Report on Charter Schools and Unions Misses the Point

This is exactly right:

Business professionals who involve themselves in charter schools need to recognize that teachers' unions are in the membership business. They "sell" services to education employees. Your operation model takes away their customers.

 

The battle over charter schools has little to do with education, and everything to do with labor and economics. Unless we address it that way, there is no resolution possible.

Let's be clear: if I was a teacher union leader, I'd behave exactly like they are behaving.  They are completely rational.  The key is not to get angry about this; it's to understand that the interests of teachers (and certainly teacher unions) is NOT the same as the interests of students -- and, often, precisely the opposite.  But the unions are VERY clever (and effective) in wrapping themselves around the children and screaming that any effort to rein in, for example, the most eggregious clauses of their contract and get the system to serve children, rather than adults, is an attack on children and/or public education.

 

 

"The idea that parents should sue—it's going to break the bank," says the charter school's co-founder Ilene Lainer, a labor-management lawyer from the Upper West Side and mother of an autistic 9-year-old. "The answer is to create programs that are publicly run." Lainer knows the alternative all too well. Up until her son Ari landed a spot in a state-approved private school this year (he lost the lottery for a place in Lainer's school), he spent five years alternating between her living room and a private academy in New Jersey. How did Lainer pay? She sued the city.

-------------------

The Education Intelligence Agency

COMMUNIQUÉ – October 23, 2006

On the Web at http://www.eiaonline.com

 

1)  Report on Charter Schools and Unions Misses the Point. EIA highly recommends the new report by the National Charter School Research Project titled The Future of Charter Schools and Teachers Unions. Authored by Paul T. Hill, Lydia Rainey, and Andrew J. Rotherham, the report summarizes the conclusions of a symposium held last May that included various luminaries from both the charter school and union worlds. Judging solely by the report, there were some fireworks.