CURMUDGUCATION: How Charter Students Would Benefit from Teacher Unions

CURMUDGUCATION: How Charter Students Would Benefit from Teacher Unions:

How Charter Students Would Benefit from Teacher Unions

As part of the general "Please don't leave us" hubbub arising from the nominally-Democratic-neo-liberal fear that a bunch of Trump-hating lefties are about to bolt out of the reformster tent, Peter Cunningham over at Education Post ran a big discussion about how unions and charters should maybe be BFFs (you can read my take on the discussion here, here and here). 

Arguments included that unions would be great if they didn't act like unions, charters would start implementing policies they've always avoided like the plague, unions would make charters look better, and it would be innovative, somehow. But these all involved supposed benefits for the unions and charter operators. Can the marriage of unions and charters be a happy one?  Later on twitter, Cunningham tweaked the focus--

Would there be a benefit to charter students if charters welcomed a teachers union? Would this be the kind of marriage that would benefit the children, even if it's a little rocky?

Benefits for the Kids

Well, actually he used the term "student achievement" which is a euphemism for "standardized test scores." If the question is "Would having a teachers union raise student scores on the Big Standardized Test," I have three responses.

1) We already know that there is a positive relationship between unions and test scores. We've known this for a while. It's a fuzzy correlation-causation connection, but we've done the research CURMUDGUCATION: How Charter Students Would Benefit from Teacher Unions: