The billionaire investor and famed corporate raider Carl Icahn, best known recently for his attempt to shake up Time Warner, has quietly opened one of the most successful charter schools in the city and plans to open several more.

Nestled into a quiet street in the South Bronx, the Carl C. Icahn Charter School serves 252 children in kindergarten through sixth grade.

Inside, the building is peppered with inspirational signs reminding students that college is a requirement, not an option, and that students are expected to attend a top city high school.

“Success doesn’t just happen, it happens one day at a time. Read every night,” a sign posted in the school hallway reminds students.

The one-story red brick building sits a block away from a large housing project and just across the street from a homeless shelter for battered women that is also supported by Mr. Icahn. Rising from an empty lot, the prefabricated school arrived on flatbed trucks in 22 pieces from a factory in New Jersey in the summer of 2001.

Last year, a remarkable 86% of fourth-graders passed the state reading test. That’s much higher than the city’s average pass rate, which was 56%. Every fourth-grader in the school passed the state math exam.

A top corporate raider in the 1980s, Mr. Icahn, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes at $8.5 billion, knows a bit about turning a company around. He routinely bought stakes in a company and then threatened a hostile takeover bid. If he took over a company, he would install new management and try to make it more profitable.

“Look, I think it’s very analogous,” Mr. Icahn told The New York Sun in a telephone interview about his charter school. “What I’m saying is that we go in, clean up the bureaucracy, get rid of the waste, and obviously we profit from it. Well in this case I’m not trying to profit, but what I’m trying to do is something that I think society needs badly.”

Mr. Icahn is trying to take the government out of schools and said he wants to see public schools run by private nonprofit institutions. Until that happens, he wants the state law changed to allow for the creation of more charter schools.

While he attends monthly board meetings for his school, Mr. Icahn doesn’t believe in micromanaging. He spent months trying to tap the right principal and once he chose a veteran educator and principal, Jeffrey Litt, he backed off.

In September, Mr. Icahn is opening a middle school across the street under the same charter, and he is approved to open another charter school in the Bronx. After that he has plans to open several more charters in the Bronx and in his native Queens, pending a change in state law.

Governor Pataki signed into law the Charter Schools Act in 1998 that allowed for the creation of charter schools – which are publicly funded but privately run – but limited the number of such schools to 100. State lawmakers are now debating whether to lift that cap because every charter has been granted.

Opponents of charter schools argue that the schools drain much-needed funds from the regular public school system. The city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, is a proponent of charter schools and is lobbying the state to amend the law.

Although he calls Mr. Pataki a “friend” and supports efforts to expand the charter schools, Mr. Icahn says he doesn’t like discussing politics. He declined to comment on whether he is helping to finance a multi-million dollar advertising campaign underway across the state to promote the creation of more charter schools.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the second, third, and fourth grades at the Carl C. Icahn Charter School were busy presenting projects at the school’s math fair.

Students in blue and white uniforms proudly showed off colorful dioramas and construction paper projects to parents and students passing through. Above the blackboard, the alphabet is posted along with an American flag.

“It’s a microwave,” 7-year-old Lisa Wilson said with a large smile on her face. She was assigned to build a three-dimensional box-like object.

Class size at the school is capped at 18 and the school day runs from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. with Saturday classes for students who need more help. The school year extends into the middle of July, offering children significantly more school time than their peers in regular public schools.

The children are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic and more than 90% have family income low enough to qualify for the federal free lunch program.

Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, Mr. Icahn, the son of a teacher and a lawyer, was one of the few seniors at Far Rockaway High School to head off to Princeton.

He graduated in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and then enrolled in medical school, but dropped out two years later before moving into finance.

“He doesn’t like brains to be wasted,” the executive director of the Foundation for a Greater Opportunity, which runs Mr. Icahn’s charter school, Julie Goodyear, said. “We have proved that kids from this neighborhood can do just as well as, often better than, kids from wealthier neighborhoods.”

The foundation also runs the Icahn Scholars program that places 10 students every year at the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Connecticut. His staff travels the country every year interviewing poor students for the posts.

“The bottom line is that I can be terminated with or without cause – you have to be sure that you’re good at what you do, Mr. Litt said. He retired from the New York City public school system and plans to remain as principal of Icahn’s charter school for at least another seven years.

Mr. Litt introduced at the school the Core Knowledge Curriculum created by education theorist E.D. Hirsh. An assessment director is in charge of overseeing regular testing at the school.

The president of the Center for Educational Innovation, Seymour Fliegel, takes credit for planting the idea about opening a charter school with Mr. Icahn.

“He’s not very warm toward unions, and that’s putting it mildly,” Mr. Fliegel said. “I said, ‘Look, you can get involved in public education and it’s not a problem because charter schools are basically not organized schools … He’s a funny guy, he wanted to know, ‘Can I fire the principal?'”

Mr. Icahn said, “It’s not just the unions, you should blame the board of education – they’re equally at fault.”

While Mr. Icahn, 70, paid for the school’s $3.5 million building, he resists infusing the school with additional cash so that the school model can be replicated in other schools using the taxpayer funding that follows students under the charter school law.

“Is he changing the New York City school system? It’s too big for one single person to change, including the chancellor,” Mr. Fliegel said. “What he’s doing, he’s demonstrating that you can educate the children of the poor.”