Many Teachers Favor Charter Schools Although Their Unions Don't
Charter schools commonly have waiting lists of student applicants. Generally overlooked is the often larger supply of potential teachers. Teachers have started many such schools, including the first one, City Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota. Established in 1992 by two of St. Paul's union member teachers, it is still operating. Teachers also flock to those started by others. This is true from Arizona, where a school had 200 qualified applicants for ten teaching jobs, to Massachusetts where 500 applied for 7 positions. A school with more than 70 applicants for each position has a distinct advantage in selecting superior teachers.
Salaries are sometimes higher in charter schools but that's misleading. Being new, charter schools have entry level salaries. With no higher-paid senior positions and added efficiencies of operation, they can pay more initially. Being smaller, they have lower extraneous expenses, such as fewer administrators and other non-teaching staff, and lower building and transportation costs. It remains to be seen whether they can pay $60,000 or more a few years down the road. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, one public school district's median salary is about $86,000.
Part of the challenge to charter schools is the claim by teacher unions that charter schools are threaten public education. This ignores the fact that they are public schools, just a different type. The suggestion or implication that charter schools can cost teachers jobs overlooks their creation of alternative ones. After all, the students are simply moving from one school to another as they do when a district opens an additional conventional school. In terms of school districts, many if not most won't be moving at all. The real problem is the unions fear that charter schools threaten them. That is something they cannot tolerate.
An unusual study by the Pennsylvania State Education Association led them to say they wouldn't fight charter schools any more but, instead, would try to organize them. Yet the study admitted, in effect, that would be a difficult task. There are two reasons.
One, charter schools are small and teachers can solve their own problems, especially if they run the school, as is true in hundreds of cases. As Milo Cutter, co-founder of the City Academy in St. Paul has said, when they have a problem they sit around a table and solve it.
Second, also related to school size, even if unions try to organize charter schools, most of them are small. The average size, which varies from year to year, is about 240 students, and that factors in large public schools that converted. At the time of the U.S. Department of Education's Fourth Annual Study of charter schools, new charter schools averaged 137 students. It often isn't cost-effective to organize the half-dozen or so teachers in such small schools. By contrast, successfully organizing the 200+ teachers in an average school district can give a union a profitable return on its investment.
Even if an organizing drive is successful in a small school, dues from a half dozen teachers may leave a net loss for a long time. This is especially true for the state union which bears the major cost of organizing while a significant portion of the dues goes to local and national units.
Despite teacher union opposition, the continuing growth of the charter school movement demonstrates the ongoing teacher enthusiasm for them. Jim and Fawn Spady led the decade-long drive for a charter school law in Washington State, which finally succeeded in late March. Teachers have been eager to take advantage of the new opportunities the law presents to them. Jim says that almost immediately after the bill passed, and even before the Governor who signed it, he began receiving phone calls from teachers who want to work in new charter schools.
Of course, some teachers would fear charter schools, even if the unions didn't exist. They are those who lack confidence that they could attract students if the students and their parents could decide whether or not they wanted to be in their classes.
According to Tom Cammeret of the Marblehead School in Massachusetts, "the only creaming going on in charters is that of teachers." Washington, D.C., The Center for Education Reform, Monthly Newsletter No. 25, April 1996
David W. Kirkpatrick is a Senior Education Fellow with the U.S. Freedom Foundation and The Buckeye Institute.
