PEP, June 2010: Charter schools are non-union, says DC 37 prez

“Most of the city’s charters are non-union by mayoral design,” Veronica Montgomery-Costa, president of DC 37 and Local 372, told state senators April 22 at a hearing that delved into allegations of corruption and fiscal abuses at the privately run, publicly funded schools.

“Taxpayers need to know about the contracting abuses,” she said.

DC 37 has called for a statewide freeze on charter schools and monitoring of the corporations that run them.

State Sen. Bill Perkins, a vocal opponent of charters, held the hearing to explore the schools’ finances and their exclusion of parental involvement.

“As in the financial industry, there is a lack of transparency in the charter industry,” Perkins told the packed room. He called charters a “money-making scheme” much like Goldman Sachs and now-defunct Enron and questioned the motivation of Wall Street’s interest in the schools.

Charging that the well-funded charter movement is more interested in profits than the long-term interests of schoolchildren, DC 37 and other experts called for evaluating charters not only by test scores, but also by students’ actual academic and cultural achievement and their progress in learning skills they can use in the workforce.

“Under the mayor’s sole control of city schools, the number of non-union charter schools increased and unionized charters are unwanted in a system that is being split into two distinct tiers,” Montgomery-Costa said.

DC 37 has consistently opposed charter schools that divide city students into two “separate and unequal” school systems, contradicting the fundamental principle of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation.

New York City’s first generation of charter schools modeled public school staffing with unionized teachers and Local 372 support service workers to pilot new strategies for educating children. Today charters selectively exclude children with physical and learning disabilities and language issues as they skim the brighter and more tractable children from public schools.

Montgomery-Costa said the current situation “values charter students while leaving neighborhood public school children behind” and “pits charter parents against public school parents and non-union workers against union workers. For charters to coexist with neighborhood public schools, they must do so equitably and be equally accountable with transparent contract procurement and fiscal records.”

— Diane S. Williams