A new analysis shows not only the extent of segregation in New York City, but also that the achievement gap is just as strong even at most “integrated” schools. Success Academy schools defy the demographic trend. The network’s diverse Cobble Hill school, for example, has only a tiny achievement gap. As one report co-author, Nicole Mader, put it, while Success’ “income gaps are some of the widest . . . their test score gaps are among the smallest.”

Last Tuesday, dozens of public charter school parents, including many from Success Academy schools, traveled to Albany to advocate for these families. They met with state legislators and told them why it’s so critical that public charter schools are able to grow, and expressed a belief we all share: that every kid should get to go to a school where excellence is the expectation rather than an anomaly.

A new analysis from the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School takes a closer look by mapping the achievement gaps within each public elementary school in New York City. There were schools that defied the study’s overall trends. Those from the Success Academy charter network, which has significantly outperformed district schools on state tests, did so again, showing extremely high test scores for its students who are mostly poor minorities.

One notable exception to the trend of big achievement gaps in income-diverse schools are those that the Success Academy charter-school network that has opened in higher-income neighborhoods, such as Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. Schools like that one have managed to achieve relatively high math scores across racial groups and income levels.

Eva Moskowitz says that in truth, charter schools are not about privatization or politics. They’re about empowering parents who don’t want to sit helplessly by while their children attend failing schools. As such, they deserve support from every Democrat — and every American — who is committed to advancing equality and opportunity for all our citizens.

Rather than sapping resources and putting students at district schools at a disadvantage, the data in New York City show that students do better when charters open nearby. In particular, students at co-located district schools, where their school shares a building with a charter school, experience the most sharply positive spillover effects.

Thousands of young track stars braved the East Coast’s historic snowstorm to compete at the third preliminary meet of nation’s largest amateur track series for women, the 44th annual Colgate Women’s Games. In the Elementary B division 55M, Brooklyn’s Kaela Swift of Success Academy Bed-Stuy beat Philadelphia’s Amirah Nesmith by 1/100 of a second in a photo finish that shows Swift won by a nose in 7,91 to Nesmith’s 7,92.

It was the best early Christmas gift Michel Sidemion could have asked for — an offer of admissions from his dream school: Tufts University. A video capturing his moment of joy went viral over the weekend, shared around the world. The Bronx teenager is a senior and a member of the first graduating class at Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts in Manhattan

For a generation now, charter school opponents have warned that these alternative public schools will spell doom for the American ideal of public education. It’s about time that they offer something more than anecdotes and theory to support their claims. More than two decades into the charter school experience, it’s clear that charters are not proving harmful to traditional public schools—and, if anything, are helping them do better.

What urban charters in general, and Success Academy in particular, have figured out is that the achievement gap is not, as some conservatives have speculated, genetic. Nor is it some ethereal “culture” that defies institutional design. It is the product of a confluence of policy and environmental factors that can be identified and remedied. The achievement gap results from a gap in health, nutrition, parental involvement, community expectations, an orderly school environment, exposure to vocabulary, and access to books, among other things. Urban charter schools have systematically identified the missing sources of support and supplied them.