Ninety-three percent of charters are non-union. This is part of their business plan. Teachers work long hours and turn over frequently. This keeps costs low.
Sometimes charter teachers try to form a union. The management fights them, as big business did decades ago.
This article in Salon shows how charters fight to keep unions out.
Hella Winston reports that charter management fights unions by intimidating teachers, even calling in cops. Teachers have no rights.
Why do they want a union?
“Alliance educators began their push to unionize in large measure, Mernick says, because they were concerned their employer was not “actualizing its core values,” including the establishment of smaller classes and a personalized learning environment for its students, most of whom are poor and Latino or black. Mernick says that teachers who have signed on to the union effort want more input into decisions regarding curriculum and pedagogy. They’re also questioning how the school assesses their performance and discloses how it spends its funds. Making changes in these areas, Mernick believes, will help Alliance retain the kinds of qualified teachers it prides itself on hiring….
”
Of the non-Alliance schools, there were 11 where administrators held captive-audience meetings—one-on-one or group meetings called by management and held on company time and property, in which management is legally permitted to share anti-union opinions; 12 where teachers brought charges of retaliatory action or threats against teachers involved in organizing; and eight schools where administrators made jurisdictional or legal challenges intended to impede unionization. Schools in the Alliance network had incidents of all three, as well.
Captive-audience meetings are one of the most common experiences teachers reported. These meetings—long opposed by labor advocates, who argue that they give bosses undue power to pressure and coerce employees, who have no legal right to hold their own such meetings—are typically called by management in the period after teachers go public with a desire to unionize and before a formal union vote.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My children attended a charter before I realized that Superman was just a guy in a costume. It was supposedly “one of the good ones”. The teachers formed their own Union as an affiliate of the California Teachers Association. But with only 12 teachers or so and 50% turnover every single year, the union leader was often standing alone in fighting for teacher rights and benefits.
One time, facing a budget crisis, the little school board voted to eliminate teachers’ insurance benefits for their dependents and to increase class size without revisiting the bargaining table. It took months to reverse it. In the meantime, the parents and school community took sides in a heated conflict.
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In our district, the divide and conquer tactics of school “reform” have devastated many traditional neighborhoods. One reason our city can now not agree on much of anything is because there is little overall understanding of the many fractured interests. School “reform” has done so much more than invade our schools.
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I completely agree. Who knew that we would reach a point when supporting schools would become controversial? People think they have to take sides in a complex political conflict before they help schools. The reformers have been hugely successful in their public relations campaigns.
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YES.
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Is it too hyperbolic to say that the so-called reformers are traitors to democracy, since everything they’ve done – eliminating/taking over school boards, closing public schools and simultaneously funding private charters, pitting parents and communities against each other to facilitate continued expansion – is an intentional tactic, strategy or policy outcome.
Take away the naifs (of whom there are many), the apolitical opportunists who benefit whichever way the wind blows (likewise) and one is left with a nexus of scam-trepreneurs, cynically manipulating PR-generated social justice cliches… insidious and straight-out evil.
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VERY well said.
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Teacher unions have even weakened incredibly. Teachers do more and more without any questions asked. We are progressing rapidly back to the old days without unions. I’m sure other teachers feel this too.
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“Teachers do more and more without any questions asked.”
GAGA* teachers one and almost all.
Did the teachers speak out when the custodial, bus and cafeteria workers were “privatized”? Wasn’t there some name Niemöller who said something about “First they came for. . . and I didn’t speak out then they came for . . .and I didn’t speak out. . . “?
*Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution** upon their passing from this realm.
**Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to Go Along to Get Along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
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I totally agree with you. I’m appalled of crazy things that the younger teachers are letting pass right by them. Yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I’ll do that too. That..no problem! Yes, I can eat my lunch in five minutes….Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes.
I am a teacher close to retirement who has given tons and tons of free hours over thirty years of weekends. I view that as being dedicated…
I’m talking crazy stuff….These younger teachers do not realize that they are walking into a buzz saw of low pay, no job security, and a job which is so miserable that they will never be able to sustain it.
Sadly, I think I’m in the last ten years of teachers being able to make it to retirement.
I’m very afraid that in the next five to ten years we will be seeing teachers all over the United States running to the door…….and finding other jobs to get groceries and pay the electric bill.
Even more sadly, this is exactly what the deformers planned for.
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Will public elementary and secondary schools face the college/university crisis of not paying for full-time tenured professors, but cobbling a school year together with an ever changing lineup of very low-paid adjuncts? We (society) also have not done much to stop that game, either.
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Likewise, here in NYC it’s hard to imagine any teacher with less than ten or twelve years in the system making it to a minimally decent pension. There are now six pension tiers, and the last requires ten years before vesting, double the previous time, and increased contributions.
The ultimate intention is to make the job so onerous, and the once-generous benefits so increasingly out-of-reach, that the young innocents coming to slaughter in the profession will submit to the replacement of the precious defined-benefit pension with a 401K. When that happens, we’ll be a long way toward an industry-wide standard of teachers as temps.
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Teachers from one of the best funded charters in Chicago, the Uno chain are unionized and are taking a strike vote. https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/uno-charter-school-teachers-to-take-strike-vote/8a80f3a4-9a66-4a77-a903-ded28d099299 Guess what their issues are?
