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Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The Choices Charters Hate

One of the evergreen arguments in favor of modern charters is that they will be laboratories of innovation. Freed from the constraints of the public school system, charters will whip up brand new educational approaches, pedagogical discoveries that somehow nobody has ever whipped up before. Once they have freed the edu-genii, they will then unleash these cool new ideas on the whole education world, and all schools will work better because the charters were allowed to figure out brilliant new techniques that the public schools could not.

That's how it's sold. But that's not how it works.


First, charters have displayed no special ability to think of brand new educational ideas that nobody has ever thought of before. Longer day, longer year, only teach the kids that are easy to teach-- none of these are new ideas. Pay teachers less and give them no say in how the school is run-- also not new ideas, but also not particularly good ones, either.

But even if charters are whipping up new edu-concepts, that doesn't mean they want to share. The modern charter is born of corporate culture, and one basic principle of corporate culture is that Ford does not send its best ideas over to Chrysler management.

No, in the corporate world many contracts come with strict non-competition clauses. So it should be no surprise to find the same thing going on in the charter world. In fact, it should be no surprise to discover that charters want to straightjacket their teachers as much as possible.

Meet Mike Kowalski.

Mike Kowalski was a teacher for the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School. Like most charters, MVRCS has no union and hires teachers for just a year at a time ("at will" meaning "at the will of the bosses"). They also offer lousy wages, and their teachers have no real power or say in the school. So how do they keep teachers from jumping ship at the first available opportunity to get a real job?

Easy. They require teachers make a contractual commitment in April for the following fall. And if the teachers take another job, the school sues them for breach of contract.

Kowalski signed his contract in April, was offered a job weeks later. His replacement was quickly hired and Kowalski actually trained him.

And the school still demanded that Kowalski pay them over $6,000.

Kowalski ended up talking to a Massachusetts Teachers Association lawyer, who found even more astonishing contents in the MVRCS-- a non-competition clause that forbid Mystic Valley teachers from working for any of the sending districts. In other words, this laboratory of innovation was specifically forbidding its employees from sharing anything they discovered or developed. The Massachusetts notion that charters are meant to "stimulate the development of innovative programs within schools" is not only being ignored, but is being expressly thwarted, specifically forbidden.

The non-compete clause makes perfect sense if you think that a charter school is a private business run on proprietary secrets. This is one more reason that these modern charters are in no way, shape or form public schools.

This also highlights the hypocrisy behind the charter choice arguments. Choice is great-- when it's the choice they like. The free market is great-- as long as it's serving them. But when it comes to staff, charters like Mystic Valley have taken steps to avoid any kind of market forces to come into play. Rather than compete for teachers by offering attractive employment terms, Mystic Valley tries to make sure that their teachers have no choice at all, to force them to stay by coercion and extortion.

In the corporate charter world, teachers should be easily-replaced widgets who get no choice in their working conditions, no choice in whether to stay or go, no choice in who they can talk to professionally.


15 comments:

  1. Charters should only be authorized by the sending district. That way there wouldn't be duplication of services and they would be fulfilling a real need or innovation.

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  2. Seems like a con game to me. Maybe school districts should make that a requirement of a use permit?

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  3. just banging my head against a wall...white students in charters 2186..in non charters...402 I documented it with state department stats, school by school. http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1193146&p=16313369#p16313369 this does not include 956 students from KIPP...which might add to the number of white charter schools. KIPP just leaves the state with a big blank page full of FU.

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    1. http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1193052&p=16312777#p16312777 the link stltoday worked when I pasted it in that top box. I did not even mention I was talking about st. Louis public schools.It is my belief that the town hosting the debate Sunday has two separate and probably not equal systems....44 percent charter, and 56 percent non charter.

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  4. You sign a contract then either abide by the terms or else pay damages. Keep your word. That's how men of integrity live.

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    1. You offer a contract that is fair, decent and honest, and you offer it under fair conditions that don't closely resemble extortion. That's how people of integrity live.

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    2. But Peter, if the contract wasn't fair decent and honest, then why didn't Mr. Kowalski turn it down? We can assume he's literate, read the provisions and understood the conditions. Sounds like the school wanted to secure their talent pool early so as to avoid a lot of last second hires. Makes sense. So either teacher-school contracts are inviolable or they're not. If they can be broken with no consequences, then imagine your school board dispensing with the contract....and you.

