One of education’s deep problems isn’t discovering success. It’s sustaining it. Again and again, we celebrate high-performing schools at their peak, only to watch — or, more pertinently, fail to notice — when they drift, decline or disappear altogether within a decade. This raises a significant and uncomfortable question: If the high-fliers we celebrate and seek to emulate don’t stay aloft, were they really that good to begin with?

When successful schools lose their momentum, the usual suspects are leadership turnover, staff churn, demographic change, political conflict or the quiet assumption that the success was fragile all along. But many of these factors, particularly staff and leadership changes, are not flaws in the system, they’re features.

The average superintendent typically little more than a single contract cycle. Principals tend to remain only about in a given school, with even shorter stints in high-poverty settings. Roughly of teachers leave the classroom within five years. Any school improvement model that works only if the adults stay in place isn’t a model; it’s catching lightning in a bottle. What ultimately distinguishes the schools that endure is not whether turnover happens, but whether effective practices have been institutionalized strongly enough to survive it.

Some analysts have begun to demonstrate this durability problem empirically. Chad Alderman recently asked a deceptively simple question: Do “good” schools stay good over time? He found that in Virginia, only half of the schools that were in the state’s top quartile of schools in 2004 remained there in 2024.

This suggests a thought exercise: If we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what should we look for? Not test scores. Not a charismatic principal. Not a compelling origin story. Those things can tell us a school is working now but clearly don’t predict if it will still be working years from now.

Let’s start by acknowledging that schools are not stable organizations occasionally disrupted by turnover. They are — or ought to be — organizations built to function despite turnover.

What follows is best understood as a working hypothesis based on my observations and experience: an attempt to identify the institutional features that seem to appear, again and again, in the schools and systems whose results persist while others fade

Durable schools tend to share a clearly defined instructional core. Not a “philosophy.” Not a mission statement. An operating system. They use common materials, sequence content deliberately and define effective instruction in observable terms. New teachers are acculturated and trained into an existing model rather than invited to invent their own. Durability begins with instructional clarity as the foundation, with consistency as the structure.

Schools that sustain results minimize variation in the things that matter most, particularly foundational literacy and numeracy instruction. They monitor whether the curriculum is actually delivered. They coach toward specific practices. When drift appears, they correct it.

Fragile systems rely on great teachers. Durable systems assume ordinary teachers and build routines strong enough to support them. Durable systems assume turnover and design accordingly.

One of the more revealing lessons I took from my reporting on New York City’s Success Academy charter school network is that its results cannot plausibly be explained by stable staffing. Neither does it recruit from elite colleges and universities. Teacher turnover in the network has long been substantial, in part because the demands placed on staff are unusually intense. Yet it continued to produce unusually strong academic outcomes, even as it rapidly grew from a single school to more than 50.

As I wrote in :

The de facto model that has evolved is more like the U.S. Army or the Marines: a small and talented officer corps surrounded by enlisted men and women who do a tour, maybe two, then muster out, with new recruits reporting for duty. Teacher turnover, lack of experience and continuity, is widely assumed to be a problem, particularly in urban schools. But it’s never suggested that our military would be better if only soldiers stayed in uniform longer. So far, the relative inexperience of Success Academy teachers hasn’t seemed to compromise their effectiveness.

The lesson isn’t simply that this model works, but that its effectiveness depends on turning instructional expectations into organizational routines rather than individual discretion. In practice, this meant that first-year teachers were not improvising their own curriculum or instructional routines. Lessons were tightly sequenced, materials were standardized across the network and instructional leaders conducted frequent classroom walkthroughs to ensure the model was being executed as designed. Consistency was not aspirational. It was operational.

Nearly a decade after my reporting, Success Academy’s academic results remain consistently strong, suggesting the model was not a temporary reform-era peak but an institutional system capable of sustaining performance despite high staff turnover. That said, its founder, architect and culture-keeper, Eva Moskowitz, is still in place, meaning the ultimate test of its durability is still to come.

Moreover, I don’t think Success Academy’s model is universally portable. New York City is a magnet for ambitious young people willing to endure an intense professional environment for a few years. It’s far from certain that the same dynamic would apply in smaller or less attractive labor markets. Staff churn would likely be fatal in such places.

Looking back, education reform spent decades searching for the miracle school — the visionary leader, the transformative model, the “it’s being done” proof point that dramatic improvement was possible. We found many such schools. What we rarely built were institutions designed to sustain their promising results. Education has never lacked miracle schools and stories. The real challenge isn’t identifying successful schools but learning how to recognize whether their success is institutional or temporary.

