just created this culture where kids want to be there. Everybody understands the expectations, and I don't think you don't need more money to do that. You don't need laws passed to do that. The only thing you need is conviction that it is important and it is possible and we will get it done.

B

So frequently when I have conversations on chronic absenteeism, it seems like it's a little bit taboo to talk about consequences for persistent absenteeism. A lot of folks, well, they're focused on sort of making school more inviting and compelling, which I appreciate. And it seems like there's sort of a tacit logic that, well, any kind of consequences for not showing up is going to work against that engagement. Do you think consequences have a place in this struggle? And how would you describe them?

A

Yeah, I mean, I think we are not afraid of consequences, assuming that the standards have been made nauseatingly, explicitly clear because you don't want to play a gotcha on kids or families. And so it's really, really important that the standards are clarified. And I would also argue that often you would want to practice standards so that everyone can meet them, so that the consequence is only. First of all, it has to be a logical consequence, and it needs to be a consequence that is imposed after practice. So that's just our philosophy of consequences in general. And schools can skip the step of explaining the why of the standard, the what of the standard, and really belaboring that I think it's different for different school types. So in middle school, the kids get there on their own. They're perfectly capable of getting there on time. And there is detention for kids who are late. But detention alone does not solve the lateness problem. It has to include a discussion with the parent and, you know, really a motivating plan to get the kid to come on time. But you wouldn't want to do that for elementary school students, because, frankly, if they're late, it's really the parents who are getting them to school. So in elementary school, we do a lot more motivating of parents. And we also get the kids to care about being on time with celebrations and certificates and all sorts of hoopla. So we find at our schools that the kids are kind of dragging their parents there. I want to be there on time. I want to be there on time. You know, we do also, you know, try and make it easy by, you know, we do a lot of games at success. And so we will have certain days of the week. We like Monday, because Monday we find there's a higher level of tardiness than the rest of the week. So on Monday we will have games during morning time and the kids want to play Uno and they want to be there to do that. And so there are some tricks of the trade. But ultimately you have to really decide as a school. Is this important to you?

B

I want to shift gears a little bit about what you think makes success tick. And there's a lot of ingredients that go into making success as successful as it has been. Culture, curriculum, teachers, the leader, you, and certainly the families and the students. This is an impossible question, but if you had to rank those factors, what would come out on top?

A

Well, I mean, first it's just important, and I'm sure your listeners know this, but we are a random lottery school, so, you know, succeeding at an extraordinarily high level. I, I am hesitant to pick one factor because it's really the symphony. You know, we think about schooling as. How do you treat it? As the opposite of. And maybe this is too ancient a reference for your audience. But school can feel like cod liver oil. And we don't want school to feel that way for kids or for families. We want it to be super pleasurable in every possible direction. And some of that is the quality of the content is engaging. Some of that is the range of electives from visual arts to dance to soccer to basketball to coding to chess. And some of it is just silly stuff like, you know, a faculty student dodgeball game or going apple picking as a whole community. But we are very intentional about making school a place that kids want to be. It makes learning easier, it makes the chronic absentee and tardies easier, but it's also just good for kids to be happy. And we put a premium on that. But I would say that our content is one of the distinguishing factors. We've always had good content, but last year we read, we launched our multi year redesign project. And I've never been happier than I am this year as a result of this content redesign that we did.

B

Well, let me ask you that about that Because Success Academy was putting up really good numbers by, by any metric, it looked like an extremely successful school. And then a little over a year ago, we were talking and you said, yeah, we're going to revamp the curriculum, which is a puzzling choice, right? I mean, you know, the, the car's running fine. Why, Why'd you do a redesign? What was the motivating factor?

