Sound And Fury Over Charter Schools

Another day, another display of fulmination from one of the Big Apple’s right wing tabloids. Editorial assaults on Randi Weingarten and the UFT from the Post, the Daily News and the Sun have become as predictible as rush hour traffic jams and as ubiquitous as Manhattan Starbucks’ outlets. It is impossible to read these daily sallies, so carefully orchestrated by Tweed and its allies among the power elite, without recalling those great lines from Macbeth: “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

This rhetorical fusillade is intended, it would appear, to bully New York City educators into ending our opposition to Chancellor Klein’s ill-conceived and destructive third reorganization of our schools in five years. That shows just how little its authors understand New York City educators, the UFT and Randi Weingarten. Sound and fury from the post-modern version of New York City’s 19th century Know Nothings only confirms for us that we must be doing something right. The more we read it, the more we redouble our work with with parents, students and community organizations to put the public back into public education.

The latest casus belli for the tabloids were the legislative agreements on charter schools that were included in the state budget. The slew of editorials and op-eds on the subject, and their echos over at the blog of the New York Charter School Association, The Chalkboard, provide a window into what was at stake in that particular battle.

Readers who have followed the ongoing discussion of charter schools on Edwize know that starting well over a year ago, Randi Weingarten and the UFT made a public offering of a “grand compromise” on the question of the charter school cap — raising the cap in return for a recognition of the labor rights of charter school teachers. [Our discussion of the charter school question is summarized here.] Such an agreement made perfect sense, if both parties shared a common desire to create good public schools. Yet this UFT offer has been consistently spurned.

The editorials and Chalkboard make clear the reason why the NYCSA and their allies at Tweed have been unwilling to agree to such a bargain: for them, the reason for supporting charter schools is the creation of non-union public schools in which teachers have no voice.

The teachers union loathes charters because they are not covered by the strictures of its contract… It’s easy to see why: Small, flexible and free to experiment with reforms that would be impossible within the confines of a 600-page union contract… [New York Daily News]

Indeed, on the table was a host of new provisions and regulations so onerous as to defeat the whole point of charter schools… Consider, for example, how easy the deal would make it for the new schools to be unionized… Unions work to create rules that undermine one of charter schools’ prime advantages: their flexibility. [New York Post]

Let’s put to the side this little exercise in writing fiction that transforms a contract of two hundred pages into one three times that size, and that pretends that a contract negotiated with the largest school district in the United States, including such unique elements as the entire section dedicated to pedagogues at WYNE, the Department of Education’s radio and television stations, would be applied in its totality to a single charter school. The simple truth is that the the contract the UFT has negotiated with the Amber Charter School, where we have organized the staff, runs fewer than twenty-five typewritten pages. However, what is important here is not the dishonest argumentation, but the unrelenting opposition to giving charter school teachers the same democratic voice and same labor rights guaranteed to teachers in district public schools — the right to organize and bargain collectively which is enshrined in the First Article of the New York State Constitution. “Flexibility” is a thinly disguised euphemism for maintaining “at will” employment, so that charter school teachers can be fired for such grave misdeeds as sharing with their colleagues information on the salaries of NYC public school teachers and signing a letter of protest against a principal’s decision to ban the reading of a poem in memory of Emmett Till during Black History Month.

Perhaps nowhere was the anti-teacher and anti-union agenda of the tabloids, the NYCSA and Tweed more apparent than in their unrealized demand that Chancellor Klein be given the power to authorize charter schools on his own — a power now reserved for the NYS Regents and the SUNY Board of Trustees. The Chancellor has always had the power to create innovative new schools within the Department of Education, and Klein has regularly used that power to create scores of new schools every year he has presided over the New York City public schools — with decidely mixed results. He also possesses the authority to exempt a New York City public school from any and all regulations of the Department of Education. In sum, the Chancellor already possesses the power to create public schools which are identical to charter schools in every respect but one — he can not create his own schools where the teachers are denied democratic voice and labor rights. He needs the power to authorize his own charters under a law with inadequate labor rights to accomplish that end.

This part of the anti-teacher and anti-union agenda was turned back in Albany, much to the ire of Tweed and its blogosphere shills. When the DOE held a press conference for the purported purpose of inviting applications for the 50 new charters to be given out in New York City, it included rather prominently in its talking points the complaint that Klein did not receive independent authorizing power, together with its spin on the NYC charter schools which have been in the headlines for arbitrarily firing their teachers. The Mayor used the press conference to launch an attack on the elected officials who refused to do his bidding.

On this issue, take careful note that NYCSA has opposed proposals to give independent authorizing power to other school districts in New York, on the compelling logic that the very idea of charter schools was to create public schools autonomous of the district — an argument with which we would agree. Take note also that NYCSA has defended the work of the existing statewide authorizers, especially the SUNY Board of Trustees — a judgment with which we have agreed here in the the past. But in this situation, this first principle of chartering went right out the nearest NYCSA window. If you need to know what the NYCSA prime objective is, look no further than its willingness to abandon the fundamental tenets of chartering in order to aid Tweed in its efforts to establish non-union public schools.

[NYCSA's willingness to abandon chartering principles is one more step in a long march of anti-unionism in the service of ultra-right wing ideology. Previously, we discussed this sordid record in some detail, from the NYCSA alliance with the infamous union busters Jackson, Lewis and their Atlantic Legal Foundation to the NYCSA funding by the anti-union Walton [Wal-Mart] and Gilder family foundations to the ties of the NYCSA officers with far right ideological organizations such as the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability [FERA]. Some on the NYCSA board have become rather shrilly defensive about that record. The issue has troubled NYCSA enough that it has embarked on a small public relations offensive to redo its image, if not its political substance: for example, it’s now recycling the Chalkboard blogger, Joe Williams, as Executive Director of a front group called “Democrats for Education Reform.”]

Much has been made of the legislative agreement to provide automatic union representation to teachers in charter schools with over 250 students by the end of their second year of existence. In point of fact, the New York Charter law always had this provision: in its first enactment, it applied only to the first year of a charter school’s existence. It meant little in practice: if a charter school was intent upon denying labor rights, it waited until the second year to take in more than 250 students. Adding a second year makes the provision of a law a little more of an inconvenience, but the real problem for the anti-union charter school is a political one: it makes it more difficult to disguise the fact that student population is being manipulated in order to deny charter school teachers union representation.

Another focus of complaint has been the procedures requiring pubic hearings and reviews when a charter school is sited in a public school building. These requirements are a response to the unilateral, top-down way the Department of Education has made such decisions. A charter school movement that had not abandoned all independent judgment would recognize that the DOE’s hamfisted approach had created an anti-charter backlash among parents, and that a process which required some measure of consultation would be in its long term interests.

At the end of the day, what is most troubling about this sound and fury is how little it has to do with creating good public schools.