I had to read Edwize again. I sure misread it the first time.
2007 May 21
Maybe I was tired. Or maybe it’s just crazy around here as we get closer to June 6th. But I totally misread Leo Casey’s post on EdWize about Green Dot.
I thought he was supporting the view that Green Dot was an anti-union enterprise. But I got it wrong.
Casey defends Green Dot because:
- They have tenure procedures.
- They have grievance procedures.
If I got it right this time, that’s pretty weak stuff.
Here is what I see. A public school is taken over by a non-public although non-profit organization. Simultaneously the existing union, the UTLA, is essentially decertified and a weaker union is brought in to replace it.
For further clarification, or confusion (if I am any example), read the comments that follow Casey’s posting.
The UFT doesn’t oppose charter schools; it posits that they should be unionized and organized. We went as far as to start two unionized charter schools.
So instead of
1. oppose their opening
2. organize their teachers
3. support their reconversion to public schools
we get
1. support their opening (including agreeing with politicians to allow more)
2. lobby to get legislation to make them easier to organize
3. attempt to organize some
It’s hard, without rethinking our approach, to look at Green Dot critically. There is an ideological commitment, coupled with a reluctance to admit mistakes. At least we are trying to organize, but what we need is a sharp policy change.
Fred:
I was actually addressing a single issue — the claim that the Green Dot schools had done away with tenure. The fact is that they have a system of just cause and due process which is as strong as any tenure system.
Although the amount of invective that has been invested in the exchanges over this issue makes it difficult for anyone to figure out what is at stake, that is all that I addessed, which is why I limited myself to those two points.
There are a number of larger issues — what is the appropriate approach of teacher unions to charter schools, what is the appropriate mix of educational and traditional union organizing are two that have been touched on here — which I have discussed elsewhere. What to make of Green Dot is an entirely different issue, which is worthy of a discussion.
Leo
Leo,
Help me understand this better.
In Illinois, tenure is statutory. Unless the board were to come to us with a plan to make it longer (which we would reject), the law requires four years probation.
Green Dot’s teachers, who would not be covered by the state law in Illinois, could negotiate no probationary period with release for just cause right from the get.
But, that’s not what the Green Dot web site says. Their web site says that their agreement with the CTA has a no tenure, no seniority provision.
All the questions you raise are good ones. And Green Dot does seem to break the mold to some extent. But if you see a major tension as one beween the public and the private sector in education, then I assume that those advocating against public schools will use more than one approach.
Of course, those of us defending public schools should use more than one approach too.
-Fred
preaprez
Fred:
This is complicated, I concede.
First, the charter school law in California and New York and in most places I know do NOT include charter school teachers in the statutory right of tenure. If Green Dot teachers were teaching in the L.A. school district, the law would require a system of tenure similar to what you describe — a number of probationary years, followed by a tenure decision. I know NY best, but I think all of these systems are essentially the same in that it is relatively easy to fire a probationary teacher, the burden of proof is on the fired probationer to prove that the firing was illegitimate and that the probationer has no employment during the period of time while the appeal works it way through the system — with the employer having every reason to drag it out.
Tenure changes that in a number of key ways — the burden of proof shifts to the employer, who must show that there is a good, job-related reason for dismissal, there is a due process hearing before an impartial hearing officer, and the tenured teacher maintains employment while the case for dismissal is heard.
Without statutory tenure, charter school teachers need a union which can negotiate the essential features of that system. In the case of the Green Dot, the contract establishes the two essential elements — a just cause standard for dismissal, and a grievance/arbitration procedure which culminates in a hearing before an independent arbitrator. Those two elements are the equal or better of every tenure system I have seen. Further, these two elements don’t start in year four or year five of a teacher’s career, after they have tenure, but from the first day.
There are two reasons why I think there is honest confusion over this issues. [There's some deliberate obfuscation from some circles too.] First, people have misread the description of what teachers give up when they leave LAUSD — tenure and seniority rights — not as something every teacher gives up when they leave a public school district for some other employment as a claim that Green Dot did not have any protections in this area. Second, the word ‘tenure’ gets a bad press, so it is easier not to use the actual term, even though the rights in place are identical to or better than tenure as we know it. This is why I have asked critics — with no answer — to point out exactly what substantive element Green Dot should have in its contract in this area that it doesn’t have.
