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Unions for against charter schools?

Katie of A Constrained Vision points out that Ohio’s teacher unions are smacking at charter schools with one hand and reaching out with the other:

All three major unions — the Ohio Education Association, Ohio Federation of Teachers and Ohio Association of Professional School Employees — have said they are interested in gaining charter-school teachers as members.

The news is squarely at odds with the legal and philosophical war between the unions and the roughly 300 charter schools in Ohio. The unions are behind a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of charter schools, charging that charters aren’t held to the same academic standards as public schools and that they operate too much like private schools.

Charter schools are public schools that can operate separate of traditional school districts and are often free of state rules. Currently, none is unionized. There are few, if any, public districts without a union.

"At first blush, I think people would say (the interest in organizing charters is) hypocritical. We’re challenging the existence of charter schools on one hand, and yet remaining open to organizing," said Mark Hatch, spokesman for the Professional School Employees group.

Boy, we would hate to be in Hatch’s shoes right now.  Just how does one spin this sort of thing?  Especially when the OFT’s parent sister union*, the United Federation of Teachers, opened a charter school in Brooklyn?  

In all fairness, there are a few charter schools in Michigan that are unionized.  But Katie is probably right when she says:

Why would charter school teachers want to pay dues to an organization that is attacking their schools? How does it "protect" teachers to have their schools declared unconstitutional? I’ll go out on a limb and predict that the unions will not find many takers. 

*We mistakenly said the UFT, the New York City union, is the OFT’s parent organization.  Fixed now.