I created schools good enough for my own children
Eva Moskowitz bet her children's education on her ability to create good schools in poor neighborhoods, she writes. Her son Dillon, who'd gone to a Jewish nursery school, enrolled in kindergarten at Success Academies' new Harlem charter school. He was the only white child in the school. Now a college graduate, Dillon remands friends with a dozen of his Success classmates.
Her daughter had a harder time socially, but stayed through high school.
"I do not believe I sacrificed their education," writes Moskowitz. "I believe they received an education better than the one available at even New York City’s most celebrated district schools."
New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones blames her daughter's experience at low-performing, high-poverty public schools on a segregated system. "Educational failure falls far more heavily on children in poor Black and Latino communities," who most need strong instruction, Moskowitz writes. Schools in affluent areas have an easier time "recruiting and retaining experienced teachers." If a student doesn't do well, parents "can purchase tutoring, move to a desirable zone, master a byzantine admissions process or leave the public system entirely."
But non-white students -- and classmates from educated, advantaged families -- can succeed at schools where "adults determine what children are taught, how carefully their work is examined, how much help they receive when they struggle, whether classrooms are orderly and whether anyone responds when the evidence shows that learning is not occurring," writes Moskowitz. Hannah-Jones’s daughter "needed honest assessment, so that an A represented mastery. Learning fractions, long division and independent study habits required a school that treated teaching those things as its nonnegotiable responsibility."
Success Academies opened charters in high-minority, low-income neighborhoods. Students were admitted by lottery. Black and Latino students outperform district students -- and "outperform students in virtually all of the state’s wealthiest suburbs."
In 2026, 91 percent of Success students tested as proficient in English, 97 percent in math, on state exams, she writes. While 24 percent of district students tested at Level 4 (excellent), 64 percent of Success students, "most of them low-income students of color," reached Level 4 in English, 74 percent in math. That's higher than all the selective schools in the city, she writes. At two Success schools, including a Bronx school where 98 percent of students are children of color and 83 percent come from low-income families, 100 percent of students hit Level 4 in both reading and math.
Success graduates lead the nation in AP success, notes Andrew Rotherham. The network is doing so well that New York "officials are fighting to squelch their data."
New York City's public "schools trained teachers in ill-conceived but fashionable instructional methods — at the expense of proven approaches — while also incorporating equity policies that eroded standards and made no one truly responsible for student learning," writes Jennifer Weber, a Manhattan Institute fellow, in City Journal.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, in the name of promoting equity, "got rid of school letter grades in 2014 and replaced Michael Bloomberg’s policy of closing underperforming schools with the Renewal program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on extra services on those failing institutions." In addition, "the city stopped using test scores to determine whether third- to eighth-graders were ready to move on to the next grade," writes Weber.
“Algebra for All” gave all eighth-graders a chance to take algebra, but those weak in math fundamentals failed the exam.
Charter leaders are trying to lift the state-imposed cap on charter schools in the city, arguing that charters dominate the list of top-scoring schools. Teachers' unions have led the opposition to charter expansion.
Comments