http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Yesterday, the Buffalo News reported that the Buffalo Public Schools and the Buffalo Teachers Federation had negotiated a new teacher evaluation system. But what is particularly significant is that the News simultaneously reported on and endorsed the contract negotiated between Washington, D.C. teachers and administration, and promoted it as a model for Buffalo. The D.C. contract — known as IMPACT but not mentioned by name in the editorial — has, according to the Buffalo News, four key components: performance-based teacher evaluation, financial incentives to raise test scores, limits on the protections of tenure, and increased ability of the district to lay off “bad teachers” without “economic cause”. But the News is either unaware or unwilling to report facts unfriendly to its position of support.

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Jack Gerson and other reporters (as indicated) – September 25, 2009

Well over 5,000 students, staff and faculty packed the University of California Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza on September 24, 2009, to protest sweeping layoffs, deep cuts to academic and research programs, steep tuition hikes, and the privatization of public education in California.

More than 5,000 students, teachers and other staff protested against cuts in higher education and privatization at the University of California’s Berkeley campus on September 24, 2009. Above, some of the crowd at Sproul Plaza, Berkeley, during the day of protests. Substance photo by Jack Gerson.On this, the first day of fall semester classes, over a thousand faculty members and more than 1,100 graduate teaching assistants staged a walkout, coinciding with a one-day strike by University Professional and Technical workers.

Reports compiled by Chicago’s Labor Beat (see button on the right for their Home Page):

Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:51:58 -0700

Subject: Reports from around California (and the world) – The UC Walkout

From: Eric

On Thursday, September 24, 2009, protests shook all 10 campuses of the University of California. Prompted by a walk-out letter signed by over 1,200 faculty, and a strike by 12,000 union researchers, students and labor allies organized a massive day of action to re-prioritize the budget of the UC system and push back against privatization. UC Berkeley, in particular, saw thousands attend rallies and marches reminiscent of previous generations, while activists at 3 other UCs occupied campus buildings (one of which is still ongoing). Politicians all over the state were forced to respond, with UC admins blaming state legislators and vis-versa. Schwarzenegger dismissed the protesters as a “screaming special interest group,” while Gavin Newsom insinuated his support of the walkout, injecting the UC crisis into the 2010 Governor’s race. Seeing how this was the very first day of class for most UCs, it looks to be a very long school year.. especially if you’re on the wrong side of the bullhorn.

Here’s a collection up of some of the reports from today. There’s many more – please feel free to comment.

UC Wide

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/24/california-university-berkeley-budget-protest

http://www.sacbee.com/108/story/2204365.html

http://studentactivism.net/2009/09/24/reports-from-the-uc-walkout/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/25/MNVU19SBEV.DTL

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/09/20/18622513.php

http://socialistworker.org/2009/09/25/thousands-join-uc-walkout

http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/video?id=7030684

http://extras.mercurynews.com/slideshows/news/2009/09/0925walkout/

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=0z&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=uc+walkout&oq=uc

background info: http://labornotes.org/node/2459

UC BERKELEY

* Huge rally. Police estimate 5,000. March through streets of Berkeley, sit-down civil disobedience in front of campus, shutting down three main streets.

* All day picketing

* Over a half-dozen teach-ins (see titles: http://www.saveuc.org/teachout-sched.pdf)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/24/MN2Q19S3FS.DTL

http://www.dailycal.org/article/106776/walkouts_vary_across_uc_campuses

http://www.insidebayarea.com/twitter/ci_13411072

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-09-24/article/33824

http://twitpic.com/iyy8d

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APuKukByoQA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pERb1G0-UA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_w0CToZjCc

UC DAVIS

* All day picketing

* Teamsters electricians and others honored the strike and went home

* Rally/March with estimates from several hundred to over a thousand + bikes w/ sound systems

* Brief occupation of admin building

http://twitpic.com/iz6i9

http://www.news10.net/video/default.aspx?aid=82555

http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-news-ucbudget0924,0,6713606.story