Durable success, not temporary breakthroughs, is what the field most needs to find, study and emulate. In a piece, my pal Holly Korbey notes that Kobe Bryant studied Michael Jordan to raise his game, so educators should do the same. I agree, but give me John Stockton, Vince Carter, Cal Ripken or Lou Gehrig as models: guys who were not just good but managed to stay that way for a long, long time.

This is not a challenge schools can solve with lectures or punishments. My own early efforts to talk a student into better attendance were often met with slow eye rolls, exasperated sighs — and no change. In hindsight, I wasted time talking at students about not showing up. What I’ve learned — and now teach other school leaders — is that the only way forward is to build schools that students want to be in, families feel proud to choose and that instill confidence in their teachers.

When I was a principal, my team at Harlem West Middle School, part of the Success Academy network, stopped treating absenteeism as a compliance problem. We saw it for what it was: a culture issue. While some students were facing housing instability, coping with mental health challenges or caring for relatives, many simply didn’t feel a strong sense of belonging at school that would make attendance worthwhile.

The same was true for families. Between work, transportation and income constraints, parents faced hurdles. Their child’s absenteeism wasn’t due to a lack of care — it was the result of life’s complexities.

It became the job of my faculty and staff to recognize what was making it hard for students to show up or fully engage, and then offer practical ways to help them make the most out of their school day.

One of the most powerful — and surprisingly simple — shifts we made was giving students more ownership of their school. They helped shape how we started our mornings by making daily announcements: researching and delivering news stories, providing schoolwide updates or interviewing classmates, often showcasing their own talents. They also offered ideas for celebrating peers and created engaging student-run organizations, such as chess, theater and book clubs, along with student-organized competitions and leadership opportunities within the school community.

Instead of talking at students when they showed up to school, we made it a point to speak with them, and more importantly, to listen. We asked what school needed to look and feel like for them in order to show up. When students returned after an absence, we didn’t lead with scolding or suspicion. We said, “We missed you yesterday,” sending a message: You belong and you matter. These reconnections were not formal interrogations or overengineered workshops. They happened in the in-between spaces — while walking to class, sitting side-by-side in the cafeteria or helping set up for an event. The best conversations started with soft questions like: “What’ve you been up to?” or “What’s good?” or “What did you think of [add a local event]?” I often asked students for help as a way to invite connection: “Can you give me a hand with these?” Walking shoulder to shoulder, we created quiet moments to talk — or just be together. Sometimes the silence was just as valuable as the words. 

We worked just as hard to re-engage families. For younger students, we used drop-off and pick-up times as natural opportunities to connect — moments that didn’t require extra trips or schedule changes. For older students, we prioritized showing up at sporting events and performances — not just to be seen, but to listen and learn. We asked families what was exciting their kids, what made them anxious and what they needed from us to rebuild trust. 

We documented those conversations and brought them back to our regular meetings with our teaching and leadership staff. There, we looked for patterns and designed responses that were consistent across classrooms. These included deliberate attendance recognition — shoutouts to students by name during morning meetings, personalized notes or celebrations of progress — and flexible academic support time, where students could catch up, study quietly or get targeted help during the school day. These weren’t new programs; they were daily choices made by our staff, built on strong connections with students, that gave them the time and chance to be truly engaged and focused.

Today, as managing director of , I employ those lessons to help educators use attendance as a lever to design better schools. That includes leadership coaching, academic redesign and strategic planning that prioritizes enrollment, engagement and better outcomes.

Across the country, I’ve seen low-cost, high-impact strategies that work: greeting every student each morning, elevating student voices through clubs and leadership roles and creating moments for peers to celebrate one another. These culture shifts work because they put the people in the building first.

Chronic absenteeism won’t be solved with incentives or threats. But it can be addressed by building schools that students are drawn to. It starts with school leaders. I encourage every administrator, district leader and principal to build a school they’d be proud to send their own child to. When students feel a school is worth showing up for, they will.

Flipping the card over, she began to read. “When,” she said. “W-H-E-N.” She placed the card back on the table and announced she wanted to keep going.

“Good job!” Madison Schwab, her first-grade co-teacher responded.

She tried another one. “Fret. F-R-E-T,” she carefully and triumphantly sounded out. 

