The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

I was saddened, but not shocked by this video of a Success Academy teacher named Charlotte Dial berating a first grader for struggling with a math problem.

It’s easy enough to say that the Charlotte Dials of the world should not be teaching. But what we really see here in this video is the essence of Moskowitzism, which is a philosophy predicated on a particularly odious and insidious brand of white supremacy. The idea that because the education system has profoundly failed black and brown communities, we should strive to offer those communities not what we offer to white communities, but what we deem “good enough.”

I come from a family of teachers. My mother teaches at a public school in Park Slope that serves an extremely affluent, predominantly white population. If there were rumors — forget about a video — of a teacher at her school verbally abusing a student like this, there would be a riot. And maybe blood running in the streets.

That’s not because Park Slope parents are superior to other parents. It’s because as a society by and large we tell white parents, especially wealthy white parents, that their children deserve the best possible education. We tell white parents that their children deserve to be offered rigorous and effective instruction, but also to be nurtured and loved and treated as the endlessly curious, gentle, wide-open-to-the-world souls that children are. We tell white parents these things and we promise that we will educate their children this way.

What we have told parents who are not white is that their children deserve instruction and nothing more—not patience, not softness, not emotional or spiritual nourishment. The terms of the deal are non-negotiable.

Success Academy not only accepts this ideology; it celebrates it. In fact, it was built upon it. That’s why Charlotte Dial was a “model” Success Academy teacher. She was a model teacher not in spite of her mistreatment of students but because that is part of the model. That’s not just my opinion; it’s Success Academy policy:

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.

Eva Moskowitz says as much herself:

“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.”

As a teacher at Success Academy, Charlotte Dial may be an outlier. But the educational philosophy she demonstrates here — moment of weakness or not — is the educational philosophy of Success Academy writ large.

It’s a disgraceful philosophy.