Public charter schools have proved the key to success for minority and low-income students.
The people in charge of public education have chosen to place job security above the well-being of students. Children attend schools that have been failure factories since before they were born, and in some cases before their parents were born. Yet these schools remain in operation because they provide solid middle-class employment opportunities for adults. They continue to underperform because they reward teacher seniority over competence.
“These are not schools teetering at the edge of success,” reads the report, which cites publicly available state and local education data. “They are schools that have been massively failing—persistently, systemically, and at staggering public expense—for years, and in many cases for decades.”
Success Academy was founded 20 years ago by Eva Moskowitz, a former chairwoman of the New York City Council’s education committee. Ms. Moskowitz has a well-earned reputation as a tireless champion of school choice, and her high-achieving public charter-school network gives lie to the claim that outside forces—poverty, racism, broken families—are primarily to blame for lagging performance in the classroom. At these schools, there are no excuses, and the achievement gap has all but disappeared.
Success Academy students are disproportionately black, Hispanic and low-income, yet they outperform their peers in traditional public schools and students from wealthier and predominantly white school districts. In 2025 Success Academy ranked first in math and second in reading in New York state exam results out of more than 700 school districts, and 100% of its students were accepted to four-year colleges for the ninth year in a row.
If policymakers are looking for a way to juice racial and ethnic diversity without lowering admissions standards, the obvious move would be to overturn laws backed by teachers unions that restrict school choice.