A

Well, I think there were a couple of motivations. First, I thought we could do better. Not so much from the external outcomes, although we could do better there, but really more qualitatively, the quality of the learning. And I've always believed that the quality of the questions you ask kids determines the quality of the answers. If you ask kids a low level question, you're going to get a low level answer. If you ask kids a provocative high level question, you're going to get a high level answer. So I've, since the day I opened Success, I believed in content, I think more than most educators do. But there were things, things missing from the content. So I'm a huge believer in logic and what logic as a discipline can really teach children. By the way, the LSAT just this past year eliminated the logic problems from the lsat. So I think we can look forward to less than logical lawyers, which strikes me as a very bad thing. But those LSAT logic problems, our kids do them in middle school. So the notion that the future lawyers can't handle the logic seems quite absurd to me. But leaving that as it may, there were things that were missing subjects, like logic. I really believe in a very quantitative science program. And our program was less quantitative than I wanted it to be, even though we teach science five days a week starting in kindergarten. But the main problem I was trying to solve was 13 years of continuous integrated education. And we get very confused in America because we use this terminology, K12, but it's not really K12. It's a collection of elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. But they're not intellectually connected, and there's tremendous educational waste because we're not integrating those. So when I did this redesign, I started with college and life and what I wanted to prepare our students for intellectually beyond our high school. And I designed our high school curriculum for that. Then I designed our middle school curriculum to really prepare kids for high school. And I redesigned our elementary school curriculum to prepare kids for our middle school. And it was not just academically. So what does the mathematics have to look like in kindergarten? So your seventh graders are very mathematically competent and prepared. It was also the habits of mind that are necessary for what we call scholar preparedness.

B

Eva, it strikes me that most folks that run schools do not revamp the curriculum themselves, that they do not sort of have a overall design, but are actually often building it with building blocks. Some of this, some of that which I can understand might lead to some incoherence in the. In the approach. Is that a structural problem in schools that school heads and leaders are sort of building from pieces rather than designing from the top down?

A

Well, yes, but I would say it's a huge problem with the publishing houses for K12 because they are hocking wares that are not integrated and school districts are buying them, not realizing that they're not coherent. And I didn't want to be a publishing house. And I tried for the first three or four years to piece together the way you are narrating and I found it rather inadequate. So I built my own. But I built it very quickly. And A, I didn't know what I was doing because I wasn't a curriculum person and B, I was building it just in time. So as my kindergarteners, you know, my first graders became second graders, I would produce the second grade and I actually built it forward. I did not have the luxury of to run, you know, and it got revised and revised and I kept trying to revise it to make it better. And then I realized that it just wasn't ideal. It had some really good elements to it. And it, it's not that my new content throughout everything, but it was not. Did not have the level of coherence that it needed to have.

B

So was this a marginal redesign? I mean, certainly it was top down, so it wasn't like. Well, we, we left some things in whole. But what percentage of the curriculum that you had is present in your redesign?

A

Almost nothing. I mean, I learned a lot along the way. So it depends on how you count it. But if you're literally asking, if I looked at my 13 years, how many words did I take? It was nothing. I took the learnings of the last 12 to 15 years, but I redesigned it totally and completely. And I had the luxury of time. I spent four years and I have a team of people. It's a scrappy team, it's not a big team, but I did have a team of people and we spent a lot of time on the design. And by the way, curriculum is a little bit of a misnomer because it's also a pedagogy. It's also professional development that is built in for how to teach. So it, it's kind of a twofer.

B

So you, you brought up your teachers. Let me ask about them. Where do you get your teachers at success?

A

Well, we recruit nationally. It's super hard. There's a massive teacher shortage. That was pretty significant pre Covid, but the world has really scrambled post Covid. I get a lot of requests from teacher candidates that they would be happy to work remote. How many days a week can they work remote? And you know, in my view, and people can differ on this, schooling is not a remote sport. It's an impermanent person activity. The relationships you build with children, the classroom community that you build is really essential to the quality of the experience and the quality of learning.

B

So at success, I think one key ability you've shown is to grow your teachers that aren't necessarily PhDs with stellar credentials. They're not necessarily coming in. It's not like you're recruiting the all stars. Seems like they are good teachers, plenty of capabilities, but then you build them up. What does that process look like? How much does success pour into its new teachers?

A

It's not only our new teachers, it's every teacher. We have 13 weeks of training for both new and returning teachers. And their growth and development is of the utmost importance. We have a slogan at success, that education is for the kids, but it's about the adults. And the quality of the learning is derivative of the quality of the teaching. And so the most important aspect is the quality of the teaching. Now, in order to have quality teaching, you have to have instructional leaders who understand what your, what quality learning is and how to get a rather large number of adults to exhibit sort of those essential qualities.

B

What do you look for with your candidates? I mean, what is, what is the attribute that tells you you're a good fit at success? Is it sort of academic aptitude that's particularly high? Is it, is it something else?

A

It's whether the person is a learner. You can't be a good teacher if you're not interested and have hunger to learn.

B

I've also heard that you like teachers who are coachable. I think that fits right in with teachers who are learners. How, how do you know that a teacher's coachable? And how long does it take you to know?

