Nationally, charter advocates are making the same argument: that a union-free environment has fueled the success of many schools. Teachers unions ramp up recruitment efforts at charter schools

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has called charter school expansion “part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling.” But in October, the union leader was at a charter school in Chicago, fighting for its teachers.

The teachers at UNO Charter School network are union members, and they were getting ready to strike. Weingarten was on hand to express support. The school ultimately worked out a deal with its teachers, and avoided what would have been the nation’s first charter-led teachers strike.


With President Donald Trump expected to push for an expansion of charter schools, the growing battle between union organizers and charter operators is poised to become more significant.

Although charter schools have become known for operating outside the realm of unions — and flaunting that fact — teachers unions are making a play to increase their membership within the charter sector. And charter schools have noticed.

“AFT for a long time has tried to organize charters. But recently has quadrupled down on that effort,” said Todd Ziebarth, who leads state-level advocacy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “It was a priority, and then it became a huge priority.”

A union leader in Chicago called last fall’s UNO negotiations an “important marker of what is possible for charter school educators,” while a progressive blog tracking the fight called it “a nightmare for neoliberal ed reformers.”

For AFT, an aggressive plan to organize charters in urban hotspots — the same areas where charter proliferation has diluted its ranks — will go hand in hard with continuing to oppose laws that encourage charter school expansion.

One charter school leader said the union’s two-pronged approach amounts to “cognitive dissonance.” An AFT organizer countered that the union’s growing charter presence is motivated by the simple desire to make sure that charter teachers are included in decision-making — just like teachers at traditional public schools.

“Charters were supposed to be about management and teachers collaborating locally — that’s not what is happening,” an AFT charter organizer said.

The National Education Association, the other major teachers’ union, has also moved toward charter school organizing. Secky Fascione, a local organizer for the NEA, said that as charter enrollment has grown, “The need to have uniform standards demands that we respond.”

Serving as a backdrop is an ideological debate over what charter schools are and should be. Does organized labor elevate teachers’ voice in an industry where year-to-year contracts are the norm, or does it saddle schools with the red tape of traditional school districts?

In 2012, just 7 percent of charter school teachers belonged to a union, according to the Center for Education Reform. That number has now risen to 10 percent, the center estimates.

In Chicago, it’s even higher: Roughly one-quarter of charter school teachers belong to a union, according to an estimate by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. About half of the nation’s unionized charter teachers are bound by state law to local collective bargaining agreements. (In Maryland, for example, all of the state’s charter school teachers — roughly 840 of them — are unionized. Kansas, Iowa and Alaska have similar laws.)

But those state laws haven’t changed in the last few years, which suggests it is union organizing that’s driving the recent increase in membership at charter schools.

Teachers’ unions, for example, have pumped resources into local charter organizing campaigns. When a group of teachers at a school begin to mull unionization, union hands are ready to assist.

The American Federation of Teachers, which employs a local organizer focused solely on charter schools, has active campaigns in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City and Chicago. AFT is also investing resources in New Orleans, where it is reviving unionization in a city with few organized educators after the city’s schools were largely handed over to charter management organizations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The campaigns have given the American Federation of Teachers the strongest hold on the charter sector, with 227 unionized schools in 15 states that add up to roughly 7,000 members. The National Education Association would not provide details on its charter school membership.

Meanwhile, the largest charter school organizing drive in the country is unfolding in Los Angeles. The prize at stake: the 28-school Alliance College-Ready Public Schools charter network.

With a growing enrollment of over 12,000 students, Alliance is the largest independent charter school network in the Los Angeles Unified School District. A successful unionization push would be a big win for organized labor.

From the outset, the organizing drive has been ambitious, with the goal of organizing all of Alliance’s schools, and roughly 700 educators, collectively under one contract. An AFT affiliate, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, is leading the charge.

Organization efforts rose above chatter in March of 2015, when 70 Alliance educators from across the network announced in a letter to charter management that they intended to seek unionization under the name “Alliance Educators United.” By the end of the year, roughly 150 educators had signed the pledge. Union officials refused to provide an updated number of signatures.

Alisha Mernick, an art teacher at Alliance’s Gertz-Ressler High School, is one of those leading the effort. Mernick said talk about unionization at her school began about 5 years ago, but last spring’s formal announcement was the “birth” of the current drive. She said educators at the core of the organizing effort spent days editing the letter of intent, which calls for teachers “to have a collective and effective voice in the decision making processes at the Alliance.”

Mernick said that key decisions at the school — such as how to incorporate technology in the classroom — were made without teacher input.

“The only difference between a unionized charter and a non-unionized charter is that leaders have to consult with teachers before major changes,” Mernick said.

The letter of intent also asked that Alliance leaders not interfere with the unionization effort, and come to an agreement on a neutral process.

Alliance’s top leaders responded by issuing this public statement: “We acknowledge the rights of our teachers to undertake this effort. We also recognize that our teachers are under no obligation to participate.”

A website paid for by Alliance features a memo on the benefits of Alliance’s independence, and states the network’s position on the issue: “We respectfully disagree with the assertion that unionization with UTLA would help advance educational opportunities for our students. We do not think being a part of the ongoing antagonism between UTLA and LAUSD and limiting our flexibility and autonomy would be beneficial to our students and our teachers.”

A fact sheet, also on the site, warns teachers in all-caps that, “ONCE UNIONIZATION OCCURS, IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO REMOVE THE UNION.”

Some teachers in favor of unionization allege Alliance’s opposition has amounted to unfair labor practices, and they complained to California’s Public Employee Relations Board.

