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In yesterday's State of the City, Mayor Bloomberg said he would encourage Eva Moskowitz' Success Academy charter chain and KIPP to accelerate their expansion.  He may have a fight on his hands. First, see the stickers being pasted all over the glossy recruiting ads in the Williamsburg subways and bus stops for her new charter, to be co-located in MS 50.  (thanks to GothamSchools for the photo to the right.) According to many observers, Eva Moskowitz is recruiting almost exclusively in the northern, primarily white sections of Williamsburg.  (This is a practice she followed  with  the Upper West Success charter on the Upper West side, holding recruiting sessions in the Trump hi-rise condos and at the Jewish center, and producing thousands of glossy promotional flyers in English and almost none in Spanish -- despite the charter law which requires the recruitment of English language learners.)    In Williamsburg, a new coalition, called the Southside Community Schools Coalition has emerged to fight the charter, and its openly racist tactics,  including long-time educational leaders and activists like Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente,  Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, CM Diana Reyna, several local churches, and the District 14 Community Education Council.  An excerpt from their message is below

Rahm Emanuel, whom Occupy Chicago has dubbed Mayor 1%, fired another shot at the city's public schools December 1. He proposed seven school closings and phase-outs, 10 "turnarounds" in which all the teachers and staff get fired, and six "co-locations," where private charter school operators grab portions of existing public schools.

Unfortunately, last week's publication of a guest essay by American Enterprise Institute researcher Daniel Lautzenheiser in Rick Hess' EdWeek column marks a return to the simplistic rhetoric and unsubstantiated assertions which Hess himself has warned are becoming too common among self-identified "reformers." In "A Tale of Two Schools," Lautzenheiser makes the claim that Democracy Prep's high test scores come despite its enrollment of "the same kinds of students" as its academically struggling co-located school, the Academy of Collaborative Education (ACE).

During a hearing in June, as the city's Panel for Educational Policy prepared to move on a plan to "co-locate" 22 charter schools in public-school buildings, most of the audience knew what would happen: Parents would yell, teachers would plead and union members would attack the Bloomberg administration. And then, after hours of testimony in the tightly packed auditorium of a Prospect Heights high school, the plan would pass as expected.

Here is the story of Karen Sprowal and her son Matthew, that Mike Winerip of the NY Times writes about here. While charter schools have advertised themselves as open to all students through random lotteries, many have been shown to enroll relatively few numbers of special needs children and English language learners, and to have high rates of student attrition.  The charter school described below is a member of the Success Academy chain, the fastest growing chain in NYC.  Its rapid expansion has been enthusiastically supported by the DOE, and by their authorizer, the NY State University Board of Trustees, whose charter committee is headed  by Prof. Pedro Noguera.  There are currently seven Success Academies, all co-located in NYC public school buildings, with two more planned for the fall, and three more authorized by SUNY to open in NYC in 2012.

New York State Education Law requires that when a district provides space or services to a charter school it shall do so " at cost", and yet the NYC Department of Education provides free space and services for nearly one hundred co-located charter schools. Using figures from the Independent Budget Office, we estimate that the space and services they currently receive is worth more than $100 million annually, and that this practice contributes to the fact that these schools receive about $3,000 more per student in public funds annually than traditional public schools.   Our lawsuit seeks to stop the New York City Department of Education from violating the law.  Their illegal provision of free space and services has created a separate and unequal school system across the city, sparked divisive battles between parents and community members, and encouraged rapid charter school expansion at the expense of our public schools. 

As the controversy about the co-location of charter schools continues to rage throughout the city, another issue has been raised: Hedge funds are making tremendous profits off charter schools while public school students lose already-scarce dollars because of the presence of the schools.

Success Charter Network founder and former Councilmember Eva Moskowitz faces multiple hurdles in her attempt to open a K-8 charter school in the Cobble Hill/ Boerum Hill area next fall.

