Schools That Expect Black Children to Perform at Grade Level Get Black Children Who Perform at Grade Level

The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the NAEP, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card — is the only nationally representative test of student achievement in the United States. It has been administered since 1969. For every one of those fifty-seven years, it has documented the same result: Black students score significantly below white students in reading and math at every grade level tested (NAEP, National Center for Education Statistics, 1969–2024). The gap persists across income levels. It persists across regions. It persists across decades of reform and billions of dollars in spending.

The establishment has concluded, with the weary certainty of people who have stopped looking for answers, that this gap is a permanent feature of American education — a structural inevitability that can be managed but never eliminated. They are wrong.

And the proof that they are wrong is not theoretical. It is operational. It exists in specific schools, in specific cities, producing specific results that demolish the assumption of inevitability with the only evidence that matters: children who were told they could not are doing what the establishment says is impossible.

I am going to name these schools. I am going to cite their data. I am going to document what they do differently. And then I am going to ask the question that every parent, every politician, and every civil rights leader should be asking: if these schools can close the gap, why can’t the rest? The answer is not flattering to the establishment. It is not supposed to be.

Success Academy: Harlem’s Inconvenient Truth

Success Academy Charter Schools were founded in 2006 by Eva Moskowitz in Harlem, New York City. The network now operates 53 schools serving approximately 20,000 students. The student body is 93 percent Black and Hispanic.

More than 75 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. These are the same demographics that produce the worst outcomes in the traditional public schools located, in many cases, in the same buildings.

The results are not marginal. They are seismic. On the 2023 New York State Mathematics Assessment, Success Academy students scored in the top one percent of all schools in New York State. They outperformed not just their geographic peers, but the wealthiest districts in the state, including Scarsdale, Bronxville, and Great Neck (Success Academy Charter Schools, “2023 State Test Results”; New York State Education Department, 2023 Grades 3–8 Assessment Results). In English Language Arts, they beat the state average by more than 30 percentage points.

The achievement gap between Success Academy’s Black students and the statewide average for white students is not merely closed. In mathematics, it is reversed.

Read those sentences again. Black children from Harlem, from families earning below the poverty line, are outscoring white children from the wealthiest suburbs in New York. They are not closing the gap. They are erasing it. They are proving, with the unanswerable authority of data, that the gap is not a function of race, or income, or zip code, or anything immutable about the children themselves.

It is a function of what happens inside the school. And what happens inside Success Academy is fundamentally different from what happens in the traditional public schools that serve the same community.

The Common Elements

Success Academy is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. Across the country, a network of schools serving majority-Black and Hispanic students from low-income families are producing results that the traditional system says are impossible.

They differ in geography, in organizational structure, in specific curriculum. But they share a set of characteristics so consistent that they constitute a blueprint — a documented, replicable formula for closing the achievement gap wherever adults have the will to implement it.

Extended Learning Time

Success Academy, KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Noble Network, and the Ron Clark Academy all operate on extended school days. Most also extend the school year. The typical Success Academy school day runs from 7:45 AM to 3:45 PM, with enrichment and tutoring available afterward. KIPP schools traditionally operate from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM, with mandatory Saturday sessions and a three-week summer program (KIPP Foundation, KIPP Annual Report, 2023; Dobbie & Fryer, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2011).

The math is straightforward: students who spend more time learning learn more. The traditional public school calendar — 180 days, six hours per day — was designed for an agrarian economy. Gap-closing schools have replaced it with a schedule designed for academic mastery.

High Behavioral Expectations

Every gap-closing school enforces a strict behavioral code. Not because the educators are authoritarian, but because they understand what research confirms: learning cannot occur in chaos. At Success Academy, students track the speaker with their eyes, sit in ready position, transition silently, and follow instructions the first time. At the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, the “55 Essential Rules” govern everything from classroom conduct to how students greet adults (Clark, The Essential 55, Hyperion, 2003). At Noble Network schools in Chicago, a merit/demerit system provides immediate consequences for behavioral choices.

