A new report is putting a harsh spotlight on what it describes as New York City’s persistently underperforming public schools.
The analysis argues that failure across the city’s school system has become routine — and, in some cases, obscured by grade inflation and manipulated outcomes — with nearly half of schools repeatedly falling short for students.
Released Tuesday by the Success Academy Charter Schools network, the report found that at 906 public schools, fewer than half of students passed math, reading, or both on last year’s state exams.
Those schools enroll 43% of the city’s roughly 912,000 public school students, according to the report’s findings.
The numbers were especially stark at 503 of the 906 schools, where a majority of students failed both math and reading.
The report also noted that about one-third of the 906 schools have appeared on state “accountability” lists since 2012, with some campuses labeled as struggling or failing for decades.
Rather than confronting what the report characterizes as an urgent crisis, it contends that city and state policies have allowed the problem to deepen, either by failing to intervene effectively or by masking the scale of the issue.
“These are not accidents. They are the product of a system that has chosen, year after year, to protect itself rather than serve its students,” the report, titled “By Any Honest Measure,” stated.
“Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties.
“No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way.”
But the level of failure in the nation’s largest public school system “has been normalized — and, worse, systematically obscured.”
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Success Academy head, Eva Moskowitz, said the report marked the most extensive review to date of consistently low-performing schools.
The report also accused New York policy makers and educators of actually rewarding failure — including by pumping more funds into low-performing schools with dwindling enrollment.
New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024 — $36,293 per pupil, double the national average of $17,619.
Lawmakers pump more money into the failing schools, to more than $40,000 per student, the report found.
According to the analysis, 34% of elementary students attend failing schools, with that percentage going up to 49% for middle schoolers and 62% for high schoolers, based on test scores.
In many cases, students are routed from a failing elementary school to a failing middle school to a failing high school.
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Many high school graduates are unprepared for college-level work and have to take remedial courses when enrolled in CUNY’s community colleges, the report noted.
The problem would be worse if not for grade inflation — and the accountability system for both students and teachers is a joke, the analysis charged.
The student grading policy measures effort, participation, and attendance — but excludes performance on the state’s standardized math and English exams.
Using state test scores as part of a student’s grade was scrapped by the Panel for Educational Policy under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio.
It means nearly all students who score poorly on state exams end up getting good grades and are promoted.
Meanwhile, state policy forbids using student test scores to evaluate teachers. Therefore, nearly all teachers receive satisfactory ratings.
The report noted: “98% of teachers [rated] effective. 43% of students failing. The math doesn’t add up.”
The state Education Department also comes under severe criticism — for repeatedly lowering benchmarks to boost passing rates on its math and reading exams, the report said.
The manipulation is exposed when students score much lower on the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress exams, considered the gold standard for testing.
Albany has participated in downplaying or covering up failure, the report charges.
The state no longer releases its own comparisons on standardized test results by traditional public versus charter schools, as the latter on the whole perform better on the exams.
But state lawmakers are also blocking entry into alternative education programs, such as higher-performing charters, by imposing a cap on the number allowed to open.
A decade ago, the state Legislature also approved a law striking the phrase “persistently failing school,” changing the term to “persistently struggling.”
The biggest wasteful folly: state lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s approval of the class size reduction law in New York City.
The legislation — passed at the behest of the powerful United Federation Teachers president Michael Mulgrew — comes despite enrollment in city public schools dipping by 123,000 students since 2020, the report said.
The city Department of Education failed to consolidate or close schools after a decade of enrollment decline, the report said.
The struggling and failing schools already have lower class sizes because families abandoned them, and the report said evidence doesn’t support the mandate setting classroom caps. Of the roughly 900 failing schools cited in the report, 167 were woefully under-enrolled.
Another budget drain is the city Department of Education’s commitment to “propping up schools” with plummeting enrollment.
More than 800 schools out of the roughly 1,800 in the system have fewer than 400 students, while 241 had fewer than 200 students enrolled.
The politicians have contributed to the problem by holding such schools “harmless” — maintaining their level of funding despite them having fewer students.
“Failing schools rob children of their futures,” the report said. “Under-enrolled schools drain the budget for no return.
“The class size mandate will spend billions more on schools where class size is already low — and where it has demonstrably not helped,” it adds. “New York City cannot afford any of this in the midst of a significant educational crisis.”
The report suggested that the state make test data more readily available; tie teacher and school evaluations to students’ results; stop manipulating state tests and end grade inflation and curb wasteful spending, among other recommendations.
