Category Archives: Current Affairs

Understanding the Frederich case

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear Frederich v. California Teachers Association, on appeal from the Ninth Circuit, I knew immediately that teacher’s unions would come under fire by the media and other political pundits who have, so often, found disdain for the role of public sector unions in the workplace.  The Court heard arguments in the case yesterday and we can expect the Court to provide its decision by the end of June, when it ends its annual session.  

 

At stake is the ability for a union to prevent the free rider problem.  The free rider problem occurs when non union members, who do not pay membership fees/dues, receive the same benefits/incentives as union members.  Because teacher’s unions work to improve working conditions for all teachers, not just their members, it is plausible that teachers in Washington would seek to change their status as union members to agency fee payers.  Being an agency fee payer means that the teacher pays a fee to the local union for the union to negotiate the local collective bargaining agreement (CBA) from which the agency fee payer, a non member, also benefits.  If the Court strikes down the right of a union to collect agency fees for the work that the union does for the benefit of all of teachers, not just members, non members are able to “ride for free” on the coattails of union members.  Frederich asserts that all union work is political and that her union advocates for issues/areas that she disagrees with, asserting that the union leverages increased salaries against classroom size (see the article from NPR on January 11, 2016).   Although the state of California has come down on the side of the California Teachers Association, recognizing them as a bargaining agent for the 325,000 certificated employees in the state, the role of public sector unions is now in the balance if the Supreme Court sides with Frederich.

 

I’ve been the co-president of my local association for the past nine years.  I’ve bargained three contracts, soon to bargain my fourth, and I’ve had the pleasure of working to improve the conditions for the teachers in my district.  Over the past three contracts, our teachers have earned access to fifteen days of extra pay for the work that they do outside of contract hours.  Our teachers have seen increased dollars allocated towards skyrocketing health care costs and more money placed into their professional development, so that they may seek further education that benefits their students.  Because of our union’s work, our school district pays all of the fees associated with National Board Certification and has worked with our district to establish an OSPI approved cohort.  We have worked to advocate for smaller classroom sizes, increased stipends, and more paraeducators for our students and our teachers.  All teachers, regardless of whether they are members or agency fee payers benefit.  Most of the work that I do as co-president benefits all teachers, not just our members.  In addition, our union benefits our school community.  We provide three scholarships to graduating high school students, regardless of whether the student’s parent is an affiliated member with the union.  For our members, we provide three scholarships to teachers who want to further their education.  We work to be good stewards of fees, returning them to our members in the form of classroom grants for supplies and materials that go directly in the hands of the students.  If Frederich wins, fewer teachers will likely join the union and since the union cannot collect agency fees, fewer funds will be available to support the work of the union. Teachers who have been outliers to union activity will not have to support the work of the union to negotiate the contract and advocate for student and teacher needs.
I am proud of the union work that I do and of my union here in Washington.  We work hard to advocate for student needs which includes providing them with the best quality education possible.  I shudder to think what the state legislature, which has just recently come back into session, thinks is the best quality education.  Frederich has serious ramifications nationwide but let us not look past the potential consequences in our state.  With our legislature in contempt of the Supreme Court, now is the time for more advocacy at the state level, not less.  Teachers need their union to serve as one united voice to speak for our practice.  Our union advocates for our students by supporting reduced class sizes, reducing testing mandates, and bringing awareness to the social justice issues that our students face.  The Court’s decision will surely impact the work of our local and state union to do the advocacy work that our students and teachers need them to do.

Home for the Holidays

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Current Affairs, Education, Food and Drink, Social Issues

Winter, particularly the stretch from Thanksgiving to New Years, is especially challenging for many schools located in high poverty rural and urban communities. Teachers wrap up units and collect essays, anticipating days to rest, catch up on grading, and reconnect with their spouses and children. For many of our students, the holidays are not times of joy but rather a reminder of scarcity.

In response to that scarcity, each year my principal pulls a Commissioner Gordon, sending out the bat-signal and asking teachers and community members to collect peanut butter, jelly, and other non-perishables so that we can send home food with our McKinney-Vento students’ families. The McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law, requires that schools provide “educational stability for homeless children and youth.” Like many federal and state mandates, this program is underfunded. McKinney-Vento partially funds “educational needs” such as transportation, school supplies, class fees, and ASB cards (allowing students to participate in clubs, sports, and school activities).

