TEACHER UNIONS SEEK TO HOBBLE CHARTERS
By Robert W. Kasten
Letters to the Editor, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1999

        In response to your June 28 Aside "Stifling Charter Schools": You correctly identify the ultimate intention of the education bureaucrats when you accuse them of being willing to "stop at nothing to drag charter schools back under the same bulky Education Code that helped produce so many failing public schools." But their efforts are not isolated to California. New York, Ohio and other states have pending legislation or union-financed lawsuits that aim to drag teachers back into a system they expressly wished to leave.

        According to a study by the National Education Association, there are few reports of labor complaints in charter schools. Indeed, charter school starting salaries are higher than starting salaries in the other public schools. Teachers who work for charter schools do so because they want to. The challenge and opportunity of working in an innovative environment excites them. If they wanted to remain in a "regular" school, they would have chosen to do so.

        By applying to charter schools hundreds of regulations and restrictions they were created precisely to avoid, these proposals are anti-teacher, in the sense that they would "deprofessionalize" a group of professional educators seeking to use their best resources on behalf of children. In a recent joint statement, former Teacher of the Year Kim Jacobsma of La Habre, 1993 National Teacher of the Year Tracy Leon Bailey, and a number of other prominent public school teachers and teacher union members, note:

"Charter schools represent a covenant between teachers, parents, and the state of California. [These proposals] would violate that covenant. . . . The winners will not be teachers, parents nor children, but only a few union officials who often don't represent our views, didn't negotiate our contract, and in many cases weren't chosen by us even if we are dues-paying members."

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