Last year, 29 percent of New York City children were considered proficient in English and 35 percent in math on the state's challenging Common Core-aligned exams. For Success Academy students, the proficiency rates were 64 percent in English and an astonishing 94 percent in math. Success students in the city's poorest communities outperformed kids…

Teach For America (TFA) began in 1990 as an organization purportedly interested in working towards ameliorating a national teacher shortage by sending its corps members into urban and rural schools. In the decades that followed, especially during and immediately following a nationwide onslaught of teacher layoffs instigated by the 2008 Great…

The significant growth of charter schools in the United States has brought both praise for the excellent results achieved by some schools and criticism that charter schools may not be serving the most disadvantaged students. In New York City and elsewhere, a significantly smaller proportion of students enrolled in charter schools are classified as…

The documentary film "The Lottery" focuses on the battle between advocates for a New York City charter school provider, Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools (HSA), and those presented as charter school opponents. It uses the struggle of four students who hope to get into a charter school as a vehicle to examine how difficult it is for…

Diane Ravitch's book, "The death and life of the great American school system," is an exploration and critique of educational change in the United States since the report "A Nation at Risk" in 1983 and more specifically since the passing of the No Child Left Behind legislation in January, 2002. Arguably, there are several…