Ramona Edelin: At charter schools, old union rules don’t apply
It’s National Charter Schools Week, a time for parents, students and teachers to celebrate these unique schools of choice. But in the District, legislators and unions are targeting the basic operating principles of charter schools: their independence from the city-run school system, along with accountability for improved student performance, strong school governance standards and civil rights law compliance. Until now, this adversarial agenda, routine in other states — most recently in the Los Angeles labor dispute — has largely bypassed DC, where charters educate nearly half of all public school students.
The American Federation of Teachers, an AFL-CIO affiliate, is organizing at the Mundo Verde Bilingual campus in Northwest DC. This follows similar efforts at Chavez Prep Middle School last year, which included filing multiple complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. These actions coincide with a push from some DC Council members to require charter schools — which by law are nonprofits offering tuition-free, taxpayer-funded public education — to publish the names and salaries of all staff. The benefits of such requirements for union organizers are too obvious to need explaining.
This activity follows the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFCME that unions cannot collect fees from non-union members in the public sector. This decision — which reversed a 41-year-old court precedent that allowed the collection of such fees — was a hard hit for labor unions’ recruitment, and therefore finances. As a result, teachers unions have embarked upon a spirited nationwide membership drive that includes efforts at largely non-unionized charter schools.
This union focus on charter schools — which are outside the public sector thanks to their nonprofit status — is not an attempt to restore the rights of federal, state, county and municipal employees. Rather, it is an intrusion into charters’ working environments, which are based on shared vision and relationships. This third-party effort to impose a union contract is starkly distinct from the traditional role of unions in overcoming low pay, long hours and discriminatory policies and practices.
Historically, the organization of labor has been the principal means by which people of color moved into the middle class, firmly linking racial equality to economics in the view of the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. underscored this during his landmark speech before the AFL-CIO in 1961. King was convinced that African Americans, as an “almost entirely working people,” possessed “needs identical with labor’s needs.” Long before the 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination illegal, activists within the movement used the primary means of organization — strikes, boycotts and demonstrations — to attack the problem.
But union achievements at the height of labor’s strength — for instance, securing better pay and conditions for members of the United Automobile Workers and the United Farm Workers — don’t compare to issues facing charter schools today. Operating as nonprofits, these unique public schools are run with a sense of mission, vision and cooperation. Imposing third-party union contracts in this setting disrupts the collaborative principles of charter operations.
These attempts to reshape how charter schools function have sparked a polarized debate between unions and school choice advocates. The former frequently fail to understand how the circumstances and purpose of charter schools differs from those at private corporations; the latter often indulge in union-bashing that dismisses employees’ interests.
Public charter schools do not exist to provide a rate of return to owners and investors; rather, they are founded to serve their communities, many of which have been traditionally underserved. (In the District, most charter students are African-American or Latino.) The overriding purpose at DC charter schools — closing the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their peers — is shared by management and employees, who are often highly skilled in the necessary cultural competences this task requires.
In DC, charters have succeeded in meeting the most at-risk children where they are, both academically and socio-emotionally. The one-size-fits-all, traditional public school monopoly, with its attendant union contract, historically failed these same children.
But the notion that teaching quality alone is responsible for academics, a view held by some school choice advocates, similarly fails to acknowledge the bigger picture, ignoring such critical factors as intergenerational poverty, discrimination, and other deficits impacting children’s development. Traditional educational monopoly and simplistic anti-union views are both relics of old ideologies and interests that are not relevant to charters’ unique circumstances and achievements.
Placing the needs of our most vulnerable children front and center requires accepting this as fact and beginning a conversation in which leaders of color are in the vanguard of these debates — not merely co-opted in the wake of traditional public school failure.
By removing additional obstacles to student achievement, we can build on charters’ established record of success in a manner consistent with their model of operational independence. If unions and their critics — not to mention lawmakers — could agree to focus their efforts on this, every District child would benefit.
Ramona Edelin is executive director of the DC Association of Chartered Public Schools.
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Mundo Verde’s administration paid $3000 a day of our tax dollars for a union-busting consultant.
It was the TEACHERS at the school who asked for the union. Not the union who somehow “brainwashed” the teachers in to asking for a union – as you are clearly implying, if not stating outright.
If charter schools are for the public good, why don’t they want to be open to the same student protections as public schools? Why are you fighting open government efforts to have the same FOIA and government oversight that public schools take? If you take public money there should be public oversight. We have seen too many times in DC charter schools that are bamboozling millions in upkeep contracts to charter owners, only to disappear and close overnight when light is shone on them. What do you have to hide? Why not invite a full public review and oversight of all DC charter schools the same way DCPS is managed?
Who picks up the pieces whe charter schools close suddenly?
DC charter schools that have closed:
Dorthy Height
Ceasar Chavez
Democracy Prep
City Arts and Prep
National Collegiate Prep