Success Academy, a chain of high performing charter schools in New York City, is defending one of its teachers who was filmed tearing up schoolwork and harshly speaking to a first grade student for not answering a math question correctly.
In the video, provided by the New York Times, the teacher tears up a student’s homework and contemptuously tells her to “go to the calm-down chair and sit.”
“There’s nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper,” the teacher, who teaches at a Success Academy in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, said stridently. “Somebody come up and show me how she should’ve counted that was one and a split, show my friends and teach them.”
The video was recorded in the fall of 2014 by an assistant teacher who was concerned about the teacher’s behavior, the Times reports. Success Academy temporarily suspended the teacher after being shown the video, but now she’s back on payroll.
Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz has dismissed the outburst as an isolated incident, that “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.”