The city wants to give one third of a formerly-struggling Cobble Hill high school to a high-performing charter school - but parents are already fighting the co-location plan. Under the plan, the Baltic and Court street school - which is home to Brooklyn School for Global Studies and the School for International Studies - would house grades kindergarten through fourth of Success Charter Network's school, run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

Look for all the furies to be unleashed at a public hearing Tuesday evening on a proposal to locate a high-performing charter school in a Brooklyn building that has hallway after hallway of vacant classrooms. The Success Academy charter network is seeking to open an elementary school in Cobble Hill's K293, a structure that has space for 700 desks, despite being occupied by three other schools.

Success Academy opened in August 2011 in the Brandeis High School Campus building located on Manhattan's Upper West Side.Part of the highly popular Success Academy network of charter schools, Upper West is the network's first foray into middle and high income neighborhoods. The school draws its student population from a swath of Manhattan that encompasses everything from public and low-income housing to some of the most upscale addresses in the city.

Yesterday I wrote about Juan Gonzalez's article on Success Academy, which was seeking a 50% increase in its management fee from the state, even though it has a surplus of $23.5 million and spent $3.4 million last year on marketing. The typical charter management organization in New York City has a management fee of 7%, but CEO Eva Moskowitz wanted to increase hers to 15%. Given her surplus, it is hard to see a case for "need," especially in light of her fund-raising prowess and the presence of several well-heeled hedge fund managers on her board. Needless to say, she is handsomely compensated at a salary close to $400,000 a year.

Ms. Moskowitz is a brigadier in the charter school wars that could define the next mayoral election. Armies mass on either side. The teachers' union, parent groups and the organization New York Communities for Change oppose charter expansion. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has sent a trusted aide, Micah C. Lasher, to work with the hedge-fund-backed group StudentsFirstNY to push expansion. Ms. Moskowitz embraces life in wartime. She yearns not only to compete, but also to drive the teachers' union and some public schools into the East River. In e-mails several years ago to the chancellor at the time, Joel I. Klein, obtained by the columnist Juan Gonzalez of The Daily News, Ms. Moskowitz made clear her views. "We need," she wrote, "to quickly and decisively distinguish the good guys from the bad."

Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

"Mic check! MIC CHECK! Let the Puppet show begin! LET THE PUPPET SHOW BEGIN!"   The demonstrators who held the floor at a December 14 meeting at Newtown High School in Corona, Queens, were part of Occupy DOE (Department of Education), a mix of veteran teachers, parents and Occupy Wall Street activists that is bringing the language and tactics of OWS to the grassroots fight against neoliberal education reform.

Much of Brooklyn's school District 15-which includes Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Red Hook-is a comfortable, brownstone-studded idyll, with schools so popular that they drive up real estate values and boast long waiting lists. Many of the district's parents are privileged and have, commendably, used their advantages to improve their local public schools, insulating them from the budget cuts that devastate the rest of the borough. But an escalating charter school battle serves as a jarring reminder that even District 15 parents are still only the 99%-and that it's the 1% that runs the show.

A proposed charter school is splitting the Williamsburg community in half, but while opponents turned out in force for a hearing Tuesday, the program is expected to be approved by the Panel for Educational Policy. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.

Critics vandalized a series of subway ads for the Success Charter Network - a group of charter schools that aims to open an elementary school in Williamsburg this fall - on the same week that the neighborhood's community board called on the city to reject plans for the school.

Right before the New Year, Judge Feinman ruled against our request for a preliminary injunction against the DOE's provision of free space and services to charter schools, in the lawsuit that Class Size Matters, along with other parents and the NYC Parents Union, filed in July.  His decision, which was publicly disclosed today, is posted here.  Here is a fact sheet about the case. One of the reasons he denied our request is that he determined that the payments of more than $100 million owed by the charter schools  would not necessarily be used by the DOE to benefit our kids in any way or restore the egregious budget cuts their schools have suffered, so it was difficult to prove irreparable harm. Nevertheless in his decision, he fired a shot across the bow to DOE & the charter school industry, saying that they should not take this as any sort of signal that when the case comes to trial, he will necessarily rule in their favor.  Below is the press statement we put out with the NYC Parents Union.