The progressive critique is that these practices are culturally insensitive — that they impose “white norms” on students of color. The results say otherwise. These students are not oppressed. They are achieving at levels their critics call impossible. They are doing it in environments where self-discipline is treated not as a cultural imposition but as a form of respect. Expecting a child to control themselves is an expression of belief in their capacity to do so.

Teacher Quality Over Teacher Certification

The gap-closing schools hire differently. They do not rely on teacher certification as a stand-in for teacher quality. The link between the two is weak at best. What they select for is the ability to produce results. They measure teachers by student learning gains, observe them through rigorous classroom evaluation, and sustain a culture of continuous improvement that traditional public schools have never implemented at scale.

Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools, spent years studying the specific techniques used by the most effective teachers of low-income students. His book Teach Like a Champion (Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 3.0, Jossey-Bass, 2021) documents sixty-three discrete teaching techniques. Methods like “Cold Call,” “No Opt Out,” “Right Is Right,” and “100 Percent” produce measurably higher engagement and achievement. These are not theoretical. They are filmed, cataloged, and trained. Every teacher at Uncommon Schools learns them and is observed implementing them.

The contrast with traditional public schools is stark. In most districts, teacher evaluation is functionally meaningless — 98 percent of teachers receive “satisfactory” or higher ratings regardless of student outcomes (TNTP, “The Widget Effect,” 2009). Tenure — job protection that is nearly impossible to revoke — is granted after as few as three years. Dismissal for poor performance is almost unheard of. The system protects adults. The gap-closing schools protect children. The difference in results is the difference in priorities.

Data-Driven Instruction

Gap-closing schools test frequently — not to sort children, but to diagnose precisely where each child’s understanding breaks down and to adjust instruction in real time. At Success Academy, interim assessments occur every six weeks, and teachers analyze the results question by question, student by student, reteaching concepts that were not mastered before moving on. At KIPP, data meetings are a weekly ritual, with teachers presenting student work and developing targeted intervention plans.

This is not “teaching to the test.” It is the educational equivalent of evidence-based medicine: diagnosing the problem accurately before prescribing the treatment. The traditional public school system, by contrast, administers a single standardized test at the end of the year — too late to help the child, useful only for producing the data that confirms the gap the system has decided is inevitable.

The Ron Clark Academy: Proof in Atlanta

Ron Clark is a former North Carolina Teacher of the Year who moved to Harlem in 1999, took over a class of fifth-graders that had been through seven teachers in one year, and by the end of the year had them scoring twenty points above the district average. He founded the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta in 2007 as a demonstration school — a place where visiting educators could see, in real time, what high-expectation teaching looks like with the students the system has written off (Ron Clark Academy, School Performance Data, 2023).

The Ron Clark Academy’s student body is 90 percent Black, drawn primarily from low-income families in the Atlanta metro area. The school’s results are extraordinary by any measure. Standardized test scores consistently exceed the state average, and in many subjects exceed the national average. But the numbers alone do not capture what makes the school different. What makes it different is culture.

Students at the Ron Clark Academy are expected to look adults in the eye, shake hands firmly, speak in complete sentences, and hold doors for visitors. They are expected to work hard, fail gracefully, try again, and celebrate each other’s successes. The school has slides between floors and a DJ booth in the cafeteria, but the joy is built on a foundation of relentless academic demand. The students love the school because the school demands their best and celebrates when they deliver it. The progressive critique that strict expectations are joyless is refuted every day by the children at Ron Clark, who produce both the highest test scores and the highest energy in the city.

The CREDO Evidence

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University has conducted the most rigorous large-scale studies of charter school performance in the United States. Their methodology compares charter school students with “virtual twins” — demographically identical students in nearby traditional public schools — to isolate the impact of the school itself.

CREDO’s 2023 national analysis found that urban charter school students gained the equivalent of 16 extra days of learning in reading and 6 extra days in math per year (CREDO, As a Matter of Fact: The National Charter School Study III, Stanford University, 2023). For Black students in poverty, the gains were significantly larger. At top-performing networks — Success Academy, KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, Noble Network — the gains were measured not in days but in years of additional learning over a student’s career.