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    3. That's what unions are for, so you can be assured the contract is fair, decent, and honest. Without unions, even if the contract is fair, management tries to violate them. I have seen many, many cases in my district where management violates the contract, but since we have a union, a grievance is filed, and all the ones I know of have been found for the employee. Management did not have integrity.

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    4. So let me get this straight Rebecca, the only way a contract for a teacher can be fair is to have a union behind them to review it? Contracts are signed every day with no union behind it in many areas of life. This is a grown adult, capable of teaching. Capable of questioning the contents of a contract and if he doesn't understand something, he is capable of contacting an attorney before he signs it. Now, I'm not saying Mystic is right, especially since they didn't sign their portion until after he gave his notice but come on, there has to be some personal responsibility out there.

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    5. I don't know, Michael. It does sound like the April contract requirement suggests that that particular charter school isn't interested in competing on the competitive free market that proponents seem to adore. If they were such an awesome employer, they shouldn't worry that the competition could poach their employees.

      Yes, you are correct that a contract should be honored but it's always twisted in favor of the employer. I teach in Michigan where an emergency can simply nullify a contract that everyone agreed upon.

      So this honoring a contract business always seems to favor the more powerful entity that agreed to it in the first place.

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    6. Unknown, so what's wrong with employees pooling their money and engaging a union attorney to make sure the contract's fair for everyone, instead of each employee engaging their own, which would be less efficient and much more costly and time consuming for everyone involved, including the Board? What's the difference? What's it to you?

      And if it's because you think teachers should have the "right" to negotiate their own salary and terms, I don't see that the teachers at Mystic have that right; it's take it or leave it. If you think there should be some kind of "merit pay", that kind of thing has been shown not to work for teaching, because collaboration, not competition, makes teachers better, and in any case there is never enough money to pay the majority of teachers, who are good, a decent salary and pay a few others enough extra to have it mean anything, besides the fact that there is no good way to determine who the "best" teachers are. If it's up to the principal, it's whoever their buddies are.

      If merit pay worked, it could be spelled out in the union contract. Years and years ago, my local district union developed a "teacher ladder" that was based on the merit pay idea. It was touted as a model and people came from all over the country to see how it worked and copy it. But it never really worked. The money ran out and the program was dropped. And everyone knew that the teachers who got on it were not necessarily the "best" teachers, they were just lucky or the one who best figured out to jump through those particular hoops set up. There are too many intangibles and variables to excellent teaching to be able to reduce it to a formula and have the evaluation be reliable or valid.

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    7. Not the issue at hand, Michael. The issue is if charters were truly laboratories of innovation designed to improve education n all schools (as they were designed to be), why would they force teachers to sign non-compete contracts since that is well outside the spirit of cooperation that charters are (allegedly supposed to) operate under?

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  5. If you read the article, Kowalski acknowledges he signed the contract in April because with a new baby on the way it gave him security knowing he'd have a job in September. So the contract protected his financial interests by guaranteeing an income. If the school changed its mind they'd have to pay him off. Contracts protect both parties. Kowalski chose to break his part of the bargain, so he must pay.

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  6. I hope this case goes to court. Separate from the egregious attempt to reduce teacher options, the contract is not in the public interest. Charters are not independent entities; they serve the public using public tax dollars. It is in the interests of children attending those schools and the public paying for them that policies be fully transparent. This includes curriculum, discipline, class size, attrition rates for both students and teachers, subgroup statistics,outside funding, contractual relationships of all kinds, potential conflicts of interest, etc. The notion that a publicly funded school should be able to keep it's curriculum or its policies to itself is outrageous and concerning. A non competition clause restricting public school teachers from using their skill to benefit children in another public school is absurd on its face. It should be thrown out. Public education isn't private industry. There are no proprietary formulas... mutual cooperation is in the public interest. It's an inappropriate expectation for a public school. Fight it.

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  7. Mr.Kowalski is a savage. He was my sister's econ teacher and a really nice guy overall. It's a shame to see the school that I used to go do such a thing. I feel bad for K-Wal(that's what people at my old school used to call him).

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