UC IRVINE

* Faculty-Student Improv Show

* Rally (w/ estimates between 500 and 1000) outside admin building

http://www.upte.org/photogallery/index.html#original/05

http://twitpic.com/iz10h

UC LOS ANGELES

* Noon Rally (LA Times estimate 700 people)

* March to Chancellor’s office

* Occupation of Chancellor’s office results in forcing Chancellor to set a meeting.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucprotests25-2009sep25,0,3895472.story

http://media.dailybruin.com/dailybruin/img/2009/sep/24/walkoutcrowd_-_derek_liu.jpg

http://media.sacbee.com/smedia/2009/09/24/14/CaliforniaUniversity5.standalone.prod_affiliate.4.jpg

UC SANTA CRUZ

* City buses (UTU), UPS (Teamsters) and construction crews refused to cross picket lines.

* All Day Picketing

* Noon Rally with 300+ people

* 3:30pm second rally and march

* Ongoing occupation of building in the center of campus, with rally outside http://occupyCA.wordpress.com and http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/09/24/18623088.php

http://www.flickr.com/photos/melissarachelblack/sets/72157622449721648/

http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_13412921?nclick_check=1

UC SAN DIEGO

* All day picketing, joined by UNITE-HERE Local 30 members who’ve been boycotting the Manchester Grand Hyatt over similar issues.

* Rally w/ about 350 attendees

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjPJO2zwmkM

UC SAN FRANCISCO

* All day picketing

* Rally w/ about ~75 people

UC SANTA BARBARA

Rally with ~400 people

http://www.independent.com/news/2009/sep/24/protesters-target-uc-regents/

http://twitpic.com/iyz2p

UC RIVERSIDE

Rally (w/ widely ranging estimates – from 150 to 500 to 1000) followed by a teach-in.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/25/qt/walkouts_across_u_of_california

http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_13414178

UC MERCED

A small rally, but notable since Merced is the newest and smallest UC!

http://www.ksee24.com/news/local/61292127.html

LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB (UC-managed)

UPTE Strike/Picketing/Protest

http://cbs5.com/local/UC.walkout.strike.2.1206109.html

TAIWAN

UC Education abroad students assembled and took a group picture.

http://tinyurl.com/yecgbxa

“The words we are holding up say, “Protect the UC, prevent fee increases” in traditional Chinese characters. We took the picture at the front gate of National Taiwan University, where we are all studying and have students from all the UC campuses except for San Francisco and Merced (we even have a student from CSU East Bay and a student from SF State).”

-

SOLIDARITY:

UNIV. of ARIZONA:

Rally w/ ~100 people against cuts and costs in the UA system, staged on 9/24 in solidarity w/ UC.

http://www.kold.com/Global/story.asp?S=11195684

SF STATE:

~75 students held a rally against cuts, costs, and the elimination of hundreds of classes in the Cal State system, and in solidarity w/ UC.

SF City College:

Rally against budget cuts and in solidarity with other educational institutions.

UNIV. of MICHIGAN:

Members of Michigan GEO, AFT Local #3550 took a group picture, with signs in solidarity.

http://tinyurl.com/y8ho329

-

QUOTES OF THE DAY:

“Walkout, Rally Hailed as Rebirth of UC Activism” (as if it ever died – Front Page story from the Berkeley Daily Planet)

“I’ve been here since 1972, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” – George Lakoff

“For most of UC, today was THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES, so there was essentially no time to organize. That makes #UCwalkout even more amazing.” – @studentactivism

“Faculty, students and unions from the University of California’s 10 campuses including its two most prestigious, UCLA and Berkeley, joined forces in what was the biggest student protest for more than a generation… The scale of the protests has come as a shock to state authorities.” – The Guardian (UK)