This is not ideological data. This is Stanford University research using the most rigorous methods available. Schools with the highest expectations for Black children produce the highest outcomes. Schools with the lowest expectations — those that replaced rigor with relevance and discipline with understanding — produce the lowest outcomes. The pattern is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. It is, in the language of social science, robust.

What the Gap-Closing Schools Do NOT Have

It is worth documenting what these schools do not do, because the absence is as instructive as the presence.

• They do not have lower expectations. They do not group students by perceived ability and provide different levels of rigor. They teach to the top and scaffold up, rather than teaching to the bottom and hoping for the best.
• They do not have “culturally responsive mathematics.” They teach mathematics — the same mathematics taught at Exeter and Stuyvesant and every school that produces high achievers. The notion that Black children need a different kind of math is the soft bigotry of low expectations applied to the one discipline where objectivity is absolute. Two plus two is four in every culture on earth.
• They do not replace academics with social-emotional learning. The progressive push to replace instructional time with SEL curricula — mindfulness exercises, emotional check-ins, identity affirmation — has consumed hours of the school day in traditional public schools without producing any documented improvement in academic outcomes. The gap-closing schools understand that the greatest source of self-esteem is competence, and that competence comes from instruction, not affirmation.
• They do not practice grade inflation. A student who has not mastered the material does not receive a passing grade. A student who has not met the standard does not advance. The gap-closing schools treat grades as information, not comfort.

The Political Opposition

Here is the fact that transforms the achievement gap from an educational problem into a moral scandal: the schools that are closing the gap are fought, actively and consistently, by the same institutions and organizations that claim to care about Black children.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — the two largest teachers’ unions in the country — have spent hundreds of millions opposing charter school expansion (Moe, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Brookings Institution Press, 2011). They have lobbied for caps on charter schools in each state. They have funded campaigns against ballot measures that would have allowed more families access to gap-closing schools. In New York City, the UFT and allied politicians fought to deny Success Academy co-location space — the right to share a public school building. That means they tried to shut down the schools producing the best results for Black children in the state.

The NAACP passed a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion — even as its own members supported school choice in survey after survey (NAACP, Statement Regarding the NAACP’s Resolution on a Moratorium on Charter Schools, October 2016; Education Next, 2023 Education Next Poll of Public Opinion). The organization founded to advance Black people called for restrictions on the schools advancing Black children. Why? The unions that oppose charters are among the NAACP’s largest institutional donors. Follow the money. It always explains what the rhetoric cannot.

And here is the cruelest detail: the politicians and union leaders who oppose charter school expansion for Black children send their own children to private schools. Members of Congress who vote against school choice legislation disproportionately educate their own children in private or selective public schools. They have already chosen. What they are fighting to prevent is other parents — poorer parents, Blacker parents — from making the same choice.

The Lemov Revolution

Doug Lemov’s contribution deserves its own accounting, because it addresses the most common objection to the gap-closing schools: that they depend on exceptional, irreplaceable leaders. Escalante was one man. Collins was one woman. Clark is one teacher. What happens when they leave?

Lemov’s answer is that great teaching is not a gift. It is a skill. And skills can be trained. His Teach Like a Champion methodology breaks effective teaching into discrete, practicable techniques (Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 3.0, Jossey-Bass, 2021; Green, Building a Better Teacher, W.W. Norton, 2014). “Cold Call” ensures every student is engaged, not just the volunteers. “No Opt Out” means a student who says “I don’t know” does not retreat into silence — the teacher provides support, and the student produces the answer. “Right Is Right” means partial answers are not celebrated as correct. The standard is mastery. “100 Percent” means behavioral expectations are universal, not aspirational.

These techniques are not intuitive. They must be learned, practiced, and refined. But they are learnable — by any teacher, in any school, with any population. The gap-closing schools have proven this at scale. Uncommon Schools operates 56 schools in three states. KIPP operates 275 schools in 21 states. Success Academy operates 53 schools in New York. The techniques work when implemented faithfully. The question is never whether they work. The question is whether the existing system will allow it.

