In Chicago, 1,000 teachers from 32 charter schools voted to join the nation’s most militant teachers union, the CTU. There are 125 charter schools in Chicago, according to CPS data.
“Unionized teachers at Chicago’s charter schools are one step closer to unifying with their counterparts in the city’s public school district, a historic move that would strengthen opposition to austerity and neoliberal education reform.
“Last week, members of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ChiACTS)—the American Federation of Teachers local representing about 1,000 educators at 32 charter schools—voted to merge their local with the nearly 30,000-member Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
“The unification vote passed with the approval of 84 percent of voting members, ChiACTS said. Before the merger can move forward, CTU members will also have to vote on the measure this fall.
“Our overwhelming vote for unity affirms that charter educators are educators first, and servants of the public with a shared commitment to the futures of our students across the city,” ChiACTS president Chris Baehrend told In These Times.”
Charter lobbyists attempted to dissuade ChiACTS members from approving the merger by describing the CTU as “anti-charter school.” But union leaders dispute this characterization.
“CTU has been very clear that they do not have a problem with our schools. They have a problem with the charter model of public school management,” Baehrend told In These Times….
“Though CTU undoubtedly opposes the expansion of charter schools, as demonstrated by the union’s successful effort to win a moratorium on the opening of new charters last fall, Baehrend said ChiACTS shares this goal.
“Charter proliferation does not help the charter schools that already exist. It actually spreads the pot of money more thinly,” he explained. “We’ve been seeing the nasty effects of it lately. This year, we’ve had budget cuts, layoffs and enrollment decline in the majority of the schools we represent.”
This raises many interesting questions. The major funders of charter schools are militantly anti-union (the Walton Family Foundation). More than 90% of charters are non-union. The business model of charters relies on a constant turnover of young teachers who don’t stay long enough to expect a higher salary or a pension. While it is satisfying to see charter teachers demand a fair contract and the right to bargain collectively, it is important to remember that the reason every Republican governor and so many rightwing philanthropies support charters is that they see them as weapons to bust unions. Can the unionization of charters in Chicago change the anti-union purpose of charter schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t accepting charter teachers into the union validating and normalizing charters tho?
I say let em form their own union and build it from the ground up like generations of public school teachers had to do (only to see it all fall apart within the span of a decade of course.)
They chose to work in a charter. The information about what they are was available when they signed on.
Charters exist, philosophically, as a way to avoid unionized teachers. This won’t somehow end charters or modify them over time to become regular public schools.
I say keep the charter teachers out of our unions. All it will do is 1) validate and normalize charters and 2) decrease charter teacher turnover, thereby normalizing and validating charters.
Maybe we’ve given up and just accept charters as part of the landscape now?
I mean that’s totally fine but we have to call that what it is then.
Losing.
This is a double edged sword, to be certain. Unions wind up protecting charters when responsible for the teachers who work in them. I am reminded of when, here in L.A., our union agreed with our district to let a charter off the hook for paying for teachers’ retirements. The district absorbed the cost and kept the charter solvent, union approved because the teachers deserved to be able to retire. But then, there is the other edge of the sword. Charters without collective bargaining requirements can drain as much money as possible from the classroom with no one to stop them. There is a reason the most invasive charter chain here in SoCal had to have a court order it to stop interfering with teachers’ efforts to unionize. I would not look to charter unionization to end the scourge of privatization, but it could in many cases turn the tables on some longstanding injustices. This issue is complex. Good thing no one is trying to boil it down to a value added algorithm.
It is a complicated issue, and I understand both points of view. If charters want to unionize, it could act as a deterrent for some privateers that may be dissuaded from investing in charters. It may disincentivize some privateers from pursuing privatization schemes.
I doubt it would be beneficial to members of the AFT or NEA to have charter teachers in the same union. It could work to the advantage of the charter teachers looking for parity with public school teachers. I could work to the disadvantage of public teachers if management tries to use charter school contracts to reduce benefits, salaries etc.using charter school contracts as the basis to negotiate downward. It would probably be better for the public school teachers if the charters schools had their own union. It seems as though the AFT is already moving forward in representing charters without any regard to the impact on public school teachers.
