Upset over long hours, low pay, and high turnover, teachers in charter schools are increasingly choosing to fight back and unionize.
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Charter schools receive public funding but are run by private corporations. They often get large sums of private contributions as well. For instance, Chicago International Charter Schools was founded in 2004 with a $4 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. CICS has a for-profit subcontractor, Civitas.
Public or private?
Charter schools claim public school status when asking for state funding. Yet when a majority of teachers at three CICS schools signed union cards in April, Civitas changed its tune and claimed that it was essentially a private institution. Civitas hoped to circumvent state law that empowers the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board to recognize unions in public schools, calling instead for a secret ballot vote under the oversight of the National Labor Relations Board. (In These Times, July 31)
The NLRB narrowly agreed that Civitas was a private entity despite receiving public funds, and invalidated the union. The NLRB decision essentially allows charter schools to enjoy the best of both worlds, claiming public or private status at their own convenience. Union organizers accepted the ruling as a compromise, feeling confident that, despite the greater challenges of a secret-ballot vote, they would win. And win they did.
Fighting for quality education, decent jobs
Increasingly, teachers at charter schools are dissatisfied with their unjust working conditions and are rebelling against the profiteers at the helms of their schools. Through pressure, they are pushing the teacher unions to campaign more aggressively in organizing charters.
The Knowledge Is Power Program is the largest charter school corporation in the nation. KIPP runs 66 schools in 19 states and the District of Colombia. According to Leo Casey, vice president of the United Federation of Teachers, pro-union teachers were harassed and fired when attempting to organize a union at a KIPP School in Brooklyn, N.Y. Despite the campaign of intimidation, the teachers eventually won union recognition. KIPP is negotiating with Brooklyn teachers for the first time, while facing demands for higher pay at one of its unionized schools in Baltimore, Md. (New York Times, July 26)
Last February, teachers at four Accelerated Charter Schools successfully joined United Teachers Los Angeles, after suffering from unbearable conditions such as lack of teacher involvement in decision-making and unfair treatment at the hands of the administration. Teachers at charters in Philadelphia and Oregon have also successfully fought and won union representation.
Democratic White House no friend of teachers
Despite the unambiguously anti-worker orientation of charter schools, the Obama administration has come out in support of them. According to the July 24 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is blackmailing states into accepting charter-like reforms such as “merit pay” and state-mandated tests to evaluate teachers.
Duncan threatened California with the loss of millions of dollars in federal aid unless it changed its laws that protect teachers from being evaluated by the unfair and culturally biased assessment tests. His threats to withhold aid from California during a time that education and all social services are in extreme financial duress is inexcusable.
Duncan has also announced that only states that lift restrictions on charters and link teacher pay to student achievement would be eligible for a piece of the $4.35 billion in federal financing. Since working-class students do not perform as well on assessments as children in affluent areas, teachers in working-class neighborhoods will be hurt the most in the states where Duncan’s anti-teacher crusade succeeds.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration is supporting the same pro-privatization agenda that the Bush administration advocated. Contrast the meager resources allocated to struggling schools with the hundreds of billions of dollars given to the Pentagon each year to promote U.S. imperialism. Schools are being forced to implement anti-union practices in order to get just a few crumbs of the pie.
Unions are right to organize within charter schools—since their existence is a reality—but charter schools must be challenged on a more fundamental level. Their expansion must be opposed. Public funds should not be doled out to for-profit private institutions at the expense of quality public education. Workers should not have to pay to finance charter school corporations that oppose their interests.
Teachers, parents and students have a right to public schools that will increase student achievement—and this will require much more education spending, lower class sizes, and greater teacher and community input in the running of schools. We must vigorously defend public schools when speaking to workers, and denounce “merit pay” for what it is: a bludgeon against teachers who are fighting for decent wages.
The current state of affairs offers a clear lesson: having a Democratic White House with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress will not solve the problems of public education in the United States. Only a movement made up of organized labor, bringing teachers and students together, can defeat efforts to privatize schools at the expense of quality education and decent paying jobs.
