Last March The Chalkboard reported that teachers at KIPP Infinity Charter School in Harlem submitted a unanimous petition to the state Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) to decertify membership with the United Federation of Teachers union. Last Friday, the New York Post reported here that the UFT agreed earlier this month and had "voluntarily withdrawn" from its representation of the Infinity faculty without a protracted PERB hearing.

In effect, KIPP Infinity's teachers told the UFT to take-a-hike, and UFT complied.

The UFT doesn't "voluntarily" do anything like this, so the safe bet is that the union was going to lose before PERB. Cheating the hangman avoids a PERB decision that could be seen as humiliating the union.

It's hardly humiliating for teachers to choose not to be unionized; most teachers in charter schools in fact have done so. Certainly the UFT would not want to see this trend continue with more charter faculty decertifying, especially after the union and its state parent, the New York State United Teachers, ramrodded a charter school funding freeze through the legislature for the 2009-10 school year.

The KIPP Infinity teachers have shown that the union is supposed to be the servant, not the boss, and that if you are unsatisfied with such representation, you don't have to stand for it. You can drop them.

This was not the first charter school to kick out a NYSUT local. The Western New York Maritime Charter School faculty in Buffalo effectively fired NYSUT and formed their own school-based teachers' association. This means that their dues truly go towards "representing" them before charter management and doesn't subsidize the union's anti-charter school legislative agenda in Albany, unlike the teachers at every NYSUT/UFT charter school.

At least one other charter school's faculty recently manifested impatience with NYSUT's behavior, that being the Charter School for Applied Technologies, which conducted a protest last month before the union's headquarters in downtown Buffalo.

As long as NYSUT takes an adversarial stance toward charter schools, teachers deserve better and can do better, as KIPP Infinity and WNY Maritime have shown.

Peter Murphy
for The Chalkboard