Charter schools and collective bargaining

On this blog, we’ve aired views from current and former teachers who feel collective bargaining creates stifling rules that prop up a centralized school bureaucracy, or that teachers unions would be better off functioning as professional advocacy organizations, akin to the NRA and AARP, rather than industrial-style bargaining agents.

We don’t claim this represents the view of all educators, but some education reformers are beginning to point toward a third path.

What if, instead of negotiating wide-ranging, one-size-fits-all labor agreements with a central district office, educators negotiated terms of employment, working conditions, class sizes, and other issues at the school level?

That’s an optimistic lens through which some education reformers are starting to view efforts by national teachers unions to organize charter schools.

It’s not yet clear how serious national unions are about organizing charter school teachers en masse. But they’ve made a few inroads, grabbed a few headlines, and hammered out enough contracts in different parts of the country that it’s worth asking: What happens when charter schools go union, and could it hold lessons for the school system as a whole?

Eric Lerum of America Succeeds and Pam Witmer of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools did an informal analysis, which they presented this week at the National Charter Schools Conference. They looked at 17 labor agreements in unionized charter schools around the country, and compared them to the collective bargaining agreement in Chicago Public Schools.

They found that, in many cases, charter school bargaining agreements looked a lot like their district counterparts. If teachers could earn tenure, it was typically based on years of service. Teacher pay was often tied to step-and-lane salary schedules based on degrees and experience. Layoffs were typically prescribed in reverse order of seniority.

But in some contracts, they found worthwhile innovations. A few examples:

  • Aspira charter schools in Chicago offered $7,500 bonuses to teachers in high-need areas. (Think of the push, in Florida and elsewhere, to draw more qualified teachers into key math and science fields).
  • Amber Charter School in New York offered a $10,000 pay differential for a “lead teacher” — a role that gives educators a path to advance their careers without becoming administrators.
  • California-based Green Dot schools include student learning growth and teacher performance in their decisions about layoffs, tenure and employee discipline.
  • The professional development program in Massachusetts’s Conservatory Lab is controlled entirely by its faculty.

In other words, it’s at least possible that, when teachers negotiate their terms of employment directly with the people who run their school, the resulting agreements could better reflect their priorities and their school’s culture.

Many charter, private and rural district schools already give teachers a say in big-picture decisions, with or without collective bargaining. They have a strong incentive to do so, since teachers are there by choice. (Consider this rural Florida charter school, where teachers gave up dental insurance to free up money for classroom aides).

And that’s where Lerum and Witmer said they see promise, not just for charters, but for district schools where collective bargaining is already the norm. Could shifting negotiations over hiring, pay and priorities from the district office to the school level lead to more innovations that could spread to other schools?

This idea isn’t entirely new. It seems to jibe with John Chubb and Terry Moe’s seminal observations about schools of choice, which tended to thrive outside the central control of a school district:

Bureaucracy vitiates the most basic requirements of effective organization. It imposes goals, structures, and requirements that tell institutional principals and teachers what to do and how to do it — denying them not only the discretion they need to exercise their expertise and professional judgment but also the flexibility they need to develop and operate as teams. The key to effective education rests with unleashing the productive potential already present in the schools and their personnel.

It also meshes with some of the thinking behind Albert Shanker’s vision for charter schools.

In other words, Lerum and Witmer’s work suggests unionized charter schools are starting to show that collective bargaining doesn’t need to entail centralized bureaucratic control. It may light a path to a future in which educators have more direct say in how their schools are run. Food for thought.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.

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