I agree that the contradiction between public and private education is the central political line of demarcation in the world of American education today, just as the contradiction between de jure segregated schools and racially integrated schools was once the central opposition. But I would say that in the last twenty years we have seen the emergence of various hybrid forms, more civil society than either directly state or directly market models of schooling. Charter schools are just one example of such a development. Figuring out how to struggle on that terrain is awfully complicated. In my view, it would be hugely counterproductive to write off all forms of hybrid schooling as private education.
Hey Leo,
I don’t know who the obfuscating circles are, but I’m not in one. I don’t think.
We agree: In most ways I can think of, I would prefer to be negotiating our tenure language than have it imposed on us by the state legislature. This may not have always been true. But several years ago, the Illinois legislature extended probation from two to four years in a punitive act, egged on by the Chicago Tribune. Our local is strong enough where we could negotiate something better, but are prevented by law. Other locals who might be too weak to negotiate strong language probably did better when probation was two years and it was statutory.
We agree: There is confusion. But the cause of the confusion seems to rest with Green Dot. I can’t find a copy of their contracts. But their web site says, “no tenure.” Tenure is a bad word? What’s the new word?
We agree: Not all charters represent an undermining of the public sector education system. (Even if they did, we’d want to organize them).
We agree: It’s complicated.
But coming off your comments, I don’t find criteria for helping to define what’s good, what’s public, what’s private, what’s a hybrid, and what’s not? I’m not asking for a checklist. I see individual and groups of charter schools that are good, serve the public interest, particularly poor and minority community interests, and provide a challenge to public schools to do better. While I’m not interested in writing off all forms of anything, what’s public then and what’s private?
-Fred
Fred:
I had hoped the context made clear that you were not in the obfuscating circles. Sorry if references were a bit illusory.
You ask the million dollar question of the hour regarding the public and the private. I have seen virtually nothing that looks at these questions in the sort of depth I think is necessary, so one of my summer projects is to write an essay with a friend that addresses some of these questions and would hopefully open up some dialogue. It would take up three questions:
1. How education is a public — as well as an individual — good, and why public ends such as universal accessibility, equity, promotion of common good and accountability to the public financier can not be adequately met by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, but require a public enterprise;
2. The extraction of the idea of public from its late 20th century organizational form — largely bureaucratic, hierarchical, standardized, centrally organized — which market reformers take as synonymous with the public, and the elaboration of a pluralist, decentralized — but non-market — vision of the public;
3. The emergence of hybrid and civil society forms of education, with some practical guidelines on how one might decide what advances and what undermines a truly public education.
I think part of the problem is the tendency — and this is how I would characterize my differences with Jonathan over the charter school issue — to establish very clear, very unambiguous, very rigid categories of public and private, and then to assign different phenomenon to one or the other side of the divide. I think that these categories were never so clearly demarcated, that they are more and more quite fluid and dynamic, and that we have been handicapped by the inability to see that. The right grasped this fluidity and dynamism, and understood that charter schools were a terrain on which the battle was fought, and so they have been able to capture much more of that ground than they should ever have rightly had. Some respond to that advantage by deciding that the charter school idea and organizational form is somehow intrinsically right-wing, market inspired, private — and sees anything less an effort for their elimination as a surrender. I think that this is strategically wrong-headed, and in the long term, disastrous. We need to be on the strategic terrain of charter schools, fighting to take them back from the right wing. It seems to me that underlying this antagonism toward charter schools per se is a reified notion of the public that it can only take the form of schools run by bureaucratic organized, standardized, hierarchical school districts.
You can see some of the internal contradictions of this posture in Jonathan’s comments above — he suggests that we should try to eliminate charter schools and organize charter school teachers at the same time. Not only would such a posture having one work at cross-purposes, but what charter teacher would join an union committed to eliminating his or her school?
Some of the criteria you want are easy: I would draw a distinction, for example, between not-for-profit and for-profit entities as appropriate managers of charter schools. But it requires a lot more thinking on issues that are not so easy. Could professional development in a school be contracted out to a private entity without compromising the public ends of schooling? That is a lot harder, given that the entity could be everything from a university to a professional development arm of a teachers union to a conservative educational foundation. We have been dealing with these issues in an ad hoc way, and we need to think them through in a more systematic way.
There are contradictions here, Leo, but not in my advocacy. It’s kind of easy: we should be acting in the best interests of teachers. If a school is non-union, we should seek to organize it. If a school is charter, we should seek to recovert it.
“What charter teacher would join an union committed to eliminating his or her school?”
How is reconverting a school the same as eliminating it? Of course principals and administrators would be bitterly opposed. And if any teachers directly benefited from sharing decision making with management, perhaps they would be opposed.
