906: The damning figure that tells the tragic story of NYCs 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.Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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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 ...