It is established AFT policy to move forward without considering the needs of the public school teachers it purports to represent.
NYSTEACHER
We are going to disagree for a change . On every level my friend you are wrong on this one .
1) It is not your Union , you didn’t fight the fight that created it .
2) For the UFT in NYC which enabled the rest of the state to follow.
Teachers lost that battle . They were rescued by the lions of NYCs labor movement. The most powerful of whom I had the pleasure of working for, 35 years ago right before he passed away . The 1960 walk out to force the recognition of the UFT as the bargaining agent was an abject total failure . Only the two male teachers at my elementary school, PS 200 in Queens walked out . That might have been a good showing city wide. The superintendent of NYC schools ordered the firing of all those who walked . Harry VanArsdale the president of the NYC labor council and several other powerful NYC labor leaders were put in a position they did not want to be in. They had warned those teachers not to strike unless they could shut it down . The failing strike happened anyway. Faced with the threat to fire these workers VanArsdale called Wagner and told him that he and Kennedy could forget about the 1960 election .The following day the superintendent not only rescinded his order the UFT was recognized as the bargaining agent for all NYC teachers . Check the history of the UFT.
So my friend I would say to you none of us alive fought the battles that enabled the labor movement they were fought long before any of us were born . None of us made the sacrifices in blood and personal freedom, in this nation with the most brutal labor history in the First World.
We do not own our Unions . we participate in them and as the two of us have said; our members are the weak link not up to the task at hand.
Done venting ;
Organizing the unorganized is now and always was the way forward . I have had this same battle with members of my own union some of them 3rd Generation who feel entitled for some mysterious reason .
When an employer knows his workers will be organized he has little incentive to try and undercut good employers by hiring none union. Those charter schools are not there to innovate, they are there to profit. Aside from all the other fraud the way they profit is through substandard wages, bennifits and working conditions. Like any other unscrupulous employer .
I will show you the way this should work or should I say works in the industry I am in . Those newly organized employees who can demonstrate through resume,education ,interview and exam that they are sufficiently qualified are rapidly brought up to the journeyman’s rate . Those who do not qualify spend (X) years at a secondary rate but more than they were making and with benefits they did not have. Then they are given the opportunity to take an exam to qualify for the higher rate. Presumably with teachers you would want to see them pursue the educational certifications that public school teachers have.
Not only should we be organizing the unorganized the Labor movement has to expand and become a true social justice movement, battling the oligarchy, our nation is becoming(perhaps always was ) . We in labor spend more time fighting each other than those that seek to crush us. We don’t want to be fighting other workers we want to be uniting with them, whether they be other teachers or fast food workers scraping out an existence. We want to unite with environmentalists , consumer groups and civil rights groups to protect the America people .Because the enemies of labor are the enemies of all other progressive causes.
Hope you enjoyed your fathers day.
Joel,
Thanks for the comment.
First off, I never claimed that I was anything but the beneficiary of the hard-fought fights you so aptly describe. I claim no lineage to them. I am a 40 year old, 16 years-in, reluctant as all hell, never-was-my-life-ambition-to-be-a-teacher, teacher. I believe in what i do, i am good at what i do (on a good day). I am a proud union member however with a distinct belief in unions. I was never part of any teachers union that was anything but in decline. I agree with you fully on all of that. All I was saying re. Our current unions was that they were bled for and that I wasn’t particularly keen on a bunch of charter teachers jumping in when all of the evidence points to a bunch of folks who knew what charters were all about and went and worked there anyway. That’s about all I was thinking on the whole topic. So sure, feel free to disagree with that point….you are likely correct that they should be folded in. I dunno. I was just working off that one basic idea and I didnt go much further. I get the philosophical principles behind organizing all workers. Again, also agree with you. It just got my panties in a wrinkle a bit to think of all those charter teachers who once thought they knew better coming over on our team.
I mean the fact is that the real rubber meeting the road on school privatization is technology in the classroom. One day soon the whole charter thing will be moot.