A

Oh, well, we get a pretty good idea in the interview. You know, what are you curious about in life? That's one of my favorite interview questions. I don't do it myself anymore, but I've interviewed thousands and thousands of teacher candidates myself, and I think you need to kind of scrap some of the typical teacher interview questions. What interests you about life or the world around you? If you don't have a curious person, it's going to be really hard to learn to be a good teacher. I also like to ask people, what are you reading? What are the five last books that you've read? And I don't really care. It could be a romance novel, it could be history, it could be science, it could be a graphic novel. But you're motivated to learn and be intellectually engaged. That's pretty darn important.

B

If you don't mind me asking, are success as teachers paid according to a rigid scale or is there pay differentiation?

A

There is pay differentiation. You know, it can vary by school type, so it's different for es middle school and high school. But, you know, we try and compensate our teachers as generously as humanly possible because they're doing the work. But we also believe in rewarding performance and rewarding teacher leadership. And so, you know, we have various incentives to help us do that.

B

So you're a consumer to some degree, I assume, of education schools. Education colleges that train teachers. How happy are you with the training that the teachers that come out of ed schools that you hire get?

A

Well, I think that the schools of education in America are quite broken. To be blunt, they're quite broken. And I'm not maligning or blaming. I think there are historical reasons and in fact, structural reasons why teacher preparation programs are very disconnected from the actual work. And so I think we're going to have to rethink that model pretty fundamentally. So it's a problem because it costs a lot of to go to these teacher preparation programs. And I have not seen people come out of them really knowing even the basics.

B

Success has proven to be scalable in New York. I mean, success Academy, you've grown a lot. 22,000 students. One might imagine that the talent pool in New York kind of helps out with that. There's a lot of people that live in New York, a lot of folks. And of course, success has some brand recognition. Do you think that's fair? Is that an advantage that you have being in the city?

A

Oh, yeah. I mean, if I were in, you know, rural Kentucky, I think this would be significantly harder. So I do think that is an advantage. People want to come to New York, live in New York, etc. But I also think that many of the mechanisms of talent acquisition that school districts are using are incredibly outdated and we're not keeping up with Gen Z and the labor market and you know, all of the things that this generation cares about. And you have to pay attention to the labor market. Now, having said that, and the advantages that we have in New York, it is darn difficult for us. It's not like we're sitting here with our feet up on the desk saying, we've got this. It is a full time. We are hustling like nobody's business to recruit the best and the brightest for our students who, you know, are learners and dedicated to kids. And the market is a limiting factor. It is super difficult. As CEO, I spend a lot of time on puzzling through how we're gonna make it to the finish line. I wouldn't obviously have this problem if I weren't growing so rapidly. That makes it harder.

B

All right, Eva, it's time for grade it. I'll give you some topics, you give me a letter grade and a brief explanation. Are you ready?

A

Sure.

B

The other day the New York Times published an article that was titled teachers worry about students using AI, but they love it for themselves. So teachers using AI.

A

I think everyone's going to need to use AI and so, oh, I have to give it a grade. I'm not sure I quite understand the hypocrisy or the use of AI for

B

teachers, whether teachers stand to advantage by using AI in their teaching work.

A

I think everyone's going to be using AI and I think it can be used sort of intelligently or less so. And we've just got to make sure that it's utilized in a quality way.

B

The Frick collections policy not to admit children under the age of 10.

A

As I went to the Frick as a child, my mother is an art historian, so from a selfish point of view, I would be in favor. I think 10 is a little bit high to prohibit. I can understand why you wouldn't want a 6 year old because you do have to worry about the paintings being touched, etc.

B

Can you grade how American schools do with educating boys?

A

I think we have work to do. I think it's. I mean, it's hard to say because we're doing a poor job of educating everyone, but I think boys are suffering more even and that we have to address, you know, everything from the amount of physical activity to, you know, self confidence and a lot of the softer skills that I think are needed for both genders to be successful.

B

So a grade for how we, how we fare for boys, I would say C. All right. AP History courses.

A

I love it. A straight A. I would say to the College Board, there are Things that I would improve. But we are AP for all at success and we love AP history.

B

Teaching chess in elementary school, well, we

A

do it at every single school. I'm the largest employer of chess teachers in America and I love chess in school. So anyone who does it a what's the benefit? In short, it's a nonverbal game that promotes strategic thinking therapy culture in schools. What do you mean by therapy culture

B

therapy adjacent treatment of children and their social emotional needs.

