This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Friday, October 11th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

What predicts how well young people will perform in school? How has a group of charter schools in New York done so very well?

Robert Pandisio has spent a year in a success academy school? The book detailing his observations is how the other half learns, equality,

excellence, and the battle over school choice.

This book is in the trenches, as it were were you spent a year at a success academy and we'll get into we'll get

into that I guess did you have particular expectations going into this that were immediately dashed?

Well, what a good question and I have to challenge myself to recapture my mindset walking in because now you can't forget what you know and what

you've seen and what you've learned. I think like a lot of folks in New York I've

been fascinated by Success Academy for a very long time.

And yeah, it's about the test scores.

But, you know, there's more of a school than the test scores.

But the test scores are just, how can I put this without seeming outrageous?

They were just too good to be true.

I think I wrote a piece in the Daily News some years ago and I made the analogy that I didn't

know if Eva Moskowitz was the Michael Jordan of testing or the Mark McGuire.

And what that means if you're a sports fan is, you know, Michael Jordan was this transcendent athlete and Mark McGuire was a steroids cheat.

So you know having been in the trenches myself teaching in the very same neighborhood

where I was covering Success Academy.

It just seemed these scores were too good to be true.

And in particular, they're ELA scores.

I mean, I don't want to divert the conversation in a different direction.

It doesn't always surprise me when schools can put points on the board quickly for math.

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