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Virginia: Vote NO on Putting Anti-Union Statute in State Constitution

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2016 //
6

At the elections next week, Virginians will be faced with a proposal to write its so-called “right-to-work” laws into the state constitution.

Even conservative newspapers say this is a bad idea.

This is from an editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:


This newspaper has always supported Virginia’s right-to-work law — and we continue to do so. The law, which prohibits making union membership a condition of employment, is good for the commonwealth’s economy and helpful in keeping a proper balance between unions and employers.

But not every good law deserves to be raised to the level of constitutional writ. A speed limit of 25 mph is a good idea. We can think of no more worthy cause than saving children’s lives. But writing that speed limit into the Virginia Constitution would be foolish and wrongheaded.

Constitutions create frameworks for governance. They lay down a set of rules by which all other rules should be established: Bills for appropriating money shall originate in the House of Representatives, the president may veto legislation, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, the governor shall be elected to one four-year term, and so forth. They are not supposed to be cluttered up with detailed compendiums of what government allows and forbids. That is what the legal code is for.

This is the principal reason Virginians should reject the proposed amendment. There also is a secondary reason.

Virginia law does more than forbid requiring someone to join a union in order to get or hold a job. The Code of Virginia also forbids making employment conditional upon non-membership in a union. In other words, it is against the law for a company either to force you to join a union, or to force you not to.

This is a properly neutral stance. Yet the proposed amendment includes only the former provision from the Code of Virginia, not the latter. In short: While the state code is neutral, the amendment is tilted against union membership.

It is one thing for individuals and companies to take sides in the tug-of-war between workers and employers. The government should not — and it most definitely should not inscribe its partiality in its own foundational documents. That Virginia Republicans have sought to mar the state’s Constitution with what is, at bottom, a political stunt ought to be a mark of enduring shame.

Categories Unions, Virginia

Rebecca Mead of The New Yorker: Did the Candidates Forget about K-12 Education?

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2016 //
29

Rebecca Mead writes in The New Yorker that the presidential campaign has almost entirely overlooked K-12 education. The subject never came up in the presidential debates (nor did climate change).

She writes:

Unsurprisingly, the candidates differ as much on their approach to education as they do on virtually every other issue, as the Washington Post outlined in a helpful analysis earlier this month. In September, Donald Trump delivered a speech at the Cleveland Arts and Sciences Academy, a charter school in Cleveland, Ohio, in which he offered his vision, though not before delivering an extended peroration about the perfidies of his Democratic opponent—e-mail, Iraq, the Clinton Foundation—unrelated to educational concerns. When he did get around to his own proposals, he spoke of expanding existing school-choice programs, promising that in a Trump Administration twenty billion dollars of federal education funds would be reassigned to provide a block grant enabling the eleven million students living in poverty to attend the private or public school of their parents’ choice. “Competition always does it,” he said. “The weak fall out and the strong get better. It is an amazing thing.” He advocated merit pay for teachers, stated his opposition to Common Core, and spoke in favor of charter schools and against teachers’ unions. “It’s time for our country to start thinking big and correct once again,” he declared, thereby failing to meet the second-grade Common Core standard 2.1.E. (“Use adjectives and adverbs, and choose between them depending on what is to be modified.”)

Clinton has a long-standing commitment to educational issues; as First Lady of Arkansas, in 1983, she headed a committee to improve academic achievement among the state’s public-school students. She has declared the intention of “preparing, supporting, and paying every child’s teacher as if the future of our country is in their hands,” and has given some suggestions as to how that estimable goal would be accomplished. She has said that she will provide funding to increase the teaching of computer science; she has also pledged to fund the rebuilding of school infrastructure, and to address the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, whereby African-American and minority students are disproportionately subject to overly punitive disciplinary policies, often involving law enforcement, within the schools they attend; she would fund interventions in social and emotional learning, to the tune of two billion dollars.

Clinton has left us all guessing about charter schools, but she has a balancing act: She needs money to run her campaign (think DFER), and she needs to satisfy the her strong supporters, the teachers’ unions, whose very existence is put at risk by the growth of the non-union charter industry (more than 90% of charter schools are non-union).