Scarlett and her Success Academy classmates, all sitting in clusters of three or four, were playing a new literacy game called Popped!. 

At the next table, a group of students chatted with one of the game’s creators: world-renowned artist Jeff Koons, whose famous sculpture, Balloon Dog, just turned 30 and serves as the game’s mascot. 

“There is a tremendous problem with education,” Koons bluntly told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ in an interview Thursday, referring to reading instruction. Of the science of reading, which the game is meant to bolster, he said, “I think it’s wonderful.”

Popped! was created in collaboration with , a company that promotes literacy through table-top games. Jacquelyn Davis founded Clever Noodle after she noticed her son, Madden, struggling to read during the pandemic. 

A former teacher and school leader, she began creating games, which she says are based on the science of reading and its emphasis on phonics instruction, to get her son back on track. At the encouragement of Madden’s teacher, Davis said she decided to fill the need for other students as well. 

“We want reading to be so much fun that they don’t even know they’re learning,” Davis added. “And that’s why we’re beyond grateful that Mr. Koons is going to work with us.”

In the first-grade classroom, Tanisha, 7, sat at a table in the back, surrounded by colorful posters and signs. Of Popped! she said, “I think it’s fun because I like reading, and I like reading books, too.” Her favorites? The Fly Guy and Elephant Piggy series. 

Tanisha packed up the game and headed to the rug where Koons was presented with drawings and cards to celebrate Balloon Dog’s big birthday. 

The father of seven thanked the students for their artwork saying, “Each one of these is so special 
 we are all artists.”

“When you see the blue dog in the future,” he continued, “it’s smiling back at you.”

Clever Noodle released Popped! in the midst of a nationwide literacy crisis and a reckoning with how schools have historically taught reading. As of April, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws or implemented policies related to evidence-based literacy instruction that broadly fall under the science of reading umbrella, according to an   

Davis noted that they were excited to bring the game to Success Academy because they were already integrating the best practices of evidence-based literacy instruction. Since its founding in 2006, the 55-public school charter network, the largest in New York, has used a phonics program for all kindergarten and first grade students. 

Koons and Davis are hoping to extend this sort of learning that is also exciting to other students through the game. 

Koons has his own reading story. He shared that he grew up with a mild astigmatism, a curve in the eye’s surface which blurs vision, which made reading challenging and, he believes, ultimately pulled him more towards the visual world. But, as an adult, reading greatly impacts his work. 

“When I make a body of work I look back and think, ‘Oh, I was reading this philosophical text and I was reading this novel’ 
 It just activates the mind.”

Koons is widely known for his stainless-steel sculptures depicting everyday objects, including the iconic Rabbit and Balloon Dog pieces. In 2019, a $91 million sale of his Rabbit sculpture set a new , for a living artist. 

Davis relayed that when Koons was younger, he felt intimidated and not welcomed when he walked into a museum. His response was to make art that was accessible, inviting and helped people find themselves. 

“For us, reading is that,” Davis said. “Reading makes the world accessible. Reading makes math accessible. It makes science accessible 
 I love that [Koons] focuses on accessibility because for me reading is about access to the world.”

“That was put so well,” the artist responded. 

As the presentation concluded, Davis announced that all of the students would get their own Popped! to bring home.

“We hope you have a great time playing 
 and we hope you do a lot of practice over the summer, so you can stay smart and come back to school ready.”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown sits on Success Academy network board of directors emeritus. Brown co-founded ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and sits on its board of directors.

Seth Andrew, founder of the Democracy Prep charter schools and a nationally recognized champion of school reform, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison Thursday for illegally taking more than $200,000 from the network he helped create.

Appearing before Judge John P. Cronan at the federal courthouse in New York City, Andrew’s defense team requested he begin serving his sentence for wire fraud no later than Sept. 22 at FCI Otisville, a medium-security prison 82 miles outside New York City. The prosecution did not object.

Hands behind his back, fingers fidgeting, Andrew acknowledged doing “harm to Democracy Prep” and said he hoped “future students can learn from my mistakes.” When he finished, his eyes welled with tears and he looked back at family and friends in the courtroom.

Calling the sentencing “particularly difficult,” Cronan said he weighed Andrew’s track record of civic achievement against what he called “a very conscious decision to violate the law.”

The judge referred specifically to a character reference sent by a former student, one of 57 letters written in support of a lighter sentence. “Among other things, you taught her about what it means to be accountable,” he said. “I hope you’ll take those words to heart.”