The Puzzle and the Solution

A puzzle master looks at that result and identifies the variable that changed. The children are the same. The neighborhoods are the same. The family incomes are the same. The variable is the school — specifically, the expectations inside the school. The gap-closing schools expect mastery. The failing schools expect failure. Both get what they expect.

“You cannot cure what you refuse to diagnose.”

The diagnosis is not an achievement gap. It is an expectation gap. The establishment has diagnosed Black children as the problem — as inherently, culturally, or economically deficient — and thus prescribes endless, failing therapies aimed at them. The real disease is the systemic, often unconscious, lowering of academic and behavioral expectations for Black students. The NAEP data is the fifty-seven-year fever chart of this disease.

Five Solutions That Match the Scale of the Problem

1. The Expectation Audit. Every parent of a Black child must conduct a forensic audit of their child’s school. Do not ask about feelings. Demand the data. Obtain the actual curriculum materials for core subjects and compare them grade-for-grade with the materials used in the top-performing public school in your state. If the reading level is lower, the math problems are less complex, or the history text is simplified, you have documented the expectation gap.

• Target: Documented parity in curriculum rigor between your child’s school and the state’s top-performing school
• Mechanism: Present evidence at the next school board meeting and demand an explanation for the differentiated, inferior curriculum

2. The Zero-Tolerance for Disruption Compact. Organize parents within your child’s grade to form a compact. The terms are non-negotiable: you will support any teacher who removes a chronically disruptive student from the classroom, regardless of that student’s background. You will publicly counter the narrative that discipline is racist when it is applied equally to protect the right to learn.

• Target: 80% reduction in major classroom disruptions within one semester
• Mechanism: Create the conditions where high-expectation teaching can actually occur

3. The Direct Instructional Pivot. If your child’s school is using “inquiry-based” or “student-led” learning models in core K–8 subjects, they are experimenting on your child. The high-expectation schools proving the thesis of this article use direct, teacher-led instruction for foundational knowledge.

• Target: 1.5 grade-level advancement in standardized test scores within 12 months
• Mechanism: Demand a direct-instruction classroom option; if refused, enroll in Kumon or Russian School of Mathematics for two hours per week

4. The Exit Strategy. Your loyalty is to your child’s future, not to a failing institution. If the expectation audit reveals a deficit curriculum and the administration refuses to correct it, you must leave. Apply to every high-expectation charter school lottery within commuting distance.

• Target: Placement in an environment where your child’s intellectual capacity is assumed, not doubted
• Mechanism: Physical withdrawal — or organize with ten families to hire a certified teacher and form a micro-school

5. The Political Demand for Replication. The existence of Success Academy is an indictment of every traditional public school in its vicinity. Your political demand is not for more funding. It is for the literal replication of the high-expectation model.

• Target: A public, binding school board vote on adopting the model within 90 days
• Mechanism: Demand the district adopt, verbatim, the curriculum, discipline code, and teacher training model of the highest-performing school serving a similar demographic. Stop asking for “innovation.” Demand imitation.

The Bottom Line

The numbers tell a story that no political narrative can override:

• Top 1%: Where Success Academy’s 93% Black and Hispanic student body scores on New York State math assessments (NYSED, 2023)
• 30+ points above: Success Academy’s ELA proficiency advantage over the state average (NYSED, 2023)
• 16 extra days per year: The learning gain for urban charter school students in reading (CREDO, Stanford, 2023)
• 275 schools in 21 states: KIPP’s operational proof that the model replicates (KIPP Foundation, 2023)
• 98%: The share of traditional public school teachers rated “satisfactory” while their students fail (TNTP, 2009)
• 72%: The share of Black parents who support school choice — while the NAACP calls for a moratorium (Education Next, 2023)

The achievement gap is not a mystery. It is not a structural inevitability. It is a choice — made by adults who control the systems, funded by unions that control the politicians, and defended by an establishment that has decided Black children’s failure is an acceptable price for institutional comfort. The schools that prove the gap can be closed exist. The question is whether we will replicate them or continue to fund the industry that explains why we cannot.

Every year spent debating whether high expectations are “culturally appropriate” is another year of children paying the price for adult cowardice. The data is not waiting for permission. Neither should we.