The war against excellence reared its ugly head again at a city Panel for Educational Policy meeting Wednesday night — this time as a verbal brawl between charter-school supporters, who sought approval for a co-location in a Sheepshead Bay school, and those who opposed it. Success Academy won its permission, but the battle revealed how deep the anti-academic fervor is inside New York City public schools.

Students both for and against the co-location spoke, and the supplied talking points were quite obvious as many repeated the same ideas using the same words, but some ventured to share their own opinions. What emerged from most of the opponents was a clear distaste for having Success — or any school that’s unapologetically academic and focused on student achievement — in the midst of their school buildings, as if something unsavory would rub off. Why? Why does a school that relentlessly promotes and celebrates student academic success provoke such anger in those who should be doing the exact same thing?

The city’s traditional public schools — the base camp of the teachers unions — have over the last many years focused their efforts on something called SEL: social-emotional learning. There are no tests for SEL, nothing that can let you know if a student has mastered the subject or if a teacher is doing a great job, a mediocre job or nothing at all.

SEL is all about feelings and behaviors. Words like “microaggressions,” “oppression” and “gender identity” come up a lot during SEL workshops and teacher trainings. Grades, tests and achievements, not so much.

De-emphasizing academics and student achievement is, unfortunately, not just a New York City trend — it is a national phenomenon. Asra Nomani, a reporter and education activist who has fought the anti-merit attacks on her child’s once famously rigorous Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, described this week how the school sought to downplay and ignore its National Merit Scholars by not properly notifying students or families in a timely and public manner.

A school administrator explained, “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” adding that the school didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of non-scholar students. 

What if you’re a really smart kid who takes pride in your academic achievements? What if the answer to “Who am I as an individual?” is “the best mathematician in my class,” “aspiring scientist” or “National Merit Scholar”? How can that be hard for schoolteachers and administrators to understand? 

The supporters of Success Academy’s co-location application included students, parents and even alumni who each took hours out of their Wednesday night to listen to an hours-long Zoom meeting and offer up two minutes of testimony about how Success positively shaped their lives. They were pleading for the opportunity to site a K-4 school in an inconveniently located building that already contains two high schools, one a transfer high school. They were begging for crumbs.

The South Brooklyn Success Academy locations have growing waitlists because city public-school families want what Success is known for — rigorous academics and a focus on student achievement. Success Academy students outperform their city district-school peers, with proficiency rates for black and Hispanic students up to triple those for district peers.

Yet the Panel for Educational Policy parent representatives voted against the co-location, as did the political appointees of Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, Manhattan Beep Mark Levine and Brooklyn Beep Antonio Reynoso. These elected leaders appoint and promote PEP members who just so happen to desire the same thing the teachers unions desire: zero competition and no means to compare metrics of success when it comes to student achievement. 

The teachers unions that contribute to the campaigns of those elected leaders get a lot for the donations this way: a conveniently closed loop that suggests all stakeholders want what they want. That is not true, and the numbers don’t lie. More than 120,000 students have left the school system in the last five years, and of the 938,000 currently enrolled, a staggering 40% are chronically absent. 

Bad COVID policies are partly to blame for the decreasing enrollment and chronic absenteeism of New York City public schools. But it’s not just that. Parents want schools that focus on teaching so students can be focused on learning. Academic achievement should be at the our schools’ center, not brushed aside as an inconvenience.

Maud Maron is a co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education (PLACE-NYC).