But meaningful collaboration arises from the strength of the teachers’ organization, not from nice admins or cleverly created joint management structures. Think of all the wonderful school based management and consulation agreed to in NY. How much is this stuff worth, while the union is weak?
Your friend Peter writes that the C-30 voice for teachers in selecting principals was always a sham here and I wrote that we should withdraw from the process here and got no negative feedback publically or privately. (Fred, sorry for making links). Strong unions guarantee solid collaboration, not fancy agreements.
And so the question really has to be, are teachers better off in a charter than in a regular public school? And the answer needs to be based on the reality of the school, not what’s on paper. If I were a charter advocate, I might want to fixate on the technical details on paper.
But teachers should be looking at the overall movement to break up schools, to break up systems, to decentralize, and to chop up teacher rights in the process. Not for profit? Why should I care? There is a movement to harm teachers, and yeah, I think there’s two sides.
Jonathan
Jonathan:
In my view, your argument is based on a serious conceptual and strategic mistake: the identification of public schools with a late 20th century organizational form of public schooling — hierarchical, bureaucratically organized and centrally run public schools, each one a ‘factory model’ school. Here’s why:
1. It passes over the ways in which that historical type of organization often thwarted and distorted — rather than advanced — the public purposes and character of schooling. Teacher unions emerged in significant measure as a reaction to that organization, an immanent critique as the philosophers would say, and if we make ourselves into uncritical defenders of that organizational form, we have seriously lost our way. Defending public schools, defending schools for public purposes and ends, defending schools of, by and for the public, is not the same as defending an organizational form which has a great deal that should be changed. Indeed, I would argue that the only defense of public schools that has a long term chance of success is not one based on the defense of an embattled status quo, with all of its flaws, but one based on a vision of change that would would more fully realize the public character of our schools — public schooling organized in a more democratic and more thoroughly public fashion.
2. This is not simply a conceptual or philosophical difference. This is why we see the small schools movement quite differently. You see the “overall movement to break up schools, to break up systems, to decentralize” as part and parcel of “chopping up teachers’ rights.” That misreads a movement which in its inspiration and in much of its work has been quite the opposite — empowering teachers to have real voice in the running of schools. It gives a Joel Klein the power to define what small schools are and should be — and in the process, obliterates the vision and the work of the Deborah Meiers, the Ann Cooks, the Ted Sizers, and all of the other educational pioneers who have created democratic small schools which have greatly advanced schooling dedicated to public purposes and public ends. Klein colonizes a grass roots, democratic movement, and the response is that he and his defintion of that movement is all there ever was. There is a real battle being fought over the meaning and future of that movement, and we should not be withdrawing from it and declaring all small schools — not just the small schools in Klein’s image and likeness — the enemy. Rather, we should be advancing our conception of a small school, one true to its original democratic and public vision. We should have a pluralist vision of public education with a place for many different types of public schools, of different sizes, different educational philosophies, different visions, different curricula.
3. There is a reason why teachers, such as the teachers in LA, choose to work in a charter school, just as there are reasons why they would choose to work in a small school. They are not deluded, or victims of false consciousness. They make those choices because they want to teach in schools which are not hierarchical, bureaucratically organized and centrally run. They value such things as school autonomy, and ability to give personal attention to their students. Now, they invariably find that small schools in the Kleinian mode and charter schools in the union-busting mode do not deliver on their promise. But that doesn’t change what they were looking for. What they want to work in are schools that deliver on that promise, small schools and charter schools true to a vision of truly public education. A union that attempts to organize charter schools on the approach that we will turn your school back into the district school of the hierarchical, bureaucratically organized and centrally run mode the teachers were trying to escape is a union doomed to organizing failure.
There is only way I can see that teacher unions will be able to organize charter schools, a strategic imperative upon which our future depends — and that is engagement.
Leo,
If I follow your argument, you see charters as dividing into two: Good, teacher empowering, autonomoous and student centered on the one hand and Kleinian, hierarchical, union busting on the other.
And I agree: We we need to see the differences.
But you don’t talk much, even though what I know about you is that you’re among other things, a union activist, about the role teacher unions play in this.
There is an inevitable conservative streak to a union. It must and should defend and represent the rights of all its members. It is mainly defensive, particularly right now when what you call tradtional models of public schools are under attack, as are the unions that represent the teachers. See the Chicago union election results.
Interesting that even in the good charters, teachers have unions, contracts, grievance procedures, work hour language, tenure rules. If all was good, there would be no need for any of that.
That is different than JD’s point about organizing to reconvert. A losing proposition, I agree.
