I received a telephone call last evening from an individual who is an exceptionally prominent figure in the national charter school movement. He explained to me in an exasperated tone that in an extremely pro-charter locality the teachers’ union has figured out how to infiltrate the zoning board so that property cannot be approved for use by these alternative schools.

I’m frankly not surprised. The singular focus on charters by teachers’ unions has nothing to do, of course, with the future success of children. It is all about protecting the status quo of adults. I cannot conceive of anything more tragic.

We have observed this identical scenario play out in D.C. The teachers’ unions fought as hard as they could against the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the plan that became federal law in 2004 that provides private school tuition to kids living in poverty. In 2009, Joseph E. Robert Jr., faced no choice but to terminate his Washington Scholarship Fund from administering the OSP due to the Obama Administration’s move to close it out. Fortunately, due to the fierce persistence of many people, especially former United States House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and former Senator Joe Lieberman, it continues in a stronger fashion today under the leadership of Serving Our Children.

More recently, we have seen unions try and takeover Paul PCS, Cesar Chavez PCS’s middle school Bruce campus, and now Munde Verde PCS. The response to each of these actions has got to be the same. We cannot allow unions to invade our schools. We must protect them at all cost. The current state of public education in our city cannot continue. The academic achievement gap between the affluent and poor is growing, not shrinking. As measured by the proficiency rate for reading and math on the 2018 PARCC standardized test, it now stands at about 64 points.

Here in the nation’s capital we are 23 years into public school reform and for the first time in our history some charters are seeing students reach identical levels of preparedness for college no matter their particular zip code. But the numbers of these kids are still way too small. Tens of thousands of young people still lack a quality seat. We still have a tremendous way to go.

This is why I hope that our charter school leaders and teachers have been able to get some relaxation time this summer. The challenge to improve our schools is tough, and long, and filled with those such as members of the teachers’ unions that would like nothing more than to see us fail.

So we will be brave in this fight. It is the only right thing to do. We are standing up for our children for one reason only. When people look back in history at this period in our society, there can be no option of them coming to the conclusion that we simply gave up.

Right in the middle of National Charter School Week, the teachers at Mundo Verde Bilingual PCS voted by a wide margin to become part of the District of Columbia Alliance of Charter School Teachers and Staff (DCACTS), an arm of the American Federation of Teachers.

I really have enjoyed all of the positive media stories over the past few days regarding children and staff that comprise the charter school landscape in the nation’s capital. However, it is extremely difficult to be happy when the employees of one of our premier institutions agree to be represented by a group that desperately wants to shut down these innovative schools. Consider this comment two months ago by AFT president Randi Weingarten about charters, as written about by Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner:

“Weingarten told C-SPAN the AFT would try to make it [the charter school issue] a national issue by asking presidential candidates if they backed traditional public schools or the ‘private, for-profit charter operator who doesn’t have any accountability.'”

Here’s what she had to say last January after a teachers’ strike in Los Angeles resulted in a moratorium on the opening of new charter schools:

“In the wake of tax caps, the lack of appropriate investment has been a challenge for public education in Los Angeles for decades. Add to that the unregulated growth of charter schools that siphoned off more funding, and the result was the scarcity that led to the L.A. teachers’ strike. While charters were sold as a response to the demand for better schools, they too have a mixed record. More than 80 percent of charter schools cannot meet their projected enrollment numbers, and 8 of the 10 worst-performing schools in L.A., including one that has already been closed, are charter schools. So a moratorium is a good idea to bring equity and sustainability back to LAUSD, and with this vote, the school board made good on its promise to help do it.”

Finally, as Mel Leonor of Politico found Ms. Weingarten commenting in 2017, “American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has called charter school expansion ‘part of a coordinated national effort to decimate public schooling’.”

I really don’t understand the teachers over at Mundo Verde. They must really dislike their place of employment. Why else would you agree to be represented by an organization that wants to see your school disappear off the face of the earth?

I also deeply feel for Kristin Scotchmer, Mundo Verde’s executive director, the other members of her leadership team, and its board. After all they have done for this school, including founding it, growing it to be a DC Public Charter School Board Performance Management Framework Tier 1 facility, and successfully moving it from a crowded, inhospitable space on 16th Street, N.W. to what will become two beautiful state-of-the-art buildings this summer, they must feel particularly dejected.

Finally, I’m terribly disappointed in the lack of public reinforcement for the school’s administration. We have so many charter school support organizations in this town. Many of its chiefs are my friends. Where are you in this fight for the future of our movement? Why were you silent?

Despite truly heroic efforts, the verdict on whether 20 years of public school reform have been successful in Washington, D.C. is still to be decided. Yesterday, we took a tremendous step in the completely wrong direction.

 

The opinion piece by Lis Kidder that appeared yesterday in the Washington Post was terrific. A lawyer whose job involves complying with Freedom of Information Act requests, she also has two children that attend Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS. Ms. Kidder offered a polemic on the reasons that D.C. Council member Charles Allen’s bill requiring charter schools to comply with FOIA requirements is a bad idea.

The article was forceful, logical, well thought-out, and clear. It will also not change public opinion.

The terribly unfortunate premise behind my assertion is that the argument over whether charters should have to respond to FOIA requests is actually not about FOIA at all. What this fuss is really focused on is nothing less than the desire by a segment of the populous to bring an end to our local charter school movement.

“No,” I can hear you saying. “You are not right. It is simply an attempt to treat charters the same as the traditional schools.” I’m sorry but these sentiments could not be further from the truth. How do I know?