Thanks for the Father’s Day wishes….though I am mostly certain that I have no children. Of this I am grateful. I hope you had a good day if you claim paternity. Best wishes my friend.
Excellent response!!! Bravo!
NYSTEACHER
That was a thoughtful response. I fully understand what you are feeling . I have dealt with it many times with many of my fellow union members .
I like to think of myself as third generation only because of the age difference between me and my much older brother, who took his P.E. left the union and became a Union contractor .. After college I was never going to be an electrician. It was going to be a short stay on my way through grad school. Work ,school and the City Financial crisis led me to taking a withdrawal . Nothing like falling asleep by the third page of every reading.
Except for some of those TFA types who have no plans on career, . most of those newly organized workers knew what they were doing, was not quite honorable . Knew that they were undermining the living standards of other workers . They did what they did because they had to survive . I am sure they would have jumped at the opportunity, to be a Union Teacher or a Union Electrician. Of course as I like to point out they weren’t third generation Electricians in a father and son union. Or they did not have a political connection to drop a calling card in a suburban district, ,as did some of the teachers I know. Make no mistake the trades may no longer be farther and son . But few sons who want in are left out .
Over the years the thing I have noticed is that, many (by no means all )of those newly organized members are more active than members who got in through nepotism. They appreciate the opportunity they were given and had experienced a non union work place. The lineage always gave me a leg up, dealing with members who were first generation or second generation on the issue of intolerance to organizing. . They were not going to question my motives.
The dynamic is similar to the issues surrounding the immigration debate . In both cases these are problems generated by employers .
The overwhelming majority of European migration to this country was legal not because our Grand Parents and Great Grand Parents were law abiding but because there were no immigration restrictions till 1923 . Unless you happened to have been Chinese. In which case you were banned from 1882-1943. .Being here first , does not make one a better American as having the benefit of a Union Job does not make one a better Union member.
1000 thousand employees at 32 employers is quite a feat. CTA did a great job and bottom up unionism works well.
This is a big problem in L.A. United Teachers Los Angeles has been spending huge amounts of money “organizing” charter school scabs. A lot of this money comes from NEA and AFT along with CTA and CFT. UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl says that charter school scabs “deserve the protection of a union.” This is an incredibly callous statement given that at the same time UTLA helps in getting rid of experienced teachers. Why do we not deserve union protection?
“The business model of charters relies on a constant turnover of young teachers who don’t stay long enough to expect a higher salary or a pension.”
Profit First, Children Second.
In a related headline–concerning healthcare and business: Profit First, Patients Second. Not far from Profit First, Children Second. As long as this descending order remains, the excellence of service afforded either patients or children will be constantly battered and diminished, and disturbing cultural conflict will continue.
On a political note, capitalism CAN live in a good tension with the responsibilities of good leadership and government. It’s when those who “want it all” forget that leadership and responsibility and become predatory, fabricators, and manipulators of the government, and of those who benefit from neither capitalism nor foul government–when those predators try to take the whole thing over, that capitalism has seen its day and is no longer a fair option. That’s not just my political opinion. Rather, it’s just how things work. In the long term, THAT’s real-politic.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/07/13/putting-profits-ahead-of-patients/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Health%20care%20Afghanistan%20DiMaggio&utm_content=NYR%20Health%20care%20Afghanistan%20DiMaggio+CID_c943540b4f1cdc3fb309be2d05cbae90&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Putting%20Profits%20Ahead%20of%20Patients
These teachers must not have felt “empowered”- ed reform replaces actual enforceable rights with words like “empowerment”.
It’s really incredibly patronizing. It’s how one treats volunteers, not people who are earning a living to support their families.
A significant chunk of the charter agenda is comprised of union busting, children first and choice. It is ironic that charter teachers recognize the advantages of collective bargaining. Personally, I have little sympathy for charter teachers. The proliferation of charter schools in Newark has made my work harder and harder. While they teach the cherry picked children, public schools teachers welcome all with open arms. As a reward for our unstinting hospitality we our vilified for being bad teachers in “failing” schools. A former charter school teacher described to me the advantages of being in a union. In his previous place of employment, he would come to work on some mornings and find e-mail messages reaming him out on his computer. “Workers of the world unite.”
