Success Academy Charter Schools students — nearly all from low-income black and Latino families — “outperformed every district in New York state on the annual grades 3-8 exams,” reports Kate Stringer on The 74.
Of the New York City charter network’s 5,800 tested students, 95 percent passed the math test and 84 percent passed reading, Success reports.
Only 41 percent of
New York City students passed the reading test (29 percent of “children of color”) and 38 percent (24 percent of children of color) passed the math test.
Ninety-five percent of Success students are black and Latino; their parents have a median income of $32,000. They outperformed white New York City students. The charter networks’ special-needs students, English Learner, low-income and homeless students outperformed similar New York City students by huge margins.
The charter network is trying to expand: 17,000 students have applied for 3,000 open seats.
However, Joseph Belluck, head of the State University of New York’s charter authorizer committee, threatened to block new Success charters because its board chair, Daniel Loeb, said an anti-charter black state senator has done “more damage to people of color than” the Ku Klux Klan, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Loeb apologized for the Facebook post, but Success’s opponents are demanding his resignation.
Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz and parents lobbied for expansion space last year at City Hall. Photo: George Etheredge/New York Times
If the network can’t expand, thousands of children of color will be denied the chance to attend schools that nearly quadruple their success rate in math and nearly triple it in reading. Leaving the Klan aside, that will damage their odds of success.
Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success Academy, crowed about the scores and criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio for “celebrating . . . a 60 percent failure rate.” Scores are up slightly in district schools. “We are stealing possibility from children,” Moskowitz said. “En masse; 200,000 kids who cannot read or do basic math. Kids of color. The monumental scale of the failure despite $31 billion a year in resources, the corruptness of it, the unfairness of it, the corrosiveness of it to the fabric of our society gets a ho-hum response.”
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