Chicago Teachers Union sets more traps to kill charter schools
Charter school contracts can be renewed for up to 10 years, but the Chicago Teachers Union has been pressuring for as few as two years. Sowing instability hurts charters and improves CTU’s odds of killing competition for their mediocre product.
The Chicago Board of Education recently voted to renew all 21 charter schools for just two to four years, creating instability that the Chicago Teachers Union will use to damage parents’ abilities to choose better schools for their children.
Of Chicago Public Schools’ 21 charter school campuses up for renewal, 11 in late May received just two-year renewals despite state law allowing charter schools to be renewed for up to 10-year terms. The longest renewals approved by the board were four-year terms at eight charter schools.
CTU has a history of denying access to charter schools for Chicago families and trying to limit them statewide. The union’s newest collective bargaining agreement with CPS advances that assault.
The most recent contract mandates a moratorium restricting the number of charter schools in the city and their enrollment. The agreement also includes a union neutrality clause for contract renewals, requiring charter operators to in effect support a union’s attempt to organize its staff and making it easier for CTU to unionize all charter schools in the district.
The agreement also includes a new provision to create “reabsorption guidelines” for converting charter schools back into district-run schools. That means charters disappear and CTU regains control of those staff and students.
Charter schools offer an alternative to traditional public schools while still being a free, public-school option for Chicago families. CTU sees them as competition designed to avoid the union’s dictates and interfere with how children are educated – which is a major reason charters are so successful while fewer than 1 in 3 students can read at grade level under CTU’s tutelage.
In step with the anti-charter school provisions in the union agreement, the board of education passed a resolution May 29 which threatens to further undermine charter schools and their intended autonomy. Fifteen school board members voted “yes” on the resolution, with four abstaining.
Among other things, the resolution requires the district to create a policy to address what happens when a charter school closes and considerations for transitioning it into a district-run school, much like the “reabsorption guidelines” in CTU’s contract agreement.
The resolution also requires charter school operators to remain neutral to any unionization attempts at their school, similar to what is in the CTU contract. Additionally, it requires charter schools to comply with requests by labor organizations to meet with school employees or obtain lists of employees who are eligible to organize as union members, including their personal contact information.
Parents ought to have the opportunity to enroll their children in the schools that best fit their needs, whether that be a district-run public school, charter school or private school. CTU already removed private schools from that equation, killing the state scholarship program that was helping 15,000 low-income children.
But CTU and its allies on the board of education continue to undermine charter schools, creating instability for the students choosing that option. CTU is intentionally making it very tough for charter schools to plan for their futures when those futures are only two years away.
Rather than undermining charter schools, Chicago should expand access to public schooling options – not kowtow to a teachers union that has a history of poor results at high costs and works against parents’ interests so it can further its own political goals.