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The Public Policy
Chartered Into Unions
Unlike the NAACP the AFT is happy to back charter schools — if it can unionize them.
These days, the American Federation of Teachers must be relieved that it has avoided at least some of the wrath faced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the suit it filed last month against New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to stop the city’s longtime practice of allowing the publicly funded, privately operated schools to share space with its traditional counterparts in the city’s massive (and often half-empty) buildings.
Black parents and a younger generation of African Americans such as charter school principal-and-CNN contributor Steve Perry are particularly displeased with the nation’s oldest civil rights group for continuing its longstanding — and wrongheaded — opposition to helping children escape the worst America’s public schools have to offer. Meanwhile, the NAACP hasn’t helped its own cause with such moves as a press release issued last week declaring that prominent critics — who include Democrats such as Michelle Rhee and school choice activist Kevin Chavous — were being funded by “right wing opponents of traditional public schools.” It also had to do damage control after the head of its New York branch, Hazel Dukes, told a charter school parent that she and her fellow supporters were doing the “bidding of slave masters”; its national president, Benjamin Todd Jealous has made himself the public face of the NAACP’s efforts, attempting to strike a tone of conciliation (and willingness to settle the suit, albeit on its terms and that of the AFT’s Big Apple local).
But the suit — and the bad press coming from it — is also spoiling the nation’s second-largest teachers union’s effort to triangulate the nation’s school reform movement — and stave off its loss of influence over America’s public education systems — by embracing some reforms while otherwise preserving the array of degree- and seniority-based pay scales, near-lifetime employment privileges and defined-benefit pensions that have made teaching the best-compensated profession in the public sector. Once again, the union’s interests in preserving its status quo — along with its general opposition to charter schools, the publicly funded-privately operated outfits that are the nation’s most-successful forms of school choice — belie its attempts to play the role of moderate reformers.
Under its cunning and charming president, Randi Weingarten, the AFT has become a player of sorts in the charter school movement. It already operates charter schools in Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis. In the Big Apple, it operates a charter with Green Dot Public Schools, one of the leading players in the charter school movement. In California, the AFT also finagled its way into controlling 22 schools that were both spun off and newly created by the Los Angeles Unified School District as part of its school reform initiative.
At the same time, the AFT is also attempting to co-opt the charter schools by unionizing the ranks of their mostly nonunionized teachers. Along with the larger National Education Association, the AFT has unionized the teaching staffs of 602 charters, or 12 percent of those schools. Last month, the AFT’s Massachusetts branch unionized teachers at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in tiny town of Orleans. The union potentially has even more room to grow. Eighteen of the 42 states that allow for charters to exist — including New York State, home to the AFT’s largest local and state affiliate — require them to allow their teachers to join AFT and NEA locals. The fact that charter schools are no longer new kids on the education block (28 percent of them have been open more than a decade), along with the lower pay for charter school teachers than their traditional district colleagues, also theoretically makes them ripe for unionization.
The AFT’s own idiosyncratic history as occasional reformers (amid its legendary role in unionizing the teaching profession) is one driving force behind these efforts. During the 1970s and 1980s, its longtime president, the fiery Albert Shanker, argued for the kind of rigorous curriculum standards that would later form the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act. Driven by his twin goals to improve teaching and stave off the push for vouchers, Shanker also teamed up with education scholar Ray Budde to help foster the charter school movement and its underlying concept of small, independent, bureaucracy-free schools geared toward providing high-quality education to every child.
But, as with so much with the AFT these days, it’s also out of necessity. Its locals are located in the nation’s most woeful traditional urban school districts, the hotbeds for the most important efforts in school reform. For urban families, big-city mayors, centrist Democrats and young African-Americans more-concerned with improving economic conditions than with union loyalties, charter schools are the preferred alternatives to those dropout factories and failure mills. In New Orleans alone, charter schools account for 61 percent of all students, while four of every ten students in Washington, D.C., and Detroit attend charters. The growth of charters — and their success in improving student performance — is particularly threatening to the AFT and the traditional districts it keeps under its thumb. The presence of charters have also begun to exacerbate the AFT’s internal split between its declining number of Baby Boomer members — who want to preserve their privileges — and younger rank-and-file counterparts, who, like many charter school teachers, embrace the use of standardized testing in evaluating performance and welcome the possible abolition of tenure.
