The Other Option
Hannah-Jones had a third choice for Najya that, if considered, she never mentioned: a charter school.
She recounts a tearful exchange with the principal of Unison, Emily Paige. Together they lamented the challenges the school faced, including the knowledge gaps of incoming students and the inexperience of the school’s teachers. To honor her commitment to antiracism, Paige had eliminated homework; too many of her students were so behind academically that they could not do the work on their own. But that lowered academic expectations and harmed her students, she painfully acknowledged. “It’s very, very hard,” Paige said. “There’s no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once. We are working within the system that we know is not working, while trying to recreate and reimagine a new system, while working with young people who have all this potential, who’ve not been given the opportunities for that potential to thrive and be unleashed. And they understand all of it, and they understand none of it, all at once.”
But there is a model. Paige need only to have made a short walk in any direction from her school in Bedford Stuyvesant to see it in action. She might have walked northeast to Success Academy Bed-Stuy, which in the 2024–25 school year enrolled nearly a thousand students (only 26 of whom were white). Seven in 10 were economically disadvantaged. Ninety-seven percent performed at or above grade level in English and 99 percent in math (with 77 percent scoring at the state’s highest level).
Paige had many other places in the city to find excellence in action. Concentrated in New York’s poorest communities, scores of high-performing charter schools enroll the neighborhood’s children. They are Black and Latino and, in the main, from low-income families. Unlike the New York City Public Schools, where fewer than half of Black and Latino students perform on grade level in English and math, a growing number of the city’s charters now boast near universal student proficiency. At Classical Charter Schools in the South Bronx, 98 percent of students tested proficient in math and 96 percent in English in 2025. Four of the network’s five schools are in the country’s poorest congressional district. Success Academy, the city’s largest charter network with 57 schools and 22,000 students, performed nearly as well.
Nearly three decades since New York State passed its charter school law, misconceptions about the schools abound—namely, that they select their students and are more generously funded than traditional public schools. In fact, the city’s charters are open to all children, regardless of ability or prior academic achievement, are publicly funded (at levels lower than the district), are prohibited from charging tuition or fees, and—crucially—are held accountable for their students’ outcomes under threat of state closure.
Some critics see charters skimming off the most motivated parents. Research discredits this. Studies compare the performance of students who won a seat in a charter school’s admissions lottery to those who did not; both benefited from parents motivated to apply. Moreover, charter skeptics conceive of parents who are motivated to ensure their children are educated as a finite commodity, extracted and hoarded by charters like gold in the ground. In truth, motivation is forged in part by a school’s culture, an infinitely expandable asset that effective schools produce as much as tap.
