Thursday, February 21, 2013

Here's The Strategy Going Forward

In case you haven't seen the news:

The Department of Education has reversed a decision to place a charter school in the same building as Brownsville Academy High School, the transfer school which fought the co-location with a student-led lawsuit.

D.O.E. officials said on Wednesday that they found an alternate site for the Success Academy elementary school. They would not say whether the lawsuit played a role in the change.

“While we believed co-locating the two schools was the best option at the time, another better option became available,” said Devon Puglia, a D.O.E. spokesman. “As a result, we decided to propose a new location.”

The D.O.E. is now proposing to locate the new charter school at P.S. 167 The Parkway in Crown Heights. 

Oh, sure - the lawsuit didn't play a role in the DOE backing down and putting the Success charter somewhere else.

The lawsuit - which was student-led - had everything to do with the DOE backing down and choosing another site.

The last thing Eva wanted to do was embroil the Success Charter brand in a fight against a student-led lawsuit at an A-rated transfer school with a population of special needs students.

I wouldn't be surprised if Eva herself asked for another site to replace this one.

And this shows us what the strategy against the deform movement going forward should be - student- and parent-led lawsuits against co-locations, closures, etc.

The DOE and Eva are happy to fight the UFT on this stuff.

They're not so happy to fight students on it.

Doesn't make for such nice headlines.

There's a lesson here.

2 comments:

  1. You do not really think that anyone will have actually learned that fight back lesson. UFT did not learn it from the time they fought the DOE over who was at fault for the students would have a one day week, a few Septembers back, when the Jewish holidays fell just right.

    Here's hoping the parents and students at PS 167 sue Eva next.

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    1. I do not think the UFT learned that lesson. In fact, I hope they didn't learn that lesson. Because even when they sue over deforms, closures, etc., they manage to screw things up. Remember how they won the lawsuit against Cuomo/Tisch/King over the 40% test score evals and then caved to Cuomo and APPR anyway last February. Or when they won the closures lawsuit against Bloomberg a few years back, then did nothing to protect those schools the next year so many of them ended up closed anyway.

      Nope - I mean student-led and parent-led and teacher-led (NOT union-led) lawsuits.

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