Charter giant Success Academy expands to Miami with $50M boost from Ken Griffin
New York’s largest charter school conglomerate is coming in hot — with its eye on underutilized public school buildings in Miami-Dade.
At a press conference Thursday at Florida International University, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz appeared alongside some of Florida’s most powerful players, including Governor Ron DeSantis, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin and FIU president Jeanette Nuñez, to announce Success Academy’s expansion into South Florida.
The announcement signals a significant push to further expand charter schools in South Florida, a move critics warn could drain resources from traditional public schools already grappling with declining enrollment.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire transplant who has taken great interest in public education reform in Miami, pledged to give $50 million to Success Academy to support the work.
Standing at a podium with the words “School Choice Success,” Governor Ron DeSantis said the increasing school choice options will ultimately benefit students.
“Here in Florida we are going to do everything we can to ensure you’re successful,” said the governor to Moskowitz.
Moskowitz runs 59 Success Academy charter schools in New York, serving about 22,000 students in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Based on metrics, they have lived up to their name: Success Academy has built a reputation for producing students who overperform on standardized tests. According to Success Academy, 100 percent of their graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges and universities, many to highly selective institutions. Moskowitz told the Herald she hopes to enroll between 8,000 and 10,000 students in Miami-Dade within five years, eventually expanding to other parts of the state.
Her goal is to open three to five schools in Miami by the 2027-28 school year.
The move is enabled by the expansion of Florida’s Schools of Hope law, which allows approved charter school operators co-locate or have full access to underused, vacant or surplus district facilities in the attendance zone or within five miles of a persistently low-performing school. This means that Success Academy or other approved Schools of Hope operators can essentially operate out of district buildings at no cost.
A new rule approved this week by the state’s Board of Education requires districts to provide those charter schools the same custodial, food, safety, nursing and transportation services as traditional schools.
The recent updates to the law also expanded the definition of “persistently low-performing,” meaning that now many more schools in the state are fair game for a Schools of Hope operator to move in.
Based on the new criteria, in the 2024-2025 school year, 30 schools in Miami-Dade were considered persistently low-performing. In the year prior, no schools were on the list in Miami-Dade.
DeSantis praised Moskowitz’s record, acknowledging that her work in New York for the past 19 years has been an uphill battle, as the state has not been as supportive of charter schools. New York has a cap on the number of charter schools, and Success Academy schools have faced criticism for what some consider harsh disciplinary policies and teacher burnout.
Moskowitz said she had considered expanding to Tennessee and Texas, but she told the Miami Herald she chose Florida because the state is “really interested in innovation and really committed to excellence.”
The governor brushed off concerns that easier access for charters into the school district would hurt traditional schools.
“If a charter school is offering better programs, then [traditional public schools] will have to do something to earn the trust of parents back,” DeSantis said.
Miami-Dade teachers’ union leaders say that the expansion of the Schools of Hope law unfairly burdens public schools.
“Co-location proposals further strain our schools,” said Tony White, president of the United Teachers of Dade. “Our students deserve real investment in proven public-school solutions—not experiments that pull resources from the schools serving our communities.”
Two DeSantis-appointed Miami-Dade school board members, Danny Espino and Roberto Alonso, attended the press conference. Miami-Dade schools superintendent Jose Dotres was not present.
“I think at the end of the day it’s about empowering parents to make the choice for their children, it causes all of us to compete,” Espino said. “We welcome [Success Academy] into the state.”
Moskowitz framed her plans as a way to address inequities. “When you disaggregate the data by socio-economics and race, it’s a tale of two cities, it’s a tale of two groups,” she said. “My sweet spot is serving the poorest of the poor exceptionally well,” she told the Miami Herald.
Moskowitz said at the press conference that the United States faces an “education crisis,” when you compare outcomes to other countries, and that Florida is setting the stage as a national model for supporting school choice and high standards.
“Governor DeSantis has done something extraordinary here, he has put excellence at the center of public policy and nobody else has done what he is doing on the issue of quality, not only helping Florida’s children, but setting a new national standard,” Moskowitz told the Miami Herald.
This story was originally published September 25, 2025 at 1:22 PM.
