New York City’s Success Academy Charter School students outperformed the city average by a considerable margin this past year. Of 3,065 Success Academy students tested, 93 percent were proficient in math, and 68 percent were proficient in English. Comparatively, the citywide averages are 35 percent and 30 percent.

The difference is that Success Academy requires its students to sit up and pay attention.

Eva Moskowitz, who founded the Success Academy in Harlem in 2006, explained the method behind the results in the Wall Street Journal. The approach came from educator Paul Fucaloro, who Moskowitz described as “instructionally sophisticated,” but also “decidedly old school on the topic of student behavior.”

Moskowitz explained that students are not allowed to “stare off into space, play with objects, rest their head on their hands in boredom, or act like … ‘sourpusses’ who brought an attitude of negativity or indifference to the classroom.”

Critics of the school’s standard claim the methods used “to reach such high test scores take a toll on teachers and students by creating high-stakes environments that are often competitive and stressful.”

Moskowitz rejects such claims. “If we lessened our standards for student comportment [behavior], the education of the 11,000 children in our schools would profoundly suffer,” she said, adding:

As Paul repeatedly preached to me, it’s morally wrong to let a child choose whether to pay attention because many will make the wrong choice, and we can’t let them slip through the cracks. So if a student had trouble paying attention, he’d move him to the front of the class, call his parents, keep him after school to practice.

Trumpet Daily Radio Show host Stephen Flurry discussed Success Academy in relation to the recent events at Missouri and Yale University, saying:

It makes you wonder … how much different would it be if some of those troublemakers would have been sent to the front of the class in one of Paul’s classrooms years ago? Or better yet, how much different might it be … if they would have been brought up right in the home, even before they got to grade school, even before they go off to kindergarten?

(Listen from 47:55)

As Moskowitz admits, the results of Success Academy have not come from any new truth. They have come from what many used to accept: that children succeed when they have structure that forces them to pay attention and engage with their education. To learn how you can help a child through school, read “Five Ways to Help Your Child Succeed in Public School.”