A

Well, I don't think you can run a great school without sensitivity to students social and emotional needs. So I think that's important. I think sometimes we psycholog, psychologize issues that are academic or disciplinary or environmental. And we've got to be careful that everything isn't about the psychological. But I certainly believe that students have emotional needs and social needs and in poor communities are under a lot of psychological stress and schools have to address that.

B

And how would you grade them? How well are they doing at balancing those factors?

A

Well, I don't think the schools are doing well at most things, so I would give the schools a D at that.

B

All right. I want to talk about successes, expansions. I've heard that success is interested in expanding not just in new schools, but potentially to Texas or Florida. Is that something you can discuss?

A

Sure.

B

What do those plans look like and what are the challenges involved?

A

Well, I will just say that while many of my colleagues in the charter sector expanded very quickly, very early on in their histories, I was rather resistant to doing it because I was planning on growing super fast, lightning speed. And I was after this extraordinary quality. I really didn't want to go somewhere else until I had sort of a clear pathway towards getting to extraordinary quality. And while I'm not there yet, I do think we are a few years away from extraordinary learning quality. So I finally have picked my head up and said, you know, where else could we do good and help children? And while there are many sort of candidates and states, I think both Florida and Texas have sort of hospitable entrepreneurial environments. There are also high growth states. And so there's a ton of educational need. But there are some policy challenges in both environments for high quality replicators. And those are, you know, those are going to require some level of legislative work before those barriers are minimized.

B

If those barriers are taken care of and the path has made way, what's. What's the big challenge? I mean, it's a big jump to go from one state to another. You're kind of building from the ground up, not with satellites nearby. When you look out there, what is your, your primary concern?

A

Well, I think it's just honestly not knowing what I don't know. And I'm not thinking about going to these other states and saying to myself, I will just take success in New York and I will plop it down in some other jurisdiction and it will all go smoothly. I've spent several years doing due diligence on what is the regulatory environment. I've even just tried to understand what are the differences between poverty in New York and poverty in Texas or Florida, because poverty is not all the same. I find that even in New York, I serve radically different ethnic communities. So the Dominican poverty is a little different than Puerto Rican, which is a little different than Mexican, which is a little different than Russian poverty or Ukrainian poverty. You know, you have to understand some of these nuances of the jurisdiction that you're going to. I think then you just need to be agile and go with, you know, your best guess at what is the design. And then you've got to amend on the fly and rather quickly if your best guesses are off for any reason.

B

It's been said that one key lever of successes, success over the years is that when a school is having a challenge or not doing well, you can move teachers, you can move bodies, you can move staff from one school to another school to help sort of shore it up or fix things. First of all, do you think that's true? Is that a unique advantage that you have that many other systems don't have the, the will or ability to do? And is that something that you find might be missing when you move to Florida or Texas and sort of create a new beachhead?

A

Well, I, I think it's in a very limited fashion. True. I'm not saying I've never moved a teacher, but teachers are creatures of habit. They have their commute times. It is not the easiest thing to say to a teacher, Yank them out of their beloved community of learners and send them somewhere else. And to some extent the same with principles. So I wouldn't say that that is really the strategy. I would say it's the design where people can be dropped into the design and rather quickly get up to speed rather than our advantage is moving people around.

B

Another recent expansion that has already happened. You've expanded into high school over the past several years. What was challenging about moving into the high school space?

A

Everything. There was nothing easy. I mean, it, it and particularly our high school. So as I mentioned, we're AP for all our kids. Take 18 APs by the time they graduate from high school. And, you know, those courses are hard to staff. They're, you know, challenging. So we have, you know, all of our kids take AP Art History. That's 250 works of art that you need to know. The artist, the context, the form, the function. It's, it's a lot our kids take. 100% of our kids take AP macroeconomics. And understanding the content is challenging. I also have found, you know, college admissions is a really hard nut to crack. It's not really designed to serve poor kids especially well. I get the colleges are well meaning and trying, but their process really was not designed for poor kids. Why would you have applications due on January 1st when school personnel is not around? The kids are on their own. If you're a low income first generation, you know, you might not submit your application to college because nobody is there because it's due on January 1st. If they made it due on December 15th, all of the school personnel would be there ready to support the kid. So there are some pretty significant structural barriers that we have had to sort of brute force our way over, under, around in order. For eight years in a row, we have sent 100% of our kids to four year colleges with 96% getting at least one offer that meets their full financial need as defined by the colleges. That is very hard to do. And if we were not kind of crazy for the kids, we probably would not be able to get over all those barriers.

