During its late conference held during the Independence Day holiday weekend, the National Education Association took up a series of new resolutions that targeted charter schools. The union was looking for ways to reign in the success of charter schools to make their own woeful attempts at education in the public schools look better. The union was also looking for ways to cash in on charter school’s success as well as for a way to get more union oversight into them.
But, here is the thing: when they work, charter schools work because they have less union meddling involved in their operations.
In their adopted resolutions, the NEA paid lip service to the “potential” reforms and “creative teaching methods” that can more easily be adopted at charter schools. Yet the following resolutions seemed determined to undermine and eliminate the very freedom and flexibility it paid lip service to at the outset. One is struck by the logical disconnect. Why, exactly, do the unions imagine that the freedom realized at charter schools lends itself to that innovation in the first place? Conversely, why is innovation not seen in public schools?
There are several troublesome resolutions that, if widely adopted, would spell the end of the effectiveness of charter schools, turning them into just another public school outlet ruled by union bigwigs and uninterested in the children’s education, not to mention the end of all that innovation the NEA initially praised.
Take this resolution, for instance:
Charter schools should be subject to the same public sector labor relations statutes as traditional public schools, and charter school employees should have the same collective bargaining rights as their counterparts in traditional public schools.
In other words, the union expects all charter school employees to be placed inexorably under the same union contract that the other public school employees are governed by. Of course, one of the chief successes of charter schools is that school administrators have more power to hire and fire teachers to get just the right balance to fit their program. Being forced under regular union restrictions would eliminate this flexibility outright.
Another resolution seems to lay the groundwork for making it tougher to even create a charter school.
A charter should be granted only if the proposed school intends to offer an educational experience that is qualitatively different from what is available in traditional public schools.
This one almost sounds reasonable until you begin to wonder exactly who it is that will determine when the charter plan would be a “qualitatively different” educational experience? If left to the union, one might expect that never would be the answer to the question of when a charter school might be authorized if they were the ones to set the criteria.
One other statement from the NEA is suspect:
NEA shall oppose any initiative to greatly expand the growth of charter schools and assist its state affiliates in identifying any effective practices incubated therein that could subsequently be implemented in our traditional public schools. By no means should this effort conflict with the ongoing and necessary work of organizing charter school teachers, nor should it conflict with charter schools that meet NEA guidelines.
That is a sly piece of rhetoric, isn’t it? On one hand this statement pretends at supporting charter schools right to organize, yet also sternly opposes them and announces the intent to try and steal what does work there and copy it in their own schools.
But, as I said, one of the chief reasons that charter schools work, when they work, is that they’ve gotten out from under union domination. So, as the NEA tries to impose its rules anyway, it claims that even if a charter school is lucky enough to survive and find success despite the union’s best efforts, then the union will copy the successful bit and further marginalize the charter school.
The kindly folks at the NEA cannot brook with success of charter schools. Do they care if it helps the kids? Not really. They only care if they are in control of it all.
IOW a charter school is only okay if its teachers belong to NEA
bk Tuesday, July 14th at 7:10AM EDT (link)No kidding
Warner Todd Huston Tuesday, July 14th at 7:23AM EDT (link)And THEN it may as well NOT be a charter school! Nice plan them union thugs have, eh?
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NEA Control of the Board is the Key.
Achance Tuesday, July 14th at 9:46AM EDT (link)State laws vary on charter schools; some are just a different form of public school, some are publicly chartered private schools. Those that are public are subject to the same teacher bargaining laws as other public schools and if the district has a master agreement, the teachers are under that agreement. Those that are private are subject to the National Labor Relations Act, which is much less generous to employees and to unions than are most teacher bargaining laws. Also, it is a matter of state law whether a teacher in a private charter school would come under the same credential and tenure laws as public school teachers. What distinguishes charter schools is not whether or not the teaching staff is or can be union, it is who controls what the staff teaches and how they teach it. Even where the charter school is a part of a public school district and subject to state teacher laws, district policies, and even the district’s union contract, there is the group of charter subscribers, parents and community members, interposed between the district’s Board of Education and the teaching staff.
I’ve bargained with NEA and find them generally laughable as a collective bargaining organization. They behaved arrogantly towards us back during the Hickel Administration and we took their union President and two members of their bargaining team and turned them into classified employees and moved them out of the NEA union during bargaining for a successor agreement - just to show them that we could. They took us to the labor board and to court where we beat them like a rented mule. I’ve done all sorts of things to them over the years and the only thing they could do about it was whine and snivel. Now, whining and sniveling they do superbly. However, I worked for a state government, we didn’t employee that many teachers and they had little influence over us politically even in a Democrat administration and essentially none in a Republican administration.
But what they do best is play politics. The National Extortion Association OWNS virtually evey school board in the Country. They WILL turn out all their teachers in a SB election and they will vote pretty much in lockstep for the always liberal candidate endorsed by the EA. Once the EA controls the Board, they control the hiring and firing of District management and thus the management of each school. Once that hegemony is achieved it isn’t that the teaching staff can’t be controlled under the union contracts, it is that they WON’T be controlled. If a principal tries to discipline a teacher and the union objects, that objection isn’t usually played out through the grievance and arbitration provisions of the labor agreement and the tenure provisions in policy or law. It is played out when somebody superior in District management calls the principal and says something like, “Do I have a problem with Susie Teacher or do I have a problem with you?” NEA doesn’t need union grievance and arbitration rights, it just calls somebody in management and “fixes” it.
What the NEA has done is give practically every SD in the Country the same sort of union cowed management that characterizes the big Blue States and the Blue Cities, which is essentially no management and a union/Democrat controlled patronage employment system. They hire education school graduates as teachers’ aides and if they like them, they hire the aides as teachers, and if they “fit in,” the sole criteria for achievng tenure, they become tenured teachers and are essentially employed for life.
It isn’t that you can’t discipline or dismiss a unionized, tenured teacher; you can and it is little more trouble than disciplining or dismissing any other public employee. It is that once the NEA controls who gets elected and appointed, nobody will discipline or dismiss a tenured teacher. The advantage that the charter school has in this scheme is that the teaching staff tends to be self-selecting and the slackers won’t want to work in that environment and the fact that there is an activist group of parents and community members between the Board and the school’s management and staff.
In Vino Veritas