New York State limits the number of charter schools allowed in the state to 460. Currently, about 352 charter schools operate across the state. Roughly 285 of these privately-operated schools are in New York City. See here for more details about the number of charter schools allowed only in New York City.
A June 16, 2026, Press Release from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) states that NYSUT and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City, “have filed a legal challenge to stop a scheme by Success Academy Charter Schools and the State University of New York’s Charter School Committee that attempts to circumvent the state’s charter cap.”
Over the years, Success Academy Charter Schools has been exposed in the media for a broad range of illegal and unethical activities (search here and here). For its part, the State University of New York’s Charter School Committee, a major charter school authorizer, is notorious for consisting of unelected pro-privatization individuals who regularly rubber-stamp charter school applications.
The NYSUT/UFT lawsuit, filed in New York County Supreme Court, “charges that SUNY’s Charter School Committee illegally approved the ‘transfer’ of a Success Academy charter in the Bronx to a brand-new entity called Strive Charter School — even though New York City has already reached its statutory cap on charter schools and state law does not allow for the transfer of an existing charter to a new entity. Strive’s founder, Eric Grannis, is the husband of Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz.” Patronage, nepotism, and corruption are widespread in the U.S. charter school sector.
This “transfer” approval goes against “the explicit objections of the New York State Board of Regents, which found the action was likely illegal and recommended it be abandoned.” It also violates legal obligations for prospective charter school operators to engage in “community outreach, public hearings and demonstration of demand.” Over the years, many communities across America have rejected proposals to open a charter school in their community. It is no accident that many prospective charter school operators across the country do not even seek public approval to open a charter school or do so in superficial meaningless ways.
A key takeaway from all of this is that charter school owners and managers operate with arrogance and impunity. They think their wealth, privilege, and power entitles them to whatever they want and that they are above the law. They do not believe in being transparent and accountable. They have no sense of social responsibility and prefer authoritarian modes of governance.
Much of this has to do with the fact that major owners of capital behind school privatization exercise significant control of key State officials, levers, agencies, and capacities, which allows them to rapidly advance their narrow aim of maximizing profit. Charter schools, it should be recalled, are a prominent pay-the-rich scheme in the neoliberal period. They channel huge sums of public money and public property into the hands of the rich and their allies under the banner of high ideals.
Brenner and Theodore (2005) remind us that, “The imposition of neoliberalism has not established a framework for stable economic development, political regulation or social cohesion. Rather, neoliberalization projects are deeply contradictory insofar as they tend to undermine many of the economic, institutional and geographical preconditions for economic and social revitalization. Thus, instead of resolving the political‐economic crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism, neoliberalism seriously exacerbates them by engendering various forms of market failure, state failure and governance failure.”
Neoliberals have worked hard over the decades to methodically starve public schools of funds and to demonize them and set them up for failure, only to turn around and set up thousands of failed “free market” charter schools. And they have gone even further by trying to pit people against each other by embroiling them in diversionary “charter schools v. public schools debates.”