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Sabrina Tan, a lawyer for Advocates for Justice, describes the firm's suit over a new charter school.

Backed by a law firm that has battled the Department of Education in court repeatedly over the past year, a group of Cobble Hill parents announced today that they are suing to stop Eva Moskowitz’s Brooklyn Success Academy 3 from moving into their neighborhood.

Fifteen public school parents signed onto the suit, which Advocates for Justice said it would be filing today.

The suit claims the city and Moskowitz circumvented state education laws when they abruptly changed plans for the school late last year. BSA 3 was originally approved for either District 13 or District 14, but the city revised its proposal in late October and announced the school would instead share a building with two high schools and a special needs elementary school in District 15.

Opposition to the plan quickly mounted and reached a climax when protesters clashed with Moskowitz at a meeting she hosted for prospective parents in November. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy approved the co-location plan two weeks later.

It’s the second time in as many years that a Success school has been the subject of a lawsuit from the surrounding community. Last April, parents on the Upper West Side filed suit against the city’s plan to site a Success school on the Brandeis campus, charging that the network was not serving the needy student population that was written into its charter. The suit was dismissed just weeks before the school was slated to open. (more…)

After successfully suing to stop the city from closing schools last year, the city’s teachers union is raising a new set of concerns that could pave the way for another legal battle.

At last night’s meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, a United Federation of Teachers official outlined a dozen issues the union has with the city’s new rules governing the kinds of information released about the schools it wants to close. Last year, the union sued the city for writing barebones education impact statements that didn’t include enough data to comply with the state law governing how schools are closed.

Now, the city has a new regulation that calls for more information to be released. This school year, education impact statements should include information about how schools will share space if they’re located in the same building, as well as how a school’s closure or loss of building space will affect special education students and English language learners.

But the teachers union wants still more information. In his letter to the Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg, UFT president Michael Mulgrew called for the reports to include data on how class sizes will change and an explanation of what the city did to save the schools before it decided to close them. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg called for an end to social promotion for the city’s fourth and sixth graders this morning, a change that would expand one of the most hotly debated education policies of his tenure.

At a press conference this morning, the mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein called their efforts to end social promotion “a great success,” citing rising test scores and the decreasing number of students enrolled in summer school. Ending social promotion means that students who do not meet proficiency standards on state tests are held back until they do. Some of these students attend summer school and are bumped to the next grade in the fall when they pass the exam, while others can have waivers signed that let them out of retention program.

Bloomberg said that once the citywide school board is reconstituted, he would ask it to end the policy in grades four and six — the only remaining tested grades in which social promotion is still in practice. In 2004, when several board members told the mayor that they would vote against ending third grade social promotion, he had them removed and replaced overnight with people who supported his policies. The event is commonly known as the “Monday Night Massacre.”

Standing in the library of the Patrick Henry School (P.S. 171) in East Harlem, Bloomberg said that with the new retention policy, “kids will either learn what they need or teachers will know they haven’t learned.”

Asked about researchers’ claims that retention policies can raise the dropout rate, Bloomberg said he was “speechless,” adding, “It’s pretty hard to argue that it does not work.” Klein said that since 2004, when the DOE ended social promotion for third graders, support for its end has been “unanimous.”

There is significant opposition to the administration’s retention policies, said Norm Fruchter, director of the community involvement program of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)