Joseph H. Reich, a financier and philanthropist who with his wife created one of New York City’s first independently run public schools, proving that impoverished students could outperform expectations in such a setting — and which helped to kick-start the city’s charter-school movement — died on Sept. 29 at his home in Sheffield, Mass. He was 89.

The cause was respiratory failure, his daughter Marcia Walsh said.

Convinced that city-run schools were failing to educate students in high-poverty neighborhoods, Mr. Reich (pronounced rich) and his wife, Carol F. Reich, raised $1 million and secured a building, opening the Beginning With Children school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1992.

It was largely funded with taxpayer money and free to students, but it operated outside the bureaucracy of the local school district.

That model was largely a novelty; it would be another six years until New York State passed the Charter Schools Act, codifying rules for such experiments. The year before that, Beginning With Children had been named the city’s most improved elementary school, a beacon to hundreds of charter schools that would follow.

“We both shared a common and basic belief: Families of means can afford to send their children to private schools or relocate to an affluent neighborhood where public schools have greater resources. The poor cannot,” the Reiches wrote in a mission statement. “We recoiled against this injustice.”

Today, 15 percent of New York City schoolchildren are enrolled in one of the city’s 281 charter schools — though the school choice movement still ignites fiery debates over whether charters siphon off motivated students and money from traditional neighborhood schools.