United States | New York's schools

The great experiment

Bringing accountability and competition to New York City's struggling schools

|new york|5 min read

THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn's impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher's alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The great experiment”

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