906: The damning figure that tells the tragic story of NYC’s public school failure

The Success Academy charter-school network’s just-released report on New York City public-school failure is so shocking and troubling that even anti-charter-school teachers unions should be shaking in horror.

The report crunches the numbers on school accountability, quality, expenditures and standardized test results.

Its finding? Widespread, pervasive, tragic dysfunction.

A system rife with grade inflation, under-enrolled schools, no accountability and assorted tricks meant to obscure failure.

Remember this number: 906.

That’s how many perennial failure factories, out of 1,600 city schools, are allowed to fester year after year.

They enroll 409,379 kids, or 43% of all NYC public school children.

Just how bad are they? In 503 of them, the majority of students failed both math and reading last year, some for a whole decade.

Despite massive amounts of extra resources and attempts at reform, these schools have never successfully turned around.

And bizarrely, the more a school fails, the more categorical federal aid it qualifies for — which gets siphoned into more money for adults before reaching any students.

The criteria used to identify failing schools “does not create accountability,” instead the system “creates eligibility,” charge the authors.

They flag “the profound harm done to hundreds of thousands of children” and “the high societal cost of this failure” to properly educate children in poor neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, education funding forever ratchets upward: Mayor Mamdani is handing the Department of Education $38.6 billion this year — an increase of almost $4 billion from last year, despite plummeting enrollment — with no strings attached.

Today, the per-student cost has soared to roughly $49,500 per pupil, among this highest in the nation.

Anyone who cares about education in the city needs to digest every word of this Success Academy analysis. 

“What is missing is not money . . . [but] honesty — honest  measurement, honest reporting, and honest consequences when schools consistently fail,” conclude the authors.

Here’s the takeaway: The New York bureaucracy that runs the system — officials at DOE, in Albany and in the unions that control them — intentionally mislead and obscure failures, mostly to protect the adults. And to hell with the kids.

We can, we must do better: Privately run (but publicly funded) charter schools see far superior results for the same student demographics, and for far less money.

They’re open with their data, and it’s not just their teachers who face real accountability: Failing charters can, and do, get shut down.

The solutions are simple: Hold those 906 schools accountable, at long last, and give more parents better options by growing the public charter-school community.

Start by scrapping the charter cap meant to limit competition for the union-run schools.

Success Academy has done the city a great service by documenting these schools’ eternal failures. Now it’s time for the city and state to act — and save the kids of the future before it’s too late.