VIDEO: Success Academy Teacher Screams at Brooklyn Girl Struggling With Math

Success Academy’s campus in Cobble Hill. Image via Google Maps

UPDATE, Friday, 3:30 p.m.: Success Academy Accuses New York Times of ‘Gotcha Tactics’

COBBLE HILL, BROOKLYN — The New York Times uploaded a secretly recorded video Friday of Charlotte Dial, a charter-school teacher at Success Academy in Cobble Hill, flipping out on a young female student who forgets how to solve a certain type of math problem.

In the video, reportedly recorded in fall 2014 by an assistant teacher concerned about Ms. Dial’s aggressive teaching style, the woman rips up the child’s scratch paper and screams: “Go to the calm-down chair and sit!”

Ms. Dial then says to the remaining children, full of rage: “There’s nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper. Somebody come up and show me how she should have counted to get her answer.”

“You’re confusing everybody,” she tells the girl in the corner. ”I’m very upset and very disappointed.”

Success Academy Charter Schools, a New York-based charter network, has been fighting back via social media all morning.

“#StopBashingTeachers who turn classrooms into magical places of learning,” the academy wrote on Twitter. And in another Tweet: “#StopBashingTeachers who turn their scholars into superheroes.”

On its YouTube channel, Success Academy uploaded a video of parents responding to video of Ms. Dial. (See below.)

The video ”sounds like me with my children,” one mom says.

The unidentified mom continues: “You know how many times I’ve actually — and it’s a horrible thing to do — I’ve picked up the pencil and erased my own child’s work and said, ’Do it again’? ... You get frustrated because you know they know it. It’s a tough love thing.”

She adds that her child, who had Ms. Dial for a year, “knew that she loved him unconditionally. That just sounds like a little bit of frustration to me.”

Contacted for comment, Success Academy officials told Patch via email that they would respond to the New York Times article at an afternoon press conference.

This is the second time in the past few months that the Times has exposed a controversial practice at a Success Academy campus in Brooklyn. In October, it was revealed that administrators at the campus in Fort Greene created a “Got to Go” list of difficult students.

The “Got to Go” list prompted an investigation by the SUNY Charter Institute and a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights by numerous of parents, city officials and activists. The complaint alleges, among many things, that an autistic 9-year-old girl was denied special-ed support and services at Success Academy’s Cobble Hill campus.