Our McKinney-Vento students aren’t the only ones in need. Many LHS students rely on school breakfast and lunch to give them sustenance for the day. Teenage stomachs are bottomless pits. My students are hungry all the time. It’s difficult to imagine how they survive the winter break when their primary nutritional source is closed. This is why we do what we do at Lincoln—-we pack two weeks worth of easy to prepare groceries in order to offset the driving hunger. In additional to our McKinney-Vento students, my colleagues and I usually identify about forty families who need financial support. It seems that every year our list of families in needs grows longer.

This is why many schools, like my own, desperately rely on strong community involvementtoys.

When we sent out the signal in the beginning of Dec,  we expected some help from our usual supports. We hoped there would be enough to cover the increased number of LHS families in need this year. What we didn’t expect was 3x the aid!

  • Team Backpack gifted 102 backpacks bursting with PJs, toiletries, and a new jacket for each homeless student.
  • A church donated toothpaste, shampoo, feminine products, and other desperately needed toiletries.
  • Someone brought in 40 blankets.
  • The Iron Workers Union supported 70 families with gifts under the tree.
  • Absher Construction supported 74 families with Christmas dinners that included a huge
    turkey.
  • Compassionate individuals organized their workplaces to collect donations to purchase Christmas dinners for more Lincoln families.
  • Businesses like Tacoma’s Best Grooming sponsored specific families on our list.
  • Life Center, East Side Community Church, Soma, and other faith communities sponsored families dinners, and gave generous donations so we could purchase the items we needed to fill boxes to the brim with groceries for over 90 families AND send kids home with gift cards so they could have a Christmas!
  • Ken, a friend from church, connected us with God’s Portion who brought in an hundreds of boxes of Kettle chips & popcorn. There was so much that my ASB students stood outside the entrances to our school handing out bags of chips to each student!
  • Many others–names I don’t know– donated their time to organize, sort, and lovingly pack bags and boxes. You know who you are. Thank you.

I conservatively guess that 200-ish families will have a more joyful holiday because of the kindness of “strangers”. We are grateful for every last dollar or item donated.

We all know schools are grossly under-funded in Washington state. Although economic indicators tell us otherwise, many communities are yet to recover from the Great Recession of 2008. School and community programs that support families are essential, and finding sustainable school funding is critical especially for the most vulnerable children in our society.

ESSA: A New Direction? (Part Two)

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy

Last Friday I shared some of my evolving thinking around the No Child Left Behind replacement act, known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Certainly there are valid criticisms of the law as written, but that doesn’t change this first key fact:

When Our State Shifts Policy, Teacher Voice Will Be Key
Believe it or not, Washington state has done an increasingly better job of working with real, live, practicing teachers for designing and implementing broad education policy. I know because as a practicing teacher, I saw it happen and participated in it…and saw how teacher input did actually shape policy decisions. McCleary and that mess is a different can of worms.

While our Washington might stay the course in many ways (we did, after all, hold our ground about not requiring the use of standardized test scores for teacher evaluation, and the feds punished us by revoking our NCLB waiver…and yes, we were the only state to have our waiver revoked), there will certainly be policy decisions for us to consider and ensure teacher voice around:

    • Standards: Let’s not toss babies with bathwater. Many folks in our state have issues with the Common Core, so this may be an opportunity to make revisions to our standards. However, not everything in the Common Core is inherently bad; some of us actually like the standards. The question is then about compromise and agreements about how standards should be used to improve student learning in the state of Washington…and what role teacher autonomy can and should play in this.
    • Testing: I’m all for streamlining an assessment system. We have to always return to this question when it comes to testing and data: What are we going to do with the test data? I love that our evaluation law requires student growth that can be shown using classroom-based and teacher-designed assessments: That policy is keeping “data” close to where it can be used for making decisions about student learning. Since ESSA still requires some form of standardized testing, what will that look like in Washington and how can we guarantee that testing information is used appropriately? Here’s a crazy thought, not a policy proposal, but worth a ponder nonetheless: howsabout we test in September, not to evaluate “how we did,” but to give clarity about “what we need to do”?
    • Accountability: Man I hate that word. The question we need to ask instead is this: How will we know that state policies and district implementation are in concert to positively impact student learning?
    • Intervention: This is where I am (perhaps naively) the most optimistic. I am fundamentally opposed to the premise that struggling schools deserve sanctions, punishment, and re-organization. More than anything else, struggling schools deserve more resources, more stability, and more support. How can we create a system where, when a school ends up performing at the “bottom,” the prospect of state intervention is a welcome relief, not a source of fear?