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Fast food schools that pretend to be gourmet restaurants are what almost all charter schools are.
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Organizing Unions has never been easy except for a short period between. The Wagner act and Taft Hartley . 15 years the Republicans seek to make it more difficult than it is.
So unless workers are willing to put it all on the line they will continue to be crushed
But history reveals oligarchies fall. They may may not always end where we want them to
But they do fall.
Bu
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Democrats are doing nothing other than pretending to support labor. When Walker creamed teachers in Wisconsin, Obama did nothing except make a weak comment about union busting. Too many Democrats are working in tandem with conservatives to destroy public education. They are even afraid to open their mouths in support of public schools for fear of stopping the money train from Silicon Valley and hedge funds.
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Which is why I think Hillary is Republican-lite.
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No argument here which is why once elected Hillary must meet a wall of opposition on her left
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“You say you want a revoLUtionnn….”
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My first year of teaching, incredibly, our glorious leader, the principal presided over union meetings. The union was in its infancy and the next year the principal was forever banned from union meetings, for obvious reasons. He was grumbling and whining that he was now excluded from control over the union meetings. What a bozo. One anti-union teacher (her brother was the superintendent of schools) said that all those union leaders were weirdos. I just ignored this right wing troll. This lady drove to school in a huge new Cadillac and her husband was a president of a bank, her teaching salary was extra lunch money for her. I drove to school in a 7 year old Dodge Pioneer and my salary was my salary, period. Unions will always be needed and necessary.
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Diane, I am curious about your thoughts on Teacher-Powered Schools http://www.teacherpowered.org/ I understand it is currently a very small movement, but there are now teacher-powered schools in about 19 states. Many of the schools are charters and non-union, but since the teachers have the final say on almost all aspects of the school operation many of them don’t feel that they need a union. In many cases the teachers make up the majority of the school board, so they are responsible for everything from employment contracts, to curriculum, to calendar, to budget, to professional development. It may not work in large districts, but as someone who has worked in both systems, I much prefer having a say in how my school runs and being treated as a professional.
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My opinion, even though I wasn’t asked, is reflected in understanding the business model behind the charter school movement.The stated goal of New Schools Venture Fund ($22 mil. in Gates funding), is
” to develop diverse charter school organizations that produce different brands on a large scale.” There’s ample evidence that Mom and Pop charters will survive, at the same rate that small retailers did, when Walmart moved in. For an illustrative education model, look at universities. College faculty had the role that you describe. After business-centric people took over, only 25%-30% remained full time. And, that can’t even be expected, in the short-run for K-12. Gates and Pearson are investors, in the largest seller of schools-in-a-box. When U.S. schools are privatized, neighborhood charters will lose their tax revenue. And, then, the schools-in-a-box will be promoted, like the World Bank promotes them in other nations, which will make Mom and Pop schools financially uncompetitive. It’s highly doubtful that “teacher powered schools” can compete for rich kids, against heavily-endowed prestigious private schools. There’s no shortage of self-interested people touting the “ideal setting”, who are being used to put a façade on the destruction of public education. They ignore obvious anticipated outcomes b/c it doesn’t benefit them to understand. They ignore, that political clout doesn’t exist for the “ideal”. And, protecting public education isn’t worth the effort for them, because it doesn’t put money directly in their pockets.
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Slate article cross-posted at: http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-lengths-that-charter-s-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Management_Rights_Teachers-Unions_Union-Busting-161004-682.html
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Remember: all this anti-union propaganda in charter schools is 100% publicly-funded.
We’re all paying for this.
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..as well as for their profit margin and their advertising/ marketing budget and their investors’ ‘New Markets Tax Credit.’
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As an American born educator living in Ontario, Canada, I have the right to join and be treated equally in a union, professional association or other vocational association. This applies to membership in trade unions and self-governing professions, including the terms and conditions of membership, rates of pay and work assignments. It includes employees’, employers’ and managers’ associations. My right to form and join a union is protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code, The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the International Declaration of Human Rights.
Why are Americans today so unaware of such instruments as the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87) or Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98)? These documents declare that working people have the right to establish their own organizations without preliminary approval, to elect their own representatives freely, and to formulate programs of action and create federations and confederations.
Thomas Paine would argue Americans standing up for unions stand up for The Union. Is the land of my birth now the land of the incrementally free, home of the formerly brave?
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Any thoughtful person should pause a moment and ask: “Why are hedge funds the biggest promoters of charter schools?” Hedge funds aren’t altruistic — there’s got to be big profit in “non-profit” charter schools in order for hedge fund managers to be involved in backing them.
And even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
One typical practice of charter schools is to pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxy companies which then pocket the public’s tax money as profit. Another profitable practice is that although charter schools use public tax money to purchase millions of dollars of such things as computers, the things they buy with public tax money become their private property and can be sold by them for profit…and then use public tax money to buy more, and sell again, and again, and again, pocketing profit after profit.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities; nevertheless, they get public tax money. Moreover, as the NAACP and ACLU have reported, charter schools are often engaged in racial and economic-class discrimination.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property. NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
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You’re right. Politicians are serving the plutocrats instead of us.
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