When people talk education reform, and the promises of charter schools, they tend to talk about the KIPP family of schools. And one of the key ingredients of KIPP, we're told, is their excellent teachers, who are treated as professionals, something that teacher's unions simply don't allow. But now the teachers at KIPP's Brooklyn charter have unionized.
A super-majority of the KIPP AMP teaching faculty has signed authorization cards for the United Federation of Teachers, well in excess of the threshold needed for official recognition under state labor law for public employees.In a letter delivered to co-principals Jeff Li and Melissa Perry this afternoon, the teachers said that they had decided to unionize in order to secure teacher voice and respect for the work of teachers in their school...The letter stressed that the decision to organize was directly connected to the teachers' commitment to their students. “[A] strong and committed staff,” the teachers wrote, “is the first step to student achievement.” Unionization, the teachers believe, will help create the conditions for recruiting and retaining such a staff.“We organized to make sure teachers had a voice, and could speak their minds on educational matters without fearing for their job,” says KIPP AMP teacher Luisa Bonifacio.“For us,” KIPP AMP teacher Emily Fernandez explains, “unionization is ultimately all about student achievement, and the ability of teachers to best serve students at this crucial middle school time in their education.”KIPP AMP teachers believe that the high staff turnover at the school has harmed their efforts to build a positive and consistent school culture for their students. “There is a need to make the teacher position more sustainable,” says Bonifacio, “so that teachers don't burn out, but are able to make a long-term commitment to the students and the school.”
KIPP's instructors are among the best in the nation. KIPP gets the hype, and so they get the applicants, and so they get to choose the very best teachers. And these teachers want a union. Which makes their letter a useful read. Opponents of teachers unions give a lot of attention to tenure battles, and as such, tend to associate unions with incompetent teachers. But it's often the opposite. Here, you have a bright, young teaching staff advocating for a union. They clearly don't think it will detract from their professionalism. But they do think it will give them more of an occupational voice and allow them put in place structures that will ease the burnout and calm the rapid turnover rate, which isn't good for the school or the students. This, incidentally, will now mean that three of four KIPP campuses have teachers unions.
