Success Academy Students Excel on AP Tests, New Results Show
More than half of charter network’s graduates passed 5 or more exams
New test results from the College Board’s Advanced Placement exams show impressively strong performance from the Success Academy charter school network.
The stunning and consistent high performance of the Success Academy charter school network on statewide math and English standardized tests is by now a well-known story, and one that has made the network’s founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz, a hero in the world of education reform and results-oriented philanthropy.
New York tests are one thing, though; Advanced Placement tests are another, measuring student achievement on rigorous, college-level material. Some elite private schools avoid the AP tests altogether, perhaps because they are wary of providing parents with independent empirical assessments of whether the schools are preparing students to excel at college-level academic work.
New results from the College Board’s AP tests, which are administered in the late spring and graded over the summer, tell the story. In the top state nationwide, Massachusetts, 33 percent of high school graduates passed one or more AP exam. By comparison, in the Success Academy network, 100 percent of the graduates passed at least one AP test.
Nationally, only 35.7 percent of the high school class of 2024 even took any AP tests, and only 22.6 percent of the class of 2024 scored a passing grade (three on a five-point scale) on any test. Yet, again, at Success Academy, 100 percent of students not only took an AP test, 100 percent of students passed at least one.
More than half of the Success Academy graduating seniors—65 percent of them—passed five or more AP tests. That is a rare feat.
Success Academy broke out its AP performance by subject. The highlights include:
● AP Environmental Science: 76% passed, 32% scoring 4s or 5s
● AP European History: 85% passed, 55% scoring 4s or 5s
● AP Literature: 91% passed, 48% scoring 4s or 5s
● AP Macroeconomics: 85% passed, 58% scoring 4s or 5s
● AP Microeconomics: 91% passed, 65% scoring 4s or 5s
The Success Academy students include a lot of poor students in New York City whose parents are not college graduates. They are not the wealthy suburbanites who stereotypically dominate AP tests.
And it’s not just the graduating seniors taking AP tests at Success Academy; 100% of Success Academy students in grades 9-12 took multiple AP exams, the network says. In May, 1,505 students from all three Success high schools took 5,717 AP exams at the Javits Center — averaging about four exams each.
The irony is that even as Success Academy racks up these impressive results, the public policy environment in New York State and New York City has the potential to become increasingly threatening to charter schools. The United Federation of Teachers, the powerful New York City teachers union that has traditionally been hostile to charter schools, recently endorsed the Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, an Israel-hating socialist who is leading in recent public opinion polls. And the Democrat-led state legislature is threatening to out-Mamdani Mamdani with far-left legislation.
That comes as Success Academy is poised to expand. A new 300,000 square foot school in the South Bronx that will eventually be filled with 2400 students is under construction and set to open in less than a year. The schools are aiming to not just add seats but keep continuously improving the quality of an already high-quality education; Success recently rolled out a new K-12 curriculum. An expansion to Florida is slated for the 2027-2028 academic year after a lot of public-policy groundwork there.
But New York is the home base of Success, where it was founded in Harlem in 2006 and now serves more than 22,000 students in nearly 60 schools. If New York students are to continue to benefit from a Success Academy education—and from those at other high-quality charter schools in the city—their parents and staff and alumni and friends will have to devote creative energy, effort, and skill to public-policy advocacy in similar ways that they do to excellence in the classroom and to teaching Advanced Placement classes.
When I dropped by Success Academy headquarters in Manhattan this week for a visit with Moskowitz, that was part of the message she was stressing to her assembled network staff. Perhaps the “progressives” on the political rise in New York will eventually come to realize that helping poor kids in the Bronx and Harlem ace Advanced Placement tests is highly progressive. At least, it is concrete, measurable progress.
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The word “passed” is relative. Some institutions require a grade of 3 or above. Others require 4 or 5 to obtain college credit. 1 to 5 is the range of possibilities for AP test takers.
Thanks for this. I was a teacher at a school where “making thinking visible” and daily, weekly and end of term “reflections” consumed endless hours of teacher and student time. Is it a surprise that they have entirely dropped AP courses in favor of “deep learning initiatives”? Or that school leadership dropped the ideal of academic rigor in favor of “intellectual rigor”?