Financial trouble

The case rocked the education world when it was announced last year, and its intricacies revealed a deep leadership conflict at the heart of one of the country’s most acclaimed charter networks.

Andrew, who founded Democracy Prep in 2005 and served as CEO for much of the next eight years, was arrested last April and charged with wire fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors alleged that he siphoned over $200,000 from escrow accounts maintained by several Democracy Prep schools, transferring it to new accounts under his control and mingling the stolen monies with those of his Democracy Builders nonprofit group. The scheme allowed him to inflate his apparent wealth and attain a lower mortgage interest rate for a $2.3 million Manhattan apartment, according to a .

Andrew illegally misrepresented his relationship with the network, which had been officially severed in 2017, through the use of an old institutional email address. The criminal complaint included damning security footage of him sitting in the bank from which he withdrew the escrow funds, clad in a branded Democracy Prep hat that he was rarely photographed without.

After initially indicating that he would fight the charges in court, Andrew pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in January. In the weeks leading up to his sentencing, a volley of competing documents were filed by his attorneys and federal prosecutors — each emphasizing their own gloss on the case.

Citing the deliberate and long-running nature of Andrew’s deception as he first misappropriated and then shuffled the money between banks, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York asked the court to hand down a sentence “on the lower end” of the legal guidelines of 21–27 months. The defense asked for a period of home confinement, followed by three years’ probation.

In arguing for a harsher sentence Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Finkel noted that during the period he committed his crimes, Andrew was giving interviews extolling Democracy Prep’s civic values.

“He wasn’t following through on the actions he was preaching,” Finkel said.

But in a recent twist, prosecutors modified their characterization of the motive behind Andrew’s “brazen and shameless act”; while acknowledging that the favorable mortgage terms constituted an additional inducement, accused him of primarily seeking revenge against Democracy Prep for turning down his offer to return as a short-term CEO in spring 2019. 

Painting a picture of an organization in disarray, Andrew said he asked the Democracy Prep board to offer him a contract through that July at a salary of $25,000 per month and a potential $250,000 bonus. But those expectations would increase, he warned, for every day he remained unhired and the network’s “financial, talent, and organizational situation” — including its handling of individual schools’ escrow accounts, which are mandated by the state to cover costs in the event of a school closure — deteriorated further. Ultimately the pitch was rejected, and Andrew misappropriated $142,000 just a few weeks later. An additional $75,000 was fraudulently withdrawn that October.

Whether or not the true state of Democracy Prep was as dire as he claimed at the time, Andrew’s brainchild had undergone enormous changes over the previous decade. Established as a single middle school in Harlem and designed to prepare low-income students for both college and democratic participation, Democracy Prep swelled to a network of over 20 campuses across five states and Washington, D.C. The schools administered the citizenship exam as a graduation requirement, taught students to lobby politicians and register voters, and sent them on trips to Europe and Asia. 

The results won national acclaim. Not only did Democracy Prep schools post some of the most impressive standardized test scores in New York, research showed that their alumni were significantly more likely to vote and be registered to vote than their same-age peers. After nearly a decade in leadership, Andrew left in 2013 to take a job in the Obama administration.

But cracks began to show in the coming years. The network’s nationwide spread was fueled in part by grants from the federal Charter School Program — investment that came with conditions around the speed and quality of expansion. Some critics, including a former chief financial officer who had recently been terminated, argued that Democracy Prep had become overextended in its commitments to new sites, giving way to acute financial strain. 

A few months before Andrew’s proposed return, according to documents obtained by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, then-CEO Katie Duffy emailed school staff warning of “significant deficits across our network of schools” and forecasting a period of retrenchment. Even before the school year began, she announced that the network would cut ties with its Washington campus, which had floundered academically from the outset.

It was this dysfunction, combined with a “frustration with the management of DPPS during a time of uncertainty,” that led to Andrew’s scheme, in a response to the U.S. Attorney’s office. While his plot was criminal, they conceded, it did not arise from a desire for self-enrichment or vengeance.

In a statement provided to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, a spokesperson for Andrew argued that the U.S. Attorney’s office had “backed off the false narrative of greed” as an explanation for the fraud, instead claiming that he had taken the money as a vindictive measure against his former employer.

“In a last-minute submission, the government contended that Seth transferred these funds to cause unspecified harm to organizations he founded while admitting that he still cares about this mission deeply to this day,” the statement read. “His entire career belies their false assertion.”