Let’s look at the union playbook. The National Education Association Action Guide on Charter Schools spells out the organization’s strategy:

“In the case of charter schools, the key is accountability. The goal is great schools for every student. If charter schools can achieve good results without cherry-picking students, falsifying test scores or cooking the books, we can welcome them to the neighborhood. If charter schools will open their board meetings and accept parents to join it, they can become part of the local community. The next step may be to organize their teachers to make sure they are professionally treated and adequately paid” (page 17).

Of course, charter schools do not cherry-pick students, falsify test scores, or cook the books. But accuracy is not the point here. Teachers’ unions want these schools to disappear off the face of the earth because its instructors do not, for the most part, work under a collective bargaining agreement. In order to make it as difficult as possible for these schools to operate, the Action Guide includes this mandate:

“Charter schools must be subject to the same open meeting and open record laws as the public schools” (page 4).

This is a war whose front line has landed at Mundo Verde Bilingual PCS. Since the union failed at Paul PCS and Cesar Chavez PCS, it is extremely frustrated and has aimed its scope at a new infiltration site. You know things are bad when an anonymous letter written by a Mundo Verde parent asks the following question:

“Why are outsiders speaking at the Board Meeting who have no kids in our school? What are their motivations?”

By now the nature of this inquiry should be seen as strictly rhetorical. We know why outsiders are speaking at board meetings. They are here to destroy what we have spent over 20 years creating. They are here to stutter the great innovative charters that brave men and women have designed and built. They are here to make sure we go back to a city of only neighborhood schools.

They are here because the union’s needs supersede the needs of our children.

The following anonymous letter was sent to the Mundo Verde Bilingual PCS parent listserve and was reprinted on the DC Urban Moms and Dad blog.

Dear Mundo Verde Families: 

We want to Save Our School (SOS) Mundo Verde PCS. For years, we have been families of Mundo Verde. The community of teachers, staff, and leaders have been part of our lives, like a second family. We have united with the entire community to watch our children grow, learn a new language, and thrive in a community that honors free play, outdoor time, and sustainability. We’ve shared out voices at Padres meetings; spoken at Coffee with Leadership; or eagerly spoken with prospective families and each other about our school. We support our teachers, our staff, and our leaders. We support our community and we want to unite to Save our School: Mundo Verde. 

But our community has been divided in these past few weeks by efforts to unionize. These efforts to many of us came from hushed meetings, secret agreements, and clandestine operations culminating in an overt condemnation of our entire community. We have not been “united.” Instead, the efforts spearheaded contradict our entire shared values as a school of ESPICA [Habits of Community Stewardship (referred to as ESPICA, the acronym created by the habits themselves)]. and transparency. While we value the open dialogue of all families and diverse input, we equally value our entire community being able to speak our truth, inquire and collaborate to find common solutions for all of our children. 

We sympathize with our teachers and staff and their concerns over individual support for students; increased health care costs, and ability to have a voice in school happenings. We want the same things for our students and our teachers. What we are less clear is how unionizing will accomplish these things. 

Many of us have worked in unions as teachers, service workers, operators, drivers, and federal and DC government employees. We know first-hand the limits that unions place on employers and employees. We also know that unions can’t guarantee any of these things. We want our school dollars going to our kids not union lawyers and bureaucracy. 

Those of us in DCPS, which has the same teacher union who is at our school (AFT) and DC government, pay substantially more than the $48 for health insurance at MV. Our rates for an individual at the lowest HMO are $95 bi-weekly. DCPS class sizes far exceed the class sizes of our school. Instead of being able to directly speak to our school leaders, managers or leadership, unionization has added layers of bureaucracy to our work places supporting the least qualified individuals in our organizations (see here) Teacher turnover at DCPS is among the highest in the country where more than 1 in 4 teachers leave annually. Students in DCPS have among the fewest resources and have academic achievements far below our school. We want our entire community to thrive. 

We want to urge all of our families to be a part of the conversation of how we Re-Unite our Mundo Verde community. How we all work together to foster and build a community that honors all of our teachers, staff, leaders and families. How we rebuild the trust within our school community. The events of the last few weeks contradict this very spirit. We have been asked to interject our kids into an adult debate. Let our children be kids! 

In the past few weeks, many of us have been sickened by the division this has created in our school. The secret meetings, the hushed phone calls, and the division between leadership and select teachers/staff and parents is hurtful.Our school has been mocked on twitter with nasty messages. Local listserves like UrbanMoms have lambasted the division. In just a few days, we are the center stage of the negative press, internal division, and reliance on fear and secret tactics to divide. We want to change the narrative about our school. 

We ask more parents to speak up! We ask more families to support Mundo Verde – our entire community. We have come together collectively to ask – 

– Who is behind the efforts to unionize Mundo Verde? 

– Why are we being targeted on our way to pick up and drop off to sign petitions in secret? 

– Why are we being followed to our kids soccer games, swim lessons, parkour [sic] lessons, choir lessons and being bullied into signing petitions? 

– Why has this entire effort been done in secret? 

– What other ways can we work together for our kids? 

– Why are outsiders speaking at the Board Meeting who have no kids in our school? What are their motivations? 

– How do we reshape the public narrative to share with others what a beautifully diverse community we are so proud to be a part of? 

We want the best for our children. We want a school community that is UNITED among all of our voices. We want to Save our School: Mundo Verde with our voices and collaboration.