Education Expert: NEA Campaign Will Harm Charter Schools

by Jim Brown
January 19, 2004

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(AgapePress) - A former Assistant U.S. Education Secretary is decrying a National Education Association campaign to entrench itself in California charter schools

The Education Intelligence Agency recently reported that the NEA plans to spend nearly two million dollars over a three-year period for the specific purpose of organizing charter school teachers in the state.

Dr. Chester Finn was an education policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, and is currently president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. He believes the NEA effort will prove harmful to charter schools.

Finn considers the campaign predictable NEA behavior, "both because it might enable them to recruit some more members and more importantly, I think, because it will have the effect of harassing and discouraging charter schools and people who would open charter schools and people who would teach in charter schools." The longtime education reform advocate says he thinks the NEA plan is "mostly an effort to slow down and set back the charter movement."

The more the NEA effort succeeds, Finn says, the harder it will become to run an effective charter school. "The whole point of a charter school is to have quite a lot of freedom to do things differently," he explains, "and if you are facing a unionized staff and a collective bargaining agreement, a lot of your flexibility is going to go away pretty fast."

But according to the education analyst, it was inevitable that the unions would come after charter schools and their personnel eventually. "As more and more teachers go to work in charter schools, it's obviously in the interests the unions, frankly, to retrieve them if they can and discourage them from making the move if they can't," Finn says.

The Fordham Foundation's president believes that thwarting the NEA's charter school campaign will be difficult because, under federal law -- and in most places under state law -- workers have the right to join unions if they so choose. Finn says to defeat the NEA's effort, individual schools must persuade their employees that they have a pretty good situation without the union.