The “failing public schools” narrative in ed reform is really awful and boy, is it pervasive. It is EVERYWHERE, in everything they write and say. They’re so pickled in it they don’t even hear themselves. RELENTLESSLY negative. They can’t even credit a public system with improvement. If a public school system improves it is assumed that improvement only happened because of the existence of charter schools or vouchers. They actually promote vouchers in Ohio by pointing to any public school that improved “see that? Private schools did that!” I mean, JEEZ. Would it kill them to admit a public school might have improved because the PUBLIC school did something?
I like to speculate on what would happen if we had a US Sec of Ed who talked about charter schools the way all of DC talks about public schools.
That person would not have a job. They would be effectively barred from employment in the federal government. Yet Betsy DeVos conducts taxpayer funded “public schools suck!” tours once a month.
“Charter proliferation does not help the charter schools that already exist. It actually spreads the pot of money more thinly,” he explained. “We’ve been seeing the nasty effects of it lately. This year, we’ve had budget cuts, layoffs and enrollment decline in the majority of the schools we represent.”
Charter promoters call this “flooding the market”. Before they figured out that it sounds terrible they used to brag about it in Ohio. The chaos and disruption of ordinary peoples’ lives was considered a plus- it would shake us out of our “complacency”.
They seem to have figured out that talking about neighborhoods like they are some experimental population who must be manipulated into Correct Beliefs wasn’t really very “empowering” so they dropped all the market language about “flooding” and “creating new markets”.
It has always been a ridiculous assumption that we can provide all these choices and still have strong, well funded public schools. They never discuss this as it is assumed the public schools are really just the host to the parasites. They tried to sell market place competition as a positive for all, but we know this is a big lie. The privateers have never really cared one iota about impact on those left in public schools stripped of resources.
Of course not. Why should Netflix care about putting Blockbuster out of business? Why should Gates/Microsoft be concerned about Apple? Why should Samsung be concerned about LG or Panasonic or how many other electronics manufacturers? Heck, tech and electronics manufacturers don’t even give a hoot about their workers in sweatshops who die or commit suicide on there cents-a-day salaries. KIPP and other such Big Wigs in the charter school chains don’t care what happens to the public schools, private schools, other charter schools – all they want is the ca$h, and TFA is complicit in providing revolving doors of “teacher/temps” who will work 2 years, and magically become principals of their own charter school and pay themselves handsomely. It was never about improving education; it was about taking over, privatizing, profiting, and gobbling up sweet real estate deals and management fees. They don’t care about education – they’d be happy with “school in a box” which is “attended” from wherever you are – eliminating every layer of care and oversight.
CTU will merge with the charters b/c it wants the cash infusion, and will say it makes the union stronger – but we all know that is B.S., particularly in California where many teachers have been hung out to dry, where Deasy testified against the teachers, etc. We know the history.
IDK what the solution is, but I’ll tell you this…a woman with a 2 year old was telling me about a new charter school in her neighborhood that focuses on STEM…and I advised her that it was Gulan school, owned by a Turkish hermit who lives reclusively in PA and to read up on it, that this location buses kids in from several towns away, wherein her kid will likely never make a neighborhood friend because none of the attendees are from her neighborhood, which makes it harder for group projects logistically and getting kids together. I told her to come here and educate herself – she has a few years to learn about charters. By the way, there is absolutely nothing “wrong” with her local neighborhood school, but she is reading about the kool-aid, perhaps not drinking it yet.
This must be a tough situation for ed reform politicians. Now they’ll have to admit to the public that they oppose labor unions and labor rights.
Uh, oh.
Terrific comment, Chiara.
And, this issue is, indeed, a VERY sticky wicket.