-Fred
Fred:
I would make a distinction between a teachers’ union defending the rights of its members — one of our primary tasks — and be in a generally defensive posture. I don’t the two as synonymous, or understand the defense of members’ rights as exhaustive of what we should do. Consequently, even accepting that when you say a teachers’ union has a conservative streak you are not talking about political conservatism, but a defense of the more democratic and egalitarian features of the status quo when they are under attack from management and the anti-union right, I do not share that view. Once we accept the limits of that self-conception, we put ourselves at a distinct strategic disadvantage, and accept terms of a contest which will make it near impossible to be successful. At this historic juncture, we absolutely need to articulate our own positive conception of change.
In this vein, I would argue that a teachers’ union should provide voice for its members — professional, democratic voice. I wrote an essay for the upcoming summer issue of the AFT’s American Educator which makes this case. Such a conception means that educational issues are high on our agenda, and that among our most important goals is the control of the teaching craft in all of its facets. Part of our positive conception of change is the promotion of teacher professionalism.
Understood this way, the role of a teachers’ union would be, if anything, more significant in a good school which respects teacher professionalism and values teacher voice. I do not agree, therefore, that if “all were good” with school management, there would be no need for a teachers union. When the UFT started our own two charter schools, we made a point of doing it under the same contract that we have with the Department of Education, and of creating an institutional wall of separation between the UFT as sponsor and management of the school and the UFT as union representative of the teachers. Great attention has been paid on how to promote teacher voice in all of our policy and educational decisions. There is always an important role for teacher unions in schools, but that role changes depending upon the nature of the school and the school’s management.
Leo
Leo,
You seem to come very close to arguing that “hybrid forms” are superiour to “burreaucratic models,” ie, that charter schools are better than regular public schools. Is this your intent?
Be very careful about putting words in my mouth. I opposed new small schools in New York. I think many too many were opened way too fast. They weren’t opened as alternatives, but rather as mini-replacements of failing schools. Let’s remember that the NYCDoE often rigged the numbers to make the old schools look worse. And in many cases just divided the poor results into smaller pieces.
These small schools are part of a movement to divide us, to privatize us, to “flexibilize” our work rules, etc. They also have created in New York areas that are poor and minority and are served mostly by these horrors, and areas that are less poor or middle class, more white or Asian, and are served by large comprehensive high schools. You should know better than to give a pass to separate and unequal.
There are good small schools, opened for a very different reason. They have nothing to do with what has been happening in New York. They cannot replace regular schools, but become an alternative, a set of trade-offs that parents and children are able to choose.
I am not sure how you can write: “That misreads a movement which in its inspiration and in much of its work has been quite the opposite — empowering teachers to have real voice in the running of schools.” when you know that there are hundreds of public school teachers with no on-site union representation in your local because small schools have been so effective at disorganizing the union.
In a small school near me, miserable place, the entire staff, bullied and harassed, moved on to new places the next year. Principal and her abuse of rights continued the following year, with a new staff, some of whom got bounced out, most of whom moved to new schools. New year, new abusive principal, and once again, teachers move on. A permanent cycle where no one gets near tenure, no one knows their rights, or if they do, no one is brave enough to assert them.
We’ve got members getting creamed. Talk to them. I know that you’d modify some of what you say.
Fred,
my suggestion that we work to reconvert charters, you called it a losing proposition. And I agree, at least today. But who says we can only talk about what we can win today? And certainly we can win on the related issue of opening new charters (I think we should oppose them).
At the same time we should be careful not to conflate the idealized image of what charters could be with what charters actually are today: part of an effective anti-teacher union, anti-public education movement. Are there exceptions? Certainly.
But we should all remember reading through these comments: There is an anti-teacher movement. It exists. How does it use the issues we are discussing?
jd,
I don’t quite know how to read your final question. But I am going to assume a meaning for the purpose of making a point.
Over the last few days, I have received off-line criticisms about items that were posted on this blog. For example, my post about the failures of leadership by the IEA in our fight here in Illinois for fair funding.
We know that at least one anti-teacher union blogger has commented on this conversation about charters, tenure and bargaining rights.
In the case of the IEA, I was scolded for making my criticisms public. I was reminded of that scene in The Godfather when Michael scolds Fredo in Vegas for disagreeing with The Family in front of Moe Green. Our local state senator scolded me for criticizing him on the blog rather than calling him for a private conversation.
These are public issues that ought to be discussed in the public arena. I am more and more amazed at the democratic power of the internet and blogging. People in power have no idea whether 50 or a thousand people are reading what is said. And that scares the crap out of them.
