A System That Rewards Attendance Over Achievement
More than 40% of New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8 failed state standardized tests in math and English this year — yet the city held back just 0.4% of those students. Nearly every child, regardless of demonstrated academic proficiency, moved on to the next grade. That gap between measured learning and official outcome is not an accident. It is the direct result of deliberate policy choices made over the past decade, and it is failing hundreds of thousands of children, disproportionately those from low-income communities who have the least margin for error.
City officials pointed to genuine, if modest, progress. The share of students meeting English Language Arts proficiency standards rose 7.2 percentage points, from 49.1% in 2024 to 56.3% this year. Math proficiency climbed 3.5 points, from 53.4% to 56.9%. Both figures outpace the state average, and gains appeared across every grade level — with Grade 3 ELA jumping 12.9 points and Grade 6 math surging 15 points.
Those are real numbers, and they deserve acknowledgment. But they do not resolve the deeper structural problem.
The Scale of the Crisis
A report from the Success Academy charter network — itself a politically contested institution — examined data across the city’s roughly 1,800 public schools and found that in 906 schools, fewer than half of students passed math, reading, or both on state exams last year. That means approximately 43% of the system’s 912,000 students attend schools where a majority of their peers cannot meet basic proficiency standards.
The chronic absenteeism picture compounds the problem significantly. Roughly 300,000 students — about 35% of all NYC public school children — were flagged as chronically absent during the school year, meaning they missed at least 10% of required school days. You cannot teach children who are not in the room, and you cannot build on learning that never happened.
About a third of the 906 struggling schools have appeared on state accountability lists continuously since 2012. Some have carried failure designations for decades. They have received additional funds, undergone mergers, rebranding exercises, and administrative reshuffles — and remained failing schools. The children cycling through those buildings did not get a second chance at third grade.
How Policy Disconnected Grades from Learning
The mechanics of this disconnect are straightforward, and they trace back to specific decisions made under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Panel for Educational Policy eliminated state test performance as a component of student grades. Under the current grading framework, student marks reflect effort, participation, and attendance — categories that matter, but that cannot substitute for demonstrated academic competency.
The practical consequence is stark: a student can score in the bottom tier of a state math exam and still receive grades good enough to advance to the next year. Nearly all do. The promotion rate sits at 99.6%.
State policy compounds the problem on the teacher evaluation side. Test scores cannot be used to assess teacher performance, which means that 98% of teachers receive effective ratings even in schools where the majority of students cannot pass basic proficiency benchmarks. This is not primarily a critique of teachers, many of whom work under genuinely difficult conditions. It is a critique of an accountability structure so hollowed out that it cannot distinguish between a school that is working and one that is not.
Spending More, Getting Less — and Why That Framing Needs Scrutiny
New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024, up 67% from $24 billion in 2014 — growing at more than 5% annually even as enrollment fell by nearly 100,000 students. New York State’s per-pupil expenditure of $36,293 is the highest in the nation.
Critics on the right will use these figures to argue that spending does not improve outcomes, and that the solution is deregulation, vouchers, or charter expansion. That argument deserves resistance. High per-pupil spending in New York reflects the genuine cost of serving a large, dense, multilingual urban population with significant poverty — not bureaucratic waste alone. The comparison to lower-spending districts ignores profound differences in student need and cost of living.
But progressives who believe in the state’s legitimate role in public education — and who understand that well-funded public schools are essential infrastructure for an equitable society — cannot simply wave away a decade of flat or declining outcomes while spending doubled. Defending public education means demanding that it work. Accountability and adequacy of funding are not opposites; they are both necessary conditions.
The Perverse Incentive Problem
The Success Academy report highlights a structural irony embedded in how categorical funding operates: the deeper a school’s failure, the more additional funding streams it becomes eligible for. Resources flow toward failure designations rather than toward demonstrated improvement. Schools that have been labeled as struggling for a decade receive supplemental grants, intervention programs, and administrative attention — without any mechanism that actually breaks the cycle.
This is not an argument for defunding struggling schools. It is an argument for redesigning how accountability and support interact. A school that has been failing for twelve years is not failing because it lacks a new label. It is failing because the children it serves face concentrated disadvantage, and because the interventions deployed have not been sufficiently intensive, sustained, or structurally honest about what is going wrong.
What a Progressive Accountability Framework Would Look Like
The answer is not to return to high-stakes testing as a blunt instrument that punishes children for systemic failures. Holding back a struggling eight-year-old is not a policy; it is a transfer of institutional failure onto a child. The research on grade retention is, at best, mixed, and at worst, it shows long-term harm to the students held back.
But the answer is also not a promotion-for-all policy that allows schools and administrators to paper over failure with inflated grades and satisfactory ratings. Children — especially those in under-resourced communities — deserve a school system honest enough to identify when they are falling behind and intensive enough to actually close those gaps before they compound.
A coherent progressive framework would do several things at once: restore meaningful diagnostic use of assessment data without weaponizing it against students or teachers; invest in early-grade intervention when gaps are smallest and most reversible; address chronic absenteeism as the public health and housing crisis it partly reflects; and build teacher evaluation systems that are fair, evidence-based, and actually connected to student outcomes. None of that is ideologically incompatible with strong unions, adequate funding, or a robust public school system. All of it requires the political will to be honest about what is not working.
New York City’s children are not well served by a system that tells them — and their families, and the public — that nearly everyone is succeeding when the state’s own tests say otherwise.