Sweet smell of ‘Success’
Harlem kids off ‘charts’
Charter school students in Harlem are now performing better than the New York state averages in reading and math — a key indicator of the once-struggling neighborhood’s upward trajectory in education, according to a new report.
Today, 59% of kids in community School District 5 attend a privately run, publicly funded charter school compared to a traditional district school in Harlem, research compiled by Success Academy Charter Schools found.
And they’re passing with flying colors — beating state averages by 10 points in math and 9 points in reading, the data showed.
That’s a vast improvement from 2005, when Harlem students, most of whom attended district schools, performed an abysmal 25 points behind the state average in math and 22 points in reading, according to Success Academy.
The new scores have helped close the Manhattan neighborhood’s overall statewide performance gap to 3 points in math and 2 points in reading on the grades 3-8 tests Albany uses to gauge performance and compare districts across the state.
Traditional public school students in the district also helped shrink the gap, with modest 3-point gains in math test scores and 6-point gains in reading, according to the Monday data release.
Union opposition
Success boasted of the latest stats as Gov. Hochul struggles to win support for her budget proposal to lift the regional cap on the state’s charter schools and allow about 100 more to open in the coming years. Currently, New York City is only allowed to have 275 of the state’s 460 charter schools.
“Harlem’s example demonstrates that raising the cap on charter schools in New York City wouldn’t harm district schools,” Success said in its report. “Rather, it would simply give more alternatives for families who are dissatisfied with their district school options — and many of them have good reason to be.”
The opposition to the charter expansion plan is led by the United Teachers Federation, which argues that charters cherrypick highly motivated students from supportive families, while the public school system is left to educate the neediest masses, such as English-language learners, special education students or those from the poorest families.
The UFT, which represented 190,000 current and former educators in the city, according to 2022 tax forms, is a major donor to Democrats, who control both of New York’s legislative houses.
Former Democratic City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz opened the flagship Harlem Success Academy in 2006, at a time when students in the neighborhood scored 25 points behind their statewide peers on math tests and lagged 22 points behind in reading, according to Success.
Some 141,000 city students now attend charter schools — making up 15% of the student body in the five boroughs. About 90% of the charter school students are black or Latino, and 80% are from economically disadvantaged families, according to the New York City Charter School Center.
‘Help, not harm’
Success, which runs 47 charters in four of the city’s boroughs, refuted criticism that charters take away resources from public schools by highlighting three public Harlem schools — PS 30, PS 133 and PS 194 — with large declines in enrollment that had not suffered financially and benefited from smaller class sizes.
“When charter enrollment increases, it actually increases the amount of money that district schools can spend per pupil on their remaining students since the amount of money a district school loses when a student chooses a charter school is less than the district school would have spent on that student had they remained in the school,” Success argued.
The charter chain also said students at Harlem charters were more likely to be poor minorities than those attending public schools in the increasingly gentrifying district, where Department of Education statistics show that 11% of students are white or Asian.
Charter schools admit students via lottery, and are banned from discriminating or favoring their admissions bid based on intellect, disability or any other reason, according to the state’s charter law.
The city DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.