| 摘要 | Last December, teachers at Acero Schools in Chicago initiated the first major strike at a charter school network, capping off a year of teacher strikes across the country, from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Los Angeles. The charter school angle made the Acero strike noteworthy, and many media outlets were quick to note that it might be a harbinger of future unrest. The Chicago Tribune termed the strike a “warning to all charter operators.” USA Today said it could “portend more to come.”
These predictions weren’t as novel as they might seem. Indeed, the “teacher unions are coming for charters” narrative has been unfurled before. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal predicted that increased charter school organizing in Los Angeles “could have nationwide repercussions,” while the American Prospect proclaimed “more and more charter teachers are wanting to unionize.” A decade ago, in 2009, the same refrain was in evidence: Unions’ organizing of charters “shows signs of becoming a wave,” wrote Education Week. In short, for a decade or more, the notion that teachers unions are descending on charter schools has been a recurring theme.
There’s just one catch: The data doesn’t support the narrative. While the number of unionized charter schools nationwide is up since 2010, from 604 to 781, the share of charter schools that are unionized actually declined a tick over the past decade, from 12% to 11%. Moreover, more than half of unionized charters reside in states or districts that require charters to have collective bargaining agreements. In other words, for half of the unionized charters, unionization is a government mandate.
So, unionized charters are not the norm. And research by the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education suggests there may be a good reason for this. After all, a big appeal of chartering is that it enables schools to rethink how they’re organized, including how teachers approach their work and are compensated. Collective bargaining agreements can put an end to all of that. This year, the research center evaluated 13 charter school collective bargaining agreements on a 4-point scale across three dimensions — compensation structure, personnel decisions, and work rules — and found that unionized charter schools, on average, are exactly as constrained as traditional school districts.
In particular, it found that charter contracts, like those in traditional public schools, minutely restrict the number of work days each year, the length of a school day, the length of a mandatory “duty-free” lunch, and expectations of teachers before and after school hours. When it comes to pay, charter school contracts look a lot like those in traditional districts, with the same premium placed on experience and credentials as opposed to the extent of a teacher’s responsibilities or the caliber of a teacher’s work. That is, unionized charter schools seem destined to operate a lot like traditional district schools.
So, while unionized charter schools are rare, the stakes are high. And, despite an ineffectual track record when it comes to organizing charters, the unions are trying. In 2007, the American Federation of Teachers established a national charter-organizing division. Since that time, it has installed charter organizers in seven major cities: Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The National Education Association followed suit and today represents the majority of unionized charter teachers.
During the Great Recession, union membership declined, and unions had more cause to seek new, nontraditional revenue sources. Additionally, district layoffs in 2007-2008 resulted in substantial numbers of union-friendly teachers taking jobs in charter schools out of desperation, giving unions a ready entryway to the charter sector.
In the past year, the teachers unions appear ramped up their efforts to organize charters. Last fall, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association demanded the Denver Public Schools provide the names, emails, and salaries of all Denver’s charter school teachers. Remarkably, the district complied. Since the Acero strike in December , at least five more Chicago charter schools have considered striking. And the California Teachers Union is working to organize Los Angeles’ largest charter network, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools.
Such maneuvers are unfolding as unions negotiate a shifting landscape. In June 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees that unions could not compel nonmembers to pay “agency fees.” In the past, unions could force nonmembers to pay because, it was held, nonunionized workers still benefited from the collective agreements that unions negotiated on their behalf. Post- Janus, the unions have taken a financial hit. The American Federation of Teachers lost 84,600 agency fee payers in the past year, representing a loss of tens of millions of dollars in revenue. The National Education Association hasn’t reported comparable numbers — it previously had 88,000 agency fee payers — but projections suggest it has likely lost the vast majority of them.
The unions have been spurred to respond. Since Janus, the American Federation of Teachers has more than made up its losses, signing up 100,000 new members in the past year. The much larger National Education Association has not, although it has registered 13,000 new members. In their pointed attacks on President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and their enthusiastic support for the wave of teacher strikes that crossed the nation in 2018 and 2019, the unions have made it clear that they’re on the offensive, especially as the Bush-Obama, test-based reform push continues to recede and the Democratic Party swings left.
