There is something distinctly unsettling about seeing people invoke Martin Luther King Jr.'s name to support the current effort to privatize large swaths of American public education. It has recently become customary to claim that "education is the civil rights issue of our time." True enough, for no one can succeed in our society without an education. But the people who make this claim insist that public school students should be enrolled in schools run by for-profit corporations, hedge-fund managers, and earnest amateurs, who receive public money without any public oversight. There are now about 5,000 such schools, called charter schools, across the nation, and President Obama wants many more of them. As it happens, about 98% of these schools are non-union; their teachers work 50-60 hours each week, which could not happen if they were union schools.