“being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery” – UC President Mark Yudof. (The whole interview is shockingly appalling.) See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27fob-q4-t.html?_r=1

http://www.ucfacultywalkout.com 

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George N. Schmidt – September 26, 2009

The Chicago labor news organization Labor Beat is still circulating the hit video about Arne Duncan and his work in Chicago at http://blip.tv/file/2428857

As it becomes more and more clear to more and more Americans that Arne Duncan’s Chicago Plan is worse than No Child Left Behind and more dangerous than anything done during the eight year presidency of George W. Bush, it’s more and more important that every who has Internet access takes a half hour to watch the Labor Beat story about the Chicago record of Arne Duncan.

“We used to call it segregation,” the story begins, quoting me. “Now we call it school reform…” It goes on from there to highlight the massive protests that greeted all of the Chicago lies of Arne Duncan. Those lies were only sustained because of Chicago’s unique dictatorial corporate “school reform” structure. As Chicago’s lies — from charter school and privatization to “turnaround” — become more the basis for national policy, people across the USA have the opportunity to learn about what actually happened in Chicago under Arne Duncan, who served as CEO of Chicago’s public schools from July 2001 through December 2008 at the behest of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Daley’s corporate backers.

Read more…

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approve plans to fire hundreds of Veteran teachers on the teachers’ low performance on evaluations, rather than on their seniority.

Even more controversially, the 134,000-student North Carolina district granted an exemption to teachers hired through the Teach For America recruiting program who meet teaching standards over more-senior teachers, and it is poised to hire more TFA alumni.

[...]

But members of the district’s school board said the decision was influenced by several factors, including the desire to maintain a contract with TFA and an overall sense that the teachers are doing well by their students.

Of course, firing veteran teachers and replacing them with new teachers saves money. Instead of making the legitimate demand for increased funds for education, the Board has caved in to the pressure that there is no alternative to cuts. Certainly, as well, folks in N.C. are pressured by Duncan and his “Race to Top” bribe to support, among other things, TFA.

But there are several questions. The first, raised by former TFAer Dan Brown in the Huffington Post, (“Overhyping Teach For America, Undercutting Millions of Students”) concerns the issue of turnover, or the fact that TFA teachers, by design, do no commit to teaching as a profession, creating more instability. “Our country requires broadly-conceived initiatives to ensure that our schools in all 50 states are staffed with talented, well-trained, and well-supported teachers–with or without that Princeton degree,” Brown writes. I’ll add: Schools don’t need the “support” of white-man’s-burden do-gooders arrogant and callous enough to claim bad teaching and unions are the root cause of social problems, and the presence of high-scoring Yale graduates for only a couple of years is sufficient to address the criminal conditions imposed on tens of millions of families across the U.S.

Yet, TFA is likely more than a poorly designed, silver bullet, and therefore significant in other respects. Lincoln Caplan writes, in Why big donors back Teach for America, that

TFA is … “theory of change’ [that] depends on ensuring that its teachers “attain high levels of success with their students—and then, as alumni, go on to bring about equity in education for kids of different classes and races, in the role of everything from principal to school superintendent to governor.”

While one might dismiss the theory on empirical grounds — Caplan reports one study observing that 30 percent of TFAers leave in their first year, not completing their two-year commitment — the theory itself deserve future attention (as it suggest in classic liberal fashion that the struggle for equality is most appropriate waged through the struggle for education, and not class struggle).

The other question is that of evaluation. What are the standards? In the context of a national campaign to blame collective bargaining, including the standard of seniority, what is to stop evaluators from favoring TFA recruits when that is the aim of school boards and senior officials. Sawchuk reports:

A second school board member, Tom Tate, added, “We seem to be getting good results from these teachers generally.”

