California’s teachers’ unions are at a crossroads over how to handle their “charter school problem.” Roughly 15 percent of the state’s nearly 1,100 charter schools are unionized, but the effort to organize the independent public schools remains costly, time-consuming, and fraught with uncertainty. The schools themselves are popular with parents and many legislators. Though Governor Jerry Brown is a big fan of charters, he’s also friendly with the unions, and nobody knows for certain what he’ll sign or veto next. Perhaps the best that charter opponents could hope for at this point is to constrain charter schools’ growth at the margins by imposing new regulatory burdens.
To that end, Assembly Bill 917 may be part of the unions’ long-awaited solution. Gardena Democrat Steven Bradford’s bill would amend the state’s education code to require that at least half of unionized teachersand nonteaching staff at a school considering conversion to charter status sign a petition in order to make the switch. Existing law requires only that 50 percent of teachers or parents sign a petition, either for a new charter or a charter conversion. The California Charter Schools Association endorsed the new bill, claiming it would give “greater flexibility to charter school petitioners.” Yet one of the bill’s prime movers is the Service Employees International Union, whose affiliates represent non-teaching school employees—bus drivers, kitchen staff, janitors, and so forth. The SEIU’s support for AB 917 suggests an objective other than “flexibility” for charters.
Bradford’s bill is hardly the first union-backed measure aimed at constraining charter growth, and others have been far more hostile. In 2011, the California Teachers Association sponsored AB 1172, which would have let a chartering authority—usually the local school district—deny a charter petition if officials made a “written factual finding that the charter school would have a negative fiscal impact on the school district.” But the bill, vague on what “negative fiscal impact” meant, died in committee. Existing law offers plenty of well-defined reasons to deny a petition already.
Via: California Political Review
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