And Teacher Leadership?
Title II of the law, which existed previously to support teacher, preparation, training and recruitment, now more explicitly opens the door for funding related to teacher leadership roles and positions. Thus, states and districts seem to have a bit more room to fund teacher leadership (compensate teachers in teacher-leadership roles) under Title II grants. I’m very much a policy novice, so I don’t know what sorts of changes in practice this language change will precipitate. However, given the Department of Education’s Teach To Lead initiative and the nationwide conversation around teacher leadership, it seems to be one more positive step toward providing resources to support engaging teachers in leadership and systems influence.

Overall, ESSA is certainly a better policy than NCLB. True, it’d be hard to craft something worse. Will ESSA be the magic wand that fixes everything by next September? No, of course not, but sadly this expectation will certainly lead some, as soon as next September, to proclaim it a failure.

Even though teachers have the busy day-to-day work of supporting students, it is incumbent upon us to keep our ears up, and speak up, as the discussion about ESSA continues. Here in our state, I am confident that we will be offered opportunities to shape the direction we go with our new apparent autonomy: we need to be ready to respond to that call.

ESSA: A New Direction? (Part One)

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Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy

Maybe, maybe not.

I’ve been reading quite a few very divergent opinion pieces and policy summaries about the No Child Left Behind replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act. I’ll be the first to admit that my first impressions were overwhelmingly positive, perhaps because I am easily influenced by syntactical shifts such as moving from the presumption of deficiency (We are leaving kids behind!) to the presumption of potential (All student can succeed!). I’m an advertiser’s dream.

Critics of ESSA are starting to emerge, of course, with argument ranging from the concern that Common Core is merely ‘not required’ as opposed to ‘forbidden, dismantled, and burned in effigy,’ to the reality that the amount of federally required testing hasn’t actually changed, despite all the hoopla. (One source points out that while states are given more autonomy and control under ESSA, the over-testing was actually the result of state and local policies, not federal policies.)

One of the most convincing critiques of ESSA has less to do with its content and more to do with its use as a political and rhetorical tool. Both Democrats and Republicans stand to benefit from playing this up as a “bipartisan” agreement. Some of the language is essentially moot: In the cases of at least 40 states, NCLB waivers granted states the same supposed autonomy as they will gain under ESSA; Similarly, Obama’s call for a cap on testing (that it take up no more than 2% of instructional time) sounded great in theory, but data suggests that most schools are already under that 2% cap based on time required for SBAC and PARCC assessments.

The shift of power to states is also receiving criticism, with one point being that states still must submit plans to the federal government for review and approval. I get the concern behind this, but the law also guarantees a hearing for states whose plans are denied. It’s imperfect, but in an accountability-addicted system like we have had for the last twelve years, this is a reasonable “stepping down” of dosage.

How States Can Really Screw This Up:
First and foremost, for states who have been wrestling for more autonomy and freedom from the burdensome yoke of Common Core Standards, I hope the baby doesn’t go out with the bathwater when it comes to standards. Standards in and of themselves are not evil, and like I’ve said many times, I’m not married to Common Core: I taught to standards before under a different name, and should CCSS be tossed, there’d be some sort of system of standards that would replace it. As a high school English teacher, the Common Core didn’t rock my world in the way it apparently did at other levels where concerns about developmental appropriateness do deserve rational examination and discourse. ESSA opens the door for revision at the state level, if nothing else.

What I’d hate to see is an unnecessary investment in inventing another wheel: New standards just so we can avoid calling them Common Core and escape the political public-relations nightmare whose symptoms include asinine Facebook posts about Common Core Sex Ed.

