Nearly half of NYC schools are failing, and taxpayers are footing the bill

A report released Tuesday by Success Academy Charter Schools concludes that 906 New York City public schools are consistently failing their students, with fewer than half of their children reaching proficiency in math, English, or both on state exams. According to the analysis, roughly 43% of the city’s 912,000 public school students attend one of those schools.

The report, titled By Any Honest Measure, doesn’t merely blame poor academic performance. It accuses state and city education leaders of creating incentives that disguise failure instead of fixing it.

“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 states.

It continues with a comparison designed to drive home the scale of the problem:

“Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures… No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way.”

The findings paint an especially bleak picture for older students. According to the report, 34% of elementary school students attend schools where the majority fail state exams, rising to 49% in middle school and 62% in high school. Researchers found that many children simply move from one low-performing school to another throughout their education.

Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz called the study the most comprehensive review ever conducted of chronically low-performing New York City schools. Rather than rewarding success, she argues policymakers continue directing more taxpayer dollars toward schools that continue losing enrollment and producing poor academic outcomes.

Those dollars are substantial. New York City spent roughly $40 billion on public education in 2024—about $36,000 per student, roughly double the national average. Some struggling schools receive more than $40,000 per pupil.

The report also takes aim at policies adopted over the past decade that critics say have weakened accountability. Standardized test scores are no longer included in many student grades, making it possible for students to receive passing classroom grades while performing poorly on state exams. At the same time, New York largely prohibits student test performance from being used in teacher evaluations.

The report sums up the disconnect with one statistic:

“98% of teachers [rated] effective. 43% of students failing. The math doesn’t add up.”

Researchers further argue New York State has repeatedly lowered proficiency benchmarks on its own exams, while federal National Assessment of Educational Progress testing has continued to show weaker student performance than state testing suggests.

The findings come as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration pushes additional education spending, even as enrollment has fallen dramatically since 2020. The report argues hundreds of under-enrolled schools continue receiving protected funding while lawmakers maintain limits on expanding charter schools, which generally outperform traditional district schools on state exams.

The report recommends restoring transparent testing data, tying educator evaluations more closely to student achievement, ending grade inflation, reducing wasteful spending, and expanding access to higher-performing schools.

If this report is even close to accurate, taxpayers aren’t funding public education anymore—they’re funding an expensive public relations campaign.

Forty billion dollars? Private businesses don’t get to tell customers they’re doing a fantastic job while nearly half the product comes out defective. Hospitals don’t hand themselves gold stars after botching surgeries. Airlines don’t celebrate “participation trophies” when half the planes miss the runway.

Yet somehow that’s exactly what America’s education bureaucracy expects parents to applaud.

The education establishment has perfected one skill, making failure look compassionate. Lower the standards. Inflate the grades. Rename “failing” schools as “struggling” schools. Give everybody an “effective” rating. Then ask taxpayers for another few billion.

Children don’t benefit from pretending they can read. They benefit from actually learning to read. That’s not cruel. That’s common sense. And common sense is exactly what’s been missing from too many classrooms for far too long.