A similar argument was sounded in from a noteworthy ally: Eric Grannis, a prominent New York City charter advocate and husband to Success Academy head Eva Moskowitz. Though not a friend of Andrew’s — in fact, Grannis wrote, the two clashed over at least one contentious charter school issue — he spoke up out of a belief that the Democracy Prep founder had acted on principle for the benefit of the Democracy Builders group, formerly a sister organization of Democracy Prep.

“Although my dealings with Mr. Andrew were limited, he is someone whose nature is readily apparent and he is deeply idealistic and zealous, a real ‘true believer,’” Grannis wrote. “I am therefore convinced that his primary goal in taking these funds was to put them to what he believed was good use, not to reduce his interest rate on his mortgage or for any other personal benefit.”

Under Andrew’s leadership, Democracy Builders had set its eyes on a bold new project in the months before the pandemic: the acquisition and reopening of Marlboro College, a defunct institution in Vermont, as a two-year academic program for disadvantaged students. The deal, in the tiny community where the new school was to have been sited, was ultimately halted over Andrew’s prosecution and Democracy Builders’ own organizational crisis.

A ‘sad chapter is finally closed’

After his guilty plea earlier this year, Andrew returned the $218,005 he misappropriated from the network and paid a forfeiture obligation to the government of $22,537. On Thursday, Judge Cronan added a $5,000 fine.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a press release that the sentence would send a message to potential white-collar criminals.

“Andrew committed this crime to attempt to punish non-profit charter schools because they declined his offer to return as their leader,” said Williams. “Thankfully, the victim of Andrew’s crime was resilient, and its important work continues.” 

In an email to her employees, network CEO Natasha Trivers said she was “grateful this sad chapter is finally closed.”

“Seth’s actions are a profound betrayal of all that Democracy Prep stands for,” she wrote.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown sits on Success Academy’s board of directors. Brown co-founded ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and sits on its board of directors.

A recently announced $100 million donation to Success Academy charter schools by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will allow the network to move ahead with building a massive K-12 school in the South Bronx, but staffing shortages could prove a major hurdle.

The gift, which roughly matches the entire of the Poughkeepsie City School District, will fund a 300,000-square-foot campus, making it the in New York City history. The facility will create an additional 2,400 seats for Success Academy students and will become one of only a few schools to span all grades from kindergarten through high school in the city. The network does not expect the school to begin enrolling until the 2025-26 academic year, said spokesperson Ann Powell, and will only accept K-4 students unless they are transferring from another Success Academy school.

Success Academy already owns the land, previously a warehouse holding storage units, where they plan to build the new facility. The designs are pending approval from the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals before the network can break ground. Success Academy, whose 47 schools educate roughly 20,000 students, already has a charter for the new school so it will not run into an issue with the existing state-mandated cap that limits charter expansion in NYC. 

But finding — and keeping — teachers to staff the new school may be the bigger deterrent.

A current and a former Success Academy teacher in the Bronx both said that staffing shortages and poor retention had reached dire levels.

Shannon Russo said that at his former Bronx school it sometimes took weeks to replace departed teachers, especially in science and math. While positions were empty, students would sometimes have study hall rather than their regularly scheduled lessons, he said.

“The biggest problem is just how unstable it was as a result,” Russo told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Kids couldn’t reliably believe, ‘I’m always gonna go to science class.’”

He himself left in February after being moved from associate teacher into a lead teaching role that he felt unprepared to fill. With the school’s operations staff seemingly moving in and out through a revolving door, he said he felt unsupported in the classroom and in over his head.

His campus has lost 16 of its 58 faculty members since the fall, the network told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Another Bronx teacher, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at work, said her students regularly come up to her and ask, ‘Are you going to stay with us or are you leaving?’ 

The teacher, who does plan to depart in June along with several colleagues, called the Bloomberg donation “tone deaf,” saying it should be used to help already-struggling Bronx schools, not to build a new one. 

The charter network says the new campus will deliver sorely needed learning opportunities to the borough with the lowest high school graduation rate and highest poverty rate in the city. Success Academy schools in the Bronx receive roughly eight applications for every available seat, according to the network.