Another way to screw this up is for states to make the same mistakes so central to No Child Left Behind: Falling into the trap of designing the standards or assessment system that seems “easiest to administer” rather than the system that actually improves student learning. This should be the greatest lesson for states from the failure of NCLB: Differentiation is key. From a broad systems perspective, differentiation is hard (heck, it’s hard in the classroom), and for “accountability” purposes, differentiation is difficult to administer. Which leads me to my next thought:

This: Let Us Abolish the Cult of Accountability
I’m not saying schools or teachers shouldn’t be “held accountable,” but a system focused on accountability tends to oversimplify large and complex problems. (Take a read about “Accountabalism” and how it destroys the very systems it attempts to fix.)

I’d love a six-year moratorium on all use of the word “accountability.” Instead, let’s get clearer on what we’re actually talking about. Are we talking about improving test scores? Then let’s talk about that, not “accountability.” Are we talking about measuring teacher impact on student learning? Then there’s our language, not “accountability.” Accountability has come to imply the assumption of imminent failure if accountability controls are not in place. That schools are failing is an assumption we need to stop permitting in dialogue around public education.

In a couple of days, I’ll be posting Part Two of my thinking: What this all means for teacher voice and teacher leadership…particularly since teacher leadership is explicitly called out in the text of the law.

 

Understanding the “Every Student Succeeds Act”

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education Policy, Social Issues

Congress appears to be poised to pass an overhaul of NCLB, and in a convenient move have maintained the four-letter acronym standard. While time shall tell if “Ess-Uh” will have more staying power than “Nickle-Bee,” there are probably more pertinent issues to consider. Before doing so, however, it is worth noting as a good lesson in civics that buried at around page 914 (of 1061) of the Every Student Succeeds Act is a posthumous pardon of a early 20th-century heavyweight boxer convicted on racially motivated and thus baseless charges. But I digress (as does the bill, clearly).

The things to consider paying attention to…with citations to the page number of this document, the published text of ESSA, as relevant to the topic:

Testing
Not gone. In fact, not changed all that much. The federal government will still require testing at the same grade levels it currently does (page 54), but what will be different (to an extent) appears to be how these results will be used. Rather than nationwide, uniform and unrealistic goals (100% proficiency by a year ago), states will have the power to establish appropriate goals, have these goals reviewed though some as-yet-to-be-determined process, after which they would be submitted to the federal level (starts on page 80). If the assessment and accountability plans designed at the state level are rejected at the federal level, states are guaranteed a hearing.

Significantly, standardized test scores are no longer the main means of judging a school’s effectiveness. Rather, a combination of factors must be considered, with test scores being part rather than all (page 85).

Interestingly for those of us at the secondary level, the bill also appears to open the door to use of tests such as the ACT and SAT as the high school standardized test (source).

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When Tragedy Strikes Over & Over & Over Again

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Current Affairs, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development, Social Issues

 

Teaching in an urban, high poverty school isn’t like teaching elsewhere. The lack of resources, sporadic community support, systemic inequalities, and high mobility cultivates an environment filled with trauma. In this environment, it necessary to be in a constant state of alert. My kids are on guard. I’m on guard.

Tragedy is around every corner.

Literally. Every few months–it seems–there is an altercation that results in the death of a young man or a young woman. Usually a young man. A young man of color. It was Elijah yesterday.

Having taught in a suburban high school, I know this is not the same experience. Yes, there were deaths and sadness but there wasn’t an air of expectation. An air of resignation to the facts of life–that hardship, struggle, and sorrow are moments away. It’s an air of “we hope this never happens again” combined with a whiff of “we aren’t surprised anymore.”

Our students are constantly faced with loss and death, but are expected to be resilient and move on. They mourn in whatever way they can—through stories of precious moments, through over-sized T-shirts tagged “in loving memory” and through altars of remembrance. The district sends in extra grief counselors and we all pray the day hurries to a close so we can stop pretending to care about Shakespeare, transitive properties, and Government. Tomorrow will be better we tell ourselves. And it will.

But what about the days after the initial event? Who is there to help our students process this grief? How about the next tragic event? And the one after that?  Five counselors, two psychologists, and a few administrators can not carry the psychological and emotional weight of 1400 students and 90 + staff members.

