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Parents at a Fort Greene elementary school are lashing out against the city's proposal to move a new charter school into their building, claiming that their own expansion plans were denied to make room for a school with more political clout.

A state Supreme Court judge has rejected a request from public school parents and advocacy organizations for a preliminary injunction to require New York City to charge charter schools rent for the space they occupy inside public school buildings.

Video.

The schoolyard looks pretty bleak on a rainy day. Some men were surveying it last week. Turns out, the schoolyard is soon to get redone - based on a work order that was issued four years ago. The yard has been settling for a long time now, and needs drain work, leveling, and repaving and painting, along with improved equipment. Amazing how as soon as the charter gets approved, this four-year-old work order (along with others, stay tuned) is getting filled…  One wise prediction is that the funds we're entitled to (to match the charter's improvements) are going to be said to have been used for these outstanding and necessary repairs.

As the city's Department of Education moves to bring a charter school to Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, a state assemblywoman and a former city schools official are backing a different school proposal that would compete with the charter school for space. The proposal asks the department to open an early learning center that would serve students in prekindergarten and kindergarten who live walking distance from 284 Baltic Street, the same address the city plans to give a new Success Academy Network charter school. Carmen Farina, a former deputy chancellor for the Department of Education who retired in 2006, and Joan L. Millman, a state assemblywoman representing Cobble Hill, are both promoting the idea as the best way to use available space in the Baltic Street building.

The city has proposed placing two of former City Council Member Eva Moskowitz's newest charter schools in the heart of Manhattan, sharing buildings with struggling high schools in Union Square and Hell's Kitchen. Those elementary schools and four others slated to open in 2013-14 would bring the number of schools in Ms. Moskowitz's fast-growing Success Academy Charter network to 18 and solidify her foothold in the city's more affluent neighborhoods.

"As previously reported on this blog by an anonymous teacher at Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy charter chain, parents, teachers, students, and staff have been directed to participate in a march across the Brooklyn Bridge on October 8 to protest any slowdown in allocation of  public space to charter schools or any effort to charge the charters rent for public space."

"This Sunday's NY Times featured an outrageously one-sided article on Success charters.  It is not the first.  One remembers the Steve Brill article from 2010 on Harlem Success Academy which was so similar in tone that I had to keep checking to see that this was not the exact same piece. The Brill article was replete with many factual errors - claiming that the high-performing students at Success charters were exactly like those as the public schools with which it shared space, even though that was a clear falsehood that any reporter or editor could have checked if they had bothered to look at the data.  This time, the reporter Daniel Bergner admitted that the type of students enrolled may be different, writing in an offhand manner"

Parents at a struggling Bedford-Stuyvesant public school say the city is playing favorites - pushing their children out so a charter school that's already in the building can expand.

Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz cut short a pitch to Brownstone Brooklyn parents Saturday after dozens of protesters interrupted her presentation.

Waving signs and shouting out questions, parents from local schools interrupted an information session held Saturday by a charter school planning to move into Cobble Hill. The meeting, held at the Carroll Gardens library, broke up before head of Success Academy charter schools, former Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, could deliver her planned presentation.