How To Fix Our Failing Public Schools November 12, 2026November 12, 2026 But first . . . MISSISSIPPI! Ah, sweet irony (50 seconds). NEIL PATRICK HARRIS! I loved Doogie Howser. This Oscar opening may be the greatest eight minutes in Broadway history. His latest: this ad for Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile. Nice. And now . . . TWO PODCASTS The first — Public Schools Have a New Crisis: Not Enough Students — was “The Daily” yesterday from the New York Times. Executive summary: with fewer kids enrolling, school boards in places like Pittsburgh are having to decide which schools to close. Excruciating. No clear answers. The second — The Most Important Educator in America — may leave you excited and hopeful. It’s not easy, one concludes from this interview with Eva Moskowitz, but it can be done. The best performing school “district” in New York State are the 60 Success Academy public charter schools she oversees, despite the fact that 94% of her students are black or brown, 15% special ed, 10% homeless . . . admitted not on the basis of test scores but randomly, by lottery. In tiny part: I want poor parents to have the same right that my husband and I have for our three children, and I would do anything to make sure that our 3 kids got an excellent education. We should not delude ourselves in thinking that school choice guarantees quality. I think school choice is a necessary but utterly insufficient mechanism for quality. Let us liberals and conservatives have one value that we organize ourselves around, and that is excellence. We don’t care if it’s a district school. We don’t care if it’s a public charter school. We don’t care if it’s a private school. We are the people who are going to stand for excellence. And excellence could mean a variety of things, but it has to mean, like, in kindergarten kids can count. It has to mean that children can read. And we can debate should they read Karl Marx or Adam Smith. But if they can’t read either, it would seem that our society is going to be poorer, not only culturally, but I would argue from an economic global competitive standpoint. Ninety-four percent of our kids are black and brown, 15% of our kids are special needs, 10% of our kids are homeless. And yet we’re number one in the state in mathematics. We’re number two in reading on the advanced placement exams. We are beating global averages in 9 AP courses; 100% of our kids take AP Calc, AP Macro, AP Art History, AP Bio, and Chem. This is a very rigorous education, and our average pass rate on these exams was 68%, with a very high percentage of our kids getting the highest scores of 4s and 5s. Frankly, we’re doing what nobody has done in America ever, which is outperforming very affluent school districts along a variety of academic measures. And we don’t judge ourselves only by our academics. We also brought home first and second place in the world dance competition. We compete musically in classical music and acapella, and win accolades in chess. The first African-American grandmaster in the history of the United States of America went to our school. We have 11,000 kids playing chess competitively. We have 9,000 kids playing Futsal competitively. So it’s not only along academic dimensions. We are trying to provide our children with everything affluent kids get. If you’re affluent, your kid goes to ballet lessons. Well, our families can’t afford ballet lessons, so we must provide it in the school. We have the largest youth classical guitar ensemble of any place in the country. We have 100 kids playing classical guitar. We have a 200-kid orchestra at our high school. . . . If you’re interested in education, it’s worth a listen to see how Success does it.