This is the story of an enthusiastic young teacher who eagerly sought a position in a Michigan charter school, only to be disillusioned by the administration’s indifference to teachers and their views about their work.
When teachers in the charter school became frustrated by their powerlessness, they decided to form a union. Bad idea. The enthusiastic young teacher was out of a job and out of teaching.
The story is bigger than just one person, however. It is the story of how charters began with the sponsorship of the nation’s most important union leader, Albert Shanker, but is now vehemently opposed to unions.
Nationally, 93% of charter schools are non-union. Their teachers are at-will employees.
In Michigan, 79% of the charters operate for profit.
This was not what Shanker had in mind.
When reformers wonder why unions oppose charter schools, it is because the overwhelming majority of charter schools do not permit their teachers to join a union and to have a voice in their working conditions, in the curriculum, or discipline policies, or anything else.
The money behind the charter movement never wanted unions in their schools.
[Michigan’s] focus on free markets and privatization — 79 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit management companies— set a somewhat strained tone between the local unions and the charter movement. Nationally a similar phenomenon was occurring, resulting in the AFT and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers unions, taking national stances against charters as well. In 1993, one year after the first charter opened, Shanker himself renounced the idea, calling charters an anti-union “gimmick.”
As unions pushed against charter schools, the education reform movement shoved back with a narrative of schools in crisis, which largely blamed incompetent teachers, and the unions protecting them, for the achievement gap. Charter schools could do their part in this generation’s civil rights battle — education equality — by using their flexibility to get around unions and collective bargaining, and instead stand up for hiring-and-firing latitude.
While the Michigan Association of Public School Academies’ spokesperson Buddy Moorehouse says the coalition for charter school leaders “does not have an official stance on unions” (MT tried getting in touch with president Dan Quisenberry on several occasions but he would only speak through Moorehouse), their website indicates partiality explaining that most charter schools don’t have unions because they “prefer the ability to [be] innovative and remove the red tape element when a teacher is not performing.”
The Great Lakes Education Project, a Michigan-based charter advocacy group, more accurately highlights the dichotomy between unions and charter schools. Funded largely by the right-to-work, union adverse DeVos clan, the organization has been forthright in its declaration of union failures, stating on its website in 2004 that unions are “status quo forces looking to protect their cash cow.”
The entire article is worth reading to understand the politics of unions and charters. Unions are now trying to organize charter teachers, and they hail each school that they win as a big success, but the reality is that the charter movement is at heart a union-busting movement. Its leaders are hostile to unions, as they are to public audits and any other intrusion on their freedom to operate as they wish with public money.
It’s a very thorough piece, but it would be really helpful if they would include the name of the management company. These companies are running the schools. They should always be named when describing the school. Not doing so just promotes the fiction that the charter school is somehow a public entity apart from the management company, when in a very real way that is not true.
is it university YES academy, or is that just the name of the school?
Joe,
I did not read the article but I know that University Yes Prep schools recently had a unionization vote. It was spearheaded by TFAs who wanted to remain in the classroom. Yes Prpe first tried to claim that TFA teachers should not be allowed to vote in union certification elections because they weren’t actually teachers. (Yes Prep hired them to lead classrooms but the distinction is an interesting splitting of hairs, I guess.) Then Yes Prep’s management company said it would drop the schools if they voted to unionize.
But, yeah, those charters are all about the kids, right? Only those greedy unions are for themselves. All Yes Prep, who has massive attrition, does is brag about its test scores. So apparently they believe they’re an awesome school with fantastic teachers who aren’t really teachers when it’s convenient for Yes Prep.
I can’t tell. About 80% of Michigan charters are run by for-profit companies. Mosaica is a big one, for example. You can see their MI schools at the link. They’re international.
http://mosaicaeducation.com/locations/
I think they should identify the school, the management company and the “sponsor” or “authorizer” because that’s what comprises the school. There’s “a charter school” and then two (or sometimes three) contractual relationships. To find out which entity controls the school one has to dig a little deeper than the name of the school. The sponsor or authorizer should always be identified because they’re partly responsible for these schools.