He reports that earlier this spring, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg board approved a new policy that put a heavier focus on performance. In a context where TFA supporters bring millions, is it unreasonable to question to degree to which local TFA hype influences perceptions of competence? (the C.D. Spangler Foundation donated $4 million to expand the Charlotte TFA program this school year and next.) The policy directs the district “not to renew any teachers whose licenses are not current, those who do not meet minimum standards on local evaluation instruments, part-time teachers, and retired teachers who have returned to teaching. After that, it exempts TFA teachers and a handful of others in shortage subject areas, such as math, science, and foreign languages, over traditionally certified teachers with more seniority or equally high performance ratings” (emphasis added). Superintendent Peter Gorman is reported to be planning to “hire additional TFA teachers for 2009-10, rather than giving priority to teachers who are receiving pink slips.”

Are TFA graduates, with the Ivy League test scores, more effective teachers, or just cheaper and not likely to join the union ranks? Caplain reports that TFA

has attracted a list of accomplished critics in its adolescence. Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford’s school of education, is the lead author of the best-known study, which concluded that students of uncertified teachers of TFA lagged significantly behind students of certified non-TFA teachers. Deborah Appleman, the chairwoman of education studies at Carleton College, shadowed a former student of hers through the summer training of TFA’s first class in 1990. She came away disappointed and has been been a persistent critic ever since. She discourages her students from applying and refuses to write letters of recommendation for them. TFA also contends with the fear that the public will lose patience, since progress in closing the achievement gap has been so modest, given the large sums spent on education, including on Kopp’s brainchild.

It should be noted that Caplan writes:

In its defense, TFA cites a study from Mathematica Policy Research that looked at how students of corps members fared compared with students of the teachers hired instead (rookies and old hands, some certified and some not) in hardest-to-staff schools. Reading scores were the same, math scores notably higher.

A more careful review of the merits of that study can be found here, although this line of criticism has its limits too, as I hope to argue in the future (along these lines).

So with such limited prospects for “success”, why such public praise in the big media outlets? Certainly data are not driving this decision…

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In April, three-quarters of the Civitas teachers and staff at the three schools signed cards stating they wanted the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) to represent them as a union. Under state law, that was enough for the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board to automatically certify Chicago ACTS as the union representative, which the board did. But school officials filed a petition with the NLRB, claiming Civitas was a private entity that required an NLRB-supervised election.

“We continue to believe that these charter schools are public schools because they are funded with taxpayer dollars,” said Brian Harris, a special education teacher at CICS/Civitas Northtown Academy and a member of Chicago ACTS. “We are prepared to proceed with an election as soon as possible and are confident that our union will prevail.”

Civitas argued that its charter schools are essentially private schools not accountable to the public, despite receiving taxpayer dollars. In the brief Civitas submitted to the NLRB, it claimed it is a for-profit company not required to provide any type of annual presentation to any government body to justify its annual expenditures, and that it has no “direct personal accountability” to any government public officials.

“We urge Civitas administrators to work with the teachers and staff at the school to ensure the election is conducted fairly and quickly,” said Martha Biondi, chair of Chicago Workers’ Rights Board and an associate professor of African American studies and history at Northwestern University. “We applaud the teachers and staff at the school for working to have a say in their school in order to improve learning and teaching conditions that will ultimately benefit the children.”

Chicago ACTS is a joint project of the American Federation of Teachers, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Chicago Teachers Union. Chicago ACTS is an affiliate of the IFT.

Links:

Chicago ACTS brief to National Labor Relations Board

CICS/Civitas brief to National Labor Relations Board

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In reviewing a front page item from Education Week (“Unions Set Sights on High-Profile Charter-Network Schools”), I’m reminded of how frustrated I have become the by vague and self-serving language of “accountability” that appears in news reports and speeches. Witness the law of diminishing accountability as one climbs the social hierarchy.

In discussing the “culture clash” of unions with philanthropy-backed academic sweatshops, Stephen Sawchuk writes: “Charter school advocates say unionization has historically carried a set of policies—such as seniority provisions and lengthy appeals processes for dismissed teachers—that discourage accountability and the recognition of differences in performance.”

