The Walton Family Foundation is not going to like this. The National Labor Relations Board ruled that Teach for America teachers in a Detroit charter school have the right to unionize.
The charter operator fought the TFA newbies, claiming that they weren’t “real” teachers.
“The National Labor Relations Board ruled Friday that Teach for America teachers in a Detroit charter school have the right to be a part of a union.
“According to a statement from the Michigan Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, the NLRB said Friday 14 Teach for America corps members should have been able to vote in an election last spring. That election was held to determine if teachers at University Prep Schools, a charter school network in Detroit, wanted to form a union.
“Detroit 90/90, the private company that operates the schools, argued the Teach for America members, as well as long-term substitutes, were not professional employees.
“We are really pleased to be recognized as professional teachers,” said Patrick Sheehan, a TFA corps member and second grade advisor at the time of the election. “U-Prep hired us to teach just like other teachers. Making the legal argument that we are not professionals means one of two things — either Detroit 90/90 doesn’t respect the work we do with students or they lied to prevent us from organizing a union.”
The vote to unionize at University YES caused their sponsor to abandon the school:
“University Yes Academy teachers voted to unionize earlier this year, despite their parent company — New Urban Learning — announcing it was walking away from the school. The announcement of New Urban Learning walking away from University Yes took place days after the school’s teachers announced they planned to hold a vote on unionization.”
Why won’t the Walton Family Foundation like these developments? The Waltons, owners of Walmart, don’t like unions. They like charters, because 90% or so are non-union. They have given more than $50 million to TFA to supply the workforce for non-union charters.
Kids! What’s the matter with kids today?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Problem with kids today is they don’t want a single one of their billions of dollars passing into the hands of anyone who may actually need it.
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And when teachers are no longer classed as “government workers”, there goes one of the always invalid but still often used excuses for saying they can’t strike. Wouldn’t that be poetic justice?
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I know. When my charter unionized, management kept trying to scare us by raising the specter of a strike. Meanwhile, they were fighting for our union to be under federal, not state, law, under which strikes are hardly regulated at all by comparison.
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“The charter operator fought the TFA newbies, claiming that they weren’t “real” teachers.”
Certainly an ironic statement from the charter operator, given many of the discussions on this blog regarding quality and retention of TFA recruits.
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Certainly is an interesting day when charter operators agree with us over here!
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GE2L2R: what you said.
Christine Langhoff: what you said.
Don’t be surprised if a rheephorm shill or troll accuses one or both of you of injecting an ugly and threatening tone in the ed debates because y’all pointed out the self-wounding contradictions of the so-called “education reform” movement.
But, as I’ve said before on this blog, all you two did was skewer the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” with their own words and deeds. They did all the heavy lifting; you just reported what was said and done.
😎
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And now we clearly know why TFA and charters are so important – union busting.
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Ever since I began to meet, teach or be friends w/students that chose TFA, I found many/most of them were terrific young people. I never fully trusted the organization or its underlying assumptions and self-interested rhetoric [and still really don’t]. But the kids I knew reminded me of Viet Nam vets in the sense I should’ve hated that war, BUT treated w/caring and respect all those that fought in and maintained a sense of decency and patriotic motives, etc. I liked so many of these kids and that didn’t stop when they wandered off to the Valley in Texas, or Houston or wherever for at least 2 years of their adult lives.
Now, here some of them are pulling the lion;s tail – in that I wouldn’t expect TFA corporate to love some of the Minions fighting to act like union members. That bangs sharply against the majority of external funders of TFA. BTW, I simply don;t trust at all a lot of that list. Laying down w/them, like the Walmart Foundation, is to embrace a constant future of being flea-ridden. Just like I don;t trust or respect some TFA members or alums that decide in 2years only they are smart enough to fix everything about education in the US. Having said all that, reading about this action by some TFA minions in a hell known as Detroit is quite wonderful. They will do what’s necessary, the best among them, no matter what the company line designates.
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Speaking of the Walton Foundation’s influence, it is present in Ohio big time. Bravery in Ohio or just fed up? August 3, 2015.
Superintendents in forty-one school districts in four Ohio counties have had enough.
The Greater Cincinnati School Advocacy Network, not yet with any funding, is a coalition of 41 superintendents who are fed up with federal and state mandates and data-gathering that are eating up budgets and time.
