Success Academy Charter Schools
charter school operator in New York City
Success Academy Charter Schools, originally Harlem Success Academy, is a charter school operator in New York City founded by investor Joel Greenblatt. Eva Moskowitz, a former city council member for the Upper East Side, is its CEO. It has 47 schools in the New York area and 17,000 students.
History
Hedge fund managers Joel Greenblatt and John Petry founded the school and helped to recruit Eva Moskowitz as CEO. The first Success Academy charter, Harlem Success Academy, opened in 2006 with 157 students chosen by lottery. She subsequently opened more schools in Harlem, and then schools in other New York City neighborhoods. The charter schools are funded by taxpayers and donations. The school was the subject of the 2010 documentary, The Lottery.
In February 2014, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to stop the city's former policy of providing free space in public school buildings to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, and to evict those schools, including three Success Academy schools already in those buildings. The decision was reversed in April after New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo stepped into the controversy. The city ended up finding space for three Success Academy schools.
John Paulson donated $8.5 million to Success Academy in July 2015 to help open middle schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Success Academy Charter Schools” is charter school operator in New York City. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Success, Academy and Charter, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “charter school operator in New York City” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14707388. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2015.
A single description cannot reconcile every naming convention, rebuilding phase or administrative transfer associated with a place. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Success Academy Charter Schools” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.