But as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, points out: “Collaboration [the buzzword of corporate charters used in the article] without having some balance of power is not collaboration, if a teacher knows that he or she can be fired for any reason at all.”

So what is the actual problem? The problem is not “accountability” but different standards of accountability for different people holding different offices. When administrators fire teachers for “no reason at all” they are rendered as masters of innovation, serving the public good as “no excuses” educators who have, finally, rescued poor, minority children from the grips of uncaring, lazy teachers.

How can setting up an arrangement where management cannot be challenged be described as somehow more accountable than collectively agreed upon contractual arrangements that stipulate rights and responsibilities of both parties? While much in the media aims to discredit collective bargaining, especially seniority and the right to challenge management, as the root of all that is wrong with public schools, I caution pause. The problem is not peoples right to collectively organize themselves in their own interests.

The notion of accountability is fundamentally relational, and refers both to the party who must give account, and to whom they must account. But also implicit in this notion is the idea of checks and balances. The present landscape of discussion about education is littered with conceptions of accountability rendered as a one way street, with those screaming the loudest about accountability simultaneously the most unaccountable. Has KIPP been held to account for its infractions against students, and the public? Has the growing list of corporate charter school fraud caused pause for those pushing expansion of the very charter school models that are associated with the fraud?

While democratic renewal is required in unions as in other spheres, attacking the right to collectively bargain the conditions of work and procedures for challenging decisions will not contribute to improving education.

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Over the past several months, a plethora of “research” and “investigateive” reports have been uncritically promoted by major media outlets. Acting as spokespersons for research think tanks funded by the largest monopolies, and aligned with the Obama administration’s education agenda, reporters take no responsibility to investigate the merits of these reports. No effort is made to evaluate the merits of the research or its status as “nonpartisan” (that is, not biased toward any particular political group). Reporters do not reprint the list of those funding these reports (lists which are easily obtained) and the known views of these funders (also easily obtained and by no means secret). In the worst cases, reporters produce their own articles supporting this line promoted by the think tanks. The undeniable fact is that all these reports are generated by rabid anti-union forces, who promote research driven by the demand for “data” that will “decide” teachers have no right to association. As Mike Petrilli, Vice President for National Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says, unions “need to be defeated, over and over and over again if reform is to advance.”

Some Examples

The most recent effort comes with a report, The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness, from the New Teacher Project. Their tag line is quite informative: “Teachers matter. In the fight to eliminate educational inequality, teachers matter most. The New Teacher Project works with school districts and states nationwide to ensure that poor and minority students get outstanding teachers.” (More on the significance of the title below.) Based on questionable research on 12 districts in four states, the report calls for eliminating the basic premise of a union with calls for pay for performance arrangements (note this is not merit pay or bonus, but pay contingent upon test score results).

As some critics have noted, to speak about educational equality absent the growing, grotesque social inequality that is in fact driven by those who fund such reports is irrational. Absent the affirmation of the human rights of poor and minority students, extant educational inequality will not be “eliminated.”

As reported in the document, “Primary funding for this report was provided by the Robertson Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Joyce Foundation. Additional funding was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arnold Family Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.”

Another example appeared in Education Week in April. Researchers Examine Contracts’ Effects on Policy Issues, by Stephen Sawchuk. It reported on a March conference held by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). Its funders include:

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
The Brookhill Foundation
The Louis Calder Foundation
Exxon Mobil Foundation
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Fisher Family Foundation
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Gleason Foundation
Martha Holden Jennings Foundation
Houston Endowment
Joyce Foundation
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Koret Foundation
Milken Family Foundation
Searle Freedom Trust

President of the Fordham Institute, Chester Finn, is on the Board of Directors. He and Fordham are not well known for careful all-sided analysis when it comes to research on teacher unions.

