Welcome to the report card with Nat Malgus, the Education Policy podcast from the American Enterprise Institute.

My guest today is Eva Moskowitz.

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy,

a network of 57 schools in New York City educating 22,000 students. Success Academy is known for its strong

results. Despite 72% of its students being economically disadvantaged, success ranked first on the 2024

New York State grade 3 to 8 math exam. A decade ago, when charter schools were at the peak of

their popularity, I heard a lot about Success Academy. But recently, as the energy around choice has shifted elsewhere,

I've heard much less about Success Academy and about schools like it. Accordingly, I invited

Eva onto the podcast to hear how Success Academy has handled learning loss and chronic absenteeism,

to hear about Success's curriculum overhaul and future

plans, and to hear Eva's thoughts on the state of the charter sector more generally.

Eva Moskowitz, welcome to the report card.

Thanks for having me.

So Eva, I'm going to assume most of our audience, has some familiarity familiarity with Success Academy and the results that it got before COVID.

Have those results held up since the pandemic?

Well, when we came back from remote and we did remote as well as we possibly could,

but we do not believe remote is the way to educate children.

I did not want to close, but the authorities made me close.

And when we came back, we were down 30% in math and about 20% in reading.

Obviously, in high school is where the learning loss was greatest.

When kids are taking AP chemistry and their AP bio is not that strong. There's kind of a Venn diagram of

biology, knowledge, and chemical understanding. But we got about 75% of the way back to where we were pre-COVID in year one, and in year two, we were

...