Eva Moskowitz | National Charter Schools Success Academy cancels pre-K programs after unsuccessful fight with city and state The network lost a contract dispute against City Hall and the State Education Department.

Success Academy has officially canceled its pre-kindergarten program for next year, after losing consecutive fights with City Hall and the State Education Department over a contract dispute.

Success CEO Eva Moskowitz and the network’s lawyers have argued that a pre-K contract the state requires all providers to sign is overly restrictive and therefore illegal. State education department commissioner MaryEllen Elia ruled in February that Success needed to sign the contract granting the city oversight over its pre-K program in order to receive public dollars.


Success had been seeking $720,000 from the city in order to run its pre-K program, which is currently in three Success schools. Moskowitz has been clear that the issue is one of one of principle, not cash. POLITICO New York reported last month that the charter network spent $734,000 on a political rally in Albany last year, $14,000 more than it is asking for from the city.

The cancellation was a foregone conclusion after an upstate judge declined to expedite Success’s appeal of the state’s decision in the dispute, forcing Moskowitz to hew to a self-imposed, end of May deadline to cancel the pre-K program.

The charter school network’s pre-K fight has been ongoing since last October, and Moskowitz has convened multiple press conferences and bought full-page advertisements in the New York Times to make her case against the city and state. But the particulars of the argument are wonky, and media interest in the dispute has dwindled as it has dragged on; a recent City Hall press conference hosted by Success about the argument was attended only by POLITICO New York.

In a letter sent to staff on Wednesday afternoon, Moskowitz sought to defend the closure of the network’s pre-K programs. “Our refusal to sign the pre-K contract is an important issue that goes beyond the $720,000 the city owes us,” she wrote.

Over the last nine months, city officials have publicly said they hoped Success would ultimately sign the contract and offer pre-K in the fall, and have said Success would receive public funding for the pre-K program immediately after signing the contract. De Blasio and others have also repeatedly noted that all other pre-K providers — including over a dozen charter schools — have signed the contract.

On Wednesday, 50 Success parents penned an “open letter” to Mayor Bill de Blasio, criticizing him for “forcing” the closure of the network’s pre-K programs. The letter concludes with a vague warning to the mayor, who is one of Moskowitz’s longest-standing political rivals: “we will not forget your hypocrisy.”

The unsuccessful pre-K fight constitutes Success’s first major political loss to the city in years. In 2014, the network claimed a clean victory over de Blasio when he tried — and ultimately failed — to reverse the co-locations of several Success schools.

“For the first time, every child in New York City has access to free, full-day, high quality pre-K programs across district, charter, parochial and early education centers,” Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said in a statement on Wednesday. “The State upheld our important standards to ensure all programs are high quality, and we look forward to welcoming more charter schools and organizations across every neighborhood to Pre-K for All to provide families with this critical year of academic learning."

Charter schools currently manage their own enrollment, but the department will provide enrollment specialists to help Success families enroll their children in other pre-K programs for the fall.