By starting their own charters and unionizing existing ones, the AFT wants to prove that traditional teachers union principles, including seniority and degree-based pay scales, and work rules that allow the average teacher to work just 35 hours during a work week, won’t get in the way of high-quality academic instruction and innovation. Weingarten, in particular, thinks that charters could serve as “incubators of good labor practice.” Co-opting the charter school movement — and unionizing its teaching ranks — would also help the AFT (along with the NEA) put a check on the more-radical reforms being embraced by Republican governors, some of their Democratic counterparts, and President Barack Obama.
But charter school operators, along with the teachers who work in their schools, have proven hostile to the presence of the AFT and for good reason. The union, along with the NEA, has spent most of the past three decades teaming up with suburban districts to unsuccessfully restrict the growth of charters and even put them out of existence. Particularly vexing to the unions is the Obama administration’s efforts to expand charters — especially through the Race to the Top initiative, which is now heading into its third year — which has helped force states such as New York to either increase or eliminate artificial caps on the growth of charters.
For charter school operators, the presence of the AFT is more threat than welcomed. They fear that union rules and penchant for rendering schools servile to their demands will stifle the innovative teaching, focus on student achievement and camaraderie between teachers and charter operators that has long-typified the movement. And the AFT, along with the NEA, hasn’t exactly given them any reason to think otherwise. This year, with reformers winning efforts to abolish or restrict collective bargaining, the AFT and NEA are striking back at all reformers. Last month, the two unions successfully lobbied California’s lower house to again restrict the growth of charters. The AFT’s Detroit branch is also opposing an effort by the school district to convert 41 of its schools into charters.
The AFT’s lawsuit in New York City once again belies the union’s triangulation. The claim by the union and the NAACP that allowing charters to share space (including libraries and lunchrooms) with traditional schools deprives equal education to poor black, white and Latino students is belied by both the demographics of the charters (which, like traditional schools, mostly serve those kinds of kids), the fact that the schools serve just three percent of the district’s children, and the enthusiastic support for charters by minority parents and Bloomberg, who is also one of the few mayors in the country who actually runs a traditional district. For the AFT, in particular, the push against charters signals to charter school teachers — already skeptical of the need for unions — that it talks out of both sides of its mouth.
This hostility, along with the reality of working under union rules that encourage and protect mediocre teachers, has also meant that the few gains the AFT has made in unionizing charters isn’t working out. This month, teachers at one AFT-unionized charter, Conservatory Lab in the Brighton section of Boston, are looking to toss the union out three years after voting to join. As the school’s temporary AFT local president, Becca Iskric, admits, the union’s demand for the school “to do certain things” and be a poster child for unionization hasn’t exactly been appealing to the school’s teachers.
For the AFT and Weingarten, facts are getting in the way of the spin.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (27) | Leave a comment
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Timothy L. Pennell| 6.16.11 @ 7:31AM
It makes sense. The only way for Weingarten, and all of the other Public School TEACHERS and ADMINISTATORS, (Who send THEIR OWN KIDS to Private Schools) to make sure that these Charter Schools are as HORRIBLE as the one's THEIR MEMBERS Teach in, is to fill them up with THEIR PEOPLE.
Alan Brooks| 6.16.11 @ 7:41PM
Homeschooling is the way to go-- no PTA, no union and no busing necessary.
Melvin| 6.16.11 @ 7:41AM
Do they think that we are so stupid, that we cannot see through their charade? It would be nothing more than Charterized Government Run Public Schools.
Dan Hirsch| 6.16.11 @ 9:52AM
Melvin;
They don't count on our stupidity, they count on our complacency. If you got kids in a public school, you better be in the school board's face, on your kids' work, and into their teachers' curricula. Or you are going to end up with a mind numbed robot who doesn't understand simple logic.
DH
PS Mine were in public and private universities for a span of twelve years. I begged them to take a course in "Logic" such as I had as a sophomore in high school (not public, natch.) Of course they couldn't, because Universities do not teach logic, it's way too dangerous. So, it was a good thing I made them play "Mastermind." They ended up with some inductive and deductive skills. And, the experience did leave them able to logically maneuver around the educators confronting them without difficulty.
