After Battle With UFT, NY Lawmakers Reach Deal with Hochul to Open 14 New Charter Schools in NYC

After Battle With UFT, NY Lawmakers Reach Deal with Hochul to Open 14 New Charter Schools in NYC

Edited by: TJVNews.com

After a grueling political fight with anti-charter teachers’ unions and their allies in the state legislature, Governor Kathy Hochul and lawmakers have reached a tentative budget deal to allow just 14 new charter schools to open in New York City, according to sources who spoke with the New York Post.

The Post reported that the state has agreed to pick up the millions of dollars in rental costs for charters that lease space in a private facility, providing relief to Mayor Eric Adams and the city treasury that is currently saddled with the massive costs of housing migrants.

Sources close to negotiations told the Post that there was one string attached in the deal. None of the 14 new charters could be located in a city school district where at least 55 percent of students are already enrolled in the publicly-funded, privately managed schools.

Harlem’s School District 5 would be the only part of the city that would be impacted.

“Governor Hochul’s effort to increase educational opportunity for our City’s children has been thwarted by Albany politics,” said Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy, which operates 49 charter schools that enroll 20,000 students,  as was reported by the Post. She added that, “A ‘deal’ of only 14 charters that discriminates against families in certain neighborhoods is a travesty for poor kids and families of color. . . The victims of this educational neglect are low-income Black and Brown children, and Albany has bargained away their access to high-quality schools.”

The United Federation of Teachers has waged a fierce campaign to block charters from sharing space with public school sites — but not when it comes to one co-founded by the union’s national boss, Randi Weingarten.

University Prep Middle School — a charter co-founded by Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former head of its local affiliate UFT — was granted more space in a city building last week.

The city’s Panel For Educational Policy — at the recommendation of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration — voted 22–0 to allow the charter to expand in the South Bronx building it shares with the Rapport School for Career Development HS, which serves special needs students, and the Academy Leadership Charter School.

While the UFT often gripes that such moves deprive classroom footage from students and staff in traditional unionized public schools, not a peep was heard from union brass about the University Prep plan, though a union rep from the Rapport School raised objections.

“This blatant hypocrisy shows that the UFT’s opposition to letting charter schools use underutilized school buildings has always been about protecting its schools from competition, not a sincere concern for children,” Moskowitz told The New York Post on Sunday.

During the April 19 PEP meeting, the head of University Prep boasted of the charter school’s ties to the UFT.

“We’re also a union school. We were started in conjunction with the UFT and every member of our teaching, counseling and. Operation Staff, as a proud member of the UFT,” David Patterson, the founding principal, said before the panel’s vote.

“We’ve worked tirelessly over the past four years with. The other two schools on our campus, and we’re very proud of having a great relationship with them.”

University Prep’s executive director Andrea D’Amato testified that “with Randy Weingarten on our board ….we continue to partner productively and collaboratively with our, with the union to which our teachers, our counselors and also our operation members.”

“What will now prevent them from walking into the area that the University charter staff and students occupy … unless you create more restrictive barriers, which in turn can escalate and trigger the students?” she asked.

A UFT spokesperson, asked about criticism of a double standard on co-locations, said, “We are opposed to the DOE pushing through any co-locations without giving real thought to the space needs of the existing school and to the new state law requiring smaller class sizes.”