‘It was like a horror movie’ — Staff and students criticize charter network’s rigid education model
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A mural on the Public School 279 building, which contains Uncommon Schools’ Leadership Prep Canarsie Middle Academy. Google Maps photo
By David Brand
It didn’t take long for first-time teacher Erika Smith to start feeling uncomfortable with the way staff treated children at the charter network Uncommon Schools. Before beginning her career at one of Uncommon’s Brooklyn elementary schools in 2011, she attended the network’s three-week teacher training program, a crash-course on classroom conduct known as “institute” among employees.
“At institute, the paramount focus was on controlling children’s bodies,” said Smith, who worked for Uncommon from 2011 to 2013. “It felt off, but they described it as behavior management that was needed to work this curriculum.”
Smith had never taught before and did not study education in college, but Uncommon hired her and offered to pay her $50,000 to teach kindergarten, implementing the network’s scripted lesson plans and rigid discipline at Leadership Prep, an elementary school in Brownsville.
During her first week of school, she said, she watched staff execute the “behavior management” techniques in ways that disturbed her — shoving childrens’ chairs, adjusting their bodies, getting in their faces to yell at them. At the time, she said, the teachers were nearly all white and the students nearly all Black or Latino.
“Teachers would physically go around and hold children in the position they’re supposed to be sitting in. We were instructed to talk to them like police. These were kindergartners,” she said. “It was like a horror movie, and it just kept getting more concerning.”
Over the past week, dozens of Uncommon students and staff like Smith have come forward to share similar stories of emotional abuse, physical discipline and intimidation at the charter network.
An Instagram account known as The Uncommon Truth has compiled many of these stories, with each post mimicking the charter network’s black and yellow graphic design style. The Uncommon Truth bio says the account provides a forum for community members to share “experiences of mismanagement, racism, prejudice, and cultural bias at Uncommon Schools.”
The account emerged on June 23, a few days after students, parents and teachers began questioning and exposing racism and oppression at Success Academy, one of the nation’s largest charter networks. By June 29, the Uncommon Truth Instagram account had posted at least 130 stories of abuse, embarrassment, intimidation and prejudice by staff at Uncommon which operates 54 schools serving 20,000 students in the Northeast. There are 24 Uncommon schools in New York City.
The stories touch on a few common themes: rigid discipline of low-income children of color who attend the schools, a one-size-fits-all curriculum designed to prepare students for standardized tests, and peer pressure and harassment against teachers who do not toe the line and adhere to the company’s discipline style or lesson plans.
“Students were treated like prisoners,” reads one post from a former counselor. “The school’s policies at the time were so rooted in broken windows policing and it was really hard to believe that this was a school for Black and Brown children.”
“Teachers were made to go around and pull on the arms of kids to ensure that they were in the correct posture … the posture of fear,” wrote a teacher at Leadership Prep Bed Stuy Elementary Academy. “When we tried to press leadership on these inhumane expectations, we were told that ‘if you give these kids an inch, they will take a mile.’”
“Kids were treated like cattle and were spoken to in very inhumane ways. I was told NOT to smile or laugh with my students until November or December,” wrote a former dean of students at Uncommon’s Excellence Boys Elementary School in Brooklyn. “I was turning into a monster. I was forced to make my student cry for small ‘child like’ misbehaviors.”
Students have used the Instagram account to share stories about teachers throwing away their food, staff humiliating them and leadership handing down long suspensions. One person said her teacher outed her as bisexual to her parents. Another said staff overlooked sexual abuse against girls.
A spokesperson for Uncommon Schools, Barbara Martinez, responded to some emailed questions for this story. Martinez said the network is aware of the Uncommon Truth Instagram account and “reading all posts carefully and assessing our response to each.”
In a lengthy statement, Martinez addressed the allegations against the network.
“Reading these accounts is disturbing and upsetting,” she said. “We are disheartened and concerned that Uncommon students and staff have had these experiences. We take the accounts of personal experiences expressed in these posts very seriously and will investigate them wherever relevant.”
“We are committed to ensuring that the experience in our schools every day universally matches what we see and strive for — an experience rooted in love, respect, safety and learning,” she continued. “We are dedicated to providing staff with the training around diversity, equity and inclusion and to fostering a school culture where every student is respected, valued, and nurtured. When our values or policies in interactions with our students have been violated, we will appropriately address and correct that. In the coming months, we will examine our policies, practices, and curriculum and make changes to ensure that we are meeting the high standards we set for ourselves.”
An expanding model
Uncommon opened its first 72-student charter school in Newark, New Jersey in 1997. Since then, the network has grown significantly, establishing schools in five additional cities and exporting its strict education style to other charter networks via proprietary books and trainings.
