Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 20.5% (239 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 17.2% (200 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 8.1% (95 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 3.9% (46 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 5.2% (61 hits)
• Framing Effect - 3.3% (38 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 1.5% (18 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 0%
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 11.8% (138 hits)

Article text

Close to Half of New York City Schools Are Failing, New Report Says

Nearly half of New York City public schools are failing to get a majority of their students to pass standardized tests measuring math and reading, even though the city is spending about twice as much money on the schools as other districts do, a devastating new report from the Success Academy charter school network says.

Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz, a former chair of the New York City Council's education committee, is billing the report as "profoundly shocking" and "the most complete accounting of school failure in New York City ever assembled."

At 35 pages, with an additional 11 appendices, it tells the grim story of how 409,379 public school students, 43 percent of the city's total, are in failing schools.

New York is by far the largest public school district in the United States.

Failing schools there have far-reaching effects on the workforce, electorate, and business climate in the nation's largest city.

"These are not schools teetering at the edge of success.

They are schools that have been massively failing — persistently, systemically, and at staggering public expense — for years, and in many cases for decades," says the report, titled "By Any Honest Measure: New York City's Long Record of School Failure — and the Price We Keep Paying."

"The cost is enormous.

New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024 — $36,293 per pupil, double the national average of $17,619," the report says.

"The city is now committed to billions more to fund a class-size mandate that the evidence does not support, while propping up hundreds of vacant schools that drain resources at a premium rate with no return."

Particularly haunting is the appendix listing the 503 "double fail" schools, which are failing to get majority pass rates on standardized tests in math and in English.

The schools are named after some distinguished Americans—abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Zionist Henrietta Szold, baseball player Roberto Clemente, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, poets Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and physicist Albert Einstein.

Or they carry names full of ambition and ideals—"Leaders of Tomorrow," "School of Leadership Development," "Renaissance School of the Arts," and "Brooklyn Democracy Academy."

"Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures.

A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls.

A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties," the report says.

"No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way."

The report is not framed as a frontal attack on the city's socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who took office January 1, 2026, and is only mentioned by name once.

The report calls it a failure "that has persisted for decades."

But it does implicitly make a mockery of the video that Mamdani and his schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, issued on June 22, 2026, congratulating New York public school students and families on "another incredible year."

"The New York City School system demands a lot and prepares you for a rewarding life in return," Samuels says in the video.

"You are entering the next phase of life well-equipped with a New York City education."

Mamdani declares, "we are so proud of you."

The report frames charter schools as in keeping with Mamdani's "affordability" agenda.

The charter schools are doing better on the standardized tests while spending less money.

"A city that is keeping 906 failing schools, enrolling more than 400,000 students, open at $40,000+ per pupil should be asking why it has simultaneously constrained the expansion of a sector that serves comparable students at lower cost and with measurably better outcomes," the report says, citing the "ban on new charters" in New York City.

Among the report's other key findings:

Students aren't showing up for school.

"Roughly 35 percent of all NYC students, around 300,000 children, were chronically absent in the 2023–24 school year."

Students are skipping state tests.

"Many schools have extraordinarily high numbers of students refusing to take exams, which inflates their proficiency rates.

The actual failure is almost certainly worse than the official numbers show."

Spending is soaring.

"In 2024, New York City spent $40 billion on public education — up 67 percent from $24 billion in 2014, growing at more than 5 percent per year, even as enrollment fell by nearly 100,000 students."

Failing schools frequently stay that way for a long time.

"About a third of the 906 schools in this report have been cycling through failure designations for more than a decade, receiving additional funds and support, merging, rebranding, relabeling, but were never turned around."

The financial incentives reward failure.

"The deeper a school’s failure, the more categorical funding it becomes eligible for."

The state legislature outlawed describing schools as failing.

"New York's officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid saying plainly what the data show.

In 2015, the State Legislature made that avoidance official: under CRR-NY §100.19, the term 'failing school' was formally struck from state regulation and replaced with 'struggling school.'"

The teacher evaluation system is flawed.

"When 98 percent of teachers are rated effective/highly effective and 43 percent of students attend a school where more than half of students are failing math or reading — or both — the only logical conclusion is that the evaluation system is not measuring what it claims to measure."

Parent surveys focused on race rather than academics.

A city survey asked parents if race and ethnicity were "positively represented in the curriculum."

At one failing school, 94 percent of parents answered yes to that.

The state hides the data.

The state education department "stopped including any analysis of state exam results in its press statements — even topline scores were missing.

Instead, NYSED provides a link to its database and a single consolidated file accessible only through proprietary ACCESS database software that requires technical expertise to query."

Neither the New York City Department of Education nor the New York State Education Department responded to a request for comment by deadline.

While New York is larger and costlier than other districts, the results for math and reading proficiency—or lack of it—are roughly in line with those of other large urban school districts nationwide.

The report concludes with a set of recommendations, many of which apply outside New York:

— "Incentivize excellence.

Tie teacher and school evaluations to results. ...

Reward excellence.

Learn from it, and repeat it."

— "End social promotion and grade inflation.

Make assessments mandatory, and educate parents on why they need to understand how well their child is learning."

— "Stop the waste"

— "Bring the pleasure of learning back to the classroom."

And it ends: "What is missing is not money.

What is missing is honesty — honest measurement, honest reporting, and honest consequences when schools consistently fail."