But of this we can be sure: Trump is 100% aligned with the far-right that hates public schools and unions. He loves charter schools and vouchers. He thinks he will “get rid” of the Common Core, but he doesn’t know that the president does not have the power to do so. His surrogate Carl Paladino of Buffalo, New York, said that Trump would not put an educator in charge of the Department of Education. The Trump campaign seems to look at public education as a cancerous growth on American society.

A vote for Trump is a vote to cripple and perhaps abandon public education.

A vote for Clinton is a vote for a candidate who has some good ideas and who knows that Obama’s education policies have been unsuccessful. Many think she will continue the status quo, but count me as one who expects that she will look for ways to improve public schools, not destroy them.

Categories Charter Schools, Clinton, Privatization, Trump, U.S. education, Unions, Vouchers

David Sirota: Scandal in Massachusetts!

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2016 //
13

David Sirota and a team of investigative reporters have discovered that the pension funds of teachers in Massachusetts are being tapped by Wall Street financiers to underwrite Question 2, which will authorize an expansion of non-union charter schools. Unions are spending millions of dollars to defend the public schools of Massachusetts against privatization. Meanwhile, their own pension funds are financing the campaign to increase privatization.

“When Massachusetts public school teachers pay into their pension fund each month, they may not realize where the money goes. Wall Street titans are using some of the profits from managing that money to finance an education ballot initiative that many teachers say will harm traditional public schools.

“An International Business Times/MapLight investigation has found that executives at eight financial firms with contracts to manage Massachusetts state pension assets have bypassed anti-corruption rules and funneled at least $778,000 to groups backing Question 2, which would expand the number of charter schools in the state. Millions more dollars have flowed from the executives to nonprofit groups supporting the charter school movement in the lead-up to the November vote. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, himself a former financial executive, is leading the fight to increase the number of publicly funded, privately run charter schools in Massachusetts — and he appoints trustees to the board that directs state pension investments….

“This report is the latest in an IBT/MapLight series examining how anti-corruption laws are circumvented or unenforced. The cash flowing to the Massachusetts school initiative spotlights more than just a fight over education policy: It exemplifies one of the ways in which the securities and investment industry can get around a federal rule that was designed to restrict financial executives from giving campaign cash to governors with the power to influence state pension business.

“In the case of Massachusetts, since the federal rule does not cover money donated to governors’ policy initiatives, executives banned from donating directly to Gov. Baker are able to give to a constellation of groups that are pushing his pet cause — and that in some cases are advised by Baker’s political associates. Meanwhile, Baker’s appointees at the state pension board are permitted to continue delivering investment deals and fees to those same donors’ firms.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Pensions, Privatization, Unions

Chicago: Will Charter Teachers Go on Strike?

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2016 //
5

The city of Chicago averted a teachers’ strike, but charter teachers at the city’s largest chain–UNO–may go on strike.

This is richly ironic, because one of the central goals of the charter industry is to kill teachers’ unions.

93% of charters are non-union. The Walton family of union-haters has promised to spend $1 billion on new charters in the next five years.

Juan Rangel, founder of UNO, resigned in 2013 after revelations of nepotism, conflicts of interest, etc.

Keep your eye on Chicago.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Unions

Salon: How Charters Bust Unions

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2016 //
27

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_grind/2016/09/the_lengths_that_charter_schools_go_to_when_their_teachers_try_to_form_unions.html

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.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Unions

Mike Klonsky: The Chicago Tribune Mocks the Union and Democracy

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2016 //
36

Mike Klonsky writes about the latest anti-union screed from the Chicago Tribune.

Funny thing about the Trib: they complain about the union but not about the Mayor’s indifference to the children of Chicago.

Categories Chicago, Democracy, Unions

In Honor of Labor Day: The National Labor Relations Board Decides that Charter Schools are not Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2016 //
12

You know this story already, as it was decided a few days ago, but it is nice to see the headline in the Washington Post:

National Labor Relations Board decides charter schools are private corporations, not public schools

The National Labor Relations Board decided in two separate cases last week that — as far as federal labor law is concerned — charter schools are not public schools but private corporations.

The decisions apply only to the specific disputes from which they arose, involving unionization efforts at charter schools in New York and in Pennsylvania. But they plunge the labor board into a long-running debate over the nature of charter schools: publicly funded, privately run institutions that enroll about 3 million students nationwide.

