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Eva Moskowitz says that each of the charter schools she runs will always look exactly the same, from their robotics labs to their chess rooms to their classrooms filled with wooden blocks.

There’s just one significant difference at Upper West Success Academy, which opened this year on Manhattan’s Upper West Side under a steady drumbeat of opposition from community members.

“Our schools in Harlem and the Bronx are far less diverse,” Moskowitz said today, speaking to reporters on a tour of the first-year charter school.

Enrollment at Upper West Success mirrors that of District 3, according to data provided by the school: The kindergarten and first grade student body is 35 percent white or Asian, 49 percent are black or Latino and 16 percent multiracial. About 40 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. English language learners make up 5 percent of students and 12 percent of students receive special education services, officials said.

The racial and socioeconomic diversity of students at Upper West provides a stark contrast to the student bodies at other school in the Success Network in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that have high concentrations of poor black and Latino residents.

Moskowitz is hoping the diversity will attract parents in District 15, a similarly diverse district, to enroll at her network’s new school next year. Seated in a kindergarten-sized chair in an empty classroom today, Moskowitz told reporters that she has been giving tours of Upper West Success to hundreds of parents from Brooklyn’s District 15. (more…)

Hundreds of families have submitted early-bird applications to the newest charter school in Eva Moskowitz’s chain, which so far lacks a home but has seen no shortage of controversy.

Upper West Success Academy reports that 357 families have filed applications since the school was approved last month. Two-thirds live in District 3, the diverse and relatively wealthy district stretching from 59th Street to 122nd Street on the West Side of Manhattan where the school will be located.

“Given that every great elementary school on the Upper West Side is overcrowded and the terrific private schools cost more than $30,000 a year, it’s hardly surprising that Upper West Side parents are lining up for a high performing charter school,” Moskowitz said in a statement. Her organization is also touting the results of a phone poll that found 70 percent of neighborhood parents would support the school opening in the area. When told that the school would share space with another public school, support dropped to 59 percent.

But applications from 269 district families and a poll of 300 households does not “demand” make, according to parent leaders who are pushing back against the school. They say the city would do better to invest in existing schools rather than to carve out space for a charter school. (more…)

Brandeis High School will phase out beginning this year.

Few were surprised today when Department of Education officials descended on the Upper West Side’s Louis Brandeis High School to inform staff that the long-struggling school has been slated to close.

For years, the school has been among the lowest-performing in the city, with a four-year graduation rate of just 33 percent. This year Brandeis received a D on its DOE progress report, used to evaluate how much students are improving.

By the time teachers and staff gathered today in the school’s basement auditorium for a 3 p.m. meeting, most appeared to know why they were there. One teacher told me that rumors had spread through the building all afternoon. “There’s been talking ever since we had gotten our progress report,” said another teacher, Tara Bernard, a speech pathologist who has worked at the school for four years.

“We’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for years,” said another teacher as he left the building.

But some students said they thought the school was improving. A ninth-grader told me he heard the school had problems, but he hadn’t experienced them. And an older student said the school had fewer fights than in the past. Bernard, the speech pathologist, said the school had been relatively stable in her four years working there. (more…)