One complaint details a July incident where an Alliance leader allegedly called police, claiming Mernick was trespassing by handing out leaflets about unionization near a school building. Teachers have also accused Alliance of intimidation and interference — UTLA emails, for example, were once routed to teachers’ spam folders.

“Within a month, it evolved into an illegal anti-union campaign,” said UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl.

The state labor board has asked Alliance to cease-and-desist from any unlawful interference, and to restore the union’s access to Alliance email servers. Separately, Alliance is also being audited by state lawmakers after accusations that the charter operator is using public funds to pay for its anti-union efforts. The audit was requested by state Sen. Tony Mendoza, a former UTLA board member whose district does not include any Alliance schools.

Alliance spokesman Catherine Suitor said the network is “just trying to get a balanced presentation of facts, instead of a one-way conversation, which is what UTLA wants.” Regarding the audit, Suitor said Mendoza and UTLA are “playing politics with our schools.”

At the core of their message to educators, Suitor said, is an argument to preserve the structure of Alliance’s schools, which boast some of the state’s highest test scores.

“The high level of autonomy and flexibility is part of the model of providing personalized support and instruction,” Suitor said.

Nationally, charter advocates are making the same argument: that a union-free environment has fueled the success of many schools.

“The reason we’ve been able to succeed to a large extent is that we have nimble, entrepreneurial-minded leaders who are running schools, can hire qualified teachers and pay them with a differentiated payscale,” said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. “They have the freedom to expand the school day and school year without having to consult a union.”

Rees said that collective bargaining agreements keep school leaders from making “mid-course corrections quickly” — a problem, she said, that ails traditional public schools.

“All of a sudden, the establishment is difficult to move,” Rees said. “It’s what‘s led to the state of education we have today.”

A memo to charter school attorneys sent by the Alliance for Charter School Attorneys, a branch of NAPCS, explains that recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board, which governs charter unionization in places where charters are deemed private employers, have expedited the unionization process.

“What's a charter to do? Be proactive!” the memo reads.

Although charter teachers in Chicago threatened to strike, that sort of tension is rare. Once the schools are unionized, collective bargaining at charters generally goes on without major hiccups.

Still, Ziebarth, the state-level strategist for NAPCS, said “operators are concerned about losing the flexibility and autonomy. I think people are concerned that all the work they’ve done over the years, that that’s going to go by the wayside, and they’re going to have to abide by some inflexible collective bargaining agreement.”

Ziebarth said he frequently advises charter operators that the best way to protect their flexibility is to ensure educators “have a voice in their school.”

“If you fall short, you open yourself to losing that flexibility, to unionization and collective bargaining,” he said. “If you want to be free of that, you better make sure the teachers are happy.”

Union leaders insist that charter schools, when initially conceived, were always meant to be unionized.

Indeed, former AFT President Albert Shanker is credited with pioneering the charter school concept. He envisioned a new kind of public school that would grow out of a proposal by a group of teachers asking to do things differently.

Those teacher proposals would spark the creation of independent new schools that could test new instructional methods, but the schools would need to be approved jointly by local education leaders and the union.

“I would approve such a proposal if it included a plan for faculty decision making, for participative management,” Shanker said in a 1988 speech. “A way for a teaching team to govern itself.”

By the time Shanker died in 1997, charter schools had become more of a mainstream idea — and unions had been cut out of the concept.

“The right wing had co-opted the charter school idea and used it as a way to get around unions,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who wrote a biography on Shanker and studies the charter school landscape.

“From the first charter school legislation, unions and charters have been at odds,” he said. “The idea became that charter schools would be the competition and kind of whip traditional public schools into shape.”

That discord at the outset has cemented in the years since. Flash forward to today, and charter supporters are deeply skeptical of the surge in unionizing efforts at their schools.

Overall, teachers union membership has declined over the last five years. And while that trend isn’t solely because of charter school growth, it is a factor.

Two key examples: New Orleans and Detroit, where union membership was all but eradicated by a surge of non-unionized charter schools. Both cities are now a priority in AFT’s charter organizing campaign.

But the organizing effort hasn’t tampered the union’s outspoken criticism of charters in general. In Chicago, where Weingarten, the AFT president, supported charter teachers who threatened a strike, there is strong resistance to charters among union members who work in Chicago Public Schools. The day after UNO charter leaders and the teachers union reached a tentative deal to avoid a strike, the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly to ratify its contract with Chicago Public Schools.

That contract includes a provision that will effectively ban all new charter schools in Chicago until 2018, and will cap the growth of existing charters to 101% of current enrollment until then.

Weingarten publicly celebrated that contract.

Over at the NEA, president Lily Skelsen-Garcia was one of the first to praise last year’s resolution from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that called for a moratorium on new charter schools.

In Massachusetts, teachers’ unions successfully campaigned to stop a proposed charter school expansion in that state. Voters in November rejected the Massachusetts charter expansion, and it was the unions that provided the organizing backbone for the “No” campaign.

Union supporters say it’s possible to both fight the growth of charters while also representing teachers who work at those same schools.

In Chicago, union leaders say the charter school cap works in favor of charter school teachers too. “The more schools that are allowed, the more stretched the money is,” said Chris Baehrend, president of the Chicago Association of Charter School Teachers, a branch of AFT. He said that in Chicago, the quick proliferation of charters has drained the public school system, a situation made worse by declining enrollment. “Charters are cannibalizing other charters,” he said. “Just because I work in a charter school doesn't mean I support more charter schools.”

In L.A., where UTLA has also fought charter school expansion, Caputo-Pearl says the union can support charter school educators and also work to slow the growth of charters.

“We are serious about organizing charter educators because we have a lot in common and because we need each other,” he said. “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. It just means were pro-sustainability.”