Relentless in its war on public charter schools, the United Federation of Teachers is suing to evict two Success Academy schools from spaces the city Department of Education awarded them last year.
This particular brand of UFT lawfare goes back over a decade.
The courts have tossed well over a dozen similar suits brought by the union or its allies, dating back to 2011.
The new cases are based on a pure technicality, a claim that DOE didn’t adequately consider the new (UFT-engineered) class-size mandate when it designated the space for SA.
Yet both buildings clearly have plenty of room.
One site, in Rockaway Park, is more than a third empty, and the other school that’s there has seen steadily falling enrollment.
The other building, in Sheepshead Bay, is more than half empty.
This is nothing but harassment: filing endless nuisance lawsuits in the hopes that someday one of them will manage to triumph — and so prevent a few dozen kids from escaping to a public school that actually teaches.
Despite the union’s best efforts, Success Academy keeps growing; if it were its own school district, SA would be one of the state’s largest — and by far the most successful.
Its scholars regularly beat the results of some of the state’s most affluent districts on state math and English exams
That, though enrollment at SA is overwhelmingly from low-income black and/or Hispanic families.
The disastrous performance of DOE schools during COVID, and the evisceration of the city’s once-selective middle schools, has enrollment plummeting in the regular public school system.
The middle class, lured back under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, is fleeing.
Success and other charters now represent the best hope for saving public education in New York City.
But the UFT doesn’t care, because charters don’t serve its needs.
And so it wastes member dues on longshot litigation, trying to deny hope for city kids.
To ensure that future members actually have jobs, the union would do far better working to restore excellence in the regular system, rather than trying to shut down schools that work.