Remember Mastermind - it was the little plastic game with one player setting colored pins in a sequence which the other inferred by proposing sequences which are then responded to with vague answers. Look it up in on Wikipedia. You can buy it online...it's cheap, especially on a cost/benefit basis.
Trust me, none of my kids are even interested in moving back in with us...Good luck to you all.
Tom| 6.16.11 @ 8:15AM
It continues to baffle me why the (national) GOP has not gone after the teachers unions. Not as the primary issue, but certainly a visible one, that would help make some inroads with minority voters and highlight the raging hypocrisy of the "for the children" Democrats and the incalculable harm they're inflicting upon tens of millions of children.
cuban pete| 6.16.11 @ 8:46AM
Didn't Shanker say something to the effect that when schoolchildren start paying dues he would represent their interests?
C Smith| 6.16.11 @ 8:47AM
The caption "Teachers Unions Gone Wild" screams for attention. Seems some itinerant journalist recently "crashed" a New Jersey Education Association's "leadership" conference and video chronicled the event. Reminds me of an expose I compiled (circa 1992) regarding America's only government funded religion. The intent: to challenge believers to "have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them" (cf. Ephesians 5:11). The elder board did not approve distribution.
The following is a facsimile:
The National Education Association (NEA) with 2.1 million members is the most powerful force in education. Although it purports to represent the interest of teachers, many of its members are not in agreement with its policies, have limited awareness of its politics, and are naive about its power and past. William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, in The Devaluing of America, describes the NEA's policies and politics:
In recent years, the union's Representative Assembly went on record in favor of teacher strikes; school- based clinics dispensing contraceptives; a nuclear freeze; gay rights; the Equal Right Amendment; D.C. statehood; and Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis for president. It has voted against merit pay for teachers; parental choice; voluntary school prayer; state takeovers of bad schools; home schooling; English as the official language; drug, alcohol, and AIDS testing; nuclear power plants; aid to the Nicaraguan resistance; the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; and Ronald Reagan and George Bush for president...Opposes every common-sense reform measure: competency testing for teachers, opening the teaching profession to knowledgeable individuals who have not graduated from 'schools of education,' performance-based pay, holding educators accountable for how much children learn, an end to tenure, a national examination to find out exactly how much our children know, and parental choice of schools....
Thomas Toch, education correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, "In the Name of Excellence" writes:
In 1989 it [the NEA] spent $7.4 million on such things as a computerized system of mass producing letters to Congress from 300,000 NEA members who "pre-authorized" the use of their names; "Congressional Contact Teams" made up of 2 NEA members in each Congressional district who are specially trained as lobbyists and flown back and forth from Washington to promote the NEA's cause from the local level; a computerized file of NEA's entire membership; a satellite link-up between a television studio in the NEA's Washington headquarters and its state affiliates; and a full-time lobbing staff of 15.... The NEA also has been a major backer of Democratic candidates since 1976, when it played a leading role in the Carter campaign. (Carter signaled the size of the NEA's contributions to his election by pushing through Congress the law that established the U.S. Department of Education - a longtime NEA goal).
The NEA's power in Iowa is of special concern. Again quoting Mr. Toch: "The NEA has sought to gain control of teacher licensing by establishing licensing boards with teacher majorities. Only Minnesota and Iowa have granted this board final authority in teacher certification." Particularly disconcerting for those of us in Iowa where an overwhelming majority of teachers are NEA members." With the NEA in charge, the role of the teacher continues to evolve. The NEA's report, Education for the Seventies, states: "Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized psycho-social treatment for the students, and teachers must become psychosocial therapists."
The NEA has encountered little resistance because so little is known of its political expediencies, and according to Mr. Toch, that's the plan. "Though the NEA has fought virtually every educational reform, it has poured millions of dollars into a public relations campaign designed to convince the nation that it is committed to the reform of the public schools, and of teaching in particular." The NEA's publication NEA Today spawns a plethora of glossy images of appreciative students and their obliging teachers, but so little content that it prompted author Samuel Blumenfeld to describe it as having been "written at the intellectual level of the National Enquirer."