“We believe now and have always believed that it was our moral obligation to open more schools given the many children assigned to failing schools in New York City. It might be easier and more convenient for us just to focus on our existing schools, but we don’t believe in that,” Powell wrote in an email to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 

The $100 million gift to Success Academy, paired with a donation of the same amount to the Harlem Children’s Zone, represents some of Bloomberg’s first contributions toward a $750 million initiative to grow the charter sector nationwide announced in 2021. In mid-April, the billionaire pledged $50 million to NYC charter schools to create their own summer learning programs, which he said was separate from the $750 million.

“Over the past two years of school closures and remote instruction, the crisis in public education has grown even worse, especially for low-income students who were already falling behind. Expanding access to high-quality charter schools has never been more important,” Bloomberg said in a announcing the gifts to Success Academy and Harlem Children’s Zone.

Bronx families seeking a Success Academy education frequently are forced to enroll their children in schools in other boroughs, spelling long, tiresome commutes. Koomson Kyere, who lives in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx, said that until his daughter got a seat in a nearby school, his wife used to get on the train with their little girl before 6 a.m. to budget time for the trip to her Manhattan school.

Should the network open a Bronx K-12 campus, its first high school option in the borough, Kyere has no doubts about whether to send his children there, he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

“If I have the chance I will enroll them 100%,” he said, explaining that the family would be grateful to eliminate the otherwise inevitable commute into Manhattan. 

Their experience with the charter network has been “excellent” he said. His younger daughter is a kindergartener and his elder, now in fifth grade, is at the top of her class and has joined the chess club. Citywide, Success Academy scholars their public school peers on state tests.

The father did note, however, that multiple teachers with whom his older daughter started the year have not stuck around, though said the network has been quick to find replacements.

Staffing woes have plagued schools across the country, with some states mobilizing the National Guard to fill gaps. Schools serving high shares of low-income learners, like the Success Academy campuses in the Bronx, have faced disproportionate challenges.

To remedy the situation, other New York City charter networks, such as Achievement First, are offering a retention bonus for educators who continue through the 2022-23 year. Success Academy has no similar incentive in place for its staff. It does, however, compensate employees who refer job candidates who are hired and stay at least 30 days.

The charter network acknowledged the staffing struggles, but said that the Bloomberg donation is slated specifically for the purpose of opening a K-12 Bronx campus.

“It’s not that we don’t care about retention,” said Powell. “But it wasn’t that the gift was for that.”

AndrĂ©s Anderson spent his early years in the Bronx and now works as a biology teacher at a Success Academy campus in Harlem. His school has seen several employees leave this year, he said, but resources have not been scarce. His classes recently have been dissecting frogs, and he’s grateful the network allows for the expense. To him, the Bloomberg gift and the new Bronx campus are welcome news.

“These kids need a school,” he said. “Let’s try to at least get one of our nice and shiny and amazing schools into the Bronx.”

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, for years have been a matter of fierce debate nationwide and in the country’s largest district. Bloomberg oversaw an explosion of charter school enrollment as mayor, and the sector now serves 143,000 youth, compared to 938,000 in NYC district schools. Charter enrollment rose in the 2021-22 academic year while district enrollment fell, and charter schools serve a higher share of Black, Hispanic and low-income students than NYC Department of Education schools.

Proponents cheer the trend as evidence that families long underserved by their traditional public schools are voting with their feet. Opponents fear that pulling enrollment away from district schools, where the majority of students still attend, drains much-needed resources from the system, which funds campuses on a per-pupil basis.

Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center Law Professor David Bloomfield said the former mayor’s tactics are the wrong remedy.

Bloomberg’s gift “privileges” an already prosperous charter school network, he said, while lowering his taxes through donations to a nonprofit organization. “This is the former mayor of the city of New York who seems to have abandoned the public schools.”

Mayor Eric Adams, Bloomfield predicts, will continue to “have it both ways” by keeping support for charters “on a low boil” while also seeking to improve district schools — though “it’s not clear how [long] he can keep that game going.”

To Bronx parent Selena Carrion, there appears to be a concerning pro-charter consensus emerging among the school system’s key power players. A longtime special educator in the borough, she has watched numerous families switch to charter schools, including Success, only to be disappointed, she said, with a lack of services and what they perceived to be a “militaristic” culture of behavior and discipline.

“It worries me that Bloomberg as well as the current mayor and chancellor all seem to be on board with charter school expansion,” Carrion told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown sits on Success Academy’s board of directors. Brown co-founded ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and sits on its board of directors.