Here is one of the key reported findings from that “nonpartisan” conference. Researchers found evidence that salary schedules (which are associated with collective bargaining) appear to depress a school’s ability to attract the best teachers. The top 75th percentile of teachers in schools with salary schedules have scores on the SAT that were 2 to 3 percent lower than peers in schools without salary schedules. While admitting that I have not actually read these manuscripts, such a documented difference is probably only statistically significant. A 2 percent drop in an SAT of 1000 would result in a score of 980 (those in the latter group probably don’t get to line up in the Gold Executive Excellent Superior Because I have Access to Money Line when boarding planes).

But more troubling is the evident irrational logic. Ignoring the minimal difference in real life of a 2 percent lower score, unless the supply of “the best teachers” is unlimited (making the concept of best meaningless) the point is moot. Teacher quality will be unequally distributed, as housing, income and healthcare are unequally distributed, with many factors affecting distribution patterns. (Unionization is generally an equalizing force as it serves to raise the wages and benefits of its members, serving to close the income gap.) But the existence of differences in the quality of teachers is not caused by salary scales, although this illogic sneaks in the reported discussion; even if salary scales were eliminated, the “best” teachers could not be equally everywhere.

If one had a society where consciousness affirmed the need to place the best in the most challenging circumstances, understanding that with talent comes responsibility, things would be different. Such a society would reject the base notion that human beings only respond to narrow self interest and the reward of gadgetry and shallow Disney story line. However, being the best is presently a status that is linked to structural inequality.

McKinsey & Company (a “global management consulting firm”) is represented on the Advisory Board of NCTQ, who wrote that media celebrated masterpiece of pseudo science, “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.” (While not explicitly about teachers, they are clearly implicated.) In that report we learn that the achievement gap “imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.”

The one graph not inserted into this prettified document tracks the achievement gap over time as it corresponds to real measures of recession over the same time period. (The Economic Impact report is premised on “what if” scinarios, not actual experience, using models inspired by the very partisan researcher, Eric Hanuschek, who has dedicated much time to justifying funding cuts to education, larger class sizes for teachers, etc.) This graph would clearly show that changes in the unemployment rate, the S&P 500 or the GDP do not correspond to average group differences in norm reference tests scores over the last fifty years.

Of course, the material in the “Economic Impact” “study” strategically confounds cause and effect. On the one hand, it goes to great lengths to claim that poverty is not a determinant of achievement. But than it goes on to assert that raising test scores will facilitate social mobility and measured economic prosperity.

Finally, there was the May 3rd “investigative” piece appearing in the Los Angeles Times, entitled, “Failure Gets A Pass,” just in time to create public opinion against teacher actions. It used the scientific method of anecdotes with selective reference to context, written in a style that leads the reader to assume that all of what is being described is clear cut and the fault of unions. By linking the existence of unions to several extreme cases, the right of teachers to associate becomes associated with protecting drug dealers, child molesters and abuse.

Certainly the governing class has no hand in these activities! In the fantasy world of philanthropy, the free market in sex trade of children and existence of drug abuse is probably the result of collective bargaining too, as are the documented abuses of children at non-union, philanthropy supported, KIPP schools. If unions did not exist, KIPP would not be needed, so the unions are at fault in the end for promoting the suspcious idea that people have a right to form associations to defend their common interests, a practice which only leads to moral transgression. It’s really “All About the Kids!” And kids want really large classes, with underpaid teachers who completed quickie bootstrapping, white man’s burden teacher training programs that narrowly focus on “following orders” and that all-time favorite pastime of youth: standardized testing.

Anyhow, the agenda that might explain the public adoption of such irrational thinking is the drive to cheapen education by eliminating unions. But maybe this is the way forward! We all know that lowering salaries and benefits will contribute to economic growth…because test scores, which are not affected by poverty, can be raised among the poor and thus close the achievement gap, which is responsible for our national recession, which does not affect test scores, because poverty is not an excuse, because all children can learn, especially when they are placed in academic sweatshops by parents who chose to be poor but are now reconsidering their ill-advised previous life choices.

