Success Academy, New York City’s booming—and at times controversial—network of charter schools, has been awarded the charter sector’s most prestigious prize.
Success Academy was selected for the sixth annual Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, which recognizes nonprofit charter networks that are aggressively closing academic-achievement gaps between low-income students and their wealthier peers.
The network, the city’s largest with 41 schools and 14,000 students, has also been at the center of heated debate over special education and discipline. Critics claim that it uses strict codes of conduct and discipline policies to push out harder-to-educate students which, in turn, boost its test scores.
But as the Broad Prize review board notes, Success Academy’s students, the vast majority of whom are low-income students of color, do well academically.