There are different burdens on each district. They want local school boards to have more and they to stop the deluge of unfunded mandates. Their announcement came a few weeks after Governor and Presidential candidate John Kasich cut $78 million from the state education budget. In southwest Ohio, some districts have a sudden shortfall of millions.
Among programs some superintendents want to scrap are the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (VAM plus SLO nonsense—47.5% to 50% of the teacher’s evaluation), Third Grade Reading Guarantee, and College Credit Plus.
Superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools Mary Ronan reported she is forced to choose between hiring a teacher or someone to input all of the data the state requires. She amplified for the press: “Why does the state capitol need to know what class my child is in during third bell? We struggle with the millions of pieces of data they want.”
The frustration has accelerated with the testing regime. Ronan said that last year, students were taught until February. That is when testing windows for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career Readiness (PARCC) began, and that cost us $28 million. “Next year we get a new test because lawmakers scrapped PARCC. “ Ronan added: “It is just about the most chaotic time that I have every seen in my career.”
Unfortunately, Ohio’s shill for Student’s First, Greg Harris, said these superintendents are just trying to dodge accountability.
The preceding is adapted from “School Leaders Unload on State” by Hannah Sparling, Cincinnati Enquirer, August, 4, 2015.
Reporter Hannah Sparling failed to be critical of Student First spokesperson, Greg Harris or the agenda of Student First in Ohio.
She is new at the newspaper. For this reason, I sent her a detailed email informing her about the privatization agenda of Students First in more than a dozen states, information on major funders and the octopus arms of this organization. I added links to a few of Diane’s posts about Students First, and a job description for a position in NY State comparable to that of Greg Harris in Ohio.
That job description and several others are worth a look. You will see the sophistication of Students First the larger campaign to privatize schools, eliminate school boards, set up “achievement districts” free of oversight by elected officials and the rest.
A big part of the job is keeping up the pretence that Students First is about students. Far from it.
https://studentsfirst.org/careers?gh_jid=75907
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Unfunded mandates is exactly right. If every ed reformer in the country wants to put their personal favorite policy into every public school in the state they are going to have to start paying for it.
Can Ohio lawmakers not say “no”? Are they incapable of restraint? We have every imaginable ed reform in this state, piled one of top of the other and they cut funding to public schools every year. We have everything from unlimited, unregulated charter schools to teacher measurement systems to Common Core to the Parent Trigger.
Our elected officials have to start saying “NO” to these lobbyists. Enough. This state’s children should not be the national ed reform experimental population.
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Mike Sacken,
TFA worker activism, delivered poetic justice, to the corporate funders.
Respectfully, Detroit is not a hell. It’s a city that fell on hard times. Last year, I visited the downtown with friends. We stayed at RenCen, overlooking the river walk and had a wonderful time. Some of the people enjoying metro Detroit, along with us, live there and others were tourists.
Quicken Loans has assumed office space in downtown Detroit, providing jobs. And, major efforts in urban planning, have shrunk, area housing, to match population. Detroit’s ball park and museum are impressive and certainly the city is worth a visit. The mix of cultures, make the city vibrant
When Belle Isle is resurrected, it will be the city’s crown jewel.
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Thanks Laura for writing to the reporter. I have contacted journalists and asked them to identify, for their readers, the funders of Fordham, Students First Ohio and, the Ohio Alliance of Charter schools.
I hope Sparling isn’t as resistant to writing about the big education picture, as other reporters are.
Before his current gig, Greg Hand was the spokesperson for the University of Cincinnati, a public state university.
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Linda. Read again. Greg Hand is not the person who was speaking for StudentsFirst. The person at Students First is Greg Harris.
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Laura,
Thanks for the correction.
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I know This needs to stop Get politics out of education
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Monetizing our children has led to all the political interference in education. It has to stop. Let teachers teach and students learn in free public schools.
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“Kids! What’s the matter with kids today?”
The parents that raised them, the teachers that taught them and most importantly television and cell devices.*
*in other words the society that surrounds them.
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The big hurdle here is that since taxpayers seem to foot the bill for the charter even if they close, the hydra cobra schools can just close up shop and open another branch that hasn’t sought unionization.
It is going to advance to the point where eventually teachers across a network of schools will try to organize such that the business can’t just walk away from the unionization force.
The insidious part of creating so many independent LEAs is it creates a moving target for labor unions whereas a public school district just can’t dissolve overnight.
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I guess New Urban Learning forgotten that charter advocate mantra always thrown at the union. You know that preferred accusation that goes like this: “It should be about the kids, not the adults.”
