SACRAMENTO -- I had been disappointed that I fell asleep so early last night and missed the big Dr. Seuss blow-out birthday party at Marilyn's Night Club. I'm told special guest DJ Howard Fuller played hip hop and R&B past 1 a.m. But I felt better once I realized that had I boozed it up big-time I might have missed one of the better sessions at the conference early this morning.
The session was titled "Teachers Unions and Charters: Do They Mix?" The panel had some great folks (all were pro-union in their approach) and like many of the sessions this week, it came alive once the audience jumped in.

STEVE BARR, of Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles, has created a network of charter high schools and made the decision at the start to have a unionized teaching force. The teachers belong to "Asociacion de Maestros Unidos" which is a bargaining unit separate from the city's teachers, but still a member of the powerful California Teachers Association. Barr said his team viewed this as an opportunity to reform the city union by offering an example of how things could be. The teachers have a 30-page contract (compared to 700 pages in the district's schools) and replaced things like "tenure" with "just cause" termination. He said the result is a cooperative effort and a hard-working culture that pushes lame and/or ineffective/or unhappy teachers out the door without having to resort to firing. Some of his philosophy is grounded in the notion that charter schools are about reform - including reforming a union that isn't going anywhere. "You can never beat a teachers union. You can co-opt or reform a teachers union, but they are here to stay," Barr said.

TOM CONRY, chair of the California Teachers Association's Charter School Work Group, began by emphasizing that his union is "not opposed to charter schools, but we do oppose bad charter schools." (More on this and the groans it caused in a minute.) He also noted that the union is engaged in trying to organize charter schools and that the teachers at each charter school site determine what the issues of bargaining will be.

JOHN PARR, a former municipal labor leader in Milwaukee, helps organize "teacher cooperative" charter schools there, where teachers own the school and take control of their professional work experience. They are started by members of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, and they keep portions of the contract dealing with pay and benefits, but negotiate side agreements on issues like the length of the school day, job applicant interviews, and removal of teachers that aren't working out. "The teachers own the culture," Parr said.

The panel was interesting enough, but once it came time for Q+A, frustrated California Teachers Association members who happen to work in charter schools lashed out at Conry and asked for help. "Why is the union not supporting us?" one charter school teacher from La Mesa, Calif., asked, noting that they are engaged in battles with their host districts and are left to fend for themselves without help from their own union. Another charter school teacher, from Sacramento, noted that she and her colleagues pay dues to the CTA but that the union was trying to shut them down. A charter leader from Hawaii, who used to be a union leader, complained that despite the unions' cutesy stance that "they are not opposed to charter schools" everyone understands how they really feel because the national unions are constantly dumping on charter schools.

Conry defended the union by saying that charter schools were still young and that some people in the union were still getting used to the idea. He said he would urge locals to work more closely with dues-paying teachers. It would certainly take time, he said.

Joan Devlin, of the American Federation of Teachers, was in the audience, and noted that she too was frustrated by the knee-jerk hostility to the idea of charter schools within portions of her union. "I would love it if they would finally listen to me at the AFT," Devlin said. But she urged charter people to stop fighting with the unions and engage with them on the issue. She also highlighted what has emerged as a clear generational gap with regard to people's feelings about reform and unions and contracts, and admitted that on the union's end, things might someday change "when the light dawns on some graying heads [in the union] that it's time to leave."

Barr recalled when his school negotiated its contract with the original teachers, and how the CTA sent professional negotiators in to help. The crew was used to dealing with hostile negotiating environments. They set-up for the good-cop, bad-cop routine, etc., until the teachers made it clear they weren't there to fight, but to come to an agreement about the kinds of working conditions that would both make teachers feel comfortable, and lead to the kind of quality education their children deserve.

Barr said his charter school teachers are paid more than their counterparts in the LA Unified District, despite the fact that his schools are funded at a 40% lower rate.

Barr, who really is an interesting dude, suggested that the fights between charter schools and unions were taking the spotlight off common interests that charter schools share with teachers: the need to deal with the huge pool of uneducated students out there. He preached collective ownership, collective decentralization, collectively battling the bureaucracy and collectively "getting rid of crappy teachers."