When New York City announced last week that it will close three public charter schools due to poor performance, you might have expected anti-school choice teachers’ unions to trumpet the news loudly, for all to hear. Instead, not a peep. Because two of the three schools are unionized, which is rare for charter schools.
The media hardly mentioned the closures either. To be fair, the story was dumped on a Friday afternoon. There were articles in the New York Daily News, NY1 and WRAL, but none mentioned the schools’ ties to teachers’ unions. Only Chalkbeat New York mentioned that one of the schools are unionized.
It seems like teachers’ union supporters are trying to sweep the closures under the rug.
One of the two remaining unionized charter schools in Brooklyn is actually run by the city’s largest teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers. That school, the UFT Charter School, doesn’t seem to have promising prospects, either. As Campbell Brown, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the education website The 74, writes in the New York Post, the school has a history of “multiple instances of corporal punishment, lost standardized tests, violations of open meetings law and the Individuals with Disabilities Act (students weren’t provided with required settings), failure to perform criminal-background checks and attrition of high-needs students.”
Unsurprisingly, those issues led to some academic failings. “The next year, fewer than 20 percent of UFT students tested proficient in English language arts and math; the school got the city’s worst score, and the lowest possible, on the School Quality Review, failing in every category,” Brown writes.
Some, like Hillary Clinton, accuse charter schools of creaming the crop of the best students. Those attacks are generally baseless, but they might actually apply in the case of the UFT Charter School. The school has some of the lowest portions of disadvantaged students in the district. Regardless, that doesn’t seem to have helped the school.
None of this is to say that public charter schools are the problem. Overall, they’re breaking enrollment records across the country, and most charters boost student achievement.
It’s the mix of teachers’ unions and charter schools that isn’t working. Remember, when charter schools perform poorly, teachers’ unions say they should close. When traditional public schools perform poorly, teachers’ unions say they need more funding.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