Years ago, before I even knew what charter schools were, I applied for a position at one. They needed a special education teacher and I needed a teaching job. I toured the odd, oblong room in this brand new building where they planned to stick me with nine 6-8th grade students with a variety of needs, ELL, behavior , emotional, LD,.. I was to teach all of them every subject all day in this little room stuck off in an isolated corner. My “aide” would be a security guard who could be called from the hall if needed. At the end of the day they would all have their special classes. The arrangement had something to do with the contract requirements of the district teachers whose contracted day ended at 3:00. Their schedules took precedence over mine as a lowly charter employee. Fortunately, the gods intervened and I did not get the job. I had naively disclosed past health issues at the end of the interview, and all of a sudden I could not get through to the central office to complete the hiring paperwork. I don’t care how skilled a teacher you are, no one would have been successful in that classroom, and I am not talking about test scores. Now, I hope that most people going into or returning to teaching (as I was ) are less naive than I; in any case, even if you refuse to believe there are genuine teachers in charters, the students deserve teachers who have some voice in their schools if they are actually going to get an education. More often than not that means a union.
The teacher unions face a dilemma. becasue they have stood by, and often enabled the metastasis of charter schools, they now have no choice but to organize charter school teachers.
But what happens when the next, inevitable round of fiscal austerity arrives, and public school funding is cut back while charters expand?
As if I have to ask that question, knowing the behavior of Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew.
I think I am with Joel on this one. If workers want a voice, they have to unionize. Quibbling over whether they deserve membership only serves those who would destroy unions. It is only through collective action that we will be heard.
I think you misconstrued my comment.
Charter school teachers, like all workers, need and deserve union representation, but that creates an inevitable conflict when charter schools are so grotesquely favored by policy makers. Frankly, it’s quite a stretch to expect public school teachers to show much solidarity with charter school teachers, when charter schools expand while public schools continue to be attacked and faced with austerity.
The hope is that by unionizing charters, their Overclass supporters will desert them, and go on to something else. But they might just be willing to tolerate charter school unionization (especially when those contracts, when achieved, are grossly inferior to those of public school teachers, as is the case) if they can continue expanding them rapidly at the expense of public schools. In a zero sum game such as this, where every dollar for a charter school is a dollar less for the public schools, the Overclass could well be willing to tolerate some unionized charter schools, as long as they can smash and grab control of the overall system.
Smash and grab is their objective, their strategy and their tactic.
The strategy of public school teachers, their unions and supporters of public education should be:
an ban on for-profit charter schools.
a moratorium on opening new charter schools.
eventual re-integration of the quality charter schools that exist (meeting all public school wage, hour and working conditions, and rules for equitably enrolling and serving all students) into local districts.
No public funding for private or religious schools.
These proposals may seem out of reach at the moment, but failure to achieve something along these lines means the destruction of public education as we’ve known it, and as a component of democracy. Needless to say, it also requires a renaissance of awareness and activism by teachers, and a total re-orientation by the unions.
O.K. although I am less concerned with charter teachers joining an activist union like CTU. Making our unions work for the membership is a separate issue. I absolutely agree that charters should have to meet and be judged by the same criteria as public schools since they are receiving public money. I see no reason to encourage their expansion; public dollars should go to public schools although we do need to enact equitable funding formulae.
I think the CTU’s activist culture is largely irrelevant here, since they will be faced with a deep structural problem, which the so-called reformers are happy to foist on them: namely, the creation of a vicious circle whereby public school closings (and Janus-type, right-to-work-for-less legislation) lead to reduced dues income, which leads to the necessity of organizing charter school teachers, which enables the opening of more charters (since the unions would then be dependent on them as a source of income), leading to more public school closings…
The unions can’t finesse this issue, the way Randi Weingarten (to put it as charitably as possible) has done, speaking out of both sides of their mouths ; they must forcefully oppose the lifting of charter caps, (with an eye toward reducing them), and push for the eventual integration of worthy charter schools into local districts, while retaining their autonomy. The remaining Kids In Prison Program scab/union busting outposts should then be shunned, isolated, forced to rely entirely on their billionaire patrons, and hopefully drowned in the bathtub.
I think activist CTU is following your playbook already. Randi Weingarten is irrelevant.