Well, apparently the very same employees that they hired are evil now that they looked out for their own personal interest.
Teaching is one of the few professions where people think the job is the reward. Not the compensation, benefits or even respect. I guess hedge fund managers should take $30K per year just because it should be about the joy of managing money.
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So I am a bit confused here. Does the commentariat think that TFA teachers are real teachers or not?
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When putting TFA teachers in front of students, yes. When TFA teachers want a union, no. Charter operators have lots of practice in this area, such as being public when getting tax money and being private when being held accountable.
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No, just the other way around. In front of kids – no; 5 weeks in small class settings do not a practicum make. Needing a union? All workers need a union.
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OMG . . . .
It breathes, it lives again . . . . .
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It’s amusing that reformers claim to value complex thinking, when they use boiler plate language like, “Charter schools are here to stay” (as if saying it, makes it true).
The slogan was trotted out by someone from the Ohio Alliance of Charter Schools, in a newspaper opinion piece. An internet search turns up identically-worded blather in N.Y. newspaper columns.
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The charters are there to stay, but the teachers who work in them are not.
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Joe Nathan has favorably stated in the past that unionized charters exist and that they are viable and could be a model.
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I’m ambivalent about charter teachers getting union representation. In Los Angeles we have more collocated charter schools than anywhere on the planet–assisted by a terrible state law that requires public schools to give up classroom space for privately run charters. Schools and communities counting on the teachers union to join the fight to save their schools might be disappointed because the union will not fight its own members from the charter side. Now TFA, another force setting out to destroy public education, is going to get union protections? I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.
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Who says that charter unions and public school unions wouldn’t be on the same side, anyway? I’m president of the Chicago charter union, and we fall straight down the line with CTU on just about everything, if not everything; there’s no fighting at all. Our Local has called for a moratorium on school closings and new charters in 2012, and tried, but failed, to get that passed at the AFT convention that year. We supported the CTU strike. Their service representatives serve our councils.
I think the idea that people who teach at charter schools are on board with the privatization movement is misguided, falling for the charter operators’ bullshit. In my seven years of experience doing this, I’ve very rarely met a teacher at a charter school who started working at one for any reason other than that’s where the jobs were. When they’ve laid off several thousand public school teachers here and those teachers have a right to be rehired, and the charters are expanding, there’s really no place to work for a new teacher other than a charter. Those people deserve union representation and, for the most part, they are not corporate ed reform supporters.
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You’re right. The union should be opposed to charter schools. One reason, charter school debt provides an 18% return to Wall Street. The money should be spent on students, not hedge funds and their pals. Secondly, there is still no answer to what happens when the philanthropies pull their financial support from the charter industry.
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I see a fundamental divide in our culture between the autocratic and the democratic. The dominance of autocracy and the subservience of democracy disadvantages the greater good. Re: public education, legitimate stakeholders, foregoing their rights and responsibilities, along with overly-ambitious autocrats have contributed to the creation of the status quo — a dysfunctional public education system and the prey of privatization.
Among each major stakeholder group — off campus and on campus — are further subdivisions, some of which are as or more divisive than that of the culture at large. On campus are the administration, classroom teachers, our-of-classroom staff, and the students. Off campus are the parents, neighborhood residents, and the people working in local commercial, civic, cultural, etc., enterprises that comprise the local socio-economic resources of the area. And through the taxes they all pay they all support public education.
At this point in time, the only legally mandated input in the governing of the school is through the vote that can be cast for a representative on the Board of Education of the local school district. As recent election turnouts have indicated — about 10% in LAUSD — the voice of all stakeholders combined is barely a whisper.
The parent trigger idea at first struck me as an opportunity for a more democratic approach for running public schools. I did not see it as privatizing them, but as a process that empowered off-campus stakeholders to work in collaboration with on-campus stakeholders to define and run the school together. Maybe it does takes a village.
But, even before reading Diane’s post and a sampling of the comments, I, too, had rejected the parent trigger idea as the veil obscuring the privatizers behind it was lifted. At the same time, the idea of parents asserting their democratic rights and asserting their personal investment as a necessary component in the discourse and decision making of running a school grabbed me.
So, I hope we don’t discard the quality of “assertability” that the parent trigger demonstrated (however pervertedly), but rather start to use it to build the relationships among all public education stakeholders that create avenues for collaboration in solving the problems our schools face today and will continually face as time goes on.
Less autocracy, more democracy.
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