Charter Schools: What a difference a contract makes

Negotiated agreements give charter school teachers a voice in their profession

Charter school teachers say they want the same things their counterparts in traditional public schools want for students and for themselves: reasonable class sizes, well-maintained buildings, and the tools and resources needed to be successful. And, like most workers, they want job security, decent pay and benefits, and a voice in decisions that affect their professional lives.

These were among the things that Vania Gulston was looking for when she left the charter school where she was teaching in Philadelphia and to join the staff at Wakisha Charter School. The fact that its teachers had a union and a contract sealed her decision to make the switch. “I wanted to be at a school where I wasn’t afraid to challenge what I thought were not good teaching practices.”

Gulston says she wasn’t comfortable taking her concerns to the administration at her previous school. “When you work in a school without a contract, you tend to feel like you can’t speak out against policies you don’t agree with,” she says.

Similar concerns prompted Reagan Fletcher to help organize a chapter of the United Federation of Teachers at the Bronx Academy of Promise (BAOP) in 2010. Fletcher says she and her colleagues at the charter school were frustrated by the administration’s failure to include them in discussions regarding work-related issues, including curriculum and student discipline.

“Decisions were being made that impacted us and the children in our classroom,” Fletcher says, “yet we were not involved in making those decisions.”

In addition, the teachers didn’t think they were being fairly or adequately evaluated, Fletcher says. “We were a brand-new staff of young teachers, and we felt that we were not being supported” by the administration.

A growing demand for union representation

Charter school teachers like Gulston and Fletcher are discovering that the best—and maybe only—way to have a voice in their professional lives and some degree of job security is through a union and a negotiated contract.

As problems related to staff turnover, job security and questionable administrative leadership have mounted for charter schools, teachers increasingly are looking to the union for representation at those schools. In addition to Philadelphia and New York, charter school teachers in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities are organizing under the AFT banner.

The Civitas Federation of Teachers in Chicago was one of the first groups of charter school teachers to organize a union and reach a contract settlement. The federation, which was chartered as a local in 2009, is part of the Chicago Alliance of Charter School Teachers, which represents teachers on 12 charter school campuses.

Bret Gaska, who teaches English at Ralph Ellison High School, is treasurer of the Civitas federation. He was in his second year at Ellison when Civitas won representation rights.

Gaska says he saw “a lot of teachers coming and going” before the union at Ellison was organized. “We needed some stability—not just for us as teachers, but for our students, some of whom were seeing as many as three or four different teachers a year.”

The union contract, which has helped stabilize teacher turnover at Ellison, placed a cap on class sizes, established a salary schedule with steps, and set up various committees through which teachers now have input into curriculum and professional development among other areas.

The contract at Wakisha has helped create a situation where teachers who try to hold students and their families accountable feel protected, Gulston says. “People are not always comfortable being held accountable” and teachers who try to do that often end up being targets.

But simply having a contract isn’t enough, adds Gulston, who is the building rep at Wakisha. “Teachers have to understand the power of that contract and insist that it be enforced.”

One of her chief challenges, she says, is getting her colleagues to understand that the contract can be used to help teachers and students achieve their goals. “The contract can support those teachers who are passionate about the profession and want to utilize the contract as a force to change things for the better—or the contract can lay dormant and just be a piece of paper that never gets enforced.”

A promising agreement

Jane Chien, a fourth-year teacher at Bronx Academy of Promise, is just beginning to feel that she can truly make a career out of teaching at the charter school. Before now, the first-grade teacher didn’t know from year to year whether she would have a job at the school the following year.

That changed in October 2011, however, when, teachers at the Bronx charter school ratified their first contract. With the pay raise and increased job security that came with the settlement, Chien now sees working at the school as a career. “Teachers will want to be here and stay here.”

Prior to the contract, there had been an atmosphere of distrust between teachers and the school’s administration and board of trustees, Fletcher says. “We didn’t feel comfortable advocating for our students without fearing for our jobs.”

Today, there’s a much better working relationship between BAOP teachers and the school’s administrators and board of trustees, she says. Members of the union served on a committee set up in 2010 to interview and hire the school’s current principal. That never would have been considered “before we went union,” says Fletcher, who teaches music.

BAOP is developing a teacher evaluation system, which will be negotiated in a labor-management committee that will include teachers and the school’s principal.

Educators at the school also want to establish a salary ladder. “That’s our big issue, salary steps, because we want to have a home at this new school and a future,” Fletcher says. [Roger S. Glass]

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Reprinted from American Teacher, January/February 2012 issue