Education administration professor, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, argues that urban youth are undergoing “toxic stress”. He further postulates that,

When we look at national data sets for trauma, the numbers suggest that one in three urban youth display mild to severe symptoms of PTSD. They’re twice as likely as a soldier coming out of live combat to have PTSD. In the veterans’ administration, this is topic number one. But in conversations about urban youth, it almost never registers. All data shows symptoms of PTSD are interruptive to someone trying to perform well in school and more likely to create risk behavior, [yet] the investment is being made on incarceration.

In a classroom of 30, that is one third of my students. Where are the discussions on mental health, toxic stress, or urban PTSD on the local and national level? Are we waiting to see how the Compton Unified class action lawsuit against the district for failure to respond appropriately to student trauma pans out?

I have my suspicions why few want to address these issues.  

Regardless, if our students are coming to school with more PTSD than a soldier, how are the staff in any building prepared to mitigate this? In 2012, the AFT published findings that 93% of teachers never received any bereavement training. The report elaborates that teachers are asking for it. Clearly, teachers want to be better prepared to serve all student needs not just ones related to Common Core. I think it’s just as important for Larry to know how to respond to his triggers as it is for him to read grade level texts.

Alas, when I browse through the catalogues of professional learning opportunities of surrounding districts, I notice I can sign up to learn how to set up a flipped classroom. I can get tips on how to use love and logic for my discipline plan. I can learn the ins and outs of the TPEP evaluation system. What I can’t find is anything on how to manage the grief my students bring with them to the classroom. I don’t see courses on mediating toxic stress for students or colleagues. I can’t seem to find a training on conflict resolution or tips for designing lessons that maintain academic rigour and give alternative activities to lower the affective filter. I can’t find a class to help me understand and respond to the differences between trauma and grief.

It is critical that schools with high percentages of students living with toxic stress receive more short and long term support addressing these conditions. Staff need more than momentary pep talks or a handout on the stages of grief. We need to acknowledge that it’s not enough to cry in the bathroom and then pretend things are fine and go back to teaching Things Fall Apart. We need to stop ignoring that our urban youth and their teachers have unique needs that aren’t being addressed system wide. We need professional learning opportunities that equip our teachers to handle grief—their own and a classroom full of it! If we develop sustainable programs truly addressing the whole child, then both our teachers and our students will be empowered to handle whatever is around the next corner.

Stop Confusing Assessment and Accountability

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education Policy

“While some tests are for accountability purposes only, the vast majority of assessments should be tools in a broader strategy to improve teaching and learning. In a well-designed testing strategy, assessment outcomes are not only used to identify what students know, but also inform and guide additional teaching, supports, or interventions that will help students master challenging material.”

(Source)

The above passage is from an October 24 United States Department of Education  Fact Sheet about “overtesting,” which tacitly acknowledged that the “accountability and assessment” movement in public schools has surpassed ridiculous proportions. The first page of the Fact Sheet even contained a half-hearted mea culpa that the federal powers bore “some of the responsibility for” the current norm of “unnecessary testing and not enough clarity of purpose applied to the task of assessing students,” which has ended up “consuming too much instructional time… creating undue stress for educators and students.”

I absolutely agree that “overtesting” is a major problem. The Fact Sheet calls for a cap of 2% of instructional time being devoted to standardized testing (which still amounts to between 20 and 22 hours of standardized testing per kid, per year). This is a start, I suppose.

My bigger issue, though, comes in the paragraph I included at the top of this post. Specifically that opening clause: “While some tests are for accountability purposes only.”

I want to make this clear: No test should be used “for accountability purposes only.” Ever. Period.

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Teach to Lead: The Hidden Work We Do

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Current Affairs, Education Policy, Teacher Leadership

This weekend in SeaTac, educators from nearly twenty states assembled for the Washington Teach To Lead Summit. Teams brought leadership ideas in various stages of incubation, and staff from ED facilitated a guided thinking and planning process to help take abstraction and organize it into more refined, defined, actionable planning.

One thing became clear very quickly: teacher leadership is messy, complicated work that often is the hidden engine driving meaningful change.

My role here has been to be a presenter and a “critical friend” for a team to assist in their thinking and project development. I had the incredible privilege of working with a team from here in Washington state as they tackle a unique but important struggle around which they want to leverage teacher leadership.