In a purely statistical sense, their model works: 99 percent of students who graduate from an Uncommon high school are accepted to college, the company says on its website. Most of those students come from low-income families and nearly all are Black or Latino — proof, Uncommon says, that their model helps close the achievement gap.
The school network has also worked to diversify its staff over the past five years, said Martinez, the Uncommon spokesperson. People of color now comprise 59 percent of staff and 44 percent of principals, she said. They have also stepped up Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training for all staff, she said.
Three past and present teachers interviewed for this story said individual teachers and some school leaders fostered supportive environments and taught creative lessons. “Of course teachers are teaching real things and not every class or subject is test prep,” said one teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because they still work for the network.
But all three teachers, along with dozens of staff and students speaking out on social media, say the statistics mask a foundational problem for the network: the depersonalization of students in the pursuit of test scores.
“The concept they build all their schools on is flawed at its base,” Smith said. “The idea that Black and Brown kids in these areas require being policed for them to excel academically is something that isn’t even questioned.”
Jarod Groome, a former kindergarten teacher at Uncommon’s Leadership Prep Canarsie Elementary Academy, also used the word “policed” to describe the rigid curriculum and disciplinary system.
“Their bodies are policed and their lives are devalued,” he said.
Groome, who is Black and grew up in Brooklyn, said Uncommon discouraged him from making connections with children with whom he could relate.
“Building relationships is number one and that's what it takes if you want to be effective in the classroom,” said Groome, who has since founded the education consulting firm Groome Group. “Students aren't animals, they're not objects, they're not statistics. But that's what they are to the network."
The principal at his Canarsie school decided to break from some of Uncommon’s methods and allowed students freedom of expression, which fostered a more positive environment, he said.
“We wanted to make sure kids loved school and loved learning and being around each other and the teachers,” he said.
That experience contrasted with his time as an intern at an Uncommon site in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where officials enforced strict discipline and upheld a “silent eating” directive, he said.
During the early morning breakfast period, children were not allowed to talk, he said. Other staff members mentioned the silent meals on The Uncommon Truth Instagram account.
“The rationale was it would help them focus for the day — come in, be silent and eat silently,” he said. “But what’s the first thing adults do when they come in for a meal? They converse. That’s natural. This wasn’t.”
Several teachers and students described how staff forced students to sit in a style known as “star” beginning on the first day of kindergarten. Kids in “star” — and acronym for “Sit up. Track the speaker. Ask/answer questions. Respect others — must face forward, watch the teacher, keep their feet firmly on the floor and put their hands on their desk, always visible to the teachers. Smith, the former Brownsville teacher, said teachers physically adjusted the kids’ bodies and frequently pushed their seats into place when they changed positions or slouched.
Students must walk through the hallways with their hands pressed against their sides and they are often denied bathroom breaks, all three teachers told the Eagle. Smith said teachers carried students out of classrooms and into the office of the dean or the principal for discipline, until the principal instructed them to stop carrying kids.
Martinez, the Uncommon spokesperson, responded to these issues, stating that the network “has policies and systems in place to ensure that classrooms are safe and nurturing environments.”
“We know that students learn best when they feel safe, loved and cared for. When our values or policies in interactions with our students have been violated, we immediately address and investigate such cases and take appropriate action. Any investigations are documented and families are notified immediately,” Martinez said.
‘They’re not statistics’
Several teachers and staff members who shared stories on The Uncommon Truth account said the education model is informed by a near singular focus on test results.
“We were all expected to teach one way, to fit one mold of success. 100% compliance every time. Which didn’t account for the teachers as individual humans, and certainly didn’t treat the kids like much more than test scores,” wrote one former teacher.
That emphasis on standardized testing compelled teachers to influence students’ answers, according to all three teachers interviewed for this story and several people sharing stories on the Uncommon Truth Instagram accounts. Smith, the former Brownsville teacher, said staff proctoring tests would emphasize key words when reading questions or hover over students and encourage them to correct wrong answers.
A teacher who asked to remain anonymous said they were encouraged to influence test responses.
“You end up at a place where many schools are cheating. This can take a variety of forms: coming up with signals for kids during tests to let them know they need to ‘double check’ their work; looking at tests before they’re given so you can have kids practice those same questions beforehand; counting answers that are barely acceptable,” they said.
Staff sharing stories on Instagram described teachers erasing wrong answers. Uncommon did not respond to a question about cheating accusations.
Smith, the former teacher in Brownsville, said she finally decided to leave the network when she received another job offer. She said she relieved to shed the emotional distress — something echoed by several former staff members on the Instagram account.
“It just didn’t sit right,” she said. “I hardly slept. It was like you had this constant depression, and feeling of oppression and eeriness — even in lighter moments.”
