After years of trying to squelch charter schools and other choice efforts, the National Education Association seems to have decided: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Beginning last October, in its publication California Educator, California's NEA affiliate - the California Teachers Association - began to promote a new effort to organize employees in hundreds of charter schools throughout the state. Articles featured such trademark NEA subtleties as "Without Union Protection, Teachers Are Vulnerable," and identified some of the primary objectives of CTA's organizing initiative: to secure "collective bargaining rights for all charter school teachers either by incorporating them into existing bargaining units or creating new bargaining units for them," to "deal with the privatization issues raised by charter schools," and to develop "programs for charter school teachers in the areas of advocacy training, communications, budget analysis, leadership, and professional development." Charter school advocates are understandably wary. Caprice Young, president of the California Charter Schools Association, criticized the union's effort to convene focus groups, complaining that "there have been cases where [the union has] paid teachers over $100 a day to take part in a focus group, and they're not really a focus group." Instead, Young alleged, those running the group were "basically trying to convince [charter school teachers] that they are unhappy." Young also blasted the CTA for "spreading misinformation about what charter schools are." And Dennis Snyder, a former public school teacher and 30-year union member who now teaches at Escondido Charter High School, blasted the union's efforts in California saying it's "about power, and getting more money into their coffers so they have more money to influence legislation. I think they should stay out of other people's houses."
"Calif. union to organize in charters," by Caroline Hendrie, Education Week, April 14, 2004