The management company is identified in the article (page 2). The article says it’s New Urban Learning.
Thanks. It looks like they make all the personnel decisions. I don’t know if the charter employees are actually employees of the management company. It seems to me they are.
One of the reasons I think it’s important to make all the relationships clear is “accountability”. The schools have authorizers or sponsors too, so should the authorizer be asked about whether they endorse the anti-labor actions of the mgmt company?
http://www.applitrack.com/newurban/onlineapp/
Whenever charter teachers attempt to unionize via the AFT or NEA, management claims that, as private entities, they are not required to observe public employee labor law.
Yet charter shills go on trying to convince everyone that these are public schools, even when their administrations openly state otherwise in venues that carry legal weight, rather than PR vapor.
In other words, reality is what they say it is, and they are public schools for budgetary purposes, and private schools when it comes to labor relations and their standing as employers.
The Obama Administration are distancing themselves from their own effort to build 400 new charter schools in Ohio:
“Following a fierce back-and-forth about $71 million in grants for Ohio charter schools, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to Richard Ross, Ohio’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
The Buckeye State gets to keep the money – $32.6 million in the first year followed by subsequent awards in years following – but it can’t use it right away. And, the U.S. Department of Education will be watching.
“Since awarding the grant to ODE, the Department has received additional information that raises continuing concerns regarding ODE’s ability to administer its CSP SEA grant properly, particularly in the areas of oversight and accountability with respect to Ohio’s charter schools,” states the letter from U.S. Charter Schools Program Director Stefan Huh.
http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2015/11/04/continuing-concerns-charter-school-grant/75151892/
I’m no clear why it was so difficult for them to find this information, since it’s been front page news in every newspaper in the state for a year but I’m glad someone finally delivered it to them by horseback or personal courier or something 🙂
Apparently no one is looking at all the “data” they’re collecting!
Seven of the 9 successful union campaigns our charter teachers’ union have won have been fought by the boss. There has been some real ugliness coming from the employer, particularly at Concept Schools (we didn’t win that one). At Urban Prep, where 60% of the teachers voted to unionize in June, management fired 16 teachers in retaliation a few weeks later. The worst part is that they’re fighting these legal battles against their teachers’ rights using public education dollars that are supposed to be spent on students.
Why is School Choice so important? https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/kjq50uff8o
I’m from Michigan. The name DeVos tells me everything I need to know right there.
Went to buy a couple of pulleys today. The only brand was Koch. Needless to say I didn’t get what I went for.
Have you noticed how Koch Industries is buying “institutional-type” ads, the “We are Koch” branding? I’ve been seeing them on CNN, the Sunday morning talk shows, this type of programming…
They have a look and tone akin to those of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing (and we know what those entities are hawking).
It’s sad that more of us don’t vote with our wallets.
My voting with my wallet is very limited since my wallet is very thin.
(but I did take my retirement in a lump sum and paid off all my loans, mortgages, etc, tired of giving too much of my money to the bankstas.)
Diane I’m curious on your views regarding teacher-led schools. This week the Teacher Powered Schools National Conference will be in Minneapolis -http://www.teacherpowered.org/conference Many of the schools attending are charter schools that are non-unionized. For the majority of those schools the unionizing debate has not been an issue because the teachers are in control. In the case of Minnesota charter schools there is a statutory requirement for the school board to have a majority of its member as licensed teachers. In addition, many of the schools are part of the Center for Teaching Quality and define themselves as teacher-led schools. In these schools the teaching staff decide on all curriculum, operations, staffing and budget. For more information on this model see Kim Farris-Berg’s book Trusting Teachers with School Success. In my experience when teachers (and teacher’s unions) work together with administration, as opposed to the usual adversarial relationship, everyone wins and unions are not necessary.