The public charter school movement is entering a new phase. To put it bluntly, charter schools are finally becoming genuinely frightening to the powers-that-be in traditional public education, and for good reason. Charter schools have always been frightening to traditional public schools for the simple reason that they are granted wide autonomy to develop new instructional models, and most of the people associated with traditional public schools are afraid of change, or rather afraid of change that doesn’t involve increasing compensation levels. This is true of the people associated with most organizations, public or private, but public schools have long been shielded from the entry of new start-ups that leave them no choice but to start doing things in new ways. Brick-and-mortar retailers might resent Amazon.com for forcing them to experiment with new pricing models, or to have to learn how to deliver their products across vast distances quickly and inexpensively, but they often have a hard time strangling innovative business models in the crib — for one thing, incumbent businesses are often divided amongst themselves as to how to respond to new threats. In contrast, traditional public educators benefit from (a) enormous political influence, a product of the size of the public education workforce and the organization of large swathes of this workforce into effective labor unions, which are keen to protect the interests of their median members; and (b) the fact that “business-as-usual” has prevailed for so long makes it easy for people to awesome that newness is bad. You don’t generally have competing unions of public school teachers with dramatically different attitudes towards charters, despite the fact that you have individual public school teachers who might be sympathetic, or who might think that the competition for talent among charter schools might actually leave them better off than they are under the unionized status quo. But unions, like all democratic organizations should, represent the interests of their median members, and it is generally true that the teachers who think they’d be better off in a more diverse, competitive educational landscape represent a minority.
So unionized public school teachers have, from the start, fought to limit the expansion of public charters and, to the extent possible, their organizational autonomy. For example, if public charters are required to be subject to the collective bargaining agreements that prevail in a given district, you’ve kind of defeated the point of having a charter school, which is to allow school administrators and teachers to experiment with new ways of doing things. This is all old news. The new news, or the newish news, is that after years of fighting these battles, public charters have nevertheless kept growing. In 2010-2011, public charters represented 5 percent of all K-12 public schools in the United States and
So unionized public school teachers have, from the start, fought to limit the expansion of public charters and, to the extent possible, their organizational autonomy. For example, if public charters are required to be subject to the collective bargaining agreements that prevail in a given district, you’ve kind of defeated the point of having a charter school, which is to allow school administrators and teachers to experiment with new ways of doing things. This is all old news. The new news, or the newish news, is that after years of fighting these battles, public charters have nevertheless kept growing. In 2010-2011, public charters represented 5 percent of all K-12 public schools in the United States and