Charter school advocates have long argued that charters are public schools because they are tuition-free, open-enrollment institutions funded primarily with tax dollars. But union leaders and other critics describe charters as private entities that supplant public schools, which are run by elected officials, with nonprofit and for-profit corporations that are run by unelected boards that are unaccountable to voters.

In its recent decisions, both issued Aug. 24, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Hyde Leadership Charter School in Brooklyn and the Pennsylvania Virtual Charter School are — like other government contractors — private corporations that receive taxpayer dollars. In the New York case, for example, the board found that even though state law describes charter schools as existing “within the public school system,” the schools were not directly established by a government entity and the people who administer them are not accountable to public officials or to voters.

“Hyde was not established by a state or local government, and is not itself a public school,” reads the board’s majority opinion, signed by Democrats Kent Hirozawa and Lauren McFerran.

The decisions mean that the schools’ employees must organize under the National Labor Relations Act, which applies to private-sector employees, rather than under state laws that apply to public-sector employees.

This is not the first time that the NLRB has ruled that a charter school is a private nonprofit corporation, not a state actor. In several previous cases, charter operators fought unionization by contending that they were not public schools and thus not subject to state labor law.

In Philadelphia in 2011, the New Media Technology Charter School insisted that it was not a public school, as it resisted efforts by its staff to unionize, even though it was publicly funded with $5 million annually. Even as it was fighting unionization, the leaders of the school were indicted by a federal grand jury in April and charged with stealing $522,000 in taxpayer funds partly to support a small private school they controlled, a health food restaurant, and a health food store. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board refused to accept jurisdiction over labor negotiations at this or other charter schools because the schools were not public schools subject to state oversight. The NLRB took jurisdiction over the battle at New Media, which insisted it was not a public school; the staff joined the union. The founders of the school were convicted and sentenced to jail. Founded with Gates money, the school closed in June 2016.

There was a similar NLRB ruling in 2012 in the case of the Chicago Mathematics & Science Academy. The school (a Gulen-affiliated school) insisted it was not a public school. The NLRB agreed because it was not created by the state or governed by the state.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard a case in 2009 from Arizona, where a charter school teacher claimed that he was fired and defamed by his employer. He wanted a hearing to clear his name. The Court ruled that the charter school was not a “state actor,” even though state law defines charters as “public schools,” dismissing the employee’s charges against it. The Court concluded that the charter operator was a private corporation with a contract to provide a public service and was not bound by the same laws as public schools.

When the founders of a charter school in California were indicted for misappropriating $200,000, the California Charter School Association submitted an amicus brief in their defense, contending that the charter was operated as a private nonprofit corporation, and thus its founders could not be convicted of theft of public money. Despite their plea, the founders were convicted.

As it happens, I wrote a post about these issues in 2013. Be sure to read Julian Vasquez Heilig’s link on charters and discipline.

Not even state law can turn a privately managed charter school into a “public school.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Unions

Steven Singer: Are Unions the Enemy of School Reform?

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2016 //
36

Steven Singer writes here about the corporate reformers’ war against teachers’ unions. In the comfortable, well-heeled world of hedge fund managers, they have every right to lead the fight to reform the public schools, but the unions do not. The unions don’t care about kids; teachers don’t care about kids. Only hedge fund managers really truly care about kids. Why should teachers or their unions have anything to say about their working conditions or their pay? Are they just greedy and selfish. So what if teachers earn less that the hedge funders’ secretaries?

Singer says the battle over the future of public schools has reached a critical juncture. The corporate reformers have lost control of the narrative. They want to hide behind benign names, like “Families for Excellent Schools,” hoping to hoodwink the public into thinking they are the families of children who want charter schools, when in fact, they are billionaires who live in places like Greenwich or Darien, Connecticut, and have never actually seen a public school, other than driving past it.

They don’t want the public to know that they want to divert money from public schools to the privately managed charters, but they can’t admit it so they say that are “improving public schools.” Which they are not.

To understand reform-talk, you have to recognize that words mean the opposite of what they usually mean.

Helping public schools means taking resources away until they collapse.

Improving academic achievement means testing kids until they cry and the test scores have lost any meaning.