B

When you expanded into high school, did it make you rethink your offerings in middle and elementary school? I mean, did it show you new things once you were educating high schoolers?

A

Yeah, I mean, I think actually perhaps more than the high school experience was the college experience. We have had a very. We love the arts. We call ourselves the high school of the liberal arts because the humanities and mathematics and the sciences are both important to us. But we've always aspired for 66% of our kids to study math, science and engineering in college. And the level of competition that exists for an elite engineering program is quite stiff. Meaning kids who are going to, you know, let's say Carnegie Mellon, one of the best engineering programs in America. Those kids are coming in often with calc 3. They're taking perhaps calc 1 or calc 2, but before getting on the college campus, they've taken up to calc 3. So if you're in a calc 1 class with them or a calc 2 class and this is your first rodeo, you might not do Very well. And so looking at our students experience and looking at the rigor at the college level and that is really partly what was responsible for our redesign. You know, we see ap, bc, Calc as frankly table stakes. Like if you can't do that, it's hard to compete in a world class engineering program with international students and students who are quite exceptional at math and science.

B

Let me ask you a few questions as we round this out on charter schools generally. Do you think charter schools have lived up to their promise?

A

I don't think so. We at Success have tried to and I think the promise is not only that the freedom will allow you to, you know, get exceptional results, but the promise of the charter movement was really innovation. And I don't we have tried to take advantage of that at every turn. I mean innovating how we take attendance, innovating in curriculum, innovating in teacher training, innovating in school safety and security. There is no area of schooling that we have not tried to innovate. Sometimes the regulatory framework makes it a little challenging. Don't get me started on the rules regulating school food. It's really hard to serve a good healthy meal given the federal regulations around school food. But within our constraints we have really innovated. But I don't think the rest of the charter sector, it's sort of like there's somewhat better districts instead of totally taking advantage of the freedom and really thinking radically differently. And there are some who have done this. But I think it is disappointing that we don't have more out of the box thinking.

B

What's your theory of the case? I mean it could be that the charter logic was wrong all along and there wasn't going to be a lot of innovation. Could be that charters to compete just have to be a little marginally better so they don't take risks. It could be a lack of creativity. But why don't we see more innovation and more divergence in the types of charter schools that we're seeing out there?

A

Yeah, I think that innovation does require career creativity. And you know, I've been able to innovate because I have been on a quest for talent density who are the smartest, most creative. And I'm talking about at the home office at the district level. I'm the fourth largest district in New York state and you know, my directs and their directs at the home office. These are really creative people who can think outside the box. You know, it may look now that I'm doing it all, but I have a lot of people who work here at Success, who are waking up every day trying to build a better educational mousetrap, especially for poor kids. And the starting point premise is that what we have is not working. So let's not just status quo and be marginally better. How do we radically rethink schooling and the experience of schooling not only for kids and families, but frankly, for teachers? How do we make this way more satisfying? How do we help teachers be way more successful? How do we engage principals and help them be better, faster leaders? How do we do the work more economically, efficiently, not because we're a for profit, we're a not for profit, but so that we can reinvest in the things we really, really care about.

B

Eva, last question. What's new for success that's exciting you? What's coming next that you're really excited about?

A

Well, I am building the first K12 campus. It's 300,000 buildable square feet in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, in Richie Torres district. And I am doing this, of course, not only to educate the kids within the four walls. It will house 2400 kids in perpetuity. But I'm really building it because it's a beacon. I'm hoping it's going to be an educational landmark. You know, there are landmarks, but this is an educational landmark where people from all over the world are going to come, God willing, if I can build it and finish it. It's supposed to open next May, August 26, for the 2627 school year. This is going to be an educational landmark of extraordinary excellence. And in one place, you're going to be able to see 13 years of continuous integrated education. And I'm doing it really to throw down the gauntlet for the city. I love New York, the state. I love New York state and the country. I love to say we can do better. We have to find the will to do so much better. Not a little bit better, but much, much better. I view the crisis in public education as the as a national security issue and our most pressing domestic issue, which is totally solvable. And that is what is very frustrating about this space. But I'm excited about this building because I think words sometimes cannot convince people. But seeing education in action, I think is going to be very powerful, or at least I hope so.

B

Thanks for listening to the report card with Nat Malkus. And special thanks to our guest, Eva Moskowitz. Thanks also to our producer, Ellie Lucas. He makes this podcast possible. That's all for this episode. I'm Nat Malka Sam.