This irrationalism is a result of the starting point of the “research”, that is, to gather “evidence” that supports the view of the monopolies and their philanthropic organizations that at the root of the teacher quality problem is teachers’ right to association. Underlying the idea of the title “Widget Effect” is an attack on the principal that stands against feudal notions of caste and loyalty and for equal treatment, rights and duties, but it now becomes apparent that such an argument must be the object of an entire article.

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She writes:

The state has certified the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff as the bargaining unit for teachers at three campuses of the Chicago International Charter School, which would seem to make it the city’s first unionized charter.

The union is calling on Chicago International Charter School management—which is handled at the three unionizing campuses by Civitas Schools—to sit down with teachers and start hammering out a contract.

Not so fast, Civitas says.

Election vs. card check. The nonprofit management group is arguing that the feds should have jurisdiction over the union certification, not the state. So it’s filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board. A decision is expected this month.

Civitas’ motivation? Under federal law, the three charter campuses fighting for union representation would have to hold an election to determine whether teachers want the union.

State law doesn’t require an election at the schools, because a majority of teachers have already signed union cards. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board says it received 91 signed and dated cards; organizers say that’s about 75 percent of employees at the three campuses.

Civitas’ CEO Simon Hess says he wants teachers to be able to make a “private, informed decision” about whether to join the union. The union says Civitas is stalling and would love to buy time to pressure teachers not to join the union.

Standing behind the fight over unionization is the distinction between public and private. Lutton writes:

The legal fight has forced Civitas to make a prickly argument: Charter schools have worked hard to emphasize they are public schools, funded with public dollars. But in order to fall under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, you’ve got to be a private firm, and that’s what Civitas is arguing. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board has jurisdiction over public educational employers.

“I wouldn’t be so certain that you’ve got a bargaining unit there in that charter school as long as there’s a question about whether the employer is a private firm,” said Robert Bruno, a labor expert at UIC.

Then again, arguing you’re a private firm just because “the place is being managed by some private management firm, that’s not gonna wash. They’re still a public entity,” Bruno told me. It’s not a clear-cut case.

Civitas CEO Simon Hess said Civitas is essentially a private vendor. Just because you receive public funds doesn’t mean you’re a public entity, Hess told me.

This raises a key problem: why would public funds be given to a private entity in the first place? The original arguments for what the right-wing calls “government schools” is that public funds should serve public purposes and to ensure public purposes are being served, public oversight is required. That “private vendors” receive public funds under the guise that “charter schools are public schools” yet demand regulations consistent with private not public entities suggests not only a self-serving agenda, but more importantly, a broad shift in the public/private distinction.

Lutton continues, summarizing legal precedent:

There’s been one other case like this, which might give us some idea of how things will turn out. A year ago, teachers at Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Kane County formed a union. Their employer, the Northern Kane Educational Corporation, also argued that the NLRB should have jurisdiction in the case, using the same private employer argument. But the state IELRB ruled otherwise. In a decision issued in November 2008, the IELRB determined that Northern Kane should indeed be considered a public employer subject to the state public educational employer act.

The school’s administration appealed the decision to the appellate court, which is where the case remains.

Who is our boss? That’s one of the first questions Chicago International Charter School teachers faced when they began organizing.

The Chicago International Charter School has 12 campuses—they’re run by four different educational management organizations: two for-profits (EdisonLearning and Victory Schools, Inc.) and two non-profits, American Quality Schools and Civitas.

Civitas was started by Chicago International Charter School in 2002 and is described on the Web site as a “wholly owned subsidiary” of CICS. For you business maj0rs out there, Hess told me that technically Civitas is a limited liability corporation whose sole member is CICS. The Civitas name is on teachers’ paychecks at the campuses it manages, so “we decided they were the employer,” says Northtown Academy teacher Eric Levy.

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