Singer writes:


Their story goes like this – yes, there is a battle going on over public education. But the two sides fighting aren’t who you think they are.

The fight for public schools isn’t between grassroots communities and well-funded AstroTurf organizations, they say. Despite the evidence of your eyes, the fight isn’t between charter school sycophants and standardized test companies, on the one hand, and parents, students and teachers on the other.

No. It’s actually between people who really care about children and those nasty, yucky unions.

It’s nonsense, of course. Pure spin….


When corporate education reformers sneeringly deprecate their opponents as mere unions, they’re glossing over an important distinction. Opposition to privatization and standardization policies doesn’t come from the leadership of the NEA and AFT. It comes from the grassroots. This is not a top down initiative. It is bottom up.

This is how it’s always been. There is no political organization directing the fight to save public education. The Democrats certainly aren’t overly concerned with reigning in charter schools. It was grassroots Democrats – some of whom are also union members – who worked to rewrite the party platform to do so. The Clinton campaign is not directing anyone to opt out of standardized testing. However, voters are demanding that Clinton be receptive to their needs – and some of them are union members.

There is no great union conspiracy to fight these policies. It’s called public opinion, and it’s changing.

That’s what scares the standardizers and privatizers. They’ve had free run of the store for almost two decades and now the public is waking up.

They’re desperately trying to paint this as a union movement when it’s not. Unions are involved, but they aren’t alone. And moreover, their involvement is not necessarily an impediment.

The needs of the community and the needs of teachers are the same.

Both want excellent public schools.

Both want the best for our students.

Both want academic policies that will help students learn – not help corporations cash in.

And both groups want good teachers in the classroom – not bad ones!

The biggest lie to have resonated with the public is this notion that teachers unions are only concerned with shielding bad teachers from justice. This is demonstrably untrue.

Unions fight to make sure teachers get due process, but they also fight to make sure bad teachers are shown the door….

Unions stand in direct opposition to the efforts of corporate vultures trying to swoop in and profit off of public education. Teachers provide a valuable service to students. If your goal is to reduce the cost of that service no matter how much that reduces its value to students, you need a weak labor force. You need the ability to reduce salary so you can claim the savings as profit.

THAT’S why corporate education reformers hate teachers and their unions. We make it nearly impossible to swipe school budgets into their own pockets.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Teachers, Unions

Mercedes Schneider: The Text of the Dissents from the Decision to Deny a Rehearing of Vergara Case

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
17

Mercedes Schneider posts here the dissents of the three judges who wanted to rehear the case. The majority of four denied the rehearing, agreeing with the lower court.

Categories California, Teacher Tenure, Unions

Randi’s Statement on Latest Vergara Decision

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
13

This just in:

WASHINGTON—American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the California Supreme Court’s decision to reject the plaintiffs’ petition for review in Vergara v. California.

“I am relieved by the court’s decision declining an appeal of the unanimous California Court of Appeal ruling upholding California educators’ due process rights. The billionaire-funded attack, from its inception, tried to pit our children against their teachers—people who make a difference in our children’s lives every day—rather than understand and solve the real problems ailing public education. Now that this chapter is closed, we must embrace our shared responsibility to help disadvantaged kids by supporting them so they can reach their full potential. While that starts with teachers, it also means providing programs and services that engage students and address their well-being.

“I hope this decision closes the book on the flawed and divisive argument that links educators’ workplace protections with student disadvantage. Instead, as the expert evidence clearly showed—and the Court of Appeal carefully reasoned—it was the discretionary decisions of some administrators, rather than the statutes themselves, that contributed to the problems cited by the plaintiffs.

“It is now well past time that we move beyond damaging lawsuits like Vergara that demonize educators and begin to work with teachers to address the real issues caused by the massive underinvestment in public education in this country. The state of California, like many others, remains in the throes of a serious teacher shortage. We need to hire, support and retain the best teachers, not pit parents against educators in a pointless blame game that does nothing to help disadvantaged students pursue their dreams.”

– See more at: http://www.aft.org/press-release/afts-weingarten-calif-supreme-courts-decision-decline-hear-vergara#sthash.ZruIIJjh.dpuf

Categories California, Teacher Tenure, Unions
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