The kids and community around Marysville, Washington suffered tremendous trauma with the violence of almost a year ago. One school in particular realized that traumas such as this, as well as the often hidden and cyclical traumas that often occur in children’s lives, have a direct impact on students’ ability to succeed in school. A team from Quil Ceda Tulalip Elementary came to the Teach to Lead Summit to help refine their project, which aims to proactively equip these young students with knowledge, skills, and strategies to handle the complex emotions that come with traumas, whether connected to the recent shared community trauma or the private struggles that happen at home. These educators know that test scores, too often The Measure of school effectiveness, only tell a tiny chapter of the story: these educators know that in order for academic achievement data to show growth, a child needs to be in the physical and emotional place to even learn in the first place.

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Yes, Recess Does Matter

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Current Affairs, Education Policy, Elementary

As Seattle teachers are engaged in their first strike since the 1980s, one sticking point has been the amount of time the district wants devoted to recess (hint: it’s less, not more).

If you make the mistake that I’ve made and scrolled down to read the “comments” under some of the new reporting of the strike, you’ll see the typical union- and teacher-bashing, and of course, an utter lack of civil discourse or respect for divergent points of view. You’ll also see that a few commenters hone in on the idea of recess: some brand it as an add-on the union penciled in to maintain the guise that they “care about kids,” while others agree that recess is but frivolous play time…a lost opportunity to force more learnin’ into ’em.

Spend a morning in a typical elementary classroom and you’ll start to understand that recess is far from frivolous play time. If the quivering energy of a roomful of seven-year-olds could be bottled and sold, we’d never need to drill a drop of oil again.

Yet, the “play time” that recess provides is not just about getting energy out so that the kids can focus. It’s also not just about granting the teacher the rare opportunity to sit down, return parent phone calls or emails, or (if they’re bold enough) sprint to the restroom.

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Charter Schools are Unconstitutional

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Current Affairs, Education Policy, Parent Involvment

AR_Const_1878_p001By Tom White

It’s been quite a week in the world of Washington Education policy. We’ve got teacher strikes going on in Pasco and Whidbey Island, with another one looming in Seattle. Meanwhile, the State Supreme just ruled that Charter Schools are unconstitutional, three years after voters approved them, one year after the first one opened, and two weeks after eight new ones opened across the state.

The timing obviously could have been more convenient, at least for the families who are attending those charter schools. On the other hand, the court may have timed it just right, picking Labor Day weekend to send a subtle message to charter school supporters.

I have never worked in a charter school, nor will I. However, about five years ago I was part of a group that spent a week looking very closely at a handful of charter schools in and around The Bronx. I was the only teacher in the group, and as we toured each school, the others marveled at how “high-performing” everything seemed to be. And they were. Kids were working hard, adults were working really hard and test scores were great.

But there was also a sense that things were fraying around the edges. Teachers were working from 7 AM until 5 or 6 PM, and were on-call for homework assistance until 9 or 10 PM. Sick leave consisted of having your colleagues cover your classes. They worked most Saturdays, in addition to a three-week “Boot Camp” in the summer. I asked one teacher if she was planning to have a family while working in her school and she just laughed; “I don’t even have time to take care of a cat!” Worst of all, there was absolutely no job security. It was entirely up to the principal whether you returned next year.

The time and effort that these teachers put in was simply unsustainable. Consequently, the turnover rate was around fifty percent per year. In other words, these charter schools were a union waiting to happen.

But that’s the whole point of charter schools.  They’re supposed to be public schools that operate outside the jurisdiction of school districts. Which really means outside the constraints of teacher unions, since most school districts would be more than happy to have their teachers putting in the same time and energy as charter school teachers.

The State Supreme Court ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional because they aren’t “common schools.” They take public funds, yet aren’t run by elected officials. The Court obviously realizes that if they were run by elected officials (the local school board) they would become district schools and subject to the collective bargaining agreement between the district and its corresponding education association.

In other words, charter schools, which essentially operate by exploiting the talent and effort of their teachers, are not constitutional.

I’m not sure what happens next. But if I had a kid in one of those schools, I’d be studying my options.