It has often been painful to watch (even for my union friends who like charter schools) the cigar-chomping New York State teachers union bosses try to navigate the whole charter school issue for the last few years.
At their core, the bosses hate the idea of charter schools upsetting any of the power-arrangements they worked so hard to create in the traditional system. Yet, because they are popular and because the best charters get a lot of attention and – more recently – because teachers from their own local in NYC sought professional empowerment by starting their own charter schools, they have had to pretend that it isn’t really charter schools they hate, but, uh, bad charter schools.
But everyone knows they are full of crap on that point. They hate these schools. We all watched as they delighted in a recent audit that showed that teachers at KIPP took some end of the year vacations to someplace tropical. Instead of asking why more teachers in the state aren’t treated to that kind of reward for doing an extremely tough job year-in and year-out, NYSUT jumped up and down and demanded that control of these popular and successful schools be turned over to auditors that the union bosses could strong-arm behind the scenes.
It’s been all the more awkward, because at the same time they want to kick the bejesus out of the people who work in charter schools, they sometimes pretend that they are interested in someday organizing the same schools. It’s like the bosses want to love them to death or something.
But the latest New York Teacher magazine shows they have finally discovered the way to have their cake and eat it too. Paging George Lakoff! The NYSUT bosses have figured out if they word it properly, they can be player-haters (playah-haytah’s for our friends in the South Bronx) and players at the same time!
Check out this uproariously funny piece where they avoid slamming charters but instead slam “charter management” and “charter corporate”!!! Totally freaking brilliant. I love it. And probably even effective.