ACADEMY AWARDS
All charter’s seniors accepted to college
Every senior in one of the city’s largest charter school networks has been accepted to a college this year, officials said.
All 98 of the 12th graders at Success Academy’s HS of the Liberal Arts in Manhattan earned admission to universities — including Yale, Penn, Duke and Georgetown.
“Thanks to the work of our extraordinary faculty, and the steady support of parents and families, these scholars are well prepared for the challenges of college,” said Eva Moskowitz, the network’s founder and CEO.
Success Academy, which enrolls mostly low-income students, said the senior class notched an average SAT score of 1268 en route to their college acceptances — nearly 200 points higher than the national average.
“They have read and analyzed poetry, studied calculus, electrical and biomedical engineering and plumbed the primary sources of ancient history,” Moskowitz said in a statement. “They are ready to show the world just how capable they are. I couldn’t be prouder.”
Success Academy enrolls roughly 18,000 students across 45 schools in every borough except for Staten Island.
Other local charter school networks with traditionally high college admissions rates — including KIPP NYC, Ascend and Uncommon Schools — are still receiving their acceptances this year and have yet to tally a final figure, officials said.
Moskowitz announced earlier this week that despite the city being in coronavirus lockdown since March, the network would maintain a grading system for all students.
“Now is not the time to throw out standards and give up on kids,” she said.
The Department of Education tossed numeric- and letter-grading for K-8 kids entirely while maintaining them for high school students.
Advocates of scrapping grades argued that traumatized city kids should be relieved of academic stresses in favor of emotional supports. Opponents countered that two-thirds of the school year had already taken place and that student efforts to that point should not have been discarded.
Mayor de Blasio shuttered the nation’s largest school system in March as coronavirus fears began to take hold, and schools have moved to a remote-learning model that has yielded vastly disparate results across the city.
Some parents complained this week that their kids were not receiving adequate attention or instruction from teachers while others said they were satisfied by the DOE’s remote-learning efforts.