So, given all this, why isn’t there more evidence that the unions are succeeding in organizing charters? Why are only 11% of charter schools organized, with no real movement for a decade?
Well, for one thing, while union leaders may cast covetous eyes at more than 6,000 nonunion charter schools, they also find charters to be a convenient political target. In January, Los Angeles public school teachers went on strike for higher pay, lower class sizes, and more school funding. In making their case, union organizers found an easy scapegoat in charters, alleging that the district wanted “to starve our schools in order to justify cuts and justify handing more schools over to privately run charter schools.”
Around the nation, unions continue to attack charters. This February, West Virginia teachers went on strike to oppose a bill that would bring charter schools and school vouchers to the state. The same month, New Mexico’s teachers unions backed a bill halting all new charter construction. In Colorado last November, the state union opposed a measure that would have required school districts to share a portion of new tax revenue with charter schools. In October 2018, the Washington Education Association was party to a lawsuit alleging that charter schools were unconstitutional.
The constant attacks by union leaders against charters introduces some obvious complications when it comes to wooing charter school staff toward organizing.
Thus, Alex Caputo-Pearl, the same Los Angeles teachers union leader who said the district wanted to “starve our schools” in favor of charters, has also insisted that “we have a lot in common” with charter educators and “we need each other. … We don’t think it is sustainable to have unlimited growth of charter schools, but that does not mean we are anti-charter or existing charters.”
Unions talking out of both sides of their mouth at charter schools has become more common, and even national-level union leaders have leavened their fevered attacks with the occasional flirtation. In 2016, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten thundered that charters are “a coordinated national effort to decimate public schools by rigging the system against neighborhood public schools and the students they serve.” A year later, she sounded like a member of the charter school chorus, proclaiming that “taxpayer money should support schools that are accountable to voters, open to all, nondenominational and transparent about students’ progress. Such schools — district and charter public schools — are part of what unites us as a country.”
What should one make of all this?
First, unions are stuck walking a delicate line on charters. Union leaders find charters a tempting political target, yet these attacks can make it tougher for them to recruit credibly in charter schools. Many charter school teachers have chosen to work in charters, in part, to escape the petty bureaucracy that permeates district schools. At the same time, it’s always possible that relentless union attacks on charters may generate so much bad press and create so many political problems that capitulating to union demands may start to seem sensible to charters. Complicating things is that many charters employ a lot of young liberals, and in a polarized era of energized leftism, these teachers may prove receptive to union entreaties.
These dynamics can evolve over time. Michael Hartney, a Boston College professor and longtime student of teachers unions, has noted, “Educators who are pro-reform and drawn to charter schools are also going to want representation of their interests if charters move away from the original values and preferences of the teaching workforce that joined them at the outset.” How all these competing tensions will play out is anybody’s guess.
Second, it’s not clear whether organizing charters is generally worth the time, money, or hassle for unions. Only about 7% of American K-12 schools are charters, and most of those are either stand-alone schools or in small networks. They tend to be smaller than the typical district school, meaning that charters account for only about 3% or 4% of the nation’s teachers. The Chicago Teachers Union has had more success organizing charters than unions in almost any other city and claims 25% of the city’s charter schools. Yet, for all that, charter teachers make up less than 5% of the Chicago Teachers Union’s membership. Given the numbers, organizing charters may wind up being a lot of effort for relatively little reward.
Finally, charter advocates must remember that charter schools have much to offer teachers as well as families. After all, huge numbers of educators are frustrated by school districts in which they can’t do their best work due to chaotic environments, distracting paper chases, oppressive bureaucracy, and the faddish diktats of ever-changing district leaders. Charters can and should be a haven from all that. Advocates should remember that union organizers fare well in workplaces where employees don’t feel valued, engaged, or adequately compensated. And yet, when advocates make the case for school choice, they have a bad habit of ignoring teachers, at least when they’re not clumsily belittling them as part of a “failing” system.
American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker explained three decades ago that charter schools were designed to empower professional educators as well as families. When it comes to charter schools and teachers unions, the big question today may be whether charter schools can live up to that promise. |
