Many school reformers were unhappy when the UFT decided to start its own charter school in NYC, but I was delighted. As I said at the time, I looked forward to them having to grapple with the issues charter schools have to deal with. And if that isn't difficult enough, I pointed out some additional dilemmas that their charter school would have. For example, to ensure a successful school, they'd have to hire based on merit, not seniority, and I wondered what they would do when (not if) they had an ineffective or rogue teacher. I recall writing at the time that I wish I could be a fly on the wall to witness the delicious irony of watching the UFT, which grieves every single attempt by the DOE to remove even the very worst teachers, to try to remove one of their own.
Sure enough, the chickens have come home to roost -- the principal has been forced out (if you read between the lines; it probably should have happened a long time ago), a teacher went off the reservation, was fired, grieved it and was reinstated, teachers and parents are up in arms, etc. What a total mess.
Here's the beginning of the story from the front page of today's NY Sun:
When the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, opened a school in 2005 — the first ever union-run charter school in New York, and one of the only such schools in America — she promised an “oasis.” Under UFT management, she said, teachers would win a reprieve from the Bloomberg administration’s heavy-handedness, and children would benefit.
Three years later, “oasis” remains the goal, but nearly everyone involved concedes the school isn’t there yet.
With two school years completed, the total number of teachers at the school has risen to 31 from nine. Eleven teachers have left, some of them with ill will. Though many parents are happy, others have recently held an emergency meeting to criticize what they say is sometimes an unsafe environment and a dictatorial management. A tug of war is going on with the traditional public school whose building the charter school shares.
Now the school’s top administrator, Rita Danis, is announcing her resignation to parents and teachers after facing criticism from a teacher who said she was mistreated and subsequently fired in large part because she raised complaints.
“It hasn’t been the utopia that I had hoped for,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview last week. “I think the processes that we’ve had in place are really good processes now. But we’ve had, just like every other school has, some bumps in the road.”
The article doesn't say what the school's test scores are, but they must be weak if Randi's making lame excuses like this:
Ms. Weingarten said that she believes the school’s difficulties do not stem from its unique labor-management structure, but rather from external pressures created by the No Child Left Behind law and the State University of New York, which as part of its oversight of charter schools inquires regularly on progress, including test score gains.
“I think what’s starting to happen is that the focus and fixation on test scores to the exclusion of all else, that SUNY requires, the pressure that people feel from No Child Left Behind, has really stunted good educational opportunity,” Ms. Weingarten said. “And, you know, I’ve seen that in terms of even our teachers and our school leader being really afraid of what the school scores are going to be like. That dominates their life, and instead of looking at it in terms of taking risks, trying new things, and things like that, that’s dominated their life.”
Now maybe Randi and the UFT can better appreciate why nearly all charter schools are nonunion -- or at least reject the onerous contracts that exist in most big cities (not all contracts have to be this way -- witness Green Dot). It's NOT because they want to exploit teachers by underpaying or overworking them or subjecting them to arbitrary firings. Rather, to run an effective school, the principal needs to be able to manage the school, a critical part of which is being able to hire and fire people with relatively few restrictions. Some principals are lousy at this and treat people badly/unfairly, but the solution to this problem is not to make labor an equal partner with management -- it's to fire the lousy managers.
There's a reason why 99.9% of all organizations in the world, both for profit and nonprofit, have managers and employees that are not equals: because the interests of employees are not the same as the interests of the organization, so you need management to represent the latter. As we're seeing with the UFT charter school, when one violates this basic principle, while it may sound good -- all kumbaya and such -- in practice it leads to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
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UFT Charter School Leader Will Leave After Clash With Teacher
By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 22, 2008
When the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, opened a school in 2005 — the first ever union-run charter school in New York, and one of the only such schools in America — she promised an “oasis.” Under UFT management, she said, teachers would win a reprieve from the Bloomberg administration’s heavy-handedness, and children would benefit.
Three years later, “oasis” remains the goal, but nearly everyone involved concedes the school isn’t there yet.
