I’ve bargained with NEA and find them generally laughable as a collective bargaining organization. They behaved arrogantly towards us back during the Hickel Administration and we took their union President and two members of their bargaining team and turned them into classified employees and moved them out of the NEA union during bargaining for a successor agreement – just to show them that we could. They took us to the labor board and to court where we beat them like a rented mule. I’ve done all sorts of things to them over the years and the only thing they could do about it was whine and snivel. Now, whining and sniveling they do superbly. However, I worked for a state government, we didn’t employee that many teachers and they had little influence over us politically even in a Democrat administration and essentially none in a Republican administration.

But what they do best is play politics. The National Extortion Association OWNS virtually evey school board in the Country. They WILL turn out all their teachers in a SB election and they will vote pretty much in lockstep for the always liberal candidate endorsed by the EA. Once the EA controls the Board, they control the hiring and firing of District management and thus the management of each school. Once that hegemony is achieved it isn’t that the teaching staff can’t be controlled under the union contracts, it is that they WON’T be controlled. If a principal tries to discipline a teacher and the union objects, that objection isn’t usually played out through the grievance and arbitration provisions of the labor agreement and the tenure provisions in policy or law. It is played out when somebody superior in District management calls the principal and says something like, “Do I have a problem with Susie Teacher or do I have a problem with you?” NEA doesn’t need union grievance and arbitration rights, it just calls somebody in management and “fixes” it.

What the NEA has done is give practically every SD in the Country the same sort of union cowed management that characterizes the big Blue States and the Blue Cities, which is essentially no management and a union/Democrat controlled patronage employment system. They hire education school graduates as teachers’ aides and if they like them, they hire the aides as teachers, and if they “fit in,” the sole criteria for achievng tenure, they become tenured teachers and are essentially employed for life.

It isn’t that you can’t discipline or dismiss a unionized, tenured teacher; you can and it is little more trouble than disciplining or dismissing any other public employee. It is that once the NEA controls who gets elected and appointed, nobody will discipline or dismiss a tenured teacher. The advantage that the charter school has in this scheme is that the teaching staff tends to be self-selecting and the slackers won’t want to work in that environment and the fact that there is an activist group of parents and community members between the Board and the school’s management and staff.