No expose on the NEA would be complete without investigating its contention with evangelical Christianity. Blumenfeld in his book NEA: Trojan Horse In American Education describes the organizations long association with secular humanism:
...in 1933 John Dewey and 33 other liberal humanists drew up and signed that extraordinary document known as the Humanist Manifesto. It reflected all of the influences of science, evolution, and the new psychology which were reshaping American education... It was thus Dewey who began to fashion a new materialist religion in which humanity was venerated instead of God. This is basically the religion of Secular Humanism, and this is what has become the official religion of the United States, for it is the only religion permitted in its public schools and totally supported by government funds.... The NEA has remained remarkably faithful to the Humanist Manifesto since 1933. For all practical purposes, the public school has become the parochial school for secular humanism. Its doctrines pervade the curriculum from top to bottom.
Dewey, for his contributions to education, was elected honorary president of the NEA in 1932. He was also issued the American Federation of Teachers' first membership card. With the 1973 signing of Humanistic Manifesto II, humanism became even more culturally entrenched:
As in 1933, humanist still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.... No Deity will save us; we must save ourselves.
Signers of Humanist Manifesto II include Alan F. Guttmacher, president of Planned Parenthood; Betty Friedan, founder of N.O.W; behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, a horde of Unitarian ministers, and Lester Mondale, former president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists. Such is the NEA's consanguine "fellowship.
"The NEA's domination of education affects all teachers. It dictates the rules of professional advancement. It pressures teachers to be politically partisan. Its infusion of humanist curriculum places conscionable teachers in a moral dilemma. And its influence over accreditation and other policies is disconcerting for teachers public and private. In summation, the NEA's monopoly on education places teachers, and our children, at risk!
"And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea" (Mark 9:42, cf. Matthew 8:16 & Luke 17:2).
http://popularapostasy.blogspo.....-wild.html
Old Soldier| 6.16.11 @ 9:25AM
Unionize my kids' parochial school and they will be enrolled elsewhere the next school year.
Dave | 6.16.11 @ 10:52AM
Cutting through the pro and con union minutia for a moment, here's some of what's posted in fine print below the bottom line. Looking at student test scores over the past several decades (since the AFT/CTA (and or) other groups affiliated with the NEA put a death grip on the throats of American taxpayers and the politicians who mandate the purse strings, the numbers clearly indicate that, on the whole, "Johnny, Janine and Jammal will get their degrees but somehow can't manage to correctly spell, define or comprehend basic phrases and their usage."
Examples:
(a) Unfunded Teacher Retirement Pensions
(b) Unfunded Teacher/Retirement Healthcare Plans
(c) Unfunded Cost of Living Increases
(d) Mandates to Fund Classroom Space for Children of Illegal Aliens.
(d) Mandatory Bi-Lingual Education (Spanish, Languages and Dialects of Asian Immigrants and (soon) various forms of Farsi, Urdu and Ebonics.
Finally ...
(e) Local Requirements to Eliminate or Alter the changing of Historical School Mascots Names and Logos that may be viewed and or linked with terms like Warrior, Indian, Tomahawk or other mascot images that may depict Hispanic persons as charactures adorned with (1) serapes,( 2)sombreros or (3)*huarache sandals.
(*unless mascot in question is an image depicting an anglo California surfer, the requirement is then waived and the rights to salute, celebrate and maintain said logo will remain as is.
Meanwhile, parents will be advised to heed the sign posted near enterances at their next taxpayer/AFT meeting:
"Check Your Wallets At The Door."
It may sound semi-oppressive but who else do you think is going to fund all those ... Unfunded Mandates?
Just askin'.
Kevin Compton| 6.16.11 @ 12:54PM
I have to admit that I have no current figures or statistics but what I remember about teachers is they all had summer jobs and many had a second job so they could afford a middle-class lifestyle. They drove 20 year old cars, lived in modest housing and dressed very modestly. They had to keep taking college classes in order to re-certify every 5 years or so. Granted these observations are mostly 15 - 30 years old, but have things really changed so drastically to say that teachers only work 35 hours /week and are the highest compensated of all public employees?
cuban pete| 6.16.11 @ 1:14PM
There are districts in suburban Chicago where the average salary is over $100,000 per year. Many high school districts have to go to junior high and elementary teachers to fill assistant coaching positions because the high school staff makes so much money they don't need the stipend for coaching or club moderator.