After multiple rounds of vote tabulation triggered by New York’s new ranked-choice voting system, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams was declared the winner of the Democratic primary on Tuesday. With all other candidates eliminated, Adams edged past former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by a margin of roughly one percent. He is now seen as a heavy favorite in the November election against Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.

With early voting already underway in the New York City mayoral primary, a question hangs over the nation’s largest school district: How will the next administration help schools get back to business after multiple academic years have been profoundly jolted by COVID-19?

Whoever emerges as the party’s nominee will face a multifaceted challenge in leading New York’s school system. After a lengthy period of serving as mayor-presumptive (Democrats massively outnumber Republicans across the city, making November’s general election a likely rout) he or she will need to complete the transition back to in-person schooling, carefully steward billions of dollars of federal relief money, and help students recover from nearly two years of learning interrupted by the pandemic.

And there’s a further plot twist: Charter schools, perhaps the most controversial force in citywide education politics, have won the backing of most of the field’s leading candidates. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and former city sanitation chief Kathryn Garcia have all signalled for the public schools of choice, which have seen their allies dwindle both in City Hall and Albany over the past few years. At the same time, one of the most strident charter critics, Comptroller Scott Stringer, struggled to build momentum even before his campaign was rocked by of sexual harassment.

It’s a situation that upends the political logic of much of the last decade, when Democrats across the country have increasingly broadcast their skepticism of the sector, even to the point of proposing full-on moratoriums on new charters. Now, in a city almost synonymous with liberal politics, most of the party’s top mayoral contenders appear to be taking the opposite tack. The causes for the shift are multiple, including the relative popularity of charters among minority voters, a traffic jam in the primary’s progressive lane, and families’ dissatisfaction with the district throughout the travails of the pandemic.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview that charter schools and their allies are exploiting a hectic post-COVID environment in which K-12 education has taken a backseat to issues of public safety and economic hardship.

“Crime is on the rise, we’re coming out of the pandemic, homelessness is exploding,” Mulgrew argued. “There are so many other issues that are facing people. If this election was last year, when education was at the forefront…this phenomenon would not have happened.”

But according to Richard Buery — a former deputy to incumbent Mayor Bill de Blasio who served briefly as the CEO of the Achievement First charter network before that he would leave to head the Robin Hood Foundation — it’s entirely unsurprising to see Democrats talking openly about supporting and expanding charters.

“Charter schools are incredibly popular among the Democratic electorate,” he said. “The distinction between a charter school and a district school does not fundamentally matter to most people. What people are interested in is whether they have access to quality schools for their children.”

De Blasio backlash

The 2013 election of Bill de Blasio marked a turning point on school choice in New York. After years of enthusiastic support from Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, both Republicans at the time they were elected, charter schools faced a Democratic mayor who openly vented his frustrations with them.

It began in de Blasio’s first few months in office, when he three schools in the high-performing Success Academy network from co-locating in district-owned facilities. He was outmaneuvered by the schools’ allies in Albany, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, guaranteeing charters the right to use space in public buildings. But the new mayor’s position was clear, and he has largely stuck to it throughout the remainder of his two terms in office — including at the National Education Association’s annual assembly that his fellow Democrats needed to be held accountable for being “cozy with the charter schools.”

It was a stance that caught on throughout the party and only gained steam after President Donald Trump appointed longtime school choice advocate Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education. Though he had previously served in the Obama White House during a rapid surge in charter growth, then-candidate Joe Biden had about charters while winning the Democratic presidential nomination last year.

All of which makes the current configuration of mayoral candidates somewhat surprising, at least from the perspective of K-12 schools. Yang, who polled in first place during earlier portions of the race before fading somewhat — has to a charter organization in the past. While he reportedly favors unionizing charters, Adams also that he would support the duplication of successful charter models. And Garcia has even on charters in New York, currently set at 290, dismissing the debate around them as a “political football.”

Those positions haven’t gone unnoticed. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said she was “incredibly disappointed” with Garcia’s proposal. And Scott Stringer, who has sought to during his time as city comptroller and of the UFT in April, has several charter-friendly financiers for making huge donations to political action committees that support Yang and Adams.

But the criticism hasn’t paid off so far. A familiar face in New York politics who many when the race began, Stringer has failed to gain much altitude. Of the field’s top tier, only Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney who worked in the de Blasio administration, seems to be generally running to the left on K-12 issues; even she is focused more on racial segregation and lowering class sizes than school choice.

