It’s a deli­cious irony for teach­ers unions that Rauner Col­lege Prep — a Chica­go char­ter school named after Bruce Rauner, Illi­nois’ vir­u­lent­ly anti-union gov­er­nor — may soon have a union.

"The only accountability charters have is when we form unions in them."

On March 3, the Chica­go Asso­ci­a­tion of Char­ter Teach­ers and Staff (ACTS) announced an orga­niz­ing dri­ve at the Noble Net­work of Char­ter Schools, which has 18 cam­pus­es across Chica­go, includ­ing Rauner Col­lege Prep. If the cam­paign is suc­cess­ful, Noble will become the nation’s largest union­ized char­ter net­work. The addi­tion of Noble’s 800 teach­ers and staff to its ranks would also give ACTS, a local of the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers (AFT), an impres­sive den­si­ty in Chicago’s char­ter mar­ket — the union says it would rep­re­sent as many as 40 per­cent of char­ter teach­ers in Chica­go. About 10 per­cent of char­ter teach­ers nation­wide are union­ized, accord­ing to the pro-char­ter Cen­ter for Edu­ca­tion Reform.

The Chica­go Teach­ers Union, a sis­ter local to ACTS, has been a bright spot in a bleak labor land­scape. But tra­di­tion­al pub­lic school edu­ca­tors aren’t the only ones on the move. Chica­go is also at the epi­cen­ter of a nation­wide push to union­ize char­ter schools. The AFT says it now has 7,000 mem­bers across char­ter schools in 15 states such as New York and Cal­i­for­nia, where large orga­niz­ing dri­ves are also gain­ing stream. More than 1,000 of the union’s char­ter mem­bers are in Chicago.

ACTS hopes to increase char­ter teach­ers’ pay and ben­e­fits (accord­ing to data obtained by Cat­a­lyst, a Chica­go edu­ca­tion pub­li­ca­tion, full-time Noble teach­ers make about $60,000 a year includ­ing bonus­es and stipends; CPS teach­ers make $74,000), increase teacher reten­tion and wrest con­trol away from ​“unac­count­able” char­ter man­age­ment. In doing so, the union may elim­i­nate cor­po­rate reform­ers’ incen­tives for push­ing char­ters in the first place.

The growth of char­ter schools dur­ing the past decade has gone hand-in-hand with the dis­man­tling of pub­lic edu­ca­tion. In the 2015 – 16 school year, near­ly 3 mil­lion stu­dents — up 250,000 from the pri­or year — attend­ed more than 6,800 char­ters across 42 states, accord­ing to the pro-char­ter Nation­al Alliance for Pub­lic Char­ter Schools. In Chica­go, char­ters have spread rapid­ly at the same time tra­di­tion­al pub­lic schools have been shut­tered. The city infa­mous­ly closed 49 schools in one fell swoop in 2013 and closed about 100 in the decade before that. At the same time, new char­ter schools have con­tin­ued to open, total­ing 130 today. The schools are pri­vate­ly run but oper­ate almost entire­ly on pub­lic dollars.

Char­ter boost­ers say the mod­el pro­vides school admin­is­tra­tors the free­dom to inno­vate. In a state­ment respond­ing to the Noble union dri­ve, Super­in­ten­dent Michael Milkie said that the char­ter net­work would ​“respect the rights of indi­vid­u­als to orga­nize or not orga­nize.” How­ev­er, he warned that ​“a restric­tive union con­tract could elim­i­nate the cur­ricu­lum and flex­i­bil­i­ty we have to best serve our stu­dents’ needs.”

Char­ter crit­ics, mean­while, say that this so-called flex­i­bil­i­ty stems from the absence of work­er pro­tec­tions. Union­ized teach­ers, like all union work­ers, nego­ti­ate the terms of their employ­ment; non-union teach­ers work at the whim of their employ­ers.” Like­wise, while ​“account­abil­i­ty” is a watch­word for char­ter oper­a­tors who say that they aren’t behold­en to any­thing oth­er than stu­dent out­comes, ACTS Pres­i­dent Chris Baehrend says this couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth.

“The only account­abil­i­ty char­ters have is when we form unions in them,” says Baehrend. Before then, ​“you find it was a whole bunch of crony fam­i­ly mem­bers and friends” in lead­er­ship posi­tions or receiv­ing con­tracts at charters.

A prime exam­ple is Chicago’s large and influ­en­tial UNO Char­ter School Net­work, whose 16 schools serve more than 8,000 stu­dents. Before open­ing its first char­ter in 1998, UNO’s roots were in Saul Alin­sky-style orga­niz­ing in the city’s Lati­no neigh­bor­hoods, and the orga­ni­za­tion quick­ly posi­tioned itself as a pow­er play­er in Chica­go pol­i­tics. But a series of inves­ti­ga­tions by Chica­go Sun-Times reporter Dan Mihalopou­los in Feb­ru­ary 2013 found that UNO had engaged in major ethics vio­la­tions, includ­ing hand­ing out large con­tracts for ser­vices to fam­i­ly mem­bers of the network’s high­er-ups. After sev­er­al gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tions, mil­lions in pub­lic fund­ing were pulled from the net­work, and UNO CEO Juan Rangel was forced to step down in disgrace.

Up against the ropes, UNO lead­er­ship pro­posed a neu­tral­i­ty agree­ment, and teach­ers quick­ly union­ized. Sev­er­al oth­er lead­ers were forced to resign, and the school cleaned up some of its most egre­gious practices.

Like­wise, teach­ers at the ASPI­RA char­ter net­work, who joined Chica­go ACTS in 2010, say that one of their biggest con­tentions with man­age­ment was basic bud­get transparency.

“ASPI­RA has been dete­ri­o­rat­ing for the last five years,” says Marines Mar­tinez, a teacher at ASPI­RA and act­ing head of the union’s coun­cil of edu­ca­tors, cit­ing a lack of basic main­te­nance in class­rooms. ​“That left us to won­der: Where is the mon­ey going?”

Baehrend says the union helps ensure that more char­ter resources go to class­rooms, rather than admin­is­tra­tion. Exact fig­ures on just how much admin­is­tra­tors earn are dif­fi­cult to come by. While the City of Chica­go releas­es names and salaries for all oth­er city employ­ees, includ­ing teach­ers, it does not do so for char­ter teach­ers, and most char­ter net­works refuse to pro­vide them.

To achieve its aims, Chica­go ACTS has not shied away from work­place mil­i­tan­cy. In the last six months, the union has threat­ened to strike three times when con­tract nego­ti­a­tions reached a stand­still. While all three strikes were ulti­mate­ly avert­ed, that’s still quite a change from 2012 when, days before the Chica­go Teach­ers Union strike, then-UNO CEO Juan Rangel bragged about his school stay­ing open while pub­lic schools shut down. The rapid turn in Rangel’s for­tunes, just four years lat­er, prob­a­bly pro­vid­ed a bit of schau­den-freude for teacher union­ists. But more impor­tant­ly, char­ter orga­niz­ing and ACTS’ will­ing­ness to strike mean that char­ter teach­ers can­not be pit­ted against their coun­ter­parts in tra­di­tion­al pub­lic schools.

“[We want] a future in which every char­ter school in Chica­go is union­ized,” says Baehrend. ​“That’s a win for both of our locals. No longer will char­ters be used to under­cut the labor of CTU members.”