Becoming Unionized in a Charter School: Teachers and the Promise of Social Justice

• In Event: 66.030 - Multiple Meanings of "Education for Social Justice": From Knowledge to Practice in an Urban District

Abstract

The California Charter School Act of 1992 allowed charter schools exemptions from state education codes and from collective bargaining rights for teachers. Hope Charter School (a pseudonym), located in a densely populated area of Los Angeles, was founded in 2000 by local community leaders, teachers, and funders. The schools offered a bilingual program, longer school year, longer school day, with a focus on social justice. They also claimed to provide an environment where teachers had greater instructional autonomy than in the traditional public schools. Before 2005, Hope Charter School (HCS) was a vibrant community of teachers, leaders and parents who worked side by side to reach high levels of success. The success they reached came at a great cost to its teaching force who expressed difficult working conditions and high turnover year to year, eventually leading teachers to seek unionization. In 2006, HCS teachers formed their union and it signaled a defeat for the HCS management that tested the reputation of the charter school organization in the eyes of the larger charter movement in Los Angeles. Teachers realized that although their intention in unionizing was to create a better school for the community, the board and management did not share the same values as they did. The board and management did not want to provide teachers the same rights that they had set out to provide for the students in the community. The experiences of teachers in this charter school are at the center of this paper, which asks, How did the illusion of social justice lure teachers to work in an environment that ultimately did not value their own working conditions?
This paper utilizes a qualitative case study design to focus on the experiences of one group of teachers within one charter management organization. There were 17 participants, including former and current teachers all who were members and/or leaders of the teachers’ union. The data consisted of historical documents, retrospective interviews, observations and ethnographic field notes, and semi-structured focus groups. After collecting data, I utilized an inductive analysis to extract the themes directly from the participants (Hatch, 2002). Instead of gathering data in order to test a hypothesis, in the inductive analysis model, the theory emerged from the context of the study.
The teachers in this study described how Hope Charter School promoted a social justice mission for their students. Being mission-driven attracted teachers to HCS and created an environment where teachers were motivated to work on behalf of the students and families in the community. Yet their power as a collective was limited when the governing board and school management pleaded for flexibility and called the union a “third party.” By using neoliberalism as a conceptual framework, this paper analyzes how free market forces create charter schools that operate as businesses rather than community partnerships. This paper captures the beliefs and experiences of teachers who felt that the schools’ progressive ideologies did not apply to them, particularly when they were seeking to improve their working conditions.

Author

• Elizabeth Montaño, University of California - Davis