I'm not saying that's necessarily bad because truly gifted teachers should be well compensated but districts(taxpayers) should be able to fire poor performing teachers.
And your observations are mostly 30 years old because in suburban Chicago teachers have been doing quite nicely for many years.
Trina| 6.16.11 @ 8:27PM
Teachers' salaries may be adequate, but they typically work well more than 35 hours weekly. They might spend 35 hours in a school - with kids hanging off of them, few if any breaks, and a need to be constantly "on" - and then they spend extra hours on lesson planning, grading, curriculum development, etc etc. No teachers' union can or will stop that. My hat is off to any teacher, but especially teachers serving in chaotic school districts. I could not do it, and I bet most of the comment-ers couldn't either.
Oldefarte| 6.16.11 @ 1:59PM
IMO, the split between charters and public schools is counter-productive, as charters appear to be an alternative when the solution should be to fix the problem public schools. This can be accompolished by eliminating any/all teacher unions, and thereafter hiring/promoting/compensating the truly qualified and dedicated among the teacher ranks. Teacher unions allow, promote and demand that the incompetents amoung their ranks be protected, when the solution involves firing and replacing them instead. Teacher unions, along with all governmental unions and private industry unions should all be disbanded and eliminated, and until this country realizes and accompolishes same, we will all [not just the children] pay and suffer for this travesty!!!!!!!!
Al Adab| 6.16.11 @ 2:00PM
Wait. Do you mean the issue isn't about educating the next generation but rather about Union control, power and self enrichment? Who would have thought.
Oldefarte| 6.16.11 @ 4:12PM
That's exactly what """I'm"""" saying, that to EDUCATE THE CHILDREN, you first have to GET RID OF THE TEACHER UNIONS!!!!!!!!
wolflen| 6.16.11 @ 2:12PM
in todays LATimes...the mayor stated that los angeles schools have a 50% drop-out rate...and the remaining 50% only have a 30% body of students prepared for college..
without too much research, this should tell us...that this school system(the second largest in the US) is NOT teaching..it has thrown hundreds of thousands(LAUSD has over 600,000 students) of kids into poverty and possibly a life of crime..
with numbers like that one wonders why there are not riots in the streets...what does it take to make parents angry enough to say "stop the insanity"..
but then again..this is los angeles..perhaps the parents think this is what education should be..warehousing, a free lunch, and a waiting minimum wage job...
weddingdresses | 6.17.11 @ 5:31AM
That's exactly what """I'm"""" saying, that to EDUCATE THE CHILDREN, you first have to GET RID OF THE TEACHER UNIONS!!!!!!!!
Sue Mclellan| 6.17.11 @ 9:47AM
NCLB is Nationalized Education. Teachers, unions, parents or taxpayers have nothing to say about the current trend in our educational services. The Federal Government is operating our schools and their inept leadership is not accountable for any of the current results.
Sending in their own people (EFM'S) they have radically changed schools with their reforms reflecting dismal results. They have created choas in our schools which has negatively affected our chilldren. With total control of the curriculum, educational decisions and taxpayer dollars they have thrust large urban districts in even further debt with no measurable academic improvement.
Just the way we measure children is flawed and that has provided the rationale and foundation for massive reforms. Expecting a large portion of the impovrished to compete with suburban counterparts IS discrimination. Expecting an impaired child to pass a state authorized test with 100% accuracy is bizarre, setting teachers and children up to fail. Since when to we guarantee outcomes for anyone?
Over the past ten years, testing alone, only one aspect of NCLB laws has cost taxpayers over $200 billion...happy yet?
If one has confidence that our progressive government leaders will fix our schools, I'd like to know when and how.
Christian Louboutin | 6.23.11 @ 6:00AM
Black parents and a younger generation of African Americans such as charter school principal-and-CNN contributor Steve Perry are particularly displeased with the nation's oldest civil rights group for continuing its longstanding
wholesale| 9.27.11 @ 2:18AM
what a good post.
wholesale | 9.27.11 @ 2:23AM
a good post.
wholesale | 9.27.11 @ 2:24AM
thanks