So, those who hate teachers and their unions use what we say here for their own purposes. But the benefits outweigh the dangers as far as I’m concerned. My tracking of the hits shows that an amazing number of people care about the questions that you and Leo and I have shared and are coming here to read about it. I think that’s pretty good.
Fred,
thanks for pointing out that I was being unnecessarily cryptic. (in the classroom sometimes I ask a question when I just want to pass on some information. That’s what I’ve done here.)
There is an anti-teacher, anti-union, anti-public education movement out there. They “own” charters. There is a danger they may come to co-opt the small school movement.
I think it’s an us against them fight. I think you agree. I think Leo agrees.
Once we are in that sort of fight, how do we handle issues that have been co-opted by the bad guys?
Leo says, in the case of charters, that we try to reclaim charters, that we find some original intent, some way to make them not be part of the anti-teacher movement. As confident as I sound here? I extend Leo the benefit of the doubt. I did not vote against him when he went to the UFT Delegate Assembly seeking approval to open our charter schools. (another discussion: I think those schools are doing quite well).
I say, in the case of charters, that we recognize that the other side owns them, that even where they are not explicitly anti-union, that they contribute minimal weight to that side in the war, etc, etc.
Underlying this: teacher unity is more powerful when more teachers are involved. One venue for this can be a large school. Another can be a campus of schools, where the teachers come together across school boundaries. Another might be a group of schools in the same neighborhood, again where teachers could come together. I see charter schools (not small schools) as a tool to break up potential for teacher unity. And even benign charters have some of this effect.
Should we discuss this publicly? I think so. My criticisms of my union have always been in the context of making the union stronger. I hope I have not descended into personal attacks, etc. And just in case a reader thinks that this is due to good upbringing (?!?), I feel no such constraints in general. Anyway, if union people are arguing, even loudly, about what unions should do, that’s a discussion that potentially benefits millions. Let it be public.
Hi everybody. This is unrelated (or very tenuously related!) to the tenure discussion, but I thought you might be interested in this blog post of mine anyway, on the San Francisco Schools blog:
http://www.sfschools.org/2007/05/how-charter-folks-fool-press.html
How the charter folks fool the press
This is kind of a classic, though it’s from the hinterlands.
From a story in the May 16, 2007, L.A. Weekly on Mayor Villaraigosa’s effort to remake LAUSD (“Antonio Remakes School Board / But with 43,000 kids fleeing LAUSD to charter schools, will mayor follow?”) by Janine Kahn:
Locke isn’t the first large L.A. school to seek a conversion to independent charter. In 2003, Granada Hills High School broke L.A. Unified’s hold. It now earns an impressive 9 out of 10 on the statewide test-score rankings, and was recently named one of California’s 39 certified charters — a designation of excellence.
California Charter Schools Association President Caprice Young says Granada officials got tired of being told “you can’t have that discipline plan, you can’t have the teachers staying after school, you can’t have a longer school year — Granada said, ‘Forget it. We know what the kids need.’”
This assumes but doesn’t state that Granada Hills’ scores improved after it became a charter.
I checked the school’s API for the years before it became a charter in 2003.
2000-01: 9/9
01-02: 9/8
…
05-06: 9/8
I assume the reporter was snookered rather than helping to promote the deceit.
I don’t know how much of an honor it is to have made the charter folks’ list of 39 top state charters. Included on the list is San Francisco’s own Edison Charter Academy — the musty, largely forgotten mediocrity that was the center of a hype frenzy five or six years ago.
— Caroline
JD
If the other side owns charters, who owns the schools I work in? Who own the Chicago, NY or LA public schools?
Do you think it is us? The people of Chicago, NY or LA?
While I would think that Leo would be more skeptical about charters, I think his point about the present nature of traditional forms of public education has a lot of merit. But…I think it’s way too soon to say that forms like Green Dot should receive so one-sided an endorsement.
And I think there is a need to be more respectful of how 1) intractable and reisistant to change our 100 year old system of public schools are. And 2) the role of teacher unions as agents of change.
Public school systems have weathered many storms of change. They are tough, huge, bureaucratic institutions. The very characteristics that Leo sees as problems are the same that make them such tough nuts to crack.
And again, I respectfully suggest you look closely at the Chicago union election results. Those that think they can transform large teacher unions, whether AFT or NEA too fast, forgetting the range of teacher beliefs and outlooks, risk the results Debbie Lynch got: an overwhelming rejection by the rank-and-file.