No single candidacy of the progressive anti-charter movement than that of Dianne Morales. The experienced nonprofit executive had long before pivoting leftward during the primary; her includes proposals to end co-locations and prevent charters from accessing student recruitment data. But just as her campaign was gaining attention, amid allegations of mismanagement and discrimination. And as the primary is in its last gasp, Adams, Garcia, and Yang make up three of the top four candidates.

The UFT’s Mulgrew said plainly that he believed the turn on charters was the product of campaign contributions. A persistent critic of former Mayor Bloomberg, who worked energetically to spread more school options throughout the five boroughs, he argued that Wall Street donors who played an outsized role in charter expansion a decade ago were now hoping to control the debate again.

Bloomberg “had partners who financed so much of this, and we see these same people emerging again and being part of our political process right now in the mayor’s race through various IEs [independent expenditures] and different relationships,” Mulgrew said. “We feel very strongly that a small number of people who have a lot of money should not be influencing us.”

‘A huge disrespect to parents’

But support for charters doesn’t merely come from the financial and philanthropic realms. showed that a strong majority of New York City Democrats approved of lifting the charter cap. And while it was commissioned by StudentsFirstNY, a pro-charter advocacy group, its findings are mostly consistent with existing survey evidence demonstrating the popularity of schools of choice, particularly among who will play a role in choosing the Democrats’ nominee.

Families have already during the COVID era, with public data showing that charter school enrollment grew by roughly 10,000 students — about 7 percent — over the 2020-21 school year. While charter and traditional schools both spent long periods closed to in-person learning while the pandemic raged, the reopening process led by the district left many with its performance and the quality of virtual learning. In May, against both the mayor and Chancellor Meisha Ross-Porter to try to force an immediate full-time return to physical classrooms.

Dan Weisberg, CEO of the reform-oriented nonprofit TNTP and a Bloomberg-era executive at the New York City Department of Education, called the unpredictable pace of reopenings “a huge black mark on Mayor de Blasio’s record.”

“One of the guiding principles should have been respect for parents and students and families,” Weisberg said. “If that’s one of the guiding principles, then you don’t repeatedly change schedules and plans the night before, or with 24 hours notice. …And that was done again and again and again, and there is still significant anger about that, as there should be. It’s a huge disrespect to parents.”

Yiatin Chu is a New York parent and co-president of the group , which advocates in favor of strengthening gifted education programs and has recently co-endorsed both Adams and Yang. Much of her work focuses on fighting back the increasingly controversial admissions test to the city’s specialized high schools, but she has said that many of her fellow parent advocates also look favorably on the alternatives offered by well-regarded charter networks like Success Academy. After an “eye-opening” year of closures and remote instruction, she added, the respective stances of Adams, Garcia, and Yang held great appeal.

“While they’re not saying, ‘I believe in the single test,’ or ‘I believe in charters,’ you don’t get the sense that they’ll expend their political capital or energy to take down these schools,” she said. “We’ll see where things land, but at least in the campaign season, they’re saying things I think many parents want to hear.”

But according to Joseph Vitoritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College and an experienced chronicler of the city’s education politics, if charter backers are aiming to resurrect the Bloomberg-era disposition toward big, high-performing networks, they’ll have to do more than win a mayor’s race.

“I would think they’re encouraged by the fact that three out of the four top candidates are pro-charter — I mean, that’s a start,” Vitoriti said. “But the bottom line is that the decisions are going to be made in Albany, not City Hall
.And I think that’s going to be a tough sell — tougher than ever.”

An end to the charter school cap can only come at the state level, where mayoral influence has often proved weak. The New York Senate, which was formerly held by a complex coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, flipped in 2018, and its newly liberal majorities haven’t shown a willingness to greenlight further expansions of school choice. Even more important, Andrew Cuomo, one of the charter sector’s most steadfast friends during the de Blasio mayoralty, could be in danger of in the next few months; even if he survives, it’s an open question whether he will seek a fourth term next year.

Robin Hood’s Buery said that, regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination next Tuesday, the place of charters in New York is now too firmly entrenched for either city or state leaders to dislodge. A combination of factors — more representative leadership at the school level, successful lobbying from political allies, and the consistent support of African American and Latino voters — have created a “fundamentally different world” for charters, he observed.

“There’ll still be debates about how the sector should grow, and I don’t want to discount the challenges involved. I just think it’s a different kind of debate; we’re past the point of people asking, ‘Should there be charters?’”