Preemptive Strike
Welcome, EdWize readers! You’re here to see my entertaining “efforts at spin” over the fact that teachers in charter schools run by the city of Pembroke Pines, Florida, voted 181 to 46 to join the Broward Teachers Union.
The secret ballot election came after city commissioners decided not to automatically recognize the union after a card check submission.
The results prompted United Federation of Teachers official blogger Leo Casey to pen this thoughtful prose:
“But this should be the end of the blogosphere controversy about how
teacher union ‘thugs’ use ‘card check’ recognition to force ‘compulsory
unionism’ on ‘unsuspecting, naive teachers.’ Or it would be if evidence
mattered.“We are not holding our breath. But see for yourself, at the sites
which have given much ink to the Broward organizing efforts in the past, as they
spun their tale of teacher union ‘thugs’ misleading Broward teachers. Go to the
New York Charter School Association’s blog, Chalkboard, the National Alliance for
Public Charter Schools’ Charter Blog, Michael Antonucci’s blog, Intercepts, and the State Policy Network blog, to name just a few of the more prominent cases. If nothing else, the efforts at spin should be entertaining.”
I’ll let those other blogs speak for themselves, but a quick check of my archives shows I’ve never described anyone associated with a teachers’ union as a “thug,” never used the term “compulsory unionism,” and never referred to “unsuspecting, naive teachers.” (A Google search of the latter phrase suggests no one but Leo has used it in the Internet era.) So much for scare quotes.
I’ll let Leo stick to the argument that the outcome of a secret ballot election is a reason for not holding one. But let’s not pretend that union organizing of charter schools has anything to do with “teacher voice.”
“If we want to maintain our influence, our ability to do ANYTHING, we must make
sure that education remains a unionized industry…. If we lose our grip on the
labor supply to the education industry, we will bargain from a position of
weakness.”
That’s from a 2000 report from the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Charter Schools Strategic Options Project, which I have posted on the EIA web site for your reading pleasure.
